Extraordinary<li> (12 page)

Unless you’re one of the people who’s been camping out on my lawn, odds are that you’ve never been to Des Moines. We’re not exactly a vacation spot. If you like giant umbrella statues, we’re your place—we’ve got one of those outside of the Civic Center. A giant fiberglass cow, too, outside of the dairy on East University. Other than that, there’s not much here that you can’t find in any other city, except maybe George the Chili King, the greasy spoon on Hickman Road.

It may not be an exciting place to visit, but it’s a great place to live. We have a nice downtown that feels like a real city these days, but you’re never more than a fifteen-minute drive from rolling hills of green fields, if that’s what you’re into. We have nice parks, theaters, and farmers’ markets. There are band concerts on the steps of the capitol building in the summer.

The commutes here are short, too. Preston is just about the farthest suburb from downtown, and we were almost there in twenty minutes.

The lights in the big buildings on the horizon were like extra stars—I liked looking at the patterns formed by the windows that had lights on and the ones that didn’t. It was sort of like looking for pictures in the craters on the moon.

“Hey,” said Amber. “Check out the Weather Beacon. It’s purple.”

The Weather Beacon is this big pole covered in lights that you can see from all over town. If the lights are white, it means it’s going to get colder. If they’re red, it’s getting
warmer and if they’re green, there’s no change coming. There’s a rhyme to explain it that I can never quite remember.

This night, it was glowing purple.

“What the hell?” asked Jason. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” said Amber. “And how are they going to work that into the rhyme? Nothing rhymes with purple.”

“Nurple,” said Jason.

“Don’t you dare,” she giggled, slapping his hand.

I was pretty sure I knew what it meant when the Weather Beacon was purple.

It meant that my fairy godparent wanted me to know this was
my
night.

Even the Jenmobile was running better than usual. We had made it almost all the way downtown before it stalled out. I put it into neutral and let it roll to the side of the road.

“Sorry, guys,” I said. “This happens a lot. We’ll be fine in ten minutes.”

“This is why we don’t have flying cars,” said Jason. “One of
those
things stalls and you’re dead!”

“I haven’t been in too many cars,” said Mutual, “but they don’t usually have a dashboard like this, do they?”

My dashboard was made out of carved wood—it was like an art project for whoever had owned it before.

“Nope,” I said. “It’s the main reason I bought the car. I probably should have sprung for one with a good engine instead, though.”

“I like it,” said Mutual. “It’s not like any other car.”

“Exactly,” I said.

“We’re right by a cemetery,” said Amber. “Isn’t this the
one where Alley Rhodes and her zombie boyfriend got attacked?”

“I think so,” I said. “Prom was at the Science Center that year, and that’s right by us.”

“I hear his grave is, like, a shrine now,” said Jason. “People who think Alley and Doug were tragic lovers or something make pilgrimages to it.”

“Tragic lovers?” Amber scoffed. “I doubt it. Did you ever read any of Alley’s old columns from the school paper? She was vicious!”

“I’ve never read them,” I said, “but I’ve met her a few times since she graduated. She comes to alliance meetings during the summer, when she’s in town.”

“What’s she like?” asked Amber.

I shrugged. “She doesn’t seem that mean to me,” I said. “Maybe she’s settled down. Maybe falling in love was just what she needed.”

“Maybe,” said Amber.

I turned to Mutual. “Did you hear about that? The first vampire attack in about a hundred and fifty years was right here in Des Moines.”

“I heard,” he said. “It was on the radio. That Wilhelm guy sounds pretty awful.”

“He was an awful drummer, I can tell you that much,” said Jason. “I saw that band he was in at the Cage one time, and they could have sucked a walnut through a straw.”

“Every time there’s a dance, people say his clan is going to come get revenge, just because he attacked Alley at the prom,” said Amber. “Stupid.”

“Is his clan still around?” asked Mutual.

“They’ve been told never to show their faces around here again,” I said. “They got banished to Canada’s great outdoors.”

