by Sara Farizan
“With a husband as awful as Celie’s, I don’t blame her. Am I right?” I say with a chuckle that almost sounds real amid the laughter of my peers.
Two
“What are you up to?”
Greg pulls up a chair next to me in the computer lab. I quickly minimize Anastasia’s Facebook page and turn to him. So maybe I’m not completely over her.
“Oh, nothing. What’s up?”
“I saw the new trailer for Zombie Killers Part V. It’s pretty sick.”
“No way! The teaser trailer wasn’t supposed to come out until November!”
“Hey, I know a guy. Here, I’ll show you,” he says, commandeering my computer as I shift my chair a little to the side.
Greg’s the kind of guy I wish I could crush on. He and I have a lot in common. We both like comic books and hip-hop, and we both think that Naya Rivera is our dream girl–though he doesn’t know that. He types in a web address and hovers the arrow over grainy footage of zombies parachuting out of the sky.
“Holy crap!” I say, and Greg turns to face me.
“I know!” We look at each other in excitement, but his eyes linger a little too long. I scoot away as he rubs the nape of his neck and looks back at the screen, almost as an apology.
At the semiformal dance we went to last year, he told me he’d liked me for a long time. I care about Greg . . . I just wish he didn’t have a crush on me. I suppose it’s flattering and makes me feel pretty. Other people have told me the same thing, but I never feel that way. I feel . . . not yet assembled, if that even makes sense.
After our make-out session last spring, I didn’t call Greg for about two weeks. Eventually he called and asked if I was okay. I told him I didn’t want to ruin our friendship by dating, and I could tell he was upset, but he agreed that our friendship was more important. I knew he’d be fine and date some hot girl who would treat him like crap, and I’d be left to moon over some girl of my own.
“I thought McNair died in the last one,” I say, watching the trailer on the screen.
“Well, he came back as a zombie.”
“But he’s a zombie hunter. So he’s hunting his own kind? Talk about self-loathing.” God, nothing in this franchise makes sense. When women in bikinis who have nothing to do with the plot show up, Greg clears his throat. I pretend I don’t notice and hope I’m not blushing.
I haven’t had a crush on anyone from school, which is a blessing. At Armstead everyone knows everything about everyone, even people you’ve never had a conversation with. While the school is physically impressive and has a lot of land and buildings, there are less than six hundred students, grades seven through twelve, inhabiting its halls. There are paintings and photographs of former educators and students, most of which look to be of the WASP variety, dating from the school’s inception in the 1800s.
The campus boasts several athletic fields, a giant gymnasium, a hockey rink, tennis courts, squash courts, a performing arts center, a photography lab, a science building, a building for the middle school, and three computer labs. There’s also a library, which is small and mostly used as a place to nap or read magazines.
The Zombie Killers trailer ends and Greg moves to a chair next to mine. “Are you going to Lisa Katz’s party this weekend?” he asks, checking his Facebook newsfeed.
“I didn’t know I was invited.” Greg and I aren’t exactly in the cool group. We’re more in the middle–not popular but not ostracized, either. There are a few well-established tiers within the social hierarchy at Armstead, yet Greg and I have somehow managed to remain floaters.
The cool kids are Ashley, Lisa, and their shopping buddies, some jocks, and some billionaire kids. I don’t understand how cool kids find one another. It’s like they have sonar for who is socially acceptable and who isn’t.
“Yeah, it’s like a back-to-school thing,” Greg says. “Almost everyone’s invited. You going?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I have a ton of work.”
“Homework? It’s a Lisa Katz party, Leila! I’ve heard her house is badass. We’ve got to check it out!”
I don’t tell Greg that I went to Lisa’s house all the time when I was younger. She and I always had a pretty good time, until her mother showed up. Stephanie Katz always put me on edge. There was something about her that made me nervous all the time. She didn’t yell or scream. She would just phrase things in a certain way that made you feel inferior or useless, like “I didn’t think you were familiar with Charles Dickens’s work,” or “Your mother has such an interesting accent. The way she says ‘ vatermelon’ instead of ‘watermelon.’ ”
Lisa and I stopped hanging out when she came to Armstead in seventh grade. I came in ninth grade, and Lisa wasn’t superenthused to see me in her class. By the time I got here from my old school, Ashley had kind of swooped in on Lisa. They had this weird bond that I didn’t understand. They talked about clothes and TV shows I never had an interest in. It was like watching a Seventeen magazine article come to life, where the models look like they’re laughing about something you just wouldn’t understand. I think I had a window to join in but blew it when Ashley looked down and saw I was wearing sandals with socks. I have since remedied this, but in my defense it was cold and those sandals were within Armstead dress code. I don’t think Lisa or I really missed each other that much, but sometimes I wonder how she’s doing when I see her in class. She seems so . . . different now.
Lisa’s older brother, Steve, died last year in a car accident on Route 128. Back when we were younger, Steve would hang out with me and show me his X-Men action figures when his sister had to practice the piano. Lisa hated playing, but her mother insisted it was a skill she would be thankful for in the future, and she had to practice every day at 5:15. I heard “Für Elise” over and over again while Colossus and Sabretooth duked it out for supremacy. Sometimes Steve let me, as Colossus, win.
During Steve’s funeral service, Lisa sat quietly next to her mom, pulling down her bangs in front of her eyes. For the shivah, a few days later, I went over to her house with a plastic bag in my hand. Ashley and all the popular kids were leaving as I walked in. We said hey, and they pointed me in Lisa’s direction. I stood around for a while, feeling a little out of place. I hadn’t been to her house in ages. The house seemed twice as big as I remembered and so empty, even with all the mourners ignoring the table full of food. Lisa made eye contact with me and excused herself from a group of her father’s business partners.
“Thanks for coming.” Lisa said.
We hadn’t really spoken outside of school for so long–it was funny talking to someone I didn’t really know anymore in a setting that no longer seemed familiar, either.
“It was a nice service the other day.”
She nodded.
“I’m sorry. I know you’ve probably been hearing a lot of that for the past week, but . . . I’m really sorry. Steve was a good guy.”
“He was. A really good guy.”
She looked away from me. Not at anything or anyone in particular, just away from me.
“Do you still play piano?”
She looked at me like I had just asked her an intimate question about her sex life. But whatever surprise she felt at the question was soon masked again with indifference.
“Yeah. I still play.”
“Practice at five fifteen?” I asked.
She made a noise that sounded like a cough, though given the circumstances I think that was the best version of a laugh she could muster.
“Not so much anymore, what with soccer and everything.”
I nodded.
“He’d always play video games with me when you’d go off to practice. He didn’t have to, but I always thought he was so cool, being older and everything. I always wished I had a big brother like him.”
She nodded politely, looking away from me again.
“I told him that once. I think I was about eight. He smiled and gave me this.”
I pulled a Colossus action figure fro
m the plastic bag and gave it to Lisa.
“I thought you might want to have it back. I know it’s lame–”
She hugged me. I almost jumped back in shock.
“Thank you.”
We released and I gave her a small smile.
“Anyway, I better let you get back to things. Listen, I know, we’re not best friends or whatever, but if you need anything–” I thought I saw a hint of a smile, but I wasn’t sure. I walked away as quickly as I could. I didn’t want to be there anymore.
“Damn. Lisa’s e-vite has a hundred RSVPs,” Greg says, pulling me back to the present and the computer lab. He’s scrolling down the guest list, his eyes getting wider as the list goes on and on.
When is that stupid bell going to ring?