Extraordinary<li> (7 page)

Just like my whole life. Different, but not different enough to matter too much.

It was a weird feeling.

When Dad dropped me off, he stared up at the Wells Fargo Wagon in the driveway.

“Was there anything good inside it?” he asked.

“Not that I know of,” I told him.

“It looks loaded,” he said. “You might want to check.”

I assumed he had hidden something there, like an envelope full of brochures for the MBA program at Drake. I
thought
he’d given up on that when my sister, Val, got out of an expensive business school and found out that a master’s degree and a 4.1 GPA don’t really qualify you for any more jobs than an undergrad degree in art history does these days, but you never can tell with Dad.

I made a point of walking right past the wagon, then made sure there was no unicorn in the backyard. There wasn’t.

But after Dad had driven away, I went to see if my Wells Fargo Wagon had, in fact, come stocked with rocking chairs, double boilers, and all the other stuff the people of River City, Iowa, had ordered in the show.

All I saw at first was a bunch of empty cardboard boxes.

However, taped to one of the boxes was a postcard addressed to me.

I sat there and read it over and over, even though it was just eight words.

It couldn’t be real.

There was no postmark. And no reason in the world that there should be a postcard on the wagon for me from
anyone
. Gregory must have read my file and found that newspaper article about the spelling bee—the one that described Mutual as my boyfriend (which was totally embarrassing at the time). This was simply part of his attempt to trick me into thinking he was magic.

But it looked like Mutual’s handwriting to me.

And how would Gregory have known that I tended to get postcards from Mutual in mysterious ways, as if he had no way of actually mailing them and had to find sneaky ways to send them to me?

Like, one time a guy just knocked on the door and said he found the postcard in a truck full of pumpkins and felt like he should drop it off.

Maybe Gregory was for real after all.

And really was granting my wish.

If Mutual was the guy he wanted me to kiss at the dance,
and he was willing to magically help make it possible, I would never say another word against him, even if he was a creep.

I took the postcard indoors and went to my room to look up the news story about fairies being real. On the off chance that you haven’t already found this out, just typing “fairies” into a search engine isn’t really going to get you much information—mostly just a bunch of pictures of Tinker Bell and stuff. Probably pictures of me now, too. Nothing about “real” ones, except for those pictures that a couple of English girls took a hundred years ago, which look totally fake to me.

Eventually I dug up some news stories where some of the older vampires said there was some group of short post-humans that had lived in the woods years ago, but no one knew much about them, except that they were all long dead. An archaeologist backed the story up with pottery fragments she’d found, but no one really knew what this group could do, exactly. Whatever powers or abilities they had had obviously hadn’t been enough to keep them from being driven from the forests.

There was no mention of magic. No one knew anything about magic being real—all the stuff vampires could do was because of protein mutations, not magic. If the guys in the forests could turn invisible or anything, that was probably just a bodily function the rest of us didn’t have.

The next day, I called Murray and asked if he knew much about fairies. He just groaned.

“Look,” he said, “we don’t know about every post-human group in the world. Every now and then you hear about some weird tribe that lives inside the hills and comes out for one
month every hundred years to play nine-pins or something, but as far as I know, it’s all BS, and those guys who got driven out of the forests are all dead.”

“So, you weren’t buying that guy last night, either?”

He laughed. “That was just some putz who wanted the twenty-buck honorarium Dave pays to speakers,” he said. “Probably an out-of-work actor.”

“He’s working for the drama department at my school,” I said.

“See? Actor.”

“Why would Dave even book him?” I asked.

“Well, Dave probably didn’t believe him, either,” said Murray. “But he’s got a tough job trying to find a post-human every week in Des Moines. He’s sort of running out of options by now. You remember that werewolf two weeks ago?”

“Sure.”

“Fake. That was just a hairy guy. Like Robin Williams. Personally, I think more vampires should move to Des Moines, because all these insurance-industry jobs here are perfect for dead people, but that whole thing with Wilhelm three years ago scares ’em away.”

So that was that. Gregory was no post-human, according to someone who’d been living as one since the seventeen hundreds. He was just some weird actor/substitute teacher trying to motivate me or something.

All he knew about Mutual would have come from whatever file they had on me at the office—the file was probably full of newspaper articles about the bee. But maybe there had been a postcard for me from Mutual in the file that had been sent to the school for some reason.

I figured that I had solved the mystery already.

That night in bed, I tried to force myself into a crush on a movie star or something. It was no use falling back into a crush on a boy I would probably never see again.

You know where you stand with movie stars, at least. You can’t really get hurt.

But that night, I had vivid, extremely naughty dreams.

About Fred the vampire.

Cathy’s boyfriend.

The Fred in the book was actually based on Jason, not the real Fred. You’ll notice Eileen never says what part of Fred the “royal tattoo” was on.

Jason was hoping to freak Eileen out when he pulled down his pants to show her his tattoo during her interview with us, but, well, she swooned when she saw his butt.

She’s a butt swooner. That’s what she is. A cheese-sucking butt swooner.

“That,” she told me later, “is the kind of boy girls want! Not the real Fred. So I’m going to have Fred act more like Jason.”

Now that most of the vampires have been banned from high schools, people sort of forget that most vampire students were total losers. Seriously—you know how at every school there’s one guy in his twenties who still hangs around by the football field all the time? Imagine how much bigger a loser
that guy would have to be to keep hanging around when he was two hundred. At least Fred was only about fifty or sixty.

The real Fred looked okay, but he wasn’t “hot.” He had kind of a ratty look, with one of those scraggly teenage mustaches, and acne that had lasted for decades (poor guy). He wasn’t the prince of anything. And he wasn’t exactly a rebel—the guy had stayed in high school
way
longer than he really needed to. How rebellious could he be?

