Suck It Up and Die (43 page)

“What a jerk.”

She shrugged. “Cody being Cody. This way I can pedicab you and Portia to the Waldorf Astoria.” She did a last adjustment on his now perfect bow tie. “There.”

He stared at her handiwork in the mirror. “Where did you learn to do that?”

“Oh, I’ve hit a few black-tie events recently. Sometimes I go in a dress, sometimes I go in a tux. C’mon, prince,” she ordered as she marched out. “Don’t wanna keep Cinderella waiting.”

Downstairs in the hallway they were met by Sister Flora. Flora was one of the Leaguers who had no desire to return to her Lifer dreams and reawaken her inner mortal. Before she had been turned she had run a very different
kind of house: a house for ladies of the night in Paris. Having been a Sister of Divine Compassion since the 1890s, she had no desire to go back to being a madam of the red-light district.

Flora handed the box she had taken from the fridge to Morning. “Can’t forget your corsage.” She stepped back and took him in. “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.” Something caught in her throat. “You’re growing up so fast.”

“It’s just the tux.”

“No,” she said wistfully. “It won’t be long before you turn eighteen, age out of foster care and out of my life.”

“Sister,” he said, kissing her on the cheek, “I’ll never age out of your life. Besides, now I’m paying rent and making contributions to St. Giles.” He gave her a wink. “Maybe you’ll let me stay on as the building’s super.”

Watching Zoë and Morning leave, Sister Flora let a tear tumble down her cheek.

Zoë wasn’t speaking metaphorically when she called her pedicab a pumpkin. Her new pedicab, made possible by the initial public offering she had done for stock in Fanpire Tours Unlimited, looked like a pumpkin, albeit bloodred and slightly misshapen. It was a winterized pedicab with the biker and passengers protected by a super-light composite bubble. There was even a battery that provided some extra pedal juice and heat.

As Zoë rode Morning to the Village, he said, “You have a dress, right, ZZ?”

“Yeah, in my closet.”

“So, why don’t you go home, put it on, and come with me and Portia?”

“Oh, no,” Zoë answered with a vigorous head shake. “I
know what you guys are doing tonight, and there’s no way I wanna get glommed with virginity-go-bye-bye cooties.”

“She told you?” Morning exclaimed loud enough for his voice to bounce around in the shell.

Zoë turned with an evil smile. “She tells me
everything
.”

“Oh, great!” He let out a breath. As if he weren’t feeling enough pressure, now he had to live with the prospect of Zoë getting a review the next day, if there was one. “How ’bout we change the subject.”

“Good by me,” Zoë chirped.

“I’ve been wanting to ask you something for weeks,” Morning said. “And if this is our last night on earth, it’d be nice to know.”

“Shoot.”

“Do you like me less now that I’m not a vampire?”

She shot him a quick smile. “Course I still like you as much. In fact, even though it wasn’t really you who turned me, whenever I fantasize about some badass vampire sinking fang and passing me the deuce, the face I always see is yours. You’re my one and only fang-stud.”

“Okay, okay, TMI,” he lamented. “How ’bout we ride the rest of the way in silence?”

Zoë laughed. “Deal.”

Zoë delivered Morning to the Dredful town house, but she hung back in the pedicab.

“You comin’ in?” he asked.

“Nah.” She pulled out her cell. “Got a call to make.”

Morning let himself in, having been rewarded with a key to the apartment as part of the “you’re just a mortal fireman now” care package Portia had given him for graduation. Besides, she figured he needed a key since he could no longer fly in the window as a pigeon.

He didn’t wait long before she came down the stairs off the kitchen. She wore a deep-green gown and looked reluctantly radiant. Halfway down the stairs, she asked, “You still think we’re doing the right thing?”

Morning cleared his throat. “You mean going to the ball, or—”

“Going to the ball, of course.” She squirmed in her gown. “I feel like I’ve been vacu-packed.”

He stood stiffly. “Me too. But I think we should suck it up and go.”

She moved to him. “I’d kiss you, but I had to do my lipstick three times before I got it right. How can my mom do it blind between courses in a restaurant?”

“Speaking of, where is she?”

“She got ordered to stay in D.C.”

“Ordered?”

“Yeah, if bad stuff starts coming down tonight, the president and all his cabinet are gonna do a sleepover in some underground bunker.”

Morning hid his relief that they now had clear sailing to come back to her place. Provided, of course, the world made it to midnight. He took the longish corsage box from under his arm, opened it, and presented it.

Portia laughed and pulled the corsage out. It was their croquet stake festooned with flowers. “You’re such a sentimental fool. Thank God
one
of us has that covered.” She jiggered the corsage-stake in front of her. “How am I supposed to wear it?”

He shrugged. “Maybe you’re not. Maybe it’s a magic wand.”

She brandished the stake like a sword. “All for one, and one for all, we must to the End Is Upon Us Ball!”

Zoë dropped Morning and Portia in front of the Waldorf Astoria, all dressed up for the holidays, and they made their way to the Starlight Ballroom.

Before getting into the ball, they had to show their tickets and apply temporary tattoos with the world’s expiration date: 12/21/12. They walked past the tables of swag bags:
Yogi Bear and Boo-Boo picnic baskets stuffed with decadent things you just had to have one more time, from Ding Dongs to Sno Balls. Portia explained the Yogi–Boo-Boo connection to Morning, which involved the supervolcano under Yellowstone Park that would be blowing before midnight, destroying everything in a 1,600-mile radius and spewing an ash cloud that would knock half the world into nuclear winter.

