by Adam Selzer
I also knew I was still imagining myself with the version of Mutual that I’d always wanted him to be. I had to accept the fact that the real one might not live up to it.
But I spent all day drawing little sketches of Mutual in the margins of my notes. If the favor I owed Gregory was kissing Mutual at the dance, I was more than ready for the challenge. No way was I letting him come back to town without getting the kiss we’d planned for all those years ago.
When I got to the auditorium for fourth-period rehearsal, I found Gregory Grue sitting on a stool onstage, talking to Eileen Codlin, who was taking notes. All of a sudden (and this is the only time I ever, ever thought this), I really couldn’t wait to read her book. I wanted to know more about this fairy godparent business.
I walked down the aisle and hopped onto the stage.
“Hey,” I said to Gregory.
“Hoo hoo,” said Gregory, in a more casual tone than usual. “Did you work on your song this weekend?”
“Some,” I said. “But I really just wanted to thank you.”
“For the part? Don’t thank me, just rehearse! If you suck, it’ll make me look bad.”
“No,” I said. “For … you know. Granting my wish.”
“I didn’t grant any wishes yet,” he said. “I’ve gotten you off to a good start, but these things take time. And you still owe me a favor with a guy to be named later.”
“Doesn’t look like it’ll be a problem,” I said.
“Is this how fairy magic works?” asked Eileen.
“It’s like this, baby,” said Gregory to Eileen. “As soon as one of us decides to grant someone a couple of wishes, it creates this vacuum of energy in the world that can only be filled by having the wisher do us a little favor. Nothing much. I wish we could do away with that whole angle, but I don’t make the rules.”
He looked over at me and said, “Remember that. I don’t make ’em. I just follow ’em.”
“Sure,” I said.
“Now go backstage and talk to whoever’s in charge of costumes.”
“Actually,” I said, “I was going to ask if you could give the part back to Cathy. She wants it a lot more than I do.”
“The play’s the thing, kiddo,” he said. “My job here is to make this show the best it can be, and you’ve got the right look for the mayor’s wife, minus the Grimace hair, which we’ll cover up. Cathy’s all wrong for it. Mrs. Alison must have been drinking from an extra-large water bottle the day she did the casting!”
“Can’t you fix her with makeup?”
“Look, I have a meeting with her right after class. Just let the two of us work all this out, and keep your nose on your own face, where it belongs, okay?”
“Sure.”
I thought I’d ask again later, and wandered around to find Marty, the guy who was in charge of costumes.
I wasn’t in any of the scenes that were being rehearsed that day, so I sat back and watched as Cathy and the rest of the chorus worked on the blocking for the “Iowa Stubborn” number. Gregory directed like a tyrant, shoving people around and yelling if they took a step with the wrong foot.
Under normal circumstances, I would have thought he was being a real dick.
But in my haze of stupidity, I thought he was simply being a really passionate director.
Right before my last class of the day, I stepped into the hall and saw Cathy yelling at Fred.
“I hate you!” she shouted. “I never want to talk to you again! Get away from me!”
Fred looked shocked.
Cathy threw a textbook at him. Being a vampire, he had no trouble getting out of the way. It landed on the floor and slid down the hall toward me.
When it got to my feet, Cathy gave me a look I couldn’t quite place and said, “Why don’t you go out with him instead?”
A crowd gathered around the two of them.
“What are you all looking at?” Cathy shouted. “Mind your own business!”
“Can’t we just talk?” asked Fred.
Cathy screamed out a swear word.
Mrs. Smollet appeared out of nowhere, took Cathy by the arm, and led her away.
Fred stood there in the hall, staring and looking aghast. He didn’t even move when the bell rang.
I asked around a bit but couldn’t quite get the story out of anyone. No one seemed to have seen the whole thing.
But by the end of the day, the pieces had been put together.
