by Adam Selzer
The rest of the drive back, we made our plans for the next day. First on our list was to get Fred to meet with us, during which time we’d get advice on a diciotto, then try to get him to take me to the dance. It seemed easy enough. Making a complicated plan, like the Jenny in Eileen’s book did, wouldn’t have been smart—the more complex a plan gets, the more chances there are for something to go wrong.
If Fred didn’t seem receptive at first, we’d just do something the Jenny in Eileen’s book doesn’t seem to have thought of: bribe him.
Mutual and I were both broke, but Amber’s parents were pretty well off, and Jason could always pick up more hours at Fat Johnnie’s, the pizza place where he worked. I was really touched that they’d do things like that for me.
Of course, what were they supposed to do? Let me die?
When I got back to my house, I took a really, really long shower. I did everything except scour myself with steel wool. And after I was done, I had gotten the smell off just about every part of me except for my hand, which I’d actually used to touch Princess’s mane.
I wrapped that up in some gauze, doused it with some of Val’s perfume, then headed downstairs.
I wanted to tell my mom I was being stalked by a weirdo who was apparently magic, but something told me that she would only make things harder for me. She probably wouldn’t believe me, and if she did, I didn’t see what she could do about it.
After all, in a few days, it would all be over.
In hindsight, I guess I really should have told her. I should have told everyone who would listen. For a straight-A student with a scholarship, I was certainly acting like an idiot.
But realistically, after a day like the one I’d been having, it was hard to think rationally.
When I thought about Mutual’s parents, it got me angry again. I even started looking around my room for something breakable, but then I calmed myself down.
No more breaking stuff. That wasn’t helping me.
It was just putting me on a path to end up like Dad. Who, when he thought someone else was trying to sabotage me at spelling, blasted rock music into their house and danced around chanting that I was the queen of spelling.
He’s doing a lot better now, really. He’s worked hard at it.
But I didn’t want to end up in that place myself. I needed to find better ways to stay positive.
If Mutual was going to go through all this stuff for me, I was going to be someone better. Someone worth it. For both of us.
And I wasn’t going to give Gregory Grue any more reasons to tell me I was an awful, hateful, spiteful person. Not anymore.
When Jenny went to see the costume-fitter to be measured, she was surprised. The costume lady was her fairy godmother!
She felt her face brightening. Just when she was afraid she’d never get that date!
“Just let me take out my wand,” her fairy godmother said. “You’re not out of this yet!”
sixteen
I don’t get why “Jenny” was still surprised to see her godmother popping up all over the place by then. I mean, I was a bit shocked to see Gregory Grue on the toilet in a ladies’ room, where you don’t expect to see guys, period, but other than that, if I had flown to Disney World that week, I would have fully expected to see Gregory Grue playing Snow White.
I even half expected him to show up at my door the next morning in a milkman outfit (even though I think those guys were extinct by the time my parents were kids). And when I stopped into Wackford’s for a cup of coffee on the way to school, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see him wearing one of those aprons behind the counter.
I met up with Jason and Amber by the flagpole before school started on Wednesday morning.
“You ready to do this?” asked Amber.
“Totally,” I said. “Let’s go pick up a vampire.”
Inside, Fred was next to his locker, deflecting the small handful of girls who wanted to take Cathy’s place as his significant other. He brushed them all off, cursing a lot as he did.
“There he is,” said Amber. “You want us to come with you?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s say we need him for diciotto help. That’ll be the icebreaker.”
Amber and Jason nodded, and the three of us bumped fists.
Showtime!
Fred was digging through his backpack, which I noticed didn’t actually have any books in it. He came to high school and all, but it wasn’t like he did any homework.
“Good morning,” I said.
“Hey,” he said. “I’m not looking for a girlfriend, so buzz the buzz off.”
I’ve cleaned up everyone’s language for this book (except for Mrs. Smollet and Mutual’s parents), but Fred’s most of all. He was one of those guys who just couldn’t form a sentence that didn’t use the F-bomb a few times. He practically used it as punctuation.
“We sort of need your help,” I said.
He looked up at me. “I’m not converting anyone,” he said. “I said to buzz off.”
“It’s not that,” I said. “It’s just the opposite.”
“We’ve got this friend whose parents are vampires,” Jason said. “And he just turned eighteen.”
Fred swore and shook his head. “Is he converting?”
“We were sort of hoping you could talk to him,” said Amber. “None of us want him to, and we think he’ll need help.”
Fred sighed, shrugged, and swore a bit more.
“That’s pretty much why I’m here,” he said. “I mean, I don’t do homework, or pay attention, or even show up half the time, but every now and then I can at least talk people out of converting. If you guys want to meet me after school, I’ll definitely talk to him.”
“Thanks,” I said. “He really needs it.”
“You know, Fred,” said Amber, “we knew you were a good guy.”
Fred shrugged. “I try, I guess,” he said. “Sometimes.”
I hadn’t really known that about him, personally. I’d never stopped to think about why he kept coming to high school—I guess I always thought it was just to pick up chicks.
