Vastly educated on both sides, their degrees came from the best schools. Amanda had just graduated from one of the finest conservatories for music and stepped right into the principal flute spot for the Somonoff Orchestra. She was twenty-two. Camborne ladders only went up and up, in music and business and law, although members like Uncle Tyson had plateaued in middle management. Indiscretions were not covered up. They simply never occurred. Micah didn’t think that Tuma’s parents had ever forgiven her entirely for being gay, or claiming the children of Uma and an anonymous sperm donor as her own. Gramma Cherry was of the mind that all girls minored in lesbianism in college, but no one made a lifetime career of it. Of equal grudge was Tuma rejecting Jesus as Christ and savior to become Wiccan like Uma. Along with politics, it was better not to bring up religion at the holidays. Ironically, Micah’s rejection of Wicca had created a secondary grudge with Tuma.
Someone was dawdling along at ninety miles an hour in the fast lane. Micah swerved into the middle to pass, but couldn’t get around since the driver sped up. The car was a gaudy red Clizz, the driver some clean-shaven white dude in his forties with thinning hair and nothing above an id. Micah could play this game. A Clizz was a pathetic mid-life crisis car, a lame chick magnet for the guy wanting a vehicle that was shiny and went zoom.
Micah pretended to fight for the lead with this dweeb, who jerked his hand back and forth through the window to indicate what he’d like her to do to his person. She laughed derisively, sure that the new twosome of faux dicks in her closet were twice and thrice the size of his actual member. And she could probably pleasure a woman better than he could, if ever she was so inclined. Dale had had to get a new locker already this school year, as she and Harbo discovered with delight one night that he had left the padlock undone. Micah went straight back to her house for everything she had. She glued three dildos on the outside of his locker like candy buttons down the chest of a gingerbread man, and affixed the rest to the inner side of the door, the walls and ceiling, the floor and even the textbooks. Then she closed it up and secured the padlock, tugging twice to make sure. Dale cried out in fury to see his locker door the next morning. That cry turned to a scream, a genuine scream when he opened the door while Micah watched from the shadows. HomeBase was soon covered in pictures of Dale’s den of dildos. It had been a piece of art.
This race on the freeway had to hold her for the holidays, since she couldn’t slip out of the house for a midnight jaunt. Not with night owl Shalom home, or Gramma Eleanor’s keen ears. Micah eased up on the accelerator and let the man race ahead a few car lengths. Then she pressed down hard and blew past him.
There was a minivan ahead with stickers of a happy family on the rear window. Dad, Mom, four kids, two dogs, and a cat in a declining plane. She slammed to the slow lane just as the driver of the minivan changed to the fast lane without looking. The Clizz shot onto the median with a wild braying of its horn. The minivan squealed and jerked back to the center lane, Micah now in front of it and her phone clanging its warning bell.
The Clizz sniffed around her back bumper, both nearing one hundred thirty (her mothers would yank her driving privileges so fast, ground her until graduation, have long, agonizing talks about why why why) and the two cars blazed around a turn with the guy creeping into her lane. So that was his solution? Edge her off the freeway, claim her space as his and fuck him!
The phone clanged at a higher pitch. A speed trap was near. She pressed down harder to taunt the man, made him speed up to match it, and then she yanked hard to the off-ramp. Missed the drive and rattled down the slope where she hit the pavement with a red light coming up so fast and her foot on the squealing brakes . . .
The Clizz soared past and there was no way the man could slow in time or the cop miss him. Micah turned mildly onto the road that passed under the freeway, unrolling her windows to hear the siren that meant she’d won. God, she had gotten all the way to San Criata! It was a strip-mall and condo kingdom. Spotting a Cool Spoon across the street while she refueled her car, she stopped in for a vanilla scoop. A huge sign on the door read NO STAMPS. Mr. Yates hadn’t put up anything in Cloudy Valley, although they were told to make people with Sombra C leave. No one with it had ever come in.
As she ate her ice cream in a booth within the empty store, Elania and Zaley conference-called for help with a trig problem. Wondering why Zaley was whispering more than talking, Micah walked them through it and added, “God, you two are diligent. It’s vacation. Go watch TV. Live it up a little.”