All through fifth period, Cathy had been telling Fred she wanted to break up and that he should go date some other girl. He had sort of resisted, until she blew up in the hall.
Word had it that it all started when he told her he didn’t want to convert her after all, but no one was sure.
All we knew was that she’d be spending the rest of the week in in-school suspension.
“What am I going to do about Mutual?” asked Jenny hopelessly. “Even my purple hair doesn’t bother him. I just know he’s going to kiss me tonight! I don’t want my first kiss to be with him! I want it to be special! And I want it to make me a princess!”
“I have an idea,” said her fairy godmother. “Just let me take out my wand.…”
eleven
Unless you’re awfully dumb, you can probably guess that I never had my fairy godmother give me acne and the ability to spray some nasty-smelling mist, like a skunk, to scare Mutual away, like she does in the book. That would have just been plain mean, even if I didn’t like him. The “Jenny” in the book should have been nicer to Mutual, even if he was annoying, and maybe even something of a stalker whose attempts to kiss her could be considered sexual harassment by most courts.
Girls, if you’re being harassed, the thing to do is get a lawyer. Not turn into a weird half-girl, half-skunk creature to gross your stalker out. Remember: it didn’t work for “Jenny.”
I might not have looked like a model or anything on the night of my date with Mutual, but I can guarantee you that I didn’t stink. I took the longest shower of my life and used up half of my products. Then I spent much longer than usual picking out an outfit. I wanted something sexy, but not, like, so slutty that I’d scare him off. At least it had warmed up enough that I could just wear a jacket and not have to worry about looking like Grimace in a giant coat. The ice had melted, leaving us with deep puddles full of soggy November leaves.
When I drove out to Jason’s, I felt positively elated. I had forgotten all my disappointment that Mutual wasn’t acting like some sort of Superman, and shoved the voice in my head reminding me of the difference between the real Mutual and the fantasy one into its own compartment where I couldn’t hear it.
This was the night I’d been waiting for all my life. The day that made my life up until that point worth it.
I could think of every bad thing that had ever happened to me—every bad day, every time my crowded schedule seemed to be keeping me from having a social life, everything—and how it had led me to this place.
Mutual came out of Jason’s house wearing a plain black T-shirt and looking even more nervous than usual. I was nervous, too.
Jason got into the backseat and motioned Mutual into the front.
“Hi, Mutual,” I said.
“Hi,” he said. He was blushing already. It was pretty cute, really.
We drove out to Amber’s parents’ ranch to pick her up, and she promptly made out with Jason a little bit, kicking my seat in the process to get my attention and suggest that it might be a good time for Mutual and me to do the same.
Mutual and I looked at each other, but we both just sort of smiled nervously, and I started to drive.
“Did you ever go into downtown Des Moines when you lived in Preston?” I asked.
“Not that I remember,” he said. “As far as I know, my first time there was yesterday, when I took the cab from there to Jason’s. I think it’s about the same size as Anchorage, though. I went there a couple times. And all the radio stations came out of there.”
Man, it was weird to hear hi
m using contractions.
Jason passed me up a tape he’d made of old metal songs that Mutual knew—my car only had a tape player. I didn’t really know any of the songs myself, but hearing Mutual and Jason sing along at the top of their lungs was fun.
Between songs, Mutual threw back his head and laughed. He seemed as though he was finally coming up for air after being underwater for years—like he was coming out of his shell, just the way I’d hoped he would.
“Oh wow,” he said. “I could never cut loose like that at the farm. I had to listen to the radio really quietly on headphones that I hid under my mattress. I never got to sing along!”
“You have a good voice,” I said. “You could totally be a singer.”
“Beats being a speller,” Jason said. “You get a lot more groupies, too. I don’t think there’s such a thing as spelling groupies.”
Amber elbowed him in the ribs.
“What’s a groupie, exactly?” Mutual asked.
Jason leaned up and whispered in his ear, and Mutual blushed a bit.
