by Holly Black
This time, there was blood.
Lots and lots of blood.
Even Lamont seemed surprised by so much blood. He blinked, letting go of the scissors.
Santa went, “Glurk.”
He tottered around in a circle, pawing at the scissor-ends. His legs tangled on the chair. He crashed down. He shuddered. He kicked. He gurgled. Then he didn’t do anything at all.
No one spoke for a minute.
They looked at Candy. They looked at Santa. They looked at Jingle, out in the hall.
They looked at each other. Cookie crumbs on their chins, chocolate on their lips, sticky gumdrops in their teeth.
Eventually, Mr. Gregson or somebody would come. Miz Parker would get let out of the janitor’s closet. Teachers would be mad, and parents would be called.
But that was eventually. That was later.
For now, the kids on the naughty list still had plenty of presents to open.
The Perfect Dinner Party
Cassandra Clare & Holly Black
1. Relax! Guests won’t have fun unless their hostess is having fun too.
You walk into the dining room, alone. You’re wearing a green shift, pale as grass, and have pulled your hair back into a glittering barrette. You’re biting your lip.
“Lovely,” Charles says and you look pleased. You dressed up for him, after all.
You explain that you’re sorry that your friend Bethenny couldn’t come. She had a dance recital and besides, she was too chicken to sneak out of the house. Not like you.
You met Charles the way he always meets girls. He hangs around the mall just like he used to when he was alive. Back then, he wore skinny ties and listened to new wave. He’s excited that skinny ties are back. See? He’s wearing one tonight.
You look over at me nervously. You probably think I’m too young to drink the bottle of wine you stole from your parents. You think I’m not going to be any fun.
Or maybe you’re just wondering what happened to the rest of the guests.
When I smile at you, you look away uneasily. That just makes me smile wider.
When I was a littler girl than I am now, there was this boy who would always hang around. One day, he was over at the house annoying me (he would do this thing where he put his finger on my chin and asked me “what’s this?” and when I looked down, he would bop me in the nose and laugh) and I realized the cupboard had a package of almond-flavored tea in it.
Since this was back in the eighties, cyanide was in the news a lot. We all knew it tasted like almonds. It was a pretty simple thing to make us mugs of tea—mine, plain, his, the almond-flavored kind.
Then I started telling him how sorry I was that I’d poisoned him. I kept it up until he started crying. Then I kept it up some more.
Our dinner parties always remind me of how much fun that was.
2. A few simple changes to your usual décor
will give your house that party feeling.
Charles pulls out the chair for you and that seems to reassure you that things are going just the way you thought they would. You see a pair of teenagers, dressed up in their church clothes, using their parent’s good china to have a dinner party in the middle of the night.
A grownup party, with candles burning brightly in silver candlesticks and glass stemware and napkins folded into the shape of swans. Charles pours from the bottle of wine he’s already decanted an hour ago.
You take a big sip. That’s the first strike against you. Clearly you have no idea what to do with good wine—how to catch its scent, how to swirl it around the glass to see the color. You glug it like you’re washing down a handful of pills.
You put the glass down with a bang on the table. I jump. “That was great!” you say. There’s lipstick smeared on your teeth.
Charles looks over at me. I frown at him. Disapproving. He could have done better, my look says.
Charles gets up. “I’ll get the first course.”
Silence falls between us as soon as he’s out of the room. I don’t mind. I can be silent for hours. But you’re not used to it. I see you squirm in your chair. Put your hands up to fiddle with your barrettes, unclasp them, close them again. Fiddling. You say, “So you’re Charles’ little sister, huh? How old are you, anyway?”
“Fourteen,” I lie. I try to keep the bitterness out of my voice, because there is nothing worse than a disagreeable hostess, but it’s hard. Charles is nearly grown, old enough to pass for an adult, while I am struggling to pass for fourteen.
With your flat chest and wide eyes, you look fairly young yourself. Another strike against you.
Charles comes back a moment later with bowls of soup. He places yours down first. That’s proper. He’s turning into a real gentleman, Mr. DuChamp would say.
“Are your parents on a trip?” you say. “They must really trust you to leave you here alone.”
“They trust Charles,” I say with a sly smile.
That makes her smile at Charles too, entrusted to take care of his little sister. And it makes me think of my parents, down in the dirt basement, buried six feet under with pennies over their eyes.
Mr. DuChamp said that that was so they could pay the ferryman to take them to the shores of the dead. Mr. DuChamp thought of everything.
3. Choose guests who are interesting, fun,
and who will invigorate the conversation.
You pick up your spoon and dig it into the soup like you’re scooping out a melon. I am fairly sure that when you do start eating, you will make slurping sounds.
You do. Strike three. I look over at Charles with my eyebrows up, but he is ignoring me.
“So,” you say, around your soup, “did Charles tell you where we met?”
I shake my head, although I know. Of course I know. It’s always the same. I can’t imagine why you think I’d be interested. Mr. DuChamp always used to say that guests should never talk about themselves. They should make polite conversation on topics of interest to everyone.
“It was at a concert.” You say the name of a band. A band I’ve never heard of.
“They were okay,” said Charles, “but you were amazing.”
