Bloodthirsty - By Flynn Meaney Page 0,44

frustration. Why did even my own parents assume I was a wuss? “I stopped him. I hit him.”

“Oh, Finbar,” my mother moaned. She knelt helplessly among her purloined parsley. “You’re a bully.”

“He’s a fighter!” my father boomed, suddenly loud and boastful. “Like his old man!”

Says the man who, as a college hockey player, performed a triple axel to avoid a confrontation on the ice.

“What’d you do to him?” Luke asked eagerly.

“He was being a jerk,” I said. “He was picking on a freshman.”

My mother pulled up greens off the floor with her tongs and put them on my plate.

“You’re falling apart, Finbar!” my mother said. “You’ve changed. You’re not even involved in anything anymore! Why aren’t you writing for the paper or working on the literary magazine?”

“I might join this investment club,” I volunteered.

“Greed,” my mother asserted, shoving contaminated floor-salad in my face. “Greed and violence will get you nowhere, Finbar.”

* * *

Pelham Public’s principal, Dr. Hernandez, took two full days to call me into his office to talk about the fight. I had been kind of sweating it out the whole time. I knew that Dr. Hernandez knew about the “fight” because of the way it had ended. Mr. Pitt came out of his class when I was still cutting off the oxygen to Chris Perez’s brain.

“Hey, what’s going on here?” Mr. Pitt had asked.

I pulled back right away, but the whole thing looked suspicious. We were too close to each other. I was all guilty and flushed. Perez was panting to catch his breath, and his pants were around his knees. Actually, now that I think about it from Mr. Pitt’s perspective, maybe it didn’t look The Outsiders suspicious as much as it looked Queer as Folk suspicious. Probably our teacher didn’t know what to think.

So, anyway, I was sweating out a punishment due to my cruel Catholic upbringing. At St. Luke’s the teachers were completely sadistic. Detention consisted of standing six inches from the blackboard staring at a dot for thirty minutes without moving. If you looked away or even blinked for too long, you got ten extra minutes. Then there was the punishment called JUG—Judgment Under God. Basically, rebels were sent to sit on the school steps in the cold to wait for a lightning bolt to smite them for the horrible transgression of mismatched socks or passed gas during a prayer.

Pelham Public High School was completely different. There was no God to judge us here. Actually there were probably a bunch of deities floating around—one fiery pork-hating god for the Jews, and also for half Jews like Kayla Bateman; a mild WASP-y god with good manners for the Protestant kids in polo shirts. But our teachers weren’t allowed to talk about any of them. Plus, there was that curious attitude of relaxation I had sensed the first day. I don’t just mean all the napping. I’m talking about discipline.

For example, Pelham had a theater teacher who smoked cigarettes in the parking lot with students and told them about her messy divorce. When a cell phone rang during a lecture in my history class, the owner not only answered the phone but also held her finger up to the teacher and asked, “Can you keep it down for a second?”

And once, a sophomore English teacher, Mr. Watts, found out that one of his students had spent the past eight class periods carving an elaborate design into his desk. The “artwork” read: “Mr. Watts and Dickens sucks dick.” Mr. Watts confronted the carver, telling him, “That’s wrong!” Then Mr. Watts took the knife and crossed out the last s in sucks. “This sentence has two objects,” he explained. “You need to conjugate the verb differently.” And he handed the knife back.

Our principal was probably the source of all this relaxation. Not that he was exactly relaxed. More like confused. Dr. Hernandez stood in his doorway between classes and waved awkwardly to the students who rushed past, calling them by names that were not only incorrect but also bizarre. “Good afternoon, Jarvis,” he would say to Jason Burke. Or “Aster,” with a nod to Ashley.

So I wasn’t surprised when Dr. Hernandez addressed me as “Phineas” when he emerged from his office to find me in the waiting room, biting my nails while sitting between his two secretaries. After he pulled his office door shut behind me, he asked, “It is Phineas, isn’t it?”

“Close enough,” I said as we each took a seat.

I’d never been called into the principal’s