“Oh,” he said. “I don’t really need any of those, though.”
I smiled.
“Neither does Jason,” Amber pointed out.
“That word wasn’t in the dictionaries?” Jason asked.
“Mine weren’t exactly unabridged,” he said. “Remember how Marianne Cleaver used to pick on me because my dictionary wasn’t big enough?”
“All boys worry that they should have a bigger dic … tionary,” said Jason.
We all cracked up, though it took Mutual a second to get the joke. He’d obviously come a long way since the days when he’d worn a blazer, a belt, and suspenders and had a bowl cut, but he still had a lot to learn.
And I couldn’t wait to teach him.
“So,” I said. “I want to hear about this thing where you stopped people from aerial hunting!”
He shrugged. “I didn’t really stop anyone,” he said. “The airport was a half-hour hike from my house, so I could sneak out there in the middle of the night and unscrew wheels and stuff and get back before my parents noticed I was gone. But it’s not like they couldn’t just replace the parts I stole.”
“That’s still awesome!” I said.
He shrugged again. “I needed to do something for excitement. But no matter what you do it for, unscrewing wheels isn’t terribly exciting.”
“Neither is spelling,” I said. “And look at the mess that got us into back in the day.”
“Do people still remember that around here?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Nah. Once the vampires came out of the coffin, everyone forgot all about it,” I said. “I would have, too, except that I couldn’t forget about you.”
He blushed again.
I got onto the interstate and headed toward downtown Des Moines.
Unless you’re one of the people who’s been camping out on my lawn, odds are that you’ve never been to Des Moines. We’re not exactly a vacation spot. If you like giant umbrella statues, we’re your place—we’ve got one of those outside of the Civic Center. A giant fiberglass cow, too, outside of the dairy on East University. Other than that, there’s not much here that you can’t find in any other city, except maybe George the Chili King, the greasy spoon on Hickman Road.
It may not be an exciting place to visit, but it’s a great place to live. We have a nice downtown that feels like a real city these days, but you’re never more than a fifteen-minute drive from rolling hills of green fields, if that’s what you’re into. We have nice parks, theaters, and farmers’ markets. There are band concerts on the steps of the capitol building in the summer.
The commutes here are short, too. Preston is just about the farthest suburb from downtown, and we were almost there in twenty minutes.
The lights in the big buildings on the horizon were like extra stars—I liked looking at the patterns formed by the windows that had lights on and the ones that didn’t. It was sort of like looking for pictures in the craters on the moon.
“Hey,” said Amber. “Check out the Weather Beacon. It’s purple.”
The Weather Beacon is this big pole covered in lights that you can see from all over town. If the lights are white, it means it’s going to get colder. If they’re red, it’s getting warmer and if they’re green, there’s no change coming. There’s a rhyme to explain it that I can never quite remember.
This night, it was glowing purple.
“What the hell?” asked Jason. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” said Amber. “And how are they going to work that into the rhyme? Nothing rhymes with purple.”
“Nurple,” said Jason.
“Don’t you dare,” she giggled, slapping his hand.
I was pretty sure I knew what it meant when the Weather Beacon was purple.
It meant that my fairy godparent wanted me to know this was my night.
Even the Jenmobile was running better than usual. We had made it almost all the way downtown before it stalled out. I put it into neutral and let it roll to the side of the road.
“Sorry, guys,” I said. “This happens a lot. We’ll be fine in ten minutes.”
“This is why we don’t have flying cars,” said Jason. “One of those things stalls and you’re dead!”
“I haven’t been in too many cars,” said Mutual, “but they don’t usually have a dashboard like this, do they?”
My dashboard was made out of carved wood—it was like an art project for whoever had owned it before.
“Nope,” I said. “It’s the main reason I bought the car. I probably should have sprung for one with a good engine instead, though.”
“I like it,” said Mutual. “It’s not like any other car.”
“Exactly,” I said.
