Extraordinary<li>

by Adam Selzer

  He flashed me his goblin grin. Like the Cheshire cat’s, his grin was exactly the shape of a crescent moon and made me feel like he knew things I didn’t want him to.

  Like that he was absolutely right.

  I worried every day that I wasn’t really an interesting, free-spirited, extraordinary girl, and the purple hair was just a lame attempt to look like one. That the real me was going to turn out to be a total bore. Or, worse, a violent lunatic.

  I mean, I got along well with people. My teachers all liked me—I even had coffee with my old sixth-grade teacher now and then.

  But nobody except Jason and Amber really knew about my dark side. The side that spent a lot of time fantasizing about murdering people and dancing on their graves.

  Gregory took another puff of his cigar.

  “Not to mention you pretend you don’t want a part in the big show.”

  “I don’t,” I said. “Being onstage gives me spelling bee flashbacks.”

  He chuckled. “It says in your school file that you were quite the little speller once upon a time,” he said. “You don’t miss anything about those days? No one who used to compete with you?”

  I thought of Mutual Scrivener, the boy I had liked and who liked me back. He had been signed up for public school just to be in the spelling bees, and disappeared shortly after the last one. He was a guy from those days, all right. And I did miss him.

  But I said, “No. Nothing. I hated being in those things. They used to make way too big a deal of them in Preston.”

  “Now, look, kiddo,” Gregory said. “I think you’ve got a lot of potential. You really do. A few good wishes ought to help you out, and I’m prepared to grant you three reasonable ones, as long as you get a guy of my choice to kiss you during the homecoming dance.”

  “If you say that you’re the guy of your choice, I’ll kick you in the crotch,” I said.

  He just laughed. “Relax, girly girl. I’m a teacher. That would be highly inappropriate. It won’t be me at all. No one you’d totally hate to kiss, as long as you keep an open mind.”

  “Who’s the guy?”

  “You’ll find out soon,” he said.

  “I don’t think I’m going to take this deal,” I said. “Three wishes I don’t believe you’d grant in exchange for a favor you won’t even tell me all the details of? Screw it.”

  “That shows brains, judgment, and maturity,” he said. “Except that you don’t get a choice. The spell is cast, the tale is told. Et cetera.”

  “That’s not fair!” I said.

  “That’s the way the coffee drips,” he told me. “I don’t make the rules here, I just follow them. But at least you get some wishes out of the deal.”

  “I don’t want anything from you,” I said. “Why should I even believe that you’re for real?”

  He chuckled and took another drag on his cigar. “We don’t carry credentials, but I’m in the giving vein today, so I’ll prove it if you want. What are you going to do, ask me to make a unicorn appear?”

  “Yes,” I said. “That’ll do. Get me a unicorn. I want one in my backyard.”

  In fairy tales, if you ask a fairy for something impossible, they usually end up tearing themselves to pieces or something. But Gregory Grue smirked.

  “Early humans tried to exterminate unicorns, you know,” he said. “Best thing humans ever did.”

  “You think driving an animal to extinction is good?” I asked.

  “I do when their crap smells as bad as unicorn crap. You’ve never smelled anything as bad as unicorn crap, honey. Not even if you’ve been in the men’s room of the bus stop in Passaic, New Jersey. Wouldn’t you rather I just made your car smell like that? The cleanup would be easier.”

  “You just can’t get a unicorn,” I said. “You’re probably planning to fart and say you made the smell appear magically.”

  “Look,” he said, “I can’t get you a unicorn out of thin air. I can get you one, and I won’t even count it as a wish, but it’ll take a day or two. When it gets here, you’ll know I’m serious beyond any doubt.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “Get me a unicorn and I’ll never doubt you again.”

  “Okay,” he said. “You can slack off and not believe me until then, if you want. But either way, I owe you three wishes, so close your eyes and think of the bestest wishes you can, kiddo.”

  He blew some more smoke at me, and I closed my eyes—not so much because he told me to as to keep from getting smoke in them.

  “Now, wish!” he said.

  So I wished.

  “I wish you would go away,” I said.

  “I will once you’ve made a few good wishes for me to pick from,” he said. “So get at it.”

  The smoke started to cloud my brain—I still don’t know what was in that cigar. But I started talking.

  “I wish I had a million dollars.”

  “Be less obvious, please. And more realistic. Let me help you out. What do you really wish for, in those parts of your brain you hoped the purple dye would seep into and cover up?”

  He blew even more smoke and I felt it swirling around in my nostrils. I felt myself go light-headed, and started saying things without even thinking about them.

  “I wish I could get revenge on Cathy.”

  “Swell. What else?”

  “I wish Emily would tell Corey to go to hell.”

  “That’s harsh, kiddo, but consider it done. Anything else?”

  I paused.

  “I wish I could find an old friend who moved away.”

  “Nice,” he said. “Now think of the rest of your wishes. Wish for the things you won’t say out loud. Like being in the play.”

  Everything went silent for a few seconds. When I opened my eyes, the smoke was gone and Gregory was still smiling, so wide that I was pretty sure he’d be sore in the morning. And I felt like I’d just come up for air after being underwater.

