by Adam Selzer
And he ducked off the stage.
Dave came back up and said, “So you see, folks, no human need be concerned.”
“And anyone comes near that dance who doesn’t have two forms of student ID, pow!” Murray shouted out from the corner, where he was still talking to Vlad.
I walked over to where Murray was.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “Something else happened, didn’t it?”
“Hey,” he said, “don’t worry. You saw us in action. No one’s gonna mess with you tomorrow night on our watch!”
“But what happened? Why did he dodge my question about Fred?”
Murray breathed in deeply.
“Well,” he said, “we need to keep things quiet, otherwise people will panic. There was a vampire-on-vampire attack today, too.”
“What?”
“Not a vampire-on-human attack,” he said, “so you got nothing to worry about.”
“Who was attacked?” I asked. “Was it Fred?”
Murray nodded. “If that girl hadn’t been converted and the school hadn’t sent us out to his apartment, we wouldn’t even know about it. But someone attacked him. Probably someone who didn’t approve of him converting that girl.”
“Fred would never have done that,” I said. “It can’t have been him.”
“Well, I don’t have any word from the guys who went to Canada yet,” said Murray. “But we’ve got a pretty good sense of smell—once we get a whiff of those guys, we’ll know if one of them was in Fred’s apartment. So we’ve got things under control. No one needs to be worried. Just don’t tell anyone, or they’ll freak out. That school of yours smells enough like garlic already!”
It had to be Will’s clan that had done it. There was no other good explanation for what had happened. One of them had offered to convert Cathy, like she always wanted, and another had taken revenge on Fred for not getting shredded right along with Will.
“Is Fred going to be okay?” I asked. “Like, by tomorrow night?”
Murray turned terribly pale.
“Jesus, kid,” he said. “I don’t know what to tell you … it was a vampire attack. When a vampire attacks another vampire, they don’t just knock ’em upside the head, you know?”
“What happened?” I asked. “Tell me!”
Murray took a deep breath. “He’s dead, Jennifer,” he said. “Whoever it was killed him.”
Jenny felt terrified. Fred had been kidnapped! How would she ever get kissed by midnight now?
twenty-one
I took off running away from the meeting, scared to death and crying my eyes out. I’d felt like I’d been punched and kicked a few times in my life, but now I felt like an anvil had fallen on me.
I wish I could say that I was a better person than “Jenny” here—that the first thing through my mind was how sorry I was for poor Fred.
However, as I went running out of the armory, I was mostly thinking that I was going to die for sure now if I didn’t become undead first. If Fred was dead, he certainly wouldn’t be kissing me at the dance.
Naturally, when I got out the door, I found Gregory Grue standing in the parking lot and grinning. Grinning!
“Hoo hoo!” he said. “Blushing little green apple of my winking, blinking eye!”
“What the hell are you smiling about?” I asked.
“I’m not,” he said, even though he was. “Shame about that poor kid, isn’t it? Cut down in his prime!”
“You can’t possibly expect me to get him to kiss me at the dance now,” I said. “You’ve got to cancel the deal. It’s only fair.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “The moon wanes, and fate takes its cut, kiddo,” he said. “This is just the way the pee dribbles in fairyland. The dance will end tomorrow night without you getting your kiss from Fred, and you’ll drop dead. Nothing I can do, unless you decide to go with option B and get converted. I don’t see what choice you have.”
I’m pretty sure I was crying at this point. I don’t know for sure—everything seems hazy when I try to remember this part of the story. My brain was running in a million directions at once and trying to get used to the fact that becoming a teenage vampire was necessary if I wanted to see another Thanksgiving.
Dying seemed like a better option, really. But if I was dead, Mutual might lose his resolve and agree to convert. I couldn’t let that happen, even if I would be too dead to feel guilty.
Meanwhile, Gregory looked like he was having the time of his life. He grinned from ear to ear and breathed in deeply, like he hadn’t smelled fresh air in years.
“So, I granted your wish, didn’t I?” he said. “Cathy’s going to spend her homecoming in a coma before waking up to a miserable eternity as a teenage member of the walking undead. She’s lost her part in the show. She was in the running for valedictorian before, and that’s totally out the window now. And you can bet that getting converted in the bathroom was not exactly the romantic adventure she always dreamed of. I did everything but throw her under a truck! How do you feel?”
“Awful,” I said. “I have to live through an eternity of misery, too, if I convert!”
“Oh, it won’t be so bad,” he said. “I bet Mutual will decide to become a vampire, too, so he can be with you. At least you’ll be miserable together! And you can get the Wells Fargo Wagon to school all by yourself.”
“I can’t believe this,” I said. “I never wanted to be a vampire. Not even when every other girl did. And I can’t believe Cathy got converted in the girls’ bathroom. Disgusting.”
“You won’t have to do that,” said Gregory. “Just step into your car tomorrow at any time. I’ll have you drive out to a place where it can be done like a medical procedure. We’ll put you to sleep first, so you won’t even have to see the guy who does it.”
I didn’t say anything for a second.
“Is your friend part of Wilhelm’s clan?” I asked.