“We’re right by a cemetery,” said Amber. “Isn’t this the one where Alley Rhodes and her zombie boyfriend got attacked?”
“I think so,” I said. “Prom was at the Science Center that year, and that’s right by us.”
“I hear his grave is, like, a shrine now,” said Jason. “People who think Alley and Doug were tragic lovers or something make pilgrimages to it.”
“Tragic lovers?” Amber scoffed. “I doubt it. Did you ever read any of Alley’s old columns from the school paper? She was vicious!”
“I’ve never read them,” I said, “but I’ve met her a few times since she graduated. She comes to alliance meetings during the summer, when she’s in town.”
“What’s she like?” asked Amber.
I shrugged. “She doesn’t seem that mean to me,” I said. “Maybe she’s settled down. Maybe falling in love was just what she needed.”
“Maybe,” said Amber.
I turned to Mutual. “Did you hear about that? The first vampire attack in about a hundred and fifty years was right here in Des Moines.”
“I heard,” he said. “It was on the radio. That Wilhelm guy sounds pretty awful.”
“He was an awful drummer, I can tell you that much,” said Jason. “I saw that band he was in at the Cage one time, and they could have sucked a walnut through a straw.”
“Every time there’s a dance, people say his clan is going to come get revenge, just because he attacked Alley at the prom,” said Amber. “Stupid.”
“Is his clan still around?” asked Mutual.
“They’ve been told never to show their faces around here again,” I said. “They got banished to Canada’s great outdoors.”
“You two should go see the grave,” said Amber. “See if it’s really a shrine.”
She gave the back of my seat a kick, which meant “you two should go be alone together.”
I looked over at Mutual. “You want to?”
“I will if you will,” he said. He turned back to Jason and Amber. “Are you guys coming?”
“I think they want some time to make out in the backseat,” I said.
The two of us got out of the car.
The gates of the cemetery were locked—the
y’re always locked. It’s the law now, actually—all cemeteries are on lock-down in case anyone has cast the zombie rites over any graves. Zombies are usually pretty harmless, but the first few hours after they rise up, they’re sort of in frenzy mode. Keeping them locked into the cemetery is safer for everyone, including the zombies. If they rise up behind a locked fence, they’re less likely to get machine-gunned by a hillbilly.
“So, how do people get in?” I asked.
“There’s probably a broken link in the fence someplace,” said Mutual. “Let me see.”
He began to run his hand along the gates, and then found a space where the boards were farther apart than most of the others. There was just enough room for us to shimmy through, though I really had to squeeze.
“You okay?” he asked as I pushed through.
“I’ve got it,” I said.
“This is a pretty safe place to be,” he said. “My parents wouldn’t attack around so many other people’s graves.”
Vampires can’t go into other people’s graves, for some reason. Most of them avoid cemeteries altogether. Just being in a place this comparatively safe seemed to loosen Mutual up a bit. He stopped looking over his shoulder every few seconds and started to smile.
You might say he really came alive in the graveyard.
We walked through the grounds, and I said, “ ’Tis now the very witching time of night, when churchyards yawn.’ ”
Hamlet.
Mutual smiled and countered with, “ ‘Now it is the time of night that the graves, all gaping wide, every one lets forth his sprite, in the church-way paths to glide.’ ”
“Spooky,” I said. “What’s that from?”
“Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
It wasn’t hard to spot Doug’s grave—I remembered Alley saying he had liked to build stuff, and from the looks of things, he had really tricked out his gravestone. There was a huge wooden carving built on top of the stone marker, as easy to spot as the Weather Beacon in the skyline, even in the dark graveyard.
As we walked up toward it, I started to feel, like, overwhelmed. There was this … feeling in the air that I walked right into. I didn’t understand what it was. Maybe what had happened that night, when Doug crumbled to dust (right in his own grave, which was kind of convenient, I guess) in Alley’s arms, had left some kind of energy in the space around his grave.