by Adam Selzer
Ugh!
After paying eight hundred bucks, I think I had a right to expect that it would at least get me home without stalling.
Why wouldn’t the world just follow my damned instructions?
All the anger and rejection and everything else inside me sort of merged into one big ball of ugly hatred. I couldn’t compartmentalize it any longer—the compartments were full.
This called for drastic action.
When I got home, I ran upstairs, reached under the bed, and pulled out my Big Box of Breakables.
I had countless pieces of dollar-store crap in reserve. There is no shortage of tacky, breakable crap at thrift stores and the dollar store.
There were about a dozen porcelain angels in the box. There was a ceramic hand on a little stand with a sign that said “Please Stop the Violence.” A whole bunch of cute porcelain kids with really big eyes wearing pajamas with drop-down seats. A tiny ceramic mushroom house that looked like a penis with windows.
There were Santa Claus figurines. Snowman napkin holders. All kinds of tacky Christmas junk.
There were a couple of ceramic toilets that you were supposed to hang on the bathroom door, one of which had a ceramic old guy with a mustache sitting on it and holding his nose.
This was all going to have to go.
I took the box out to the driveway and laid the contents on the sidewalk, then headed back in to get my headphones. This scene called for music.
I spun around to the Music Man folder on my phone and cued up “Seventy-Six Trombones,” the big, bombastic march.
Then I went back out to the toolshed to find some actual tools—I wanted something more than just a hammer. A bigger, more powerful weapon that took two hands to use. I wished my dad were the kind of dad who owned a sledgehammer, but there wasn’t one of those. And most of his tools had gone with him when he moved out.
There was a crowbar, though.
I took it out to the sidewalk, stood before the junk, and raised the crowbar high above my head with one hand while I hit the Play button on my phone with the other. I turned the volume up so high it hurt my ears.
I stood there rethinking the events of the last few days during the prologue, from Gregory Grue calling me Grimace at McDonald’s to getting a traffic ticket right after being told that I probably wouldn’t be able to move out for college.
I just let the anger flow through me.
This was not the teenage life that movies, TV shows, and books had promised me (or the one that Born to Be Extraordinary is promising you). I had been cheated.
And the dollar-store junk was going to pay.
I lifted the crowbar above my head with both hands and felt the freezing metal against my fingers. It was so cold that it stung.
The wind picked up, howling through the trees and into my face. It was almost as if I were controlling the weather.
The prologue ended, the brass band kicked in, and “Seventy-Six Trombones” began. I brought the sledgehammer down on its first victim with a roar just as Harold Hill sang the word “six.”
The little porcelain angel crumbled under the weight of my mighty crowbar, and I brought it down on him again a few times, all to the rhythm of the music.
Then I showed a ceramic Santa Claus who was boss.
Seventy-six trombones hit the counterpoint, and the crowbar hit a miniature clown whose pants were falling down.
Then, just to mix things up, I swung the crowbar like a golf club into the ceramic mushroom house that looked like a penis, sending it rolling across the lawn in two or three pieces. I ran after the biggest chunk and brought the crowbar down again and again on the most thingy-like part, screaming all the while.
When there was nothing of the mushroom house left, I stomped back to the sidewalk, where the rest of the stuff was waiting for me.
Boom! The crowbar hit a ceramic Easter bunny with buckteeth.
Crash! Another dollar-store angel bit the pavement.
Clunk! The crowbar hit the damp sidewalk beneath the bits of rubble.
It was almost like dancing, especially as long as I swung the crowbar to the rhythm of the song.
Soon all that was left on the square of sidewalk was dust. The song faded out and turned into the next song on the sound track, a barbershop quartet song about love.
I ignored the music and shouted at the sky.
“When you come to a lawn where the angels lie dead and not a weenie-shaped house is standing, you will know that I have been here. And you will know that I am the Dark Lord Jennifer the Purple! And you will be afraid!”
It probably looked funny to anyone who might have been watching, but I was completely serious at the time. I screamed again as I brought the crowbar down a couple more times on what was left of the big-eyed kids in pajamas.
Yeah. I was kind of off the deep end. I know.
But destroying twenty bucks’ worth of tacky crap was something I could afford. Actual therapy was not.
I was so wrapped up in my little reign of terror, and the music, that I didn’t notice a car pulling into my driveway, next to the Wells Fargo Wagon.
Then I heard a voice behind me.
“Jennifer?”
I turned around and saw Jason’s car. The door opened, and Jason, Amber, and another guy stepped out.
“Look who we found!” said Amber.
The third person was a pale, muscular guy wearing a flannel shirt over a heavy metal T-shirt. His hair hung to his shoulders, with bangs that nearly reached his glasses.
For a second, I didn’t recognize him. I stood there and stared while the barbershop quartet sang on in the headphones that hung over my shoulder.
But then he smiled.
“Oh my God,” I said.
Mutual Scrivener was standing in front of the Wells Fargo Wagon.
What is love? ’tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What’s to come is still unsure:
In delay there lies no plenty;
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.
