by Adam Selzer
The look on Cathy’s face haunted me all the way home.
By the time the Jenmobile got me back to Preston (which took half an hour, since it stalled out twice), the annoyance had turned into a slow-burning rage that was going to need to be dealt with.
I took three porcelain angel figurines out of the box under my bed and smashed them to smithereens on the icy sidewalk in front of my house, imagining that one of them was Cathy, one of them was Mrs. Smollet, and one of them was Gregory Grue. I loved the weight of the hammer in my hand, the satisfying crash it made when it came down on the porcelain, the plink sound when it hit the sidewalk—or, in this case, the crack when it busted the thin layer of ice.
I was still cleaning up the broken pieces when I looked up and saw that the Wells Fargo Wagon was coming down my street.
Jenny sighed as she stood behind the piano, practicing singing one of her songs for the school musical.
“I’m never going to get this!” she said sadly. “I couldn’t hit that note if I stood on a chair!”
“Keep trying,” said Amber. “I know you can do it. You’re going to be a star!”
Jenny tried again. She felt so lucky to have someone like Amber—a popular, skinny girl who always had the very latest shoes and knew all the latest music—as a friend.
three
One thing I’ll say for Eileen: she nailed Amber.
Well, in a way. The real Amber is about my size and wears fishnets and pentagram necklaces. And she listens to metal, not pop, like the book version of her. She certainly wasn’t “popular,” exactly.
But she did wear the very latest footwear—her shoes were always that season’s ten-dollar Converse knockoffs. And she really was a friend I was lucky to have.
I didn’t play Marian the Librarian in The Music Man, like “Jenny” does, but if I had, Amber would have helped me and encouraged me and made me feel braver, just like she does in the book.
And if I’d really been practicing my singing, maybe I would have been less pitchy when I sang out the “Wells Fargo Wagon” song on my lawn upon seeing one coming down my street.
Now, in case you’ve never seen The Music Man, it’s all about this con artist named Professor Harold Hill. He’s a traveling salesman back in 1912 who goes from small town to small town convincing parents that their sons are going to grow up to be immoral bums, then offers to solve the problem by teaching the kids to play musical instruments and organizing them into a band. But he doesn’t really know a thing about music; as soon as he collects the money for the instruments and uniforms, he skips town, never to be seen again, leaving the townspeople with a bunch of instruments they can’t play while he goes off to pull the same con in another town.
Since it takes place here in Iowa, every high school drama department does it every now and then. We Iowans love anything with Iowa in it (pronounce Des Moines correctly—like “Duh Moyne”—on television and we’ll love you forever), so even the crappiest of high school productions is likely to sell enough tickets to break even.
And when I say the Wells Fargo Wagon was coming down my street, I mean a Wells Fargo Wagon. Like, the old horse-drawn kind they sing about in the show at the end of act one, when it rolls into town with all the junk people ordered from catalogs. But instead of a horse, this one was being led by a tow truck that came down my street and turned right into my driveway.
When the door to the tow truck opened, I just about fainted.
The driver was Gregory Grue.
He was wearing a jumpsuit that looked like it was supposed to be white, but it was practically tie-dyed with stains.
“Hoo hoo!” he said. “I see you’re hammering out love between your brothers and sisters all over this land.”
I tried to keep calm as well as I could.
“You’re a delivery man, too?” I asked.
He chuckled. “I don’t know much about economics,” he said, “but I do know that you can’t make a living teaching one class a day. And ladies love a man who delivers the goods!”
“I thought the techies were building the Wells Fargo Wagon,” I said.
“Nope,” he said. “They can’t. You need all kinds of tools that violate the zero-tolerance weapons policy to build something like this. They ordered it from a prop supplier.”
I sighed. “I believe that,” I said. “But why don’t you just take it over to the school? I can’t do anything with it here.”
He shrugged. “The sheet says to deliver it here, so I can’t take it there. Sign here, madam.”
He held out a form on a clipboard and I signed it.
“I’ll put in a request at the school to have it towed there,” he said, “but it’ll take a while.”
He left the wagon in the driveway, then jumped up into his truck, gave me a little salute, and drove off singing “It’s a long way to Cornersville Trace, it’s a long way to go.…”
When the tow truck was gone, the wagon looked like some sort of billboard for the Wells Fargo company in my driveway. They should have paid me.
And it’s not too late. Hint hint.
I told myself I’d probably been seeing Gregory around for years but never noticed him, because he had never called me Grimace before. It was like when you learn a new word and suddenly hear it three times the next day.
At least he didn’t eat the form I’d signed or anything. As far as I knew. There was no telling what he did with it once he got back into the truck.
I finished cleaning up the debris I’d created and shook off the general feeling of creepiness Gregory gave me just in time for Melinda Cranston’s mom to drop her off for her piano lesson.
I did, in fact, teach Melinda piano, like “Jenny” does in Eileen’s book. But she came to my house, not the other way around, so if she did have a little brother, he never threw any underwear at me (thank God). And Eileen was at least nice enough not to mention that I was probably the world’s least competent piano teacher. I’d taken flute, piano, and violin just long enough to list them on a college application, and I’d be out of a job as soon as Melinda got through the advanced beginner workbook.
