Extraordinary<li>

by Adam Selzer

  “Nice to meet you,” Vlad said.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “How’s that friend of yours?” Murray asked.

  “He’s gone into hiding, like you suggested.”

  “She’s got this friend whose parents are vampires,” Murray explained to Vlad. “They want to do a diciotto, and I figure his best shot is just staying someplace they’d have to break into until we get those outlawed.”

  “Five, ten years, tops,” said Vlad. “I know that seems like a while to you, but it doesn’t seem like too much when you’re immortal.”

  “And hey,” said Murray, “nowadays you can go to college online, get your laundry sent out, whatever. No reason to get off your couch, anyway, am I right?”

  “Sure,” I said. “He’ll be fine.”

  A couple of hours later, I met up with Jason and Amber in the parking lot and told them I’d gotten the date, and that Cathy had actually helped.

  “Marconi?” said Amber. “And you don’t think she’s just setting you up to embarrass you?”

  “She might be,” I said. “But she got me the date, so I don’t care what she’s planning to do.”

  “So what did she do?” Amber asked. “Not that I’m surprised you could do it or anything, but I want to know!”

  I blushed a bit more, then told them the story.

  The three of us looked at one another, then Jason and Amber started laughing. I actually felt a bit bad for Cathy—she was going to all this trouble, and saving my butt, and I was sure that Fred was never going to convert her.

  When we got to Jason’s house, we found Mutual pacing back and forth, looking scatterbrained and manic, like this was prison and he’d been in the hole for twelve hours—not just hanging around while we were all in school.

  “I have an idea,” he said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Gorilla suit,” he said.

  “Gorilla suit?”

  “I’ll get a gorilla suit. And I’ll just wear that every time I go out, so they won’t know it’s me.”

  Amber shook her head. “Sweetie,” she said, “I think they’ll guess that something weird is going on if they see a guy in a gorilla suit coming out of the house.”

  Mutual made a sort of half-scream, half-grunt noise. The kind of noise you make after you stand in line for three hours and find out they don’t have the form you need to sign, then you stub your toe as you’re walking out the door.

  “It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours, and I’m going crazy!” he said. “It’s like they’re still keeping me locked down. Only now I’m letting them!”

  “Maybe we can get you moved someplace else,” I said. “I saw the vampire honor guard in action today—I’m sure they could move you to a place of your own.”

  I had been fantasizing about this all day, actually.

  Once I had some money, the four of us could rent a little cottage together in the South of Grand area, or maybe one of those Craftsman-style houses in the neighborhood near the Playhouse, and paint the walls all sorts of funky colors. There would be a view of the city skyline from the roof, where we would have picnics. Life would be great, even if he could never leave.

  But he wasn’t thinking that far ahead. He kicked the ground a couple more times.

  “And I don’t even want to think about what might happen if you don’t get that date with Fred,” he went on. “I should be out there, helping you!”

  “Oh, I got that, actually,” I said.

  He stopped kicking and looked up.

  “You did?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Cathy thought that if she set him up with me, he’d decide to convert her. It’ll never work, but I got a date out of it.”

  “But I thought he hated dances.”

  I smiled. “Well, I think she promised him I’d do a lot more than just kissing.”

  “Okay,” said Mutual. “But … you won’t, right?”

  “She couldn’t if she wanted to,” said Amber. “You probably never saw all the commercials, since you didn’t have a TV up there, but this one girl let a vampire squeeze her butt, and it bruised so badly they had to amputate!”

  “Is that how it happened?” asked Jason. “I always imagined him just squeezing it right off.”

  “Ew!” said Amber, though she was laughing.

  “I wouldn’t let him do anything even if I could,” I said. “As soon as I get that kiss, I’ll thank him for a wonderful evening and be on my way.”

  And I gave Mutual a kiss, but his face didn’t light up this time.

  “It’s actually kind of mean,” said Jason. “Getting his hopes up like that. Poor guy’s been a high school horn-dog who can’t get any action without killing the girl for decades now.”

  “He’ll understand when I explain it was life or death,” I said. “I just hope I don’t screw it up. Should I get something … enticing to wear?”

  “Try not to see him at all between now and then,” said Amber. “Not that you couldn’t entice him, but now that you’ve got the date, don’t give him a chance to change his mind.”

  I nodded. “Good point.”

  We talked over my options, and in the end I decided to skip school altogether—the less I saw of Fred, Cathy, Smollet, and Gregory Grue, the better. I sent Fred a text saying I wasn’t feeling very well, so I’d be staying home the next day to make sure I was feeling strong enough to make it to the dance on Saturday.

  I didn’t realize it, but I had just confirmed the stories he’d heard about my health.

  He immediately sent one back telling me to “be strong and do what you need to do!”

  Meanwhile, Mutual stared up at the ceiling. After a couple of minutes he stepped away from the conversation and flopped down on the couch. The rest of the evening, when he talked at all it was just low muttering again, like his first night in town, only even weaker. He was back to being broken.

