Extraordinary<li> (8 page)

Cathy raised her hand.

“You’re the mayor’s wife? Eulalie Shinn?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Not anymore,” he said. “You’re in the chorus from now on.”

“
What?
” Cathy shouted.

Then she went into a bit of a rant. This is one of the parts of the story where I’m cleaning up the language.

Gregory just nodded and ignored her.

“Jennifer Van Den Berg,” he said, “can you come up onstage, please?”

I wandered up and stepped onstage, feeling like everyone was staring at me, which I wasn’t really used to back then.

“You’re the mayor’s wife now, kiddo,” he said.

My head started to spin.

Cathy had not sat down yet. She started yelling something about how they didn’t have purple-haired women in Iowa in 1912.

“They have wigs for that,” Gregory said with a wave of his hand. “And Mrs. Shinn wears hats with brims and feathers that go from here to who laid the rails, so no one’ll notice the hair anyway.”

Cathy looked like she’d just been smacked in the face with a baseball bat.

And I kind of felt that way myself.

“I’m not an actress,” I said to him, quietly.

“Sure you are, kiddo,” he said. “I’m pulling you out of the chorus and into the spotlight!”

“I never wished for that!” I said.

He just winked.

Obviously, Gregory couldn’t read my mind. He assumed that I wanted to be a star or something, and that getting to sing “Pick-a-Little, Talk-a-Little” would fulfill my destiny.

As I stood on the stage, I started to have spelling bee flashbacks, just like I’d predicted.

When I was a kid, Preston was a very different town. It still had much more of a small-town vibe—the kind of town that probably would have revolved around the high school football team, except that we didn’t have a high school at all. The only real local competition we had in town was the spelling bee—and people took it very, very seriously.

In the run-up to the all-school bee, we’d have gamblers hanging around the playground, trying to figure out who to bet on. And then the five kids who went to districts every
year were treated like heroes around town—until they lost, when they were treated like dirt. It was more pressure than an eleven-year-old should have to deal with.

And it all came rushing back when I stood onstage. This was
not
the way to help me build my confidence. In fact, I nearly had a panic attack.

“Let’s hear it for Jennifer!” said Gregory.

There was one person applauding: Eileen.

Gregory handed me a script and told me to get to work. I spent the rest of the class huddled over in a chair, pretending to be learning my lines while I breathed as deeply as I could and avoided looking in Cathy’s direction.

Jason and Amber were giving me a ride home that day, since my car was still in the shop. After school, I met up with them at the back door, where Smollet brought them out from their last day of in-school, and told them how the new director had given me Cathy’s part.

Jason laughed. “You getting revenge on her?” he asked.

“I was as surprised as she was,” I said. “But I’m still thinking of getting revenge for yesterday. I actually woke up thinking about how awesome it would be if I stole Fred from Cathy.”

Amber turned toward me. “You like Fred?” she asked.

“Not
really
,” I said. “But I had a dream about him last night, and, well, you know how it is.”

I wasn’t sure if they
did
know. They had been a couple since, like, before either of them had probably even started puberty. Maybe they’d never had a dream about anyone else.

How awesome is that?

“So now I have a plan,” I said. “I’m going to seduce Fred and rub it in Cathy’s face.”

“Jennifer,” Amber said, “I totally believe that you can do any damned thing you feel like.”

“So are you in? Can I put you down for casting me a love spell or something?”

She shrugged. “I haven’t tried any of that stuff in a while.”

When we were kids, Amber was really into the occult. She’d cast circles of protection around her desk on test days and curse people she didn’t like. But after the post-human thing,
every
girl was into Wicca and stuff, which a lot of them thought was, like, the next best thing to becoming a vampire. She kind of drifted away from it then.

“We’ve hung out with Fred a few times at, like, heavy metal vomit parties and stuff,” said Jason. “He actually got converted backstage at an Alice Cooper concert in the seventies.”

“I heard it was an Ozzy Osbourne concert,” I said.

