by Adam Selzer
Gregory just laughed.
“She’ll still be intact if everyone plays ball, kiddo. But what you’re going to do now is the favor I asked you for, which will twist the knife even farther inside her guts. You’re going to get her boyfriend to kiss you at the dance. The guy you’ve been dreaming about!”
“Fred?”
“None other! That’s the guy I want you to kiss.”
“I assumed it was Mutual!”
He laughed. “It could have been,” he said. “But you also wished for Cathy to be miserable, so I went with having you kiss her boyfriend. She’ll see you kissing him and realize that you’ve taken everything from her—her part, her boyfriend, everything!”
“Oh God,” I said.
“So if you think I’m being mean,” he said, “remember—you’re the one who wished for what you wished for. You brought it on yourself. You wouldn’t have to kiss her boyfriend if you hadn’t wished for her to be miserable.”
“He’s not her boyfriend anymore,” I said. “They broke up this afternoon.”
“I know,” said Gregory, “but she’s just mad at him. She didn’t stop caring about him. I’d say they’ll be back together in two weeks if he doesn’t find someone new, which gives you a nice little window of opportunity. And if that dance ends and Fred hasn’t kissed you on the dance floor, you’ll die.”
And he tossed some glitter above his head and let it rain down onto him. Some fell through the space between his legs and into the toilet.
“Well, I unwish what I wished,” I said. “I don’t want to be a part of this deal.”
“I told you that’s not how it works,” he said. “You don’t get a choice here. I got you Mutual back, I saw to it that that other boy ended up miserable, and now I’m granting your wish of making Cathy Marconi suffer. Now you have to get her boyfriend to kiss you at the dance, or you’ll die. Simple as that. Even if you go right back to Mutual at the end of the night, she’ll still know you did it, and it’ll haunt her forever!”
Gregory grinned and took a long chug of beer. My knees were shaking as he hopped down from the toilet and walked out of the stall, past me and over to the mirror, where he took off his hat and started dragging a comb across his greasy hair. Bits of grease actually came flying out like spittle splashing against the mirror. He ran his fingers through his hair, then smeared the grease on his overcoat before pulling a cigar from his pocket and lighting it.
And, for no good reason, he started to whistle and dance a little jig while I slumped back against the wall.
He sang a bit of “Bang Bang Lulu,” the song he’d been singing at McDonald’s. I sang “Goodnight, Ladies,” which was the same tune, right along with him to keep from hearing too much of what he was singing (none of which could be printed in a book for this age group).
When he finished up a verse about a guy with no teeth, he stood in front of me with a more serious look on his face.
“Now, let me give it to you straight, kiddo,” he said. “I’d say the odds that you’re going to get Fred to kiss you at the dance are somewhere between slim and zilch. So the minute the dance ends, you will die.”
I very nearly barfed.
He took a long drag on his cigar and exhaled. This time I definitely saw faces in the smoke rings. They all looked like teenage girls. Some were in old-fashioned bonnets. One looked like she was from the 1940s, and one was a hippie. They looked like they were trying desperately to talk to me before they dissipated and vanished into the air, but no sound came out of their mouths.
“Those faces,” I said. “Are those …?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Aren’t they lovely? They all got their wishes, but they didn’t keep their end of the deal. See the one in the bonnet? Her job was to count all the grains of rice in a bag. And the bag kept refilling itself! Ha!”
“That’s terrible.”
“But on the bright side,” he said as the last of the smoke withered away, “there’s another option for you.”
His grin got even wider.
“What?” I asked.
“You can’t really be killed if you’re already dead,” he said. “So if you want, I can arrange to have you made into a vampire ahead of time. You’ll satisfy the void in the universe, and you’ll still be able to walk the earth and kiss your boyfriend.”
“I can’t possibly convert,” I said. “There’s a whole process you have to go through before you can do the operation. You have to sign a letter of intent at least a week prior, and the dance is in a few days.”
“Oh, I know that,” he said. “You need a letter of intent a week ahead, then a letter of consent on the day of the conversion. But we can get you one of those when the time comes, and you signed the letter of intent on Friday.”
“No I didn’t!” I said.
“Sure you did.” He pulled a sheet of paper out of the inside pocket of his overcoat. “You probably should have read the thing I had you sign when I dropped off the Wells Fargo Wagon, kiddo.”
I felt my face starting to burn.
“I like to plan ahead,” he said. “I can’t use the magic I get for myself, so I have to find creative ways to make it pay. I have a vampire buddy who pays me very, very well to bring him girls he can convert legally. More than I’d make using magic for stock tips or to rob a bank.”
He smiled again, used a paper towel to wipe his hands, then shoved it in his mouth and took a bite.
“Your buddy sounds like a sick bastard to me,” I said. “What, does he get his kicks converting girls?”
Gregory swallowed. “It’s like a spiritual thing for him,” he said. “Like a missionary performing baptisms.”
“Right,” I said. “That operation isn’t just dunking someone’s head in the water.”
He moved in closer, looking at me like Jason’s old pet snake used to look at mice just before it leaped out and broke their necks so it could swallow them whole.
