The Next Full Moon (13 page)

“Oh.” Ava felt totally guilty all of a sudden. She
had
been a little selfish, hadn't she? But it wasn't every day that a girl discovered she was a swan maiden. Was it?

But she had been ignoring Morgan a little.

And Josh Kirschner was
almost
as cute as Jeff Jackson with those marble eyes, and Morgan had only been in love with him for five thousand years.

She sighed. “Okay, fine. We can all ride our bikes together.”

“I'll be there in a few,” Morgan said, and hung up the phone.

Ava sat at her desk, dejected. From this angle, she could see the robe winking and glittering at her from under the bed. Despite herself, she went over to pick it up. Without even thinking she wrapped it around her shoulders and there, in front of the mirror, watched as her body turned to feathers, swooping down into the graceful perfect shape of a swan.

She walked over to the mirror on the closet door, planting one black webbed foot in front of the other. Her black eyes staring back at her. Her feathers like fresh-fallen snow, the way it sparkled under streetlamps and made Christmas—and Hanukkah, for Morgan, her
extremely annoying
best friend—the most magical holiday of the whole year, even better than
Halloween when she got to dress as a mermaid or a cat.

Everything looked more sparkling through these eyes, actually. Her bedspread and computer, the sunlight coming in through the window, the photo of her mother. It was the same room, but entirely different.

She lifted her wings, admiring their curve and shape. What a magical body she had! Even the human things seemed magical now: the way her body told her when it was hungry and when it was tired, the way she bled once a month, the way she was changing, and growing, and becoming a woman . . .

Suddenly, she caught something out of the corner of her eye. Her mother's photo was
really
different now, she realized, more than everything else. She walked up closer to it, craning her long long neck.

It wasn't just her mother leaning against a tree anymore, smiling into the camera, the way it had been for as long as she could remember.

Now Ava could clearly see that her mother was wearing a robe in the photo, one just like hers, the white feathers flaring up around her face like a boa, or waving hands. The photo wasn't misshapen the way other things were—the bed longer and thinner, the computer screen larger and more glaring. Her mother just stood there, staring at her, with the white robe hanging from her shoulders. And she was smiling eerily, as if she were actually looking right at Ava. Her eyes black and glittering.

“Mama,” Ava breathed, though what came out was a strange cooing noise.

Her mother's face softened, came into focus, and then there was nothing eerie about it at all. It was as if her own mother were right there. Soft, beautiful, in full color now, her hair a pale creamy gold, her cheeks pink and milky, and around her, bright green leaves and swaying grass.

“Ava.” The voice whispered in her ear, was all around her.

“Mama,” she repeated. “Please come back.”

And then, faintly, just as her mother appeared to move, to walk toward her, she heard the doorbell ringing, cutting through her reverie.

A few seconds later, her father was banging on her door. “Ava!”

She flapped her wings, panicked, almost forgetting herself. And then she reached back and was standing in her room with the robe in her hand, wearing her bathing suit and sundress.

Quickly, she stashed the robe away, stealing a glance up at her mother's photo as she did.

It was the same as before: black and white, her mother in a pale dress, standing against a tree.

There was magic all around her, she realized—things she couldn't see with her regular, human girl eyes.

“Ava!” her father called. “There is a
boy
here for you!”

A burst of happiness moved through her even as she groaned at her father's embarrassingly loud voice. She felt a warmth inside her that she'd never felt before, knowing her mother was so close. A full, glowy kind of feeling, as if the moon itself were inside of her. And it was the moon that would bring her mother to her. The next full moon, she was sure of it.

But for now?

Her one true love awaited.

Before she stepped out into the front hall, where her father stood no doubt regaling Jeff Jackson with the most embarrassing moments of her short-yet-embarrassment-filled life, Ava paused in the living room to lean against the wall and collect herself.
Ava Gardner
, she thought, breathing in, imagining how Ava Gardner would glide into the hallway and toss her hair and flick her eyes down and then up again before saying, “It is such a
pleasure
to see you, Jeff.”

And of course he would look at her in amazement, barely able to stammer about how marvelous she looked in her fashionable new swimsuit and sundress.

She took a deep breath, smiled broadly, and stepped into the hallway.

He was so cute! Jeff Jackson stood there all tall and yellow-haired and manly and dimpled, talking with her dad about his
career ambitions
.

“I plan to get a PhD, too, sir,” he was saying, and she just
about died, he was so adorable.

“It's a good life,” her father said, and he would have said more except that Ava, in a misguided attempt to both toss her hair and glide toward her date, tripped on the slick tile and nearly landed in Jeff's arms, just as Morgan burst through the front door, pushing it so that it smacked Jeff Jackson right in the back.

“Girls, girls!” Ava's dad said, just to make things even more totally humiliating. “I know he's handsome but don't
throw
yourselves at the poor kid.”

Steadying herself, Ava was about half a second from running to her bedroom in tears when she realized that Jeff Jackson was laughing. Laughing! And not at all in a mean way, either! And then Ava's dad was laughing, and Morgan was laughing, and before she knew it Ava was laughing, too, and by the time Ava, Morgan, and Jeff headed out to the garage to get Ava's bike, the ice had been broken and Jeff didn't even seem to mind that Ava had asked—been
forced
to ask, that is—Morgan along.

