Extraordinary<li>

by Adam Selzer

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents

  either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used

  fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

  events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2011 by Adam Selzer

  Jacket art copyright © 2011 by Mike Heath/Creative Magnus

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by

  Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the

  colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! www.randomhouse.com/teens

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools,

  visit us at

  www.randomhouse.com/teachers

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Selzer, Adam.

  Extraordinary : the true story of my fairy godparent, who almost killed me, and certainly never made me a princess / Adam Selzer. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Fourteen-year-old Jennifer sets the record straight after a best-selling book, ostensibly written about her, declares that her life was improved by her fairy godparent, who is actually a creepy, unkempt drunk with greasy hair.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-98358-0

  [1. Supernatural—Fiction. 2. Fairy godmothers—Fiction. 3. Dating (Social customs)—Fiction. 4. Vampires—Fiction. 5. High schools—Fiction. 6. Schools—Fiction. 7. Family life—Iowa—Fiction. 8. Iowa—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.S4652Ext 2011

  [Fic]—dc22

  2010046308

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  To Ronni,

  WHO TOLD ME SHE WAS TIRED OF BOOKS ABOUT

  GIRLS WHO THOUGHT THEY’D DIE IF THEY DIDN’T

  GO TO THE DANCE. HOPE YOU LIKE THIS ONE!

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Stephanie and Krista, my fantastic editors.

  Also, thanks to Jennifer Laughran, Taryn Fagerness,

  Claudia Gray, Kitten McCreery, “The Emily” and the

  Hamster Trainers, James Kennedy, Colleen Fellingham,

  Stephanie Kuehnert, and the crews of Sip Coffee

  and UPS Store #5428 on Grand Avenue.

  “Production babies”: Maggie Rose and Lola Bel

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  About the Author

  “So all I have to do is get that boy to kiss me at the dance and I’ll be a princess?”

  Jenny drew a sharp breath. The air was filled with the smell of daffodils, and the very stars in the sky seemed to be taking on a purple hue. First she’d found out that her naturally purple hair meant she was a fairy, and now she could become a princess, too?

  “Just let me take out my wand,” said her fairy godmother.

  “Jenny Van Den Berg, you were born to be extraordinary.…”

  —from Born to Be Extraordinary, by New York Times bestselling author Eileen Codlin

  Eileen Codlin sucks cheese.

  And I should know. I’m Jennifer Van Den Berg. The real one.

  While Eileen is sleeping on mattresses stuffed with money, I get to deal with all the idiots who think I’m really a fairy princess and that I can make other girls princesses, too, if they just bug me enough.

  And with their moms.

  Especially their moms.

  I’m not a princess. And I don’t really want to be one. I believe in democracy, and I think it’d be super-awkward to have a servant hanging around me all the time.

  But that’s only one of a thousand things Eileen changed around for her book to make it more like “what readers want to read.” That was nice of her, huh?

  When she showed me the first draft, I felt sick to my stomach before I finished the first page.

  “So, I guess you’re not going to say it was a true story after all, huh?” I asked. “This girl isn’t anything like me.”

  She just laughed. “I want this book to really connect with teens and tweens,” she said, “and they probably don’t want to be like the real you.”

  Gee, thanks, Eileen. That just makes me feel super.

  “If you want to connect with them, stop calling them ‘tweens,’ ” I said. “That’s the stupidest word ever.”

  “But I know what they want,” she said, with that stupid fake smile of hers.

  “What?” I asked. “Pure crap?”

  She just kept on smiling.

  But obviously she knew what she was talking about, seeing as how about eleven million people bought the book, and even more saw the movie.

  Now, I’m not trying to be mean or spoil your fun or anything, but I feel like I need to clear a few things up.

  Also, I need some money.

  So this is the real story. Exactly as it happened. I’ve cleaned up the language in a few places, but that’s about it.

  First of all, my parents want me to make it very clear that I’m not an orphan. Mom got really upset when she read that she got mowed down by a truck when I was four. Dad wasn’t too upset when he read that he was a billionaire playboy who didn’t even know I existed, but that’s way off, too.

  My “fairy godmother” did not smell like daffodils, unless those daffodils were growing in a public restroom that hadn’t been cleaned since the early 1980s.

  And I know I’ve been going around saying that Mutual Scrivener, the nerd who keeps trying to kiss me in the book, is a fictional character, but, well … you’ll see.

  And here’s fair warning: if it’s crap you want, well, you’re gonna get it. The real story has a lot more unicorn poop in it than the version you’ve already read. Just, a lot more. Born to Be Extraordinary didn’t mention that stuff at all, which is probably just as well, but I can’t tell the real story without it.

  To be fair, though, Eileen did get some things right.

  When the story began, I really was a normal, smart, slightly chubby but totally lovable (most of the time) teenage girl from Iowa.

