apparently “kind of a snore,” i.e., she wouldn’t let Jason do anything more than kiss her. Ashley could get pretty wild. They’d hooked up in all these weird places around school, like the bullpen of the baseball field and the photography darkroom.
“How do you pull it off? Hooking up with two girls?” I asked him once, genuinely impressed. Kayla and Ashley were both pretty good-looking. Plus, they were friends with each other. Wouldn’t they notice they were sharing Jason?
“Well, here’s the secret,” Jason told me. “Sometimes I just suddenly stop hooking up with both of them. Then they get mad, and they join forces against me. That keeps their friendship going.”
Wow. Jenny had been right when she told me Jason was smarter than he looked.
Now it was tough to avoid his invitation to cut class, and he and Ashley were waiting for me to come with them. Jenny was waiting, too—waiting to see how I would get out of this. She knew it was too sunny out, and I think she almost wanted me to blurt out my secret to prove she knew more about me than anyone.
“Um,” I said. “Well. Actually. I have this thing where… I can’t go outside when it’s really sunny.”
“What?” Jason asked. “Like, when there’s an eclipse?”
“No, like, a regular day,” I said. “Like today. It’s like… my skin… reacts badly. To sun.”
Ashley Milano gasped. Actually, it was kind of a combo squeak-gasp. The noise conveyed so much astonishment that I knew. I knew that Jenny had told Ashley I was a vampire.
Just in case I wasn’t sure, Jenny whispered pretty obviously to Ashley, “I told you so.”
Jason didn’t notice all the vampire gossip. Instead, he suggested, “I think Finn just wants to stay and hang with Kate.”
Maybe Kate and I were big news around school. Maybe everyone was talking about us and speculating about our relationship. I had noticed some people smiling when they saw us together twice in one day, but most of the sophomores who saw us eat lunch together seemed to assume that because we were both new to Pelham, we knew each other from somewhere else. I wanted juniors to be talking about us, smiling at us, too. “Did you hear about Finn and Kate?” That was what I wanted, even more than everyone talking about me as a vampire. That was why I wanted everyone talking about me as a vampire: I wanted a girl.
“Right, sophomore Kate!” Ashley said. “She totally likes you, Finn! I read it in the gossip column.”
“We have a school gossip column?” I asked.
I’d read the school newspaper a few times, mostly to criticize it and thus appease Jenny, whose pieces always got rejected by the douche bag editor. I’d never seen a gossip column. There was a perverted “guess the body part” photo display that constituted the Science Section, but apparently a gossip column would have been inappropriate.
“The gossip column is self-published,” Ashley said with dignity.
“By your self,” Jenny scoffed.
“On the girls’ bathroom wall,” Jason added.
“How’d you know that?” I began to ask Jason. Then I saw him and Ashley exchange guilty looks and stopped pursuing that subject.
“And, like, nothing in your gossip column is true,” Jenny said pointedly, crossing her arms.
“Let’s go,” Jason said, tossing his car keys in the air and snatching them with one hand. “Finn—enjoy Kate.” He added in a low voice as he passed me, “I recommend the third stall in the girls’ bathroom.”
In physics lab, I had to do a whole lot of vectors by myself. And while “vectors” sound like something that superheroes would shoot out of their eyes, they aren’t as cool as they sound. They’re really just arrows you draw on paper. I didn’t care, though. I was in a great mood because everyone knew that Kate and I liked each other. Which meant that it was true that Kate liked me and not just something I’d created in my desperate mind.
It only takes a small dose of self-confidence to get me high on it, because I’m not used to having any. And I was drunk as hell on self-esteem when I met Kate at her locker for lunch.
“Lolita!” I greeted Kate’s latest book.
As part of her quest to read classic novels, Kate had picked up Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov.
“A classic and timeless story of an old pervert,” I pronounced like a college professor.
Kate laughed, then said, “I’m actually having trouble getting through it.”
“Creeped out?” I asked her.
Kate put Lolita, whose cover had a really