Extraordinary<li> (6 page)

But he didn’t, thank God.

He just looked into my window and said, “Mind if we talk for a second?”

I shrugged, and he let himself into the backseat of the car, where he made himself comfortable, stretching out his legs, which weren’t long enough to fill the whole backseat.

Up close, I saw that he had a smoker’s face; like he wasn’t really old, exactly, but he was already wrinkled. He looked
like he would have had more teeth than most people, except that he was missing a few.

“Who the hell are you, really?” I asked. “You’re obviously not a post-human.”

He smiled and tossed a handful of sparkly glitter in the air.

“I’m your fairy godmother!” he announced as the glitter rained down on him. The sound of some trumpets going “Dun duh duh DUN!” blared up on my radio at just the right second, interrupting the ragtime piece.

“Give me a break,” I said. “Fairy godmother?”

He laughed, then coughed, then laughed, then coughed some more, then scratched his neck and coughed some more.

“That’s as good a title as any. I’m here to make your life all better. But I’m nobody’s mommy, so let’s just say I’m your fairy godmofo, okay?”

He laughed again.

“You’re full of crap,” I said.

“You don’t have to believe me,” he said. “Not yet. You will. And it’s pre-human, kiddo. We’ve been around since before you humans started screwing everything up and drove my people out of the forest.”

“At least quit smoking in my car, all right?”

He lazily took another drag on the cigar, totally ignoring me, and looked out the window.

“What do they call you bow-necked hawkeyes, anyway? Iowish?”

“Iowan,” I said.

“Iowan.” He nodded. “I like the word for people who live in Michigan better. Michiganders. Sounds like a bird.”

“I guess,” I said.

“The name for Minneapolis people is good, too. Minneapolitan. Sounds tasty.”

He exhaled right in my face again, right at my eyes this time. I clenched them shut till the smell died out, but when I opened my eyes the smoke was still curling around me, making weird shapes that I don’t think smoke is supposed to make. Like, I could see little miniature faces that were moving their lips in the smoke curls.

Freaky.

“How about people from Des Moines?” he asked. “Demoinic?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Will you please just tell me what you want?”

He sat up.

“Every now and then, my people get a little bit of magic to play with,” he said, “and I’m using mine to help you out. I can see that you need it.”

“I don’t need any help,” I said. “Not from you.”

“I read your file,” he said. “And I think I’ve got you figured out. You thought you had a chance with lover-boy in there, but he turned you down, right?”

“Shut up.”

“And you act like the purple hair isn’t to get attention, but it secretly is.”

“Shut up!”

“You dropped all your extra activities, but you fritter away all the time you saved. And you tell yourself that most of your problems are because of Cathy or Mrs. Smollet or your parents, but the truth is you know you’re just … not … good enough.”

He flashed me his goblin grin. Like the Cheshire cat’s,
his grin was exactly the shape of a crescent moon and made me feel like he knew things I didn’t want him to.

Like that he was absolutely right.

I worried every day that I wasn’t
really
an interesting, free-spirited, extraordinary girl, and the purple hair was just a lame attempt to look like one. That the real me was going to turn out to be a total bore. Or, worse, a violent lunatic.

I mean, I got along well with people. My teachers all liked me—I even had coffee with my old sixth-grade teacher now and then.

But nobody except Jason and Amber really knew about my dark side. The side that spent a lot of time fantasizing about murdering people and dancing on their graves.

Gregory took another puff of his cigar.

“Not to mention you pretend you don’t want a part in the big show.”

“I don’t,” I said. “Being onstage gives me spelling bee flashbacks.”

He chuckled. “It says in your school file that you were quite the little speller once upon a time,” he said. “You don’t miss anything about those days? No one who used to compete with you?”

I thought of Mutual Scrivener, the boy I had liked and who liked me back. He had been signed up for public school
just
to be in the spelling bees, and disappeared shortly after the last one. He was a guy from those days, all right. And I did miss him.

