Five Parties With My Worst Enemy

by Sharpe, Elle

  Allison pulled me down the hallway. When we got to the door that led from the house to the garage she practically shoved me through it.

  “Wow, you must be pretty desperate for that Coke,” I muttered.

  The moment I finished the sentence, I was attacked.

  “Get her!” said a snarling voice from the shadows. Two small figures leapt out at me. One was winged and hairy, the other had glowing red plastic eyes and a big black hat. I yelped in surprise, and found myself wound up in a jump rope before I could react.

  “We’ve. Got. Her. Captain,” said the glowing-eyed figure, as it moved its arms stiffly up and down. “Aye. Aye.”

  The other one growled viciously at me, while waving a wand with a big sparkly pink heart at the end of it.

  “Now you are paralyzed by my were-y dust!” the little creature yelled at me. “And if that doesn’t work, I’ll use my teeth on you! Grrrrr!”

  “Well, looks like my work here is done,” Allison said, and turned to leave.

  “Wait, Cousin Ally, say the thing,” the were-fairy pleaded.

  Allison folded her arms and sighed, but must have decided that she was feeling indulgent.

  “I have brought you the Princess Norah, as we agreed,” she said, deadpan. “Now I return to my lair. Cackle cackle. I’m a witch.”

  Apparently that was the cue for Lela and Kyran to pull out the pink plastic crown from my costume box and place it on my head.

  “Bring her before me,” said the snarling voice, which at this point I definitely recognized. I stifled a laugh as a masked Ronan swept dramatically out of the shadows. He held his black cape out in front of himself on a bent arm, like Dracula.

  “Ah, and what are you supposed to be?” I asked him.

  “I am none other than the great Dragon-pire!” he replied, “I drink blood and breathe fire! None can escape me! Especially not with the help of my faithful minions. Robot Pirate, Werewolf Fairy! Bring forth the princess!”

  Lela and Kyran shoved me forward. The jump rope would have been very easy to wiggle out of, but I wasn’t about to disappoint them like that.

  “Later, guys,” Allison called from the door. “Try not to kill the princess!”

  I watched her slip back inside the house. Then Ronan used a single finger to turn my chin back in his direction. I came face-to-face with the dragon mask.

  “Whatever do you want with me, great Dragon-pire?” I asked. I even added in some quivering for good measure. Unlike Allison, I had no resistance to the expectations of children. They wanted a frightened princess, so that was what I gave them.

  “Why, I shall take you to my lair, and make you my bride, and force you to sing songs for me day in and day out!”

  “Oh, no!” I lamented, letting my voice go high. “What a terrible fate! How dare you! I can’t marry you, you brute!”

  “Too late, Princess. You are my prisoner, and no one ever escapes me! Minions, take her to the lair!”

  “To the lair!” the twins shouted in unison. Then one of them added, “Uh, where’s the lair?”

  “The lair is...uh...the backyard!” the Dragon-pire growled.

  “Ah, an al-fresco lair,” I observed. “How very European of you.”

  “Silence, maiden!” Ronan roared. “We’ll have none of your lip, or I’ll burn you to a crisp! To the lair!”

  Lela and Kyran marched me to the side door of the garage, which led out to the back yard. Ronan followed, making hissing, dragony sounds and flapping his cape like a pair of wings. He looked and sounded absolutely ridiculous, and also seemed like he was having way too much fun. Maybe he’d never been allowed to play dress-up as a child, and was getting all his repressed creative energy out now.

  Once we got to the back yard the twins pushed me up against a tree. They unwound the jump rope and re-wrapped it around both the tree and me, tying a loose, clumsy knot.

  “Oh no, tied to a tree!” I cried. I tried not to move my body too much, so the rope didn’t slip off. “There is no possible way to escape!”

  “Now, you shall serenade me and my minions with the songs of our evil homeland!” Ronan cried.

  I arched an eyebrow.

  “Ah yes, your famous homeland..Drag..pire-rate..bot...wolf-airy...land?”

  “The very same. Remember, your life depends on it. So be sure to please us!”

