Carlos never shied from a mission, and if Mal wanted a howler, there was no alternative but to provide one. There was nothing he could do about it, AP Evil Penchant or not. He knew his place on the totem pole.
First things first: a party couldn’t be a party without guests. Which meant people. Lots of people. Bodies. Dancing. Talking. Drinking. Eating. Playing games. He had to get the word out.
Thankfully it didn’t take too long for everyone he crossed paths with at school, and the minions of everyone they crossed paths with, to spread the word. Because Carlos didn’t so much issue an invitation as deliver a threat.
Literally.
He didn’t mince words, and the threats only grew more exaggerated as the school day wore on. The rumors spread like the gusty, salty wind that blew up from the alligator-infested waters surrounding the island.
“Be there, or Mal will find you,” he said to his squat little lab partner, Le Fou Deux, as they both dissected a frog that would never turn into a prince in Unnatural Biology class.
“Be there, or Mal will find you and ban you from the city streets,” he whispered to the Gastons as they took turns stuffing each other in doomball nets in PE.
“Be there, or Mal will find you and ban you and make everyone forget you, and from this day onward you will be known only by the name of Slop!” he said almost hysterically to a group of frightened first-years gathered for a meeting of the Anti-Social Club, which was planning the school’s annual Foul Ball. They turned pale at his words and desperately promised their attendance, even as they trembled at the thought.
By the end of the day, Carlos had secured dozens of RSVPs. Now, that wasn’t too hard, he thought, putting away his books in his locker and releasing the first-year who’d been trapped inside.
“Hey, man.” Carlos nodded.
“Thanks, I really have to pee,” squeaked the unfortunate student.
“Sure,” Carlos said, scrunching his nose. “Oh, and there’s a party. My house. Midnight.”
“I heard, I’ll be there! Wouldn’t miss it!” the first-year said, raising his fist to the air in excitement.
Carlos nodded, feeling mollified and more than a little impressed that even someone who’d been trapped inside a locker all day had heard the news about the party. He was a natural! Maybe party planning was in his blood. His mother certainly knew how to enjoy herself, didn’t she? Cruella was always telling him how boring he was because all he liked to do was fiddle with electronics all day. His mother declared he was wasting his time, that he was useless at everything except chores, and so maybe if he threw a good party, he could prove her wrong. Not that she would be around to witness it, though. She’d probably be enraged to discover her Hell Hall crawling with teenagers. Still, he wished that one day Cruella could see him as more than just a live-in servant who happened to be related to her.
He made his way home, his mind awhirl. With the guests secured, all he had to do was get the house ready for the blessed event—and that couldn’t be too hard, could it?
A few hours later, Carlos took it all back. “Why did I ever agree to have this party?” he agonized aloud. “I never wanted to have a party.” He raked his fingers through his curly, speckled hair, which made it stick up in a frazzle, a lot like Cruella’s own do.
“You mean tonight?” A voice echoed from the other end of the crumbling ballroom, from behind the giant, tarnished statue of a great knight.
“I mean ever,” sighed Carlos. It was true. He was a man of science, not society. Not even evil society.
But here he was, decorating Hell Hall, which had seen better days long before he’d been born. Still, the decrepit Victorian mansion was one of the grandest on the island, covered in vines more twisted than Cruella’s own mind, and gated with iron more wrought than Cruella’s own daily hysterias.
The main ballroom was now draped in the sagging black-and-white crepe paper and partly deflated black-and-white balloons that Carlos had pilfered from a sad stack of dusty boxes stashed in his building’s basement. Those few boxes, stamped De Vil Industries, were all that remained of the former De Vil fashion empire—the merest scraps of a better life that had long since faded away.
His mother, of course, would be furious when she saw that Carlos had gotten into her boxes again—“My stolen treasures,” she’d scream, “my lost babies!”—but Carlos was a pragmatist, and a scavenger.
