Bloodthirsty - By Flynn Meaney Page 0,9

stood up, looking as bruised as the green pepper that had been smushed between my ass and the lowest cement step. I brushed off my nice collared shirt, apologized, and left. And the copy of No Exit? I never wanted to see that shit again in my life. I left it buried beneath the peppers.

Empty-handed, I walked the eighteen blocks back to Grand Central Terminal. Neither those long city blocks of open air nor the bootleg Burberry cologne I bought outside the train station could get rid of my pepper stench. On the 8:43 train, a man in my car kept sniffing around my seat and mumbling to his friend, “I don’t know why, but I suddenly feel like pizza.”

chapter 3

I’d been rejected by a vicious Frenchwoman and sniffed out like an Italian sausage by hungry tourists. How could it get any worse?

“Finn! Is that you?”

This is how it could get worse. My mother. She would need a post-game wrap-up of the worst first date since Adam and Eve got caught trespassing. She emerged from the living room, where she’d been fighting with our new air filter. She’d bought it because our house in Pelham was older than our house in Alexandria and she was convinced it was lined in asbestos.

“Finbar!” She began fluttering around me like a hummingbird after a Starbucks Doubleshot. “How was your date?”

“Oh.” I pulled the door shut behind me. “It was good.”

“Did Celine like dinner? You smell like something delicious; it must have been good.”

I smell like humiliation, I thought. As I took off my shoes, my mother followed me. I was accustomed to this. But, for once, she didn’t whip out her brush and pan to sweep up the invisible but deadly molecules of dirt.

“Dinner?” I said. “Well, she ordered a lot of food.”

My mother clapped her hands together rapturously. “That meant she liked it! And what about the book?”

“Uh…” I tried to avoid this question and escape her entirely by going up the stairs, whose banisters were now cloaked in toilet-seat covers. Look what happens when I leave this woman home alone on a Friday night.

My mother followed me shamelessly, up the stairs and into the first room, which Luke and I shared. We’d had separate rooms since the days we rocked out to Raffi songs, but here in Pelham, we shared a room. Luke was rarely here, between his football practices and all the friends he’d made in five freakin’ days. But he left a stench of sweat and overenthusiasm to keep me company, as well as enough cleat-dirt to AstroTurf our bedroom.

Since we were sharing a room, it was a lot harder to avoid Luke than it was in the days when I could refuse his invitation to a Swedish dented-beer-can orgy (or whatever weird event he’d concocted). Nowadays when my mother found a warm bottle of Killian’s Irish Red beer inside a loafer in our closet, I was there for her interrogation (“Finbar, is this yours?” “I don’t drink beer.” “Luke, is this yours?” “I think it came with the shoes. They’re, like, Irish leather.”); I was there when she placed the empty bottle on our dresser and filled it with fresh flowers and a little note she’d written about the dangers of alcohol poisoning. I was there when Luke frowned at the bottle and said, “Hey, I think I recognize that vase. Is that from Grandpa’s house?” And when he spit his gum into the note about alcohol poisoning. But where was Luke when I needed him?

“Did she like the book?” my mother prodded.

I thought for a second. “It certainly caused a scene,” I told her truthfully.

“Great!” My mother curled up on my bedspread and didn’t even pick off the lint balls. She was in her element. She loved hearing about love.

“When are you going to see her again?” she asked eagerly.

“I’m not really sure.”

“You didn’t make another date?”

“Nah.” I tried to sound casual. “I think we’re better as friends.”

When I turned around, my mother was giving me puppy dog eyes.

“Oh, Finbar,” she said. “I’m so sorry….”

I was glad when my father interrupted. Popping his receding hairline in the door, he said, “Hey, Finn! You gotta come downstairs and check out the new TV. This high-def is really something. You can see the sweat on the—”

“Paul!” My mother was offended.

“What?”

My father looked a little scared. We were all scared of my mother.

“You didn’t ask Finbar about his date!”

“Oh. Sorry,” my father said. “Finn, how was your date?”

“Paul! Don’t ask