THE XANDER YEARS, Vol. 1

by Keith R. A. DeCandido

  But this necklace was different. It was the most beautiful thing anyone had ever given her.

  And she was furious that she had to give it back.

  Slamming the locker shut, she stomped over to Xander and practically shoved the necklace into his hand. “Here. It’s a good thing we broke up. Now I don’t have to pretend I like it.”

  Take that, she thought.

  If Xander was insulted, he didn’t show it, the creep. He looked too angry. Cordelia had never seen him this angry before.

  Well, tough. If you’re gonna toy with my feelings, you pay the price.

  They both stormed off in opposite directions, Cordelia never more sure that breaking up with that vindictive little geek was the right thing to do.

  Xander had been hoping that Amy would just wave her magic wand over the necklace, say, “Bim sallah bim” or something, and that would be it.

  No such luck.

  They had gone after dark to one of the chem labs, where Amy had drawn the female symbol in red on the floor. Then she instructed Xander to take his shirt off. After he did so, she used the same red paint to draw three symbols on his chest. Amy called them sigils, and said they were mystic letters. Then she handed him a thick candle, told him to light it, then sit within the symbol, cross-legged, holding the lit candle over his lap.

  The reason for being in a chem lab was simple. It was one of the few places in the school where you could boil things. Apparently, several rather pungent herbs needed to be boiled in water in order for this to work.

  Xander sat in the middle of the female symbol, candle in hand, feeling very exposed without his shirt. He kept casting furtive glances at the candle, worried about where the wax might drip. That candle was now the only light source in the room.

  Amy stood in front of the boiling water, clutching Cordelia’s necklace, and reading from a book whose mustiness was enough to make Giles’s books look shiny and new.

  “Diana, goddess of love and the hunt, I pray to thee. Let my cries bind the heart of Xander’s beloved. May she neither rest nor sleep—” Amy dropped the necklace into the brew; a weird red smoke started shooting out of the beaker, providing another light source and casting sinister-looking shadows on her face, “until she submits to his will only. Diana! Bring about this love and bless it!”

  Amy was shaking now, almost convulsing with, Xander assumed, mystical energy.

  “Blow out the candle! Now!” she yelled.

  He did so, and the room went dark.

  “Great,” Xander said after a moment. “Really. Good spell. Can I put my shirt on now?”

  The next day, Xander went to school all prepared. Cordelia would profess her undying love for him. She would beg him to take her back.

  And then he’d dump her.

  He had an entire speech laid out. It had the one that went with the gift beat all to hell. It would be beautiful.

  But first things first, Xander thought. Gotta get the ball rolling.

  He found Cordelia sitting with a bunch of her lapdogs. He sauntered up to the little gathering and hovered near Cordelia.

  Any moment now, she’ll be begging me to take her back.

  Any moment now.

  Okay, maybe now.

  Cordy continued gossiping, giving Xander the occasional sidelong glance, then finally snapping, “What?”

  “Morning, ladies,” he said with what he hoped was a seductive smile. “Some kinda weather we’ve been having, huh?”

  “What do you want?” Cordelia asked. “You can’t be sniffing around for more jewelry to melt, ’cause all you ever gave me was that Wal-Mart–looking thing.”

  Xander felt his crest falling. She’s not following the Love Potion #9 script. He leaned in close to her. “Is this love? ’Cause maybe on you it doesn’t look that different.”

  Cordelia could not believe that Xander was pulling this. She especially couldn’t believe he was leaning into her personal space like that. Unless kissing was involved, she didn’t even like that when they were dating, much less now.

  Shoving him back, she asked, “What are you doing? Are you going, like, stalker-boy on me, now?”

  “Sorry,” Xander said, much more quietly this time. “My mistake.”

  “Yeah, I should say so.”

  With that, he went off.

  Cordelia turned to Harmony. “What is his deal?”

  Harmony, though, was looking at Xander as he went off with his tail between his gangly legs. “I know,” she said. “Did he cut his hair or something? He looked halfway decent for a change.”