“Nope. Cooper,” said Jason. “Ozzy wasn’t even a solo act back then, he was still with Black Sabbath. Anyway, Fred was so drugged up at the time that he isn’t even sure who did it.”

“Ouch,” I said.

We drove up Eighty-Second Street, which a few years before had been nothing but cornfields when you got north of Cedar Avenue. Now it was all strip malls and subdivisions full of white houses on streets named after trees. The year before, the last of the corn separating Preston from Cornersville Trace had been plowed up and the land had been developed.

The population had ballooned in the past five years, but half of the original residents had moved out to other, smaller
towns. Finding a native Prestonian in Preston was rare now, which was fine with me. None of the people who had put For Sale signs in my yard when I lost the district spelling bee, or accused Mutual of being a traitor, still lived nearby.

There was nothing about the old Preston that I missed.

Except for Mutual, of course.

But I pushed that out of my mind and tried to imagine how Fred looked with his shirt off.

I still don’t have a freaking credit card in real life.

And ever since Eileen’s stupid book came out, every spare cent I’ve been able to scrape up has gone to security, legal bills, and all that crap. And it wasn’t like I was swimming in money to start with. I owed my mom a pile for car repairs and stuff—by the time of this story, I was already so far behind that I’d have to teach piano lessons clear till Melinda was in high school.

After the Jenmobile broke down at the armory, Dad had it towed to a garage over on Fourteenth. They called the house and said it would be ready during the day on Monday, so Mom drove me out there after she got off work.

She went inside to pay while I sat in her car. This was going to be another chunk of money I owed her. I wasn’t even sure I could afford to keep dying my hair purple, let alone have my car painted purple (which I totally would
have done if I had the cash—at least I have
that
in common with the “Jenny” in the book).

And when Mom came stomping out of the garage, she looked furious.

“Eight hundred dollars!” she said. “They charged eight hundred dollars!”

“That’s more than three times what I paid for the car!” I said.

“Your dad authorized them to do whatever they needed to,” she said. “So now we owe Visa another eight hundred bucks.”

“Shoot,” I said. “If he authorized it, he’d better be planning to help.”

She tossed me my keys with a sigh.

“Jennifer, I’m afraid you might have to get used to the idea of living at home next year. For the first semester, at least,” she said.

“But I’m already signed up for the dorms!”

“It’s a twenty-minute commute from our house to Drake,” she said. “It doesn’t make sense for us to waste money on a dorm. Not when we’re still paying more on Val’s student loans than we are on our mortgage.”

“We can scrape together the money,” I said. “I’m sure we can.”

“I wouldn’t count on it,” said Mom.

I took my keys and stomped back out toward my own car.

“Jen, calm down,” Mom called out. “It’s not the end of the world.”

I didn’t listen to her. I just kept walking until I got into my car, and drove off without a damned word.

I realized that paying for a dorm when I only lived five or ten miles away from campus wasn’t exactly frugal, but being on my own felt like it was a huge, totally necessary step in separating myself from my old, boring life. I felt like as long as I lived at home, surrounded by Val’s old trophies and all the reminders of my old eighty-hour schedule, and with one parent constantly around to nag me and another who still had keys, I’d be stuck as the same old person, no matter what I did with my hair.

As I drove along, I imagined Val’s student-loan officer standing in front of my car several times. I was so mad that I wasn’t even paying much attention to the road or the speedometer.

Not until I saw the flashing blue lights in my rearview mirror.

I pulled over and a police car pulled up behind me. I shouted a few words (none of which was “shoot” or “darn”) at the roof of the car as the cop walked over, then forced myself to be calm as I rolled the window down.

“Something wrong, Officer?” I asked, which I think is standard protocol when you get pulled over.

“I clocked you at fifty-one,” he said. “And this is a thirty-five-mile-per-hour road.”

“No one goes thirty-five on this road,” I said. “Other cars would think I was a bridge or something.”

