Bloodthirsty (3 page)

“What is
she
doing with
him
?”

I could sense them evaluating me.

“He seems to suffer from a lack of pigmentation,” the oldest scientist would observe clinically.

“And from excessive perspiration,” his younger colleague would add eagerly.

“He doesn’t appear very fertile,” the only female would surmise. “
I
wouldn’t select him as a mate.”

But the scientists could suck it, because Celine came up and hugged me! As her head pressed against my chest, her dark brown hair felt like ribbons. She smelled like she wore deodorant over every inch of her body. God. Wow.

“How great to meet you!” Celine said, pulling away. “And—the restaurant! This is… well, a surprise.”

“Do you like it?” I asked, pulling out Celine’s chair for her.

“It’s certainly a surprise!” She laughed, folding her little pink skirt under her tan legs. “I thought we were just having coffee.”

“I thought we could have dinner instead.”

“Oh! Well, great!” Her voice was so high-pitched that I couldn’t tell if she was excited or faking enthusiasm in a high-decibel range.

After I took my seat, we sat facing each other like chess opponents. I was looking at the napkin I was folding in my lap, but Celine was staring unapologetically at me.

It made me uncomfortable, seeing as I’m
unusual
-looking. Well, not
unusual
looking. I’m not a van Gogh or anything. But my dark hair is kind of shocking because my eyes are
really
light blue. Like, really light blue. Think Siberian husky. And, as I’ve told you, I don’t have the greatest tan.

“You’re very pale,” Celine informed me.

I was startled by her saying that, just straight out.

“Oh, yeah,” I fumbled. “Well…”

“I didn’t know you’d be this pale.”

“I described myself as looseleaf…” I began. We had exchanged physical descriptions via Facebook message. I had been honest, but focused on my height—my best attribute.

“I didn’t understand the extent.”

“… covered in Liquid Paper,” I finished.

“Right. Well.” Celine sipped her water. “This is a lovely place!”

For a lovely lady
, I thought. Nope. Censored. Don’t spout that weak shit, Finbar. You are already unworthy of her.

There was definitely a
Beauty and the Beast
situation happening here. Celine was even a French brunette who liked to read, like Belle. I could picture all these little bakers popping out of their houses singing “Bonjour” to her. Of course, I didn’t have much on the Beast. He was über-manly and could kick some ass. Also, he was abnormally hairy. I’m not even
normally
hairy, judging from brief and frightening glimpses in the St. Luke’s locker room…. Okay, I needed to stop thinking about body hair. And Disney movies. And how Celine was way beyond my league.

Man up, Finbar! Get in the zone! Keep your eye on the ball! Get your head in the game! Get your, get your, get your, get your head in the game…. No! Do not sing the songs from
High School Musical
in your head! That is
another
damn Disney movie! Does Zac Efron have more body hair than me?

“So,” I interrupted my own stream of insanity. “What are some places I should check out in Manhattan?”

Knowing my interests, or perhaps based on her own interests, Celine began to talk about bookstores. I was mesmerized by the movements of her mouth, picturing it on my mouth, so I didn’t speak much. Luckily Celine was content to talk, giving me the poser quotient of every bookstore on the island. It wasn’t until the waiter interrupted us that I realized I couldn’t read the menu, which was written in French.

I gestured for Celine to order first, and she pursed her lips even more to order. God, French was a sexy language. You had to make kissing faces just to speak it! Celine ordered two different dishes. They sounded sexy but later turned out to be snails and exploded duck liver.

Was there anything written in English? Or anything I would actually eat? I scrambled frantically.

“Hamburger!” I declared in triumph. “I’ll have the hamburger.”

A curt nod from the waiter. He snatched the menu from my un-continental hands.

“Ahm—burr—gare,” Celine pronounced.

Oh. Hamburger. In French.

“Om—birr—gahr,” I tried.

Celine laughed lightly. As our food arrived, the conversation turned to Manhattan’s coffee shops. “I just don’t understand what Americans have done to coffee,” Celine was saying.
I never drank coffee in my life,
I thought as Celine compared the expansion of the Starbucks chain to “entrepreneurial genocide.”
Maybe I should start.
Of course, to drink coffee, I would have to be a whole different person. A guy with not only body hair, but facial hair, too. A mustache. Maybe I
should
be a whole new person. If I was all sophisticated and disdainful like Celine, if I was all sophisticated and disdainful
with
Celine, I wouldn’t care about everything so much. I wouldn’t care about not being good at sports like Luke. And I wouldn’t worry about guys like Johnny Frackas calling me a fag. If I spent the weekend drinking coffee out of tiny cups with a French girl and sported a mustache, no one could call me a fag.

Wait, maybe they still could. Scratch that. If I had a
girlfriend
, no one could call me a fag. So I needed to make moves. While Celine was chewing on foie gras, I spoke up. “I have something for you,” I said.

Over her greasy-looking and expensive liver, Celine looked surprised. I removed a small package from my pocket and set it in front of her. It was a book with a ribbon wrapped around it, like a present without wrapping. I’d tied the ribbon myself.

“It’s
No Exit
,” I told her. “I remembered you said it was your favorite play.”

Celine looked at the cover as if it enshrined an object from an alien spaceship, something she didn’t know how to touch or open.

“But it’s not my birthday,” Celine said.

“No,” I said. “It’s just a gift.”

