Passing Strange

by Daniel Waters

  “Popeye,” Tommy said. “We’re only…trying…to help.”

  Popeye realized that Phoebe had placed her hand on Adam’s disturbingly large bicep. Watching the effect of her touch was like watching an elephant get hit with a tranquilizer dart; Adam visibly relaxed, and his lips closed back down over that winning smile. Fun time was over; Popeye realized he’d have to talk his way out of this one.

  “If you really…want to help you’ll…stay away,” Popeye said. “It doesn’t…matter…how many you…bring. There will…always…be more…humans.”

  Tommy had the nicest blue eyes, Popeye thought. They always appeared as though they were looking right into your soul.

  “The bullying…will end today. I…promise you that,” he said. “I need…to do this.”

  He leaned forward, hoping that Tommy could see right through the dark lenses and into his soul—if he had one—like he’d imagined.

  “I would think…if anyone…you…would understand.”

  Check and mate. “Your way, then,” Tommy said. “Good…luck.”

  They left, and he thought that their type of nuisance would be over. But of course, he was wrong again.

  * * *

  “Just so you know, I’m going today,” Margi told him, having once again dropped beside him in study hall. “You can’t stop me.”

  “Go…away, pink-haired…flea. Take your…jangling chains…with you.”

  “I heard what you said to Phoebe and the boys,” she said. “Not nice. Not at all nice. Shame, shame.”

  “Will you please…stop…chattering?” he said.

  “But I know why you did it. You are really just trying to protect the other zombies. I think that’s really noble of you, Popeye.”

  He slapped his desk so hard one of his copper fingernails broke off and went skipping across the room like a discarded pull tab.

  “Your ability…to completely misread…all of my motivations…is truly…astounding you…idiot!”

  “Is there a problem, Popeye?” Miss Quin asked from the front of the class.

  “Yes!” he said, aware that the entire class, TC included, was staring at him. “Yes! May I…change my seat…please?”

  Miss Quin nodded her assent, and Popeye took an open desk next to the quiet kid who had warned him about the beating the day before. Derek. His groupie, his greatest and only fan. As he approached, he saw that the boy was working on a sketch of his own, one that he was covering with his soft-looking hands.

  “Let me…see,” Popeye said.

  With obvious reluctance, Derek removed his hands. Popeye was looking down at a small drawing—a portrait, not a caricature or a cartoon—of himself, done with careful marks of black ink on lined white paper. Derek had sketched his horns back in.

  “Not…bad,” Popeye said.

  He looked at the kid for a moment, as Derek stared up at him with scared but curious eyes. How many classes did they have together? Three, at least—art, math, and this study hall. Derek opened his mouth, but Popeye shook his head.

  “Don’t speak. I…know. I know what…you are…going to say. You are going…to ask…why…did I…provoke him. Or why…am I…going through with it or…why don’t I…tell a teacher. I’m going to tell you…and only you…the answer. Although you won’t…realize…it is the answer…unless you…really think.”

  Derek looked at him in a way he’d never been looked at by a living being before; he looked at him like he really thought that Popeye might have the answers to hidden questions.

  “The answer is…that art…changes lives. That’s…all. Art is not…about empowering…anyone…or making someone feel better…or beauty…or revealing…great truths. It may do…all of those things or…it may do their…exact…opposite. But at its…hot core…its only aim…is…to change lives.”

  Derek stared up at him and Popeye couldn’t tell if the confusion clouding his eyes was breaking or gathering, but he knew it didn’t really matter.

  “Remember that,” he said.

  * * *

  There were about thirty people at the field already when Popeye made his way toward the concession stands; they were clustered in little groups of twos and threes and there was an ebullient, carnival atmosphere surrounding them. Many people seemed surprised to see him, others were curious, but the emotion he could most readily identify on most of their faces was hatred.

  TC was there, the center of the largest group of people, the ringleaders of the school’s main bioist faction. Holly Pelletier, Steve Winter, this newer kid they all called Dorman. TC, already jacketless, his large muscles bulging under a thin Oakvale Badgers T-shirt, saw him and cracked his knuckles. The sound they made was like thick twigs breaking.

  “I can’t believe you actually came, wormburger,” he said. “I am so going to enjoy this.” He rolled his shoulders and turned his neck from side to side, loosening up as he hopped from leg to leg.

  “Yes…you will,” Popeye said. He walked within ten feet of Stavis, and the gathered throng, driven by some primal instinct, formed a wide ring around him.

  “He’s going to kill you.” This from Holly Pelletier, the look on her sometimes pretty face hungry and feral.

  “Dead meat,” one of their companions added.