  I do have purple hair (though I wasn’t born with it or anything—it’s dyed). I also have purple clothes, purple walls in my bedroom, and anything else purple that I can get. I’m purpliferous. And yes, that’s a real word (especially now that it’s in a book).

  And I do have a friend named Amber. She’s really awesome, too.

  The guy you’ve seen in pictures with me isn’t really Fred, but Fred was a real guy. He was really a vampire, too.

  And the story of my fairy godmother really did start out on a lousy, crappy, soul-sucking, butt-sniffing, very bad day.

  Jenny climbed out of her Prius and waved
to Melinda Cranston’s mom, who was sitting on the porch with Melinda. Melinda was crying already. It was going to be another long piano lesson.

  As Jenny walked up the driveway, Melinda’s little brother threw a pair of dirty underpants out his window, narrowly missing Jenny’s head.

  If only I were a princess, she thought, I wouldn’t have to teach piano to these brats just to make my car payments!

  one

  I think “Jenny” must have had a second job holding up convenience stores. Take it from me, you do not earn enough money teaching piano to buy a Prius.

  It’s true that I taught piano, but my real car, the Jenmobile, was an old powder-blue thing that looked like it couldn’t decide whether it was a sedan or a station wagon. I bought it at an auction for two hundred fifty dollars, and I probably overpaid. There were over three hundred thousand miles on the odometer, it had a weird smell that I could never get rid of, and it stalled more than a six-year-old at bedtime.

  When it stalled on the way to school that fateful November morning, I patted the dashboard and said, “Come on, baby. It’s just a few more blocks.”

  Sometimes that got it to start back up right away. This time it didn’t.

  It almost always started back up if I just gave it five or ten minutes, but the heater wouldn’t come on when the car was stalled, and there was freezing rain coming down that morning. I wasn’t about to sit there in the cold, so I put on the flashers, braved the sleet, and ran down Cedar Avenue to McDonald’s for a cup of coffee.

  That was where the story began.

  When I stepped inside, a gruff voice called out, “Hoo hoo!” and I turned to see a scruffy guy sitting at a table wearing a tattered overcoat and a bent fedora.

  “Excuse me?” I asked.

  “Anyone ever tell you you look like Grimace, kiddo?” he asked.

  “Who?”

  He flashed me a goblin grin and stood up. When he did, I saw that he was hunchbacked, and couldn’t have been more than four and a half feet tall. His curly brown hair—what I could see of it under his hat—must have been at least 50 percent grease.

  The little weirdo hobbled up to a sign on the wall with all the characters from the McDonald’s commercials and pointed at Grimace: the big, fat purple guy who looked like a talking eggplant or something.

  “All that purple you got on, kiddo,” he said, in a growly voice that made it sound like he was gargling whiskey. “You’re the spitting image!”

  For a second I was too dumbstruck to say anything.

  He was the one who looked like something made by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. And he was calling me a big, fat eggplant man.

  “Dick,” I said.

  He kept grinning at me as I slunk away from him and walked up to the counter.

  My purple coat made me look fat. That was all. It was a big coat. I knew I wasn’t the skinniest person in town or anything, but I was not shaped like an eggplant.

  “Don’t mind him,” the woman at the register whispered. “He’s been here every day lately. And when we close, we see him sitting in the parking lot across the street, smoking cigars.”

  “What a freak,” I said.

  “And when he gets a burger, he eats the whole thing. Like, the wrapper and everything.”

  I looked back over at the guy. He was back to sitting at his table, pouring some red liquid from a bottle in a brown bag into a teaspoon and slurping it up. I assumed it was not grape juice.

  He was not the kind of guy you expect to see in Iowa. Not in suburban Des Moines, anyway. Maybe out in the smaller towns. There are plenty of weirdos out there. I ought to know—my town used to be a small town before it got absorbed into suburbia, and it was a regular freak show.

  “Maybe you should call the cops,” I said. “Are you sure he didn’t, like, escape from an asylum or something?”

  “No!” the weirdo shouted from his table. “I didn’t.”

  I blushed and probably shivered a bit. I hadn’t thought he could possibly hear us.

  He put the bottle away, looked out the window at the strip malls and sleet, and started singing a song that went “Bang, bang, Lulu, bang away strong …”

  “Well,” I whispered, “you could at least get him on public drunkenness.”

  “Believe me, we’ve tried.” The woman sighed. “But he passes the test every time.”

  When I left, I gave the guy my dirtiest look for his Grimace remark, but he didn’t acknowledge me. He just kept singing to the window.

  As I walked back to my car, I imagined three creative ways to murder him for calling me fat: dropping heavy rocks on his head; carving him into a funny shape with a chain saw; and tying a rope around his feet, swinging him around above my head, and throwing him clear to Omaha.