Why his mother had ever been obsessed with black-and-white Dalmatian puppies, he had no idea. He was terrified of those things; but she had been prepared to own one hundred and one of them, so there was a lot of stuff to scavenge.
Over the years, he’d repurposed more than a few empty crates—scientists requiring bookshelves as they did—abandoned leashes—nylon withstanding the elements as it did—and unsqueaked squeaky toys—rubber repelling electricity as it did—that had fallen by the wayside when his mother’s plans were foiled.
An AP Evil scientist and inventor like Carlos couldn’t afford to be choosy. He needed materials for his research.
“Why did you agree to this party? Easy. Because Mal asked you to,” Carlos’s second-best friend Harry said, shaking his head as he wiggled his fingers, tape dangling from each one. “Maybe you should try, for your next invention, to build something that would free us all from her mind control.”
His third-best friend, Jace, tried to take a piece of tape but only succeeded in taping himself to Harry. “Yeah, right. No one can stand up to Mal,” said Jace. “As if.”
Harry (Harold) and Jace (Jason) were the sons of Horace and Jasper, Cruella’s loyal minions, the two blundering thieves who had attempted to kidnap the one hundred and one Dalmatian puppies for her and failed miserably. Just like their fathers, Harry and Jace tried to look like they were more capable and less nervous than they actually were.
But Carlos knew otherwise.
Harry, as short and fat as his father, could barely reach to fasten his side of the ebony streamer. Jace, taller even than his own tall, scrawny father, didn’t have that same problem but, as previously mentioned, couldn’t manage to figure out the tape dispenser. Between them, they didn’t exactly constitute a brain trust. More like a brain mis-trust.
Carlos wouldn’t have chosen them as his friends—his mother chose them for him, just like she did everything else.
“They’re all we’ve got,” Cruella would say. “Even when we have nothing else, we’ll always have…”
“Friends?” Carlos had guessed.
“Friends?!” Cruella had laughed. “Who needs friends when you have minions to do your bidding!”
Cruella certainly ruled Jasper and Horace with an iron leash, but one could hardly say that Harry and Jace did Carlos’s bidding. They only seemed to hang around because their fathers made them, and only because they were all scared of Carlos’s mother.
Which was why he considered them only his second- and third-best friends. He didn’t have a first best friend, but he knew enough about the concept of friendship, even without having any proper ones of his own, to know that an actual best friend would have to be able to do something more than follow him around, tripping over his feet and repeating his not-worth-saying-the-first-time jokes.
All the same, it was good to have some help for the party, and it was Harry who nodded sadly at him now. “If Mal doesn’t like this party, we’re doomed.”
“Doomed,” echoed Jace.
Carlos surveyed the rest of the room. Every piece of broken-down old furniture was covered in a dusty white linen cloth. Every few feet of plaster wallboard was punctured by a crumbling hole that revealed the plywood and plaster underneath.
The overachiever in him bristled. He could do better than this! He had to. He rushed upstairs and dug out his mother’s antique brass candelabras and rigged them up around the room. With the lights off, the candles glimmered and flickered as if they were floating in midair.
Next, was the chandelier swing—a staple at any Isle party, or so he’d heard. He had Jace climb up a makeshift ladder and tie a rope swing to the light fixture. Harry jumped off from one of the sheet-covered couches to test it out, which caused a cloud of dust to settle over the whole room. Carlos approved—it kind of looked like a fresh snowfall had been sprinkled over the hall.
He picked up the rotary phone and called his cousin Diego De Vil, who was the lead singer in a local band called the Bad Apples.
“You guys want a gig tonight?”
“Do we ever! Heard Mal’s having a full-moon howler!”
The band arrived not too long after, setting up the drum set by the window and practicing their songs. Their music was loud and fast, and Diego, a tall, skinny guy who sported a black-and-white Mohawk, sang out of tune. It was marvelous. The perfect soundtrack for the evening.
