Bloodthirsty by Flynn Meaney Read Free Book Online

agonizing silence left before the train finally stopped and the doors opened at Fordham.

chapter 4
    I think my twin brother, Luke, is a superhero. He can sprint like a cheetah. He can do the hundred-yard dash in ten seconds. He can catch something, throw something, and swat at a fly all at the same time. He can do no-look passes to the shooting guards on the basketball court. Actually, he can pass to himself on the basketball court. He has the reflexes of a Marvel comic character and the speed of a hermaphrodite Olympian.
    Our pediatrician thinks Luke has a hyperactivity disorder. Luke can’t read more than one chapter of a book at a time. He can’t finish standardized tests. He walked out on the PSAT last year and went to see an action movie instead. Then he walked out on the movie. Luke can’t eat dinner without standing up and running around the table. He doesn’t do great in school, and he makes some people impatient. During our childhood, three elementary school teachers, a zookeeper, and a museum guide at the World’s Largest Ball of Paint all quit their jobs and not by coincidence. (My mother was sad when that zookeeper left the children’s zoo. He was gonna give her advice he’d learned from raising baby baboons.)
    In eighth grade, increasingly concerned about Luke’s bad grades, my parents put Luke on a drug for ADHD. Three months into taking it, Luke collapsed midcourt during a CYO basketball game. I’ve never seen so many rosaries pulled out of so many purses so fast.
    An ambulance rushed him to the hospital. The medicine had sped up his heartbeat, and there was so much blood rushing around his body that he got dizzy and passed out.
    My mother has been neurotic about our health since she was knocking on her stomach and yelling “Are you dead in there?” at our nine-week-old fetal selves. So you can guess how much she freaked out about Luke and the ambulance. She never let him take that ADHD medicine again. In fact, she never let him take a Flintstones vitamin.
    So how did she react when the weaker of her offspring arrived at the gate of Fordham Preparatory School wrapped in bandages?
    “You look horrible!” my mother wailed.
    “Hello to you, too,” I told her.
    “What’s wrong with you?” my father asked eagerly.
    I’m a pale and creepy virgin? Nope, not what he was asking.
    “It’s an allergic reaction,” I reassured them. “It’s temporary.”
    I was super thrilled when I saw that it was a pretty girl who was ripping the game tickets at the Fordham gate, seeing as I was wearing my best James Bond formalwear: my swim trunks, a t-shirt that showed off my man-nipples, and a Y2K supply of Ace bandages.
    “Go Rams!” the ticket girl told me, making an admirable effort to focus on school spirit and not my arms.
    She was a brunette, too. Brunettes are my favorite. Eff my lack of luck. Not only did I look like a freak, but when I sat down in the bleachers, I was one of the few kids with parents instead of friends. I was sandwiched between my dad, who was wearing a new Fordham Prep hat (my dad doesn’t wear flat-brimmed hats because he’s a rap star. He wears them in a very uncool way), and my mother, who kept accidentally smacking me in the face as she pointed to Luke on the field.
    “Look, he’s drinking water!” she’d say. “Look, he’s lacing up his shoes! Look, he just spit! Oh, Luke”—my mother shook her head at her son from fifteen rows up—“that’s not very polite.”
    My parents and I first spotted him with a cluster of other white-padded guys under a floodlight. Luke was playfully hopping from foot to foot. Other players were doing various homoerotic things that belong in the locker room: slapping each other’s asses, giggling over secret handshakes, etc. One leaned over to slap Luke’s ass, and my mother was proud.
    “Look!” my mother said happily. “He already has friends.”
    As the announcer introduced the other team, Holy Cross, I ignored the field and looked