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to spurt out, he took my hands in one of his, holding them tight and, with the other seized my neck and pressed my mouth to the wound…"

    When his mother saw this, she threw the book down the garbage chute.
    In the next morning when Jules found the book missing he screamed and twisted his mother's arm until she told him where the book was.
    Then he ran down to the cellar and dug in the piles of garbage until he found the book.
    Coffee grounds and egg yolk on his hands and wrists, he went to the park and read it again.
    For a month he read the book avidly. Then he knew it so well he threw it away and just thought about it.
    Absence notes were coming from school. His mother yelled. Jules decided to go back for a while.
    He wanted to write a composition.
    One day he wrote it in class. When everyone was finished writing, the teacher asked if anyone wanted to read their composition to the class.
    Jules raised his hand.
    The teacher was surprised. But she felt charity. She wanted to encourage him. She drew in her tiny jab of a chin and smiled.
    "All right," she said. "Pay attention children. Jules is going to read us his composition."
    Jules stood up. He was excited. The paper shook in his hands.
    "My Ambition by…"
    "Come to the front of the class, Jules, dear."

    Jules went to the front of the class. The teacher smiled lovingly. Jules started again.
    "My Ambition by Jules Dracula."
    The smile sagged.
    "When I grow up I want to be a vampire."
    The teacher's smiling lips jerked down and out. Her eyes popped wide.
    "I want to live forever and get even with everybody and make all the girls vampires. I want to smell of death."
    "Jules!"
    "I want to have a foul breath that stinks of dead earth and crypts and sweet coffins."
    The teacher shuddered. Her hands twitched on her green blotter. She couldn't believe her ears. She looked at the children. They were gaping. Some of them were giggling. But not the girls.
    "I want to be all cold and have rotten flesh with stolen blood in the veins."
    "That will… hrrumph!"
    The teacher cleared her throat mightily.
    "That will be all Jules," she said.
    Jules talked louder and desperately.
    "I want to sink my terrible white teeth in my victims' necks. I want them to…"
    "Jules! Go to your seat this instant!"
    "I want them to slide like razors in the flesh and into the veins," read Jules ferociously
    The teacher jolted to her feet. Children were shivering. None of them were giggling.
    "Then I want to draw my teeth out and let the blood flow easy in my mouth and run hot in my throat and…"
    The teacher grabbed his arm. Jules tore away and ran to a corner. Barricaded behind a stool he yelled:

    "And drip off my tongue and run out my lips down my victims' throats! I want to drink girls' blood!"
    The teacher lunged for him. She dragged him out of the corner. He clawed at her and screamed all the way to the door and the principal's office.
    "That is my ambition! That is my ambition! That is my ambition?"
    It was grim.
    Jules was locked in his room. The teacher and the principal sat with Jules's parents. They were talking in sepulchral voices.
    They were recounting the scene.
    All along the block parents were discussing it. Most of them didn't believe it at first. They thought their children made it up.
    Then they thought what horrible children they'd raised if the children could make up such things.
    So they believed it.
    After that everyone watched Jules like a hawk. People avoided his touch and look. Parents pulled their children off the street when he approached. Everyone whispered tales of him.
    There were more absence notes.
    Jules told his mother he wasn't going to school anymore. Nothing would change his mind. He never went again.
    When a truant officer came to the apartment Jules would run over the roofs until he was far away from there.
    A year wasted by
    Jules wandered the streets searching for something; he didn't know what. He looked in alleys. He looked in garbage cans. He looked in lots.