—Shakespeare (Eat your heart out, Codlin!)
nine
Now, look, people—I know I’m not exactly F. Scott Fitzgerald or anything. I keep trying to work more dazzling imagery into this book besides all the stuff about cold, wet leaves, but it’s not easy. I keep waking up from nightmares about reviewers saying I don’t use enough “strong verbs” or use too many adverbs or whatever.
So I don’t want to dwell too much on how bad a writer Eileen is. At least I have an excuse for my own writing: I’m a sophomore in college right now, and I’ve never really done any creative writing before. You can’t devise standardized tests for creative writing, so we never did it in school.
Eileen practiced writing for years to develop her clumsy, inelegant third-person voice, her awkward mixed metaphors, and her convoluted sentences.
But again, I don’t want to rant about her—I just want to point out how the real story went differently than the story in the book.
Mutual really did come back into my life the same week I met my fairy godmother, just like in Born to Be Extraordinary.
In the book, “Jenny” and Mutual are childhood sweethearts, which is at least partly true. And she nursed a crush on him after he moved away, like I did. But when the “book Mutual” was younger, he was a cool, athletic kid with a jet-powered bike and a designer backpack.
And when he sweeps back into her life all of a sudden, he’s become a total nerd who wears a blazer and dinner-plate glasses and never uses contractions when he talks.
It was sort of the opposite in real life—he really did wear the blazer and talk sort of like a robot or serial killer or something when we were kids. It was a side effect of being raised by his old-fashioned, agoraphobic, weirdo parents.
Now, as he stood in my driveway, six years since I’d last seen him, his hair was longer, his glasses smaller. And the boy was ripped. His muscles were
practically breaking through the Metallica T-shirt he was wearing, which I think was Jason’s. Jason is a wiry little guy. Next to him, Mutual looked like a bodybuilder.
In Eileen’s book, Mutual is always running up to Jenny and trying to kiss her. And if he can do it before she kisses Fred at the dance, it will break the spell, and the princess-ship will go to someone else, for some reason.
In all my fantasies of finding Mutual again, I had imagined him running up and giving me that kiss we’d planned on years earlier. Maybe he’d even say those lines from Shakespeare I just quoted, which basically mean “we won’t be young forever, so let’s not waste our time.”
But he didn’t run up to me, like he did in my fantasies or in Eileen’s book.
He just stood there. He was smiling, but he looked scared.
I couldn’t do anything but stare, either.
I dropped the crowbar, took a step closer to him, and got a good look.
He was older now, naturally—it stands to reason that everyone who’s not a vampire will look older at seventeen or eighteen than they did when they were eleven.
“Oh my God,” I said. “It’s you!”
“Hi,” he said, softly. “Remember me?”
“Of course,” I said. “I got your postcards.”
“All of them?” he asked.
“How many did you send?”
“About a hundred and fifty,” he muttered. He was blushing a little. I could see it in the fading light.
Oh my God. He had sent me a hundred and fifty postcards.
The wind blew and sent a bunch of brown leaves flying off the trees toward us. One of them stuck to Mutual’s face, but he didn’t try to brush it off.
“Then I only got about five percent of them,” I said. “I got about one a year. One was in that Wells Fargo Wagon.”
“He’s been in Alaska this whole time,” said Amber. “His parents moved to a farm outside of Anchorage!”
He and I stepped a bit closer to each other.
“There were no stamps or phones or computers in the house,” he said, his voice trembling a bit. “I would slip postcards for you into the vegetable crates we shipped out and hope someone would find them and mail them somewhere along the line.”
That solved that mystery.
I couldn’t control myself any longer—I ran the last couple of steps up to him and hugged him.
I could feel his muscles, but it seemed like he was barely able to stand upright. He barely hugged me back. It was almost like I was holding him up.
“He was on my porch when I got home,” said Jason. “My mom said he showed up in a taxi and waited there all day.”
“Are your parents back, too?” I asked Mutual.
“No,” he said. “If I were two weeks younger, I would be a runaway. I had been wanting to get out, and then this FedEx guy came up to my door with a package for me, and it was a ticket to Des Moines in a purple envelope. I thought one of you had sent it.”
“We could never figure out where you were!” I said.
“Isn’t that weird?” said Amber. “It just, like, magically appeared! Like the universe wanted him here!”
I hugged him again.
Only I knew it wasn’t the universe.
It was me. And my wish.
And Gregory Grue, my fairy godmofo.
My opinion of Gregory changed in an instant.
“Come on,” said Jason. “We’re going to go bust into his old house. His parents still own it, so it ought to be empty.”
Mutual smiled nervously.
“Okay,” I said.
I didn’t care where they were going, as long as I could go, too. I would have gone clear to St. Louis if they had just said the word.
We climbed into the car, Jason and Amber in the front and Mutual and me in the back. I couldn’t stop staring at him.
There was something weird about him. I mean, he was always sort of weird, but now something seemed to be bugging him. I hoped it wasn’t me, but I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe he was all disturbed that I was so much heavier now than I’d been six years ago. Or maybe he’d never seen a girl with purple hair.
