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And frankly, I felt like a dick just making that argument. It’s the same argument bigoted jerks use when they say vampires should have to sit at the back of the bus or whatever.

And I don’t believe that at all—I’m a member of the Iowa Human/Post-Human Alliance. It’s one of the activities I kept going to even when I dropped most of the other ones. I totally support post-human rights.

But part of being a good debater is being able to argue for a side you don’t really agree with.

“Sorry, Jennifer,” said Jablonski. “It’s automatic, even if I do think this whole thing is ridiculous myself. I’m only going to keep you in the in-school suspension room for the rest of the day, but I can’t do any less than that.”

Mrs. Smollet stepped forward and motioned for me to follow her. I had lost.

This day just kept getting worse.

I followed her through the office, where Kyle gave me a consolation sigh, and into the little in-school suspension room. I sat down in a chair that must have been on loan from a preschool—my whole butt didn’t fit into it, which didn’t exactly help me feel less like a human eggplant.

For most of the next hour, I had nothing to do but sit there, stew about the size of my butt, and imagine Cathy, Mrs. Smollet, and Gregory Grue being in the same plane crash over the Atlantic. It wouldn’t kill Mrs. Smollet, but getting back to dry land would at least be a major inconvenience for her.

I wouldn’t be ice-skating home after all.

I really had wanted to try that, too.

Ever since I was a kid, I’d had this idea of the kind of person I wanted to be. I thought of myself as one of those
women you always see in old screwball comedies—the kind who have pet leopards, keep their undies in the freezer, and walk barefoot through the park in January. They operate on a sort of internal logic that makes people think they’re crazy—until it turns out that they’re the smartest characters in the movie.

But my eighty-hour-a-week schedule had never left me much time to try my hand at being a teenage Pippi Longstocking. Now that I finally had some free time, I wanted to get started on being more … well, being more extraordinary (something I really wish I hadn’t told Eileen about).

But so far, all I had really done was dye my hair purple. I
meant
to go write poetry in coffee shops, dance naked in front of windows, and all that, but I’d usually get wrapped up in looking things up online, and, well … you know how it is. I still felt as ordinary as ever. Ice-skating home from school had seemed like just the kind of thing that would kick-start my career as a free-spirited eccentric.

The day was almost over when Mrs. Smollet came back, with Jason and Amber marching behind her.

My face brightened and Jason gave me a triumphant grin.

“I have some company for you, Miss Van Den Berg,” said Smollet.

“What are you guys doing here?” I asked.

“They caught us burning stuff,” Jason said casually.

He tossed his backpack across the room. Smollet vanished for a second, then reappeared in front of him, holding it. She’d done that vampire trick where they run so fast you can’t even see them—it looks like they’re just vanishing and reappearing.

“Watch yourselves,” she said, handing it back to him.

“You’re locking me into a room with a couple of pyros,” I said. “Concerned about safety, my butt.”

“And your mouths,” she said.

This is
not
one of the parts of the book where I’m cleaning up the language. Victorian vampires always think words like “butt” are swear words.

But scaring old ladies has been a hobby of Jason’s as long as I could remember, and Mrs. Smollet was an easy target.

“No telling what we might get up to,” said Jason. “A boy and two girls in a room together … with our loose modern morals … anything could happen!”

“Mass-teria!” I said.

“Don’t think I won’t be watching,” Smollet said. “No funny business.”

I blinked, and she was gone.

Jason, Amber, and I looked at each other, then started to laugh.

I felt a million times better just being in the same room with the two of them. I was still mad at Cathy and Mrs. Smollet and Gregory Grue, but having Jason and Amber there gave me something to do besides sulk.

“We heard about what happened to you from Kyle,” said Jason. “And I had to see it for myself. Jennifer Van Den Berg, every teacher’s favorite student ever, in trouble!”

“You guys got yourselves in trouble just for me?” I asked.