But I said, “No. Nothing. I hated being in those things. They used to make
way
too big a deal of them in Preston.”

“Now, look, kiddo,” Gregory said. “I think you’ve got a
lot of potential. You really do. A few good wishes ought to help you out, and I’m prepared to grant you three reasonable ones, as long as you get a guy of my choice to kiss you during the homecoming dance.”

“If you say that
you’re
the guy of your choice, I’ll kick you in the crotch,” I said.

He just laughed. “Relax, girly girl. I’m a teacher. That would be highly inappropriate. It won’t be me at all. No one you’d totally hate to kiss, as long as you keep an open mind.”

“Who’s the guy?”

“You’ll find out soon,” he said.

“I don’t think I’m going to take this deal,” I said. “Three wishes I don’t believe you’d grant in exchange for a favor you won’t even tell me all the details of? Screw it.”

“That shows brains, judgment, and maturity,” he said. “Except that you don’t get a choice. The spell is cast, the tale is told. Et cetera.”

“That’s not fair!” I said.

“That’s the way the coffee drips,” he told me. “I don’t make the rules here, I just follow them. But at least you get some wishes out of the deal.”

“I don’t want anything from you,” I said. “Why should I even believe that you’re for real?”

He chuckled and took another drag on his cigar. “We don’t carry credentials, but I’m in the giving vein today, so I’ll prove it if you want. What are you going to do, ask me to make a unicorn appear?”

“Yes,” I said. “That’ll do. Get me a unicorn. I want one in my backyard.”

In fairy tales, if you ask a fairy for something impossible,
they usually end up tearing themselves to pieces or something. But Gregory Grue smirked.

“Early humans tried to exterminate unicorns, you know,” he said. “Best thing humans ever did.”

“You think driving an animal to extinction is good?” I asked.

“I do when their crap smells as bad as unicorn crap. You’ve never smelled anything as bad as unicorn crap, honey. Not even if you’ve been in the men’s room of the bus stop in Passaic, New Jersey. Wouldn’t you rather I just made your car smell like that? The cleanup would be easier.”

“You just can’t get a unicorn,” I said. “You’re probably planning to fart and say you made the smell appear magically.”

“Look,” he said, “I can’t get you a unicorn out of thin air. I
can
get you one, and I won’t even count it as a wish, but it’ll take a day or two. When it gets here, you’ll know I’m serious beyond any doubt.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “Get me a unicorn and I’ll never doubt you again.”

“Okay,” he said. “You can slack off and not believe me until then, if you want. But either way, I owe you three wishes, so close your eyes and think of the bestest wishes you can, kiddo.”

He blew some more smoke at me, and I closed my eyes—not so much because he told me to as to keep from getting smoke in them.

“Now, wish!” he said.

So I wished.

“I wish you would go away,” I said.

“I will once you’ve made a few good wishes for me to pick from,” he said. “So get at it.”

The smoke started to cloud my brain—I still don’t know what was in that cigar. But I started talking.

“I wish I had a million dollars.”

“Be less obvious, please. And more realistic. Let me help you out. What do you
really
wish for, in those parts of your brain you hoped the purple dye would seep into and cover up?”

He blew even more smoke and I felt it swirling around in my nostrils. I felt myself go light-headed, and started saying things without even thinking about them.

“I wish I could get revenge on Cathy.”

“Swell. What else?”

“I wish Emily would tell Corey to go to hell.”

“That’s harsh, kiddo, but consider it done. Anything else?”

I paused.

“I wish I could find an old friend who moved away.”

“Nice,” he said. “Now think of the rest of your wishes. Wish for the things you won’t say out loud. Like being in the play.”

Everything went silent for a few seconds. When I opened my eyes, the smoke was gone and Gregory was still smiling, so wide that I was pretty sure he’d be sore in the morning. And I felt like I’d just come up for air after being underwater.

He threw some more glitter over his head and blew another puff of smoke. This one was so big that it filled up my entire car. Through the smoke, I heard him say, “Your wishes are granted. Long live Gregory Grue!”