  Cordelia stared at Harmony in open-mouthed shock. “Halfway what?”

  CHAPTER 4

  Xander wandered morosely into the library after classes ended. The day hadn’t been quite as miserable as yesterday, but it still rated a 9.5 on the Life-Sucks-O-Meter. After going to all the trouble to blackmail Amy, after sitting shirtless on a cold lab floor with red paint on his chest and candle wax dripping into his nether regions, he got bupkuss.

  The sole consolation was that the ridicule had lessened. In fact, he thought, now that I think about it, it was just guys making fun of me today. The girls pretty much left me alone. What’s up with that?

  Sighing to himself, he thought, Well, at least things can’t get any worse.

  “Ah, here’s another,” the Watcher was reading bits out of some book or other. “Valentine’s Day, yes, Angel nails a puppy to the—”

  “Skip it,” Buffy said quickly.

  “Yes, but—”

  “I don’t want to know,” Buffy said with feeling. “I don’t have a puppy. Skip it.”

  “Right you are,” Giles said, closing the book and getting up from the chair he had been sitting on the back of. “I’ll get another batch.”

  As he went back to his office, Xander approached Buffy. “I have a plan. We use me as bait.”

  Buffy frowned. “You mean, make Angel come after you?”

  “No, I mean chop me into little pieces and stick me on hooks for fish to nibble at, ’cause it would be more fun than my life.”

  “Yeah, I heard about you and Cordy. It’s her loss.”

  Sighing, Xander said, “Not really the popular theory.”

  Buffy stood up and stared at Xander in a way she’d never stared at him before. “You know what I’d like? Why don’t you and I go do something together tonight? Just the two of us.”

  “Really?” he said, surprised.

  “Yeah. We can comfort each other.”

  Smiling, Xander asked, “Would lap dancing enter into that scenario at all? ’Cause I find that very comforting.”

  He had spoken facetiously. Xander spent most of his life speaking facetiously. It was how he dealt with reality.

  So the last thing in the world he expected was a serious response.

  Buffy actually leaned close to him and ran her fingers over his chest. “Play your cards right . . .”

  Somebody replaced Buffy with a pod person. “Okay, you do know that I’m Xander, right?”

  She leaned closer. “I don’t know. I heard that you and Cordy broke up, and I guess I was surprised how glad I was. It’s funny how you can see someone every day but not really see them, you know?”

  I’ve died and gone to heaven. “Yeah, it’s funny. And it’s just getting funnier.”

  Buffy looked like she was about to say something else, but was interrupted by Amy walking in. She looked a tad nervous.

  “Xander, can I talk to you for a minute?”

  His first instinct was to tell her to get lost, but it was bad form to blow off someone who’d cast a love spell for you, even if she did get it wrong.

  And given the way Buffy’s acting, maybe it’s all for the best.

  “Yeah, okay,” he said to the blond witch, then turned to the Slayer. “Hold that thought. Tightly.”

  Buffy smiled a seductive smile.

  Xander followed Amy out of the library. As soon as the door closed, Amy said, “Xander, I don’t think the spell worked
out right.”

  “Oh yeah, it bombed. No biggie,” Xander said dismissively. He stole a glance into the library to see Buffy staring right at him. Giles had come back in and was probably reciting another bit from Angel’s Guide to Vampiric Stalking Techniques. But Buffy was obviously ignoring his every word.

  “Well, we could always try again,” Amy said. “I’m still pretty new at this.”

  “It’s okay,” Xander said, wanting this conversation to hurry up and end so he could get back to being with Buffy. He wanted to spend as much time as he could with her now that she’d finally come to her senses. “You know what?” he said. “It was wrong to meddle with the forces of darkness. I see that now. I think we’ve all grown. I gotta go.”

  But Amy wasn’t finished. “Well, we don’t have to cast any spells. We can just hang out.”

  “Sure,” Xander said, then realized what, exactly, Amy was saying. “What?”

