by James Ponti
Natalie was exhausted and breathing heavily, but this was still Natalie, and she was not about to show the slightest sign of weakness in front of the undead.
“Didn’t you learn your lesson the last time?” she asked, trying to get a rise out of Orville. “Here, let me remind you.”
She went to kick him in the same leg that she had nearly destroyed in their previous fight. But unlike before, when her foot hit his leg, he didn’t crumble.
She did.
She screamed in pain as she fell to the ground and grabbed her foot. Then she looked up at Orville, and he gave her a big toothy grin as he rolled up his pant leg to reveal a thick metal pole that had replaced his damaged leg beneath the knee.
“Now you learn a lesson,” he said as he bent down and lifted her by the shoulders. Natalie kicked and squirmed but couldn’t break free of his grip as he slammed her against the rock wall again and again.
I felt so helpless. And then Alex came to the rescue.
He came running up from out of nowhere and in a single move managed to rip Natalie free from Orville’s grasp and at the same time sucker punch him from behind with three quick jabs. Orville was dazed and turned just in time for Alex to go Krav Maga on his face. He was poking and pulling, and Orville screamed for help. The other zombies instantly stopped fighting the rest of us and rushed to help him.
At one point, it looked like Alex was going to fight all of them single-handedly, but they’d seen enough. Once they’d helped Orville to his feet, they formed a wall around him and ran into the darkness of the tunnel and disappeared.
Grayson and I did the only thing we could think of. We applauded. But Alex was in the moment, and he spun around to check on Natalie.
“Are you okay?”
Natalie was still trying to catch her breath and get up from the ground. She made it to her hands and knees but had to stop there. She looked up at Alex, and I couldn’t read her expression. I was worried that she was seriously hurt until she flashed him a big smile. Then she bowed repeatedly and said, “I’m not worthy of you and your Omega awesomeness.”
It was dark, so I couldn’t tell for sure, but it looked like Alex was blushing.
A Time for Giving Thanks
Do my eyes deceive me, or is my Little Molly Bear wearing makeup?”
Little Molly Bear. Ugh.
Apparently, my grandmother was under the impression that I was still four years old. Of course, I could have straightened this out by telling her that the reason I was wearing a little makeup was because I was trying to hide the cuts and bruises I’d gotten during hand-to-hand combat with a couple of killer zombies in what appeared to be an abandoned top-secret government bunker underneath Grand Central Station. But that probably would’ve ruined the flow of Thanksgiving dinner conversation.
And it definitely would have gotten me grounded.
So instead, I just smiled and tried to be the best Little Molly Bear I could possibly be. I passed the mashed potatoes and said, “Yes, Grandma, I wanted to look especially nice for you.”
We don’t have a ton of relatives, but with one set of grandparents, two aunts, an uncle, and three cousins over for Thanksgiving, we more than filled up the apartment with holiday cheer. And when it was time to hold hands and say what we were thankful for, I truly had a lot of things to choose from. There were some I listed out loud, like “great friends and an amazing family,” and some I kept to myself, like “surviving this morning’s run-in with the zombies and reconnecting with my undead mom.”
As for dinner, we had all the Bigelow family’s greatest hits. Dad made turkey and stuffing that was so good you could write poetry about them, Aunt Fiona baked not one but two of her famous Texas-style pecan pies, and Grandpa Homer ended the feast the same way he did every year, by patting his ample belly and saying, “Thanks for having us over, Michael, it’s the only time I ever get a good meal.”
It really was great to see my relatives again, but big family gatherings are kind of hard for me. No matter how many people are there, I still can’t help noticing the hole where Mom isn’t. That was especially true this year because I knew she was spending Thanksgiving all alone somewhere underneath Manhattan.
That night, after everybody left and Beth and I took care of the dishes (or, put another way: that night after everybody left and because of the cast on my hand Beth washed and dried the dishes while all I did was put them away), we found my father kicked back on the couch with a huge smile on his face and a big piece of pie on the coffee table. He was in heaven . . . but it was not going to last for long.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Beth asked.
“Well, let’s see,” Dad said in his special Dad-pointing-out-the-obvious way. “I’m wearing my Jets jersey. I have a slice of your aunt’s amazing pecan pie. And on the television, there’s a football game featuring the Jets. . . . Hence the jersey. So I believe I am enjoying Thanksgiving just as the Pilgrims intended it to be enjoyed.”
“Umm . . . I don’t think so,” she said as she picked up the remote and turned off the television. “Or have you already forgotten about family time?”
“Hey, hey, hey,” Dad said as he grabbed the remote from her and turned the TV back on. “I’m pretty sure we just had family time. Don’t you remember? Your grandpa patted his belly and everything.”
“But you said we were supposed to have family time,” she reminded him. “Just the three of us. Grandpas and cousins don’t count. It’s my turn to plan it, and I choose tonight.”
Dad gave her a suspicious look as he tried to come up with a way to save his night of football. “I know,” he suggested. “Why don’t we watch the Jets game . . . together? That’d be fun.”