If he really kept coming in order to talk people out of converting, I had been totally wrong about him. I suddenly felt deeply ashamed of myself.
“That’s a shame about Cathy going nuts yesterday,” Amber went on.
Fred shrugged again. “All the girls who say they want to convert do, sooner or later,” he said. “With people like her, the best I can do is drag my feet and string them along until they either get over it or go nuts. Going nuts is still better than going undead.”
“Well,” Amber said, “you’re going to need to find someone else to take to the dance.”
Now he chuckled. “No way,” he said. “I wouldn’t be caught at a dance anymore. If I dance out of step, that damned honor guard will pounce on my ass!”
“But don’t you think it would drive Cathy insane if you took Jennifer to the dance?” asked Amber.
Fred looked up at me, then sort of smirked.
“Nah,” he said, “I don’t want to hurt her or anything, she’s a good kid. But meet me back here after school, and I’ll talk to your friend, okay?”
He closed his locker and walked away.
“That went well, I thought,” said Amber.
“He smirked at me!” I said. “He’d better not have been thinking we were nuts to think he’d go with me!”
“Could’ve been worse,” said Amber. “He said he’d meet with us tonight. If it comes down to it, we can just tell him straight up that you’ll die if you don’t get kissed by him. I’m sure he wouldn’t let you die or anything. He seems nice.”
She seemed so confident that I didn’t get too worried.
Amber was actually much closer to being a screwball-comedy heroine than I felt like I was. Those women were always confident, and sometimes they turned out to be witches (like she was before it got too trendy). And she came up with ideas that seemed perfectly logical to her but never would have occurred
to me.
Sometimes I think the ideas I had for the kind of person I wanted to be weren’t really based on eccentrics in screwball comedies at all—I was just trying to be more like Amber.
When I got to the auditorium for rehearsal fourth period, Gregory was sitting in one of the seats, continuing his interview with Eileen. She smiled and waved at me, and he flashed me what I can only describe as an evil grin. I gave him a dirty look and walked up to him.
“We need to talk,” I called out as I got closer to them.
He told Eileen to pardon the intrusion, then walked down the row of seats with me.
“Hoo hoo, kiddo.”
“I need some clarification about this whole thing,” I told him.
“Shut up,” he said. “We’re not discussing that here. You say another word about it, and I’ll call you Grimace in front of the whole class!”
I just glared at him. It was all I could think to do.
“Now take your seat,” he said, “and don’t say another word until I tell you. I can still make this harder on you, girly. Got it?”
I nodded.
“Good. Any progress on getting the Wells Fargo Wagon moved here?”
“No,” I said.
“Gosh,” he said with a grin. “If only there were some way you could become strong and fast enough to move it here all by yourself!”
I gave him the dirtiest look I possibly could and took a seat at the far back corner of the auditorium, away from everyone else.
When rehearsal got started, he called me up onto the stage.
“All right, ya groundlings,” he said as I climbed up. “Part of being an actor is doing things that scare you. Tapping into your darkest, deepest emotions, the parts of yourself that you keep stored away in a place where the lightbulb burned out and it’s too dark to see where the switch is anyway. If you’ve never been so scared you were pretty sure you almost died, you’ll never be an actor. Jennifer will now demonstrate the power of deep fear. Sing, kiddo.”
I looked at him. “What the hell?” I asked.
He grinned again. “Let’s hear your song,” he said. “Let’s hear how being scared out of your wits can influence you as an actor. Right now. Sing.”
“I haven’t learned it all yet,” I told him.
“Just sing what you can,” he said. “But sing it out loud and sing it out strong. Let everybody hear you!”
I just stood frozen in place for a second.
“Come on,” he said. “Turn and face your audience.”
I turned my body toward the seats, where about two dozen other kids were gathered. They were all staring at me.
I wasn’t used to that back then. I guess one of the good things that came out of having a book and a movie made about me was that I got over being nervous about that sort of thing.
But I hadn’t been on a stage in years—not since Mutual and I lost the district spelling bee. My brain went a bit fuzzy, and everything went quiet—except for the sound of a bell, like the one they rang when you missed a word at a bee, which was probably all in my head.
Then there was a voice that was probably real.
“Go, Jennifer!” someone shouted. Eileen, I’m pretty sure. The one person in the room who thought I was getting a wish granted right then.
“Sing, kiddo!” said Gregory. “Start with the monologue about dirty books, then sing.”
I froze, then said, “Dirty books … Chaucer … Rabelais … Balzac …”
This was the mayor’s wife’s big speech—she was accusing Marian the Librarian of lending out dirty books. She’d never read them herself, but the names of the authors sounded dirty to her.
She and Mutual’s parents would have gotten along great.
“Emphasize the first syllable of Balzac,” said Gregory. “Drag it out and let the L sound roll around in your mouth like a couple of cherries that you want to make glisten before you put ’em out on a tray to sell ’em at a market. And say it like you’re highly offended by the word itself. Come on. It’s an easy laugh.”
