The Awesome (3 page)

“Looks like a werewolf ate Red Riding Hood’s grandma out in Hingham and a four star vamp attack in Peabody. Gotta call Allie.”

“So what am I supposed to do all night?” Being an apprentice, even a fourth year apprentice, I couldn’t touch anything over a three star job or my mother would lose her hunting license. This translated to Mom taking off for an overnight werewolf gig while I stayed at home to watch brain-numbing reality television.

“Oh, I dunno. Study for your GED? Or maybe you can go somewhere where there are people your own age and pretend you’re normal.” She grinned as she reached for the phone. “Of course, TLC does have that show about people who eat their hair...”

“Normal. Right. Hey pot, this is kettle. You’re black.”

“I’m normal enough!”

“The kids in school used to call you the diesel dyke.” It was supposed to be a dig, but by her awful smirk, I could tell I’d missed my mark.

Back when I slogged through the dredges of angst otherwise known as junior high, my classmates thought I was a freak factory partially because I was one, but mostly because my mother was so
out there
. Every time they saw her she had different colored hair: pink, purple, sometimes green and blue. She wore military-issued combat boots, and drove either a white kidnapper van, a huge F-150 pickup truck, or a motorcycle. She was part rock star, part ninja, the secret love child of Lady Gaga and Jet Li. My friends didn’t know if they should be scared of her or worship at the shrine of Janice, so they did both to cover their bases.

“You’re so jealous of me,” she said. “Seriously though. You talk to Julie, right? Call her and see if she’s going out tonight. It’ll do you good to do something fun for once.”

“But hunting’s fun.” I picked up her coffee to bogart a sip, scrunching my face in a pucker when I realized she hadn’t sweetened it.

“Okay, something fun and not dangerous.”

“But dangerous is fun.”

“Margaret. Stop being a pain in the ass.”

“Fiiiine.”

Mom wandered into the other room with her phone. I listened to her hash out the details of that night’s job with Allie, all the while stealing misery-inducing gulps of her coffee. I was far too lazy to get the sugar from the kitchen. It was a whole ten feet away, and my chair was too comfortable to vacate. Instead I suffered through bitter crap-in-a-cup, working myself into a snit when Mom talked about cool stuff like crossbows and silver bullets.

“This sucks.”

Not wanting to sit at home brooding about the life-threatening fun fest I couldn’t attend, I picked up my burner phone, one of those jobbies you bought at 7-11 with prepaid minutes, and called my old friend Julie. Who was I kidding? She was my only friend. But one friend was better than no friends or so I told myself. I wasn’t telling Mom this, nor would I tell Julie, but if I could sucker an invite into Julie’s plans, I was on a mission. I, Margaret Cunningham would try my hand at being a slutbag.

Because ready or not, Maggie needed a promotion.

CHAPTER THREE

T
HERE
I
WAS
at eight o’clock, tarted up like a Ru Paul wanna-be, waiting for Julie. I’d used Snooki’s “two bras for extra cleavage” tip that I saw on TV, and my boobs bobbed somewhere between my chin and my eyebrows. I’d attacked my face with eyeliner, mascara, and lipstick, and somehow managed to come out not looking like a clown. This was a vast improvement over my last venture in being a girl, wherein my mother had used words like “hooker on hallucinogens” to describe my appearance. I loved her, but when she was mean, she made Attila the Hun look soft.

Allie and Tina arrived around suppertime, both of them poster children for the NRA with their big, impressive guns and camo. I couldn’t help but notice Allie’s new eye patch; considering it covered half her face, I’d have to be blind
not
to notice. She offered an explanation without prompting, her nicotine-stained teeth clenching on the end of her cigarette in what could be construed as a grin. By the slightly feral curl of her upper lip, I wouldn’t risk putting a hand near her mouth. I valued my fingers.

“A sidhe ripped it out last week,” she said. “Took his time digging around the socket with his finger, too. Made me watch him eat it afterward. Always hated those sons of bitches.”

