Extraordinary<li>

by Adam Selzer

  “Where’s Mutual?” I asked her.

  She took a few steps toward me. “When I heard about the unicorn, I followed my nose and found you all here,” she said. “I brought Mutual to his parents, but when I came back to get the consent form, Gregory was threatening you, so I called in the guard.”

  “He’s with his parents?” I asked, fighting to stay conscious. “Get him back here! There’s no consent form anymore!”

  “And if they hired this guy, they were way over the line,” she said.

  And she vanished.

  The vampire who had been sniffing the air reappeared. “It was him!” he shouted. “His smell is all over Fred’s apartment!”

  “Let me go!” bellowed Gregory. “I am a Person of Peace!”

  “Somebody get the council on the phone and get us permission to deal with this joker,” Murray called. “I’m not having another vampire attack. Not in my town.”

  Gregory broke away from the three by slipping out of his coat, but got intercepted by a vampire on the other end of the lot when he tried to run. He disappeared off the table, then reappeared fighting with the other guy. The two of them moved so fast that they looked like they were just flickering in and out of existence.

  Meanwhile, I got woozier and woozier.

  I didn’t even have the energy left to turn my head when I heard the clerk shouting, “I’m calling the cops!”

  Violence in my head is one matter, but at that moment I realized for sure that I’m no fan of the real thing. Any worry that I really wanted the people I fantasized about killing to be brutally murdered vanished right then and there.

  The last thing I heard before I passed out was the sound of Mutual’s mother saying, “I know your tricks and manners,” as the Penguin Foot guy shouted, “They’re coming!”

  And then everything went black, and all I heard was this roar that sounded like the ocean.

  I felt like I’d been asleep for hours when I woke up a few minutes later. I was sitting upright on one of the picnic table benches, and my head was surrounded by smoke.

  “There,” said Murray, who was holding a cigar that smelled different from any I’d seen Gregory smoke. “That should wake her.”

  “I’m up,” I said. “Where’s Mutual?”

  “He’s fine,” said Jason, who was beside me. “He’s totally safe. But don’t look at the parking lot.”

  I looked in the opposite direction and saw a few vampires holding Mutual’s parents’ hands behind their backs.

  “What would you have us do?” asked his mother. “Watch our only child grow old and die?”

  “Yes!” shouted Amber. “That’s what people are supposed to do, you pumpkin-sucking goons!”

  I turned toward Amber and saw that Mutual was propped up next to her, fast asleep.

  “He’ll be okay, right?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” said Murray. “But I can’t wake him right up from three large puffs of that stuff Gregory had in the cigar. He’ll be asleep for a few hours, at least.”

  “Thank God,” I said. “He took two extra puffs to keep Gregory busy while I snuck up on him with a crowbar.”

  Murray chuckled a bit. “Three puffs! That’s a brave kid.”

  Smollet turned to me. “I’m sorry, Jennifer,” she said. “I didn’t know.”

  I remembered that she had apologized to Alley after she got attacked, too.

  “You know what?” I said. “You could be a really good person if someone was just being attacked by a vampire every minute of the day.”

  I was probably being meaner than I should have been, considering she’d just saved my ass by calling the council.

  Of course, Gregory had saved it, too, by calling to tell her about the unicorn. I guess that was just supposed to scare me into thinking the clock was ticking, but it had totally backfired on him.

  Smollet sighed, and I heard the voice of the Penguin Foot Creamery guy shouting, “I warned you!” I looked down Cedar Avenue and saw an ambulance and what must have been every police car in town coming up the road.

  When they pulled into the parking lot, the sirens scared away a whole flock of blackbirds that flew off into the night.

  Then I saw why Jason had told me not to look in the parking lot.

  They had been pecking away at what was left of Gregory Grue.

  His fedora was perched on a car antenna. I stared at it for a long, long time.

  And so Princess Jenny went home to her house to run the kingdom from afar, while she waited to find girls who could join her on the royal court … girls who were born to be extraordinary, just like her.…

  twenty-five

  There’s no happily-ever-after, really.