“Excuse me,” I interrupted. “But how is that family time?”
“I’m glad you asked,” he replied, stalling as he tried to come up with an answer. “My Jets jersey . . . was a birthday present from the two of you—family. The pie was baked by your aunt Fiona—family. The TV . . . is owned by . . . you know . . . the family. Family time.”
He could tell by our expressions that this was going nowhere and realized that he could not win. He took one last sad look at the game and then turned it off himself.
“Thank you,” Beth said.
“My pleasure,” Dad replied as though he meant it. “So what did you plan for us to do?”
“You’re going to love it,” she told him. “We’re scrapbooking.”
It was almost more than he could bear.
“Scrapbooking?” he asked, trying to make sure he heard her correctly. “You realize that I’m a very masculine member of the Fire Department of New York City, right? Scrapbooking’s not exactly . . . my thing. Isn’t there some sort of mountain climbing or chopping down of trees that we could do?”
“Molly,” she said, turning to me. “Please remind him what he said to us.”
“And I quote,” I said, trying not to laugh at my dad. “ ‘Anything I do with the two of you is special to me.’ ”
“And tonight,” Beth informed him, “anything is scrapbooking.”
She headed into her room for a moment, and Dad eyed me warily.
“I like that the two of you are working together,” he said. “It would be nice if it wasn’t in some evil plot to keep me from watching the Jets game, but I do like it.”
To be fair, Beth wasn’t just messing with Dad. There was a reason she picked scrapbooking and a reason she picked Thanksgiving night. The fact that it also messed with him was just a big bonus in her eyes. She came back out carrying a couple boxes.
“Remember when Mom kept signing us up for activities like mother-daughter yoga?”
“Or mother-daughter swing dancing,” I added.
“Right, like swing dancing,” she said. “Well, one time she signed us up for scrapbooking, and we started to make this.”
She pulled a large scrapbook out of one of the boxes.
“The plan was that it would cover our entire family history,” sh
e said. “Except we didn’t get too far before she got sick. For the longest time, I couldn’t even look at it. So I just kept it under my bed.”
She handed it to us, and I started flipping through it with my dad. There were about ten completed pages. They were amazing, with pictures and keepsakes from things I hadn’t thought about in years. My dad ran his fingers across some old ticket stubs from a Broadway play, and I thought he was going to cry.
“I had Grandma and Grandpa Collins bring over this box of old photos from their house,” she continued. “I thought tonight we could all start working on it together.”
Dad was extremely quiet, and I didn’t know if maybe it was all too emotional for him. But then he smiled and looked right at Beth.
“You so get what family time is all about!” Then he wrapped her up in a big bear hug.
While she was still in the hug, with her face buried in his shoulder, she decided to go for broke and mumbled, “Does that mean I get the last piece of pecan pie?”
Dad let go and stepped back. “Don’t touch my pie!” he said. “I kept close count. I only had one piece. You had three.”
Beth just smiled and did her little eyelash thing.
“Okay,” he said, melting, “we can split it.”
I cleared my throat.
“Three ways,” he said, begrudgingly but not really. “We can split it three ways.”
It’s not an exaggeration to say it was one of the best nights of my life. We told old stories, heard a few new ones, and found some hilarious pictures of Mom and Dad when they were first dating and they looked so young.
“Notice that your mom had big hair and I had a small waist,” he said with a chuckle. “Over the years those adjectives somehow managed to trade places.”
By eleven o’clock, the entire floor of the living room was covered with photographs and keepsakes and none of us wanted it to end. That’s when Dad went into the kitchen and started making hot open-faced turkey and stuffing sandwiches.
Not to keep using it as an excuse, but my cast made it really hard to cut shapes and designs with those little scrapbook scissors. I had a good eye for layout, and we discovered that Dad had a knack for picking out decorations to go around the pictures and he was especially skilled at curling ribbon. (He said it was because of all his first-aid training with bandages.)
It was almost two in the morning when Dad called it quits.
“I have to get enough sleep before my shift tomorrow,” he said as he got up from the floor.
“Are you going to tell your buddies in the station that you watched the football game?” Beth asked. “Or that you cut ribbon and pasted pictures all night?”
He took a deep sleepy breath as he considered the best answer.
“I’m going to tell them that I hung out with the two most beautiful, intelligent, and interesting girls in all of New York,” he said as he gave us each a good-night kiss on the forehead. “And I’ll tell them that we watched the Jets game together.”
He headed off to bed and left Beth and me alone.
I sat there and looked at her for a moment. In some ways, Beth is so easy to underestimate. She’s pretty and she’s social, and you get jealous and assume that she must be shallow. But she’s not. And though I’d never tell her, there are so many ways I want to be just like her.
“What are you looking at, Little Molly Bear?” she taunted.
And so many ways I don’t.
“This was pretty incredible,” I told her. “You know, there’s no way anything I come up with for family time will be as cool.”
“No, there isn’t,” she joked. “But I’m sure whatever you pick will be nice and weird.”