  Then I poured my coffee into the gutter, put the empty cup on the ground, and stomped on it.

  I liked to break things in those days.

  Now, don’t get me wrong—I wasn’t some violent maniac or anything. All things considered, I was fairly well adjusted. I didn’t even kill bugs if I could help it.

  But up through the end of my junior year, my workload was about eighty hours per week, between school and various extracurriculars my parents made me do to pad my college applications. The only way I stayed sane was by reading a whole lot of Shakespeare (which I swear makes you breathe better) and squeezing in an hour or two a week to hang out with Jason and Amber, my best friends.

  Still, friends and Shakespeare couldn’t keep me from getting stressed out now and then, and nothing relieved stress like breaking stuff.

  Little porcelain angels from the dollar store were the best. Man, do those things shatter.

  But at the end of junior year, I got early acceptance through a special program at Drake, which is sort of the Harvard of Des Moines. The extracurriculars and volunteer work and advanced classes were no longer necessary, so I gave myself a much lighter schedule for my senior year. Breaking stuff was hardly a part of my life anymore.

  I was expecting this to be a really good day. My math class would be stuff I’d learned years ago. I could snooze through English while people read out loud from The Canterbury Tales at a rate of three words per minute. Debate would just be listening to the underclassmen argue about whether the new T-shirts should say “We Kick Rebuttal” or “We’re Master Debaters.”

  And in drama, I’d just be relaxing while the cast rehearsed The Music Man. I was working props, a job that so far required me to do nothing more than sit on my butt and watch the rehearsals.

  But the day started to fall apart the minute the Jenmobile stalled, and it only got worse from there.

  In addition to being told that I look like a giant eggplant by a pint-sized, burger-wrapper-eating freak, I realized later that morning that I’d left my lunch sitting on the kitchen table.

  Then I slammed my fingers in my locker.

  And when I got to the Music Man rehearsal in fourth period, Cathy Marconi, one of the handful of people I didn’t get along with, kept staring at me, smirking. I was just starting to wonder if she’d noticed that I looked like Grimace, too, when the doors swung open and a familiar gruff voice shouted out, “Hoo hoo!”

  Oh. God.

  I looked behind me to see the weirdo from McDonald’s standing in the doorway between the hall and the auditorium.

  “Ah!” he shouted. “This joint ain’t the Palace, but it’ll do!”

  Everyone turned and watched as he strutted down the aisle like he owned the place. He hoisted himself onto the stage, and I slumped down in my seat, praying he wouldn’t see me and make another Grimace remark.

  “Who are you?” someone asked.

  He stood up as straight as he could and took a bow.

  “My name is Gregory Grue,” he said. “I’m your new director!”

  I slumped a bit farther down.

  “What about Mrs. Alison?” asked Cathy, who was playing Eulalie Shinn, the mayor’s wife.

  Gregory smiled. “I’m afraid she’ll be
taking a leave of absence,” he said.

  “Did they finally find out that her water bottle was full of vodka?” someone asked.

  “I don’t wish to comment on the particulars, or lend credence to malicious gossip that happens to be true,” said Gregory. “The important thing is that she’s gone and I’m here, with a nail in my shoe and a song in my heart.”

  “Do you know anything about theater?” asked Cathy.

  Gregory laughed. His laugh sounded like a lawn mower trying to start.

  “I studied at the RSC for three years,” he said. “Any of you little punks know what that stands for?”

  My jaw dropped as someone a row ahead of me called out “Royal Shakespeare Company.” Gregory Grue grinned and nodded.

  I had been a Shakespeare fanatic since I was nine, so I knew that the Royal Shakespeare Company was just about the most famous Shakespeare troupe in the world. And as much as I hated to think anything good about this guy after what he’d said to me that morning, I could totally picture him playing Iago or Richard the Third.

  In fact, just as I was thinking that, he waved his hand with a theatrical flourish and went into Richard’s opening monologue.

  “Now is the winter of our discontent

  Made glorious summer by this sun of York;

  And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house

  In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.”

  He said that in a much clearer voice than his normal one; for a second, it was like he really did become Richard. It was enough to see that this guy was a damned good actor.

  “Just like how the winter of your discontent is about to be made glorious summer by Gregory Grue!” he said. “I’ve never directed a high school show before, but if I can get through three years with the RSC, I think I can handle a musical about a traveling salesman who cons a bunch of Iowans. Everyone get in your places, and we’ll run through the ‘Wells Fargo Wagon’ number so I can see where your strengths and weaknesses are. Then I’ll yell at you until you don’t have any weaknesses left.”

  And while I sat and watched, he started to direct people. He seemed to know what he was doing, but I couldn’t stop thinking that he seemed … creepy. Every now and then he would look over at me and grin, leaving me scared to death that he was going to make some other comment about my weight right in front of everyone.