  “Very well,” I lowered my eyes sadly, as the great weight of the threat settled over me. I opened my mouth and started singing the first nonsense words that came into my head.

  “Oh, there once was a land...where monsters combined...machines sailed the high seas...and werewolves could fly…”

  Kyran began flitting around the yard like a fairy-wolf-ballerina, waving her magic wand too and fro. Lela, not to be outdone, started dancing soon after. Obviously, she did the robot.

  “...So many strange monsters...this land did create...like...unicorn mummies…Frankenstein snakes...mermaid cats and...zombie...apes-”

  “Ah yes, my old rivals, the zombie apes,” Ronan said gravely.

  “But the scariest of all the villains...such fear he did inspire...it was none other than the mighty...Dragon-pire! He ate so many maidens...and it was such a mess...until he was outwitted...by a singing princess!”

  In a quick motion I pushed the ropes down to the ground. I sprang away from the tree, dashing across the lawn.

  “After her!” the evil Dragon-pire cried. “Don’t let her escape!”

  Kyran and Lela followed in hot pursuit.

  “Pew, pew!” Lela shouted. “Yarr! Arrrg! Avast ye!”

  Kyran waved her wand and barked at me.

  “My were-fairy magic has paralyzed you!” she shouted, and I stopped instantly, frozen in place.

  Ronan tossed his cape back and stalked towards me.

  “Thank you, my loyal minion. And now I shall defeat the princess once and for all. With my evil Dragon-pire bite.”

  He moved around behind me, gripping my wrists with both hands.

  Despite the fact that it was only a game, I felt my heartbeat stutter. And I was very aware of the heat radiating off of his body. I fought hard to keep back the memories of the last time we were this close together. Evil villain that he was, Ronan must have been able to sense how shamefully glad I was to have him near me again.

  He gently rubbed his fingertips along the inside of my arms. I had to repress a sigh. I kept myself still as possible, trying to pretend that I really had been frozen.

  Stupid, seductive vampire dragon.

  He positioned his mouth over my neck, ready to take the fateful bite.

  “If you don’t mind, that is?” he whispered to me.

  I laughed and relaxed. For a second I might have really let my imagination run away with me.

  “Go ahead,” I said, speaking aloud, sounding defiant and royal. “I am not afraid to meet my destiny.”

  Ronan leaned down and touched my neck with his lips, soft as butterfly wings. Then he took one soft, chaste nibble, which tickled me and made me giggle.

  Thinking fast, I transformed the giggle into a triumphant laugh, and my ticklish squirms into exaggerated writhing, as if I was undergoing a magical transformation.

  “Hahaha! The joke is on you, Dragon-pire. This was my plan all along! With your bite, you have transformed me into a Dragon-pire Princess, and transferred all your powers into me! Now I too have the power to breathe fire. Combined with the magic of my voice, I am undefeatable! For I now have the magic of...song fire! Yup, song fire. I’m going with it.”

  I crouched forward and held my hands in the shape of claws. I opened my mouth as if to breathe out a fire blast, but instead sang “Sooooooong fiiiiire” in a reverberating high note.

  “Oh God!” Ronan cried. “Not song fire! We’re finished! We’re done for!”

  I aimed my singing mouth in his direction and he crumpled to the ground.

  “I’m melting! I’m melting!” he moaned. Lela and Kyran yelped in delight.

  I turned t
owards them.

  “Yooooooou’re neeeeeeext!” I sang. They scattered in separate directions across the lawn, screeching in fake terror. I gave chase.

  “Come back here, you little monsters!”

  I stepped over Ronan’s “corpse,” trying to get closer to Lela. Apparently song fire was most effective at close range.

  Kyran ran shrieking back towards the house, and reached the door back into the garage.

  Oh shit.

  A screaming winged wolf was about to go tearing through the party, tracking dirt and grass into the house.

  “Wait, Kyran, don’t go inside. Please, I’m serious.”

  “Hawoooooooo!” Kyran howled. “You can’t catch me!”

  And with that, she was through the door.

  “Kyran, wait for me!” Lela shouted as she ran to follow. I tried to grab her, but she robot-chopped her way out of my arms.