  “Twice dead,” Stavis said, shadowboxing a few rapid jabs, any one of which looked to have the force to launch Popeye’s head from his body.

  “Sure,” Popeye agreed, taking off his leather jacket. He couldn’t honestly say that he was nervous, because even if TC ground his bones for his breakfast he wouldn’t feel anything. He was beyond any physical pain. He supposed that the afternoon could end with Stavis opening his head like an Easter egg and scattering its contents on the field—that would be the true and final end for him—but even the prospect of final death didn’t frighten him. All he felt now was the vague sense of excitement and unease, the sensation that anything could happen. This was the very same sense of excitement he had looking at a new canvas, a blank piece of paper, or an unmarked patch of skin.

  “Get ready for a crushing defeat,” Stavis said.

  “I’m ready,” he replied.

  “Yeah, he’s ready,” he heard a voice from the crowd, a shrill, warped echo of his own voice. He turned and saw Margi, her pink hair the lone daub of color in the otherwise Brueghelian landscape. She stood behind him, alone, her bunched hands on her hips, glaring at TC and his friends. Popeye didn’t know whether to laugh or to chase her back down the hill.

  “Who is this, Freak?” Stavis said. “Your girlfriend?” This earned him a round of laughter—chortling, really, the sort of haw-haw-haw type of empty-headed laughter emitted only by the dullest of the dull at the most base attempts of humor. As much as Popeye wanted to chase her away, he had to admire her courage. She may have been there for different reasons than he was, but he supposed that they were no less valid.

  There were no other friendly faces in the crowd. He didn’t know whether to be pleased or disappointed that Saint Williams and his followers had honored his request. Part of him, he was surprised to realize, was actually glad that Margi had come, after all. He was glad that there would be a witness—one to whom the beating hearts and his undead brothers and sisters would actually listen—to what he was about to do.

  “Yes, she’s my…girlfriend,” he said, walking over to her.

  “Am not!” she whispered when he was near.

  “I know,” he replied, not bothering to remind her that he’d never had a girlfriend, and never would, because he wasn’t in the least bit interested in girls. “Would you…hold this…please?”

  She regarded the garment like it was a tissue he’d just sneezed in.

  “Only because you said please,” she said.

  “And these.” He took of his glasses and set them on the jacket as it lay in her outstretched arms. “Also this,” he said, removing his shirt.

  “Oh, ick,” Margi said as he lay the shirt atop his jacket and coat. A collective “eww!” rippled through th
e crowd as they beheld his various “bodifications”—the gills, the lidless eyes, the three places on his abdomen where he’d pared back his skin to reveal the muscles beneath. “You’ll pay for this.”

  “Oh, definitely,” he told her, and stepped back to the center of the ring, raising his arms shoulder-height and turned so that the crowd could get a good look at him. He was thin to the point of emaciation, having not eaten for many days leading up to his death. He drank in the sounds and expressions of their revulsion, lifting his head as though their hatred felt like cool water on his skin.

  He now saw that Margi wasn’t his only supporter among the massed groundlings. Derek was sitting in the bleachers above the field, watching from a safe distance. Popeye hoped that he had his sketchbook with him, or that he had the sort of memory that would allow him to remember and record what he was about to see.

  “You are one hideous freak, Freak,” TC said. Popeye looked at him then; he looked both nauseated and outraged, like Popeye was an unknown insect that had just walked out of the sandwich he was about to bite.

  “I’m going to mess you up even more than you already are,” TC said.

  Popeye, his arms still upraised, showed his pointy teeth.

  “Bring it,” he said.

  TC brought it. He came in faster than Popeye had expected he could move; he was such a lumbering ox he hadn’t considered him capable of such a quick burst of speed. His first punch, a left, caught Popeye right under the temple, and TC followed with a right that struck him square in his grinning mouth. The delighted crowd hooted and crowed. Popeye felt a splash of blood roll down his chin, and when he touched it, his fingertips came away red, which meant it wasTC’s blood, not his, because his wouldn’t have been red anymore even if he had enough to make a splash. His attacker had cut his hand on Popeye’s filed teeth, one of which was still embedded in the flesh between TC’s knuckles.

  “Ouch,” TC said, plucking the tooth out and tossing it on the ground. He shook his hand and when he made a fist a bright red bubble rose up between his knuckles. Mad before, he was furious now as he stepped toward Popeye. His fists thumped solidly into Popeye’s abdomen with a swift, flat rhythm. Popeye couldn’t feel them, and he thought of the scene in Rocky where the Rock was tenderizing the hanging beef carcasses as part of his training. The tempo of TC’s blows slowed, but only so he could get more force into the individual punches. Popeye thought he heard one of his lower ribs crack.

