by Adam Selzer
We sat down next to each other and waited for the meeting to get under way. I smiled. He smiled.
Man, did I need someone to be smiling at me that day.
I was debating whether Corey would have been freaked out if I told him about Cathy and what I hoped was going to happen to Cathy Marconi’s lower intestines when Dave, a guy who had been trying to get voted onto city council for years but had to settle for just being chairman of the alliance, took the stage.
“Okay,” he said. “I apologize for the delay. Our special guest for the night had some trouble getting here, but he’s arrived, so let’s get this show on the road.”
Most weeks we have a special guest post-human who comes in to talk about his culture and struggles or whatever. Sometimes they’re interesting, and sometimes they’re a bore. I’ve heard enough vampires explaining that they don’t really bite people in the neck (at least not anymore) or turn into bats to last me a lifetime.
“Our guest tonight is a member of the species most recently revealed to exist,” said Dave, “the group of diminutive post-humans who dwelled in European forests and inspired legends of elves, dwarves, and fairies. Let’s give him a hand.”
“Oh, this’ll be cool,” said Corey while we clapped. “I’ve never met one of those.”
“Me neither,” I said. “I thought the story was that they were all long dead.”
As we clapped, Gregory Grue stepped onto the stage and waddled up to the microphone. He was back in his overcoat and fedora, the ones he’d been wearing that morning.
I almost peed myself when I saw him. The fact that I didn’t was probably the best thing that had happened all day.
Then, for a second, I was ashamed to have thought he was a freak, now that I knew he was some kind of posthuman. There are tons of kinds out there besides vampires and zombies, like this group they found out in the Appalachian Mountains. They’re almost exactly like normal humans, except that they can turn invisible for a few seconds at a time.
Maybe eating burger wrappers was how Gregory’s people got their nutrition or something.
But still—calling me Grimace was so not cool, and his people’s culture was no excuse, as far as I was concerned.
I lowered myself down in my chair, hoping he wouldn’t see me, but trying not to let Corey notice I was freaked out.
“Hoo hoo!” Gregory Grue growled into the microphone. “Sorry I’m late. I was hanging out down at this watering hole on Court Avenue, and then I had to go out to pick up some supplies. Ended up at this bar down by the river where they make a lot of cocktails with Tang. Missed the bus and ended up hitching a ride out here with some guy who works down at the airport. Nice guy. He couldn’t stay, but here I am. Gregory Grue! How do you do?”
There was some very polite applause.
“My people don’t really care to be called fairies, or elves, or dwarves,” Gregory went on. “We prefer the title we took several hundred years ago: the People of Peace. We dwelled in the forests of Ireland for thousands of years, living in harmony with nature, before we were driven out. And tonight, I come before you to stand behind you, and present to you a piece of my people’s traditional poetry.”
He straightened up as well as he could, paused, then said with great gravity,
“Ladies and gentlemen, take my advice:
pull down yer pants an’ slide on the ice!”
He paused for another second, then said, “Because you can’t get suspended for taking your butt to school. Thank you very much!”
He bowed, winked in my direction, and hobbled his way off the stage to polite, confused applause while I tried not to start hyperventilating.
“Well, that was pretty awful,” Corey said, to my great relief.
“He didn’t sound like he was from the forests of Ireland,” I said. “More like the taverns of Detroit.”
“I’ll bet he’s not even a real post-human,” said Corey. “He’s probably one of those fakers who was pretending to be a Vietnam vet before.”
“Yeah,” I said. “If he’s a post-human, then I have purple teeth.”
“Oh really?” he asked. “Let me see!”
I showed my teeth, and he reached out and touched one of the front ones.
It was as close as I’d come to kissing anyone in a long time.
And if it wasn’t a sign that he liked me, what was?
“Nope. Pearly white,” he said.
I smiled, curling my lips up just enough that they brushed his finger as he pulled it away.
It felt good to feel like someone liked me.
“Okay,” said Dave, who looked pretty embarrassed as he went back to the microphone. “Thank you, Mr. Grue, for that, uh, enlightening presentation. I knew that poem as a child, but I didn’t realize it was of … post-human origin.”
“Pre-human!” Gregory shouted offstage.
“Okay,” said Dave. “Sure. Now, let’s get on down to business. It’s homecoming season, as you all know.”
I slyly nudged Corey’s foot with mine.
“So,” said Dave, “we’re all going to be on alert, since we’re hearing all the same rumors about Wilhelm and what’s left of his clan that go around every time there’s a dance coming up. We’ve had no reports of attacks or sightings, though, so let’s just stay on guard. We will have a contingent of vampires on call, ready to intervene, right?”
“Yeah,” Murray called out. “There’ll be an honor guard of about a dozen of us stationed around Cornersville Trace High the night of the dance. We’re on call starting tonight, just in case.”
“Any reason to think any of Wilhelm’s clan is coming back for revenge?”
“Nah,” said Murray. “But they’ve all been told to stay out of Iowa, so if they show up, it’ll be curtains for those bozos. Pow!”
