It's All Your Fault

by Paul Rudnick

  “I steer my car right toward the Dastroid and I step on the gas and I get in a fender bender. Because of course it wasn’t a Dastroid, it was just some guy trying to parallel park his Hyundai. I dented his car and I got a summons to appear in court and I couldn’t tell my lawyer or the judge or the whole world that I was really fighting the dark forces, so I pleaded no contest to reckless driving. The judge let me off with probation and a warning but the studio got really nervous, so my manager told me that if I still wanted to be Lynnea, I had to go to rehab, for the first time. So I did. It didn’t get in the tabloids or online because it was only for three days at this incredibly private clinic in Wyoming. Which was where I met Oliver.”

  “Did … did Oliver work there? Was he a counselor?”

  “No. He was a drunk. Like me.”

  “Ladies?” said Wyatt, as he opened the bedroom door. “I hope you’ve finished your lunch because we have to get over to Madison Square Garden, which is already completely out of control. As my mother always says, you need to wait at least forty-five minutes after eating before you can battle the Darkling Creeper in an exclusive, fully staged, one-time-only, once-in-a-lifetime live performance in front of twenty thousand screaming Angel Warriors. Led by Ava Lily Larrimore.”

  On the schedule the next event had been listed as “Madison Square Garden Live Performance,” but I’d had no idea what a big deal it was. Wyatt and Heller explained it to me in the van on the way over:

  “The Angel Wars premiere can’t be just another movie opening,” said Wyatt. “It needs to become an internationally celebrated holiday for Angel Warriors everywhere. Since we need to make sure that everyone is on board, we held a lottery and so twenty thousand fans get to attend the first ever, right-there-in-front-of-your-very-own-eyeballs, starring-Heller-Harrigan-as-Lynnea-herself Netherdome showdown.”

  “When we shot the whole Netherdome scene for the movie, in Morocco,” said Heller, “it was amazing. They built this huge arena, just like in the book, and they used over five hundred different colors of sand to create the Netherdome mandala.”

  “Wait,” I said, “are you saying that right now you’re actually going to stage Lynnea’s battle against Malestra and the Dastroids?”

  In the Angel Wars books, there’s an unseen world called the Otherlife that is ruled by three Hosts, including the Golden Lord, who seeks only peace and beauty for all humankind. The Golden Lord’s sworn enemy is the Darkling Creeper, who feeds on ignorance and despair.

  The third Host is Mistress Miracle, who judges every soul’s behavior and determines where they’ll end up; readers have claimed that Mistress Miracle reminds them of a mythical goddess crossed with a Rose Bowl parade float.

  For the first time ever, Mistress Miracle convenes an AllSouls Universium. To avoid an all-out war she proposes that each realm select a single combatant: the Golden Lord chooses Lynnea while the Darkling Creeper and General Corpsemonger pick a merciless killing machine named Malestra.

  “You’re going to do the whole Netherdome battle?” I asked as we drove deep beneath Madison Square Garden, an indoor sports and entertainment stadium that filled an entire city block. I was getting used to April finding the most subterranean entrances to any building in order to keep Heller’s whereabouts as mysterious as possible.

  “We’re doing a version of it,” said Wyatt. “It’s going to be spectacular. You’ll see.”

  * * *

  As I waited outside Heller’s dressing room while she got into her costume I began to feel short of breath and at first I didn’t know why, since I was only there as an observer. All I kept thinking was: I’m inside the Angel Wars books. My phone buzzed, which made me jump.

  “Sweetie,” said my mom, “we saw you and Heller on Tally Marabont and we were so impressed! You both handled yourselves so well! But I’m calling because we’ve just had the most wonderful news—you got an email from Parsippany Tech! They’ve accepted you! You’re in!”

  My panic expanded. Getting into college was the first step toward the rest of my life and “the rest of my life” was the sort of phrase that appeared on all of the college websites, where I’d tried to ignore it because thinking about the rest of my life made me feel like I was standing on a ledge fifty stories up and the ledge was sliding back into the building.

