Bloodthirsty - By Flynn Meaney Page 0,53

turn and the loop-de-loop. The really sharp turn threw our car violently across the room each time, and the loop-de-loop resulted in our car just dropping straight down to the ground. So we decided to focus on one high peak and named our coaster Everest. We decided our ride would be all about marketing.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t even master that one high peak. Every time it approached, the car would roll backward. But at least no one died.

At the lab table next to ours, Matt Katz was building an epic roller coaster called the Ball Screamer. The name was weird, but the roller coaster’s motto was simple: “You’ll scream your balls off.” On Matt Katz’s team, Matt was the visionary, and Kayla Bateman, his partner, did all the dirty work. First, Kayla had to count out all the pieces they needed to build Matt’s scrawled-blueprint masterpiece. Then, after she’d discovered they were forty pieces short, Kayla had to steal pieces from other groups. We were each only supposed to have fifty. I let Kayla have five of ours. She could be persuasive somehow.

“All right!” Einstein waved to us from the front of the classroom. “By now, your coaster should be working. And you should have recorded the average velocity of your car.”

I frowned at Jason. He shrugged.

“I’ll be watching for cars going off the tracks,” Einstein continued. “It’s go time!”

Matt Katz directed Kayla. “Get at the end of the coaster to catch the car.”

“Get them in place now. And when I blow the whistle… GO!”

Jason fumbled with our car at the start of our track. Everest built momentum on a series of small hills. “Go!” Jason and I cheered urgently, guiding the car with our eyes like it was a bowling ball. “Keep going! Faster!”

The car directly disobeyed us. It barely attempted the big hill before stalling and falling lazily backward, like an old man sinking into his couch.

Jason groaned. “Do you think we’ll fail?” he asked.

I shrugged. “We didn’t kill anyone.”

We turned to watch the Ball Screamer, which was still going because it was extra long from all the stolen pieces. Matt was watching it like a crazy person, his face bright red, his fist clenched.

“Yes!” he’d cry out each time it made a turn. “Yes!” When it made it over a hill, Matt Katz got so loud that the whole class turned to look. And Einstein was loving it. She watched in wonder as the Ball Screamer looped its loop—and didn’t drop!

“An A, Mr. Katz!” Drag Einstein proclaimed.

Matt Katz was thrilled. He was so thrilled, in fact, that he forgot about Kayla, who was still waiting at the end of the roller coaster. Kayla was only mildly interested in the loop-de-loop, and she didn’t watch it carefully enough to realize that the car had really gained a lot of velocity. As all physics students know, velocity is speed in a certain direction. The Ball Screamer’s speed was headed in the direction of Kayla Bateman’s face.

I realized the car was about to fly into Kayla’s face and cringed, and Ashley Milano realized and gasped, but neither Ashley nor I was faster than the Ball Screamer. It hurled the toy car into Kayla’s face.

Instantly, Kayla raised her hand to her cheekbone, where the car had hit. Most of our physics class was laughing, and someone said, “Too bad it didn’t hit her in the tits; she wouldn’t’ve even felt it.” I smiled rather than laughed, because in my pre-vampire life I probably would have been the one hit in the face. Still, it was pretty ridiculous to be injured by something called the Ball Screamer.

Then Kayla dropped her hand and we all saw that (a) she was crying and (b) she was bleeding. There was a deep gash under her eye and bright red blood was running down her face where tears should have been. Her hand had blood on it, too. I felt sick to my stomach, which probably made me very similar to the imaginary riders of the Ball Screamer.

“You’re BLEEDING!” Ashley Milano shrieked.

“Oh, dear. Oh, dear. I’ll get some gauze,” said Einstein, rushing to her desk.

“I’m bleeding?” Kayla said anxiously. Then she raised her hand to her face and shrieked. “Oh, God, I’m bleeding!”

Then the class began to buzz with indistinct conversations, and THEN—everyone turned to look at me.

“What?” I asked. I actually asked it out loud. What was I supposed to do about Kayla’s injury? I wasn’t taking First Aid class. First Aid class was the only