by Adam Selzer
I wasn’t used to comments about my weight back then, and hadn’t made peace with the fact that I had inherited my mother’s slightly round body type. I’ve sort of had to get used to it now that I’m kind of famous and people think they can say whatever horrible thing they want about me on Internet forums, but it was still pretty new to me at the time.
So when Kyle, the office messenger, walked into the room and told me that the principal, Mr. Jablonski, and the guidance counselor, Mrs. Smollet, wanted to see me, I didn’t argue. I would have taken any excuse to get away from Gregory, even though I didn’t much care for having to talk to Mrs. Smollet. The woman was pretty scary herself. She was a vampire, after all. And not one of the nicer ones, either.
No hair dye would stick to Jenny’s hair—no matter what she did, it always stayed purple. This drove Jenny crazy—she wanted so badly to have hair as black as ebony, and skin as white as snow. All the other girls in her class had dyed their hair black the same week they found out that vampires were real.
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Actually, by the time I was a senior, vampires had been “out of the coffin” for six years, and the whole “going goth so the vampires will like me” thing was pretty much over.
We’d all gotten used to having them around, for the most part. Most of them seemed like nice, regular people who just happened to be really strong, able to run a thousand miles per hour, and immune to aging. They hadn’t had to drink blood since the Civil War, when someone developed a vegetable compound that was even more satisfying, so they were no real threat.
But they weren’t all nice.
Victorian vampires—the ones who converted in the eighteen hundreds—are usually the worst. People in the seventeen hundreds were fairly wild and crazy, but in the eighteen hundreds the world went through a sort of prudish phase. Vampires from back then never quite got used to living in a world where women dressed in outfits that showed their ankles.
Mrs. Smollet, the guidance counselor, was one of those. She was cold and creepy, the kind of vampire who just reinforced all the worst stereotypes.
Kyle the messenger led me down the hall.
“Do you know what they want?” I asked.
Kyle shrugged. “Probably just for you to fill out a form.”
“How’ve you been, anyway?” I asked. “I haven’t seen you since I quit working in the office.”
“Same as ever,” he said. “You still in the running for valedictorian?”
“Not that I know of,” I said. “I’m already accepted at Drake, as long as I don’t flunk out or anything, so I’m not really worrying about that stuff anymore.”
“Nice.”
God, it was nice not to have to worry about my class rank. Some might call it senioritis, but I called it a necessary step toward preserving my mental health.
Kyle had me sit down on one of the chairs in front of the secretary’s desk, then disappeared on some other errand.
The door to the principal’s office opened and Mr. Jablonski poked his head out.
“Miss Van Den Berg?” he asked.
“Here I am.”
He motioned me into his office. Mrs. Smollet was standing there behind his desk with her arms crossed, like I was trespassing in her lair or something.
My ice skates were sitting on Mr. Jablonski’s desk.
“Hey!” I said. “Did you guys break into my locker?”
“So they’re yours?” Jablonski asked. “No one planted them there to set you up?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m hoping the storm will put enough ice on the sidewalk that I can skate home.”
When I saw that we were getting the first freezing rain of the year, I’d packed my ice skates. Odds that I’d actually be able to skate home were slim to none, but I thought I’d give it a shot. Jason and Amber had already agreed to follow me and give me a ride if I couldn’t make it.
Smollet eyed me skeptically.
“You were going to skate clear from Cornersville back to Preston?”
My town had grown up a lot since I was a kid, but the high school wasn’t finished being built yet, so I had to commute. It probably was a lot farther than I could possibly have skated, but I wasn’t about to admit that to Smollet.
“I was going to have help from my friends,” I said.
Mr. Jablonski looked over at Mrs. Smollet like he was going to say something, but she just glared at him. I swear he shuddered.
“Jennifer,” said Mr. Jablonski, “the blades on these skates are very sharp.”
“Sure,” I said.
“Having objects like these in your locker is a violation of the school board’s zero-tolerance policy on deadly weapons,” said Mrs. Smollet.
“You have to be kidding me,” I said.
Mr. Jablonski shook his head. “I’m afraid not. And we have to take that zero-tolerance policy very seriously.”
I knew he meant it. I’d seen kids get in trouble over having plastic wrap rubber-banded over stuff in their lunch, because rubber bands can be used as projectiles.
But I also knew that the board tended to be very random in terms of how they actually enforced that rule. I could get out of this. Jablonski looked nervous already.
I summoned all my old debate team skills and got ready for a fight. I was good at debate. I could have become a lawyer, if I wanted to give up my soul.
“Taking those skates from my locker without a warrant constitutes illegal search and seizure,” I said.
“Locker searches are perfectly legal,” Jablonski said with a sigh. “There’s a thing about it in the handbook.”
“I think the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution trumps the Cornersville Trace High School handbook.”
“Sorry, Jennifer,” said Jablonski. “Lockers are school property, not student property. We can search them all we want. Trust me, we’ve been through this mill with the stoners a few times.”
There went my first defense.
“We have to take all threats seriously, Miss Van Den Berg,” Smollet said. “And Cathy Marconi told us she was afraid you were planning to attack her again.”
I felt the blood rush to my face.
I should have known it was her. That explained the smirk.
“Then I object to the language of her accusation,” I said. “She’s implying that I’ve attacked her before, and I haven’t.”
“You broke her nose two years ago,” said Mrs. Smollet.
“That was a volleyball accident, not an attack,” I said.
Cathy used to work at the dollar store where Jason and Amber and I would go to buy stuff for me to destroy when I got stressed, so she had never quite believed it was an accident when I spiked a volleyball into her face. She’d seen what I did to those little porcelain trinkets out in the parking lot.
“Okay,” Jablonski said. “I’ll sustain your objection. But the fact stands. She thought her safety was at risk, and we found contraband materials in your locker. It’s an automatic in-school suspension.”
I had never been suspended before, and I didn’t want to start now.
I was going to have to play hardball.
“Come on,” I said. “You let people who have been seventeen for decades go to school here. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you of the events of three years ago.”
“That was an isolated incident,” Smollet said. “And you know what the Council of Elders did to Wilhelm.”
“His clan vowed revenge,” I said.
“They’ve also been banished to the Yukon Territory.”
You’ve probably already heard about the events I was talking about—when Wilhelm, a vampire from my school, attacked a girl named Alley and her zombie boyfriend, Doug, at the prom. They were only saved when feral zombies attacked.
It was a pretty messed-up prom.
“Fine,” I said. “But vampires are still more dangerous than ice skates, if you break it down to empirical evidence. Vampires have attacked a student at this school, and they could get here on foot from
the Yukon in an hour and a half. I don’t think there’s ever been an ice skate attack.”
I wanted to add “You just got lawyered, bee-yotch,” but I wasn’t stupid.
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 flirti
ng 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.