  He threw some more glitter over his head and blew another puff of smoke. This one was so big that it filled up my entire car. Through the smoke, I heard him say, “Your wishes are granted. Long live Gregory Grue!”

  I was afraid for a second that I was about to suffocate in the fumes, but they started to dissipate.

  I was aware of the music stopping and the engine ceasing to purr, and when the smoke was gone, Gregory, the raggedy “fairy godmofo,” was gone, too.

  There was no lingering smell from the cigar.

  There was no glitter left in the seats, either.

  The only tangible sign left that anyone had been there was a swear word written in the frost on the outside of the rear window.

  As the fairy godmother flew away, Jenny felt as though she had been changed already.

  Amber came back to the car, holding the two diet sodas. “Are you okay?” she asked concernedly. “You look different!”

  “I’m fine,” said Jenny. “Just fine.”

  But she was different, all right.

  She would never be the same.

  six

  I sat in my car in silence for a second, shivering from the cold, trying to process everything, and wondering if I should go ask someone back in the armory for help.

  Gregory, I decided, must be one of those substitute teachers you see on TV and in movies now and then who come out of nowhere and really inspire kids before moving on. Or anyway, that’s what he was trying to do. Normally those guys pick some disadvantaged kid who never had a chance, but since Cornersville Trace is pretty damned middle class, he just pinpointed the chubby girl who apparently had a discipline problem as the most pathetic person in school—the one who needed his help the most.

  And he thought I was dumb enough that a bunch of magic tricks would make me believe he was a “fairy godmother” so he could inspire me to reach my full potential. He’d give me a part in the show or something and say he’d granted my wish, giving me a whole buttload of newfound self-esteem.

  Nice try, Gregory Grue.

  This all made me feel su
per.

  If he were really magic, he would have gotten me the million dollars.

  I still didn’t understand why there was no glitter left in the seats, but I assumed he’d used some cheap “disappearing glitter” trick he bought from a magic shop or something.

  I decided that I should just head home, but when I turned the key, the car had gone back to being stalled. Whatever Gregory had done to make it seem like it was working again must have been a trick, too.

  After fifteen minutes of turning the key, I was freezing my butt off and the car still wasn’t starting. Jason was at work and Amber didn’t have her license, so I went back and forth for a few minutes deciding which parent to call. On the one hand, I didn’t really want to deal with my dad. On the other, he might be able to fix the car, so I wouldn’t have to pay for a tow truck.

  I wasn’t exactly flush with cash—no thanks to Gregory and his inability to get me a million bucks.

  Eventually, I just called Dad and prepared for a lecture.

  When he showed up half an hour later and walked over to the car, he stared at the cussword on the window.

  “Rough neighborhood,” he said.

  “Kids,” I said. “One minute they’re buckling their knickerbockers below the knee and hiding dime novels in the corncrib, and the next thing you know they’re writing the S-word on car windows. Makes your blood boil, well I should say!”

  “Can we go one evening without you talking like you’re a character in The Music Man, please?” he asked.

  “No promises,” I said.

  He tinkered under the hood for a second, then asked me to start her up. I turned the key, and there were sparks, but the engine still didn’t start.

  “Sorry, Jen,” he said. “I’ll call and have it towed someplace tomorrow morning.”

  Super.

  I climbed out of my car and into Dad’s. He started it up and we cruised out of the parking lot and into the streets of Des Moines.

  “Your mom called the admissions people at Drake,” he said. “They said the suspension won’t be an issue, as long as it’s a one-time thing.”

  “Well, that’s a relief,” I said.

  “I don’t know how you think you’re going to get through college, though,” he said. “The kind of workload you’ve given yourself this year won’t prepare you for it.”

  “Dad,” I said, “I just had a crappy day followed by a crappy night, and I have this weird feeling that I’m having a nervous breakdown. Can we hold off on the lecture?”

  He sighed and backed down, but the worst of it was that he sort of had a point. I was slacking off, big-time, and not really feeling any closer to being the person I wanted to become than I had been before.

  We drove through the freezing rain and Dad seemed to know enough not to try to make me feel any worse. I don’t like throwing pity parties for myself, but I thought I’d earned one for the evening.

  I did feel different, though. Like the Jenny in the book.

  I’d driven through the suburbs of Des Moines, down Eighty-Sixth Street, a million times. Nothing had changed. But for some reason, everything suddenly seemed a tiny bit different on that trip. It almost felt like I’d traveled forward in time, but not very far. Like, three years or something. Everything seemed the same, but different.

  Just like my whole life. Different, but not different enough to matter too much.

  It was a weird feeling.

  When Dad dropped me off, he stared up at the Wells Fargo Wagon in the driveway.

  “Was there anything good inside it?” he asked.

  “Not that I know of,” I told him.

  “It looks loaded,” he said. “You might want to check.”

  I assumed he had hidden something there, like an envelope full of brochures for the MBA program at Drake. I thought he’d given up on that when my sister, Val, got out of an expensive business school and found out that a master’s degree and a 4.1 GPA don’t really qualify you for any more jobs than an undergrad degree in art history does these days, but you never can tell with Dad.

