by Adam Selzer
Now that most of the vampires have been banned from high schools, people sort of forget that most vampire students were total losers. Seriously—you know how at every school there’s one guy in his twenties who still hangs around by the football field all the time? Imagine how much bigger a loser that guy would have to be to keep hanging around when he was two hundred. At least Fred was only about fifty or sixty.
The real Fred looked okay, but he wasn’t “hot.” He had kind of a ratty look, with one of those scraggly teenage mustaches, and acne that had lasted for decades (poor guy). He wasn’t the prince of anything. And he wasn’t exactly a rebel—the guy had stayed in high school way longer than he really needed to. How rebellious could he be?
I tried to explain this to Eileen, but she just laughed.
“Girls don’t want to read that he wasn’t that great a catch,” she said. “They want the main character to be just like them, and they want the love interest to be the exact kind of guy they want to date, and they want them to live happily ever after.”
“You’re just pandering to them,” I said.
“And they’ll love it!” she said. “Everyone needs wish fulfillment!”
Fair enough. Wish fulfillment is as good a reason to read a book as any, I guess. I read books for that, too, sometimes.
But I’m not trying to make you be my best friend or make you think I’m just like you with this book. I don’t want you thinking you need to be a princess or have a fairy godmother to become extraordinary, either. I’m hoping you’ll figure out that you have to become extraordinary on your own terms, not wait for some guy to make you that way, even though it might be hard work. I am trying to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of our generation, or something like that.
In other words, I’m here to tell the truth. And, as hard as it’s been for me to admit, sometimes the truth was that I was just as likely to turn into a terrible, violent, spiteful person as I was to turn into a peace-loving, intellectual hippie chick who acted like one of those crazy English teachers in sitcoms or one of those eccentric women in screwball comedies. I could have been extraordinarily mean.
Beyond that, the truth is that I didn’t like Fred much at all. I thought he was a real dick, and never really stopped to think about why he became a dick, or to consider that anyone who had spent thirty or forty years unable to get his skin to clear up was liable to be pretty bitter. Just try to calculate how many zits you’d have to pop if you had a forty-year case of acne. When you’re done barfing, you’ll have some idea of why most teenage vampires seem so depressed.
So I had never liked him much, and wasn’t at all jealous of Cathy, but I woke up Monday morning feeling like I had a crush on him. You know, like you do whenever you have a dream about someone. Especially one of those kinds of dreams.
And all I could think of was how much it would suck for Cathy if I were the one he took to the dance.
In fact, as I got ready for school, I sort of fell in love with the idea. I imagined a group forming around Fred and me as we spun in the center of the dance floor, while Cathy cried and threw a tantrum in the corner.
And then the band would start a fast number, everyone would start dancing, and she’d be trampled to a messy death.
Yeah.
Man, that sounded good.
Still want your daughters on my lawn, moms?
Sure, it’s cute when Junie B. Jones fantasizes about people she doesn’t like getting “stompled” to death by ponies, but I know it wasn’t my most attractive habit.
Anyway, I nursed the crush on Fred all morning, careful not to let it get so serious that it would hurt to see him with Cathy, but letting it stay strong enough that it would keep me from falling back into a crush on Mutual until something better came along.
When it came time for the rehearsal in fourth period, I walked in and saw Gregory Grue deep in conversation with Eileen Codlin in the back row of the auditorium.
“Now, Richard the Third, the real one, was actually my favorite king,” he was saying. “He wasn’t nearly as bad as Shakespeare made him look. Man, I miss the days when kings would lead soldiers into battle!”
When he saw me standing there, he grinned up at me.
“Jennifer! I believe you know Miss Codlin,” Gregory said to me. “She’s interviewing me about my experiences as a pre-human for a book.”
Eileen turned around and beamed at me.
I rolled my eyes at her. “Do you believe this guy?” I asked.
“I know!” said Eileen, who sort of misread me (a real habit of hers). “One of the last few People of Peace in the world, and he’s right here in Iowa! He told me all about how he’s helping make your wishes come true, just like a regular fairy godmother.”
“Fairy godmofo,” said Gregory. “Let’s call it that. I’m nobody’s mother.”
She laughed again.
“By the way, Jennifer,” he went on, “the school doesn’t want to cover the expense of towing the Wells Fargo Wagon from your house, so you’ll have to find a way to move it.”
“I’m not paying for it,” I said.
“Then you’ll have to be creative,” he said.
Eileen probably thought that was him trying to inspire and challenge me, too.
I rolled my eyes and took a seat behind Cathy, where she wouldn’t see me. I wasn’t up to looking her in the eye, and if I confronted her she’d just say I was planning to attack her again.
She was holding court among a bunch of freshmen. She was doing her first show—and it had totally gone to her head.
“I want to do a really serious, difficult role next time,” she was saying. “Like, I want to see a parent die. Or have to breast-feed onstage. They can do that at some colleges.”
I giggled as quietly as I could as she went on about how she was going to stay awake for seventy-two hours to look old and frumpy enough for her role as the mayor’s wife. That was okay for opening night, but I hated to think what she’d look like for the Saturday show.