“If he was, I wouldn’t tell you, would I?” he replied. “If he was, the honor guard would be all over him, and you couldn’t convert. You’d just have to die. Which I’d be okay with, but I’d rather have the money.”
He was right. What was I going to do? Tell Murray, get the vampire friend taken out, and lose any chance I had of making it through the weekend myself?
It was over.
I had lost.
I was going to have to become a vampire the next day. There was no other option, besides just dying, which I wasn’t brave enough to do. Then I’d have to hope Mutual got through the diciotto without finding out that I’d converted, which they’d surely use to convince him.
I sat down on the ground and just cried while Gregory Grue did his little dance.
After dancing, he crouched down, pulled a marker from his overcoat, and wrote something on my forehead.
His signature swear word, I assumed.
I was too weak and dazed to try to stop him, but after he finished, he went back to dancing around in the parking lot, and I crawled into my car and drove away. I paused only a minute to check the mirror to confirm the word he’d written was what I thought it was.
Even the dumbest of you probably realize that it’s terribly humiliating to feel like you’re totally broken and beaten and see a word like that on your forehead. I tried to wipe my tears with my hand, then use the tears to scrub it off, but it didn’t do much good.
Finally, as I pulled out of the parking lot, I snapped.
I zipped down the road at way above the speed limit, screaming obscenities at the top of my lungs.
When I turned up the volume on the mix tape, it was playing a sort of calm song about trying to be free like a voice in a choir. I didn’t want to calm down. I didn’t want to be comforted.
I wanted to scream.
I fast-forwarded to the next song, which was faster, with a mean bass line and wicked keyboard part. It was another Leonard Cohen song, but it must have been from years later—his voice was a lot rougher, like he’d been through a few thousand packs o
f cigarettes since recording the calm song.
He was singing from the point of view of some criminal mastermind who planned to take over the world, starting with Manhattan and Berlin. It rocked pretty hard. When it ended I rewound and played it again.
I totally got this song, which I later found out was called “First We Take Manhattan.”
The guy in the song had been sentenced to jail or something and now he was ready to get his revenge. By taking over the world.
He was going to break civilization just like I broke porcelain crap from the dollar store.
Man, that sounded good.
I needed to break something, too. And fast—if I became a super-strong vampire who could shatter a piece of junk just by touching it, swinging a crowbar probably wouldn’t give me the same satisfaction. This was my last chance to get that aggression out of my system—I didn’t want to take it into the afterlife with me.
But I also didn’t want to just break more cheap junk. That wasn’t going to be enough. I needed to break something big.
My first thought was to break the whole school, like getting Jason to use his pyro skills to build me a bomb and blowing the whole thing up. Not with anyone in it or anything—I didn’t want to hurt anyone. But I wanted to wreck something huge.
Then I thought about maybe just breaking the damned dance.
And then my old debate-team instinct started to kick in, working hand in hand with the parts of me that loved to fantasize about people dying violent deaths and stuff.
There was a loophole I hadn’t noticed before.
The deal was that I had to get Fred to kiss me before the dance ended. I would die at the end of the dance.
So if the dance never ended, I wouldn’t die.
And it couldn’t end if it didn’t start.
If there was no dance, I’d still be alive when Gregory Grue’s allowance of magic wore out.
I felt like a string of Christmas lights was lighting up inside me, one at a time.
I could beat this.
Gregory Grue and his stupid spell were going to get lawyered!
And I was going to live. As a normal human.
I wasn’t going to be able to do it alone, probably. It was going to be a lot of work to get the dance canceled, since they were still holding it despite everything that had already happened. I’d need help from people who wouldn’t mind if the whole town wanted to kick their butts on Monday.
Luckily, I had a few friends who had been through that before.
And one who had experience with sabotage.
I rewound the tape to play “First We Take Manhattan” yet again, then turned my car toward Jason’s house. As I did, I looked at the dirty word on my forehead and began to smile.
I had a plan.
“Okay,” said Amber determinedly, “if you hit the gas hard, we should be able to bust right through the wall and save Fred!”
“Hold on tight!” Jenny yelled.
She stepped on the gas and rolled toward the brick wall.… Just as she did, her Prius stalled. It came to a stop an inch from the bricks.…
twenty-two
“Jenny” got lucky there. I am fairly sure that a Prius is not the kind of car that can break through a brick wall. She probably would have died in a brutal wreck.
As for the Jenmobile, it didn’t stall once on the way to Jason’s. As long as I played the tape, it ran like a dream. I later found out it was probably a residual-energy thing—I still don’t understand it, but it’s something like the way ghosts come to exist (another thing that used to be considered paranormal when I was a kid, but was pretty well explained since the post-humans went public).
The Jenmobile and I cruised clear to Jason’s house, and I knocked on the door like I was trying to break it down. I saw his face peeking out the window before he let me in.
“Hey,” he said. “What’s going on? And what’s with your forehead?”
“Never mind the forehead, I need your help, fast,” I said.
“What’s up?”
“Did you hear about the vampire-on-vampire murder today?”
