by Adam Selzer
“Did you guys just abandon it?” I asked.
“Yeah,” said Mutual. “One night about a week after you and I lost the district spelling bee, they told me to pack a bag. I loaded up some clothes and Jason’s music player and that Paranormal Execution CD that he gave me, and the next morning I woke up in Alaska.”
“How did they get from here to there so fast?” asked Amber.
Mutual didn’t say anything. He just got out of the car and walked up to the house.
“I want to see how much got left behind,” he said. “And if it’s safe to stay here.”
“You’re staying here?” I asked.
“I can’t afford a hotel,” he said. “I’m broke.”
I was about to offer to let him sleep on my couch (er, for now), but Jason broke in and beat me to the punch.
“We’ve had a spare room since my brother moved out,” he said. “We’d be happy to have you. You can crash there.”
“Would that be all right?” Mutual asked, his voice shaking more as he got closer to the house.
“Totally,” said Jason.
I silently cursed myself for not offering him Val’s old room.
You couldn’t have possibly paid me enough to spend a night in Mutual’s parents’ old house. You couldn’t even do it now, when I’ve lived through things a lot scarier than any ghost could ever be. I was half afraid that we’d open it up and find some witch who would shove us into the oven.
“Well, someone’s been here,” said Jason. “Look!”
There was a swear word scribbled in grime on one of the windows.
It was probably too dark for any of them to notice the smile on my face when I saw that.
The door was locked, so Mutual and Jason went to work kicking it in while Amber and I stood back.
“Nothing like watching your man destroy things,” she said.
I just nodded and watched Jason doing his best to look like he was really helping, even though he wasn’t nearly as strong as Mutual.
“He was asking about you, you know,” said Amber. “He asked if you had a boyfriend. You should have seen how relieved he looked when we told him you didn’t.”
I smiled.
“He seems a lot more … worldly … now,” said Amber. “I mean, he knows the facts of life and stuff. But he still seems like he just broke out of jail and hasn’t figured out how to live on the outside. He could only learn so much from Shakespeare, classic rock radio, and a stack of magazines.”
I snorted. “You can learn everything from Shakespeare.”
“Not everything,” she said. “Not, like, microwaves and text messaging.”
“Point taken.”
Jason and Mutual successfully broke the door open, and we all stepped into the old house.
Inside, it was scary as hell. There were probably spiders the size of Gregory Grue running around. It was dark, but I could see that there was a lot of dust covering every cabinet.
“Pretty much how you remembered it?” asked Jason.
“Yeah,” said Mutual. “I guess they must have come back and cleaned it out or something. Either that or we got robbed. But there wasn’t much worth stealing.”
“How could they come back without you knowing?” I asked. “Did they leave you alone for weeks at a time?”
He didn’t answer.
I wandered into the kitchen, where a tiny bit of starry light left from the sky was peeking in through a window. I was about to ask again how his parents could have come back when I opened a cabinet door and found three cans of VS32, the vegetable compound vampires drank instead of blood.
That explained how they could have come back so fast.
They ran.
“Hey, Mutual,” I said. “Were the vegetables you grew … for the compound?”
He stepped into the kitchen and took a deep breath.
“Mostly they sold them,” he said, in a voice barely above a whisper. “But yeah, they kept enough to make their own. They didn’t like the store-bought stuff much.”
“Holy crap,” said Amber. “Your parents are vampires?”
Mutual shuffled his feet. “I thought you’d probably already figured that out. They’re a pretty obvious case, when you think about it.”
“Victorians?” I asked.
He nodded.
That explained a lot about their distaste for anything that didn’t remind them of the good old days.
“I never found out much about their past,” he said. “I don’t know if they converted before or after the compound was discovered, so …”
“Gotcha,” I said.
He wasn’t sure if they’d ever killed anyone.
And I thought having to live with a dad who had broken into a school to get an answer sheet, like my dad did once, was psychologically damaging. At least I didn’t have to wonder whether he had ever killed anyone to drink their blood.
“I didn’t even know about them when I was a kid,” he said.
“You didn’t notice that your parents never got older?” asked Amber.
Mutual shrugged. “Who notices that when they’re a little kid?”
I followed him into his old bedroom, where he dug around under the bed but didn’t seem to find anything.
“That was why we moved. They knew the announcement that vampires were real was coming, and they wanted us to be even more isolated.”
“I always thought it was because you didn’t qualify for the state spelling bee,” I said.
He smiled a bit. “That’s what I thought, too, at first. I mean, people were getting crazy.”
As I said, people in Preston used to take the spelling bees really seriously, and when none of us went on to the state finals, they weren’t happy. There were For Sale signs in my yard, and, since Mutual wasn’t really from Preston, there were a lot of rumors that he was a “traitor” who had been paid by larger schools to take a dive.
I did not miss the old, small-town version of Preston at all.
But the truth is, we did take a dive at the district bee. I guess I can admit it now that old-school Prestonians who bear grudges are about the least of my concerns.
