my head. I didn’t want Kate to think that!
Luckily, Kate, like everyone else, ignored the intense, hypnotic stare I fixed upon her.
“I’m new, too!” she said. “I haven’t seen you in my classes. Are you a sophomore?”
“No, uh, a junior,” I told her.
“Oh,” Kate said, grinning. “So you were held back in lunch?”
I laughed out loud. She was so quick. I would have to step up my game from “Uh,” “Oh,” and my own name.
“I just couldn’t graduate to using forks,” I said.
“Some guys can’t handle their opposable thumbs.” Kate shook her head.
Again I laughed, breaking that back-and-forth rhythm of our teasing each other. She picked up the slack, saying, “You’re probably only allowed to eat finger foods. Too bad it’s pasta day.”
“Don’t tell anyone I’m here,” I joked. “Do you mind smuggling a fugitive?”
Kate smiled. Except for the way my ribs were closing in—like they were cave walls and my heart was Indiana Jones—this whole conversation made me feel like I’d known this girl forever.
Except, of course, if I’d known this girl forever, I wouldn’t be a dour and cynical sixteen-year-old virgin who was pretending to be a vampire. But anyway…
“Actually,” I said, “I have lunch this period because I’m taking a weird Latin class. I mean, uh… an advanced Latin class.”
Maybe my knowledge of Latin was a really sexy quality.
“You would have been cooler if you stuck with the ‘failing lunch’ story,” Kate told me.
Maybe not.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “But am I cool enough to eat lunch with you?”
“You should,” Kate said. “I’m great with this.” She flourished her fork. “I could teach you a thing or two.”
“We’ll see, sophomore,” I threatened, narrowing my eyes. Then I sat the whole lunch period with Kate, a smart, funny, literate, and incredibly sexy girl. I was so excited, I actually did forget how to use my fork.
For the rest of the afternoon, I was completely distracted. I was thinking about Kate. When Jenny came up to me at my locker, I barely registered that she was inviting me to go somewhere with her on Saturday afternoon. Still dreaming of Kate, fantasizing about doing a New York Times crossword puzzle together after blasphemous Sunday-morning sex, I agreed to whatever Jenny had asked me.
“Great!” Jenny said. “Don’t worry, we don’t have to wear costumes. And none of the weapons are real.”
“Huh?”
I froze by my locker as Jenny trotted happily away. Either Jenny and I had been hired as entertainers for a Lord of the Flies–themed birthday party, or I’d just accepted an invite to an S&M orgy.
chapter 8
Late Saturday afternoon, I picked up Jenny in my Volvo, and we drove to the Seventeenth Biannual East Coast Fantasy Fest. To me, the convention center was like a zoo where the animals walked around free, shaking one another’s hands and taking photographs together and drinking coffee. As I did when I was at the zoo, I wanted to look in too many different directions at once. Just when I’d focus on something new and strange, trying to understand it, some other thing would shimmer or flutter or screech by, and I’d turn my head. As a result, I bumped into about four different people—or creatures—within my first five minutes in the convention center.
There was a guy with horns the color of foreskin curled around his head who jumped out at me first. From a distance, the mask that covered his entire head was so similar to the color of his actual skin that it seemed an outgrowth of him.
Two men with beards down to their knees made peace signs at everyone who passed. A Round Table’s worth of knights in full armor lifted their face guards to sip from cans of Diet Pepsi. An angry little gargoyle with cracking blue-gray body paint was crouching around the ground and I accidentally tripped over him.
“Watch it, bitch,” he snapped.
“Jesus,” I said to Jenny, pulling myself back on my feet.
“C’mon, not everyone’s that mean,” Jenny said.
She was right. A group of girls in cottonball blond wigs and flesh-colored bodysuits blew me kisses.
Awkwardly, I waved back at them.
“It’s not as bad as you thought, is it?” Jenny asked eagerly.
A sweaty mustachioed man in slippers and a green Robin Hood hat lunged in front of us, brandishing a real and rusted sword. His foe was a six-foot-five man in a full-bodied felt dragon costume. The blade missed my aorta by about six inches.
“Whoa!”
I made a face at Jenny, like I was thinking, It’s worse than I thought. But in