  My story could have ended a few times—like, after I got the date with Fred. Or after we wrecked the gym. But it didn’t. Life is too interesting for that. There was always something coming up next.

  After a few days of mourning and recovery, it felt like we’d gotten to happily-ever-after for a while, since Gregory was defeated and the council had called off the diciotto. When the dust had settled and everything had calmed down, there really were a couple of good, happy months before the book came out.

  Mutual’s parents swore they had no idea just how bad Gregory was when they hired him four years before. Let me repeat that—four years before.

  He had been planning his whole scam on me (and Cathy) for four years. His official goal was to get Mutual to convert, but, if his plan had worked, he would have gotten to convert a couple of girls himself in the process. He’d planned every detail—right down to the unicorn, which he borrowed from Eileen’s ranch, where she was taking care of a couple of “magical” creatures. I never would have guessed she was telling the truth about that when she told me about that at the armory on the day I first met Gregory. Most of her creatures really were just things like cats with wings glued to their backs, but still. Who knew?

  We thought we were getting a great deal when she offered us five hundred bucks each for the rights to our story.

  The council decided to let Mutual’s parents live, to Mutual’s relief (they were his parents, after all), but they revoked permission for the diciotto, and banished them both to Alaska until further notice—probably as long as Mutual and I are alive.

  We haven’t heard from them since, which is fine with us.

  Mutual had no trouble with any of the standardized tests and GED exams we signed him up for, and pretty soon he was accepted at Drake, too. With a scholarship that someone had set up for the children of vampires.

  Murray gave him a summer job in his office and paid him enough that he was able to get himself a tiny little studio apartment, where he spent his free time discovering all the music and movies the rest of us already knew about.

  He made some missteps along the way. One day he was all excited over this new kind of music some joker had told him about—it was called “elevator wave,” or “mallcore,” and turned out to be Muzak—the kind of crud they play at low volume in stores so that you’ll buy stuff to relieve the boredom.

  And the week he discovered Maxim magazine was not my favorite week, either.

  But I was with him as much as I possibly could be. I had been so buried in my studies for most of my life that I was way behind in my pop culture education, too. I hadn’t even seen The Princess Bride until one night when Amber brought it over to Mutual’s house. How in the heck could I have missed that?

  See? It’s not that I hate princess stuff or anything—I liked Princess Diaries pretty well, too. I just hate crappy princess stuff. And princess stuff that leads people to camp out on my lawn, ready to give up democracy in order to have a servant to scrub their toilets for them.

  But, anyway, the point is that it wasn’t like Mutual and I rode off into the sunset to live in a castle that we never had to clean or anything.

  We argued a lot at first. Sometimes it seemed like Mutual was growing apart from me, or I was growing apart from him, while we figured out what kind of
people we were going to be. And the general pressure of all the book stuff, after that came out, really got to us now and then. It’s really tough to build a relationship when you have to tell the press that your boyfriend is actually a guy named Fred the vampire (who, in reality, is dead) just to keep him from getting hate mail.

  But we’ve made it work, so far.

  And we hadn’t argued in weeks as of the night we were all in the limo together, going to the movie premiere.

  “This was a bad idea,” I said. “We shouldn’t have come out here.”

  “Hey, free limo ride,” said Mutual. “I always wanted to ride in one of these things.”

  “I feel like a complete tool,” said Jason.

  “They’re probably going to boo your character all through the movie, Mutual,” I said. “They all think you’re a total dork who was stalking me.”

  “Well, I did kind of send you postcards for years and travel across the country and risk my life for you,” he said. “That’s kind of stalking.”

  I laughed and kissed him on the cheek.

  Even if we don’t end up together, I’ll always have a bond with him that I can’t imagine having with anyone else. With all of them, really.

  “Just ignore them,” Amber said. “They won’t know you’re you. They’ll just think you’re Fred, as usual.”