Only the fact that it would be a massive breach of etiquette prevents me from making a gagging sound.
You both get into a long, dull conversation weighing the merits of Ladyhawke, Franz Ferdinand, Le Tigre, The Faint, and the Killers. Charles forgets himself so far as to exclaim how happy he is that Devo are making another album. Your blank stare is warning enough for him to clear his throat and suggest that you would like more wine.
You do. In fact, you drink it so fast that he pours yet another glass full. A fine bright color has come into your cheeks. Your eyes shine. I doubt you have ever looked lovelier.
Mr. DuChamp always used to say that appearances weren’t everything. He said that the way a woman carried herself, the way she spoke, and the perfection of her manners were more important than how red her lips and cheeks were, or how shining her eyes. “Looks fade,” he said, “except, of course, in our case.” He would raise a glass to me. “Age cannot wither her,” he would say, “nor custom stale her infinite variety.”
Whatever that meant.
I lift the soup spoon to my mouth, smile and lower it again. It was Mr. DuChamp who taught me how to pretend that I was eating, how gestures and laughter distracted your guests so that they’d never notice you didn’t take a bite of food.
Mr. DuChamp taught us lots of things. He taught Charles to stand up when a lady entered the room, and how to take a lady’s coat. He told me never to refer to an adult by his or her first name and to sit with my legs uncrossed, always. He didn’t like pants and didn’t approve of girls wearing them. He taught us to be punctual for all social engagements, even though once he moved in with us, the only social engagements we ever had were with him.
When he first came, it was horrible. I woke in the middle of the night because I heard something downstairs. I thought it was my parents fighting—they fought
a lot: about the house, which always needed repairs, about her habit of hiding booze and pills, about girls in the office who called him on the weekends. I padded down to the kitchen in my nightgown to see the new Corian countertops splashed with blood.
Mom was on the floor with a strange man hunched over her. All I could see of Dad was his foot sticking out from behind the island.
I must have gasped. Mr. DuChamp looked up. The lower half of his face was red.
“Oh,” he said. “Hello.”
I made it all the way to the stairs before he caught me.
4.Don’t scrimp on food and drink.
Arrange it attractively and let guests help themselves!
Charles clears our soup bowls and returns carrying the main course. It’s lasagna, which is the only thing I know how to cook. I know Mr. DuChamp would say I ought to learn more elegant cooking: how to make pâté, clear soups, coq au vin, lamb stuffed with raisins and figs, maybe in a sweet plum sauce. But it’s hard to learn when you don’t have much money for ingredients, and can’t taste what you’ve made.
The lasagna is a little burnt around the edges but I don’t think you’ll care. You’re too tipsy, and anyway, hardly anyone makes it through the main course.
As you dig into your food, I wonder if you notice that there are heavy curtains across all the windows here and that they are thick with dust. I wonder if you notice the strange scratch marks on the floor. I wonder if you notice that nothing in the house has been updated since 1984.
I wait for Charles to move, but he doesn’t. He just grins at you like an idiot.
“Can I see you in the kitchen?” I ask Charles in a way where it’s not really a question.
He looks over at me like he’s only just remembered I’m here at the table too.
“Sure,” he mumbles. “Okay.”
We push back our chairs. Mom used to complain about our kitchen because it wasn’t the cool, open-plan kind. She wanted to knock down one of the walls, but dad said that was too expensive and, anyway, who wanted an old Victorian house with a modern kitchen.
I’m glad it’s the old kind, so I can close the door and you can’t hear.
“We don’t have any dessert,” I tell Charles.
“That’s okay,” he says. “I’ll go down to the corner store for ice cream.”
“No,” I say. “I don’t like her. She doesn’t pass the test.”
He slams his hand down on the counter. “No one passes your stupid test.”
I look at Charles in his skinny tie and shiny, worn shirt. I am so tired of him. He is so tired of me. It’s been so long.
“It’s a big deal,” I say. “Turning someone into one of us. They’ll be with us forever.”
“I want her with me forever,” Charles says, and I wonder if you know that, that he feels that way about you. And I wonder if Charles knows that he said “me” instead of “us.”
“She’s smart,” he says. “She’s funny. She likes the same music as me.”
“She’s boring. She has bad manners, too.”
“Manners,” Charles says, like it’s a swear word. “You and your obsession with manners.”
“Mr. DuChamp says—” I start but he cuts me off.
“Mr. DuChamp killed our parents!” he yells, loud enough that maybe you might hear. “And anyway, we haven’t seen him in months. He’s off being vizier or chamberlain or whatever it is he does.”
Charles knows perfectly well what Mr. DuChamp does. He looks after the household of the greatest vampire in our state. He has his ear. It is a very lofty position. He used to tell us over and over the story of how he rose from a lowly nestling to planning the state dinners where he entertained members of the elite from New Orleans to Washington. Charles found the stories boring but I was always fascinated.
Even though I didn’t like Mr. DuChamp, I liked hearing about how he succeeded in drawing the threads of power around himself. He seized opportunities other people wouldn’t even have recognized as opportunities. I liked to think that in his position, I would have seized my chance, too. I guess that’s what everyone likes to think.