It was weird to think that the cutest, most popular boy in school could feel like a friend, too, like a normal kid, but that's how it felt as the three of them biked to the lake, talking and laughing and being total, complete dorks. Morgan even started snorting in her totally embarrassingly dorky way and Jeff did it back to her.

“Oinkkkk!”

Ava pedaled along happily, watching Jeff as he sped ahead and then looked back at her, laughing, urging her forward. She shrugged, looking away, pretending to ignore him, and then suddenly burst forward and shot past him.

“Cheater!” he cried out, zooming up alongside her, and they raced side by side, laughing wildly, as Morgan screamed behind them.

They were at the lake before Ava knew it, and she thought how long the ride in her father's car usually seemed, because the girls were so anxious to get out of the car and onto the beach. Now, with the three of them together, she didn't care if they ever arrived at the lake. For all she cared, they could ride like this all day long.

Once the three were lying on their towels in the sun, side by side, Ava trying not to die of embarrassment every time she looked at Jeff with his naked chest, she told Jeff about her birthday party plans, secretly afraid that he would laugh at her and refuse to come and even, possibly, leave the country to be as far away as possible.

“So you'll come, maybe?” she asked.

“We're going to make it the best party ever!” Morgan said.

“It sounds awesome,” Jeff said, turning to Ava and smiling right at her, his big blue eyes even bluer in the sun. “Of course I'll come! I can't wait.”

For the rest of the day, as they swam and rode the carousel
and bought hot dogs at one of the vendor stands next to the carousel and ignored—and delighted in—the zombies' horrified, shocked looks, Ava played those three words over and over in her head, spoken in the lovely low voice of her extremely handsome friend and possibly boyfriend (!!!) Jeff Jackson:
I can't wait
.

Neither could she.

A
va spent all that evening, and all the next day, in a boy-crazed stupor. She couldn't stop thinking about Jeff Jackson . . . smiling, imagining his manly chest under the sun, his yellow hair, what it would be like to kiss him . . .

She couldn't concentrate on anything at all. She tried picking up the vampire novel she was reading, but the words blurred in front of her and instead she saw Jeff Jackson standing there, gazing at her with those crackling blue eyes of his. “Ava,” he whispered. “You're so beautiful you make my eyes ache.”

She tried watching television but then there he was
sliding next to her on the couch, reaching for her hand, telling her that he'd loved her for as long as he could remember and thought she was the smartest and coolest girl in the whole school.

More than once her father caught her smiling to herself, and asked her what was making her act so goofy. “It's that boy, isn't it?” he'd say. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No!”

How embarrassing!

But she couldn't even concentrate on the old Greta Garbo movie her dad put on that evening, and spent the whole time staring into space.

“So I'm guessing you had a nice time at the lake with that young man,” her father said, sighing and turning off the television.

“It was okay,” she mumbled. She turned away from the imaginary Jeff sitting next to her.

“I was hoping you'd be more like . . . thirty when this happened.”

“Dad!”

“Well, he is obviously quite enamored of you, too. He looked at you like you were made out of chocolate. And you, my child, you just cannot stop smiling.”

“Dad, can you just put the movie back on?”

“Fine,” he said, sighing.

But by Sunday morning, she started to worry. Shouldn't he have called her by now?

She lay on her bed, going over everything they'd talked about. Like the way she'd told him she planned to have lots of adventures when she grew up, and wanted to travel all over the place, maybe even to Thailand or California.

Her heart dropped. Panic spread through her, like water being poured over her body and soaking her right through. Maybe he thought she was a hippie!

Morgan told her she was being crazy. “You just saw him yesterday,” she said, when she called late that morning. “He
obviously
likes you. It was a little revolting, to be honest.”

“Really?”

“Yes! He had this stupid look on his face the whole time we were at the lake, and so did you. I'm getting queasy just thinking about it.”

But Ava was inconsolable. “Then why isn't he calling? If he liked me he would want to talk to me.”

“Quit being ridiculous. Get on your bike and meet me. Come on, it's amazing out today. Jeff's probably at the lake already.”

“Probably sitting with all his friends, laughing about me.”

Morgan groaned into the phone. “Can you please just get over here?”

“No, I'm staying home today.”

“What?”

“I went to the lake with you yesterday
even though
I had a date. And now he hates me. I'm not going back there—maybe not ever!”

She threw herself on her bed dramatically, hitting her chin on the phone and accidentally hanging up on Morgan.

What did it matter, anyway? Morgan clearly didn't understand that her life was ruined. What was the point of discussing it?

Ava spent the rest of the day in front of the television, to her father's dismay—“you'll rot your brain!” he said, before disappearing into the basement—and by Sunday night she was convinced that Jeff Jackson had never liked her at all and that the whole thing had been a joke, like when Ian Franklin asked out Beth Miller. She could see it so clearly she was convinced she'd turned psychic: him sitting there with all his friends, laughing.