chest and inject it into Jenny’s. It was the perfect solution. The girl who had too much would give to the girl who had too little. It was a redistribution of resources—a sort of Boob Communism. Boob-unism. Jenny would be happy with bigger boobs, and Kayla’s chiropractor would probably be glad that she wasn’t hauling those things around anymore.
Thinking about boobs in abstract economic terms was nothing new for me. I’d thought about boobs in more contexts than Karl Marx thought about poor people. But talking about boobs with someone who had boobs (even small ones like Jenny’s)—I’d never done that at all. That was revolutionary!
But I had to remember there were both boys and girls at this school. We were swimming around in a pool of our own hormones and pheromones. There was sex everywhere. Even between the students and the teachers! This one teacher, Mrs. Anderson, had senior boys coming to her classroom every period to propose to her. It was all because she had these perfect, round breasts. Those breasts were the subject of much speculation in our school—namely, were they real or fake? Jason Burke was assumed definitive when he declared Mrs. Anderson’s breasts “too good to be true.”
Jenny wasn’t my only friend at Pelham Public. It was hard not to get to know the other people she had introduced, considering I had seven classes a day with most of them. During our first physics lab period, Jason Burke asked me to be his partner.
“I didn’t want Ashley Milano,” Jason explained.
Not the most flattering motive for friendship. But good to know I ranked over Ashley Milano… and Nate the Nose-picker.
Ashley Milano, in turn, called out to me one day as I walked into AP literature.
“Finn, sit your ass down,” she called to me. “You have to hear this story.”
Someone has noticed me! I thought joyfully. Someone had noticed me… and my ass! Even with Jason, Kayla, Matt Katz, and Jenny there, Ashley’s audience wasn’t complete. She needed me, too.
As Ashley Milano’s story—which, like most of her stories, involved a senior boy and speculations about rhinoplasty—dragged on, I realized I was so busy actually making friends that I kind of forgot to be distant and mysterious. I mean, I’d planned the whole vampire thing to give a reason why I didn’t fit in with everyone else; why I wouldn’t make friends; why I would be so different. But I wasn’t that different, and I was starting to make friends. Dammit! My plan was foiled!
To keep myself on track, when Ashley Milano’s story dragged on, I locked my creepy eyes on her face and tried to “glamour” her into shutting up. Concentrating intensely, I visualized her lips coming together, magically sealed by my will. If Vampire Finbar shut Ashley Milano up, Vampire Finbar would be hailed as a hero. Hell, even a superhero.
It worked for half a second. She stopped the story to say, “Ew, Finn, are you looking down my shirt?”
Yeah, right. With Kayla Bateman two feet away? No chance. But clearly I had to work on my glamouring. In fact, I had to work on my vampire plan as a whole. My planned tactic had been to convince Jenny that I was a vampire first, then have her tell everybody else. Jenny was perfect: she was a big fantasy fan, she was a little needy, and she had once conducted a séance and set her hair on fire, so she obviously believed in crazy stuff. But Jenny had foiled my plan by becoming my friend. She was around too much. Vampires didn’t do these petty little human things like, say, eat or breathe. The eating I could handle—I didn’t have the same lunch period as Jenny, and I wasn’t very tempted by the frozen hamburgers in the unrefrigerated vending machines near the student lounge. The breathing, though? I couldn’t really kick that habit. And I actually tried, too.
But Jenny wasn’t getting the hint. And I certainly wasn’t going to tell her outright, “I’m a vampire.” Due to her fantasy obsession, I had been waiting for her to confront me with, “You’re a vampire, aren’t you? I know you are!” and let me give my mysterious Chauncey Castle shrug. But she wasn’t confronting me.
Another reason I stalled in my vampire quest was this: I met a girl.
For my first week and a half at Pelham Public, I didn’t brave the cafeteria at lunch, retreating to my favorite place, the library, instead. Because I was the only junior