  “Well, I liked spending time with you. You’re so sweet. Y’know, it’s funny how you can see a person every day and—”

  “Not really see them?” Xander finished. He felt all the blood drain from his face.

  “Exactly!” Amy said with a smile.

  Xander glanced into the library again. Oh God.

  Amy and Buffy both had the exact same smiles on their faces.

  I should’ve known. Things aren’t allowed to go right for me. There’s a law, I’m sure of it. Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not allow anything to go right for Xander Harris, for any reason, ever.

  “So anyway,” Amy babbled on, “I thought it might be fun—”

  “Hi, Xander?” someone interrupted.

  Xander turned to see one of the Cordettes—Kimberley? no, it was Katie—staring at him. She had blond hair in a kind of U-shape style that was popular in the fifties and was coming back now for no good reason that Xander could see.

  “What?” Xander asked, dazed.

  “You’re in Mr. Baird’s history class, right? I thought maybe we could study together tonight.”

  Katie smiled the same smile as the other two. This is bad.

  “Do you mind?” Amy asked snappishly. “We were talking.”

  Xander felt a sudden need to be far away from the female population of Sunnydale High. “I really gotta go right now,” he said, quickly taking his leave of Amy and Katie.

  As he worked his way out of the school, he noticed several other girls giving him that smile. Girls who would never have acknowledged his existence a week ago were now gazing at him seductively.

  He arrived home to find the house empty, which wasn’t unexpected. Neither Mom nor Dad was due home from work for a couple more hours. This meant that Xander could hide in the privacy of his own room and try to figure out how to clean up the latest mess he’d made of his life.

  He closed the door, desperate to simply collapse on the bed and not think for a little while.

  This plan was derailed by the body in the bed.

  Life on the Hellmouth had given Xander’s already fertile imagination plenty of ideas as to who or what could’ve been in his bed. As a result, it was almost a relief when it just turned out to be Willow hiding under the covers.

  Almost.

  Xander leaped from the bed in abject terror before Willow poked her head out.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I wanted to surprise you.”

  She didn’t sound like Willow. She sounded like—

  Like Buffy, Amy, and Katie all did.

  “Good job,” he said, feeling very much surprised. “High marks.”

  “Don’t be so jumpy. I’ve been in your bed before.”

  “Yeah, but Will, we were both in footie pajamas.”

  Willow sat up, and Xander noticed that she was wearing one of his shirts. “Xand, I’ve been thinking,” she started.

  Oh God, not the see-someone-every-day speech again. “Will, I think I know what you’ve been thinking, but this is all my fault. I cast a spell and it sort of backfired.”

  “How long have we been friends?” Willow asked.

  Great, she hasn’t heard a word I said. “A long, long time. Too long to do anything that might change that now.”

  “Friendships change all the time. People grow apart. They grow closer.”

  This didn’t even sound like Willow. “This is good, how close we are now,” Xander said quickly, hoping some of this would penetrate, knowing full well that it wouldn’t. “I feel very comfortable with this amount of closeness. In fact, I could even back up a few paces and still be happy.” He stepped backward to the door. “See?”

  Willow got up out of the bed and walked toward him, then started unbuttoning the buttons on the shirt. Xander also couldn’t help but notice that she wasn’t wearing anything other than the shirt.

  “I want you Xander, to be my first.”

  “Baseman? Please tell me we’re talking baseball.”

  “Shhhh. We both know it’s right,” she said as she pinned him up against the door.

  “It’s not that I don’t find you sexy—” Xander started.

  “Is it Oz? Don’t worry about him. He’s sweet, but he’s not you.”

  Xander clutched at that. “Yes he is! And you should go to him. ’Cause he’s me.”

  Willow ignored that. Instead she nibbled Xander’s ear.

  Okay, this is definitely not the real Willow. This was a girl who thought playing “doctor” when they were kids involved medical texts.

  He pushed her away and said, “That’s it. This has gotta stop. It’s time for me to act like a man. And hide.”

  With that, he dashed out the door.