“We couldn’t let a chance like this go by,” said Amber as she slipped her hand into Jason’s. “The three of us haven’t all been in trouble together in years!”

“I was overdue for some trouble anyway,” said Jason. “If I don’t keep my eyes on the prize, they won’t rename this room
the Jason Keyes Memorial In-School Suspension Room when I graduate.”

I smiled and gave him a high five.

Only a few people from my old one-class-per-grade elementary school in Preston were still at Cornersville Trace High with me, but I felt like we’d been through a war together. Especially Jason and Amber. Even though they were a couple of metalheads and I was more into show tunes and Renaissance fair–type music, we just had a sort of bond.

Jason always prided himself on being a no-good kid; on his eighteenth birthday, he got a tattoo that said “Bad for Good” on his butt and showed it to everyone who was brave enough to look. And plenty of old ladies who weren’t.

But he wasn’t
really
bad. He was a badass when he had to be, but he was one of the nicest guys I’d ever met. He wasn’t mean at all. He just liked burning stuff and frightening old ladies. That was about all there was to do in Preston when we were kids, back before they built the mall and the rest of suburbia caught up to us.

“So what’re you in for, exactly?” Jason asked.

“Deadly weapons,” I said.

“No way!” he said. “You? Weapons?”

“It was the ice skates,” I said. “Cathy said she was afraid I was going to cut her with them.”

Amber groaned. “You have got to be kidding me.”

I shook my head. “Hadn’t occurred to me before, but now I’d sort of like to cut her from nave to chops.”

“Cool,” Jason said. “Do girls have naves?”

“ ‘Nave’ means ‘navel,’ ” I said. “ ‘Nave to chops’ is ‘belly button to jaw.’ It’s a Shakespeare thing.”

“Cool,” Jason said, again. “You
would
know that.”

I smiled.

“How ’bout you guys?” I asked. “What did you burn?”

“Nothing much,” Amber said. “Just the cover of Jason’s science book.”

“They said we could either pay for it or do a stint in in-school,” he said. “This is cheaper. I did them a favor, if you ask me. That thing was ten years old. Every bio book from before the vampires showed up is out of date now.”

“Totally,” I said. “It’s just a shame you didn’t throw Marconi in the fire while you were at it.”

And I imagined a tiny version of Cathy in the little grill in the picnic area, her flesh blistering and turning black while she screamed.

Then I told them all about Gregory Grue, the little weirdo who had called me fat at McDonald’s, and Amber hugged me and told me never to mind what idiots thought.

“
Illegitimis non carborundum
,” she said. “That’s Latin for ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down.’ Is tonight your alliance meeting?”

I nodded.

“With that guy from Valley?”

I nodded again and blushed.

The only other teenager in the Iowa Human/Post-Human Alliance was a guy from West Des Moines named Corey Tapley. I wouldn’t have gone so far as to call him my crush, but he and I had been flirting back and forth for months, and homecoming
was
just around the corner.

“Then you can still salvage the day. Think he’s gonna ask you out?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s not like I’m in love with him or anything. I’d just kind of like to
go
to a dance before I graduate.”

“Well, ask
him
, then,” said Amber.

“I don’t know if I have the guts for that,” I said.

“Sure you do,” she said. “You
deserve
to have a better day than this.”

I smiled again.

Amber had a real talent for making me feel brave. I never would have had the nerve to swear at Mrs. Smollet—even just using the word “butt”—without her in the room.

I was actually starting to feel halfway decent by the end of the day, but when the last bell rang, Mrs. Smollet escorted us through the halls to the back door, and Cathy was standing at her locker grinning at me.

Fred, her vampire boyfriend, was kissing her neck and running his fingers through her hair. As we passed by, she gave me a smug “ha-ha, I win” look. The kind of look that made me want to spray toxic acid all over her.

She had probably made a point of being where I’d see her getting kissed to emphasize the fact that no one ever kissed
me
in the hallway.

I tried to run up to her and give her a good yelling-at, but Smollet ushered me right past her and said, “Stay away from her, Jennifer. Let it go.”

