by Adam Selzer
“Just shut up, will you?” I said. “I’m not that awful.”
“You’re a vengeful, spiteful, boring, stupid, ordinary little girl,” he said. Every word was like a punch in the face. “At least if you become a vampire, you’ll have that going for you.”
“I don’t need to be dead to be interesting,” I said. “I’ll get there.”
“Heh,” he chuckled. “Yeah. You’ll be extraordinary, all right. Extraordinarily dull, unless you turn out to be a serial killer or something.”
I took another shot and totally missed.
“Maybe if you had a wooden leg,” he mused. “You want me to cut your leg off?”
“No thanks.”
He started to sing along to the German tune using English words: “Apples and peaches and pump-i-kin pies … I’s got the razor if you’s got the thighs.”
I cringed but tried not to look freaked out. I wanted the only points he scored on me to be at pool.
I was not some violent, horrible person. I had my dark side and all, but no more so than any other healthy person, probably. I simply needed to learn to indulge it less, which I figured would get easier if I just stopped having to be seventeen.
And having Mutual to inspire me to be better would help, too.
You almost never get to see what those charming weirdos in screwball comedies were like as teenagers, but I’ll bet most of them were just as miserable and stressed out as every other teenager.
“Just think it over,” he said when he finished singing. “You can either die a single loser, or live forever with the boy of your dreams. Seems like an easy pick to me! Corner pocket.”
He sank the last ball, tossed his cue onto the table, then tipped his hat to the bartender and walked out the door.
I wandered back to my stool and sat down.
“So what’s going on?” asked Amber.
“He’s trying to convince me to become a vampire myself,” I said.
“You want me to chase after him and kick his ass?” asked Jason.
I shook my head. “He’d just make the whole thing worse for me,” I said. “We can kick his ass after the dance, when his magic has worn off.”
“Hell yeah,” said Jason. “Even I’m bigger than he is.”
I imagined riding the unicorn horn-first into him, then burying his body in a pile of unicorn crap.
Fred came back inside with Mutual, and they both looked discouraged. Apparently things hadn’t gone well.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Fred said to Mutual. “Diciottos aren’t easy, and neither is keeping vampires out of your head.”
“I’ll ask around at the alliance meeting on Friday,” I said. “There are some people there who are against diciottos altogether. I’ll make some calls tonight.”
“Wish I had better news for you guys,” said Fred.
Mutual gulped.
I gulped, too.
“My only advice now,” said Fred, “is to run like hell. Go someplace where they’ll never find you. It’ll at least buy you some time, and maybe you can be older when you convert. Or maybe they’ll let you just sign a letter of intent to convert when you turn twenty-five so you won’t have to be a teenager forever. I wouldn’t wish being a teenage vampire on a flea on the back of my worst enemy’s dog.”
Mutual fixed his eyes behind the bar and didn’t say anything. His lower lip quivered, like he was about to cry.
God, I hated to see him like this.
“Well, where to from here?” I asked.
“Back to school to pick up my car, I guess,” said Jason.
Fred settled up with the bartender, we all piled into the Jenmobile, and I drove the five of us away.
“So, Fred,” said Amber, “that was weird about Cathy yesterday.”
“It wasn’t fun,” he replied. “You never get used to being dumped, no matter what the circumstances.”
“Sounds like she was really bad-mouthing you,” said Amber.
“Was she?” asked Fred. “I haven’t seen her since Smollet dragged her away.”
“So, like we were saying earlier, maybe she needs a wake-up call,” said Amber. “What if you took Jennifer, her archrival, to the dance on Saturday?”
Fred laughed, which kind of hurt my feelings.
“But it would teach her a lesson,” said Amber.
“And Jennifer’s a pretty awesome person,” said Jason.
“And it’s life or death,” I said. “I might actually die. There’s a fairy curse going on.”
“I’ve heard that one before,” he said. “Look, I thought you guys just wanted me to help with Mutual, not try to con me into taking Jennifer to a dance.”
“I mean it,” I said. “I’ll die of a fairy curse if I don’t kiss you at the dance. I am one hundred percent serious.”
“She is,” said Jason.
Fred sighed. I could tell he was getting uncomfortable. “Forget it,” he said. “You can just let me off here.”
I started to say something, but as soon as I pulled up to a stop sign he opened the car door and vanished. He was probably already home by the time Jason had moved over from the middle and shut the door.
“Well, that didn’t go so well,” Jason said.
“Should we go after him?” I asked.
“How could we?” asked Jason. “I don’t have a clue where he lives.”
“We’ve still got time to wear him down,” said Amber. “We will wear him down. We’ll bribe him if we have to.”
We drove along for a bit, back through downtown. More stuff had been painted purple—the big cow statue outside of the dairy was purple now, too.
Mutual didn’t say a word for a long time, but when we made it as far as the west suburbs, he looked over at me. “You … you want to be with me, right?”
He looked as nervous as I’d ever seen him (and I’d seen him pretty nervous), but when I nodded, he smiled a little and sat back in the seat.