“You two should go see the grave,” said Amber. “See if it’s really a shrine.”

She gave the back of my seat a kick, which meant “you two should go be alone together.”

I looked over at Mutual. “You want to?”

“I will if you will,” he said. He turned back to Jason and Amber. “Are you guys coming?”

“I think they want some time to make out in the backseat,” I said.

The two of us got out of the car.

The gates of the cemetery were locked—they’re always locked. It’s the law now, actually—all cemeteries are on lock-down in case anyone has cast the zombie rites over any graves. Zombies are usually pretty harmless, but the first few hours after they rise up, they’re sort of in frenzy mode. Keeping them locked into the cemetery is safer for everyone, including the zombies. If they rise up behind a locked fence, they’re less likely to get machine-gunned by a hillbilly.

“So, how do people get in?” I asked.

“There’s probably a broken link in the fence someplace,” said Mutual. “Let me see.”

He began to run his hand along the gates, and then found a space where the boards were farther apart than most of the others. There was just enough room for us to shimmy through, though I really had to squeeze.

“You okay?” he asked as I pushed through.

“I’ve got it,” I said.

“This is a pretty safe place to be,” he said. “My parents wouldn’t attack around so many other people’s graves.”

Vampires can’t go into other people’s graves, for some reason. Most of them avoid cemeteries altogether. Just being in a place this comparatively safe seemed to loosen Mutual up a bit. He stopped looking over his shoulder every few seconds and started to smile.

You might say he really came alive in the graveyard.

We walked through the grounds, and I said, “ ’Tis now the very witching time of night, when churchyards yawn.’ ”

Hamlet
.

Mutual smiled and countered with, “ ‘Now it is the time of night that the graves, all gaping wide, every one lets forth his sprite, in the church-way paths to glide.’ ”

“Spooky,” I said. “What’s that from?”

“
Midsummer Night’s Dream.
”

It wasn’t hard to spot Doug’s grave—I remembered Alley saying he had liked to build stuff, and from the looks of things, he had really tricked out his gravestone. There was a huge wooden carving built on top of the stone marker, as easy to spot as the Weather Beacon in the skyline, even in the dark graveyard.

As we walked up toward it, I started to feel, like, overwhelmed. There was this … feeling in the air that I walked right into. I didn’t understand what it was. Maybe what had happened that night, when Doug crumbled to dust (right in his own grave, which was kind of convenient, I guess) in Alley’s arms, had left some kind of energy in the space around his grave.

That didn’t seem scientifically sound, but I felt what I felt. I didn’t feel spooked, like I should have in a graveyard at night. I felt sadness and love.

The grave was really a sight to see. All around it, people had left little tokens—teddy bears, candy, beer bottles. People had even written their names and lines of songs and stuff on the stone part, like on that one rock star’s grave in Paris.

“Wow,” Mutual said. “This is, like, where he actually died, too, right? The second time he died?”

“Yeah,” I said.

We lingered for a while, reading all the lines from songs people had scribbled.

“Are these all song lyrics?” Mutual asked.

“I think so,” I said. “I don’t really know many of them.”

“I recognize some of them from the radio,” he said. “I wish I could write songs like that. The kind that hit you so hard you want to write the lyrics on gravestones.”

“I’ll bet you could.”

We stood over the grave.

I crouched down and put my hand in the graveyard dirt.

“I can feel it,” I said. “All the stuff Doug must have been feeling.”

“The pain?”

“Sort of,” I said as we stepped right up to the grave itself. “I feel like I can feel everything the two of them were feeling that night. Sadness. Love. Sadness, mostly.”

I felt it, all right.

Along with a desperate urge not to let a minute of my life go to waste.

“Do you remember the last time we saw each other?” he asked. “Before my parents moved me away?”

Oh God. Here it was.

“Yeah,” I said. “We made an appointment to meet up the next day in the wooded area between the playground and the street.”