If I was supposed to be demonstrating that being afraid made you better at acting, I was failing pretty epically.
I started to blush. I was just about to open my mouth when the door opened and Kyle, the office messenger, walked in.
“Jennifer?” he called up at the stage.
Hearing him felt like snapping out of a trance.
“Yes!” I said. “I’m here. Right here. Do they need me in the office?”
“Yeah,” said Kyle.
I was already off the stage and halfway down the aisle.
I saw Eileen grinning at me as I ran past her seat in the back row. She was still probably thinking how wonderful it was that Gregory was working so hard to get me out of my shell and making my dream of being an actress—and sounding like I was saying the word “balls” onstage—come true.
Anyone with the intelligence level of a moose would have been able to tell by how I had acted onstage that I did not dream of being an actress. But, well … you know.
Kyle led me through the hallways right to Mrs. Smollet’s office. She was sitting at her desk, wearing a black dress and looking particularly grim, even for her.
“Good afternoon, Jennifer,” she said. “Sit.”
I took a seat, and she looked up at Kyle and said, “Leave us.”
It was so over the top that I almost laughed.
I decided to try to take control of the situation again.
“I’m glad you called me here,” I said. “I really need to talk to you about Mr. Grue.”
“Yes, I know. He gave you Cathy’s part, and neither of you is happy,” she said.
I glared at her and she glared back at me. I considered accusing her of being in league with Gregory again, but if she was, it wasn’t like she was going to admit it. She’d just make it worse for me or something. And if she wasn’t, but confronted him, he’d make it worse.
“I need to speak with you about your boyfriend,” Smollet said.
“I don’t have a boyfriend,” I said.
“Doug’s grave is monitored by security cameras,” she said. “Especially at times like these, when rumors go around about Wilhelm and his clan. We know what you and Mr. Scrivener have been up to.”
I blushed a little.
“And I also know that you were the main reason he came back to town,” said Smollet. “But his parents went to Europe to get authorization for a diciotto.”
“It’ll never work,” I said, though I was starting to tremble.
“They always work,” she said. “But his parents aren’t entirely confident, either. And according to them, when they’ve spoken to him about converting in the past, your name came up as a major reason he didn’t want to. They think a letter from you telling him to convert could make a lot of difference.”
I laughed. “You want me to tell him to become a vampire?”
“Yes.”
“Never,” I said. “Never going to happen, and if you threaten me, I’ll have the honor guard on your butt faster than you can ban a book.”
She sat back in her chair. “I could make it worth your while,” she said. “I wouldn’t ask you to do it simply as a favor. You want the valedictorian slot? I can make that happen.”
“My dad would be thrilled, but I don’t care about that.”
“I know you like Shakespeare,” she said. “Did you ever get to meet Marlowe?”
“Christopher Marlowe?”
She nodded.
Christopher Marlowe was a friend of Shakespeare’s, back in the day. And he’d become a vampire in 1593. When it first came out that he was still around, people in the Shakespeare Club that I went to got all excited because we thought he’d clear up all the mysteries about Shakespeare. But he didn’t, really. Whenever he talked about Shakespeare (who Marlowe called Wild Bill), he just started bragging that he’d written half of the plays himself, as well as most of the famous plays, movies, and rock songs that have been written since. No one really took
him seriously.
But it would still be cool to meet him.
“I know people who know him,” said Smollet. “I can arrange a meeting between the two of you.”
I shook my head.
“Then how about a date with Fred?”
I felt all the blood in my body rush to my face so quickly that my lower extremities started to go numb.
“What?” I said.
“I realize that you’re attached to Mr. Scrivener,” said Smollet. “But I also know what your generation is like. And Cathy told me this morning that you always liked him and wanted to go to the dance with him.”
“She’s just being paranoid,” I said.
I thought about yelling “Nice try, Marconi!” loud enough that she could hear it over in the in-school suspension room, but decided against it.
“He owes me a favor for keeping the council from shredding him along with Wilhelm after the attack three years ago. I can arrange a date. I can probably even keep Mutual from finding out, if you were planning on cheating behind his back like a shameful little girl.”
I thought for a second. If she could get me into the dance with Fred, it would be a major step toward staying alive. I did need that date.
Maybe I could write a letter to Mutual, then tell him it was all crap ahead of time before it could do any damage.
Smollet must have guessed I was thinking that, because she said, “Of course, we’d have to keep you isolated after writing the letter, so you couldn’t try to undermine its effect. But if you were to write a letter right now, we could arrange to set you up at the nicest hotel in town until after the diciotto. We’d let you out to attend the dance with Fred—under guard, of course.”
“I don’t know,” I said as I ran through a list of options in my head.
Could I get around the isolation somehow?
Would Mutual believe the letter in the first place? Under normal circumstances, I was sure he’d see it for a ruse right away, but a diciotto isn’t a normal circumstance. No human knows exactly what goes on in one, but it’s something like brainwashing. No one can be trusted to think straight during a diciotto.