Binky wasn’t really anybody’s friend. He was just this guy that was always coming around, wanting to be somebody’s friend and making cracks like he thought they were jokes, but nobody ever laughed at them. He had a pointy nose that was always dripping, and big sad eyes, and hair that he needed to wash a whole lot more often than he did. He hardly ever smiled because he had pretty dingy teeth and he didn’t use his tube of Ipana any too regularly, at least as far as I could tell.

He’d told me about this vampire that he’d met. It was supposed to be this big hairy secret just between me and him because we were such good friends. That’s what he thought, anyway. But Kate had wormed it out of me. She has a way of doing that. I never should have told her, but I did, and there was nothing I could do to change that.

“I guess if anybody knows a real vampire, it’s Binky,” Kate said. Her name’s really Katherine, but she thinks Kate is sophisticated or something. “Anyway, he says he does, and that’s what I need to make the party perfect.”

She should never have gone to see that movie, is what I think. Now she had the idea that a party with the girls dressed up in filmy nightgowns and guys looking like Igor or whatever his name was would be just the ticket. But she said it just wouldn’t work unless she had a vampire to liven things up.

“Maybe Dad could be the vampire,” I said. “He likes to dress up and stuff. He even has a tuxedo.”

“That’s so passé,” she said, brushing back her hair. I thought what she ought to do was cut off her bangs, but nobody ever asked me about stuff like that. “And Dad would make a terrible vampire.”

She was right about that. He was more the Mr. Peepers type, and he seemed to be getting more that way all the time, which might have been because our mother was a lot like Rip Van Winkle’s wife in that story we had to read at school.

“So that’s why you have to talk to Binky,” Kate said. This time she flipped her hair out of her eyes by tossing her head, which was even more irritating than if she’d used her hand. “If there’s a real vampire around, it would make the party just perfect. Will you do it?”

“A real vampire would be pretty dangerous,” I said. I didn’t even believe in vampires, and I thought Binky was full of crap. I was just trying to get her to shut up. I should have known better. Nobody could get Kate to shut up.

“We’ll have garlic and crosses and holy water,” she said. “It won’t be dangerous.”

“That stuff never works in the movies.”

“You don’t know anything. You don’t really like those movies. You think they’re not intellectual.”

“I never said that,” I told her, and it was the truth, even if she was right about what I thought.

“You didn’t have to say it. You sit around and observe everybody, like you think you’re better than us. But you’re not. You just like to think so.”

I couldn’t remember ever winning an argument with Kate, and I knew she’d never let up (she was a lot like our mother that way) so I finally said I’d talk to Binky if she’d do my geometry problems for a week. Not that I couldn’t do them myself, which I could, but I had to get something from her or she’d think she had the upper hand on me, which she didn’t, not really.

She thought she was a whiz at geometry, so she said she’d do the problems, and of course that meant I had to talk to Binky whether I wanted to or not.

Our high school was a big redbrick two-story building, and it smelled like that red stuff the janitors throw on the wooden floors before they sweep them. I’ve never figured out how that stuff is supposed to clean the floors, but I kind of liked the smell of it. I actually even liked the school. It’s just most of the students and faculty that I couldn’t stand.

When I went to school the next morning, not long before the first bell, the girls were all talking about how they’d seen Frankie Avalon sing “Venus” on American Bandstand the day before. That was their intellectual level, for Crissake, watching American Bandstand and liking Frankie Avalon. The guys were mostly farting and picking their noses, which was about their intellectual level. They didn’t like Frankie Avalon any more than I did, though; I’ll say that for them.

I couldn’t find Binky until Fred Burley told me that he was shut in his locker. Binky was small and weak, so some wit was always doing that to him.

“Who did it this time?” I asked. “Harry Larrimore?”

Harry was usually the one who did it. He’d done a few things to me, too, including giving me a terrific wedgie just before geometry class one day. Harry was a lot bigger than I was, so there was nothing I could do to him. I just went on into the class. I had trouble walking into the room, and everybody got a big laugh out of it, even Mrs. Delaney, the teacher, though she tried to hide it.

“I don’t think anybody put Binky in his locker,” Fred told me. “I think he just likes it in there.”

I didn’t see how that was possible. Who could like being closed up in a little dark space like that? There was no use in trying to explain that to Fred, though. If it didn’t have something to do with a ball, Fred had trouble figuring it out.

I eluded the teachers and sneaked up to the second floor where the sophomore lockers were lined up along the wall across from the study hall. The lockers were about four feet tall and painted gunmetal gray. They had little louvers at the top. I think the louvers were put there as a safety measure in case somebody left his stinky gym shoes inside but those vents were a lifesaver for some of the kids who got locked inside.

Nobody else was in the hall because we weren’t supposed to go up on the second floor before the bell. We might get into all kinds of unsupervised trouble. Anyway, it was very quiet in the hall, but I heard a noise coming from locker number 146, which was Binky’s. It wasn’t loud. It sounded as if someone might be reading a book in there and flipping the pages. That couldn’t be it, though. Binky was weird, but not weird enough to try to read in the dark.

I stood in front of the locker for a few seconds and listened. “Binky?” I said.

“Carleton?”

That’s my crummy name, Carleton, and I try to get people to call me Carl, which isn’t so bad, but nobody will do it, the bastards. They’ll call my sister Kate, but they won’t even give me the time of day.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s me.” I know I should have said, “It is I,” because old Mrs. Shanklin, our English teacher, keeps telling us how we should use correct grammar at all times if we want people to respect us, but I think it sounds phony as hell to tell you the truth, so I never do it. “Were you expecting somebody else?”

He couldn’t have been because nobody else ever came by to let him out of his locker. I didn’t come by because he was my friend, though, because he wasn’t. It’s just that I couldn’t treat anybody like the rest of the morons did him.

“What do you want?” he said.

“I need to ask you a favor.”

“I’m busy right now, Carleton. I have a test in first period.”

“You’re studying in the locker?”

“That’s right. Go away and leave me alone.”

That’s the thanks I got for being the one who tried to look out for him. I started to tell him what an ungrateful bastard he was, but I thought better of it.

“It’s about the vampire,” I said. I figured that would get his attention.

There was a dull thud, like a book being slammed shut. “You know I can’t talk about him, Carleton. I told you that. Now go away. I need to study, and I can’t be late for class. If I get another tardy, Old Man Harkness will give me detention for a month.”

Binky got a lot of tardies, mainly because he was shut up in his locker so much. I did my best to help, but I couldn’t remember to go by and let him out every single day.