“This isn’t diligence but having three younger brothers,” Elania said. “It’s the only quiet time I’ll have. Mr. Baylor sucks to give us work over vacation.”
Micah had had him the previous year. “In his defense, I seriously doubt he knows it’s vacation. The man is just a hologram the school puts out to save on a salary.” She’d hunt down his address and pay him a visit. Maybe he had a porn collection from floor to ceiling in his living room, or fifty dogs barking madly. Maybe he had no address, proving he was indeed a hologram.
“He calls me Zerley,” Zaley commented in a low voice. “Zerley Mattazerller.”
“I’m not sure he knows my name,” Elania said.
“Why are you speaking so quietly? I can barely hear you, Zaley,” Micah said.
“So my mother doesn’t hear I’m on the phone.”
“What the fuck? Is four o’clock past your bedtime?”
“Go fuck yourself, Micah.”
“Maybe Elania can read Night-Night, Bitty Kitty to you.”
“Hell no, I’m never reading that book again!” Elania exploded.
When they wrapped up the call, Micah got back into the V-6. She could have caused an accident, a rollover, killed the people in that minivan with the happy family stickers in a flaming wreck! So she drove carefully back home to make up for it, going north five miles under the speed limit in the slow lane. That cancelled out what she had done, sort of, just like buying from the Cool Spoon in San Criata sort of canceled out what she was doing at the one in Cloudy Valley.
Her blood was buzzing and her smile sincere when she walked in her front door. That was the explosion she had needed. Pizza Whippers was delivering within the hour, Uma not wanting to mess up the dining room table set for tomorrow’s meal. Shalom and Gramma Eleanor were watching a movie in the den, Uncle Tyson pacing the hallway on a business call, and Tuma called Micah into the study. She plopped down on the seat, a happy girl happy to have a happy vacation, as happy as one of those chalk outline car window stickers with the smiley face. For the moment, she was feeling a stirring of the happiness she played at home. It wasn’t that she was covering unhappiness the rest of the time. She was covering up blankness, like a page in a coloring book that had never been filled in.
“Where were you this afternoon, Joob?” Tuma asked.
If she was asking, then it meant she knew that Micah wasn’t at work. Micah gave a rehearsed, rueful pause. “I messed up my schedule at the Cool Spoon. So I thought I had work but I didn’t.”
For years at the dinner table, Tuma had talked about the cues she used to tell if someone was telling a lie. Like Micah would never think to use them for herself! Speaking in the third person (this is a girl who never forgets anything!), exploding into wordy, practiced answers (just a short pause to look embarrassed but not overly concerned at an innocent mistake), watch for extraneous physical movements (she did not move restlessly in the chair), and listen for protestations of honesty (one should assume that one was being believed). And nothing of what she was saying was so much of a lie. Always, always stick as close as possible to the truth.
“So what have you been doing all afternoon?” Tuma asked.
“I went on a drive to the San Criata Cool Spoon. Austin and I like to check out the other ones.”
“So Austin was with you?”
“Why am I being interrogated?” Micah said, somewhere between humor and defensiveness. “No, he wasn’t with me. I went on my own and had some vanil
la. Do you want to see the receipt? I’ll show it to you.” She fumbled at her pocket. “Can I get my backpack? My wallet is in there.”
Subtly, Tuma’s shoulders went down. “I just thought you’d want to spend time with your family for the holidays.” Then Micah understood this had nothing to do with her; it was Tuma bracing herself. Even now, Uncle Tyson was blustering on the phone like the know-it-all asshole he was (if daddy hadn’t owned the business, he’d never have graduated from piddling real estate agent to management of the company) and tomorrow morning Grampa Hugh would hug Shalom and Micah (but be speaking of Amanda as he did). Tuma had to have her picture perfect family around as a reply.
Micah jumped out of her chair to hug her roly-poly mother, helping herself to Tuma’s own complaints with minor substitutions. “I just needed quiet for a few hours. School is crazy and I wanted to clear my head before I came home. So I could really be present.” She kissed the top of her mother’s head, the car race on the freeway leaving her affectionate and blissful. (She could have killed someone! But she hadn’t. No harm, no foul.)