  Parsippany Tech was a good school and the campus was only a few miles from our house so I could live at home. Parsippany Tech had an especially good business program so I could study accounting, which would be a really smart thing to do because the world is always going to need accountants. I was pretty good at math although not as good as my sister Catherine, so she could help me study.

  If I only got into Parsippany Tech that would be just fine and the rest of my life would fall into place and I could finally stop obsessing and spell-checking and worrying about getting accepted anywhere else, and I could concentrate on how the famous poet Emily Dickinson had almost never left her house and she turned out to be—Emily Dickinson. Who wrote that poem with the words “I’m nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody too?” Which is my favorite poem.

  I joined Wyatt in the greenroom, which was a waiting area with a kitchen and a pool table. I asked, “So Heller is going to perform the whole showdown in front of all these people? And Ava Lily Larrimore is going to be Malestra? I thought that Ava hated Heller—why is she doing this?”

  “The marketing team has been polling the Angel Wars fanbase,” said Wyatt as he inspected a table filled with snacks, from baskets of celery and carrot sticks to platters of power bars, muffins and doughnuts—from what I’d observed, being in show business meant that there was always lots of free food, but because everyone was on a diet, no one ate anything. “They found out that the fans are divided between the people who love Heller, and the people who listen to Ava because Ava’s constantly tweeting and sending out mass emails and Angel Wars Alerts. I decided it was a good idea to keep your friends close but your enemies closer. It’s risky but it’s made the whole thing even more of an event—it’s like the Angel Wars Super Bowl.”

  “Why is Ava so angry? Why’s she on such a rampage against Heller?”

  “Here’s the simple answer,” said Wyatt as he plucked the cashews, which were his favorites, out of a plastic bowl of trail mix. “Ava is a Killer Medium.”

  “A what?”

  “Okay, because you were homeschooled I don’t think you know about Killer Mediums.”

  “Killer Mediums?”

  “There’s a mistake people make because they assume that the mean girls are always the prettiest and most popular girls in school. That’s not always true because the queen bees are usually very confident and so they can’t be bothered preying on underlings. Then you’ve got the oddballs, the chubby kids and the stoners and the drama club fiends, but if they’re smart, the oddballs hang out with their friends and create their own little worlds.”

  I’d never heard about any of these cliques but they sounded complicated and scary so I was glad that my parents had kept us at home. Just thinking about walking down a high school hallway while other people smirked and whispered about me and competed to see who could say the nastiest things was terrifying. In a way Heller’s life was exactly like that hallway, times the population of the world.

  “You’ve got the cheerleaders and the knockouts,” said Wyatt, “who I call the Bigs, and you’ve got the outcasts, and they’re the Littles. The girls you really have to worry about are the Mediums. They’re perfectly nice-looking and they get decent grades, and they’re polite, at least to people’s faces. But once they get home and go online everything changes. Because the Mediums have opinions, about how everyone else should behave and about how the world should work. In their offline lives, most people won’t listen to them. Okay, sometimes the Mediums have a few friends, but the Mediums keep telling them how to dress and who they should be dating, which is why after a while those friends start to drift away. Occasionally the Mediums will even have boyfriends but then the Mediums
will start telling those boyfriends to tuck in their shirts and to drive more carefully and pretty soon those boyfriends start to drift away too, toward other girls who aren’t quite so strict. While the Mediums are reasonably bright, they’re never a whole lot of fun.

  “All of this makes the Mediums deeply pissed off because they feel ignored. When the Mediums log on, watch out. They’re suddenly all-powerful. They’re in charge. If someone dares to disagree with them, well, that’s what the delete button is for. A Killer Medium’s favorite words are ‘stupid’ and ‘boring,’ or when they’re really on fire, ‘soooo stupid’ and ‘soooo boring.’ When a Medium becomes passionate about something, a Killer Medium is born. A Killer Medium will take her obsessions very seriously and she’ll tell her favorite pop star to lose ten pounds, and she’ll critique her favorite TV star’s kitchen, and she’ll inform her favorite YouTube personality that she’s using too much blush and looks like a whore. Once Ava Lily Larrimore had read and reread the Angel Wars books, well, just picture a Killer Medium with millions of Killer Medium followers, all primed to defend their turf. Sometimes I think that we should send all of the Killer Mediums to Afghanistan because al-Qaeda wouldn’t stand a chance.”

