“Here it is,” Alecia said timidly, handing Liz Spank’s cell phone.
“Don’t give it to me,” Liz said, stepping aside. “Put it there, where it belongs.” And she pointed at the unicorn’s massive front hooves.
Alecia darted another nervous glance toward Princess Prettypants.
But the unicorn only batted her long blue eyelashes demurely, as if to say, Me?
Hurt you? Never! I’m a lady!
Alecia knelt and put the cell phone next to one of Princess Prettypants’s gleaming silver feet.
Which the unicorn delicately lifted and, with a surgeon’s precision, set down on the phone, obliterating it.
“Hey!” Spank yelled from the hot tub.
Liz shot him an annoyed look.
“Do you want to be next?” she asked.
“You can’t go around doing that to people’s personal property,” Spank said, standing up. He was, she saw, wearing trunks, which were bright red and baggy.
Maybe it was because the trunks were red.
Or maybe it was just because he was Spank Waller.
In any case, Princess Prettypants, once the cell phone was crushed to her satisfaction, began moving in his direction.
“You can’t just come in here, Freelander, and have your freak of a circus horse, or whatever it is, step on my phone.” Spank was standing in the middle of the hot tub, pontificating to whoever would listen. “Do you know who my father is?”
It was at that moment that Princess Prettypants, coming around behind Spank, scooped him up by the bottom of his red swim trunks with her three-foot-long lavender horn and began to prance around, with Spank adorning her forehead like a live hood ornament.
“Oh,” one of Kate Higgins’s friends cried, wincing as they crouched with Kate behind her parents’ barbecue grill. “Horned up the shorts!”
“That is twisted, Liz,” Kate said, shaking her head. “You have one twisted unicorn.”
“I know,” Liz said, although of course she’d had no idea. She felt proud of her birthday gift.
The partygoers, beginning to emerge from their hiding places now that they sensed Liz’s unicorn was otherwise occupied, produced their own cell phones and began to take photos of Spank’s difficult situation.
“Hey!” Spank cried. “Stop taking pictures! Liz! Make your unicorn put me down!
This isn’t exactly the most comfortable position to be in. Look, I swear I won’t do it again. I swear!”
Liz looked at Alecia. “Do you think he’s learned his lesson?”
Alecia nodded. She looked considerably happier. She’d stopped crying, and there was a tiny smile playing on her lips.
“I think so,” she said.
Liz called to Princess Prettypants, “You can put him down now.”
The unicorn lowered her head, and Spank fell to the ground, into the grave Princess Prettypants had dug for him beside the keg. A terrified-looking Evan got splashed with mud. He eyed Liz apprehensively, certain that he was next on her list.
“Liz,” he said, holding his hands up, palms out, in front of his naked chest, which was flecked with spots of brown beer-soaked lawn. “I know how things might have looked that day in my dorm room. But you ran out before I could say a word in my defense. I was drunk. And she meant nothing to me. You’ve always been my everyth—”
“You,” Liz interrupted him, “owe me fourteen hundred and eleven dollars.”
Evan gaped at her. “What?”
“You heard me,” she said. “That’s how much you owe me. For texting fees, bus fare, and various sundries I don’t care to discuss in public. Where’s your wallet?”
Evan shook his head, his blue eyes wide. “Are you crazy? I don’t …”
… owe you anything was what Liz was fairly certain he’d been about to say. But a snort from Princess Prettypants behind her caused him to modify that statement to a more benign, and slightly terrified, “… carry that kind of cash on me.”
Liz realized he was telling the truth. He wasn’t exactly going to lie when there was an angry unicorn behind her, glaring at him with glowing red eyes.
“Fine,” she said, and pointed at his wrist. “That’ll do.”
Evan glanced down at his watch. “My TAG?” he asked. His voice broke with sorrow and disbelief.
Princess Prettypants took a threatening step forward. Evan quickly undid his watchband, saying, “N-no, it’s okay. You can have it. You’ll get at least that much for it.”