“Anything in particular going on?” Tuma asked, meaning Dale.
Sometimes I do bad things and they make me feel good. “I wasn’t sure Mr. Dayze could be as bad as Shalom said, but she was right. He’s awful. Even Elania hates him, and I don’t think she’s ever truly hated a teacher in her whole life. DeAngelo made such a stink at the office last week at school that they allowed him to transfer out.”
Tuma shook her head. “I remember Shalom mentioning his debates.”
“They end up in scream-fests while he sits there and smirks.” The discord once achieved such a deafening decibel level that a student in the next classroom came in with a request from his teacher to tone it down. Zaley was too frightened to say a word the whole hour she and Micah spent in there. “And there are some kids in my French class who won’t shut up for anything. I didn’t think I’d still be putting up with that in French IV.”
“Honey, do you sit by them? You could ask to change seats.”
“No, I’m in the front. They sit all the way in the back. It’s hard to concentrate with the lesson interrupted every minute by the teacher yelling at them to stop talking. Stop talking, stop talking, stop talking . . . I wish she’d kick them out, but she never does. So that’s my first period and then I’m off to Mr. Dayze with his horrible debates. It’s a noisy morning.”
Her mother was placated, and picked up a lock of Micah’s pink-streaked hair to ask in joking seriousness if this phase was over yet. It embarrassed her tremendously to have a daughter doing something so average, so typically teenaged girl. She suspected nothing and that was because so much of what Micah had said was the truth. That was the key to lying. Marcy and Mina did gab all through French IV every damn day; Mrs. Hopper did shout at them throughout the period and it was annoying how they couldn’t get through the lesson. Mr. Dayze was a dick. But none of that had sent Micah to San Criata.
She smiled and laughed through the evening, and attended to her uncle’s dull stories about internal wrangling among associates in her grandfather’s massive real estate company. It handled both residential and commercial in different branches and was apparently dependent on Uncle Tyson to save the day. She asked for details of Uma and Gramma Eleanor’s conversation about the trouble of growing orchids. But in her mind, she was still flying around that turn, ripping down the slope, hearing the siren. Fuck you, asshole.
Tuma’s parents arrived in the morning right on schedule, carrying bottles of wine for dinner and gifts for Micah’s birthday on Friday, as well as a DVD performance of Amanda’s orchestra in concert. The meal was made with it playing in the background, Micah helping placidly. The gifts would be the same as ever, a book and a check for five hundred dollars. Gramma Cherry could talk for hours about shopping for the perfect gift for Amanda; for Micah and Shalom, it was ever a book and a check. For birthdays, for Christmas, smaller checks for Easter and finishing another grade, Micah made bank with these impersonal funds.
The table was so perfect once the food was upon it that Shalom took a picture for her HomeBase page and wrote a post about being blessed. They sat for the battle of the blessings, Uma lighting the Goddess and God candles in the centerpiece and the four of their immediate family saying the prayer of bounty. Gramma Cherry shifted uncomfortably but was too polite to say anything at the table, and then Grampa Hugh gave a Christian grace and asked for Jesus’ blessings on each of them by name. Tuma shifted uncomfortably then.
Predictably, when it ended Uncle Tyson laughed about naked Wiccan rituals and Tuma corrected him with a tight smile that the term was skyclad and no, they did not participate in those. The Circle did not even offer them, though it really wasn’t any of his business. Micah hadn’t been to a ritual in ages, not seeing the purpose of them. Their coven was over in northwest Penger, performing both co-ed and single-sex rituals. The high priestess and high priest were StarTruth and Willowman, the women yapped about Blood Mysteries and the men yapped about the sacred masculine, they called in the corners and dumped wine all over the ground in tedious libations, and pretty much the only thing Micah had liked about it was banging on a drum. Everyone was really into this, crowing about how high they were on the energy they’d summoned, but it never touched any chords within her. So mote it be, she was just bored. And StarTruth bugged the fuck out of her.
Uncle Tyson said, “So, I bet you’re thinking about colleges, Jubilee!” It was only a launching pad for him to talk about his own choice long ago. Sometimes he called her Micah, other times Jubilee, and once Jubilee Micah figuring that the latter must be her middle name. She loved that he was so self-involved that he didn’t know his own niece’s name. He always said that he loved her, along with a big hug when he left after a visit, yet the truth was there in her mixed up name.