  Of course, now that I look back, I shouldn’t have been so smug and happy, either. I was so blinded by my delusion that I’d pulled off an impossible scheme that I wasn’t thinking about the things I should have been thinking about.

  Like the fact that I still had a unicorn stinking up my toolshed that I was too afraid to check on.

  And I probably should have been more worried about this “vampire friend” of Gregory’s, and whether it was a clue that Wilhelm or his clan was really up to no good.

  I should have been wary of what Cathy’s real motives were. The fact that she wanted me to go to the dance with Fred was super-suspicious.

  And I should have known that with forty-eight hours to go until the dance, there was no way that Gregory wouldn’t be looking for a way to screw things up.

  Jenny, you were born to be extraordinary.

  —Eileen

  Some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon ’em.

  —Shakespeare

  twenty

  I don’t usually like to disagree with Shakespeare, but I’m not really disagreeing with him if I say no one is born great. I’m just disagreeing with Malvolio, the character in Twelfth Night who said that. And Malvolio is sort of a dork.

  I don’t believe anyone is born great, or born extraordinary. Well, Shakespeare was, maybe, and I guess I can think of a couple of other artists and stuff who just seemed to be channeling something divine instead of living their own life sometimes, but that’s about it. The rest of us have to work for it.

  And sometimes even working for it isn’t enough. You really do have to have it thrust upon you to get you started.

  That’s pretty much what happened to me. If your life gets extraordinary enough, you might end up with no choice but to start being an extraordinary person.

  * * *

  Friday morning, I told Mom I had a headache and didn’t want to go to school. I had never faked sick before, so she didn’t doubt me.

  Just to make sure my date for the next night was still on, I sent Fred a text saying I couldn’t wait for the dan
ce.

  He sent back a smiley face, so I figured I was okay for the day. I spent the morning on the Internet, trying to see if anyone else had ever survived the threat of death by way of a fairy godparent.

  By noon, I think I had read every decent webpage about fairies and known species of post-humans, both living and extinct, in the world, and hadn’t found anything that would explain Gregory Grue. He must have been part of one of the “uncontacted tribes” that were known to exist here and there.

  If they only came out one year out of every twenty, it made sense that we wouldn’t know much about them. They hadn’t been in the world at all since the other post-humans went public.

  I still had Melinda’s piano lesson to teach that day and couldn’t really afford to cancel it, so in the early afternoon I forced myself away from the computer and sat down at the piano to refresh my memory on the piece she was working on. I was just about done when I heard a knock.

  I looked up to see Mrs. Smollet’s face.

  “What do you want?” I asked, through the window. “You’re not invited here.”

  “I hate to interrupt your attempt to play hooky,” she said.

  “I’m playing piano, not hooky,” I said in my best smart-aleck voice.

  “I needed to confirm that you’re still alive,” she said.

  “Well, obviously I am.”

  “I can see that,” she said. “But there’s a rumor going around school that you were killed by Wilhelm’s clan this morning.”

  Now I stood up.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I know it’s nonsense,” she said. “But I was sent to check on you.”

  “Well, here I am,” I said. “You can leave now.”

  I went back to playing piano, but she didn’t leave.

  “Can I come in?” she called through the window.

  “You can see I’m alive,” I said. “What else do you need?”

  “Please?”

  I sighed and opened the window so that she could hear better. I wouldn’t have let her into my house for anything.

  “I spoke to Christopher Marlowe,” she told me. “Or to his assistant, at least. I think I could arrange for you to meet him. You could hear some first-hand stories about Mr. Shakespeare.”

  “And all I have to do is convince a friend to become a teenage member of the walking undead,” I said. “Some bargain.”

  She looked a bit uncomfortable.

  “Jennifer,” she said, “I don’t much care for diciottos, myself. But I know that his parents are determined to hold one, and I believe the best thing I can do is find a way to make it a quick and relatively painless one for him. You’re the key to that.”

  “The best thing you can do is stop them altogether,” I said.

  “They’ll do this with or without you and me, Jennifer,” she said. “Think about what you’re putting him through. If you don’t convince him to convert quickly, they’ll put him through psychological torment you can’t even imagine.”

  I turned away from her and went back to playing, trying to pick out the Twilight Zone music just to bug her. When I turned back to look at her again, she had disappeared.

  There wasn’t going to be any diciotto. Not if I could help it. We’d keep Mutual in hiding until his parents couldn’t even think about doing it without getting killed by the council.

  I assumed that Smollet was just lying about the rumors as an excuse to bug me about Mutual, but when I went upstairs to my nightstand, where I had left my phone, I found that I had about fifty texts from Jason and probably a hundred texts and missed calls from Amber.

  Something weird was going on, all right. Amber and Jason knew I was staying home—they shouldn’t have had any reason to believe I was dead because I wasn’t in school.

  I called Amber, even though she would have been in class, and she picked up.

  “What’s going on?” I asked her.

  “Oh, thank God you’re alive!” she said. “When your number called, I was afraid it would be your mom using your phone!” Then I heard her shout out “It’s her! She’s alive!” and heard the sound of people cheering.

