Those hours at the Cool Spoon and the quick drips of other visits had had to carry Zaley through the insanity of her summer. And now it was going to continue into the autumn without the respite of school. Locked into this two-bedroom house, the television a constant blare in the living room with the dark furniture and burgundy curtains and boards throttling the last crack of daylight out of existence. Her father sulking in the recliner and coming up with new notions of how to ensure their safety, the dolls watching Zaley accusingly as she typed on her laptop and thought about colleges instead of playing with them . . . that was what she would do while she waited for school to start up. Pick colleges. Her SAT scores hadn’t been as good as Elania’s, and they certainly were nowhere near as sky-high as Micah’s, but she was above the state average. They would be good enough for somewhere, and her grades were A’s and B’s. This time next year, she should be leaving this place for a new life. All of her childhood she’d waited for rescue, someone to spirit her away. Her only savior was going to be the knight in shining armor of time.
For now, she had a laundry room that she could not fit in without a ten-minute dismantling. She had a gun in her father’s closet, star rugs on her floor, the umpteenth Join the Party request from her mother, and Sombra C trapping her into this house. She had an ex-boyfriend that she had been an idiot to dump, and now he’d moved on to someone new. Right now she had nothing.
She snapped a picture of the boards and debated to whom she should send it.
Corbin
He was dreaming of price tags.
Sally was standing naked upon shifting sands, a blue floor, colored tiles, a swathe of green grass, a gap of empty space, a white cloud, and speckled linoleum. She was holding out her arms to the sides. In Corbin’s hand was the teal tag gun he used at Mr. Foods on the plastic of the flower bouquets, and he took aim at parts of her body and squeezed the trigger. The stickers sprayed out from the gun and affixed themselves to her. Two ninety-nine to her cheeks, five ninety-nine to the hickey on her neck, twenty ninety-nine to each of her breasts. He pulled the trigger again and more stickers flew out, HALF-OFF SALE to her hair, BUY ONE GET ONE FREE to her thighs, and INQUIRE WITHIN to her loins. That meant the price was so sky-high that it could only be learned through a discreet communiqué with management.
Then the gun was gone, and he was looking through his wallet to see what he had. The store paid minimum wage, and Mr. Foods was coming down the cereal aisle to tell Corbin to get back to work. Every manager of a branch was given the honorary name Mr. Foods, unless they were female, and then they were Ms. or Mrs. Foods. The Cloudy Valley Mr. Foods was unhappy to have a naked girl in his store, and Corbin not doing his job. Corbin searched through his wallet faster, sure he had enough to cover a breast as sharp footsteps rang out on the white linoleum, and he woke up to a knocking at his door.
“Time for school!” Mom called. “September fifth!”
“Oh my God, are you serious?” Corbin yelled.
“I am serious, lazy boy! Just because it’s cancelled is no excuse not to learn!”
He had not realized that his mother was serious when she said school tomorrow last night at dinner over their bowls of soup. It was still often on the menu even though her chemotherapy and radiation were long over. They liked soup. The cheery red of tomato soup with a dash of green basil, flavorful minestrone and its snap of Italian sausage, a subtle lentil that Mom mixed to spread evenly and Corbin let settle to clumps at the bottom of his bowl, it was soup, soup, soup and two or three happy Lis, depending on if Dad was on a business trip. Soup with salad, soup with bread, and Elania gave them the recipe her family made every Passover for matzo ball soup. Lost in his second bowl of potato soup when Mom said school tomorrow, he had just laughed.
“I’m closing my eyes and letting in the dog,” Mom called with one final knock. The door opened and closed quickly. Bleu Cheese bounded in and jumped on the bed as Mom went downstairs. Corbin fought off the dog’s tongue and gave her a hug. Sixty flatulent pounds of cross-eyed blue idiocy, he snapped a picture of her everyday to post on The Daily Cheese with a one-sentence update. Some people left rude comments about how Bleu Cheese should be euthanized for being a pit, but he never responded to them. Their minds were made up, even though he had catalogued his dog’s activities for three years running and the most aggression she had ever shown was as a puppy to her reflection in the mirror by her food bowl. She thought the other puppy was trying to steal her kibble.