Micah thought of her homework and was suddenly bored with calculating for 80s; she’d go back to 100s and see if it was possible to make up the damage by finals in February. Of course she could. Why was she playing these games? It was just something to color in the blankness. Like arranging the Welcome Mat holiday party to coincide with the school-sanctioned Winter Gala, to see which one people chose. Nobody in the club had called her on it when she lied that it was the only day available. She was footing half the bill for the old community center in Blue Hill. It was five hundred bucks total and the rest they raised with the spring bake sale. Admission was free to any student at the school, as long as they brought a snack, and no one dressed up. Last year, they’d had a hundred and seventy people. The party arranged by the school was a ball at the South Haven Country Club, tickets fifty bucks each and no one dressed in any less but a suit or gown. Micah belonged to South Haven, going on the weekends for tennis or yoga or Pilates, whichever class didn’t strike her as too boring for an hour. She didn’t need to go there to party on top of it with the jocks and princesses of Cloudy Valley High.
“-completely unacceptable. So I wrote a letter and handed it to the president myself!” Uncle Tyson was saying. Uma’s lips had stiffened at his story of confronting his old alma mater with complaints about their acceptance of Sombra C students up to 35%.
“We have Sombra C kids at our school. Three of them,” Micah said, as there had been a new infection. A redheaded senior named Janie Tomlinson had been absent for two weeks right after the start of school and returned with a shiny new stamp on her neck. The tightening of Uma’s lips spread to the rest of her face. How long were they going to pretend that Sombra C did not exist? This year was one for the history books, but within the four walls of the Camborne home, it was no different than any other year.
“Well, I hope you’re staying away from them!” Grampa Hugh roared, as he grew more and more lion-like with every glass of pinot noir. “Like I told Amanda, it’s perfectly all right not to shake hands after a performance with a stamped person. A polite nod will do-”
Dumbly, Micah laughed. “Grampa, you’re so silly! I eat lunch with stam
ped kids almost every day! Trevor’s a sweetheart.” She drank in the horror around the table, just like she drank it in when the Sombra C students walked in for their first meeting and Micah offered her hand as some of the kids in the club walked out. Now it was just the diehard members. The stamped students had been equally scandalized at the offered hand. Trevor had an angry face even when he wasn’t angry. It was just the way his face settled, a pinch between his brows, a downward curve to his lips, and Micah liked how it was unsettling. What she had to do on purpose with her features, he came by naturally.
The conversation shifted firmly in favor of Sombra C and nothing would dislodge it. Watching the news coverage of explosions and mayhem on Election Day had made Micah antsy to be in the middle of it, picking desperately through rubble with the other emergency workers or peeling out in a cop car in pursuit of some gun-toting loon.
Uncle Tyson lived in Santa Barbara, and he told a long story about his local police force disbanding an illegal confinement point run by cullers. Disbanded was such a tidy word for a three-day standoff and shootout, the police shocked to find not a dozen crazies toting handguns but a full one hundred cullers armed with illegal automatics and no hesitation about using them. Fourteen cops and thirty-six cullers had died. Fourteen cops! Uncle Tyson hit the table in amazement at the details of his own story.
Anyone with a stamp had been locked inside the old warehouse and denied Zyllevir. Incredibly, the cullers considered themselves humanitarians, as they kept the water running to the building so the captives did not get dehydrated, and dumped food through a hole in the ceiling. Only two people came out alive by the time the cops unlocked the doors, and their puny 3% and 6% had to be adjusted. One went home at 39%, and the second was stripped of human rights and moved to an actual confinement point with 45%. The other sixty-six people in the warehouse had died of the virus or been torn apart by Sombra Cs gone feral. Of course that was terrible, just terrible, Uncle Tyson brayed, but perhaps there was a point in cordoning off everyone with Sombra C into some state that nobody lived in, like Idaho. Shalom and Micah exchanged a loaded look, and a text came in under the table to Micah’s cell that the one and a half million residents of Idaho might disagree.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 19