  “I should have worn my gorilla suit,” he said. “We all should have.”

  Even after his parents were no longer a threat, he had still been into the idea that he should get a gorilla suit. Don’t ask me why—he just had a thing about them. So he got one.

  And then I got one, too. It’s not nearly as effective as I’d hoped for running people off the lawn (trust me, you need a bodyguard for that, not a gorilla suit), but when we both get stressed out from all the crap going on, we put on our gorilla suits and run around screaming and beating our chests and throwing bananas around.

  It’s insanely fun. It’s even more cathartic than breaking stuff, and with none of the guilt trip or worries that you’re a maniac. You might have to worry that you look like a nut, but you know what? I don’t particularly care.

  I can’t possibly dance naked in front of a window, what with the photographers and all. But I can go jumping around in a gorilla suit, which is sort of the same thing, in a way, if you think about it.

  Anyway, as I started college, the future looked bright. Even with the guilt I felt about Fred and Cathy and everything, I remember those as happy days, when everything in the world seemed possible for us.

  Then, of course, Eileen’s book came out and everything kind of went to hell.

  I had to learn to deal with people discussing my weight online, and finding ways to protect my friends’ privacy as well as I could. I needed cash, and fast, to pay for security and stuff, which is why I said I was a real princess on some of those talk shows. Sorry I lied. I promise you that I would have preferred to earn money by dropping bowling balls on my toes.

  I don’t think I can even describe the things I fantasized about happening to Eileen Codlin. I wasn’t fantasizing about that stuff as much—being present when Gregory was torn to pieces sort of spoiled my appetite for destruction—but I made exceptions in Eileen’s case now and then.

  And now the movie version of the book was opening, which I couldn’t imagine was going to help me much. I’d probably be more famous than ever. My best hope was that I’d get more expensive—like, I could just make one commercial for something I didn’t really think anyone should buy, instead of six or seven.

  So now we were in a limo, cruising through the streets of Los Angeles, on the way to the premiere of the movie version of Born to Be Extraordinary—Jenny’s Fairy Godmother. I hadn’t really intended to see the movie at all, but they offered us a free limo ride, a four-star meal, plane tickets to Los Angeles, and all kinds of cool stuff to get us out here. No one who’s lived through an Iowa winter would skip a free chance to go to California in the middle of one.

  Also, it sounded like too perfect an opportunity for mischief to pass up.

  And the limo was pretty nice. I’d been in one a couple of times before, when people flew me out for talk shows and stuff. I’d always felt like a tool in them myself, honestly, but having my friends there made it a lot more fun.

  Especially knowing what we were planning to do on the red carpet.

  If I was going to have to be famous, at least I could be famous on my own terms, more or less.

  I got on the intercom and put in a call to Jared, my bodyguard, who was in the front seat.

  Yeah. I have a bodyguard now.

  “Just want to give you a heads-up, Jared,” I said. “This is gonna be a little different from a day in Des Moines.”

  “Roger that,” said Jared. “You guys planning something?”

  “Yes, yes we are,” I said.

  “I’m going to have to request that you give me all the details,” he said.

  “Negative,” I said. “You’d just try to stop us.”

  It’s awkward having a person working for you—not as weird as having a servant scrubbing my toilet and making my bed would be, but awkward. I like Jared, though. It’s hard not to like a guy who will beat people up for you. I totally get that. When girls say they love the Fred in the book because he turns out to be a good protector, I understand where they’re coming from.

  But I couldn’t let him know what we had in mind.

  We’d thought about just making armpit noises at appropriate moments during the movie or something, but we decided to go for something bigger.

  “Are you sure they aren’t going to boo me?” asked Cathy. “If anyone boos me, I’ll run.”

  “No one knows what you look like,” I told her. “They all think you’re a blonde. You’ll be fine.”