Dad had been nervous about her, and said if there was a problem, she was going right back to the pound where she came from. Everyone heard a lot of scary things about pits and their prey drive. Corbin watched nine seasons of Tame Me before they got the dog and ferried her religiously to obedience classes at Pet-Pet. She flunked the first time around, but not due to aggression. She just didn’t understand that sit didn’t mean dance around Corbin’s feet, and stay didn’t mean follow, and shake didn’t mean chase her tail. She gained a better understanding her second time through obedience school. The instructor said she was the dumbest dog ever to enroll in his class. Corbin had no idea what he’d done with her diploma when she at last earned it, but her first report card with a straight line of F’s was immortalized on the refrigerator, and on his blog. Mom had been scared of the breed, too, and now Bleu Cheese was her best buddy when Corbin was at school. When there had actually been school.
God, if Mom had gotten workbooks from somewhere, Corbin was going to be sad. And they weren’t going to sit on his desk. He had his whole room fashioned so that he didn’t have to see words: little curtains over his bookshelves, and his posters were nature scenes and fractals. This was his safe place where nothing jumped, nothing transposed, and if he was seeing words, like on his laptop, it was because he wanted to. Because he was ready. Dad was also dyslexic, and he liked Corbin’s room. He was the best wine salesman in his company. Dad found ways around those mixed-up words, like Corbin did. You had to work with the problem, not against it.
When ancient Gramma Lulu, who was really Corbin’s great-grandmother, asked if he was getting straight A’s, Mom said it was all right to answer yes. Gramma Lulu thought dyslexia meant lazy, not problem, just like Bleu Cheese couldn’t connect sit to her rump touching the floor, and Corbin could look at the word bat in a sentence and not say bat or string buh-ah-tuh immediately in response to sound it out. Buh-ah-tuh. Buh-ah-tuh. Or maybe it was duh-ah-tuh. No, he was right the first time. Bat. Bat. Baseball. Corbin’s only A’s through most of his school career came in physical education.
Bat. Animal. That was another meaning. He would have to read that sentence a second time to figure out if it was about sports or animals. Dyslexia was his problem. Mom only called him lazy in jest, because he wasn’t. Cloudy Valley School District was nothing short of awful with its students who had learning disabilities like his. Federal law commanded them to provide appropriate education to the disabled, but individual districts could define what appropriate meant to them. Appropriate in Cloudy Valley was a special education classroom with kids sporting IQs half of Corbin’s. He flatly refused after one week in that room to go back. That was when he was nine. In seventh grade, the district tried to assign him a one-on-one aide, but Corbin didn’t want an adult following him around all day. By eighth grade, his parents at last persuaded the district that what he needed were tests that weren’t so long, shorter essays, to allow him audio books while the other kids read. His English teacher was the worst about it, suspicious that Corbin was listening to music, complaining about the inconvenience of adjusting exams and assignments, and one day saying in a singsong, “A special test for special Corbin!” as he handed them out to the class.
Corbin hated being treated like that. He was just as smart as any other kid in that class, and smarter than a lot of them. Since the district didn’t inform the high school of his requirements, he did not take the initiative to do it himself and forbid his parents to do so for him. He was proud, and never wanted the shame of his easier
tests on display again.
Mr. Tran kept him after school one day in junior year to ask why his most enthusiastic student was getting C’s on his tests when he knew the material. When Corbin explained, Mr. Tran held up his last test and read out loud the questions marked wrong. Corbin answered perfectly. Anaphase. Spindle apparatus. Eukaryotic. He answered the essays verbally at such length and detail that the teacher stopped him. Mr. Tran changed the C to an A, a real A on a real test, and that was up on the refrigerator next to Bleu Cheese’s array of F’s. After that, Mr. Tran had him come to school half an hour early on test days and take the exam orally. Corbin finished the year with an A in science, there would be two A’s on his report card, and Mr. Tran marched him on the last day of school to Mrs. Ervin’s AP Biology to say, “This is one of my brightest students, and I’m sending him your way in September. He must hear his tests, not read them. That is what he needs to succeed.”