  It’s kind of nice to hear people cheer that you’re alive. Just saying.

  “What the hell is going on?” I asked.

  “When you didn’t show up to class, people started saying Wilhelm had killed you.”

  “He’s busy being dead,” I said. “And if his clan comes to town, the honor guard will tear them new ones.”

  “Well, thank God!” she said. “I didn’t believe that you were dead, but it was hard not to wonder, with everything else that happened today.”

  “What did happen?”

  “Cathy got converted,” Amber said. “She’s a vampire now, once she wakes up from the coma.”

  This wasn’t as bad as it sounded. It’s actually a very good sign if you’re in a coma after being converted. The people who don’t survive the operation usually just plain die right away—they don’t get as far as being in a coma.

  Still. She had been converted. At school, even!

  “Oh my God!” I said.

  “I know!” she said. “They found her in a bathroom stall, slumped on the floor. Do you believe it? She got converted in the bathroom! Ew!”

  “So who did it to her?”

  “We don’t know,” she said. “No one knows anything. Most people are saying it was Fred.”

  “No way,” I said. “Why would Fred have converted Cathy? He was totally against that.”

  “Well, I’m keeping that quiet,” she whispered. “If it wasn’t him, people will think it was Will’s clan or something and they’ll go nuts. But as far as I can guess, it’s either them, or that plan of hers to impress Fred with her selflessness actually worked!”

  “There’s no way that worked,” I said. “It had to be Will’s clan. Is the honor guard there?”

  “Some of them are. A few got sent to Canada to check on the clan, though.”

  “Let me get Fred on the phone,” I said. “I’ll get to the bottom of this.”

  I felt myself starting to shake again.

  This threw everything right back into chaos.

  I sent a couple of texts to Fred, but he didn’t reply. There was no answer when I tried to call him.

  I put on the TV news, but there was no mention of anything going on yet—whatever was happening wasn’t enough of a story to hit the cable news channels. I couldn’t even find anything about it online, except for a couple of status updates from people in school who were updating all their pages and stuff from their phones. They didn’t seem to know anything Amber hadn’t told me.

  But I left the news on all through Melinda’s piano lesson, and tried to text Fred about every thirty seconds.

  Then, while I tried to eat a frozen pizza for dinner, there was a story on the local news about a conversion in a local school. There was speculation that this all had to do with both the dance and the stuff in town being painted purple on Tuesday, but authorities were dismissing it, and the school said the dance would still go on the next night.

  As I drove out to the weekly Human/Post-Human Alliance meeting, I tried to get Fred on the phone at every stop sign. There was still no answer.

  When I got to the armory, the whole place was a madhouse. Everyone was running around like crazy, and there were actually news cameras, which we normally never had.

  Dave, the chairman, was onstage shouting for order.

  “We’ll cover everything today,” he said. “And I can assure everyone that there’s no undue cause for alarm! There have been no attacks on humans. The conversion was consensual. Everyone, please sit down!”

  Vlad tapped Murray on the shoulder, and the two of them stepped away from me to discuss something as everyone took their seats.

  “Okay,” said Dave. “I’m going to bring up Principal Ward Jablonski of Cornersville Trace High School to talk about the conversion that took place at his school today, then we’ll deal with everything else, okay?”
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  There was polite applause as Jablonski came onstage. The news cameras got right up in his face.

  Corey came over and put a hand on my shoulder, and I just sort of shook him off.

  “Not today,” I said.

  I couldn’t figure out why everyone was acting nuts. Conversions in schools had happened before. This wasn’t anything new. Something else—something very wrong—was happening. Just when I needed things to go right.

  “As far as we’re concerned, there was no incident, per se, today,” Jablonski said, though he seemed pretty nervous to me. “Cathy Marconi had signed a letter of intent months ago. She also signed a letter of consent today, she was of legal age, and there was no sign of struggle. The main issue for us was that, uh, what went on in that bathroom was”—he paused and chuckled awkwardly a bit—“was way over the line in terms of appropriate behavior in a school. Obviously, the vampire who performed the operation shouldn’t have been in the girls’ bathroom.”

  People giggled a little, but I could tell they were all nervous.

  “Now, the young lady had actually been spending the day in in-school suspension for having attacked a vampire herself,” he went on. “The secretary said Miss Marconi had seemed terribly agitated for some reason, and at lunch she begged for permission to be excused to use the bathroom, and, well, she never came back.”

  I raised my hand but didn’t wait to be called on. “Do you think it was Fred who converted her?” I asked.

  “Well, we assume so,” said Mr. Jablonski. “He wasn’t known to be in school today, but … Next question, please.”

  “What if it was Wilhelm’s clan?” someone shouted. “Why aren’t you canceling the dance?”

  “We’ve sent guard members to Canada to keep that clan under conrol,” said Jablonski. “But even if they were involved, if we don’t have the dance, we’re just letting them win.”

  “Where’s Fred now?” I asked. “What’s he saying?”

  Jablonski turned pale.

  “I’m going to turn things over to the chairman,” he said. “No further questions, please.”