  “Cover up!” someone yelled. “Cover up!” He didn’t know if the advice was directed at him, or at TC, whose all-out assault left him wide open for retaliation.

  Popeye leaned forward, as though doubled up by the shots to his stomach, and TC drove his bloody fist up into Popeye’s nose, mashing it flat with an audible pop that made the crowd gasp. His nose was undoubtedly broken. Popeye didn’t mind; he’d been considering removing it anyway in a show of solidarity with George.

  He straightened up. The punishment he’d already absorbed was brutal, and the once-cheering crowd was mostly silenced except for the encouragement of a few of the hard-core zombie haters. A lone voice, not Margi’s, from somewhere on the field urged him to hit back. He stood and grinned at TC with his ruined mouth.

  “Protect yourself!” he heard, this time from Margi. One day, he thought, one day she’ll get it right.

  TC was breathing heavily, and his shirt was damp with sweat. He bellowed and then charged like a mad beast. Popeye could almost feel the anticipation of the crowd on his dead skin; he knew they were waiting for the moment when he would lash out at TC, maybe at the height of his exhaustion and fatigue, and catch him by surprise by planting a bony fist in his eye.

  That moment never came, never would come. TC rocked Popeye’s head back with two shots to the cheek, punches that he got his shoulders into, and he followed them with a devastating punch to the stomach that probably pulped half of his internal organs.

  Popeye had to admire his technique. He took another jab across his jaw, one that spun him half around. The accompanying crowd noise was more of a series of anguished cries rather than cheers, he noticed. Even they had their limits. He tried to smile, but didn’t think that he could any longer—the beating he was taking was certainly causing him damage, even if he couldn’t feel it.

  TC picked him up and squeezed him like he was trying to crack his rib cage, and then he hurled him to the ground. Dirt and grass that he couldn’t blink away came into contact with his eyes, interfering with his vision. TC kicked him. He stomped on his hand—his right hand, the one that he drew and painted with—and broke bones. He continued to kick him, and TC grunted with each strike, as though it were he and not Popeye that was feeling the force of each blow. Popeye thought that more of his ribs were cracking or breaking under the relentless assault. Then TC wound back and launched a field-goal worthy kick that completely unhinged Popeye’s jaw, flipping him on his back like a turtle.

  “Stop it, stop it, stop it!” a shrill voice cut through the sudden silence. Popeye thought it was Margi, but as he tried to clear his eyes with the hand that still worked he could see that Holly Pelletier was standing in front of TC, her hands against his heaving chest. She, this little tart of a bioist, was begging him to stop the slaughter. Tears were streaming down her cheeks.

  “Stop it, please stop it!” she said, wailing. “Stop hurting him!”

  Popeye tried to sit up, and couldn’t. Parts of him were broken, muscles moved out of place. But even from his low vantage point on the ground he could see that Holly’s wasn’t the only face wet with tears—many in the crowd were crying, or wore the humbled, contrite expressions of bystanders at the scene of a traffic accident. Even TC looked bewildered and on the verge, as though he’d been a survivor pulled from a burning and twisted wreck.

  Cry, Popeye thought, turning his gaze toward the crowd. No amount of tears will ever wash away what you saw today, what you participated in today. My image will be fixed in your brains forever.

  Margi was kneeling beside him, using his T-shirt to wipe TC’s blood off his chin and cheeks. He was aware also that the crowd was beginning to disperse, the ring of people surrounding him loosening like the knot of a pulled sneaker lace. From where he lay he couldn’t see if Derek was still watching, but he hoped he was, and he hoped that he was sketching away. TC opened his mouth like he was going to say something, but no sound came out save that of his ragged breathing, and finally he just walked away.

  “Popeye,” Margi said, placing his sunglasses back over his eyes. “Are you all right?”

  She still didn’t get it, and probably never would. He hoped that Derek remembered what he had told him, because if he remembered, he might understand.

  “Pop…Popeye?” she said.

  She didn’t understand, but he felt compelled to answer her, his audience. He owed her that much. He lifted his arm, intending to answer her with a thumbs-up, but he realized that the twisted bent claw that had been his hand probably wasn’t going to convey what he wanted it to. His jaw was dislocated, if not worse, and he seemed incapable of speech. Communication would be even more difficult for him than ever before Margi backed away from him a little, but he couldn’t blame her. She had no way of knowing that the sounds he was making, filtered and altered as they were through the loose bones rattling in his chest like wind chimes only to exit past his broken nose and shattered jaw, were laughter—real, mirthful laughter—and not the forlorn howl of one of God’s lowest creatures, crying out in mortal agony.