  “I love the Angel Wars books,” I said, “and I really hope that the movie is wonderful. Does that make me a Killer Medium?”

  “No,” said Wyatt, offering me a paper plate of Pepperidge Farm cookies. “You’re too sweet and too anxious and too insane to ever become a Killer Medium. A Killer Medium would eat you for lunch. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s fantastic that so many people love the Angel Wars books and see themselves in the characters. But Ava Lily Larrimore isn’t just a fan—she’s a dictator. She demands total obedience. Even Sarah Smilesborough, who wrote the books, has been freaking out. Sarah is a total sweetheart and she told me that at first she was incredibly flattered when Ava kept texting her and emailing her and sending her these thirty-eight-page handwritten letters about her favorite parts of the books, along with Instagrams of her guinea pigs, which are named Lynnea, Tallwen, Myke and Avianda.”

  “Who’s Avianda?” I asked, wondering if I wasn’t a proper Angel Warrior because maybe there was a character in the books named Avianda who I’d forgotten about.

  “That’s why Sarah got scared. Ava has sent her an outline for everything that Ava thinks should happen in a fourth Angel Wars book. She’s demanding that Sarah create a character called Avianda, named after guess who, and Avianda is supposed to be even braver and prettier and more resourceful than Lynnea.”

  “But—doesn’t Sarah Smilesborough always say that she’s told the whole Angel Wars story and now she’s working on a book about something completely new and different?”

  “Yup, and she’s been really clear about that. Which is why Ava Lily Larrimore has started showing up outside Sarah’s house in North Carolina, dressed as Avianda, in order to make it clear that writing another Angel Wars book isn’t really Sarah’s choice. It’s a direct command from the Grand Ultimate Take-No-Prisoners Angel Wars Authority.”

  “Oh my gosh!”

  “Here’s the ultimate key to the Killer Medium: She has absolutely no sense of humor. None. It’s uncanny. If you say something funny to a Killer Medium or if you ask her to lighten up, she’ll just stare at you and ask, ‘Why did you say that?’ Because on every level until the day she dies, the Killer Medium will never, ever get the joke.”

  “You guys?” said Nedda, appearing from inside Heller’s dressing room. “She’s ready.”

  When I walked into her dressing room, Heller turned around and I instantly became the biggest, most awestruck, most helpless, geekiest Angel Warrior who’d ever lived. I sailed light-years beyond Ava Lily Larrimore and her Killer Medium storm troopers. I was an Angel Wars love slave because I was looking at Lynnea.

  In the books, at first Lynnea is an ordinary teenage girl who cuts her own brown hair, has to remember to wash her face and wears mostly jeans, plaid flannel shirts and her favorite hoodie; she’s a cross between a tomboy and a pile of laundry. Once Lynnea’s wings start to grow and she fully accepts her status as the Chosen Winglet, she’s transformed. When she first flies into the arena and hovers a few feet off the ground, the crowd goes silent because, and I remember every word from the book: “Lynnea was now a creature of golden sunset and mystic starshine, a glorious Winglet newly born.”

  Thanks to Nedda, Kenz, and Heller’s own gift for transforming herself, that’s exactly what Heller looked like. She wasn’t wearing her wings but her skin now had a golden glow, not like a suntan but more like the soft gleam from a polished piece of jewelry. Her hair was streaked with a thousand subtle shades of color, from the most innocently pale blonde to a bonfire red, and it fell down her back almost to her waist, with Lynnea’s two trademark narrow braids crossing right above her forehead like a crown. After a second I realized that Heller had to be wearing a wig but the effect was so natural and most likely expensive that it seemed real.