“I think as long as I remember that,” he said, “I can get through it. Just thinking you might still want me got me through six years in Alaska. Knowing ought to get me through a diciotto. It can’t last six years.”
I kissed him as soon as I came to a red light, of course.
“But you said you had some friends, right?” asked Mutual. “In the alliance?”
“I’ll call them right now,” I said.
I pulled over into a 7-Eleven parking lot, gave Murray a call, and asked if he had any advice about diciottos.
Murray groaned. “That’s the thing,” he said. “The very thing. Diciottos! We’ve got a whole antidefamation league trying to convince the media that we’re safe, normal citizens, but then the council is still authorizing diciottos!”
“Has anyone ever gotten through one without deciding to convert?”
“Probably. People also probably managed to get through being tortured by the Spanish Inquisition without saying that the sun revolved around the Earth. But, you know—not many.”
“It’s not as bad as the Inquisition, is it?” I asked.
“Actually, as I understand it, it’s not that different. They can’t physically harm a human in them, but they wear the same red robes that the inquisitors did. And what they do in them things is torture. Psychological torture is still torture.”
I ran him through a quick version of the story about Mutual and his parents. He went “hmm” and made cringing sounds in all the right places.
“Well,” he said when I finished, “the good news is that the council usually takes a few days to grant a diciotto. They don’t consider them to be emergencies, like the request I’d put in to shred any vampire that attacked someone at the dance on Saturday. So he’s got a couple of days, at least.”
“What about after that?” I asked.
“Best advice I can give this kid is to hide.”
“Where could he hide that they won’t find him?”
“Oh, nowhere,” he said. “But if he stays holed up in your friend’s house, at leas
t they won’t be able to get him. They were in the driveway the other night, right, not the house?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“See? They weren’t inside or anything. They won’t go into the house if no one invites them.”
“Really?” I said. “I always heard those stories that vampires couldn’t enter a house uninvited were a myth.”
“They are,” Murray said. “Those people are thinking of graves, not houses. But going into his house without being invited would be trespassing, and the council won’t authorize a diciotto that they have to break a law to carry out. Bad PR. Like diciottos aren’t bad enough PR to start with!”
“So he’s safe in the house?”
“He could hide there forever. Or until diciottos are outlawed. I give it five, ten years, tops.”
“Whatever it takes,” I said.
I hung up and relayed the story to everyone in the car.
“I can’t just stay in the house forever!” said Mutual.
“We’ll be glad to have you,” said Jason. “You can stay as long as you want.”
Mutual exhaled. “I came to Iowa so I wouldn’t have to be locked away someplace anymore,” he said.
“Not forever,” I said. “Murray said that diciottos will be outlawed in five, ten years tops.”
“Five or ten years!” said Mutual. “I’m gonna be a prisoner.”
“It’s worth it,” I said. “We’re going to get through this. Both of us. Whatever it takes.”
Mutual rolled down his window and just watched the streets go by like a condemned man taking a last look at his town on the way to death row.
“Do you want some good news?” I asked him.
“Please,” he said.
“Mrs. Smollet said your parents aren’t sure the diciotto will work on you.”
He turned his head toward me again.
“Seriously?”
“She’s trying to get me to help them with it. They don’t think it’ll work if I don’t help.”
“Which you know she’d never do,” said Amber.
“I thought about agreeing and then showing up to be on your side, but from what everyone’s telling me, that’ll just make it worse.”
He nodded a little.
“Well, that’s good,” he said. “But did that friend of yours know anyone who got through one before?”
“No,” I said. “But he thinks someone must have.”
“So, what should I do?” he asked.
“Hide for now, I guess,” I said, “at least until we can find something else to do. And if they catch you somehow, just keep in mind that there’s hope.”
He took a deep breath.
“You sure your parents won’t mind me living in your house twenty-four hours a day, Jason?”
“What else are they going to do?” Jason replied. “Throw you to the wolves?”
“I’ll have to stay locked away,” Mutual said, “and be very careful about opening the door to strangers.”
“We’ll get you all set up,” said Jason. “We’ll turn the basement into a whole apartment for you. It’ll be great!”
Mutual nodded, exhaled, and said, “Okay. Let’s do it.”
I drove them to Jason’s car, followed them to Jason’s place, and watched Mutual walk into the house that would be his prison for the next five or ten years.
Life really sucked right about then.
No one seemed to think Mutual really stood a chance if a diciotto happened. His parents were nervous, but it was probably the kind of nervousness political candidates get the night before an election when they’re polling at 65 percent. You can’t help but be nervous about something so big.
And it was looking like I might have to become a vampire if I wanted to be up and walking around by the next week.
If I got converted on Saturday, I didn’t think Mutual would have a chance at a diciotto, even if I wasn’t there. They’d probably convince him that I’d converted just for him, and that he’d be letting me down if he didn’t convert, too.
The leaves blew off the trees and onto my windshield so fast that I had to turn my wipers on, and my car—Doug’s car—stalled out twice before I turned the tape back on, which really did make it run better.