That was all she said of it, heading out to the van and waiting for her partners. I stared after her, trying to imagine a lithe, glorious fae with its pretty hair and pointy ears eating someone’s freshly plucked eyeball. Tiny Tina snickered, clapping a ham hand on my shoulder as she passed me by.

“She’s got pink eye. Don’t be so gullible.”

“Oh, right. I totally knew that,” I said, though both Tina and I knew I’d bitten hook, line, and sinker. Allie liked to haze me. The problem was she wove lies into her regular conversation so seamlessly, I had no idea what was up and what was down. One time she told me about getting punched in the kidney by a rabid leprechaun, I’d called her on it, and was promptly presented with actual cell phone footage of a frothing-mouthed green man moaning and kicking while he got stuffed into a sack.

Who knew?

“Have fun tonight,” Mom said, tugging a baseball cap over her pink hair and reaching for her crossbow. “There’s leftover pizza in the fridge if you get hungry. Don’t be an asshat to Julie. Say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and all that other happy horseshit. Okay?”

“Uh huh.”

“Love you.”

She blew me a kiss and trotted for the van. Watching the taillights disappear over the crest of the street made me melancholy. I should have been with them, beating up werewolves and vampires, hurling holy water grenades and firing guns. I was a hunter, damn it, not some useless sack of lame wallowing in self-pity on a Saturday night.

There was only one way to ensure I wouldn’t be left behind again:
the virginity had to go.
If I couldn’t be a hunter tonight, I’d be a master seductress—a wily, conniving minx who’d lure some unsuspecting boy into my baited trap. I’d charm him with a smile and my witty banter. I’d be the type of girl every guy dreamed of with my ridiculously buoyant boobs and too-tight jeans. What did it matter if I didn’t associate with kids my age? I’d seen all of Megan Fox’s crappy high school movies. I watched
Glee
reruns. Everything I needed to know about being seventeen I’d learned from TV.

How hard could it be?

S
HORT ANSWER: HARD.
Longer answer: Julie picked me up a full half hour later than she told me she would. I would have pretended to be surprised, but I wasn’t that good of a bullshit artist. I’d been hanging out with the girl since grade school and she’d never been on time for a single thing. When I was nine years old, Janice got the bright idea to take me and a few of my school friends to Chuck E. Cheese’s for my birthday. I woke up at something like six in the morning, so excited I’d get to see the Chuck-E-Cheese logo rat I ran around the house in circles and screamed my head off. Mom’d chewed through a pack and a half of Nicorette by noon that day, finally snapping and saying if I didn’t cut the crap, she’d feed me to the bridge troll on Nantucket. As bridge trolls crapped bigger than me, I believed her, settling in front of the TV to watch cartoons until it was time to go.

Everything was cool until Julie’s Mom called us to tell us that, “Julie’d lost track of time, they’d be about an hour late.” I’d gone ballistic, of course, because an hour was forever to a kid, and I’d built Chuck E. Cheese’s up to be the mecca of childhood fun. Mom’s solution was to let me open my birthday presents right away, thus placating me long enough for Julie to get there.

It baffles me how a nine-year-old kid with the promise of pizza, slushies, video games, and a big dancing rat ‘loses track of time,’ but somehow, Julie managed it. Nearly ten years later, she still managed it. She lost at least fifteen or twenty minutes of time every day as far as I could tell.

“Nice of you to show up, wench,” I said, climbing into the side of her car. A quick glance her way and I immediately felt under-dressed. Her hair looked salon styled, her makeup was perfect. She had on a sassy skirt with crinkly fabric and a halter top, like she’d pointed at a fashion magazine and went “Yes, that” and POOF! it was on her body. It served to prove how different we were; I padded around the house in ancient sweatpants and tee shirts; she wouldn’t be caught dead in anything non-designer. She got paraffin wax manicures; I dug crusted blood and ectoplasm out from under my nails with a dagger.

Somehow we maintained a friendship, though. Part of it I chalked up to opposites attracting, part of it was she’d always been obsessed with me and Janice’s lifestyle. She thought we were the coolest of the cool with all our guns and glory. Also, she liked vampires. She totally bought into the Edward Cullen sparkly vampire crap and she knew Mom got to interact with real ones. I liked her too much to tell her how brutal and disgusting fangers were; let her have her pretty Robert Pattinson illusions.

