if he brings home a whiny teenage girl and tells me he's in love, i'll know for sure he's accepted the curse

Friday night I was enjoying dinner with my boys when I glanced over at my oldest son and saw a tiny drop of blood venture down his neck. "That? Oh, some seventh grade kid did that to me in the the hallway at school today," he said in response to my semi-alarmed inquiry. "He had his hand out and he scratched my neck when he went past me during classes. It was an accident. He apologized to me and stuff."

It sounded plausible, and yet there are couple flaws in my son's story. First, there's a nearly identical mark on the other side of his neck, meaning the seventh grader must have double-backed and totally Wolverined my son on the other side. The second flaw rests in the fact that my son is a sixth grader and there are separate wings of the middle school for the sixth and seventh grade classes. Did this seventh grader time travel after his math class, wake up dazed and confused having landed in the six grade hallway and, in his confusion, freak out on my kid in a desperate bid to return to his normal? I don't know. Neither does my son, who rolled his eyes at me when I asked him if that last theory was possible (someone better start paying more attention in science class, methinks...).

Here's what I do know. If you kind of squint and then cock your head to the right a bit, that thing on my kid's neck kind of looks like it could be a vampire bite, and so help me, if my kid "changes" and starts acting all vampire-like, I'm going to be hella irritated! Who the hell wants an 11-year-old immortal living in their house forever?! Anytime under the age of 16 is not a good time to be given the vampire curse, in my opinion. The kid will forever need me or his Dad to shuttle him around because he'll never be able to get a driver's license, so there's that issue. Also, he'll live forever and yet not be able to get a job because who's going to hire an 11-year-old boy, even if the kid is all, "Dude, seriously, I'm 742 years old. I think I can figure out how to run the drive-through here at the old McDonald's, OK?", thus he'll live here forever, and I love him and all, but come on!

Also, the kid has developed a quasi-serious case of the back talks and I for one don't want to live out the rest of my life hearing "No!" every time I tell him it's time for bed, or ask him to stop draining the blood from our guests because it's rude.

I've kept an eye on him all weekend. This morning when we were at church, he didn't screech and act all weird when we entered, so I took that as a good sign; however, during worship, I wrapped my arms around him and noticed the little dude's flat stomach is as hard as a rock, which, according to these teenage vampire books I've been hearing so much about these days, is a sign I may have a bloodsucker on my hands!

Come to think of it, he had me wrap my arms around him because he told me HE WAS COLD, which is another big, big problem for The Vamps. I've been looking for other tell-tale signs of his potential transformation, but we've seriously been lacking in the sun around here for the last few days, which means I can't tell if he glitters and glows like a million shards of glass covered in silver glitter and lit ablaze like a burning flame when the light reflects off his marble skin that's as pale as alabaster or a bone china bowl of French vanilla ice cream.

But take another look up there at him (if you can, look past the fact that the kid is a hairy little beast)(crap - what if, instead of a vampire, the kid is a damn werewolf!?!)(oh, wait...werewolves are part of those teen vampire stories, too)(double crap). That little monkey is pale, so going on that whole powdery white skin description of vampires is going to be tough. Hell, you've seen me up there in the corner. If anyone is a potential vampire in this family, I think you're looking at it in that tiny photo (hahaha...my Tool Man just said I'm totally a vampire because I suck. Hahaha. I don't suck! I'm totally cool! Hahahaha, Tool Man...WAIT A MINUTE...).

We may be safe, though, when it all comes down to it. This kid of mine? He's always up at the crack of dawn. First glimmer of sun in his window raises him from the dead of sleep, not the dead of dead. While that's apparently acceptable if you're going to be some emo Shakespeare-quoting vampire, it's kind of a big faux paus if you're going to be a bad ass vampire, and the way he's fine-tuning the talking back, I think it's safe to assume we'd be dealing with a bad ass vampire.

The disturbing part of all this isn't that I milked an entire blog post out of my kid's scratches and possibly made up excuse for them (honestly, I think they came at the hands - aka incisors - of the annoying girl who calls our house constantly and walks to school with my son. The one who wants to marry him now, so what if we're only 11, that 'Y' under the possible bite marks is from when I started carving the word 'yes' into your skin...), or that the boy has a neck so tiny he'll never be able to support the kind of hair one apparently needs to be a brooding adolescent vampire. The real problem lies in the fact that I'm a raging zombie lover (I've been known to say on more than one occasion that "Vampires drool! Zombies Rule!"), so if I were going to have a fictional character of lore as my offspring, I'm kinda thinking I'd feel gyped if it turned out I'd have a blood sucker rather than a brain muncher. I guess my only other option is hope my first grader crosses paths with a rowdy third grader who decides he wants to crunch into his cranium.

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So you know I've made no secret of my dislike of Twilight and the heavy-handed, screaming for good editorial roll in the sheets writing style it has (typing that made me laugh with irony because, wow, take a look at the post up there....). I hate that book so hard! However, I like all of you who come here (oh, I even love some of you)(you know who you are) and tell me that you enjoyed Twilight and it's three follow-up novels, so, in light of that, and because I sell juvenile and young adult novels for a quasi-living, I figured I'd swallow my disdain, go against my adamant "I'll never read another Stephenie Meyer book as long as I live" creed, and give New Moon, the second book in this series a shot. After giving up nearly 16 hours of my life listening to it on CD (trust me, reading it would have taken me far, far longer because I'd have bitched far, far more with each page I turned), I can now say (again) that I'll never read (nor listen to) another Stephenie Meyer book as long as I live. It would probably be impossible to do so, I think, because I rolled my eyes so much while listening to how every conversation between the characters was said with a hiss (and that's the least of my complaints) that I'm still trying to get them back into their proper position! This little experiment just goes to show we all have different tastes, and I, for one, will never like the taste of blood as sucked up and presented by angsty teenage vampires. I hope we can still be friends. Like Jacob and Bella, but without the constant talking about my weird growth spurts and amber skin, OK?