I was afraid for a second that I was about to suffocate in the fumes, but they started to dissipate.

I was aware of the music stopping and the engine ceasing to purr, and when the smoke was gone, Gregory, the raggedy “fairy godmofo,” was gone, too.

There was no lingering smell from the cigar.

There was no glitter left in the seats, either.

The only tangible sign left that anyone had been there was a swear word written in the frost on the outside of the rear window.

I sat in my car in silence for a second, shivering from the cold, trying to process everything, and wondering if I should go ask someone back in the armory for help.

Gregory, I decided, must be one of those substitute teachers you see on TV and in movies now and then who come out of nowhere and really inspire kids before moving on. Or anyway, that’s what he was
trying
to do. Normally those guys pick some disadvantaged kid who never had a chance, but since Cornersville Trace is pretty damned middle class, he just pinpointed the chubby girl who apparently had a discipline problem as the most pathetic person in school—the one who needed his help the most.

And he thought I was dumb enough that a bunch of magic tricks would make me believe he was a “fairy godmother” so he could inspire me to reach my full potential. He’d give me a part in the show or something and say he’d
granted my wish, giving me a whole buttload of newfound self-esteem.

Nice try, Gregory Grue.

This all made me feel super.

If he were really magic, he would have gotten me the million dollars.

I still didn’t understand why there was no glitter left in the seats, but I assumed he’d used some cheap “disappearing glitter” trick he bought from a magic shop or something.

I decided that I should just head home, but when I turned the key, the car had gone back to being stalled. Whatever Gregory had done to make it seem like it was working again must have been a trick, too.

After fifteen minutes of turning the key, I was freezing my butt off and the car still wasn’t starting. Jason was at work and Amber didn’t have her license, so I went back and forth for a few minutes deciding which parent to call. On the one hand, I didn’t really want to deal with my dad. On the other, he might be able to fix the car, so I wouldn’t have to pay for a tow truck.

I wasn’t exactly flush with cash—no thanks to Gregory and his inability to get me a million bucks.

Eventually, I just called Dad and prepared for a lecture.

When he showed up half an hour later and walked over to the car, he stared at the cussword on the window.

“Rough neighborhood,” he said.

“Kids,” I said. “One minute they’re buckling their knickerbockers below the knee and hiding dime novels in the corncrib, and the next thing you know they’re writing the S-word on car windows. Makes your blood boil, well I should say!”

“Can we go one evening without you talking like you’re a character in
The Music Man
, please?” he asked.

“No promises,” I said.

He tinkered under the hood for a second, then asked me to start her up. I turned the key, and there were sparks, but the engine still didn’t start.

“Sorry, Jen,” he said. “I’ll call and have it towed someplace tomorrow morning.”

Super.

I climbed out of my car and into Dad’s. He started it up and we cruised out of the parking lot and into the streets of Des Moines.

“Your mom called the admissions people at Drake,” he said. “They said the suspension won’t be an issue, as long as it’s a one-time thing.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” I said.

“I don’t know how you think you’re going to get through college, though,” he said. “The kind of workload you’ve given yourself this year won’t prepare you for it.”

“Dad,” I said, “I just had a crappy day followed by a crappy night, and I have this weird feeling that I’m having a nervous breakdown. Can we hold off on the lecture?”

He sighed and backed down, but the worst of it was that he sort of had a point. I was slacking off, big-time, and not really feeling any closer to being the person I wanted to become than I had been before.

We drove through the freezing rain and Dad seemed to know enough not to try to make me feel any worse. I don’t like throwing pity parties for myself, but I thought I’d earned one for the evening.

I did feel different, though. Like the Jenny in the book.

I’d driven through the suburbs of Des Moines, down Eighty-Sixth Street, a million times. Nothing had changed. But for some reason, everything suddenly seemed a tiny bit different on that trip. It almost felt like I’d traveled forward in time, but not very far. Like, three years or something. Everything seemed the same, but different.