Maybe being a vampire wouldn’t be so bad. I mean, you got to run about a million miles per hour, and lift a hundred times your own weight. There was something to be said for that.
But then I thought about how miserable Fred seemed.
And what a whiny, emo douchebag every other teenage vampire I’d ever known was.
Even the most hard-core Victorians, the ones who really, openly supported diciottos to make vampire offspring convert, never recommended that anyone else convert.
I mean, deciding to live forever is a big deal. If I got pregnant or got a deadly STD or got caught robbing a bank or whatever, it could screw up my life big-time, but it would be over in seventy or eighty years. Maybe ninety, if medical science advances a bit and I get enough fiber.
But converting to post-humanism can mess you up forever.
I remembered those public service announcements I used to see all the time back when every girl wanted to convert—commercials with girls who had converted and really screwed up their lives (or, you know, their afterlives). They all ended by saying, “Becoming a vampire or zombie isn’t just wrong—it’s dead wrong.”
Gregory’s whole thing about how becoming a vampire would suddenly make me the kind of interesting, free-spirited person I had always wanted to be was a flat-out lie.
It would make me into just another mopey, moronic girl.
But it might also be the only way to stay alive.
And my being “alive” might be the only way to keep Mutual alive. Not to flatter myself or anything, but if I dropped dead on Saturday, he’d probably be so upset that he wouldn’t be bringing his A-game to the diciotto. Not even close, in fact.
My first instinct when I got home was to break stuff, but I resisted again. After all, it was the night Shakespeare Club met in Cornersville Trace. Shakespeare had always helped me relax.
And, anyway, I was thinking of the old saying that the idle brain is the devil’s playground. My mind had been relatively idle all year, which was undoubtedly part of why Gregory Grue was able to mess with me so much.
I needed a Shakespeare Club meeting like zombies need embalming fluid.
Jenny was still desperate to beat Cathy for valedictorian, and she knew that even though it bored her silly, the Shakespeare Club would help her keep her English grades up.
eighteen
That passage of Born to Be Extraordinary really hurt.
The Shakespeare Club had always been my favorite extracurricular, partly because it wasn’t an official club. The school didn’t have anything to do with it. You didn’t get any course credit for going, so none of the grade-grubbers from school were ever there. It was just a bunch of people, mostly people far too old to have any grades to worry about, who liked to talk about Shakespeare and met at a bookstore on Cedar Avenue every week to do precisely that.
Mom and Dad had always let me go to the meetings as a special treat back in the day, but it turned out that eight years as a respected member of the Shakespeare Club was one of the best-looking things on my college application. After all, I was planning to major in English for undergrad, and there were people from Drake in the club who were able to put in a few good words for me with admissions.
That night, we were talking about Twelfth Night, the play of the month for November—it’s one of those Shakespeare comedies that are all about mistaken identity and cross-dressing. Viola, the main character, spends most of the play dressed as a guy. No one at the meeting had ever seen a version where she looked like she actually could have passed, but she somehow managed to fool Orsino, the duke.
They brought out a TV to show a couple of clips from a BBC production where Orsino looked like he’d just wandered in from The Rocky Horror Picture Show or something, which was kind of a
ppropriate, since that movie is all about cross-dressing, too.
Really, Shakespeare’s comedies are basically the template for those screwball comedies I adore so much.
And while we argued about the finer points of the play, I wracked my brain for a new plan.
When the meeting ended, we all just mingled for a while. As we did, I looked out into the store and saw Cathy Marconi hanging around by the magazines. She was glancing over at me, trying not to look like she was staring. When she caught me looking, she blushed a bit and tilted her head to signal “Come here.”
Like I wanted to talk to her.
But I took my cup of coffee from the table where I’d been sitting and wandered over to her. Maybe she’d found a way to get me out of being in the play.
“Hey,” I said. “What do you want?”
“I heard you’d be here,” she said quietly.
“I never miss Shakespeare Club,” I said. “Not since fifth grade.”
“Sorry I’ve been … you know,” she said. “I know it’s not your fault that Mr. Grue is being such a jerk.”
“And you knew I wasn’t going to slice you from nave to chops with those ice skates?”
She smiled a tiny bit. “Do girls even have naves?”
“Navels,” I said. “It means navels.”
She nodded. “Well, sorry about that, too,” she said. “I was under a lot of stress, and I guess I wasn’t dealing with it very well. Maybe I should have just broken some dollar-store junk, huh?”
“Maybe,” I said. “If you want a tip, last time I was there they had some great new pieces.”
She smiled a bit and flipped through an issue of Seventeen that she clearly wasn’t actually reading. She looked pretty uncomfortable.
“So, I have a favor to ask,” she said.
“Aha!” I said. “That’s why you’re being nice to me! You want something from me.”
She turned a page. “Well, I know I’ve been totally mean to you lately, and I totally need to apologize for that. But I also need you to go to homecoming with Fred. I’ll pay, if you want.”
I shook my head back and forth, like I had water in my ear that I needed to get out.