  Ronan got to his feet and tried calling after them.

  “Minions! Return to me at once!”

  They were too far away to hear, and probably wouldn’t have obeyed anyway. Just as their mother always feared, they were far too “riled up” now. If it didn’t involve being chased madly around they weren’t going to be interested.

  I charged after them, with Ronan following close behind me. But we reached the garage just in time to see them vanish through the other door, back out into the hallway. There was nothing to do but try to follow them, even though it was clearly far too late.

  When we made it to the living room the girls were running around in circles, trying to shoot magic at each other from behind chairs. The adults looked on with deeply disapproving expressions.

  When Ronan and I entered the room they all turned their black looks on us. I read the familiar frustrated disappointment in my aunt’s face, and my mother’s, as they took in the princess crown on my head, the mask and the cape on Ronan, and the grass-stained socks on our feet. It was one thing for the children to cause trouble on their own, but now they were probably thinking that I had orchestrated this whole thing.

  I pulled the crown quickly off of my head.

  “Girls, stop that!” I called, trying to use my sternest baby-sitter voice. “You can’t play in here. You’re bothering people.”

  “Pew. Pew. Where’s. Your. Song. Magic. Now. Mate?” Lela cried in her robot voice. She fired a finger-gun at me from behind a chair that Uncle Isaac was sitting in. He put his hands to his ears to block out the “pew pew” noise.

  “Guys, come on. Please, I’m serious.”

  Ronan took off his costume too. He rolled the mask up in the cape and shoved them under his arm.

  “Lyra? Kellen?” he asked. “What can I offer you to get you to calm down, huh?”

  “Seriously?” I asked him, “You think you can strike a deal with them? They’re not business executives. They’re eight.”

  Before he could argue back about the principles of negotiation being based on universal human psychology or some shit like that, Allison rose from her seat on the couch. She clapped her hands together twice, so firm it sounded like bricks hitting concrete. And then, in a voice somehow loud, and smooth, and steely cold all at the same time, she said:

  “Stop. Quiet. Now.”

  The girls shut up so fast you’d have thought Allison really was a witch, and had just cast a magic silencing spell.

  She snapped her fingers.

  “Costumes off.”

  The girls hung their heads as they complied. Soon Robot Pirate and Werewolf Fairy no longer existed, except in legend. In their place were too ordinary twin girls, looking rather ashamed of themselves.

  “Go put them away,” Allison ordered. There was no menace in her voice, just pure authority. If she told you to do something, you did it. Simple as that.

  Like good little soldiers they made their way down the hallway. As they passed Ronan and I Allison added, as an afterthought, “Oh, take theirs too.”

  The girls took the crown, mask and cape out of our hands. Lela looked up at me and whispered, “She’s scary,” before they continued down the hallway.

  With her commands executed, Allison sat back down on the couch, and slipped a watermelon cheese skewer into her mouth.

  “Ah, Allison. What would we do without you?” my mother sighed from the kitchen. Then she turned a withering stare on me.

  “Norah, it’s time to set the table. Dinner is almost ready.”

  With that, my five minutes of fun came to an end. Mom kept me fully occupied until it was time for dinner to begin, getting all the food out of the oven and on to the serving trays, and also getting a kids’ table set up for Lela and Kyran.

  I believe she had originally planned to let them sit at the adult table. But they had failed to meet her expectations, and now she was going to punish them. I felt bad for them. They were back to staring down at their iPad screens, with distant, glazed expressions on their faces.

  Meanwhile Ronan had transformed back into the most polite, sedate version of himself. He made agreeable smalltalk with each one of my relations in turn, and I was sure that by the time dinner started that none of them disapproved of him anymore. And I doubted that anyone thought he was the mastermind behind costume-gate. As usual, Ronan came out looking great, and I looked like a screw-up.

  Oh, speaking of screw-ups, you may have been wondering where my dad was this whole time. After all, this was a family gathering. But he’s the one key family member who I haven’t yet mentioned. “Was he dead?” you may be wondering. Or “Were Norah’s parents divorced? Did her dad abandon the family, move to Alaska and become a deep-sea fisherman?”