Liz took the watch from him and dropped it into her pocket. She gave Evan a final, scathing look, wondering how she ever could have loved this person, who was not only a liar but had no honor either.
She must have stared at him a little too long, because Princess Prettypants stepped forward, nudging her horn toward his swim trunks.
“No, no,” Liz had to say, grabbing the unicorn by the mane and steering her head away. Not that Evan didn’t deserve it. “Whoa, girl.”
Evan, looking pale, backed up, tripped on his own feet, and fell into the beersoaked mud, much to the amusement of everyone present.
Spank, meanwhile, cried for someone to let him borrow their cell phone.
No one did. Instead everyone hurried to snap more pictures of Princess Prettypants. A few even took short films with their cell phones to upload later to their YouTube channels.
“Well,” Liz said, conscious of there being many more things that she had to do in order make amends to everyone she’d wronged. “I have to go. Alecia, do you think you can get your mom to come pick you up?”
“Oh, sure,” Alecia said. “This party is about to be over anyway.” She pointed at Spank, who had managed to wrangle away someone’s cell phone and was whining into it, “Dad, some girl sicced her pet unicorn on me. No, I haven’t been drinking again. I haven’t! No, don’t come get me! Don’t—”
Kate, overhearing this, whirled on Spank and, slapping him, cried, “Omigod, your dad is coming over here? Do you have any idea how many laws I’m violating here?
And you just called your dad? Are you crazy?”
After the mad rush that followed to go before Sheriff Waller showed up, few partygoers remained, with the exception of Alecia and Liz.
Contented, Liz gave Alecia’s arm a squeeze. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Thanks,” Alecia said, and hugged her. “I guess when boys tease you,” she whispered into Liz’s hair, “it doesn’t always mean they like you.”
“Actually,” Liz said, “it does. It just doesn’t mean they’re necessarily nice guys.”
Alecia pulled away and nodded. “I get it now.” She gave a shy glance toward the unicorn, whose eyes had turned back to their normal sparkly lavender. “Thank you … um … What’s her name?”
“Princess Prettypants, officially,” Liz said. “But I’m really going to have to rethink that.”
The spray of small stones hit Jeremy’s bedroom window a few hours later. Looking bleary-eyed, his hair sticking up in dark tufts, he opened it and looked down. “What time is it?” he asked, confused.
“After two,” Liz replied cheerfully. “Come down.”
Jeremy rubbed his eyes. “Is that Princess Prettypants?”
“Gloria,” Liz corrected him. “I changed her name. Princess Prettypants didn’t really suit her.”
“Gloria,” he said thoughtfully. “After Gloria Steinem, queen of the second-wave feminists, I assume?”
Liz nodded. “Exactly.”
“Fitting,” Jeremy said.
“Come down,” Liz said again from where she sat astride Gloria in the side yard beneath Jeremy’s bedroom window. “I want to show you something.”
“I’ll be there in a few,” Jeremy said, and shut the window. A little while later he was opening the front door to his house and coming out onto the porch in jeans and boots while buttoning a clean white shirt. Liz tried not to feel distracted by his naked chest, which had quite a different effect on her than the sight of her ex-boyfriend’s had earlier in the evening.
“Hey,” Jeremy said, coming to stand beside her in the moonlight.
Liz patted Gloria on the neck, and the unicorn obligingly knelt down, allowing Liz to slide off her back and into the dew-moistened grass.
“Whoa,” Jeremy said, impressed by Gloria’s good manners.
“Right?” Liz said, glowing. “Isn’t she great? She’s fast, too. When we were putting the geese back—”
Jeremy looked surprised. “You put them back?”
“Yeah,” Liz said. “Just now. Well, Gloria and I did. It was kind of hard, because I couldn’t remember which one went where. So some people may have gotten geese wearing the wrong outfits. But at least they got their geese back. Maybe they can all get together and swap. But it didn’t matter, because all I had to do was picture the houses in my head, and Gloria knew right where to—”
“Why’d you do that?” Jeremy wanted to know. “Put them back?”