“Sure,” said Jason. “Some vampire attacked another one. It happens.”
“It was Fred,” I said.
“What?” asked Jason. “Fred is dead?”
I nodded, and choked back a few tears. While Jason sat down on the couch, looking like he’d just been punched in the face, I took a second to hope that Fred was better off wherever he was now. He practically had to be, really. He hadn’t wanted to live forever.
But there was no time for mourning. Not yet.
Mutual came wandering up from the basement, still looking freaked out.
“Did you just say Fred got killed?” he asked.
I nodded and sniffled a bit.
“Do they know who did it?”
“Not yet,” I said. “I assume it was someone from Will’s clan. A couple of guys are heading up to Canada to check on them.”
“Wait,” said Jason. “If Fred is dead, then …”
“Then he sure as hell isn’t going to be taking me to homecoming,” I said. “But I have a plan. I can sit back and die, agree to become a vampire, or do something totally extraordinary.”
“What?”
“The deal with Gregory was that I had to get Fred to kiss me before the dance ended. If the dance never starts, it can’t end, and I’m home free.”
“So you want to get it canceled?” asked Jason. “They already said they’re not letting the attack or the whole thing with Cathy get in the way, or we’d just be letting them win. I don’t know what’ll get it canceled if a student getting killed doesn’t. Unless you want to bomb the school or something.”
I smiled. “We don’t have a bomb, but we’ve got a unicorn and a lot of … the word on my forehead. And a Wells Fargo Wagon. How long do you think it would take to get the smell of unicorn poop out of the gym?”
A smile spread across Jason’s face.
“I get it,” he said. “You think we should roll a wagon full of unicorn crap to school and spread it around the gym so they won’t want to have the dance there?”
“Well, I don’t want it in my car!” I said. “I’d never get the smell out and I can’t afford a new one. But we could load up the wagon with it and use the unicorn to drive it there. I need to get it to the school somehow, anyway.”
“Oh man, that’s brilliant,” said Jason. “Fred would have loved it.”
“We’ll do it for him,” I said. “The Fred-the-Vampire Memorial Vandalism Initiative. Let’s go get Amber!”
“I’m coming with you,” said Mutual.
“The hell you are,” I said. “You stay right here where it’s safe. There are probably some bad people out there besides your parents right now.”
“Yeah, man,” said Jason. “I don’t think there’s any law about trespassing in moving Wells Fargo Wagons. They might even already have permission for the diciotto. They could do it right in the wagon.”
Mutual kicked the floor, then collapsed onto the couch.
“I’m sorry,” I called out as Jason and I ran for my car.
I played that song about the criminal as loudly as I could as we cruised up through Preston and picked up Amber. Jason shouted what I’d told him into her ear while I drove us to my house.
“Let’s do it!” she said. “In memory of Fred!”
“For Fred!” I agreed.
I parked in the street, and we got out and I walked them up to the Wells Fargo Wagon.
“Amber,” I said, “you grew up on a horse ranch. Can you get a unicorn hitched up to a wagon?”
“Yes with a capital Hell,” said Amber.
“Good,” I said. “You guys work on hitching her up, and I’ll be right back.”
I ran inside and found three old T-shirts, then sprayed them all with perfume from my mother’s bathroom cabinet.
After tying the first shirt around my nose and mouth, I ran outside. On the way, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror
: purple sweatshirt, purple hair, purple bandana.
I looked like a Batman villain.
Outside, Amber had managed to get Princess out and get the leash or harness or whatever set up. I tossed them the other shirts to tie around their faces, and we grabbed the shovels from the shed, transporting all the mess out to the wagon one shovelful at a time.
It was amazing how much Princess had generated. Another few days and she could have drowned.
Now, there we have an awful way to die.
The perfume covered the stench about halfway, which was barely enough to keep me from barfing, but it was enough, since I was determined to get the job done. It was life and death for me—I was really touched that Jason and Amber were willing to go through all this for my sake, too.
“Pretty nasty, huh?” Amber shouted through her bandana.
“I never promised you a rose garden,” said Jason.
It took about nine trips each to get all the mess transferred from the shed to the wagon. Once it was all there, piled high and deep, we tossed the tools under the seat and Amber shook the reins, but Princess didn’t budge.
“Damn,” she said. “How do you start these things?”
Just then, we heard the sound of screeching tires, and Jason’s car came barreling up the road. It came to a roaring stop right in front of my house, and Mutual stepped out.
“What are you doing?” I asked. “You can drive?”
“No different from a tractor,” he said. “Well, not too different. Sorry I borrowed it without asking, Jason.”
“No problem,” said Jason. “But you should have stayed indoors.”
“Hurry up and get inside my house,” I said. “You’re not safe out here!”
“No,” he said. “I’m not missing this.”
“But it’s dangerous!”
He left the car in the road and came walking up the driveway, his long hair blowing in the autumn breeze. Damn, he looked hot.
“I didn’t come twenty-five hundred miles in a bus to live in a basement for five to ten years,” he said. “If they’re coming, let them come. What good am I anyway if I can’t stand up to a couple of stupid Victorians?”