  Heller was wearing Lynnea’s fitted white linen tunic, braided golden belt and white linen pants tucked into high, white leather boots that didn’t look fancy and fashionable but sturdy. Heller was also wearing Lynnea’s necklace, which was a pair of golden wings that encircled her neck and that Myke had hammered and molded for her in his home workshop.

  Heller was watching me very carefully, from inside Lynnea, which made me confused—who was she? Who should I talk to?

  “Are you freaking out?” asked Heller. “Should I slap you really hard?”

  “No! It’s just, I don’t know, I mean, look at you …”

  “Guys?” said Heller, to Nedda and Kenz. “Could I talk to Catey alone, just for a second?”

  After everyone had left, Heller held up her hands, centering herself. “Okay,” she said, “I know that you hate me and you will never approve of anything I do, but this is a time-out, okay? Everyone else here, they’re all great and I couldn’t do any of this without them but they’re all on my team so they’re too close to tell me the truth. All of those thousands of Angel Warriors out there have their own ideas of exactly what Lynnea is supposed to look like and how she’s supposed to behave. So tell me exactly what you really think—is this okay? Am I getting away with it?”

  Heller was searching my face for an answer. I’d never felt so powerful. I could crush her.

  “Heller,” I said, “I’m not going to flatter you, or suck up to you, or try to make you happy.”

  “And … ?” said Heller, leaning forward. “Spit it out!”

  “And …”

  “Say it! Or I will rip your face off!”

  “You don’t look like Lynnea, the way I’ve always pictured her and the way everybody’s always pictured her.”

  “Oh,” said Heller, in a tiny, destroyed voice. “Fine. Thank you for your honesty.”

  “You ARE Lynnea.”

  “Really?” said Heller, as if she’d just died and then instantly bounced back to life. There were tears in her eyes and a second later there were tears in my eyes too. Neither of us wiped our eyes or even blinked or sniffled because neither of us would ever admit to caring about each other that much.

  “Really, truly, yes in doody,” I said without thinking, and then I remembered—this was something that Heller and I had said all the time when we were little, and it was something I hadn’t said since that last day we’d been together, four years ago.

  “Yes in doody?” said Heller, grinning. “Are you a Teletubby?”

  “Get out there,” I said. “And save the world.”

  * * *

  As soon as Heller left her dressing room she was surrounded by her team, along with everyone’s assistants and even more studio people and a pack of security guards wearing headsets and carrying all sorts of other tech devices.

  Wyatt brought me to a front-row seat in what had been turned into the Netherdome. First of all, Madison Square Garden is the size of a football stadium; it’s like a building where you could stack up airplane
hangars and store them. When you fill up a place that enormous with people, the sound that all those people make, even before anything starts happening, is not only deafening, but enters every bone and organ in your body and makes them vibrate. On top of that, when all of those deafening, vibrating people are also the most passionate, vocal, overexcited Angel Warriors who’ve ever lived, the ultimate effect is very intense; it was like being inside the official Angel Wars website just a few seconds before the second or third books were released and everyone in the Angelsphere had logged on and they were all Skyping and texting and tweeting that THEY COULDN’T WAIT ONE MORE SECOND OR THEY WOULD DIE, THEY WOULD LITERALLY DIE, I’M NOT EVEN KIDDING!!!

  “This is really something, isn’t it,” said Wyatt, who I didn’t think was easily impressed. “Look at all of these people. It’s like a combination of one of those mega-churches, a ticker tape parade and that intergalactic bar in Star Wars.” Looking around, I could see what Wyatt meant, because the sold-out-to-the-rafters crowd included zillions of sobbing girls my age and younger, all clutching one another and standing on their seats and holding up their phones to take pictures of the arena and of each other taking pictures. There were the parents of the really little kids, and the parents were every bit as excited as their six-year-olds, and there were the most committed, serious Angel Warriors of all: These were adult men and women of every age, race and size, who were each either costumed as a character from the books or smothered in Angel Wars merchandise.