  I made a point of walking right past the wagon, then made sure there was no unicorn in the backyard. There wasn’t.

  But after Dad had driven away, I went to see if my Wells Fargo Wagon had, in fact, come stocked with rocking chairs, double boilers, and all the other stuff the people of River City, Iowa, had ordered in the show.

  All I saw at first was a bunch of empty cardboard boxes.

  However, taped to one of the boxes was a postcard addressed to me.

  Dear Jennifer,

  I’m still okay. Hope to see you soon.

  Mutual

  I sat there and read it over and over, even though it was just eight words.

  It couldn’t be real.

  There was no postmark. And no reason in the world that there should be a postcard on the wagon for me from anyone. Gregory must have read my file and found that newspaper article about the spelling bee—the one that described Mutual as my boyfriend (which was totally embarrassing at the time). This was simply part of his attempt to trick me into thinking he was magic.

  But it looked like Mutual’s handwriting to me.

  And how would Gregory have known that I tended to get postcards from Mutual in mysterious ways, as if he had no way of actually mailing them and had to find sneaky ways to send them to me?

  Like, one time a guy just knocked on the door and said he found the postcard in a truck full of pumpkins and felt like he should drop it off.

  Maybe Gregory was for real after all.

  And really was granting my wish.

  If Mutual was the guy he wanted me to kiss at the dance, and he was willing to magically help make it possible, I would never say another word against him, even if he was a creep.

  I took the postcard indoors and went to my room to look up the news story about fairies being real. On the off chance that you haven’t already found this out, just typing “fairies” into a search engine isn’t really going to get you much information—mostly just a bunch of pictures of Tinker Bell and stuff. Probably pictures of me now, too. Nothing about “real” ones, except for those pictures that a couple of English girls took a hundred years ago, which look totally fake to me.

  Eventually I dug up some news stories where some of the older vampires said there was some group of short post-humans that had lived in the woods years ago, but no one knew much about them, except that they were all long dead. An archaeologist backed the story up with pottery fragments she’d found, but no one really knew what this group could do, exactly. Whatever powers or abilities they had had obviously hadn’t been enough to keep them from being driven from the forests.

  There was no mention of magic. No one knew anything about magic being real—all the stuff vampires could do was because of protein mutations, not magic. If the guys in the forests could turn invisible or anything, that was probably just a bodily function the rest of us didn’t have.

  The next day, I called Murray and asked if he knew much about fairies. He just groaned.

  “Look,” he said, “we don’t know about every post-human group in the world. Every now and then you hear about some weird tribe that lives inside the hills and comes out for one month every hundred years to play nine-pins or something, but as far as I know, it’s all BS, and those guys who got driven out of the forests are all dead.”

  “So, you weren’t buying that guy last night, either?”

  He laughed. “That was just some putz who wanted the twenty-buck honorarium Dave pays to speakers,” he said. “Probably an out-of-work actor.”

  “He’s working for the drama department at my school,” I said.

  “See? Actor.”

  “Why would Dave even book him?” I asked.

  “Well, Dave probably didn’t believe him, either,” said Murray. “But he’s got a tough job trying to find a post-human every week in Des Moines. He’s sort of running out of options by now. You remember that werewolf two weeks ago?”

  �
��Sure.”

  “Fake. That was just a hairy guy. Like Robin Williams. Personally, I think more vampires should move to Des Moines, because all these insurance-industry jobs here are perfect for dead people, but that whole thing with Wilhelm three years ago scares ’em away.”

  So that was that. Gregory was no post-human, according to someone who’d been living as one since the seventeen hundreds. He was just some weird actor/substitute teacher trying to motivate me or something.

  All he knew about Mutual would have come from whatever file they had on me at the office—the file was probably full of newspaper articles about the bee. But maybe there had been a postcard for me from Mutual in the file that had been sent to the school for some reason.

  I figured that I had solved the mystery already.

  That night in bed, I tried to force myself into a crush on a movie star or something. It was no use falling back into a crush on a boy I would probably never see again.

  You know where you stand with movie stars, at least. You can’t really get hurt.

  But that night, I had vivid, extremely naughty dreams.

  About Fred the vampire.

  Cathy’s boyfriend.

  Every girl wished she could date Fred, the vampire prince. His royal tattoo made them swoon. But only Jenny, who had caught him reading Chaucer when it wasn’t even assigned, knew that he had the soul of a poet.

  She wished she could stare at his tattoo all day.

  seven

  The Fred in the book was actually based on Jason, not the real Fred. You’ll notice Eileen never says what part of Fred the “royal tattoo” was on.

  Jason was hoping to freak Eileen out when he pulled down his pants to show her his tattoo during her interview with us, but, well, she swooned when she saw his butt.

  She’s a butt swooner. That’s what she is. A cheese-sucking butt swooner.

  “That,” she told me later, “is the kind of boy girls want! Not the real Fred. So I’m going to have Fred act more like Jason.”