Bloodthirsty - By Flynn Meaney Page 0,51

a crush on you,” Kate observed calmly.

“I don’t know,” I said pointedly, swirling spaghetti around my plastic fork. “I wouldn’t give GARLIC to someone I had a crush on. It almost seemed like they wanted to see how I reacted to GARLIC. Like, as if I were someone who had a thing about GARLIC.”

Shrugging cluelessly, Kate didn’t seem the least bit scared of me.

When I walked back to my locker with Kate, Jenny was waiting. She looked a little pissed off, and I wondered if Ashley Milano had spent their entire third-period trip to Double D lecturing Jenny about how many calories were in whipped cream.

“Do you have lunch with Kate, like, every day?” Jenny asked me when Kate had left.

“Yeah, basically,” I said.

“But you don’t see her outside of school, do you?” Jenny probed.

“Sometimes,” I said. “Hey, are we still reading that geisha book in English?”

“You know, she wears her sweatpants over her jeans,” Jenny told me.

“The geisha?” I asked, puzzled. “I thought they wore those red—”

“No!” Jenny said impatiently. “Kate. I’m in Ultimate Dodgeball gym class with her, and she doesn’t actually change her clothes. She just puts on sweatpants over her jeans.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

“Which probably means she’s, like, really sweaty,” Jenny told me. “Kate’s probably really sweaty and gross.”

I closed my locker and swung my backpack up onto my shoulder.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

As we walked down the hall, Jenny said, without looking at me, “I don’t think she’d understand you.”

“What?” I looked down at Jenny.

“You know.” Jenny gestured to my face, then put both her index fingers up against her lips and turned them down. Fangs. Or walrus.

“I don’t think she’d understand what you are.”

Oh, right. I was a vampire. Well, I wasn’t worried about Kate understanding that. I was busy hoping she would find out! So I just shrugged at Jenny.

“Besides,” Jenny added huffily, looking away again, “Kate’s, like, four pounds too heavy for her jeans. So it’s good she covers them up with sweatpants.”

As I followed Jenny into class, I thought about her weird obsession with people’s jeans. She was always telling me if other girls were too big or too small for their jeans. And the weirdest thing was, she knew how big or how small by the pound. Kayla Bateman was six and a half pounds too big for her jeans, according to Jenny. How the eff did she know that? As for Jenny, she had to order these special jeans from Japan that were made for flat-assed Asian girls. Yeah, I’d heard all about it.

As Jenny pouted into her folders and binders, which were all Eragon-themed, I felt bad for her. As unmanly as I may be, sometimes I’m glad I’m a guy. It means I never have to get that bummed out by other people’s jeans.

It was the night after Halloween, which I’d celebrated quietly by seeing a horror movie with Jenny, telling her, “I don’t understand the big fuss about all this scary stuff, about fangs and monsters,” and also by texting Kate while she gave out candy with her parents and by avoiding Ashley Milano’s reality TV costume party.

At the dinner table, my mother announced to our family, “Luke is failing math.”

Luke had about half a burger jammed in his mouth but managed to express himself by rolling his eyes.

“What’s this?” my father asked, oblivious as usual.

“I went into school to speak with Luke’s teacher today,” my mother said. “His average is a fifty-six.”

“What’s that out of?” my father asked.

It’s pretty obvious my dad had gotten into Boston College only because he was a varsity athlete.

“I hate proofs!” Luke finally swallowed and spoke. “They’re so dumb. I shouldn’t have to write a paragraph in math. The only good thing about math is I don’t have to write stuff.”

“If he doesn’t bring his average up to a C,” my mother said, “he can’t play basketball this winter.”

My father gasped. My mother had such huge tears in her eyes you would have thought Lysol had been discontinued. This was a monumental problem. Where else could Luke use his talents for knocking people over and running really fast and breaking guys’ noses and making it look like an accident? If Luke couldn’t play sports anymore, his only choice would be to join the Mafia.

“What math class are you in?” I asked Luke.

“I’m in Math B,” Luke said.

“Finbar, could you work with him?” my mother asked, leaning into me. She gripped my arm like she was Leonardo DiCaprio and I