Corbin had not been planning to take AP Biology, just regular old senior science, but Mrs. Ervin had no trouble with adjusting tests so he went to the office to sign up. Mom screamed to see his report card when it came. He hadn’t told her about the A, wanting it to be a surprise, and Mom exclaimed, “How many times? How many times when you were little did I have to tell you that you were not a stupid boy? Just because your eyes don’t connect to your brain like mine doesn’t mean you’re not as smart!” She bragged to the waiter at Aye-Aye, Captain that night that her son was going to take AP Biology. Corbin was embarrassed, but not that much. It wasn’t every day he had an academic achievement. They went to the Cool Spoon after dinner and she told everyone there, too. Austin put extra hot fudge on their sundaes to celebrate and biked all the way to their house later that night to return Mom’s wallet, which she forgot on the table.
While the dog snuffled around the floor, Corbin pulled on a pair of sweatpants and removed his phone from behind one of the curtains. Sally had sent a morning text, as was her habit, and they’d fought repeatedly about how he didn’t answer them at length. She didn’t like to get a text of hi with a picture attached of Bleu Cheese. Sally thought that he should just read them more slowly. He was not going to spend half an hour figuring out her message and working out a reply each and every morning! Twice he accidentally sent hi and the shot of Bleu Cheese to the wrong person, having mixed up Sally and Zaley. Once Zaley sent back a picture of her bed, which her mother had piled with stuffed animals as a silly surprise while Zaley showered. Under the picture, Zaley wrote tersely I’m 4! She knew to keep it short. Her room was indeed a perpetual shrine to her four-year-old self, as Corbin saw through her window last year. Zaley had broken his heart since seventh grade. She’d only answer a question or two about her family and seize up, but he gleaned that some mental institution was short two patients. He didn’t know why he and Zaley fell apart. One day together, one day over and she would not explain. It wasn’t him but her, she said. Yet wasn’t that what everyone said to spare the feelings of the person being dumped? It’s not you; it’s me. It hadn’t seemed like she wanted to break up, not with how she cried while telling him.
Mom loved Zaley, ever so sweet and polite and eager to help. Not Sally so much, who came over for dinner now and then and never helped to clear the table. The text message from her this morning was the usual: I love you kiss kiss on a diet oh my God so hungry how is my cutie Corbie do you want to come over to watch a movie and order salads from Pizza Whippers . . . It was not worth working his way through. He went through this rigmarole every morning. Hi. And here’s Bleu Cheese! He had gone through two apps intended to read texts out loud and record his own: one crashed his phone without fail and the second heard him say: I’ll pick you up at four, okay? and translated it to the entirely nonsensical: Apples you fork who cane? If he had to read and correct the messages, then why was he bothering to speak them at all? A better one was coming out next month.
Whatever Mom had planned for home school, Corbin wanted some input. His first two classes were going to be photography and English. He yelled his schedule into the kitchen, Mom saying fine fine as she washed out her bowl of cereal.
Having a task for the day gave him an easy idea for The Daily Cheese. Corbin set up the shot at the dining room table, a pile of books to the side, one open on the placemat. The books in the pile would look better with markers in them, so he got those from Mom’s green plastic cup and inserted them at random. What else would look good? An apple, some pencils in a line, a notebook open to a page half-filled with scrawls . . . Corbin was having fun with this. The dog followed him from room to room while he collected items. Last week he’d run out of ideas for pictures, and just posted Bleu Cheese in a variety of sleeping postures.
Once the table was set up, he took some practice shots without the dog to see how they turned out. Changing the pile of books to an angle, straightening the tassel of the bottom marker, setting one of the pencils on the open notebook, he snapped another shot and was satisfied. Except he needed more light than the overhead provided.
Mom called, “Didn’t the Cheese have a blue shirt that said nerd?”