“To kiss,” he said.

“Yeah. To kiss.”

We stared at each other and giggled a bit.

“Such a sixth-grade thing to do. Scheduling a kiss. Most people just
do
it, you know?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Well … sorry I’m so late.”

“You’re here now,” I said. “So, are we going to keep the appointment?”

“If you don’t want to cancel,” he said.

“Nope.”

I shook my head and smiled. For a split second, I was glad that I’d put on weight. If I was still as skinny as I’d been at eleven, the butterflies in my stomach might have picked me up and carried me clear away.

I took a step closer to him.

Then Mutual stepped closer to me.

And then we kissed.

My eyes were closed, but I’m almost sure, even now that I think back on it, that if I’d opened my eyes, there would have been purple fireworks going off in the background.

That was how I had imagined it, too. And I still imagined it that way, even though I had been kissed once, at least technically.

My first kiss, the truth-or-dare kiss, was nothing like that. During that kiss, I felt like we were both pulling away the whole time. And our lips were both so tightly clenched that it was like kissing a rock for me—and probably for him, too.

And, honestly, the tiny kiss I had with Mutual at Doug the Zombie’s grave wasn’t a whole lot better. His lips were soft, but it was just a quick peck, really.

Still, it was more than enough for me.

I felt everything “Jenny” imagined.

When I stepped back, I was smiling so wide that it made my cheeks hurt.

I was the girl who took ice skates to school, saw pictures made of windows, and had her first real kiss while standing over the grave of a zombie.

And who then turned cartwheels through the cemetery.

Yeah, after the quick peck I was so elated that I couldn’t quite stand still. I let forth a “squee” and turned a cartwheel, which was something I hadn’t tried since I was a good forty pounds lighter.

Mutual followed along, laughing at my attempt at acrobatics.

“Okay, smarty,” I said. “Let’s see what you got.”

And he turned a cartwheel. A perfect one.

He certainly showed me.

When I tried to do another one, I slipped on a wet leaf and ended up falling on my butt.

He reached a hand down to pull me up, but instead I pulled him down to the dirty ground next to me and giggled. I moved over a bit more to cuddle up next to him. Wet leaves clung to me—they smelled like cinnamon and nutmeg.

I wouldn’t say I felt like I had become the extraordinary person I had always wanted to be, but I was a lot closer to feeling like I’d actually been that way all along.

“That looked painful,” he said.

I shrugged. “Did you know I used to shove snow down my boots when I was a kid?” I asked him.

“Why?”

“I liked it to freeze my ankles so badly that they hurt, so it would feel even better when I got to warm up at home.”

He nodded. “Makes sense,” he said. “I guess.”

“Sort of like having to wonder where you were all this time hurt, but it just makes having you back feel even better now.”

I moved my hand down into his and squeezed, interlocking
our fingers. Then I kissed him again, better and slower this time.

Then he kissed me, long and hard and good. Just the way I’d imagined he would for years.

It was a wish come true, all right.

I never wanted to stop kissing him. Ever.

He smiled between kisses. “You kiss just right,” he said, “like only a lonely angel can.”

I kissed him quickly. “Is that Shakespeare?”

He shook his head. “Springsteen. Heard it on the classic rock station.”

I laughed and we kissed again.

I suppose it was kind of an ego boost for him to see me react like that to being kissed by him, because any trace of nervousness he had was gone. We sat on the ground and kissed and held hands and talked about everything and nothing. We made some plans to see about getting him into Drake.

Maybe it sounds kind of ridiculous to think that after a few minutes of kissing, I really couldn’t ever imagine myself with anyone else, but I couldn’t. I think maybe you never can in the middle of making out with someone you like, but still. I felt different with him.

We kissed and cuddled until we got too cold, then headed back through the damp grass of the graveyard, with the Weather Beacon glowing purple above us. Jason and Amber were still in the backseat of the Jenmobile, looking sort of disheveled.