Extraordinary<li> (15 page)

“You know what?” said Jason. “I believe your story and all, but I don’t really believe you’re going to die if you don’t get Fred to kiss you.”

“Me neither,” said Amber. “Gregory is probably full of crap.”

“Turning the Weather Beacon purple is probably just a matter of getting enough cellophane over the white bulbs,” said Jason.

I nodded. “And it’s not like you have to use fairy magic to buy purple paint. Or FedEx a ticket to Alaska, even.”

When my car stalled out a few blocks from my house, we
didn’t wait for it to start up again. I just put it in neutral, rolled it to the side of the road, then put it in park and ditched it. We started walking back toward my house, taking cheap shots at Gregory and plotting to get me a date with Fred anyway, just for the sheer challenge of it (and, you know, to be on the safe side).

But as we got closer to my house, I started to smell something weird. The odor got stronger the closer we got.

“Wow,” said Jason. “I don’t want to offend you or anything, but have you been letting the Diarrhea School for Boys use your backyard as a gym or something?”

“Not that I know of,” I said.

When we went around to the back of my house, I saw it.

A unicorn was walking around in my backyard.

An actual, living unicorn.

Just like Gregory had promised that night in my car. My knees began to shake, and I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand at attention.

I was past the point of thinking that Gregory was a wild substitute teacher who was trying to reach poor disadvantaged me, but I still hadn’t been totally sure about the “magic” aspect of his routine. After all, he hadn’t fixed my car, had he? Or gotten me a million dollars?

But this proved it. The second I saw it, I knew that if Fred didn’t kiss me at the dance, I was absolutely going to die.

“Oh my God!” said Amber. “It’s a unicorn!”

I hadn’t told her the part about the unicorn. Not yet.

The unicorn wandered up to the gate and stared at us over it.

Sometimes you see an animal up close and it looks
disgusting, but the unicorn was the most gorgeous thing I’d ever seen. It was majestic, really. Sparkling white, with a beautiful horn.

Stuck on the horn was a note.

I read it, then crumpled it up.

“Was that from him?” asked Amber.

“Yeah,” I said. “I told him on Friday that if he was for real, I wanted a unicorn as proof. I guess he’s real after all.”

“Well, don’t panic,” said Amber. “We can still get you through this.”

Maybe it was just a flip side of the violent nature I tried my best not to deal with, but the whole thing about feeling like I had the icy hand of death tapping at my shoulder wasn’t really freaking me out, at least not right then.

In fact, it was a rush.

It made me feel more alive than ever.

The unicorn breathed and made a little horse noise. Its breath hung in the cold air, but it wasn’t white, like human breath. It was the green color of stink lines in cartoons, which was appropriate enough. The unicorn might have been gorgeous, but it smelled like eleven thousand rotting corpses, all wearing dirty socks, being served flambé with a glass of open butt on the rocks.

And
the thing that Jason had said about the gym.

I stepped through the gate, careful not to let it out. It seemed friendly enough, even if it did stink to high heaven.

“Hi,” I said. “Your name is Princess, right? I’m Jennifer.”

The unicorn actually knelt down on the ground for a second before standing back up.

“This is so cool,” said Amber. “I mean, it sucks that you’re being stalked by a creepy mofo and all, but I always wanted to see a unicorn!”

There was a leash, or harness, or whatever you call it, hanging off Princess, and I picked it up and led her through the backyard. Jason and Amber and Mutual followed along.

Mom stepped out onto the porch.

“What in God’s name is that thing?” she shouted.

“Unicorn,” I said, as casually as I could.

“So now unicorns are real, too?” she asked.

“I guess so,” I said.

Mom just shrugged as she looked at Princess from across the yard. In a world where we’d found out that vampires, zombies, and all those things were real, the fact that there was such thing as a horse with a horn coming out of its forehead wasn’t that big a deal, even for people who
didn’t
assume every fantasy creature was real (like you-know-who).

“He sure
smells
real,” Mom said, lifting her shirt collar to cover her nose.

“She,” I corrected.

“Whatever,” she said, through a layer of cotton. “Do you mind telling me what a unicorn is doing in the backyard?”

I thought about telling Mom the whole story, but no good could come of that. She’d just freak out and make it that much harder for me to get kissed by Fred.

“Someone offered me one,” I said. “Someone I met at the alliance meeting. I’m babysitting her for a few days.”

“And what made you agree to that?”

“What girl would turn down a unicorn?” asked Amber.

“Any girl that had smelled one,” Mom said.

She had a point.

“Well, I hadn’t smelled her.” I said. “How could I turn down the chance to have a unicorn?”

“Very simple,” said Mom. “You just say ‘No, I don’t have any place to keep a live unicorn.’ ”

“Well, I can’t take her back now,” I said. “She won’t exactly fit in the backseat of my car. But we can put her in the shed.”

Mom sighed, then held her nose. “Just a couple of days?”

“No longer,” I said. “And I’ll take care of her. They only eat once a month, so I don’t have to feed her or anything.”

“I guess there is probably room in the shed,” Mom said, “now that there aren’t many tools there. We can use that as a stable.”

I grabbed an end of the leash or harness or whatever and led her to the tool shed that Dad built when I was a kid. Inside, there was nothing but a couple of hammers, some shovels, and a box of screws.

“This won’t be the most comfortable place to sleep, Princess,” I said, turning to her and stroking her beautiful mane. “But it should be warmer than running around the yard. Drier, too.”

Princess snorted again, and I heard a fart noise and a plop.

It didn’t take a genius to know what had happened, but it took a second for the stench to hit my nose.