“You won’t even have to feel it,” he said. “I’ll cast a little spell to put you to sleep, and then my vampire friend will take care of everything. You’ll still die the minute the dance ends, but the death won’t take, since you’ll already be undead. It’s either that or you can drop dead and stay that way. Your choice, kiddo.”
Some choice. Dying on the spot or becoming a teenager forever. Either way, my chances of ever being an extraordinary person were shot. You can’t grow when your brain doesn’t mature.
Gregory took another bite of his paper towel, then offered me a piece. I shook my head.
“Even if I got converted, isn’t there a fifty-fifty chance I’d die and stay dead?” I asked. “It’s a dangerous operation.”
“Oh, we can do better than that,” he said. “That statistic is a bit skewed by all the vampires who try to do conversion without knowing what they’re doing. They don’t exactly teach it down at the Shaker Heights Institute of Technology, you know. You have to learn by trial and error. A vampire who can do it well can almost guarantee you’ll come out okay.”
“And this sicko friend of yours can do it well?”
“Yeah,” he said. “He’s a real pro.”
Even back when becoming a vampire was a major status symbol a few years back, I never went through that “omigod I wish I could be a vampire and live forever” phase, like a lot of girls.
Having to be seventeen for a full year is bad enough.
If I had to stay this way, I’d just end up all emo and mopey and douchey, like every other teenage vampire. Like, all the dark side that I kept under the surface would probably become all of who I was. There was no way I would end up being some intellectual hippie peace chick. I’d be carrying my crowbar everywhere I went, and I’d be strong enough to do a whole lot of damage with it.
“You don’t have to decide right now,” said Gregory. “You can take your chances and try to get Fred to go out with you if you want. But you’ll never manage it. We both know it. If the dance comes around and you don’t think you’re getting kissed, I�
�ll be by your car, waiting. I’ll have a letter of consent ready for you to sign, and a cigar that’ll put you to sleep.”
I gave him a dirty look and tried to be brave.
“Go to hell,” I said.
“I’ve been there,” he said. “Take my word for it, you do not want to be there during tourist season.”
He wandered over to the bathroom mirror and started drawing in the fog with his finger—the drawing was either a dog’s face or a naked woman; I couldn’t tell. But I could certainly guess. He signed it by writing a swear word in the bottom corner.
“It’s really very nice of me,” he said, “giving you a way to get around the deal. I get paid and all, but it’s still very nice of me, don’t you think?”
“You’re a dick,” I said.
“So’s your old man,” he chuckled.
Everything he had said kept sinking in, until finally I buried my face in my hands and just started to cry. I was facing death, and it was all my fault for being such a terrible person.
When I dared to look up, Gregory was gone.
I sat there and sobbed and thought for a few minutes about all the things I had done wrong.
I was a fraud. A completely ordinary girl who wanted more misery than happiness in the world. More violence than peace.
And now I had to either seduce a vampire or choose between dying and becoming a vampire myself, which meant that I’d be this miserable and pathetic forever.
I wanted to grow up.
I wanted to live my life.
After a while, Amber came into the bathroom.
“Jennifer?” she said. “Are you okay?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “You seemed so happy a few minutes ago!”
“I’m not sure I can ever be happy again,” I told her.
She looked over at the mirror, at the swear words and the drawing of the naked woman, then back at me.
“Did you do that?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“Did Mutual do something wrong?” she asked. “You’ve got to give him some time, sweetie. He’s still new to all this stuff.”
“No,” I said. “He’s been perfect today. It’s all me.”
“What’s the problem?”
“I’m a terrible, terrible person,” I said.
“Oh, sweetie!” she said as she gave me a massive hug. “No you’re not. You’re awesome! Everyone thinks so.”
“No,” I said. “I’m terrible, and fat.”
“You’re no fatter than I am. Who cares? You look great!”
“I’m also mean, and rotten, and a big fraud. And now I have to get Fred to kiss me at the dance.”
“Okay, back up,” she said. “Explain that last part.”
I took a deep breath and gave her the short version of the story. The little weirdo who had called me Grimace was some sort of magical pre-human who was using a limited allowance of magic to grant me a few wishes, including having Mutual come to town, but now I had to get Fred to kiss me at the dance, or I’d take my last breath in the high school gym—if I didn’t want to become a vampire, so the death wouldn’t take. And it was all because I’d wished for Cathy to be miserable.
When I got through the story, Amber’s mouth was hanging open as if she were a codfish or something. I was sure, for a second, that she was horrified to find out what a spiteful, awful person I was.
But then she took a step back, looked at the drawing in the mirror again, and turned back to me and started to chuckle.
“You think this is funny?” I asked.
She moved from chuckling into actual guffawing.
“First of all,” she said, “you are just about the least spiteful and hateful person I’ve ever met. You’ve never intentionally harmed anyone or anything, except for some cheap crap from the dollar store.”
“And Cathy Marconi’s nose.”
“That was an accident, sweetie! You felt terrible about it.”
