Bloodthirsty - By Flynn Meaney Page 0,52

was a lifeboat.

“I didn’t take Math B,” I said.

“What about the kids in your class?” she asked.

I thought about my precalculus class. I guess most of those Pelham Public kids had taken Math B last year. But currently, we were all pretty lost in math. Matt Katz was probably the smartest, but he was too busy resurrecting Tupac to help Luke. In terms of people who I wouldn’t feel awkward asking to my house to tutor my brother, I knew Jenny best, but she was only pulling off a C through the mutual efforts of me and her statistician father.

Of course, there was Kate. She loved math. And she was taking Math B right now, so she would be doing exactly what Luke was. In fact, she would be such a perfect math tutor for Luke that I felt guilty for not suggesting her. But I wasn’t ready for Kate to meet my family. I was almost as worried that my mom would scare Kate away as I was that my handsome brother would attract her back.

My dad turned to Luke and said, “You’ve just got to focus….”

Luke swallowed his last French fry and jumped up to scrape his plate above the garbage. He began humming loudly to drown out the conversation. I believe it was an R. Kelly song.

“Paul, it’s harder for him,” my mother said quietly.

Luke hummed louder, like screaming with his lips pursed. Yup, he was definitely humming “Trapped in the Closet.”

“Well, maybe we should look into a new medicine.”

“No!” Luke slammed his plate onto the dish rack next to the sink so hard it bounced back up.

“Luke, the plate!” From my mother.

Luke caught the plate and spun around. “I hate that medicine stuff.”

“Sweetheart…” My mother’s voice was calm, trying to soothe him—and preserve the wedding china that had somehow survived her wild son’s childhood.

“I’m not fucking with my heart again,” Luke said. “Then I won’t be able to play sports at all. Just—let me deal with it.”

“Luke—” my mother attempted.

“No!”

My mother’s worst nightmare came true: Luke threw the plate on the ground. Unfortunately it didn’t shatter into a million tiny pieces, which would have been much more exciting to watch. Instead, it sort of cracked, and the top part tipped over and clanked against our kitchen tile. Don’t get me wrong, my mother still began to sob, but it wasn’t as cool to watch.

Luke stormed upstairs and I watched in amazement. Usually he was pounding up those steps soaked in pheromone-filled sweat and exercise endorphins, singing a Rihanna song at the top of his lungs. Luke hadn’t always been an easy kid to raise, but he had always been a happy one. While I was often moody and irritated and prone to shutting myself in my closet, displaying many signs of a future serial killer, Luke was always moving, smiling, always happy, always busy. But of course Luke was happy, I’d always thought. He was good at sports, girls liked him, and he had a hell of a tan. What was not to be happy about? Now for the first time, I wondered if Luke was actually happy because he decided to be happy. I wondered this because for the first time I realized that between his grades, his failed medications, and his frustration at not being able to sit still—it might not always be easy to be my brother.

chapter 14

The first Monday in November, none of us skipped physics lab. But many of us would later wish we had.

Our teacher, Einstein in Drag (henceforth called Einstein for short), had gotten us all excited about this particular lab. It was a competition among two-person teams to see who could build the best roller coaster out of these plastic toy pieces. Once you built it, you had to race toy cars along the track. What, you may ask, made it the “best” roller coaster? Basically, you got lots of points for each fancy-schmancy addition: a really high peak, a really sharp turn, and, the king of all kings, the loop-de-loop. Oh, and you lost a hell of a lot of points if your car went off the tracks, because that meant that your riders died. However, you didn’t lose all your points, which showed how sadistic our teacher was.

And let me tell you—when you’re making a roller coaster, it’s damn hard not to kill people. In fact, I’m scared to ride a roller coaster ever again. Jason Burke and I were complete failures at the really sharp