I'll Mature When I'm Dead (18 page)

God was much cooler. He sent Moses to speak to the Pharaoh, and when the Pharaoh refused to free the Israelites, inflicted an escalating series of plagues on Egypt, including flies, cattle disease, lice, hail, boils, locusts, and fruitcake.

No, I’m kidding about the fruitcake. God wasn’t
that
wrathful. But He did send the other plagues, and I always look forward to reciting them during the seder because one of them is: frogs. Yes! God caused Egypt to be
overrun with frogs
. That kind of originality is exactly why we call Him the supreme being. And if you don’t think frogs sounds like a scary plague, you don’t know my mother-in-law. She is
terrified
of frogs. Once, when we were supposed to have dinner with her, she called to tell us that she couldn’t leave her condominium building because there was a frog outside the door. Seriously. We tried to convince her that there was no real danger, but she wouldn’t listen. In her mind, the frog was waiting out there
specifically for her
. If she went outside, her lifeless body would be found the next morning in the bushes, covered with what the coroner would later identify as several thousand tongue marks, and
then
we would be sorry.

I realize that if you were raised, as I was, in a Christian household, some of these Jewish traditions may seem strange, even weird (although I have yet to encounter anything in the Jewish tradition any weirder than, say, the Easter Bunny). But I believe, based on my experience attending both Christian and Jewish worship services, that the two religions have a lot in common. To help you see what I mean, I’ve created the following chart comparing Judaism and Christianity:

Yes, there are
differences. But in my view they are not as significant as the similarities. I believe that if we could all focus less on what divides us, and more on what we agree on, this would be a better and happier world, both here and in the hereafter, for people of all religions. Except of course for us jokeatarians. We’re definitely going to wind up in hell. Surrounded by fruitcake.

With a feeling of ominous foreboding based on the cliff-hanger ending of the last book, I turned my battered old pickup truck into the last remaining parking spot outside Creepstone High School. I glanced in the rearview mirror and scrunched my forehead in dismay as I realized for the millionth time that I do not consider myself at all attractive, although roughly 85 percent of the male characters I encounter either fall in love with me or want to kill me, or both, and in the movie version I am portrayed by a total babe.

Heaving a sigh of exasperation, I creaked open the truck door and, with my trademark charming clumsiness, fell out face-first. But before I hit the asphalt, Phil was there to catch me, having covered the seventy-five yards from his luxury car to my truck in two-tenths of a second, although fortunately nobody noticed this because Phil is brilliantly clever, and the other students at Creepstone High have the observational skills of boiled ham.

Phil swooped me into his arms using the super vampire strength that he has in addition to his super vampire speed and his ability to read minds, perform complex mathematical calculations in his head, assemble a working nuclear submarine entirely from clock parts, and recite all the lyrics to
Guys and Dolls
backward.

“Good morning,” he breathed calmly.

For a moment I was unable to respond, because I was so stunned, as I will be many, many more times in this novel, by how unbelievably handsome he is, with his perfect face and chiseled cheekbones, and his gorgeous eyes that change color depending on how recently he has sucked all the blood out of a live bear, and his perfectly teased hair tousling down over his broad gorgeous forehead speckled with beautiful little perfect beads of condensation caused by the fact that he has the same body temperature as an Eskimo Pie. Even through my unfashionable dress that I was wearing because I don’t care about fashion despite being so attractive to men, I could feel the chill of his granite-hard arms. It was like being hefted by a robot that had spent the night in a cold meat locker. I was in heaven.

“Put me down,” I insisted in a tone of determined insistence.

“Why? ” he questioned, arching a single perfect gorgeous eyebrow into a quizzical arch.

“I have to get to class,” I asserted, struggling ineffectively to escape his powerful yet sensitive grasp.

“There’s plenty of time,” he retorted, with a twisting smirk of his perfect lips.

“Maybe for
you
,” I objected with a wry smile.

We can engage in this kind of witty banter for pages on end.

Finally relenting with a sigh, Phil gently set me down on the parking lot and took my hand in his strong and perfect hand that he sometimes lovingly immerses in my Coke Zero to cool it to exactly the right temperature. Walking toward the school, we were joined by Phil’s brothers and sisters, who are all also gorgeous brilliant wealthy sophisticated centuries-old vampires posing as high-school students for reasons that are never totally clear.

As we entered the school I felt Phil’s grip tighten, possibly fracturing my ring and index fingers. Looking up I saw the reason: Stewart was striding toward us in an ominous way. Stewart is a member of an indigenous tribe of Native Americans who become werewolves at puberty, in addition to developing acne. They do not get along with the vampires. One time in boys’ phys. ed. the two sides played each other in volleyball, and before it was over seven civilian students had been disemboweled. This could have created a real stink had not the Creepstone High authorities, who are even less observant than the student body, concluded that the cause was an unusually fast-acting stomach flu.