“Seriously, though!” I said. “I’m being stalked by a fairy godmofo, and I’m probably going to die! This isn’t funny!”
“Yes it is!” she said, between laughs. “That’s what’s so funny. There’re, like, a million girls out there who are saying ‘Omigod, I’ll just die if I don’t get to go to the dance!’ But you really mean it.”
She laughed some more.
“You don’t think I’m awful?” I asked.
“Jennifer,” she said, “this is the kind of thing that could only happen to you. First you almost get kicked out of town over a sixth-grade spelling bee, and now this. You’re totally going to survive it, even if this Grue guy isn’t just messing with you. We’ll all help. It won’t even be hard!”
That was when I first cracked a smile. Not a big one or anything, but one corner of my mouth turned up a little.
I really think that if Amber hadn’t come in and started laughing, I would have ended up sitting in the corner, rocking back and forth and crying. I probably would have kept doing it until the very night of the dance.
But instead, after a few minutes of talking to her, I stood up, stretched out, did a karate chop in the air, and said,
“Well, let’s do this thing.”
Amber always did make me feel braver.
I wasn’t some terrible person who deserved to be miserable, damn it.
I was St. Jennifer the Purple.
And I had the best friends a person could ever want. As long as they were around, I was sure I could handle finding a way to get Fred to kiss me. How hard could it be to get some guy to like me just long enough to kiss me at a dance?
And I could deal with a little weirdo like Gregory Grue. He’d be out of magic and back living in the trees soon enough.
When we came out of the bathroom, the radio was playing the Beatles’ version of “Till There Was You.” Jason and Mutual were still playing Pac-Man.
“You okay?” asked Jason.
“Jennifer’s having a weird night,” Amber said. “You want to tell them everything or should I?”
“You do it,” I said. Then I leaned over and whispered, “But don’t say I wished for Mutual. I’m afraid that might be … too forward, you know?”
She nodded, then gave them a very short version. Their mouths fell open early, but the way Amber told the story made Jason start to giggle before she was halfway finished.
“So, anyway,” I said when she was done, “I need to apologize in advance, Mutual. I have to kiss another guy. It’s kind of a matter of life and death.”
He hadn’t said a word through the whole story.
But a smile spread across his face, and then he pumped a fist into the air.
“I love Iowa!” he said. “Something is always happening around here.”
We all laughed. “Mutual,” I said, “you must be the only person in the world who comes to Iowa for excitement.”
“I don’t know,” said Amber. “Someone from Nebraska might have tried it.”
Amber hadn’t told Mutual that I’d wished for him, but I’m sure it must have occurred to him that it couldn’t have been a coincidence that he got a ticket right around the time I’d been offered three wishes.
“Sounds like we’ve got a mission in front of us,” Jason said.
“An epic quest!” said Amber.
Mutual raised a can of grape soda and launched into a spirited excerpt from the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V, the Shakespeare play he and I had both read in sixth grade.
“ ‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers’!” he shouted.
“Hear, hear!” I shouted.
And for a few minutes, we sat around on top of the washing machines and talked strategy, like getting me kissed was going to be a really fun challenge.
Now, once the “Jenny” in Eileen’s book gets the assignment to kiss Fred, she and Amber embark on a whole series of harebrained schemes, like convincing Fred that she’s secretly a rock star in disguise (with help from her fairy godm
other, who takes out her wand and makes her look just like Elvis—or what’s left of him—every time she takes off her glasses).
Or pretending to be a foreign exchange student.
Or (and this was my favorite) having Amber spread a rumor that every other girl in school has the black plague, and Jenny’s the only one he can kiss if he doesn’t want to get it himself (I don’t think the plague would kill a vampire, but I bet it still isn’t the most pleasant disease to have).
Well, we really did consider all of those that night in the coin laundry on Merle Hay. But we were bright enough to know they’d never work.
In between schemes, the Jenny in the book mostly stares out her window and cries. And all that would happen to her if she didn’t get kissed is that she wouldn’t become the princess of some weird kingdom where they measure ability to govern by one’s ability to get kissed (Eileen never says exactly what she’s going to be the princess of, but my guess is Panama City).
Meanwhile, I had death hanging over my head. Death, people. The kind of thing that made Hamlet spend the better part of a six-hour play moping around his castle, acting more emo than a teenage vampire.
And what did my friends and I do?
We laughed our heads off.
We few, we happy few.
Jenny stared out her window, wishing her fairy godmother would float in from the clouds and cast her another spell. She wasn’t sure she could ever get Fred to like her without magic to help. She thought about life going on the same old way—with her not being a princess—and a tear began to form in the corner of her eye.
Sometimes, life just seemed harder than she was pretty sure it was supposed to be.
The word echoed in her head all night long: “Princess … princess … princess … princess …”
fourteen
Yeah, life’s hard, all right. But we were still laughing as we started driving back toward my house.
And you’ve probably noticed that Gregory had never said a word about making me a princess. But there is a princess in this story. In a way.
“You know what?” said Jason. “I believe your story and all, but I don’t really believe you’re going to die if you don’t get Fred to kiss you.”