He made a punching motion and everyone chuckled a bit.
“I’m sure it won’t be necessary,” said Dave. “But, well, rumors are rumors, and you know how the students there get whenever they have a dance. No offense, Jennifer.”
“None taken,” I said.
Ever since Alley Rhodes had been attacked at a prom, people got weird when there was a dance coming up—partly because Will’s clan had vowed revenge when they got kicked out of town, and partly out of just plain paranoia. Fred was known simply to stay home the whole week around prom to keep from getting harassed.
At the end of the meeting, everyone got up to mingle while Gregory Grue played something that sounded like “Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy” on the piano. Most people ignored him. I don’t think anyone else believed he was a post-human, either, but we were all too polite to confront him over it.
Corey hadn’t said anything about homecoming.
I decided that maybe he was just too shy. Maybe he didn’t want to risk freaking me out and screwing up our friendship.
Obviously, I’d have to take matters into my own hands.
I’d sure as hell never asked a guy out before, but I’d had too bad a day to let it end with more disappointment.
Damn the torpedos and full speed ahead!
St. Jennifer the Purple for the win!
After all, if I didn’t, Amber would be totally disappointed. I didn’t want to let her down.
As Corey and I sipped coffee from the urn in the corner of the armory, I made my move.
“Are you going to the homecoming dance at Valley?” I asked.
“Maybe,” he said.
“What’s stopping you?”
He smiled a little.
Here it comes, I told myself. He’s going to say “Probably, but I’m not sure the girl I like will go with me,” then he’ll tell me that I’m the girl.…
“It’s the same night as the dance at Hoover, and I think Emily wants to go to that one,” he said.
Did you ever hear someone say their heart had sunk? That’s what happened. I actually felt it drop about five inches from my chest into my stomach. I swear I even felt it bounce off my kidneys.
But I
tossed some hair around to look casual.
“Who’s Emily?” I asked.
“She’s this girl who goes to Hoover,” he said.
“Are you guys, like … together?” I asked, calmly, and like I wasn’t about to freaking die.
“Well, not officially,” he said. “But we’ll see.”
I smiled a little, but I felt like all the color was draining out of my hair, and all the blood was draining out of my heart.
“But hey,” he said, “if she doesn’t want to go, I might just go to the one at Valley with a group. You could come along, if you want.”
“Whatever,” I muttered.
Super.
A few minutes later I excused myself and tromped out to my car. Tromped.
Freezing rain was coming down again—the kind of icy rain that stings like hell against your cheeks. I was convinced that it was coming down just to spite me.
If it hadn’t been so cold and nasty out, I wouldn’t have taken skates to school.
If I hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have gotten suspended, and Cathy would have had no reason to give me that look of hers. I might not have been so desperate to turn the day around by getting Corey to ask me out. I could have just gone on living a little while longer in the hope that he’d ask me out sooner or later.
This day had sucked eggs.
Rotten ones.
Runny rotten ones.
A lousy, crappy, soul-sucking, butt-sniffing, very bad day.
And if Corey didn’t like me, where did he even get off going around touching my teeth like that? Not cool.
As much as I hated to admit it, I’d never really had a boyfriend. I’d barely even had time to have a crush on anyone.
And now I was almost eighteen and had barely been kissed. If I let myself think about it too much, I felt like a total loser.
A big purple loser.
I had really thought Corey would break my losing streak.
He had probably just been toying with the idea of dating someone like me so that people would see us together and say, “Wow, he’s going out with someone who looks like that? He must really be open-minded!”
Dick.
Of course, that was almost exactly what I’d been doing with him. I hadn’t really been that into him. But now that I knew he didn’t want me, I was bummed. If a girl doesn’t have a guy’s heart to break, she can always just break her own.
As I sat down in my car, I tried not to think about Corey, and ended up thinking about Mutual Scrivener, the boy who should have been my first kiss, instead.
Thinking about Mutual was a bad, bad idea for me.
Yes, Mutual is a real person. I know I’ve said in interviews that he was a plot device that Eileen made up, but that was just to protect him, really, since he comes off as a real loser in the book, and he’s totally not. He is kind of a dork, but he could hardly help it, given the way he was raised.
Lots of normal people homeschool their kids these days, but Mutual’s parents weren’t among them. They were … well, the kind of people who would give a kid a name like Mutual. When they signed him up to attend sixth grade at Gordon Liddy, the old grade school in Preston, I think it was the first time they’d ever let him out of the house. He showed up for his first day in a blazer and dinner plate–sized glasses, and he never used contractions when he spoke, just like the seventeen-year-old version of him in Born to Be Extraordinary.
He might have been the biggest dork in history, but I thought he was sort of … exotic. It didn’t take much to seem exotic in Preston back then, but he fascinated me.
And I found out that he liked me, too. He started reading Shakespeare to impress me—which totally worked. Jason and Amber, who taught him most of the major swear words and introduced him to the joy of heavy metal, worked hard to fix him up with me.
A week after we’d both lost at the district spelling bee, we made an appointment to meet in the woods between the playground and the street the next day to kiss.
