“Um. Ava?” It was a boy’s voice.
Her mouth dropped open. She sat up in bed. “This is Ava,” she said, trying to sound normal.
“This is Jeff.”
“Jeff?” she repeated.
“Um. Jeff Jackson?”
“Oh. This is Ava.”
“I know. I called you.”
“Oh.” She caught herself. She was the new Ava here, not the old one. She just had to remind herself. “I mean, hey. How are you?”
“Great. I’m just . . . wondering if you were planning to meet me at the lake today?”
“Sure,” she said, smiling into the phone. Grandma Kay always said you could hear a smile. “Yes.”
“I thought maybe we could go together? Ride our bikes?”
“Oh! Together?”
“Yeah. I could come by your house?”
“Okay.”
“Maybe in an hour?”
“Okay.”
“Okay. Bye.”
“Bye.”
She stared at her phone in disbelief, as if it had just grown a mouth and started talking to her all on its own.
Then it hit her, and she screamed. Jeff Jackson was coming to her house! “Oh my god!!!” she cried.
A second later, her father appeared in her doorway. “What’s going on?” he asked, his voice and face panicked. “Are you all right?”
“Yes!” She bounded off the bed and leapt across the room and into his arms. “Dad!!! Jeff Jackson just called me! He’s coming here in an hour!”
“Who’s Jeff Jackson?”
“Only the love of my LIFE,” she said, pulling back and giving him her most serious expression.
“Well, that’s great. I was hoping to have a few more years before this kind of thing came up, but . . .”
“Dad, I’m about to turn THIRTEEN. I’m practically an adult.”
“Ava, you are not even close to being an adult yet. What are you and this Jeff Jackson planning to do together, if I may ask, only being your father and sole caretaker?”
She rolled her eyes. “We’re riding our bikes to the lake.”
“Ah.” He scratched his chin and pretended to contemplate. “That means I don’t have to give you a ride, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that sounds like an excellent plan. I like this Jeff Jackson fellow already.” He pointed his finger at her. “But ride carefully and make sure you have your phone with you.”
“I will, Dad.”
“And call me when you get there.”
“Okay. I have to get ready!”
He sighed. “Maybe we can order a pizza tonight and you can tell me all about it. I’ll spend the day emotionally preparing myself.”
“Sure,” she said, pushing him out of her doorway. “Now let me get ready!!!”
She shut the door and turned back to her room, and stopped.
Everything was so . . . lovely all of a sudden. The sun shining in through the windows, split by the tree branches outside. The perfume smell of the flowers in full bloom along the side of the house. Her sweet white bed and pink pillows and there, out of sight, under her bed, the feathered robe that seemed to fill the room even when she couldn’t see it. The black-and-white photo of her mother. Her computer screen blinking with messages from her best friend, who was really very lovable despite being incredibly annoying. And the pretty sundress hanging on her closet door right next to her new bathing suit.
It was summer. Her thirteenth birthday was in less than a month.
And she was a SWAN MAIDEN.
Ava slipped into the bathing suit and the sundress, which was an off-white cotton with ropy lace around the edges. She turned to the mirror and for the first time in forever wasn’t even partially horrified by what she saw: herself, standing there, her long black hair cascading down dramatically against the pale fabric, the way it did against the white feathers of her robe. Her fair skin looked okay to her now. She kind of even liked it. It was who she was. Ava Lewis. Tall and pale, with black hair, twelve years old. And even if everyone loved Jennifer Halverson and the other zombies with their tan skin and blond hair—okay and the one black zombie, Barb Freeman, who looked like Tyra Banks—it was also true that Jeff Jackson, Morgan, and a bunch of swan maidens liked her just the way she was.
Jeff Jackson!
She screamed again and checked the clock. Now that she was ready, the half hour she had left seemed like an eternity.
She sat down in front of her computer then and typed an IM to Morgan: “Jeff Jackson on his way HERE NOW! We’re biking to the lake!”