Luckily for me, at the rate she was going, that would take a while. She wasn’t as bratty as the girl in the book, but she was not what you’d call a gifted musician.
Midway through her fifth attempt at playing “The Animal Band,” my parents came charging into the living room—both at once, which was odd, since I’d hardly ever seen them together since the divorce.
“Okay,” said Mom. “Your side, please.”
“Can this wait?” I asked. “I’m working.”
“Melinda,” said Mom, “work on your cross-hand piece. We need to talk to Jennifer in the kitchen.”
I hated it when she butted in when I was trying to teach—it undermined my role as the teacher, which could only stand up to so much undermining to begin with. But I got off the bench and followed them to the kitchen.
“So I guess Jablonski called you,” I said as we walked out of the living room and into the kitchen.
They nodded just as Melinda hit the wrong key on the piano.
“What in the heck were you thinking, taking skates to school?” asked Dad. “If the principal hadn’t suspended you, Cathy could have gone to the press and accused him of being tolerant of deadly weapons, and he could have lost his job.”
“I thought it would be fun to try to ice-skate home, since it was going to be icy,” I said.
Then I turned toward the living room to shout “Use both hands, Melinda! That’s why they call it cross-hand!”
“You would have gotten stranded halfway and missed the piano lesson and lost your job,” said Dad.
“Jason and Amber were going to follow me to make sure I made it in time.”
“Relax, Mitchell, she would have been fine,” said Mom. “Now, can we just get down to dealing with this?”
Dad wasn’t done.
“You only wanted people to see you skating and think about what a nonconformist you must
be,” he went on.
“No!”
“First the purple hair, and now this.”
“Like anyone in school still has their natural hair color, Dad. Melinda doesn’t have her natural hair color.”
“Right,” said Dad.
When the guy playing Harold Hill did a crappy job in rehearsal, Mrs. Alison would say, “Try that again—I didn’t quite believe you that time.” Sometimes I think my whole attempt to become a charming eccentric came off like a crappy rehearsal. Dad sure didn’t believe it.
Mom is fairly sane, as parents go, but I always sort of wished my dad really were a jet-set type who was never around to embarrass me with his lousy attempts to make me into an overachiever, which were known to include espionage, bribery, and possibly some light treason. Growing up with him had forced me to become an expert at compartmentalizing—pushing unpleasant things from the front of my mind into their own little compartments—which can really come in handy. I don’t know if I could have survived this whole story without it.
For instance, while he whined about my hair, I decided to stop focusing on him and focus on something else: food. I reached into the pantry, grabbed a jar of peanut butter, and started eating right out of the damned thing.
There was definitely no way I could start my new, free-spirited life, the one I’d always wanted, while I lived in a house to which he still had keys.
“Now we need to get on the phone with Drake,” he said with a sigh, “and make sure this doesn’t affect your scholarships or anything.”
“Why would it?” I asked.
“Getting suspended?” said Dad. “You don’t think that makes you less attractive to a college? They took a chance by giving you early acceptance as it was. You’ll be lucky to get into the Shaker Heights Institute of Technology now.”
“Two hands, Melinda!” I shouted again.
“But it’s hard!” she shouted back.
“It’s supposed to be!”
“I’ll call them,” said Mom, “but I’m sure it’s fine.”
While Mom got out a list of phone numbers, I imagined grinding Cathy Marconi into peanut butter in some kind of enormous peanut butter–making machine, then spreading her onto pinecones and covering her with birdseed at a Girl Scout Jamboree.
If the suspension made Drake start to think twice, I’d probably have to pick up more extracurriculars to get back in to their good graces. I didn’t have time for that. Becoming an extraordinary person takes practice, just like a cross-hand piano piece, and I felt like I had my work cut out for me.
“I suppose we should probably be grounding you,” said Mom.
“For the rest of the year,” added Dad.
“Please don’t,” I said. “I need to go to the alliance meeting tonight.”
Mom and Dad looked at each other.
“It really was just a technicality,” Mom said.
“A technicality that could cost her her entire future!” said Dad.
“Oh, please.” Mom looked over at me. “They aren’t going to screw up her future over a third-of-the-day suspension, Mitchell. You weren’t really thinking of attacking Cathy, right, Jennifer?”
I shook my head. “Not seriously.”
“Then just promise you’re not going to the meeting tonight to get someone on the vampire Council of Elders to have Mrs. Smollet torn to bits, okay?”
“Done,” I said.
It wasn’t like anyone from the Council of Elders would even be there. It’s called the Iowa Human/Post-Human Alliance, but only a handful of actual post-humans ever came. This is Des Moines, after all. We’re not really known for diversity here to start with, and about half the vampires in town had moved away to a place where people would be less suspicious of their every move after Alley got attacked.
“Now can I get back to work?”
“Okay,” Mom said. “You can go.”
She nodded, and I sat back down at the piano bench just in time to hit a key Melinda was about to miss.