When it did, I ran. Literally.

It made my insides scrunch up, like some of the organs inside me were trying to escape up my throat.

I ran out of the shed, shut the door, and raced across the yard. I thought I was going to be sick.

Mutual, Amber, and Jason were already running. I followed them clear down my street, yelling and laughing all the way to my car.

The car started back up, like it normally did after a few minutes, and we drove off, rolling down all the windows and turning the AC to full blast. The smell had come in with us.

“Holy crap!” said Jason. “That is
foul
!”

“There’s nothing holy about that crap,” said Amber.

Mutual just grinned the whole time. “I love this town,” he said.

He was 100 percent alive, all right. And he finally seemed … awake.

Maybe it was the fact that we had an epic quest in front of us now that had woken him up, but I reminded myself that he had already been pretty well awake before we got to the coin laundry. If anything woke him up, it was me kissing him.

This was a pretty super thing to reflect on.

We drove through Preston up to Jason’s house. When I pulled into the driveway, the headlights hit three people standing there with their arms folded across their chests.

One was Mrs. Smollet.

The other two were Mutual’s parents.

I did, in fact, begin to panic when I pulled into the driveway and saw Mr. and Mrs. Scrivener standing there with Mrs. Smollet. None of them looked happy.

I’d only met Mutual’s parents (who really are named Norm and Norma) once before, when he had talked them into taking him to the Breakfast for Supper Banquet, the annual pancake jamboree at the school in Preston to honor the students competing in the district spelling bee. That night, they had come dressed in matching clothes, and acted like they had matching rods up their butts.

They didn’t seem much different now. But they did seem angrier.

Mutual swore under his breath.

“We can hear that, son,” said Mutual’s dad.

The minute I saw the three of them, the first thing that ran through my mind was that there was a vampire out there
someplace who was paying Gregory Grue to make girls consent to convert. And these three struck me as suspicious.

I stepped out of the car, determined to ignore them, and walked up to Mrs. Smollet.

“Boy, am I glad to see you, Mrs. Smollet,” I said. “I want to talk to you about Mr. Grue.”

“I’ve already spoken with Cathy about him,” she said. “I’m sure you can all live with him for half a semester.”

“But he’s been doing some really inappropriate stuff!” I told her. “He’s working for some vampire, too. Don’t suppose you know anything about that?”

“He’s not important right now,” said Mrs. Smollet. “We’ve come for Mr. Scrivener.”

“We always knew you would come back to Iowa for this girl, son,” said Mutual’s mother. “Even after we explicitly forbade you to leave Alaska. We know your tricks and manners.”

“And we found more than one of those postcards you tried to send,” said his father.

His mother disappeared and reappeared in front of the car door.

“Come, Mutual,” she said. “We are going home.”

Mutual sat in the car, looking scared.

“You can’t force him to go if he doesn’t want to,” I said. “He’s eighteen.”

“You didn’t tell me that,” said Smollet to Mutual’s parents. “We can’t take him anywhere against his will if he’s eighteen.”

“He is still our son,” said Mutual’s dad.

“But I think your council would frown on you forcing him to go to Alaska with you,” I said. “That would be an attack on a human.”

“She’s right,” said Smollet. “Stand down, Norma. If he doesn’t want to leave, you’ll have to do the diciotto here in Iowa.”

Mutual’s mom took a step back.

Jason and Amber got out of the car, and the three of us stood next to it, staring at the three of them. I wasn’t sure what to do. Challenging them to a fight would have been a waste of time.

“I remember you two,” said Mutual’s mom to Jason and Amber. “The ones who taught Mutual that listening to rock music was more important than spelling.”

Jason snickered. “I’m bad for good,” he said. “Wanna see my tattoo?”

Amber slipped her arms around him.

“And you, of course,” said Mrs. Scrivener to me. “The one who convinced him to throw his spelling career away.”

“You can’t touch Mutual,” I said.

“It’ll be easier for him if he just comes with us,” Mrs. Smollet said. “I’m sure the council will grant us permission for a diciotto. If you care for him at all, you won’t subject him to one of those.”

“Come home, Mutual,” his mother said.

I waited for Mutual to shout out the window that he
was
home, but it didn’t happen. He curled up into a ball in the seat of my car, as if he were ducking and covering from a nuclear assault.

So I said it for him.

“This is his home,” I said. “Iowa.”

“The vampire community frowns on offspring who do not convert,” said Mrs. Scrivener. “And on their parents.”

“So?” I said. “That’s a terrible excuse for wrecking his life.”

“Keeping him from dying is hardly wrecking his life,” said Mrs. Scrivener.

“Look,” said Jason, “we all know you can’t touch him without it being considered an attack, and as nervous as everyone gets around here about that stuff, I don’t think you want to risk it, do you?”

“All we have to do is say we saw you with Wilhelm or someone from his clan six years ago,” said Amber. “And they’ll harass you to no end.”

“And I can have the honor guard out here in a heartbeat,” I said.

None of them said anything.

The council had made it clear that they would punish anyone who did anything
like
attacking a human, especially in Des Moines, very severely. They might have been just talking a big game to keep people calm, but they sure sounded serious to me.

“And no one invited you to Jason’s house,” said Amber, “so I suggest that you get out of here and leave him alone.”

“Then I’ll put in the request to the council tomorrow,” said Mrs. Smollet. “And you can plan on a diciotto next week.”

She vanished. Then Mutual’s parents did, too.

I opened Mutual’s door, and he sat there, crying and shaking.

He had been full of bravado when it looked like I had to get another guy to kiss me or die, but an encounter with his parents had sucked every bit of it out of him.