“Well, I had to,” Liz said, blinking up at the moonlight. “I can’t really afford to do the wrong thing anymore. Or someone could end up being killed.”
She looked meaningfully over at Gloria, who was contentedly pulling up large segments of Jeremy’s parents’ lawn and eating it.
“Oh, no,” she said with a groan. “Gloria! No. We have apples and sweet hay at home. Stop it! Great, now she’ll be making rainbow farts all night.”
Jeremy shook his head. “I don’t get it.”
“Oh, right.” Liz pulled her aunt Jody’s birthday card out of her pocket and opened it. “See, I missed that part at the bottom of Aunt Jody’s card. I have to make sure everything we feed her is organic and sweet. Also, there was a warning that unicorns take on the emotions of their owner. So, like, if I get mad, Princess Pretty —I mean Gloria—gets mad. There was already an incident earlier this evening over at Kate Higgins’s house—”
“Wait,” Jeremy interrupted, laughing. “You went to Kate Higgins’s party?”
“Yeah,” Liz said, putting the card back into her pocket. “I had to. It turned out you were right about me encouraging Alecia to like Spank Waller.”
Jeremy’s smile died on his lips. “Why? What happened?”
“Let’s just say that thanks to some negative reinforcement on Gloria’s part, Spank won’t be messing with any girls for a while.” Liz cleared her throat. “I don’t think Evan Connor will either.”
Jeremy raised his eyebrows. But his tone was carefully neutral when he asked, “Oh? Evan was there too?”
“Yeah,” Liz said. “’Cause he’s the kind of guy who goes off to college but still comes back to town for high school parties, apparently. Which shouldn’t be a big surprise to anyone. What may have come as a surprise to some people is how scared he was of a harmless little unicorn.”
“So,” Jeremy said, smiling again, “I take it you’re not selling Gloria on eBay after all, then?”
Liz’s jaw dropped.
“What? No way!” Liz looked appalled. “Why would I do that? She’s the best present I ever got! Which reminds me. I really love your gift—” She held up the key with the bow on it. “But I still don’t get what it’s for.”
His smile broadened. “Don’t you? It’s to the Cutlass Supreme. I finally got it running.”
“Oh my God, that’s fantastic, Jeremy!” Liz was so excited she couldn’t help throwing both her arms around him and giving him a big hug, which he returned.
As she held on to him, however, Liz became uncomfortably aware that this wasn’t her old friend Jeremy she was hugging.
Maybe it was the unfamiliar muscularity in the arms that were around her.
Or maybe it was something else. She wasn’t sure. Whatever it was, it caused her to let go of him abruptly and take a quick step backward, her face suddenly feeling as if it were on fire.
“B-but I can’t accept this. You’ve b-been working on that car forever,” she stammered. “Why would you give it to me?”
“Well,” Jeremy said, his gaze on hers steady. “I just got to thinking that I don’t really have anywhere to drive to. Everything I’ve ever wanted is here in Venice.
Even,” he added, his tone carefully neutral again, “as close as right next door.”
At first Liz was sure she’d heard him wrong. Or that maybe she hadn’t understood him correctly. Surely he hadn’t said … He couldn’t mean that he … not like that.
Then Liz felt a soft—but firm—muzzle at her back, and she was enveloped in the scent of night-blooming jasmine.
Gloria, fed up with her owner’s obtuseness—and knowing, as she did, Liz’s true feelings—pushed Liz into Jeremy’s waiting arms.
Which was when Liz, gazing up into his eyes, realized what she’d known all along, but had never admitted to herself until that very moment: Everything she had ever wanted had been right next door all along, as well Except, perhaps, a unicorn.
“Cold Hands”
Justine: Cassandra Clare’s zombies are more influenced by the voudin tradition of the possessed dead. They do not shuffle or leak from too many body parts, and they have no interest in eating anyone’s brains. It’s true that they’re not the world’s greatest conversationalists, but they’re loyal and they don’t lie. In fact, they are emo zombies who will love you forever. Entirely, up to you to decide whether that’s a good thing …