“OMG” came flashing back onto her screen.
“I KNOW!”
“HOW AM I GONNA GET 2 THE LAKE?”
Ava moaned. She’d forgotten all about her plans with Morgan, of course. She was just like one of those lame girls in one of those cheesy teen movies, dropping everything the moment a boy came around.
“I’m sorry,” she typed, adding in a stupid unhappy face emoticon. “Can’t your mom take u?”
“NO SHE’S WORKING!”
“But it’s a date!”
Ava’s phone rang. “Ava!” Morgan’s voice cried out, as Ava opened the phone several inches from her ear, knowing what was coming. “You cannot do this to me.”
“Morgan, this is my first date with Jeff Jackson!”
“But we had plans! And I need to see Josh Kirschner, who by the way said I looked nice yesterday, which you would have known if you weren’t all obsessed with boys and swans and actually cared about your BEST FRIEND for once.”
“Oh.” Ava felt totally guilty all of a sudden. She had been a little selfish, hadn’t she? But it wasn’t every day that a girl discovered she was a swan maiden. Was it?
But she had been ignoring Morgan a little.
And Josh Kirschner was almost as cute as Jeff Jackson with those marble eyes, and Morgan had only been in love with him for five thousand years.
She sighed. “Okay, fine. We can all ride our bikes together.”
“I’ll be there in a few,” Morgan said, and hung up the phone.
Ava sat at her desk, dejected. From this angle, she could see the robe winking and glittering at her from under the bed. Despite herself, she went over to pick it up. Without even thinking she wrapped it around her shoulders and there, in front of the mirror, watched as her body turned to feathers, swooping down into the graceful perfect shape of a swan.
She walked over to the mirror on the closet door, planting one black webbed foot in front of the other. Her black eyes staring back at her. Her feathers like fresh-fallen snow, the way it sparkled under streetlamps and made Christmas—and Hanukkah, for Morgan, her extremely annoying best friend—the most magical holiday of the whole year, even better than Halloween when she got to dress as a mermaid or a cat.
Everything looked more sparkling through these eyes, actually. Her bedspread and computer, the sunlight coming in through the window, the photo of her mother. It was the same room, but entirely different.
She lifted her wings, admiring their curve and shape. What a magical body she had! Even the human things seemed magical now: the way her body told her when it was hungry and when it was tired, the way she bled once a month, the way she was changing, and growing, and becoming a woman . . .
Suddenly, she caught something out of the corner of her eye. Her mother’s photo was really different now, she realized, more than everything else. She walked up closer to it, craning her long long neck.
It wasn’t just her mother leaning against a tree anymore, smiling into the camera, the way it had been for as long as she could remember.
Now Ava could clearly see that her mother was wearing a robe in the photo, one just like hers, the white feathers flaring up around her face like a boa, or waving hands. The photo wasn’t misshapen the way other things were—the bed longer and thinner, the computer screen larger and more glaring. Her mother just stood there, staring at her, with the white robe hanging from her shoulders. And she was
smiling eerily, as if she were actually looking right at Ava. Her eyes black and glittering.
“Mama,” Ava breathed, though what came out was a strange cooing noise.
Her mother’s face softened, came into focus, and then there was nothing eerie about it at all. It was as if her own mother were right there. Soft, beautiful, in full color now, her hair a pale creamy gold, her cheeks pink and milky, and around her, bright green leaves and swaying grass.
“Ava.” The voice whispered in her ear, was all around her.
“Mama,” she repeated. “Please come back.”
And then, faintly, just as her mother appeared to move, to walk toward her, she heard the doorbell ringing, cutting through her reverie.
A few seconds later, her father was banging on her door. “Ava!”
She flapped her wings, panicked, almost forgetting herself. And then she reached back and was standing in her room with the robe in her hand, wearing her bathing suit and sundress.
Quickly, she stashed the robe away, stealing a glance up at her mother’s photo as she did.