Next up, Carlos dug out an old-fashioned instant Polaroid camera he’d found in the attic. He fashioned a private booth by removing the sheet from a couch and rigging it on a rod in a secluded corner. “Photo booth! You take their photo,” he said to Jace. “And you hand it to them,” he told Harry.
Carlos admired his handiwork. “Not too shabby,” he said. “Now we’re talking.”
“And it’s about to get a whole lot better,” said an unfamiliar voice.
Carlos turned to see Jay entering the room holding four huge grocery bags filled with all manner of party snacks: stinky cheese and withered grapes, deviled eggs (so appropriate) and wings (sinfully spicy), and more. Jay pulled a bottle of the island’s best spicy cider out of his jacket and dumped it into the cracked punch bowl on the coffee table.
“Wait! Stop! I don’t want things to get out of hand,” Carlos said, trying to grab the bottle and cap it. “How did you get your hands on all of that sugar!”
“Oh, but that’s where you’re wrong,” Jay said, grinning. “Better your party gets out of hand than Mal gets out of sorts.”
Jay sank to the couch, putting his combat boots up by the punch bowl. The minions shrugged, and Carlos sighed.
The guy had a point.
As the clock struck midnight, Mal’s guests began to arrive in force. There were no gourd-like carriages or rodent-like servants to be seen, not anywhere. Nothing had been transformed into anything, especially not what anyone would consider a cool ride.
There were only feet, in varying degrees of shoddy footwear. Perhaps because their feet were the largest, the Gastons arrived first, as usual. They never risked a late entrance, so as not to miss a buffet table full of food they might swallow whole before anyone else got a taste.
During the awkward silence that followed the Gastons head-butting their hellos and competitively slamming pitchers of smuggled root beer, a whole ship’s worth of Harriet Hook’s pirate crew came marauding through the door.
As Carlos stood against the faded wallpaper nursing his spicy punch, the Gastons and the pirate posse busied themselves with chasing the next group of guests through the house. This happened to be an entire cackling slew of evil step-granddaughters, festooned with raggedy ribbons and droopy curls, elbowing their way around the corners at top speed. “Don’t chase us!” they begged, just waiting to be chased. “You’re horrible!” they screamed, horribly. “Sto-o-o-o-o-o-p,” they said, refusing to stop.
Their cousin, Anthony Tremaine followed them into the room, rolling his eyes.
The band struck up a rollicking tune. Dark-haired Ginny Gothel arrived with a bushel of wormy apples, and a game of bob-for-the-wormiest-apple broke out in the tub. Everybody wanted a turn on the chandelier swing, and the rest of the guests were engaged in a serious dance-off over by the band. All in all, it was shaping up to be a wicked good time.
More than an hour after the party had officially started, there was a sharp knock on the door. It wasn’t clear what made this knock different from all the others, but different it was. Carlos leapt to his feet like a soldier suddenly called to attention. Jay stopped dancing with a posse of evil step-granddaughters. The Gastons looked up from the buffet table. Little Sammy Smee held an apple between his teeth questioningly.
Carlos steadied his nerves and opened the door. “Go away!” he yelled, using the island’s traditional greeting.
Mal stood in the doorway. Backlit by the dim hall light, in shiny purple leather from head to toe, she appeared to have not so much a halo as a shimmer, like the lead vocalist of a band during a particularly well-lit rock concert—the kind with smoke and neon and bits of sparkly nonsense in the air.
Carlos half-expected her to start belting a tune with the band. Perhaps he should have felt excited that such an infamous personality had decided to come to his party.
Er, her party.
There would be no unplugging this party like one of his rebuilt stereos, not once it had begun, especially not the sort of party Mal seemed to have in mind.
“Hey, Carlos,” she drawled. “Am I late?”
“Not at all,” said Carlos. “Come in.”
“Excited to see me?” Mal asked with a smile.
He nodded yes. Except that Carlos wasn’t excited.
He was terrified.
Somewhere, deep down, he even wanted his mommy.