“You are so very funny.”
She started to clean up, and I took the box from her hand.
“Let me do this,” I said. “You had to take care of the dishes. My cast won’t get in the way of me picking up.”
“You sure?”
“I insist.”
“Okay,” she said, pleased. “But be careful to keep the pictures organized. You have to put them in the right—”
“Do you want me to do it or not?” I interrupted.
She stopped herself and smiled. “Good night.”
She went to her room, and I picked up. The little scraps of ribbon and paper were easy, but the pictures took a while. I couldn’t just put them in the box; not only did I have to organize them according to Beth’s system, but I found myself looking at each one, reliving some moments and trying to figure out others. I was getting supersleepy, but didn’t want to stop.
I was particularly excited when I found an envelope with pictures that had been taken at MIST. It was odd seeing my mom just a little bit older than me but at the same school I go to. I especially liked a photo of her with some friends on the patio. It was right next to the bench where my Omega team eats lunch every day.
Then I noticed something about the picture that woke me right up. There were two adults talking to her friends and her, and much to my surprise, I recognized both of them.
The first one was Jacob Blackwell. He was the member of the Unlucky 13 who had been killed on Halloween by being handcuffed on the subway car.
I looked at the second one and came to a realization so unexpected that I said it out loud even though I was all alone.
“I think I just found Milton Blackwell.”
MIST
As I walked across Roosevelt Island from the subway station to school, I had a flashback to the first time I was there. It was the summer before sixth grade, and I’d come to the Metropolitan Institute of Science and Technology for an admissions interview. Every year, more than a thousand students from across New York City apply to MIST, and of those only about seventy-five are invited to interview for one of the openings. The biggest reason I’d applied was because it’s where my mother had gone to school and I wanted to be just like her. But when I caught my first glimpse of the campus, I began to have second thoughts. It was nothing like St. Francis of Assisi, the Catholic school in Queens where I’d gone since kindergarten.
“What do you think?” asked my dad, who was walking beside me.
I stood there for a moment and studied the four gray buildings. They looked cold and ominous, and I couldn’t picture ever feeling at home in them.
“I think I hate it,” I answered honestly. “St. Francis looks like a school, but this looks like . . .”
“. . . a really scary hospital,” said a voice from behind me.
I turned around and saw a tall man with wild hair and a friendly smile. He held his hands behind his back as he leaned forward so that he could look me in the eye.
“And you know why it looks that way?” he continued. “Because that’s what it was when they built it. I have come to think that buildings must have DNA just like people do, because no matter how many times we paint it or plant pretty flowers around it, the whole place still looks like something you’d see in a horror movie.”
He offered me his hand and said, “I’m Dr. Gootman, the principal of this excruciatingly unattractive school.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “Nice to meet you, I’m Molly Bigelow.”
“That’s very interesting,” he said as we shook hands. “Because I am supposed to interview a prospective student named Molly Bigelow. So unless this is an amazing coincidence, I’m guessing that’s you.”
I nodded.
“And considering you’ve already told your father that you hate the school,” he added with a humorous expression, “I’m worried that things do not bode well for the interview.”
“I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
He cut me off as I tried to apologize.
“There’s nothing to be sorry about,” he said. “It’s a completely reasonable reaction. But before we go inside, I would like to ask you a question or two.”
“Okay.”
“What did you think the first time you saw a human heart? Not just a picture of one but an actual bloody, pu
lpy human heart?”
The question caught me completely off guard, and I no doubt made a doofus face as I replayed it in my head to make sure I’d heard him correctly.
“It’s not what you expected me to ask, is it?”
“No,” I said. “In fact, I think it’s a really . . . weird question.”
“It’s only weird if the answer is that you’ve never seen one,” he replied. “But you seem like someone who has seen a human heart before. And if that’s the case, then the question might be considered . . . insightful.”
And that’s where he had me, because I had seen one.
“Okay, I’ve seen a heart before,” I admitted, “but how did you know that?”
“Wouldn’t it be fantastic if it was because I had some sort of extrasensory mind-reading capability?” he replied. “But, actually, I know it because in preparation for our interview I reviewed your application. In it you said your mother was a medical examiner and that you liked to help out in her office. This means the odds of you having seen one are pretty good. So I’ll ask again. What did you think the first time you saw a human heart?”
This guy was not like any teacher or principal I had ever known. I glanced at my dad for a second, but he just shrugged and tried not to laugh. Then I looked back at Dr. Gootman and answered, “I thought it was really gross.”
“That is also a completely reasonable reaction,” he said. “In fact, if you had reacted any differently, I’d probably be concerned. But I’m curious what you thought of it when you found out that inside all those gross, disgusting parts occurs a miracle that pumps oxygenated blood throughout the body, making life possible. I want to know what you thought when you were able to look past its appearance and see it for what it truly was.”
He may not have been able to read minds, but he sure seemed to know how mine worked, because I specifically remember the day when I came to the same realization and stopped being grossed out by the stuff in my mom’s office.