“Mr. DuChamp taught us how to behave,” I say. “Our parents weren’t going to do that. If you don’t know how to behave, then you’re no better than anyone else.”
Charles looks stubborn. “Fine, if you want to do everything that guy said, remember that he said we should make more like ourselves.”
“Only if they’re worthy! He said some people don’t care about bettering themselves.”
So many lessons. At first, how to hold a wineglass, a fork, not to ever eat with your knife, no chewing gum, speaking when you’re spoken to, sitting with your hands in your lap, to say “please” and “excuse me.” Later: to kill quickly, to be subtle in finding your prey, not to make others clean up your mess, and the three “B”s: to bite cleanly, then to burn and then bury the remains, unless you wanted more like yourself.
“It’s not for everyone,” I say. “He warned us.”
“This isn’t about him,” Charles says. “You’re the one who doesn’t want anyone else around. You’re the one who doesn’t want more of us. How come I always have to be the one who hunts? How come we always have to eat the girls I bring home? What about your friends? Oh, right, you don’t have any.”
I make an involuntary sound, like the hiss of air going out of a balloon. “I can’t—” I start, then take a deep breath and start again. “When I walk around the mall alone, all the other girls are with their mothers. I used to go into this one arcade, but the boys there wouldn’t even talk to me. They’re not interested in girls, at least not girls my age. You can go out in the world alone. You can pretend to have a young-looking face, but I’m a child to everyone I meet.”
“Look,” Charles says. “You know I feel bad for you. I try to be a good brother. I bring girls to your stupid dinner parties and let them sit around like stuffed bears, while you pour out pretend tea. All I want is for tonight to be different, Jenny. Just one night. For me.”
“Fine.” I whirl around and stalk back into the dining room. I stop short, so short that Charles, just behind me, almost walks right into my back. If he didn’t have such good reflexes, he would have.
You are still sitting where you were, at the table, and I think of what Charles said about tea parties. You look stiff as a doll with little red spots on your cheeks like paint. Mr. DuChamp is standing beside you, one hand on the back of your chair. He smiles when he sees us.
“Hello, children,” he says.
5. Every party needs an element of the unexpected
to make it unforgettable. Think fondue!
“There’s a place set for you,” I say, even though, really, the place was for your friend.
He laughs, probably unconvinced, and runs his finger through the dust on the sill. “Regrettably, I have already eaten.”
“Oh,” I say, then remembering my manners, “How do you do?”
He smiles indulgently. “Very well, thank you, excepting one thing.” Then his demeanor changes, his face darkens, and he stands, still clutching your hand. You stare at him in horror. “Excepting that you were supposed to bring my master tribute not six months past.
“I have tried to contact you and nothing. You, my charges, embarrass me. Did I not instruct you better than this? If I, who manage all my master’s affairs, cannot manage you, what must I look like?”
I look over at Charles. His expression is determined, but not surprised.
“Charles?” I say. “What tribute?”
He shakes his head. “Six living girls.”
I turn back to Mr. DuChamp. He is frowning, like he’s trying to puzzle out something. “You did not receive my message?”
“I received it,” Charles says. “I tore it up.”
“That is unacceptable,” says Mr. DuChamp.
“I don’t understand.” It’s you, speaking in your tinny little human voice, like the voice of a fly. “What’s going on?”
Mr. DuC
hamp turns to me. “Ladies,” he says. “Perhaps if you were to retire to the parlor, I might speak to Master Charles in private.”
I already know you’re not going to go along with it. You don’t understand that requests for privacy must always be honored. You are already sputtering as I take hold of your arm. I squeeze, just a little, and you turn white.
“Ouch,” you say. “Ouch, what are you doing to my arm?”
“Nothing,” I say. “I’m not doing anything.” My mother used to do that when I misbehaved in the supermarket. She would pinch the skin in the crook of my arm and smile a syrupy smile like the one I’m smiling now. Although she couldn’t pinch as hard as I can, now. “Ladies retire to the parlor after dinner.”
You’re looking at Charles. “I’m not going anywhere with your creepy little sister.”
“I’ll be there in a minute,” Charles tells you. “Stay with Jenny.”
You go, but not quietly. Whining the whole way.
All the furniture in the parlor is covered in big white sheets. It’s more convenient that way. When they get blood on them, we can take them away and launder them and put them back clean. The sofa looks like a fat white iceberg, surrounded by smaller icebergs, floating in the darkness. You cough and sneeze a little, choking on all the dust. There’s a fireplace full of dead ashes and windows that have had plywood hammered over them. I wonder if you’re starting to realize this isn’t a normal sort of house.
I push you down on the couch and go back over to the door. If I stand just behind it, I can hear Charles and Mr. DuChamp, but they can’t see me.
“It’s not right,” Charles is saying. “It’s one thing to kill people because we have to, because we’ve got to live, but those girls were so scared. And I didn’t know anything. I hurt that one girl real bad because I didn’t know how tight to knot the rope. And another girl just sobbed for the whole five-hour drive. I hate it. I’m not doing it again.”
“That is the very point of etiquette, Charles. It instructs us as to how to do things we don’t want to do.”
