said, highly satisfied. “Hell, yeah!” another agreed. They high-fived like jocks.
When the slayers had passed, I called, “Jenny! Help me down!”
“Finbar?” Jenny called. She stomped off the parking lot pavement and into the mud. She looked down miserably at her muddy shoes, and then furiously up at me.
“What the hell are you doing on the roof?” she yelled. “And why didn’t you answer your cell phone?”
I pointed down to the ground by a skinny tree.
“My phone fell down,” I told her.
Jenny looked up at me and raised an eyebrow.
“My pants fell down, too,” I said uncomfortably, trying to hike my jeans up in a subtle way.
“Would you come down?” she asked me.
“I’m waiting for the Jacobs to leave!” I told her.
“They left,” Jenny said. “They went off to eat some red meat or something. Come down!”
Jenny helped me down from the dome, and she dug my cell phone out of the mud. She even looked away when my damp jeans got caught on a rain gutter. As we dashed to my car in the rain and I unlocked the passenger door for her, I was thinking what a good pal Jenny was. That is, until I turned the key in the ignition and she wouldn’t let me leave the parking spot. She locked her hand over mine around the gearshift.
“Tell me the truth,” Jenny demanded dramatically, her voice even louder than the pounding rain on my Volvo.
“What?” I shoved my wet hair out of my face, avoiding her eyes.
“I mean, you’re skinny,” Jenny began. “You’re pale. You can’t go in the sun.”
“Well, that stuff is all true,” I told her. “But look, Jenny, I can’t tell you…”
The words “I am a vampire” just couldn’t form on my lips. My mother had drilled too many commandments and vivid images of the flames of hell into my head. Then, while I was reflecting on my Catholic inability to lie, divine inspiration struck.
“I can’t tell you,” I said with passion. “Because it would just be too dangerous.”
If I told Jenny I was a vampire, I would burn in hell. Dangerous. If I told Jenny that I wasn’t really a vampire, then word could get out that I was pretending to be a vampire, and surely someone would kick my ass for that. Dangerous.
Jenny’s eyes were huge, her face serious. She nodded, heavy with the weight of my secret. Obviously, she believed it would be dangerous because I was, in fact, a vampire. She looked down in awe at my skin touching her skin.
“Your hand is freezing.” She spoke slowly, as if under a spell. “Wow.”
I nodded sadly, as if cold hands were a necessary part of my life… or my lack of life. I wondered, though, why my hands were actually so cold all the time. Maybe I should get that checked out.
Because I was covered in mud and had a tear in my pants, I came into my house through the back door. When I did, I found Luke with a nonstick spatula poised menacingly in his hand and half a cheeseburger hanging from his mouth.
“What the hell?” I asked. “Were you gonna hit me with that?”
“Sorry,” Luke said. “I thought you were breaking into the house. Mom’s paranoia is really contagious.”
“Yeah, whatever, Hamburglar,” I told him. “Where is Mom?”
“Seven thirty mass,” Luke said. “Where were you? And… what happened to you?”
Because climbing a geodesic dome was Luke’s idea, telling him about my dumb climb and my pants falling down and my phone getting all muddy might make me irrationally mad at him. So instead I decided it was time to tell him my secret. After all, my brother loved me. He would accept my new lifestyle choice. Sure, some people believed what I was doing was morally wrong. Some more conservative media portrayed us as evil menaces, preying on children, wooing others to our nasty way of life. But I was sure my brother would accept me as a vampire.
“What?” Luke asked when I told him. “How did this happen?” Then he narrowed his eyes like he did before mowing a rival down on the football field and asked, “Did someone bite you, bro?”
“I mean, I’m not actually a vampire,” I told him. “This girl Jenny who I was with today, she thinks I’m one. So I just kind of… went along with it.”
“So supposedly,” Luke said, “you’re just walking around with the rest of us, but you’re a vampire?”
“Yeah. That’s the idea. I mean, that’s her idea.”
“What do you do