Extraordinary<li> (23 page)

Even the dumbest of you probably realize that it’s terribly humiliating to feel like you’re totally broken and beaten
and
see a word like that on your forehead. I tried to wipe my tears with my hand, then use the tears to scrub it off, but it didn’t do much good.

Finally, as I pulled out of the parking lot, I snapped.

I zipped down the road at way above the speed limit, screaming obscenities at the top of my lungs.

When I turned up the volume on the mix tape, it was playing a sort of calm song about trying to be free like a voice in a choir. I didn’t want to calm down. I didn’t want to be comforted.

I wanted to scream.

I fast-forwarded to the next song, which was faster, with a mean bass line and wicked keyboard part. It was another Leonard Cohen song, but it must have been from years later—his voice was a lot rougher, like he’d been through a
few thousand packs of cigarettes since recording the calm song.

He was singing from the point of view of some criminal mastermind who planned to take over the world, starting with Manhattan and Berlin. It rocked pretty hard. When it ended I rewound and played it again.

I totally got this song, which I later found out was called “First We Take Manhattan.”

The guy in the song had been sentenced to jail or something and now he was ready to get his revenge. By taking over the world.

He was going to break civilization just like I broke porcelain crap from the dollar store.

Man, that sounded good.

I needed to break something, too. And fast—if I became a super-strong vampire who could shatter a piece of junk just by touching it, swinging a crowbar probably wouldn’t give me the same satisfaction. This was my last chance to get that aggression out of my system—I didn’t want to take it into the afterlife with me.

But I also didn’t want to just break more cheap junk. That wasn’t going to be enough. I needed to break something
big
.

My first thought was to break the whole school, like getting Jason to use his pyro skills to build me a bomb and blowing the whole thing up. Not with anyone in it or anything—I didn’t want to hurt anyone. But I wanted to wreck something huge.

Then I thought about maybe just breaking the damned dance.

And then my old debate-team instinct started to kick in,
working hand in hand with the parts of me that loved to fantasize about people dying violent deaths and stuff.

There was a loophole I hadn’t noticed before.

The deal was that I had to get Fred to kiss me before the dance ended. I would die at the
end
of the dance.

So if the dance never ended, I wouldn’t die
.

And it couldn’t
end
if it didn’t
start.

If there was no dance, I’d still be alive when Gregory Grue’s allowance of magic wore out.

I felt like a string of Christmas lights was lighting up inside me, one at a time.

I could beat this.

Gregory Grue and his stupid spell were going to get
lawyered
!

And I was going to live. As a normal human.

I wasn’t going to be able to do it alone, probably. It was going to be a lot of work to get the dance canceled, since they were still holding it despite everything that had already happened. I’d need help from people who wouldn’t mind if the whole town wanted to kick their butts on Monday.

Luckily, I had a few friends who had been through that before.

And one who had experience with sabotage.

I rewound the tape to play “First We Take Manhattan” yet again, then turned my car toward Jason’s house. As I did, I looked at the dirty word on my forehead and began to smile.

I had a plan.

“Jenny” got lucky there. I am fairly sure that a Prius is not the kind of car that can break through a brick wall. She probably would have died in a brutal wreck.

As for the Jenmobile, it didn’t stall once on the way to Jason’s. As long as I played the tape, it ran like a dream. I later found out it was probably a residual-energy thing—I still don’t understand it, but it’s something like the way ghosts come to exist (another thing that used to be considered paranormal when I was a kid, but was pretty well explained since the post-humans went public).

The Jenmobile and I cruised clear to Jason’s house, and I knocked on the door like I was trying to break it down. I saw his face peeking out the window before he let me in.

“Hey,” he said. “What’s going on? And what’s with your forehead?”

“Never mind the forehead, I need your help, fast,” I said.

“What’s up?”

“Did you hear about the vampire-on-vampire murder today?”

“Sure,” said Jason. “Some vampire attacked another one. It happens.”

“It was Fred,” I said.

“What?” asked Jason. “Fred is
dead
?”

I nodded, and choked back a few tears. While Jason sat down on the couch, looking like he’d just been punched in the face, I took a second to hope that Fred was better off wherever he was now. He practically had to be, really. He hadn’t wanted to live forever.

But there was no time for mourning. Not yet.

Mutual came wandering up from the basement, still looking freaked out.

“Did you just say Fred got killed?” he asked.

I nodded and sniffled a bit.

“Do they know who did it?”

“Not yet,” I said. “I assume it was someone from Will’s clan. A couple of guys are heading up to Canada to check on them.”

“Wait,” said Jason. “If Fred is dead, then …”

“Then he sure as hell isn’t going to be taking me to homecoming,” I said. “But I have a plan. I can sit back and die, agree to become a vampire, or do something totally extraordinary.”

“What?”

“The deal with Gregory was that I had to get Fred to kiss me before the dance
ended
. If the dance never starts, it can’t end, and I’m home free.”

“So you want to get it canceled?” asked Jason. “They already said they’re not letting the attack or the whole thing with Cathy get in the way, or we’d just be letting them win. I don’t know what’ll get it canceled if a student getting killed doesn’t. Unless you want to bomb the school or something.”

I smiled. “We don’t have a bomb, but we’ve got a unicorn and a lot of … the word on my forehead. And a Wells Fargo Wagon. How long do you think it would take to get the smell of unicorn poop out of the gym?”

A smile spread across Jason’s face.

“I get it,” he said. “You think we should roll a wagon full of unicorn crap to school and spread it around the gym so they won’t want to have the dance there?”

“Well, I don’t want it in my car!” I said. “I’d never get the smell out and I can’t afford a new one. But we could load up the wagon with it and use the unicorn to drive it there. I need to get it to the school somehow, anyway.”