It was the same as before: black and white, her mother in a pale dress, standing against a tree.
There was magic all around her, she realized—things she couldn’t see with her regular, human girl eyes.
“Ava!” her father called. “There is a boy here for you!”
A burst of happiness moved through her even as she groaned at her father’s embarrassingly loud voice. She felt a warmth inside her that she’d never felt before, knowing her mother was so close. A full, glowy kind of feeling, as if the moon itself were inside of her. And it was the moon that would bring her mother to her. The next full moon, she was sure of it.
But for now?
Her one true love awaited.
Before she stepped out into the front hall, where her father stood no doubt regaling Jeff Jackson with the most embarrassing moments of her short-yet-embarrassment-filled life, Ava paused in the living room to lean against the wall and collect herself. Ava Gardner, she thought, breathing in, imagining how Ava Gardner would glide into the hallway and toss her hair and flick her eyes down and then up again before saying, “It is such a pleasure to see you, Jeff.”
And of course he would look at her in amazement, barely able to stammer about how marvelous she looked in her fashionable new swimsuit and sundress.
She took a deep breath, smiled broadly, and stepped into the hallway.
He was so cute! Jeff Jackson stood there all tall and yellow-haired and manly and dimpled, talking with her dad about his career ambitions.
“I plan to get a PhD, too, sir,” he was saying, and she just about died, he was so adorable.
“It’s a good life,” her father said, and he would have said more except that Ava, in a misguided attempt to both toss her hair and glide toward her date, tripped on the slick tile and nearly landed in Jeff’s arms, just as Morgan burst through the front door, pushing it so that it smacked Jeff Jackson right in the back.
“Girls, girls!” Ava’s dad said, just to make things even more totally humiliating. “I know he’s handsome but don’t throw yourselves at the poor kid.”
Steadying herself, Ava was about half a second from running to her bedroom in tears when she realized that Jeff Jackson was laughing. Laughing! And not at all in a mean way, either! And then Ava’s dad was laughing, and Morgan was laughing, and before she knew it Ava was laughing, too, and by the time Ava, Morgan, and Jeff headed out to the garage to get Ava’s bike, the ice had been broken and Jeff didn’t even seem to mind that Ava had asked—been forced to ask, that is—Morgan along.
It was weird to think that the cutest, most popular boy in school could feel like a friend, too, like a normal kid, but that’s how it felt as the three of them biked to the lake, talking and laughing and being total, complete dorks. Morgan even started snorting in her totally embarrassingly dorky way and Jeff did it back to her.
“Oinkkkk!”
Ava pedaled along happily, watching Jeff as he sped ahead and then looked back at her, laughing, urging her forward. She shrugged, looking away, pretending to ignore him, and then suddenly burst forward and shot past him.
“Cheater!” he cried out, zooming up alongside her, and they raced side by side, laughing wildly, as Morgan screamed behind them.
They were at the lake before Ava knew it, and she thought how long the ride in her father’s car usually seemed, because the girls were so anxious to get out of the car and onto the beach. Now, with the three of them together, she didn’t care if they ever arrived at the lake. For all she cared, they could ride like this all day long.
Once the three were lying on their towels in the sun, side by side, Ava trying not to die of embarrassment every time she looked at Jeff with his naked chest, she told Jeff about her birthday party plans, secretly afraid that he would laugh at her and refuse to come and even, possibly, leave the country to be as far away as possible.
“So you’ll come, maybe?” she asked.
“We’re going to make it the best party ever!” Morgan said.
“It sounds awesome,” Jeff said, turning to Ava and smiling right at her, his big blue eyes even bluer in the sun. “Of course I’ll come! I can’t wait.”
For the rest of the day, as they swam and rode the carousel and bought hot dogs at one of the vendor stands next to the carousel and ignored—and delighted in—the zombies’ horrified, shocked looks, Ava played those three words over and over in her head, spoken in the lovely low voice of her extremely handsome friend and possibly boyfriend (!!!) Jeff Jackson: I can’t wait.