Or maybe watching me go ape-crap with a crowbar on all those breakables had scared the heck out of him.
Maybe he was disappointed in me already.
And as he slumped down against the seat of the car and brushed the hair out of his eyes, I tried my hardest not to feel a little disappointed in him.
I had always imagined him swooping into town, kissing me, and saving me from my mundane life.
Now that he was here, he looked strong enough to save me from a polar bear, but he seemed … broken. More than I was, even.
There were lines in his face already, at the age of eighteen.
I kicked myself a bit—who looks like a knight in shining white armor after a three-thousand-mile trip? He had gone out of his way to try to contact me over the last six years, and now he was here.
How awful did I have to be to complain?
“I barely recognize Preston,” Mutual said as we drove into town.
“It grew up,” I said. “Once they built that new mall, the town grew up around us.”
“Is Burger Baron still there?”
“No, thank God,” said Amber. “That whole strip that used to be the main drag is gone. Everything but Yurkovich’s Pizza.”
Mutual’s eyes lit up, probably for the first time since I’d seen him again. “Can we go there after we go to my house?” he asked.
“I insist on it,” said Jason.
“I’ve been dreaming of getting a pizza for years,” Mutual said.
Amber turned back toward me. “His parents kept him in, like, even more isolation in Alaska than they did here. But one time when they had to go into Anchorage, he shoplifted a bunch of music magazines and a copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare. He’s, like, figured out modern culture from those. Like how they can figure out half of what ancient Egypt was like from a handful of hieroglyphics.”
Mutual blushed. “I also had a radio,” he said. “That helped a lot. And I need to get some money, so I can mail it to the bookstore I ripped off.”
“Complete Works of Shakespeare?” I asked with a smile.
He smiled, too.
“I reread Henry the Fifth on the trip,” he said.
And he quoted a line from the St. Crispin’s Day speech, one of the famous monologues from that play:
“ ‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.’ ”
I smiled wider, and my disappointment started to evaporate. It wasn’t quite as good as quoting that line about romance and youth’s a stuff will not endure and pouncing on me, but it was a start.
It was enough to show me that he was still the awesome guy I remembered. There were parts of him left inside, under the broken pieces I could see on the surface.
Maybe he was thinking the same thing about me.
He had already seen me as an extraordinary person, the kind I wanted to be, when we were eleven. I mean, the very fact that I read Shakespeare instead of a dictionary made me seem like a total bohemian to Mutual back then, just the way women in screwball comedies always seem to the cautious, buttoned-up guys who end up falling for them at the end of the movie.
Maybe love is all about finding someone who already sees you as the person you want to be, and can help you really get there.
When I looked out the window, I saw a car passing us. Gregory Grue was at the wheel—he gave me a little salute as he passed.
Just letting me know that he’d granted my wish, I guess. I smiled and saluted back, even though he was already out of sight.
Gregory Grue, I thought, you’re all right.
Mutual Scrivener, the only guy I’d ever seriously liked who had definitely liked me back, had returned.
I couldn’t believe I was sitting in a car with him.
And I liked the fact that he had come into town of his own accord when he got a ticket. That way I knew he wasn’t just, l
ike, under some sort of enchantment. He had come because he wanted to.
Jason drove out of Preston and into the farm country to the north, then, following Mutual’s directions, turned onto a couple of back roads, heading into a wooded area.
I remembered that when I was younger, I thought there was a place called the Faraway Woods. Every time you can see a long way in the distance around here, big groups of trees are visible along the horizon, but you never seem to drive through any forests in Iowa.
We were driving into one now.
While Amber and Jason filled me in on how Mutual had run away and dreamed about coming back, and while Mutual blushed and looked terrified, we drove deep into dark woods that I’d never seen before. It was spooky, really. I half expected to see mysterious little men playing nine-pins in the clearing. Actual fairies. Especially now that I knew magic was real.
Fairies, or something like them, were real. Not the kind who had been run out of forests and killed a few hundred years ago—Gregory must have been something else altogether.
Something new.
And he had chosen me.
I tried to make conversation with Mutual, even though what I really wanted to do was just kiss him and see if it, like, woke him up.
“Are you going to college in Iowa?” I asked.
“I hope so,” he said. “But my parents’ idea of home-schooling might not really be accredited.”
“Oh, we’ll get you taken care of,” Amber said. “You can’t tell me there was anyone in Alaska who was any smarter than you!”
“There was hardly anyone there to start with,” he said.
“You can just take a GED exam,” said Amber. “My uncle Larry passed that, and he can barely fart without an instruction manual.”
We kept turning deeper into the forest until we came to a path that I never would have noticed if Mutual hadn’t told Jason to turn down it. At the end of the path was a tiny house with weeds growing waist-high around it.
“Holy crap,” said Jason. “Anyone else feel like we’re about to get ambushed by the Vietcong?”
Amber turned back to Mutual. “Is this place haunted?” she asked. “It sure looks haunted.”
“Not that I know of,” said Mutual. “Unless some ghosts have moved in.”