“Oh man, that’s brilliant,” said Jason. “Fred would have
loved
it.”

“We’ll do it for him,” I said. “The Fred-the-Vampire Memorial Vandalism Initiative. Let’s go get Amber!”

“I’m coming with you,” said Mutual.

“The hell you are,” I said. “You stay right here where it’s safe. There are probably some bad people out there besides your parents right now.”

“Yeah, man,” said Jason. “I don’t think there’s any law about trespassing in moving Wells Fargo Wagons. They might even already have permission for the diciotto. They could do it right in the wagon.”

Mutual kicked the floor, then collapsed onto the couch.

“I’m sorry,” I called out as Jason and I ran for my car.

I played that song about the criminal as loudly as I could as we cruised up through Preston and picked up Amber. Jason shouted what I’d told him into her ear while I drove us to my house.

“Let’s do it!” she said. “In memory of Fred!”

“For Fred!” I agreed.

I parked in the street, and we got out and I walked them up to the Wells Fargo Wagon.

“Amber,” I said, “you grew up on a horse ranch. Can you get a unicorn hitched up to a wagon?”

“Yes with a capital Hell,” said Amber.

“Good,” I said. “You guys work on hitching her up, and I’ll be right back.”

I ran inside and found three old T-shirts, then sprayed them all with perfume from my mother’s bathroom cabinet.

After tying the first shirt around my nose and mouth, I ran outside. On the way, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror: purple sweatshirt, purple hair, purple bandana.

I looked like a Batman villain.

Outside, Amber had managed to get Princess out and get the leash or harness or whatever set up. I tossed them the other shirts to tie around their faces, and we grabbed the shovels from the shed, transporting all the mess out to the wagon one shovelful at a time.

It was amazing how much Princess had generated. Another few days and she could have drowned.

Now,
there
we have an awful way to die.

The perfume covered the stench about halfway, which was barely enough to keep me from barfing, but it was
enough, since I was determined to get the job done. It was life and death for me—I was really touched that Jason and Amber were willing to go through all this for my sake, too.

“Pretty nasty, huh?” Amber shouted through her bandana.

“I never promised you a rose garden,” said Jason.

It took about nine trips each to get all the mess transferred from the shed to the wagon. Once it was all there, piled high and deep, we tossed the tools under the seat and Amber shook the reins, but Princess didn’t budge.

“Damn,” she said. “How do you start these things?”

Just then, we heard the sound of screeching tires, and Jason’s car came barreling up the road. It came to a roaring stop right in front of my house, and Mutual stepped out.

“What are you doing?” I asked. “You can drive?”

“No different from a tractor,” he said. “Well, not too different. Sorry I borrowed it without asking, Jason.”

“No problem,” said Jason. “But you should have stayed indoors.”

“Hurry up and get inside my house,” I said. “You’re not safe out here!”

“No,” he said. “I’m not missing this.”

“But it’s dangerous!”

He left the car in the road and came walking up the driveway, his long hair blowing in the autumn breeze. Damn, he looked hot.

“I didn’t come twenty-five hundred miles in a bus to live in a basement for five to ten years,” he said. “If they’re coming, let them come. What good am I anyway if I can’t stand up to a couple of stupid Victorians?”

“Are you sure?” I asked. “There’s a killer on the loose, you know.”

“I know. But I’m not missing this. I owe it to you, to Fred, and to myself to be a part of it. I’ll never forgive myself if I chicken out. If I’m gonna get caught or killed, it’s gonna be while I’m with you guys, not sitting in a basement.”

I looked at him for a second, and the look on his face told me that this wasn’t negotiable.

“You want me to go get a bandana for you?”

“I’m a farm kid,” he said. “I can take it. We had some hybrids. They all smell like this.”

This was the Mutual I had been waiting for.

The strong one who came swooping in to save me.

Not that I wasn’t prepared to save myself or anything, but he was finally looking like the gutsy kid I’d fallen for. The dork with a heart of fire and gold.

Only, now he was new and improved.

Mutual Scrivener: now with 300 percent more muscles. He was back, and he meant business.

He hopped up to the wagon, took the reins from Amber, and shouted something. Princess began to trot, and the wagon rolled out of the driveway and into the street at a slow but steady pace.

Soon we were riding through the streets of Preston toward Cornersville Trace, in a unicorn-led cart full of the smelliest stuff in the world.

Well
, I thought,
I wanted to have an unusual life!

I sang out “The Wells Fargo Wagon” song all the way up Jacqueline Terrace, making up new lines as we went along. There are a lot of lines in the song where people talk about
what they’ve gotten from the wagon, like grapefruits from Tampa and bathtubs from Montgomery Ward. I changed those to reflect what they’d be getting this time, which was … well, you know. Not a double boiler or a new rocking chair.

I’d never been more disgusted. But I’d also never felt more alive.

As we topped the hill, I could see the tops of the tallest couple of buildings in downtown Des Moines, ten miles away, like silent sentinels.

When I finished the song, I looked over at Mutual.

“You really sure you want to do this?” I asked. “We’ll probably attract attention. We can get you back to Jason’s house if we hurry.”

Mutual shook his head, braced himself, stood up as well as he could on the front of the wagon, and launched into the St. Crispin’s Day speech from
Henry V
.

My God, my heart was melting.

He wasn’t just muttering the lines, he was shouting as loudly as he could.

He paused for a second and nodded his head up and down, like he was trying to remember the rest of the speech, then kept on shouting.

“We few, we band of brothers!” I shouted. “They will tell our story! And our names will be as familiar in their mouths as household words!”