Some of you might have met Dad. He’s the guy in the three-piece suit who comes by now and then—even though it’s not his house anymore—and turns the hose on the people who camp out on the lawn.
And don’t bother trying to sue. You can be on my sidewalk, but once you set foot on my lawn, anything we do is nice and legal.
Trust me. I’ve checked.
“Just act natural,” Amber said sneakily. “Vampires like girls who act natural.”
“But this black wig itches!” said Jenny hopelessly. “I’ll never be able to keep it on!”
They crept through the back window into the armory, where all the vampires in town were meeting with the mayor, the local news anchors, and all the other members of the Iowa Human/Post-Human Alliance, the glitziest charity in town.
Jenny was sure Amber would be walking out with a post-human date to the dance, and equally sure that she herself would be spending the dance watching TV and eating ice cream—as usual.
four
There was no need to sneak into the Iowa Human/Post-Human Alliance meetings. The ones at the armory building were open to the public, and there were always empty seats. It wasn’t any more glamorous than most flea markets.
Inside, Eileen Codlin was the first person I saw.
“Jenny V!” she said. “How are you tonight?”
“Hi, Eileen,” I said, as politely as I could. I don’t know where she got the idea that I went by “Jenny.” I did not. Nor do I now. But it’s all she ever called me, either in person or in her book.
Back then, I knew Eileen as a flaky woman from the alliance who was always going around talking about some book she was working on; it was going to be some sort of encyclopedia of post-humans, including stuff like gnomes and the Loch Ness Monster that probably weren’t even real. She was one of a large number of people who assumed that since vampires and zombies were real, so was everything else she’d ever read about in a fantasy novel.
I never believed the rumors that she was on meth, but I didn’t take her very seriously. No one did. I wouldn’t have sold her the rights to my story for a lousy five hundred bucks if I thought she could actually make a book out of it.
But I tried to be polite to her, like always.
“How’s your book coming?” I asked.
“Oh, wonderful,” she said. “I’m taking care of some magical creatures for research. I’m getting a gryphon next week!”
“Cool,” I said, trying to sound like I believed she was really going to get a gryphon, not just a cat that someone had glued feathers onto. “Will you excuse me for a second?”
A group of people were crowded around Murray, one of our two or three token vampires. I crept away from Eileen, tossed my coat onto a table with everyone else’s, and headed over to see what was happening.
In the middle of the group, Murray was holding up his phone to show a video of a new Megamart commercial, which showed a smiling zombie talking about how grateful he was that Megamart had “given him the gift of life” when they raised up his corpse to work as slave labor in their stockrooms.
“See,” said Murray, in his New York accent. “What a bunch of dirtbags.”
“That’s just what we don’t need,” I said. “Another Igor on television.”
“Igor” is what we call zombies who act like Megamart is really a terrific operation for enslaving them. They make people think that we don’t need to give zombies any rights, because they’re happier without them.
“It’s probably not even a real zombie,” someone said. “If I know Megamart, they just got some guy to put on zombie makeup.”
“The minstrel show of the post-human era,” said Murray.
I loved hearing Murray talk. He sounded like an agent for a Broadway singer or something. That kind of accent is a total novelty around here.
“Did you ever go to one of those, back in the day?” I asked.
Murray blushed a little.
“You can admit it,” I said with a chuckle. “You guys didn’t
know any better back then.”
He smiled a tiny bit and took a deep breath. “Anyone who lives from era to era ends up doing stuff they ain’t proud of,” he said. “At least I know better now. I’m not like one of them Victorians.”
Everyone nodded and patted him on the back. Except for a Victorian vampire, who kind of scowled.
Murray was one of my favorite vampires, partly because he dealt with changing times better than most of them. So many vampires still thought that “vampire culture” gave them a free pass to act like total douchebags. These are the ones who defend all the pressure they put on the children of vampires to convert by saying “That’s just what vampires do.”
Worst. Excuse. Ever.
But you can’t really blame them—if they weren’t that forward-thinking or open-minded when they became vampires, they probably never would be. When you don’t age, your brain doesn’t really evolve.
See, this was the kind of stuff we discussed at the alliance. We talked about post-human rights, whether vampire teenagers should be in schools, and whether executing posthuman convicts counted as the death penalty, since they were technically already dead. It wasn’t anything like the glamorous vampire social club Eileen made it out to be. It was the kind of place where you threw your coat on a table and hoped the radiator was working that night.
I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to see Corey Tapley, in all his skinny, dreadlocked glory.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” I said, giving him the sexiest smile I could.
Corey was a lanky guy who sort of looked like a blond Ichabod Crane. He was much more of a hard-core activist type than I was—he was always going to protests and rallies, usually for stuff I thought was pretty pointless. But we got along really well anyway. I wasn’t exactly attracted to him, but there was always a chance that a romantic evening at a dance could win me over.
“What’s been going on?” he asked.
I told him the whole thing about getting suspended, and he groaned in the right places. But then he started talking about how we should get some picket signs made up and organize a big protest against the school’s weapons policy. Like that would work. I just smiled and nodded most of the time when he talked, and this was no exception.