“For what?” Celine first looked confused, but then the confusion softened to sympathy when my eyes met hers. She didn’t get why I was trying so hard. Disappointment and embarrassment swept over me. For the rest of dinner, Celine made an effort to be nice, like I was a speech-impaired kid assigned to her camp cabin. She smiled and nodded a lot, and even reached to touch my hand a few times. But she refused coffee after dinner, and the waiter delivered the check to me. I guess he knew I would pay because this was a date, even if it was the lamest date in the world. Or maybe he just couldn’t fit a check anywhere among Celine’s many plates, each of which had cost me… wow. My dad would really regret giving me this credit card. Celine grabbed her purse and I carried the book for her.

Out on the sidewalk, Celine abruptly stopped her diatribe against some kind of shoe called a FitFlop, and I said, “Let me walk you home.”

“Oh…” Celine tried to glance at a watch, but she wasn’t wearing one. Then she pointed vaguely in two different directions. “I’m going way uptown, so I’m taking the subway.”

“I can walk you there,” I said halfheartedly.

I knew the restaurant and the gift had been too much. But I really did want to be a gentleman to the end.

“Don’t bother!” Celine’s sharp nails waved me off. “You’re completely in the other direction.”

Actually, I had no idea which direction the train station was. This was my second trip to Manhattan ever. But I said, “Okay…” and hesitated. Now it was time to say good-bye. Right here on this busy sidewalk. The whole street was lined with the tables of outdoor restaurants, so we were being interrupted by other people’s conversations and lethal amounts of secondhand smoke. God, people in New York smoked a lot.

Celine reached up, popping onto the balls of her feet, to kiss me good-bye. No, not
kiss
me,
kiss
me. She went for the cheek. There was nothing romantic or sexual about it—even heterosexual Frenchmen kiss each other like that. To me, the kiss felt like a consolation prize.

The problem was that, at the same time, I leaned down to hug Celine. My head was headed for her right shoulder. Her lips were pursed toward my left cheek. As a result—

We kissed on the lips.

Or, more accurately, we collided.

The shock pushed Celine back on her heels. My arms hung empty in front of me like I was imitating a gorilla.

“Oh, Finbar!” Celine cooed with sympathy. She gave me these rapid little pats on the forearm. “I really think we should be good friends,” Celine told me.

“Actually, that was an accident—” I began to explain.

“But nothing more than friends.”

A falafel vendor had observed our whole little soap opera, and it was clear he thought I was coming on to Celine. Now he eyed me with suspicion and turned the long pointy sticks of his sizzling kebabs in a sinister fashion.

“Just friends,” Celine repeated yet again.

Okay, okay! I didn’t need her to translate “just friends” into French and sign language. So I said, “See you around,” and walked away.

Was I going in the right direction? I had no freakin’ idea. I didn’t know New York City at all. So I removed my map from my pocket.

Uh-oh. Something else came out with the map.
No Exit
by Jean-Paul Sartre, the first English edition. Shit.

Looking back now, I should have dropped the damn book in the garbage. I should have just let it go. But at the time, I didn’t want a souvenir of this awkward first (only) date.

So I doubled back.

“Celine!” I called from the end of the block. Celine was already crossing the busy street between two honking yellow cabs. She hadn’t heard me.

A Frankenstein-like mob was clawing its business-casual-clad-way out of the subway station. These New Yorkers were moving at warp speed (hey, I lost the girl, I can dork out as much as I want). So I set off with a few jogging steps in Celine’s direction. Seeing as my jog was slower than most people’s walking, I hoped no one would notice my desperate efforts to catch up.

I called, “Celine! Hold up!”

But I’d lost sight of her. There were more people on that stretch of New York sidewalk between Celine and me than there were in the whole town of Alexandria. When the crowd parted, she was a full block and a half ahead of me. In order to catch up, I set off on a bizarre obstacle course. To the right of the hundred-year-old grocery woman. To the left of an imposing businessman. A sharp angle to avoid a double stroller; a leap over a pissed-off dachshund in a dog sweater. A sprint past a drag queen in size-fourteen heels.

Celine had crossed the street already. When I reached the curb, my chest was pounding and I was out of breath (and, clearly, out of shape). But my primal side emerged. I called “CELINE!” above a honking yellow cab, all Rocky Balboa.

Celine was enjoying a little French stroll by a park where the sun was setting. There were no lap dogs or transsexuals in her path—proving once again that life was unfair. Celine was ignoring the wind, which was blowing her skirt up around her legs in an attempt at a paparazzi shot. She also ignored me when I called her name. Maybe it was for the best. If she had turned around, she would have seen her pale and sweaty Internet lover sprinting at her—and probably would have freaked out.

But she didn’t turn. I crossed the street but didn’t have time to call Celine’s name again. While I was looking ahead at her skirt, something hard tripped me up, and I lunged forward into a restaurant’s basement cellar. My shoulder slammed down three cement steps, which hurt like hell, and I tumbled headfirst right into a box of peppers. I guess landing with my head in peppers was better than smacking my head on the cement floor of the basement while my arm was pinned under me, but they weren’t even red peppers, which are ballsy and kind of cool. I landed in a bin of green peppers. Wuss peppers. How appropriate.

As I tried to push myself out of the bin, overwhelmed by the smell, a large truck backed up onto the sidewalk in front of the restaurant cellar. Two men climbed out and began unloading wooden crates. They were bringing new food down. They wouldn’t have even seen me if I hadn’t tipped the bin over, spilling the green peppers everywhere, like boccie balls.

“Hey!” the first man called to the second. “There’s a kid down here!”

“I’m just leaving,” I mumbled to the two of them as I climbed the steps.

“Sure you’re not tomorrow’s white meat, kid?” the second man asked. They both burst out laughing.

Because people who mock me often do so with enthusiasm, he repeated the joke. Somehow, they found it even funnier the second time around.

I didn’t even attempt a laugh. I 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.”