“Uhh, should I change?” I asked. “I figured house party so jeans, but if I need something fancier... ”

“You’re fine. I’m meeting John there and I wanted to wear something cute.” She grinned and leaned over the steering wheel to peer at the house. “Is Janice home? I’ll go say ‘hi.’”

“Nope. Off on a werewolf hunt with the rest of the Bitches of Eastwick. Won’t be home ’til tomorrow.”

“Bummer. Guess we’re set to go then.”

She pulled out of the driveway and headed towards the main road. I figured I should ask about this John person she mentioned, though trying to keep track of her boyfriends required a super powered computer and a doctorate from MIT. There were too many names and faces to process. She juggled boys like a circus performer juggled flaming balls—skillfully and without fear. “Who’s John? I thought you were seeing Mike.”

Julie’s face puckered as soon as I said the name. “Mike was boring and emo. Not my bag, but it’s cool ’cause I met John through Ian a couple weeks ago. Ian’s my cousin, the one having the party. My aunt and uncle are off in Sedona doing some weird astral flight thing so we’re holding down the fort while they’re gone.”

‘Holding down the fort’ was apparently synonymous with ‘have a huge house party and get your friends drunk’ which I was totally cool with. I had a plan, see—a flawless plan to have The Sex. Parties and The Sex went hand in hand almost as closely as watching
Xena
reruns and questioning my sexuality.

“Astral flight? Like... bow-wicca-wicca astral flight?”

“Yeah, you know. You stuff.”

I peered at her from the corner of my eye. “Just because it’s got magic associated with it doesn’t mean it’s ‘me stuff.’”

“Well, yeah, but you’re into strange stuff, so I figured you’d at least know what astral flight is. It sounds super freaky to me. Like, I don’t... whatever. My aunt and uncle are weird. I feel bad for Ian.”

I wanted to correct the “you’re into strange stuff” thing to “you’re into awesome stuff” but I was too pure of a soul to do that to my nearest, dearest, and only friend. “I guess. Your idea of freaky and mine are way different. Like, rabid leprechauns? Freaky. Totally freaky, dude.”

“Wait, what?”

We spent the next twenty minutes blabbing about random stuff. I explained the leprechaun thing, she told me about her high school—mostly about her being a runner up for Prom Queen and how “Lily Petronelli is such a bitch and totally didn’t deserve to win.” I nodded and pretended I cared, which seemed to be enough for her because she talked about it non-stop for another ten minutes. I was given a reprieve when she turned the car into a nice, upper class neighborhood, announcing we were only a couple minutes away from Ian’s house. My bladder thanked her for that; I’d had about thirty thousand cups of coffee over the course of the day and I needed to break the seal.

“Man, I have to wizz like a racehorse,” I announced. “Like, whoa bad pee time. Wish I’d thought of this earlier.”

Julie eased the car onto the curb of the street, a smirk oozing across her mouth. “You’re so weird, Maggie.” She flipped on the interior light of her Ford Focus to check her makeup, turning her face this way and that to ensure she looked Top Model gorgeous. “You say the strangest stuff. It’s cool—you’re funny—but you’re strange.” She skimmed the tip of her finger around her mouth to capture any unappealing smudges, and then did Duck Face. Duck Face was supposed to be a ‘come hither’ kissy pucker thing, but it more resembled a genetic deformity. I was pretty sure if I wanted The Sex, Duck Face was not the way to go.

“Yeah, well, I’m not the girl whose aunt is off licking a cactus for spiritual growth.”

“That’s on my aunt, not me. Ian’s normal, thank God. I think you’ll like him. He’s one of those brooding quiet types.”

I
WASN’T SURE
what part of my disposition suggested I liked brooding quiet types, but the six condoms in my pocketbook told me to shut the hell up and go with it. If Julie said I’d like him, like him I would if for no other reason than he was male and had a wang.

“By the way, love the haircut,” she said, getting out of the car. “It’s pixie cute.”