  I thought it would be awfully traumatic for Cathy to find out that she wasn’t really going to die if Fred didn’t kiss me at the dance, and that she didn’t need to let Gregory … do what he did to her. But she took it pretty well. She’s in counseling and all, but she’s tough. She’s a survivor.

  In fact, she adapted to life as part of the undead pretty quickly. She was perfectly happy as a vampire for a while there, before Eileen’s book came out and all the hate mail started coming.

  So leave her alone, guys. She’s been through enough. She was never the head of a Mean Girls–type clique; we didn’t really even have one of those at my school. She was just kind of mean to me, and she’s apologized about a million times. I even have coffee with her now and then. We’re both Gregory Grue survivors.

  It’s the kind of thing that makes people feel like there’s sort of a bond between them, even if they never got along before. Like nearly getting kicked out of town over a spelling bee, or destroying homecoming with a Wells Fargo Wagon full of unicorn poop.

  The limo pulled up to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, and we stepped out onto a red carpet, where Eileen was signing autographs.

  “Jenny V!” she shouted when she saw me. “And the whole gang!”

  “There’s Fred!” someone shouted, pointing at Mutual.

  People who really do the research can always find out the truth about Fred and Mutual without too much trouble, but it’s amazing how little research people do.

  I walked up to Eileen as cordially as possible, holding hands with Mutual all the way.

  “Hi, Eileen,” I said.

  A reporter came up to us.

  “So, this is the real Princess Jenny, right?” he asked.

  “Yes it is!” said Eileen. “The girl who was born to be extraordinary! Isn’t this extraordinary, being here tonight, Jenny?”

  “Yes it is,” I said, as regally as I could, even though I was trying very hard not to laugh, since I knew what was coming.

  “So, you are really a princess, right?” asked the reporter.

  “Yes,” I said, “and one of the reasons it’s extraordinary to be here tonight is that it’s a very special night in my kingdom.”

  “Oh,
really?” the reporter said. “Tell us about it.”

  I snuck a glance at Eileen, who was nodding as though she knew what I was talking about, though the look in her eyes was something along the lines of “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Tonight is the night known as Feasteus Maximus,” I said. “Which is also known as National Show Your Butt Day. Jason, will you please demonstrate how it’s celebrated?”

  “With pleasure,” said Jason.

  And he showed his tattoo to the whole world.

  Luckily, some photographer got a picture of the look on Eileen’s face. You’ve seen that picture. The one where Jason’s got his butt out and Eileen looks like a kid in a candy store.

  That was why we went to the red carpet. We couldn’t get a happily-ever-after out of the story, but we could at least get pictures of Eileen swooning over Jason’s hairy butt.

  The plan kind of backfired, really. I thought we’d just give Jason a chance to do his favorite thing, then maybe coerce Eileen into mooning the crowd, too (Amber and Mutual were both prepared to pitch in, though, as royalty, I was exempt). We didn’t anticipate that when word spread about the holiday, things would get way out of control.

  So, as part of the settlement with the City of Los Angeles, I’m required to say right now that we were behaving very irresponsibly on the red carpet.

  But it was totally worth it. The look on Eileen’s face alone was worth the community service and the fight I had to put up to keep my scholarship.

  There were other moments that made the trip worth it, too.

  Like the after-party, when we said that in my kingdom, we don’t eat the kind of cheese you get on trays, you suck on it. We never did get Eileen to celebrate Feasteus Maximus, but she did demonstrate the proper way to eat cheese. That’s why there are also all those pictures of Eileen sucking cheese.

  So that’s the real story of me, Cathy, Fred, Mutual, my friends, my fairy godmofo, and how I got my wishes.

  It’s not the way Eileen told the story at all, but the real world just isn’t like the world in her book. It’s scarier, stinkier, sadder, and stranger. Harder and more dangerous, too. But it’s also the kind of world where throwing unicorn poo around a gym can make you feel beautiful. That counts for something, or I don’t know what does. It’s the kind of world where you can be extraordinary without any magic spell to make you that way. Without even being royalty.