But tensions still simmered, as I could see by the dark look in Stewart’s brooding, smoldering, husky eyes. He is not as handsome as Phil, who makes Brad Pitt look like a yak butt. But he is still attractive in his own lanky darkly smoldering indigenous tribal way, and it goes without saying that he is in love with me and wants to marry me. I’m in love with him, too, but not as much as I am with Phil, who if all goes well is going to make me a vampire soon so we can spend all eternity being gorgeous and sensitive and sucking on bears together. I long for that day, but I hate knowing that I am hurting Stewart so badly by being so attractive to him without trying to or consciously realizing that I am.

“Hello, Stewart,” I mouthed with a facial expression of sorrowful chagrin.

He looked at Phil with a look of pure lanky indigenous hatred before turning to me and replying, with a voice drenched in the aching and smoldering longingness of a powerful emotion that I knew he could never express in words, “Hello.”

“What do you want?” hissed Phil with anger through his perfect white teeth, although not the ones that were currently retracted.

“I’m not talking to you, leech,” retorted Stewart with a flash of anger that made me worry that he was about to sprout full-body fur and teeth the size of steak knives, which could lead to bloodshed, death, and—if the school authorities witnessed it—detention.

“
Stop
it, you two,” I protested, my heart filling with despair at how much these two attractive males, despite being mortal enemies with completely different lifestyles and diets, were so much alike in the sense of being insanely crazy for me. “What is it, Stewart?” I added in a sincere voice of concerned friendship.

He looked at me with his dark lanky eyes, and for a moment I saw in his expression the thoughtful and caring young man with whom I had shared so many emotional moments in the previous book without ever actually doing it. Suddenly his expression changed to one of dark foreboding. “If you go out in the woods today,” he whispered hoarsely, “you better not go alone.”

“What . . .” I protested elliptically. But Stewart was already striding lankily away. I turned to Phil, but before I could speak I was struck dumb by the perfection of his chiseled cheekbones, and the realization that, of all the girls in the world, I was the one he found irresistibly attractive, as so many males do, although for the life of me I don’t see why because as far as I am concerned there is nothing special about me, me, me. Phil was watching Stewart’s back, and on his impossibly handsome face I could see an expression of anger mixed with worry, and possibly thirst.

Finally finding my voice, I inquired, “What did he mean by that?”

“Mean by what?” replied Phil flatly.

“About me not going into the woods alone,” I clarified.

Phil turned his perfect gaze upon me, causing me to be once again struck by how gorgeous etc. etc. “I’m sure it’s nothing,” he soothed calmly, adding, “I’m especially sure it’s not Denise the vengeful psychopathic female vampire from the previous book who has vowed to hunt you down and torture you to death and who has been sighted recently in the woods around Creepstone. There is definitely no need to worry about
that
,” he added with a quick glance at his brothers and sisters, who sprinted off toward the woods at speeds in excess of 180 miles per hour.

Despite Phil’s reassurance, there was something in his tone that troubled me. But what was it? What had Stewart been trying to tell me? Was something bad about to happen? Would I soon find myself in yet another dramatic plot situation filled with peril? And why
did
everybody find me so attractive?

Before I could answer these questions, the bell rang.

“I have to get to calculus class!” I exclaimed with rue, adding, “There’s a test today.”

“You’ll do fine,” kidded Phil with an impish grin on his perfect features.

“Not if I don’t get there!” I bantered in reply as I turned with such haste that in my endearing clumsiness I would have smashed face-first into the large plate-glass main door if Phil had not yanked it off its hinges with one hand and flung it aside, decapitating two freshmen. They were not major characters, but I could not help but wonder, as I hurried off to class, if this was an omen of bad things to come.

“How was school today?” inquired my father, Pete, looking up from the newspaper as he sat at the kitchen table in our modest home where we live together without my mother, who divorced my father and lives with her new husband in Florida and appears only sporadically as needed.

“Fine,” I responded noncommittally as I removed a Swanson’s Hungry Man Chicken Burrito dinner from the oven and set it down.

“Ouch,” he retorted, because with my endearing clumsiness I had set it on his forearm.

“Sorry!” I exclaimed in dismay.

“Don’t worry,” he sighed with his usual stoic calm as a blister the size of a hockey puck appeared on his skin next to the eight-inch scar from the time I made shish kebabs. “Listen,” he continued, “you seem a little distracted lately. Is there something wrong?”

I hesitated. Pete is chief of police of Creepstone, but he is not exactly Sherlock Holmes, if you catch my drift. He has so far failed to pick up on the fact that my boyfriend is a vampire who spends every night in my room, and that my other boyfriend is a werewolf, and that Creepstone, not to mention the entire state of Washington, is teeming with violent homicidal supernatural creatures, about 60 percent of whom are trying to kill me personally.

“No,” I responded simply. “There’s nothing wrong.”

Satisfied, Pete grunted and returned to his paper. Then, remembering something in his mind, he looked up again.

“By the way,” he intoned, “I want you to stay out of the woods.”

I gasped and dropped my fork, which penetrated about a half-inch into Pete’s foot.

“Why?” I inquired forebodingly.

“There’s been some trouble,” he expressed with a wince as he pulled the fork out and put it on the table out of my reach.

“What kind of trouble? ” I probed.