Free Bloodthirsty by Flynn Meaney Page B

whom, because he didn’t even look before dropping his bag there.
    “Hey, Jen,” he said mildly. Promptly he went to sleep.
    I slid forward to stare at this kid. I was fascinated. I’d never seen a real person fall asleep in class. I thought only seventies sitcom characters and John Hughes antiheroes did that. But there was an AP student, his curly Jewfro rising and falling in peaceful rhythm. He was, legitimately, asleep. I even saw a little bit of drool! As our teacher came into class, young and eager to fumble with the whiteboard and his laptop for twenty minutes to show us a two-minute Jon Stewart clip, I observed that guy’s desktop nap and took it as an omen. A good sign that Pelham Public would be, at least compared with St. Luke’s, a relaxed place.
    Although Jenny was helpful, and I sat with her in my first two classes, I wasn’t sure I wanted everyone to think we were best friends. She was a little strange, with her enormous collection of fantasy books stored in her L.L.Bean backpack and strapped to her back at all times. With orange hair and freckles, Jenny should have looked like a little kid in a graham cracker commercial. But she wore all black—black choker necklace and a black shirt with skulls and knives on it. And she had dyed her hair black too, although the orange hair had grown back in, so it was half-orange and half-black. As vampire companions go, she had the creepy goth look down but was kind of missing that sexy, cool edge I needed.
    So in physics, our third class, I separated from Jenny to sit alone at a lab table and brood. Because the same group of kids had been in all three of my classes so far, and it was clear that all of us AP students would be spending a lot of time together, it was important to make a vampiric impression on them. So while our teacher built a model roller coaster out of Legos, I did my best Edward-Cullen-in-biology-class impression. When a pretty brunette girl sat down next to me, I only glanced at her briefly before looking away. I was sure this dark and sinister look would have the same effect on this girl as Edward’s had on Bella in Twilight . My smoldering, angry eyes and bitter expression told her that I was an animal who could barely control my urge to lunge at her bare neck.
    Obviously sucked in by my allure, the girl turned to me and spoke.
    “Do you need some Pepto?” she asked me.
    In my confusion, my mouth dropped open and I kinda lost my smoldering look.
    “What?” I asked.
    She pulled a bottle of Pepto-Bismol out of her bag, then told me, “You look like you’re going to vom.”
    “What?” I asked.
    “Vomit,” she clarified.
    After this incident, I decided not to venture out on my own as much. I trusted Jenny to give me the necessary information about everyone.
    The brunette? “That’s Ashley Milano. She participates too much. And talks too much. And she abbrevs.”
    “She what?”
    “She talks in abbreviations,” Jenny told me. “Okay, next up, that’s Jason Burke. He looks like a jock, but he’s actually pretty smart.
    “Matt Katz.” Jenny pointed to the kid who’d fallen asleep in U.S. history. “Stoner kid. He’s pretty cool. He knows more about the rap wars than Ms. Karl knows about centrifugal force.”
    Matt Katz didn’t look like someone who would know about rap battles. He looked like someone who would camp out at a Dave Matthews concert and share a joint to “Satellite.” Then again, I didn’t look like a rap fan myself. Of course, I wasn’t as intense as Matt, who apparently had a five-point thesis to prove that Tupac was still alive.
    “Nate Kirkland,” Jenny continued, pointing to a kid with surfer hair. Her description was brief: “Nosepicker.”
    “Really?” I asked. Picking your nose in class seemed a very bold move to me. Even bolder than sleeping in class.
    “Well, he picked his nose once in third grade,” Jenny said.
    “How do you know that?” I asked.
    “We’ve all gone to school together