I tried to explain this to Eileen, but she just laughed.

“Girls don’t want to read that he wasn’t that great a catch,” she said. “They want the main character to be just like them, and they want the love interest to be the exact kind of guy they want to date, and they want them to live happily ever after.”

“You’re just pandering to them,” I said.

“And they’ll love it!” she said. “Everyone needs wish fulfillment!”

Fair enough. Wish fulfillment is as good a reason to read a book as any, I guess. I read books for that, too, sometimes.

But I’m not trying to make you be my best friend or make you think I’m just like you with this book. I don’t want you thinking you need to be a princess or have a fairy godmother to become extraordinary, either. I’m hoping you’ll figure out that you have to become extraordinary on your own terms, not wait for some guy to
make
you that way, even though it might be hard work. I am trying to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of our generation, or something like that.

In other words, I’m here to tell the truth. And, as hard as it’s been for me to admit, sometimes the truth was that I was
just as likely to turn into a terrible, violent, spiteful person as I was to turn into a peace-loving, intellectual hippie chick who acted like one of those crazy English teachers in sitcoms or one of those eccentric women in screwball comedies. I could have been extraordinarily
mean
.

Beyond that, the truth is that I didn’t like Fred much at all. I thought he was a real dick, and never really stopped to think about
why
he became a dick, or to consider that anyone who had spent thirty or forty years unable to get his skin to clear up was liable to be pretty bitter. Just try to calculate how many zits you’d have to pop if you had a forty-year case of acne. When you’re done barfing, you’ll have some idea of why most teenage vampires seem so depressed.

So I had never liked him much, and wasn’t at
all
jealous of Cathy, but I woke up Monday morning feeling like I had a crush on him. You know, like you do whenever you have a dream about someone. Especially one of
those
kinds of dreams.

And all I could think of was how much it would suck for Cathy if
I
were the one he took to the dance.

In fact, as I got ready for school, I sort of fell in love with the idea. I imagined a group forming around Fred and me as we spun in the center of the dance floor, while Cathy cried and threw a tantrum in the corner.

And then the band would start a fast number, everyone would start dancing, and she’d be trampled to a messy death.

Yeah.

Man, that sounded good.

Still want your daughters on my lawn, moms?

Sure, it’s cute when Junie B. Jones fantasizes about people
she doesn’t like getting “stompled” to death by ponies, but I know it wasn’t my most attractive habit.

Anyway, I nursed the crush on Fred all morning, careful not to let it get so serious that it would hurt to see him with Cathy, but letting it stay strong enough that it would keep me from falling back into a crush on Mutual until something better came along.

When it came time for the rehearsal in fourth period, I walked in and saw Gregory Grue deep in conversation with Eileen Codlin in the back row of the auditorium.

“Now, Richard the Third, the real one, was actually my favorite king,” he was saying. “He wasn’t nearly as bad as Shakespeare made him look. Man, I miss the days when kings would lead soldiers into battle!”

When he saw me standing there, he grinned up at me.

“Jennifer! I believe you know Miss Codlin,” Gregory said to me. “She’s interviewing me about my experiences as a pre-human for a book.”

Eileen turned around and beamed at me.

I rolled my eyes at her. “Do you believe this guy?” I asked.

“I know!” said Eileen, who sort of misread me (a real habit of hers). “One of the last few People of Peace in the world, and he’s right here in Iowa! He told me all about how he’s helping make your wishes come true, just like a regular fairy godmother.”

“Fairy
godmofo
,” said Gregory. “Let’s call it that. I’m nobody’s mother.”

She laughed again.

“By the way, Jennifer,” he went on, “the school doesn’t want to cover the expense of towing the Wells Fargo Wagon from your house, so you’ll have to find a way to move it.”

“I’m not paying for it,” I said.

“Then you’ll have to be creative,” he said.

Eileen probably thought
that
was him trying to inspire and challenge me, too.

I rolled my eyes and took a seat behind Cathy, where she wouldn’t see me. I wasn’t up to looking her in the eye, and if I confronted her she’d just say I was planning to attack her again.

She was holding court among a bunch of freshmen. She was doing her first show—and it had totally gone to her head.

“I want to do a really serious,
difficult
role next time,” she was saying. “Like, I want to see a parent die. Or have to breast-feed onstage. They can do that at some colleges.”

I giggled as quietly as I could as she went on about how she was going to stay awake for seventy-two hours to look old and frumpy enough for her role as the mayor’s wife. That was okay for opening night, but I hated to think what she’d look like for the Saturday show.

Wouldn’t it have been easier just to
act
?

One time at the Shakespeare Club (which I still attended, since it wasn’t a school club), we had this speaker who said the reason Shakespeare was so brilliant was that he was more alive than everyone else. Like, the average person walking down the street was maybe 50 percent alive, but Shakespeare was 100 percent alive. He saw layers of meaning in every mundane thing that happened. He could, like, hear the secrets of the universe blowing in the wind.

I didn’t feel like I could be much more than 20 percent alive myself. But at least I didn’t think that getting a small role in a high school play made me the toast of the New York avant-garde or whatever.

Once she noticed I was behind her, Cathy turned to me.

“Hi,” she said.

I just stared at her.

“Hey,” she said. “I’m totally sorry about yesterday.”

“Yeah, right,” I said.

“Seriously,” she said. “I thought they’d just, like, scare you a little. I didn’t know they’d toss you into suspension!”

She snickered, like it was funny or something. It wasn’t funny to me.

I was about to tell her so when the bell rang and Gregory Grue jumped up onto the stage.

“Hoo hoo!” he shouted. “Another rehearsal is upon us, and another chance to improve the show, yourselves, and your community. As your director, I’m going to be making some changes in the casting toward all those ends. Where’s Cathy Marconi?”