  Cordelia went to school on the morning of the seventeenth hoping for another ordinary day. Things had gotten so much better since she got over whatever virus she had that made her think dating Xander Harris was a good idea.

  So she was more than a little taken aback when Harmony, Katie, Laura, and Dori all gave her the cold shoulder.

  Assuming it to be some kind of practical joke, she said, “Ha. Very funny. What did I do now, wear red and purple together?”

  “You know what you did,” Harmony said, cold as an iced cappuccino. “Xander is wounded because of you.”

  They started to walk away. Cordelia stared after them. “Are you tripping? I thought you wanted me to break up with him.”

  “Only a sick pup would let Xander get away, no matter what her friends said.”

  With that, they all turned on their heels and walked off.

  Cordelia couldn’t believe it. “What does it take to make you people happy?” she cried.

  CHAPTER 5

  If someone had told Xander that the most hellish day of his seventeen-year-old life would be the day that every girl in Sunnydale High School desperately wanted him, he’d have sent for the doctors in the white coats.

  By now, he should have learned the universal truth of the phrase be careful what you wish for, you might get it. If nothing else, his “dream date” with that substitute teacher Ms. French should’ve driven that point home with large praying mantis–sized mandibles.

  On this day, he got more propositions, expressions of devotion, and lines about how you see someone every day but don’t really see them than he’d gotten in the previous seventeen years of life. I’ve had more of that in any ten-minute period than in the last seventeen years.

  Far worse, though, were the looks he was getting from the guys. A kind of I’m going to kill you look. The look Rodney Munson used to give him in class to let Xander know that his function after school would be to act as Rodney’s punching bag.

  By the end of the day, he couldn’t take it anymore. He had tried to talk to Amy about reversing the spell, but she didn’t pay attention to a word he said, preferring to carry on about Xander’s eyes.

  So he did the only thing he could do.

  He ran to Giles.

  “Xander, what is it?” the Watcher asked as Xander entered the library. He sounded concerned—obviously Xan
der’s agitation was written all over his face.

  “It’s me. Throwing myself at your mercy.”

  “What? Why?”

  Taking a deep breath, Xander said, “I made a mess, Giles. See, I found out that Amy’s into witchcraft. And I was hurt, I guess, so I made her put the love whammy on Cordy. But it backfired. And now every woman in Sunnydale wants to make me her cuddle-monkey. Which may sound swell on paper, but—”

  “Rupert, we need to talk,” said a voice from behind Xander. He turned to see that Ms. Calendar had entered. “Hey, Xander,” she said upon passing him. She turned to Giles, then turned back to Xander. “Nice shirt,” she added, then turned back to Giles. “Look, Rupert, I know that you’re angry at me, and I don’t blame you. But I’m not just gonna go away. I mean, I care far too much about you to—” She cut herself off, then stared at Xander again. “Have you been working out?” She felt his bicep.

  Xander indicated Ms. Calendar with his head and gave Giles a see what I mean? look.

  Giles looked befuddled at first, but as soon as he saw Ms. Calendar go from her normal self to a fawning Xanderphile right in front of his eyes, he grew livid.

  Yanking the computer teacher forcibly away from Xander’s side, he said in a low, dangerous tone, “I cannot believe that you are fool enough to do something like this.”

  “Oh no,” Xander said resignedly. “I’m twice the fool it takes to do something like this.”

  “Has, uh, has Amy tried to reverse the spell?”

  “I get around Amy and all she wants to do is talk honeymoon plans.”

  “Rupert,” Ms. Calendar said, “maybe I need to talk to Xander alone.” She had That Smile on her face as she said it.

  “Do you have any idea how serious this is?” Giles asked, again in the low tone. Xander would’ve preferred yelling, as this tone of voice was several orders of magnitude scarier. “People under a love spell are deadly. They lose all capacity for reason. And if what you say is true, and the entire female population is affected . . .” He trailed off, then said forcefully, “Don’t leave the library. I’ll find Amy and see if we can put a stop to this thing.”