It wasn’t because anyone paid us, though. We had reason to believe that our lousy principal was rigging the bee so that he could take all the credit when we won. We decided that taking a dive was the right thing to do, even though it wrecked the spelling career that Mutual’s parents had basically groomed him for.
It took a lot of guts on his part.
And it created a bond between the two of us. Even more so than the one I had with Jason and Amber, really, since they weren’t in the district bee with us. But in their case, we’d had years to let our friendship grow. I knew them as well as I could imagine knowing anyone.
With Mutual, I still felt the bond, but on the other hand, he sort of seemed like a stranger.
Mutual sifted through some empty drawers, then said, “You know what? There’s nothing here. Let’s just go get a pizza.”
He seemed deep in thought as Jason carefully steered his car down the narrow path that took us back to the road.
“So, you just turned eighteen?” I asked.
Mutual nodded.
“Do they want you to convert?”
He nodded again. “I was hoping to find the letter of intent they signed for me when I was little,” he said, “so I could destroy it. But it’s not there.”
When vampires reproduce, the baby is a normal human. But the vampire community tends to put them under a lot of pressure to convert as soon as they turn eighteen. It’s one of the horrible things that some of them think is okay because “that’s what vampires do.”
Like I said: Worst. Excuse. Ever.
“They had someone lined up to do it to me—a friend of theirs.” Mutual shuddered. “A middle-aged woman who lived sort of near us out there. And they said I should think of it as a medical procedure, but she’s no doctor. It makes me want to puke just thinking about her.”
He turned away and look
ed out the window at the trees and the moonlight.
No human knew exactly how the conversion process worked, but it wasn’t like getting a shot or a bite in the neck. It was said to be awfully intimate.
The very idea of someone being that intimate with him—well, someone other than me—made me want to break something. I only had a mental image of what the woman looked like, but I imagined shredding her in one of those big wood chippers that would spray chunks of her all over the Alaska snow.
“How long will it take them to get here if they run?” asked Jason.
“Couple hours,” Mutual said. “Tops. And I’m pretty sure they’re planning a diciotto.”
“What’s a diciotto?” asked Jason.
“It’s where vampire parents get a bunch of vampires into a room and sort of brainwash their eighteen-year-old offspring into consenting to convert,” I said. “They call it a rite of passage, but it’s really barbaric.”
“And it almost always works,” said Mutual. “I think they sort of hypnotize you into thinking you’re worthless unless you’re a vampire or something.”
“Think you could handle it if they did one on you?” I asked.
“That’s part of why I came here,” he said. “I was never braver than I was when I was with you guys.”
I smiled over at him.
“I might be able to help,” I said. “I’m in the Iowa Human/Post-Human Alliance. There are vampires there who might be able to protect you. I know at least one of them has tried to lobby the council to outlaw diciottos.”
Mutual inched a little bit over toward me in his seat.
I had always imagined him showing up again and saving me from my life of mediocrity. Teaching me to be 100 percent alive.
Obviously, that wouldn’t be happening.
He needed me to save him.
When we got to Yurkovich’s Pizza, I had hoped he would wander in looking like he could hear the secrets of the universe in the sound of the bubbling grease, in the glow of the dim yellow lights, and in the stains on the threadbare carpet, the way Shakespeare could find layers of meaning in the grime on the London streets. But he still seemed quiet, shy, and afraid.
At least now I understood why he was afraid—diciottos were scary business.
As we ate, I noticed another swear word scrawled in the window of Yurkovich’s and smiled. Gregory had been here.
Gregory Grue might have been a disgusting slob who was lacking in social graces, but I owed him a lot.
He had granted my wish.
After they dropped me off at home, Mom was sitting up in the kitchen.
“Well,” she said, “it appears that we need to talk.”
“What?” I asked.
I assumed she had somehow found out about the traffic ticket, which already seemed like it had happened ages ago, not a few hours ago.
“I got a call from Marcy Keyes,” she said. “She told me that boy with the weird name I can never remember is back in town.”
I smiled. “Yeah,” I said. “Mutual.”
And I told her all about Mutual—how he’d been basically imprisoned in Alaska, partly as punishment for not winning a spelling bee. She shook her head disapprovingly the whole time.
“What makes you think he’s going to grow into a person you still like?” she asked. “Maybe he’ll turn into a real jerk. Maybe he’ll discover other girls. Sounds like he’s attractive enough that you’ll probably have competition.”
“No way,” I said. “That can’t happen.”
“I just don’t want you to get hurt, Jennifer,” Mom said. “Or to end up like Val, thinking every new boy is the one to change your life for. Or to get your hopes up.”
“I won’t,” I said.
“Looks to me like you already have,” she said. “Just be careful.”
And she left me at the table.
I almost wished I had something left to smash.
If you ask me, Mom hadn’t quite gotten over the idea that Mutual was competition for me or something. She had known that Mutual and I liked each other (just like everyone else in town had) and hadn’t approved, and I guess she hadn’t stopped to think that things were different now. We weren’t going against each other for a spot at the state spelling bee anymore.