I kept walking and imagined Cathy falling into a grain silo and either drowning or breaking her neck—whichever it is that happens when you fall into those.

For the record, I don’t
like
to have fantasies like that. I don’t believe in violence in real life. Seriously.

But when I’m having a lousy, crappy, soul-sucking, butt-sniffing, very bad day, I can’t help thinking about chopping annoying people to bits and then pouring what’s left of them down a storm drain into a sewer. It just makes me feel better sometimes. It helps me break all the bad feelings down into smaller pieces that can be filed away for later, when I can relieve all the stress by breaking stuff.

The look on Cathy’s face haunted me all the way home.

By the time the Jenmobile got me back to Preston (which took half an hour, since it stalled out twice), the annoyance had turned into a slow-burning rage that was going to need to be dealt with.

I took three porcelain angel figurines out of the box under my bed and smashed them to smithereens on the icy sidewalk in front of my house, imagining that one of them was Cathy, one of them was Mrs. Smollet, and one of them was Gregory Grue. I loved the weight of the hammer in my hand, the satisfying crash it made when it came down on the porcelain, the
plink
sound when it hit the sidewalk—or, in this case, the
crack
when it busted the thin layer of ice.

I was still cleaning up the broken pieces when I looked up and saw that the Wells Fargo Wagon was coming down my street.

One thing I’ll say for Eileen: she nailed Amber.

Well, in a way. The real Amber is about my size and wears fishnets and pentagram necklaces. And she listens to metal, not pop, like the book version of her. She certainly wasn’t “popular,” exactly.

But she did wear the very latest footwear—her shoes were always
that
season’s ten-dollar Converse knockoffs. And she really was a friend I was lucky to have.

I didn’t play Marian the Librarian in
The Music Man
, like “Jenny” does, but if I had, Amber would have helped me and encouraged me and made me feel braver, just like she does in the book.

And if I’d really been practicing my singing, maybe I would have been less pitchy when I sang out the “Wells Fargo Wagon” song on my lawn upon seeing one coming down my street.

Now, in case you’ve never seen
The Music Man
, it’s all about this con artist named Professor Harold Hill. He’s a traveling salesman back in 1912 who goes from small town to small town convincing parents that their sons are going to grow up to be immoral bums, then offers to solve the problem by teaching the kids to play musical instruments and organizing them into a band. But he doesn’t really know a thing about music; as soon as he collects the money for the instruments and uniforms, he skips town, never to be seen again, leaving the townspeople with a bunch of instruments they can’t play while he goes off to pull the same con in another town.

Since it takes place here in Iowa, every high school drama department does it every now and then. We Iowans love anything with Iowa in it (pronounce Des Moines correctly—like “
Duh Moyne
”—on television and we’ll love you forever), so even the crappiest of high school productions is likely to sell enough tickets to break even.

And when I say the Wells Fargo Wagon was coming down my street, I mean a
Wells Fargo Wagon
. Like, the old horse-drawn kind they sing about in the show at the end of act one, when it rolls into town with all the junk people ordered from catalogs. But instead of a horse, this one was being led by a tow truck that came down my street and turned right into my driveway.

When the door to the tow truck opened, I just about fainted.

The driver was Gregory Grue.

He was wearing a jumpsuit that looked like it was supposed to be white, but it was practically tie-dyed with stains.

“Hoo hoo!” he said. “I see you’re hammering out love between your brothers and sisters all over this land.”

I tried to keep calm as well as I could.

“You’re a delivery man, too?” I asked.

He chuckled. “I don’t know much about economics,” he said, “but I do know that you can’t make a living teaching one class a day. And ladies love a man who delivers the goods!”

“I thought the techies were
building
the Wells Fargo Wagon,” I said.

“Nope,” he said. “They can’t. You need all kinds of tools that violate the zero-tolerance weapons policy to build something like this. They ordered it from a prop supplier.”