Wouldn’t it have been easier just to act?
One time at the Shakespeare Club (which I still attended, since it wasn’t a school club), we had this speaker who said the reason Shakespeare was so brilliant was that he was more alive than everyone else. Like, the average person walking down the street was maybe 50 percent alive, but Shakespeare was 100 percent alive. He saw layers of meaning in every mundane thing that happened. He could, like, hear the secrets of the universe blowing in the wind.
I didn’t feel like I could be much more than 20 percent alive myself. But at least I didn’t think that getting a small role in a high school play made me the toast of the New York avant-garde or whatever.
Once she noticed I was behind her, Cathy turned to me.
“Hi,” she said.
I just stared at her.
“Hey,” she said. “I’m totally sorry about yesterday.”
“Yeah, right,” I said.
“Seriously,” she said. “I thought they’d just, like, scare you a little. I didn’t know they’d toss you into suspension!”
She snickered, like it was funny or something. It wasn’t funny to me.
I was about to tell her so when the bell rang and Gregory Grue jumped up onto the stage.
“Hoo hoo!” he shouted. “Another rehearsal is upon us, and another chance to improve the show, yourselves, and your community. As your director, I’m going to be making some changes in the casting toward all those ends. Where’s Cathy Marconi?”
Cathy raised her hand.
“You’re the mayor’s wife? Eulalie Shinn?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Not anymore,” he said. “You’re in the chorus from now on.”
“What?” Cathy shouted.
Then she went into a bit of a rant. This is one of the parts of the story where I’m cleaning up the language.
Gregory just nodded and ignored her.
“Jennifer Van Den Berg,” he said, “can you come up onstage,
please?”
I wandered up and stepped onstage, feeling like everyone was staring at me, which I wasn’t really used to back then.
“You’re the mayor’s wife now, kiddo,” he said.
My head started to spin.
Cathy had not sat down yet. She started yelling something about how they didn’t have purple-haired women in Iowa in 1912.
“They have wigs for that,” Gregory said with a wave of his hand. “And Mrs. Shinn wears hats with brims and feathers that go from here to who laid the rails, so no one’ll notice the hair anyway.”
Cathy looked like she’d just been smacked in the face with a baseball bat.
And I kind of felt that way myself.
“I’m not an actress,” I said to him, quietly.
“Sure you are, kiddo,” he said. “I’m pulling you out of the chorus and into the spotlight!”
“I never wished for that!” I said.
He just winked.
Obviously, Gregory couldn’t read my mind. He assumed that I wanted to be a star or something, and that getting to sing “Pick-a-Little, Talk-a-Little” would fulfill my destiny.
As I stood on the stage, I started to have spelling bee flashbacks, just like I’d predicted.
When I was a kid, Preston was a very different town. It still had much more of a small-town vibe—the kind of town that probably would have revolved around the high school football team, except that we didn’t have a high school at all. The only real local competition we had in town was the spelling bee—and people took it very, very seriously.
In the run-up to the all-school bee, we’d have gamblers hanging around the playground, trying to figure out who to bet on. And then the five kids who went to districts every year were treated like heroes around town—until they lost, when they were treated like dirt. It was more pressure than an eleven-year-old should have to deal with.
And it all came rushing back when I stood onstage. This was not the way to help me build my confidence. In fact, I nearly had a panic attack.
“Let’s hear it for Jennifer!” said Gregory.
There was one person applauding: Eileen.
Gregory handed me a script and told me to get to work. I spent the rest of the class huddled over in a chair, pretending to be learning my lines while I breathed as deeply as I could and avoided looking in Cathy’s direction.
Jason and Amber were giving me a ride home that day, since my car was still in the shop. After school, I met up with them at the back door, where Smollet brought them out from their last day of in-school, and told them how the new director had given me Cathy’s part.
Jason laughed. “You getting revenge on her?” he asked.
“I was as surprised as she was,” I said. “But I’m still thinking of getting revenge for yesterday. I actually woke up thinking about how awesome it would be if I stole Fred from Cathy.”
Amber turned toward me. “You like Fred?” she asked.
“Not really,” I said. “But I had a dream about him last night, and, well, you know how it is.”
I wasn’t sure if they did know. They had been a couple since, like, before either of them had probably even started puberty. Maybe they’d never had a dream about anyone else.
How awesome is that?
“So now I have a plan,” I said. “I’m going to seduce Fred and rub it in Cathy’s face.”
“Jennifer,” Amber said, “I totally believe that you can do any damned thing you feel like.”
“So are you in? Can I put you down for casting me a love spell or something?”
She shrugged. “I haven’t tried any of that stuff in a while.”
When we were kids, Amber was really into the occult. She’d cast circles of protection around her desk on test days and curse people she didn’t like. But after the post-human thing, every girl was into Wicca and stuff, which a lot of them thought was, like, the next best thing to becoming a vampire. She kind of drifted away from it then.
“We’ve hung out with Fred a few times at, like, heavy metal vomit parties and stuff,” said Jason. “He actually got converted backstage at an Alice Cooper concert in the seventies.”