Neither could she.
CHAPTER NINE
Ava spent all that evening, and all the next day, in a boy-crazed stupor. She couldn’t stop thinking about Jeff Jackson . . . smiling, imagining his manly chest under the sun, his yellow hair, what it would be like to kiss him . . .
She couldn’t concentrate on anything at all. She tried picking up the vampire novel she was reading, but the words blurred in front of her and instead she saw Jeff Jackson standing there, gazing at her with those crackling blue eyes of his. “Ava,” he whispered. “You’re so beautiful you make my eyes ache.”
She tried watching television but then there he was sliding next to her on the couch, reaching for her hand, telling her that he’d loved her for as long as he could remember and thought she was the smartest and coolest girl in the whole school.
More than once her father caught her smiling to herself, and asked her what was making her act so goofy. “It’s that boy, isn’t it?” he’d say. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“No!”
How embarrassing!
But she couldn’t even concentrate on the old Greta Garbo movie her dad put on that evening, and spent the whole time staring into space.
“So I’m guessing you had a nice time at the lake with that young man,” her father said, sighing and turning off the television.
“It was okay,” she mumbled. She turned away from the imaginary Jeff sitting next to her.
“I was hoping you’d be more like . . . thirty when this happened.”
“Dad!”
“Well, he is obviously quite enamored of you, too. He looked at you like you were made out of chocolate. And you, my child, you just cannot stop smiling.”
“Dad, can you just put the movie back on?”
“Fine,” he said, sighing.
But by Sunday morning, she started to worry. Shouldn’t he have called her by now?
She lay on her bed, going over everything they’d talked about. Like the way she’d told him she planned to have lots of adventures when she grew up, and wanted to travel all over the place, maybe even to Thailand or California.
Her heart dropped. Panic spread through her, like water being poured over her body and soaking her right through. Maybe he thought she was a hippie!
Morgan told her she was being crazy. “You just saw him yesterday,” she said, when she called late that morning. “He obviously likes yo
u. It was a little revolting, to be honest.”
“Really?”
“Yes! He had this stupid look on his face the whole time we were at the lake, and so did you. I’m getting queasy just thinking about it.”
But Ava was inconsolable. “Then why isn’t he calling? If he liked me he would want to talk to me.”
“Quit being ridiculous. Get on your bike and meet me. Come on, it’s amazing out today. Jeff’s probably at the lake already.”
“Probably sitting with all his friends, laughing about me.”
Morgan groaned into the phone. “Can you please just get over here?”
“No, I’m staying home today.”
“What?”
“I went to the lake with you yesterday even though I had a date. And now he hates me. I’m not going back there—maybe not ever!”
She threw herself on her bed dramatically, hitting her chin on the phone and accidentally hanging up on Morgan.
What did it matter, anyway? Morgan clearly didn’t understand that her life was ruined. What was the point of discussing it?
Ava spent the rest of the day in front of the television, to her father’s dismay—“you’ll rot your brain!” he said, before disappearing into the basement—and by Sunday night she was convinced that Jeff Jackson had never liked her at all and that the whole thing had been a joke, like when Ian Franklin asked out Beth Miller. She could see it so clearly she was convinced she’d turned psychic: him sitting there with all his friends, laughing.
She sat on the couch watching Jeopardy, tears streaking her face. She didn’t even know any of the answers! In disgust, she finally turned off the television and went to bed, not even bothering to find her dad to say good night.
No one would ever love her, she realized. She would die alone and unloved. Neighborhood children would tell each other stories about the crazy old lady living by herself and occasionally turning into a swan.
She lay on her bed, tears streaming down her face.
Suddenly, there was a rapping on her window. A moment later, her phone rang.
Ava groaned. Why couldn’t Morgan leave her alone in her misery, let her suffer in peace?
The Next Full Moon Page 9