Once inside, Morning and Portia were wowed by the amazing doomsday environment the LaGuardia Arts students had created, especially given the prediction that a tsunami was supposed to rise out of the Atlantic before midnight and destroy the original thirteen colonies.

The reason for 12/21/12 being the day to end all days was clearly illustrated by the celestial model suspended from the ceiling of the ballroom. Hanging over half of the room was our solar system, with the planets revolving around the sun. On the other half was a huge cotton and LED light display of the Milky Way—the galaxy, not the candy bar. Laser beams showed how the sun and the Earth were in perfect alignment on 12/21/12 with a certain part of the Milky Way. This dark lane in the Milky Way, known as the Dark Road, and its alignment with the sun and Earth signals the last day, the very end of the 5,125-year Mayan calendar.

If this alignment with the Dark Road wasn’t enough to guarantee doom, there was also an alien mini solar system of planets orbiting around their own sun, the Dark Star, which had begun to cut into our solar system’s elliptical plane like a circular saw. The sharpest tooth in this saw blade was the fiery red planet Nibiru, which, sure enough, was passing so close to Earth on 12/21/12 that there was
going to be hell to pay, because, as every doomer knew, Nibiru had ripped into our celestial neighborhood a few times before. First time, it pocked the moon with craters. Second time, it destroyed Atlantis. Third time, it caused the flood that made Noah a sailor. And now, for its fourth visit, coupled with the end of Mayan time, Nibiru was finally going to put the human race out of its misery.

Under these chandeliers of catastrophe was a festival of end-time fun, which Morning and Portia took full advantage of. They went into the Kiss Your Ass Goodbye photo booth, took pictures of their mooning butts, then took pictures of themselves kissing the pictures of their mooning butts goodbye. They stopped by the Doomsday Vault of All Things Teenage, designed to survive the apocalypse and preserve for alien explorers what life was like for teenage earthlings. They threw in the Silly Bands they had brought for the occasion, along with Portia’s first unsuccessful fake ID and Morning’s expired IVL membership card. They also signed contracts to participate in Santa’s Moving Day, December 22, should they happen to survive all the bad tidings. Santa had to move because Nibiru was going to mess up the Earth’s magnetic flux so badly that the magnetic fields were going to be reversed, which meant the North Pole was moving south and the South Pole was moving north. Moving Santa’s entire workshop 12,500 miles south three days before Christmas was going to take lots of volunteers.

Morning and Portia were in line to buy a tube of Solar Flare Sunblock: SPF Quintillion, when they got pulled away by one of the endgames that punctuated the evening. The center of the ballroom cleared for a chariot race. One chariot was a model of Earth, pulled by students dressed
as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death. The other chariot was a model of Nibiru, pulled by students dressed as the Neo-Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Supervolcano, Quake, Magnetic Flip, and Solar Dragon. After two neck-and-neck laps around the open space, the Nibiru chariot fell behind. Rather than face defeat in the three-lap race, the Magnetic Flip horse forced the Nibiru chariot to reverse direction and raced straight into the Earth chariot. The collision ended in a twisted mass of horse, people, and planet parts, and the race was declared the disaster doomers had predicted.

When the band, Cry in the Night, began their second set, Morning and Portia hit the dance floor. In their tux and evening gown, they looked out of place in a sea of doomers. There was a Grim Reaper dancing with his scythe, and dancing coffins. The most annoying couple was a guy in a polar-bear suit clinging to his date, an ice floe. The ice floe kept yelling “I’m melting!” and shooting dancers with a squirt gun.

After a few wild dances, the band put on black hoodies and started the chords of their first slow dance, a funeral dirge written especially for the night, “Globicide.”

The only thing Morning knew about slow dancing was that he was supposed to lead, but he couldn’t tell who was leading whom. Not that he cared. He and Portia moved in such harmony it was just another sign they were eternally meant for each other, even if eternity was only a few more hours.

His first misstep was when he pulled his nose from Portia’s luscious hair and spied a figure dancing toward them. It was Cody. And he wasn’t dancing with Zoë.

“Ow,” Portia mumbled, taking a shot to the toe.

“Sorry,” Morning said as Cody danced his date over. He was wearing an all-white tux and looking more dashing than usual. It only made Morning angrier. “What are you doing here? Zoë said you were working.”

“I am,” he replied, spinning his date away and opening himself to Morning. “I’m shooting you with my tux-cam.”

Morning spied the boutonniere on his lapel and could make out the shiny little lens in the middle of it.

“In fact,” Cody continued, “we’re thinking you and Portia dancing might be the last shot in
The Rise and Fall of Morning McCobb
. That is, if we’re here tomorrow.”

Portia gave Morning a sheepish grin. True, Morning had urged her to abandon her doc on competitive knitting and return to working with Cody on the doc about Morning’s journey from vampire back to mortal, but he’d thought he would be spared their nosy camera on this special night. “What about Zoë?” he demanded. “Why’d you dump her?”

Cody pulled his date close. “I didn’t. She dumped me.”

“Don’t worry,” Portia told Morning as Cody danced his date away. “She’ll be here soon.”

Morning squinted with confusion. “With who?”

“You’ll see.” She pushed him into a turn.

“Why am I always the last to know what’s going on?”

“Because you’re a grown-up now, with a big important job,” she said faux-seriously. “And the rest of us are still just kids with kid jobs to do.”

“What job is that?”