Bloodthirsty by Flynn Meaney Read Free Book Online Page B

Luke’s—looked me up and down and asked, “Are you a reporter for the school paper or something?”
    I shook my head. “I’m Luke’s brother,” I said.
    “Oh, his little brother?” She broke into a smile. “Awww.”
    She looked at me like someone who had the potential to be cute one day.
    “Oh, uh, no,” I said. “We’re… twins.”
    Her pupils flashed from the bandages around my toothpick arms to my sunken-in chest and the goose bumps emerging on my legs beneath my swim trunks to my super-pale face and eyes.
    Then this brunette said an obvious, truthful, and terrible thing.
    She told me: “You two are nothing alike.”
    When I didn’t leave the house for three days after the football game, my mother worried that I was antisocial. My mother has suspected me of antisocial behavior since last year when I didn’t cry during The Notebook . After her prodding, I managed one tear. I didn’t tell her that the tear came from the fact that I was home on a Friday night watching a Nicholas Sparks adaptation with my mother.
    During the last few days of August, I used the excuse that the doctor had said it was too sunny for me to go outside. This also conveniently got me out of mowing the lawn. It also excused me from scoping out our seventeen-year-old neighbor, whose family was Italian and renting a house for the summer, and who Luke claimed sunbathed topless. I was so embittered by my recent experiences that I didn’t want to see another teenage girl as long as I lived. I didn’t even want to see another teenage girl’s boobs . When it became early September, and also got rainy and overcast, though, I had no more excuses (neither did the topless girl, who buttoned up and went inside, much to Luke’s dismay). To appease my mother, I decided to go to some museums in Manhattan. I looked forward to losing myself in mummies, dinosaurs, and other species who were past their self-conscious teenage years.
    Unfortunately, my seat on the train was directly facing three teenage girls. Didn’t girls in New York ever go to school? Oh, wait, school hadn’t started for me either. Well, I could just look out the window. Oh, wait. I didn’t have a window seat. Oh, well. If I had to look ahead, I would focus on the books the girls were reading and not on the three pairs of crossed legs beneath them.
    The first book cover had the typical Fabio-style romantic male lead. He had blond hair longer than the woman’s and a piratelike shirt ripped open to reveal pectoral muscles that were bigger than hers, too. He was a guy who could speak five languages and perform award-winning sexual maneuvers. He was a seducer.
    I could never be a guy like that.
    On the second novel cover, the guy was swinging an ax dangerously close to the woman’s face. She was still smiling. He was a clean-cut kind of guy, with a flannel shirt and bulging biceps, like the Brawny paper towel man. He could handle a canoe or a grizzly bear, and catch and grill a fish for dinner. Like that guy on the Discovery Channel who scoops the insides out of buffaloes and then sleeps inside them.
    I could never be a guy like that.
    The third book cover was different. First of all, the book was called Bloodthirsty , which didn’t seem very romantic. The letters of the title were enormous and red and dripping with blood. On this cover, the girl was featured prominently. Although she was wearing a white lacy dress and making the sort of innocent face you see on kids in juice commercials, she had some pretty intense cleavage. The Grand Canyon of cleavage. I admit that I leaned forward to examine this a little closer (hey, it’s literature!), but then the guy on the cover caught my eye. No, not in that way. In fact, he wasn’t sexy at all.
    The Bloodthirsty cover guy was lurking in the distance behind the girl. He had bad posture. His arms were crossed. He was brooding. His skin was the color of paper. And his eyes… He had eyes like mine! They were spooky, crystal-ball blue.