  Nope, nope and nope. Dad was just late. To a party at his own house.

  Sadly, this was normal. Dad, you see, hates parties.

  There’s this one episode of Mad Man where Don Draper—consistently irresponsible father and jerky 1960s husband—has to go get a cake for one of his kid’s birthday parties. He leaves the party to get the cake, but he hated being at the party so much that instead of coming back inside with the cake he just sits in his car smoking a cigarette.

  I thought about this scene sometimes when my dad was late to parties.

  And look, in some ways I understood. As you’ve seen, being around my mom while she’s in party-mode isn’t exactly the most fun. But traipsing back into the house just as everyone is sitting down to dinner at your own table isn’t exactly a good look either.

  He strolled through the door at ten past seven, smiling like nothing was wrong. His beard looked scraggly, and he was wearing an ill-fitting flannel shirt over a worn gray t-shirt.

  “Hi everyone!” he said, waving. “Wow, big crowd. What, we havin’ a party or something?”

  No one laughed at this non-joke. His face registered a touch of embarrassment as he kicked his shoes off.

  “Sorry, looks like I’m a little late here. But I figured no party would be complete without-” he looked down to read the label on the bottle he was holding. “-’sparkling red grape soda cocktail.’ Took me ages to find it though, let me tell you. Had to go to five different stores…”

  It was always something different. Some special essential party thing he’d gone out to find, which always mysteriously took more time to track down than he’d even imagined it could have. It might have been a good scam, if he had only used it to make himself scarce during the party-prep phase. Using it as an excuse to miss a good chunk of the actual party was clearly a step too far. Either he didn’t notice everyone else’s secondhand embarrassment or he didn’t care.

  “Food smells great, hun!” he said to my mom, as he gave her a small, frigid peck on the cheek. Her face was as stiff as a rock, and she barely acknowledged his presence. Unperturbed, he sat down at the head of the table.

  “And the double-act begins,” I muttered her my breath. Ronan, who was sitting near me, turned to me with a questioning look. I was pretty sure that I hadn’t meant for him to hear that. But then, why else had I spoken my commentary aloud? Usually I k
ept it safely inside my brain where it belonged.

  The entire family fell silent as we waited for Mom to sit and say grace. Dad preemptively started shoveling green bean casserole onto his plate, before “remembering” that he wasn’t supposed to yet. He put the spoon down and looked around sheepishly. His eyes flicked to Mom. He probably anticipated a scolding, but she was still doing her best to ignore him as she carried out her pre-dinner rituals.

  She turned the lights down and lit the excessive number of candles around the room—candles on the bookshelves, candles on the mantelpiece, candles on the coffee table, and finally the candles on the table itself.

  “To create atmosphere,” I explained to Ronan.

  Most of them were scented candles, which created an odd and not particularly appetizing mixture of aromas in the air. I never knew why she thought this was a good idea right before dinner, but I questioned my mother’s rituals at my own peril.

  Finally she came to sit down. There was an empty chair next to my dad, but she ignored it. Instead she approached Ronan, who was currently sitting at the other head of the table.

  “Excuse me, dear. Norah should have told you that this is my usual seat. Hosts and Hostesses sit at the heads of the table, you know.”

  She said this smilingly but with an icy voice, as if Ronan was some backwoodsman with no knowledge of basic table manners. She definitely would not have talked to him like that if she’d known his net worth.

  She also probably would not have insisted on sitting at the head of the table if she hadn’t wanted to avoid sitting next to my dad. As often happened with my family I wasn’t sure whether to be amused or mortified.

  “Mom,” I said, “I asked Ronan to sit by me. Wouldn’t it be okay to buck tradition for one night?”

  “Don’t be selfish, Norah. You should be socializing with your family, not just talking to your…’friend’ all evening. And he should be getting to know new people, not paying attention only to you.”

  “It’s alright, I’ll move,” Ronan said. “Apologies for taking your seat.”

  I could tell by the hint of a smirk on his face that he also thought this was a little silly, but he had a good sense of which hills were worth dying on. I sighed and watched him take the chair next to my dad, while my mom replaced him in the seat next to me at the head of the table.