“The nerd shirt!” Corbin yelled. He had forgotten all about that, the shirt Dad got for her to wear the second time through obedience school. That was perfect for the picture, along with a pair of Dad’s old glasses. Going out to the garage, Bleu Cheese padded after him in thrill at this activity.
Tomorrow he could put her in front of his old easel with a copy of the Mona Lisa clipped to it, and a blue paw print at the bottom for her signature. The garage was giving him so many ideas. He found the box and her shirt was right at the top when he opened the flaps. NERD was written on the back and the front multiple times. Excited, he shook it out. His phone rang, Sally of course, and he grimaced.
“You didn’t answer me,” she wheedled when he picked up.
“I wrote hello,” Corbin protested.
“You did not! You wrote hi. I don’t even get five letters from you! So, what time will you be here?”
“Oh, I can’t come. Mom is making me do some schoolwork.” He picked fuzz from the shirt while Sally bitched. Bleu Cheese snapped at the falling pieces, thinking they were treats. He laughed.
“What’s so funny?” Sally asked.
“Bleu Cheese is eating fuzz.”
Annoyed, Sally said, “You love that dog more than you love me!” and hung up in a snit.
Sally . . . he almost wished that he hadn’t gotten involved with her. She was such a princess. He could already see the fit she was going to throw when he chose the Welcome Mat winter party over the school gala at the South Haven Country Club in December. There was nothing to be done about that; the place over in Blue Hill where they held the Welcome Mat party was only available that one evening.
Remembering the dream, he closed the box and called the dog out of the garage. He knew why he’d dreamed that. Corbin had four shifts a week stocking at Mr. Foods, and Sally had come over to hang out recently. He couldn’t hang out, not at work, and she pushed out her lower lip. God, she was sexy when she pouted. Then she trailed her hand over the bouquets, saying love me a little at the cheap alstroemerias, love me more at the mid-range Summer Sweetness mix of chrysanthemums and asters, and love me most at the dozen red roses. He loved her most, and that night was well rewarded when her shirt came off in the back seat of his mom’s minivan behind the movie theater. Then she posted a picture on her HomeBase page of the flowers and a message saying how sweet her boyfriend was.
Corbin was not sure what to think about that. He felt like he had paid, albeit indirectly, for her tits. And while he enjoyed them, it was kind of weird that a cheap bouquet might have just gotten him permission for a kiss, the Summer Sweetness a make-out session fully clothed, and the roses the ultimate prize of naked flesh. He’d buy her those roses again when he could afford them, but the weird sensation was still going to be there. Zaley had been so undemanding that Corbin wanted her to demand more, tell him what she wanted instead of acquiescing to whatever he w
anted. He didn’t want to date his echo and he knew perfectly well she had her own thoughts and opinions and preferences. They just vanished in proximity to him when they were together, or she felt that she didn’t have the right to them any longer, and she blocked his attempts to dig deeper.
Sally, on the other hand, was so demanding that Corbin wished she’d back off. Try to see things his way once in a while, rather than him always doing her thing. Why did he want to hang out with his other friends when he could hang out with her? So he’d seen little of them this summer to placate her temper, turning down a movie with Austin and Elania, cutting short a video game visit with Stephen Chang when she called with an unnamed emergency. Stephen made a whipcrack sound as Corbin left. The emergency turned out to be his opinion on a new haircut, and Corbin was annoyed. Was it asking too much to have one afternoon here and there shooting aliens on the screen with a friend? He barely saw Stephen at school, even if they both did Welcome Mat three times a week, since Stephen liked to hang out in the free activity side and build models or tutor people in math. The instructions on the models made Corbin’s head hurt, although he liked to visit that side and see the works in progress. Sally was furious to even be asked if the opinion on her hair could have waited. How could her boyfriend put virtual aliens over her wellbeing? She even saw the time he spent on The Daily Cheese as time that rightfully belonged to her, but which Corbin was callously granting another girl. A stocky, stupid, cross-eyed, four-legged blue girl.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 3