“That’s no excuse,” he said. “Did you know that you also ran a stop sign back there?”

I shook my head.

“And with ice on the road, too,” he said.

I started to cry, but it didn’t make him feel bad enough to
let me off with a warning. He gave me a ticket for speeding and failure to stop.

“How much is this going to cost me?” I asked.

“I’d say about four hundred,” he said. “And you’ll have to go to traffic school. And your insurance will probably go up.”

“Great,” I said, sniffling.

And he handed me the ticket and read me some legal-speak gobbledygook that I didn’t pay any attention to.

“I’d say to have a good day,” he said when he was finished, “but … well, have a
better
day.”

He walked back to his patrol car, and I stayed pulled over until he was out of sight. Once he was gone, I looked up at the roof of my car and screamed at the top of my lungs.

Then I drove exactly one block before my car stalled out again.

It started right back up, but still.

Ugh!

After paying eight hundred bucks, I think I had a right to expect that it would at least get me home without stalling.

Why wouldn’t the world just follow my damned instructions?

All the anger and rejection and everything else inside me sort of merged into one big ball of ugly hatred. I couldn’t compartmentalize it any longer—the compartments were full.

This called for drastic action.

When I got home, I ran upstairs, reached under the bed, and pulled out my Big Box of Breakables.

I had countless pieces of dollar-store crap in reserve. There is no shortage of tacky, breakable crap at thrift stores and the dollar store.

There were about a dozen porcelain angels in the box. There was a ceramic hand on a little stand with a sign that said “Please Stop the Violence.” A whole bunch of cute porcelain kids with really big eyes wearing pajamas with drop-down seats. A tiny ceramic mushroom house that looked like a penis with windows.

There were Santa Claus figurines. Snowman napkin holders. All kinds of tacky Christmas junk.

There were a couple of ceramic toilets that you were supposed to hang on the bathroom door, one of which had a ceramic old guy with a mustache sitting on it and holding his nose.

This was all going to have to go.

I took the box out to the driveway and laid the contents on the sidewalk, then headed back in to get my headphones. This scene called for music.

I spun around to the
Music Man
folder on my phone and cued up “Seventy-Six Trombones,” the big, bombastic march.

Then I went back out to the toolshed to find some actual tools—I wanted something more than just a hammer. A bigger, more powerful weapon that took two hands to use. I wished my dad were the kind of dad who owned a sledgehammer, but there wasn’t one of those. And most of his tools had gone with him when he moved out.

There was a crowbar, though.

I took it out to the sidewalk, stood before the junk, and raised the crowbar high above my head with one hand while I hit the Play button on my phone with the other. I turned the volume up so high it hurt my ears.

I stood there rethinking the events of the last few days
during the prologue, from Gregory Grue calling me Grimace at McDonald’s to getting a traffic ticket right after being told that I probably wouldn’t be able to move out for college.

I just let the anger flow through me.

This was not the teenage life that movies, TV shows, and books had promised me (or the one that
Born to Be Extraordinary
is promising you). I had been cheated.

And the dollar-store junk was going to pay.

I lifted the crowbar above my head with both hands and felt the freezing metal against my fingers. It was so cold that it stung.

The wind picked up, howling through the trees and into my face. It was almost as if I were controlling the weather.

The prologue ended, the brass band kicked in, and “Seventy-Six Trombones” began. I brought the sledgehammer down on its first victim with a roar just as Harold Hill sang the word “six.”

The little porcelain angel crumbled under the weight of my mighty crowbar, and I brought it down on him again a few times, all to the rhythm of the music.

Then I showed a ceramic Santa Claus who was boss.

Seventy-six trombones hit the counterpoint, and the crowbar hit a miniature clown whose pants were falling down.

Then, just to mix things up, I swung the crowbar like a golf club into the ceramic mushroom house that looked like a penis, sending it rolling across the lawn in two or three pieces. I ran after the biggest chunk and brought the crowbar down again and again on the most thingy-like part, screaming all the while.