But the day we made that plan was the last time I’d ever seen him. He and his parents had vanished the next morning.
I got about one postcard a year from him saying “I’m okay,” but they all had different postmarks, so I had no idea where he was. I had tried and failed to find him online about a hundred times. It was a dead-end mystery that just kept giving me glimmers of hope that I’d see him again someday.
Those glimmers of hope can wreck you, you know. They’ll keep you chasing something like it’s a dollar on a string in an old silent comedy. Even when you know you should just move on.
Flirting with Corey had helped me a lot, but now that I didn’t have him to focus on, I’d probably be going back to drawing pictures of what Mutual might look like now (since pining over an eleven-year-old is just icky) and fantasizing about him showing back up, saving me from my mundane life and showing me how to become the extraordinary version of myself that I always dreamed of being (and that I wish I’d never told Eileen about).
But all that pining would just end up hurting me. He was gone. I hadn’t gotten a postcard from him in over a year now.
Falling back into a crush on him would be a bad way to finish off a lousy day.
And the day hadn’t finished sucking yet. Driving home in the sleet was going to be a pain in the neck, and the way my luck was going, I’d slide off the slippery road, the car would flip over, and they’d end up hosing what was left of me into the Raccoon River along with the dirty slush.
I shook my head and tried to file all my misery into its own compartment so I could focus on driving. Then I turned the key in my ignition, and, as I should have guessed, nothing happened.
The engine didn’t even try to start.
Ten minutes went by, and the car still wasn’t starting. Not even sputtering, like it usually did when it was stalled.
I was about to pull out my phone and call for a ride when the dashboard lights turned on and the radio blasted to life, playing ragtime piano music. The engine started to hum, and there was a tap at the window.
“Hoo hoo!”
Gregory Grue was standing next to my car, smoking a cigar.
“Just let me take out my wand and the spell will be cast!” said the fairy godmother. She took out her magic wand and began to wave it in circles over Jenny’s head.…
five
If you’re reading this, I assume you read Eileen’s book, so you know that “Just let me take out my wand” is the fairy godmother’s catchphrase. Even if you haven’t read the book, I’m sure you’ve seen “Just Let Me Take Out My Wand” on a T-shirt or something.
If Gregory Grue had tried to say anything like “Just let me take out my wand,” I probably would have tried to bash his skull in before he could make another move.
But he didn’t, thank God.
He just looked into my window and said, “Mind if we talk for a second?”
I shrugged, and he let himself into the backseat of the car, where he made himself comfortable, stretching out his legs, which weren’t long enough to fill the whole backseat.
Up close, I saw that he had a smoker’s face; like he wasn’t really old, exactly, but he was already wrinkled. He looked like he would have had more teeth than most people, except that he was missing a few.
“Who the hell are you, really?” I asked. “You’re obviously not a post-human.”
He smiled and tossed a handful of sparkly glitter in the air.
“I’m your fairy godmother!” he announced as the glitter rained down on him. The sound of some trumpets going “Dun duh duh DUN!” blared up on my radio at just the right second, interrupting the ragtime piece.
“Give me a break,” I said. “Fairy godmother?”
He laughed, then coughed, then laughed, then coughed some more, then scratched his neck and coughed some more.
“That’s as good a title as any. I’m here to make your life all better. But I’m nobody’s mommy, so let’s just say I’m your fairy godmofo, okay?”
He laug
hed again.
“You’re full of crap,” I said.
“You don’t have to believe me,” he said. “Not yet. You will. And it’s pre-human, kiddo. We’ve been around since before you humans started screwing everything up and drove my people out of the forest.”
“At least quit smoking in my car, all right?”
He lazily took another drag on the cigar, totally ignoring me, and looked out the window.
“What do they call you bow-necked hawkeyes, anyway? Iowish?”
“Iowan,” I said.
“Iowan.” He nodded. “I like the word for people who live in Michigan better. Michiganders. Sounds like a bird.”
“I guess,” I said.
“The name for Minneapolis people is good, too. Minneapolitan. Sounds tasty.”
He exhaled right in my face again, right at my eyes this time. I clenched them shut till the smell died out, but when I opened my eyes the smoke was still curling around me, making weird shapes that I don’t think smoke is supposed to make. Like, I could see little miniature faces that were moving their lips in the smoke curls.
Freaky.
“How about people from Des Moines?” he asked. “Demoinic?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Will you please just tell me what you want?”
He sat up.
“Every now and then, my people get a little bit of magic to play with,” he said, “and I’m using mine to help you out. I can see that you need it.”
“I don’t need any help,” I said. “Not from you.”
“I read your file,” he said. “And I think I’ve got you figured out. You thought you had a chance with lover-boy in there, but he turned you down, right?”
“Shut up.”
“And you act like the purple hair isn’t to get attention, but it secretly is.”
“Shut up!”
“You dropped all your extra activities, but you fritter away all the time you saved. And you tell yourself that most of your problems are because of Cathy or Mrs. Smollet or your parents, but the truth is you know you’re just … not … good enough.”