And why shouldn’t I have a boyfriend? I deserved one as much as anyone else, and Mutual and I had been brought together by magic. Actual magic!
But she sort of had a point, as much as I hated to admit it.
For one thing, no one else had liked him when we were eleven. He was a total dork, and there were barely half a dozen other girls in class to start with. I might have more competition now that he was totally cut.
Also, I didn’t really know Mutual that well. No one did. Not even him. There was no telling what kind of person he’d turn out to be away from his parents. I hoped he wasn’t just going to be shy, retiring, and muttering all the time now.
But hell—I hadn’t really figured myself out yet, either.
My life until a month or two before hadn’t been lugging giant vegetables around a farm with no phone, TV, or Internet connection, but it probably left me with even less free time than he had.
We were both free now—or freer than we’d ever been.
We might not have figured out who we were yet, but we would. And we could help each other.
And I was willing to bet that he’d turn out to be someone I still wanted to know. Probably someone I still wanted to kiss.
If we could just get me through the weekend, and him through the diciotto.
As I lay in bed, I hummed a few verses of “Goodnight, My Someone” from The Music Man. It wasn’t the song I had to learn, but it seemed more appropriate at the moment.
Goodnight, my someone, goodnight.
Jenny couldn’t believe that this was Mutual. The boy with a designer backpack, the coolest clothes, and the best batting average in Little League had grown into a teenager with a bowl cut. He seemed like he had forgotten to take the hanger out of his blazer before putting it on.
In short, he had grown up to be a nerd.
A nerd who wanted a kiss—and expected to get it!
ten
Yep. Exactly the opposite.
I had never, in my wildest dreams, imagined that he would grow up to be so … dreamy. Rugged.
He was pale and scared and a little unkempt, and not exactly acting like a knight in shining armor so far, but I could just imagine that once he cleaned himself up, he’d look as if he were on the cover of a romance novel.
After all, he had to be jet-lagged, in addition to worrying about being brainwashed into agreeing to be turned into a vampire.
I wasn’t really the most empathetic person alive or anything (something I’ve worked on since then), but I could see where all of that could get you down.
In the morning at school, I went straight to the theater to thank Gregory for granting my wish, but he wasn’t around yet. I guessed he was only in for one period a day.
Cathy was sulking around in the hall by her locker, and even shaking Fred off when he tried to comfort her. When she saw me, she gave me the dirtiest look anyone had ever given me.
It hurt. I might not have been popular, exactly, but people didn’t usually hate me enough to give me dirty looks like that. Most people seemed to like me, even. I didn’t enjoy having enemies.
I walked up to Cathy, hoping I could settle things with her.
“Hey,” I said.
“Get away from me,” she said.
“Look,” I said, “I didn’t ask for any part in the show. I don’t want it. I’m going to tell Gregory to give it back to you.”
“I have a meeting with the little freak today,” she said. “I’ll handle him.”
“Want me to come along? I’ll take your side.”
She shook her head. “Just leave me alone.”
I shrugged and walked off.
I really didn’t want the part. The mayor’s wife doesn’t sing much, but, well, it was
still more singing than I was going to be able to pull off. Some people really do come alive onstage, but I’m not one of those people.
I was just getting to my locker when Amber tapped me on the shoulder.
“There you are!” she said. “Where’ve you been?”
“I was trying to find the new director,” I said.
“And I was trying to find you! We stayed up, like, all night talking to Mutual last night.”
I tried not to let on how jealous I was to have been left out of that.
“He’s, like, the coolest guy ever now,” she said. “Did you ever hear of aerial hunting?”
“Is that where they kill wolves and stuff with airplanes?”
“Yeah. There was an airport base a mile from his ranch—he used to sneak out there at night and steal parts of the airplanes so they couldn’t take off!”
Swoon.
“Awesome!” I said. “He was like a superhero!”
She leaned in closer. “And when we told him that, he said he was just imagining what you would have wanted him to do. You inspired him, Jennifer.”
I smiled.
Well, actually, no. I made a noise like “Squee!”
I hadn’t seen much of it yet myself, but there was definitely some evidence that he wasn’t as much of a cowering wreck as he’d seemed to be the night before, if he was out engaging in espionage.
“And it gets better,” she said. “We’re going on a double date tonight. Date. Jason specifically referred to it as a date.”
“Please tell me you’re not kidding,” I said. “Because if you are, you’ll be missing several vital organs in the morning.”
“Didn’t it feel good, the four of us all together again?” asked Amber. “We just, like, fit. We could retire together and buy condos in the same senior apartment complex.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” I said.
But I was imagining it, too. I was imagining Mutual and me as adults. We’d live in a small, colorful apartment next door to a theater, with the million or so of his babies I planned to have, and we’d be mild-mannered liberal arts professors by day and environmental espionage agents by night. Everyone would think we were a couple of extraordinary people.