“I heard it was an Ozzy Osbourne concert,” I said.
“Nope. Cooper,” said Jason. “Ozzy wasn’t even a solo act back then, he was still with Black Sabbath. Anyway, Fred was so drugged up at the time that he isn’t even sure who did it.”
“Ouch,” I said.
We drove up Eighty-Second Street, which a few years before had been nothing but cornfields when you got north of Cedar Avenue. Now it was all strip malls and subdivisions full of white houses on streets named after trees. The year before, the last of the corn separating Preston from Cornersville Trace had been plowed up and the land had been developed.
The population had ballooned in the past five years, but half of the original residents had moved out to other, smaller towns. Finding a native Prestonian in Preston was rare now, which was fine with me. None of the people who had put For Sale signs in my yard when I lost the district spelling bee, or accused Mutual of being a traitor, still lived nearby.
There was nothing about the old Preston that I missed.
Except for Mutual, of course.
But I pushed that out of my mind and tried to imagine how Fred looked with his shirt off.
To celebrate finding out she was a fairy, Jenny decided that she should have more purple things—starting with her car. She took the car (and her credit card!) to the nearest custom paint shop and had it painted a beautiful metallic purple.…
eight
I still don’t have a freaking credit card in real life.
And ever since Eileen’s stupid book came out, every spare cent I’ve been able to scrape up has gone to security, legal bills, and all that crap. And it wasn’t like I was swimming in money to start with. I owed my mom a pile for car repairs and stuff—by the time of this story, I was already so far behind that I’d have to teach piano lessons clear till Melinda was in high school.
After the Jenmobile broke down at the armory, Dad had it towed to a garage over on Fourteenth. They called the house and said it would be ready during the day on Monday, so Mom drove me out there after she got off work.
She went inside to pay while I sat in her car. This was going to be another chunk of money I owed her. I wasn’t even sure I could afford to keep dying my hair purple, let alone have my car painted purple (which I totally would have done if I had the cash—at least I have that in common with the “Jenny” in the book).
And when Mom came stomping out of the garage, she looked furious.
“Eight hundred dollars!” she said. “They charged eight hundred dollars!”
“That’s more than three times what I paid for the car!” I said.
“Your dad authorized them to do whatever they needed to,” she said. “So now we owe Visa another eight hundred bucks.”
“Shoot,” I said. “If he authorized it, he’d better be planning to help.”
She tossed me my keys with a sigh.
“Jennifer, I’m afraid you might have to get used to the idea of living at home next year. For the first semester, at least,” she said.
“But I’m already signed up for the dorms!”
“It’s a twenty-minute commute from our house to Drake,” she said. “It doesn’t make sense for us to waste money on a dorm. Not when we’re still paying more on Val’s student loans than we are on our mortgage.”
“We can scrape together the money,” I said. “I’m sure we can.”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” said Mom.
I took my keys and stomped back out toward my own car.
“Jen, calm down,” Mom called out. “It’s not the end of the world.”
I didn’t listen to her. I just kept walking until I got into my car, and drove off without a damned word.
I realized that paying for a dorm when I only lived five or ten miles away from campus wasn’t exactly frugal, but being on my own felt like it was a hu
ge, totally necessary step in separating myself from my old, boring life. I felt like as long as I lived at home, surrounded by Val’s old trophies and all the reminders of my old eighty-hour schedule, and with one parent constantly around to nag me and another who still had keys, I’d be stuck as the same old person, no matter what I did with my hair.
As I drove along, I imagined Val’s student-loan officer standing in front of my car several times. I was so mad that I wasn’t even paying much attention to the road or the speedometer.
Not until I saw the flashing blue lights in my rearview mirror.
I pulled over and a police car pulled up behind me. I shouted a few words (none of which was “shoot” or “darn”) at the roof of the car as the cop walked over, then forced myself to be calm as I rolled the window down.
“Something wrong, Officer?” I asked, which I think is standard protocol when you get pulled over.
“I clocked you at fifty-one,” he said. “And this is a thirty-five-mile-per-hour road.”
“No one goes thirty-five on this road,” I said. “Other cars would think I was a bridge or something.”
“That’s no excuse,” he said. “Did you know that you also ran a stop sign back there?”
I shook my head.
“And with ice on the road, too,” he said.
I started to cry, but it didn’t make him feel bad enough to let me off with a warning. He gave me a ticket for speeding and failure to stop.
“How much is this going to cost me?” I asked.
“I’d say about four hundred,” he said. “And you’ll have to go to traffic school. And your insurance will probably go up.”
“Great,” I said, sniffling.
And he handed me the ticket and read me some legal-speak gobbledygook that I didn’t pay any attention to.
“I’d say to have a good day,” he said when he was finished, “but … well, have a better day.”
He walked back to his patrol car, and I stayed pulled over until he was out of sight. Once he was gone, I looked up at the roof of my car and screamed at the top of my lungs.
Then I drove exactly one block before my car stalled out again.
It started right back up, but still.