If zombies need brains to keep going, then it’s official: I. Am. A. Zombie.
Heartbeat or no, I’ve never felt so …alive …before. The brains, they are …intoxicating, electrifying, rejuvenating. I feel like I’ve inhaled 15 Red Bulls at one shot—without the after-crash. Or like the runner’s high I get sometimes—without the running.
It goes down a lot—a lot—faster than I thought it would. Believe it or not, I’m so ravenous for the gray matter, I grab the first bag of brains, lop off a second pound, and eat it straight up. No chaser—not a single spice. No garlic cloves, no salt, not even a little pepper or soy sauce to cut the chewy, musky, organ-y taste. No fork or knife, either; just standing right there over the sink, gnawing on these little gray brains, chomping away caveman style like those guys who enter the all-you-can-eat buffalo wing contests on TV.
Halfway through my over-the-sink cerebrum pig-out, I hear some kind of animal sounds, like a distant groaning. No, not quite groaning—more like growling. That’s it! Like a German shepherd when you get between him and his bowl.
Then I realize it’s no animal. It’s me doing all that growling.
I try to picture myself there at the sink, 17-year-old girl in her flip-flops and yoga pants, a high ponytail to cover the half-dollar-sized black mole in the middle of her head, brain juice oozing down her forearms toward her rolled-up hoodie sleeves as she chomps, chews, gnashes, gnaws on a pound of brains straight from the butcher bag, growling like some dog with a bone.
Sexy, huh?
I swallow, quickly, and wash my hands all the way up to and past the elbows, Grey’s Anatomy style. I dry them off with a dishrag and am tossing out my second paper plate of the morning when I realize, well …that won’t do.
What if Dad comes out of his shower and sees the full trash and wants to recycle, and as he’s sorting the trash finds brains all over the paper plate?
So I groan and empty the trash, lugging it out to the curb while looking around to see if maybe the neighbors can somehow see through the can and spot the brain crumbs drying as we speak. Nope. So far, so good.
I go back inside and hear Dad whistling in his room. Okay, coast’s clear, for now. I risk a quick shower, skipping washing my hair, and then grab my usual school uniform: khaki slacks, white blouse, high collar, black flats, a pomegranate scarf around the waist for color.
And boom, I’m back in 10 minutes or less and there’s Dad, standing in the kitchen looking clean and dapper, with his thinning hair combed back, his powder blue boxer shorts and starched white undershirt hiding beneath his frazzled green terry cloth robe, which never quite fits all the way around his bulging belly.
He’s chewing and swirling a morsel around in a little plate of soy sauce. Around a full mouth of something, he says, “You know, I’ve never been a big fan of sushi for breakfast, but I have to say, this raw fish you brought home from the deli is really great. What is it? Tuna? Whitefish?”
I look at the “it” he’s talking about and, of course, I’ve left the half-empty bag of thickly sliced brains out on the countertop and the soy sauce and sesame seeds nearby. Wouldn’t you know it? Dad has confused a pound of leftover lamb’s brains for his morning serving of sushi. (Hmm, doesn’t say much about his coroner’s training, now, does it?) He’s already got the second bite wedged in his mouth and is soy saucing up a third, so it’s too late for me to tell him what they are now. Instead, I kind of putter behind him, bag up what’s left of the brains, and stow them in the freezer.
“I’m glad you like it, Dad, but I was saving that …uhhm, sushi …for a special occasion.”
He swallows his last bite of brain sushi. “Well, dear, I hope it’s not too special.” He takes out one of the business cards from his wallet and picks the brains out of his teeth. “I don’t think sushi’s supposed to be quite that hard to chew.”
As he teeters back into his bedroom to start dressing for the day, I look in the foyer mirror and flinch at the pale, dead face staring back. Then I remember the burn hole in the middle of my head and let down my greasy ponytail while scouring the hallway closet for something suitable to cover my head with.
I find an old beret Dad gave me after he found out I watched all of the Pink Panther movies on cable one night. I slip it on and stare at my reflection. Not bad. Not good, by any stretch, just not …bad.
Kind of edgy, a little out there, but …definitely something Hazel would approve of. Then I grab my keys and stomp out the door, ready to face Day Number 1 as Zombie Number 3.
Part 2
The Dead and the Near Dead
14
Maddy Gets a Makeover
“CAN YOU HELP me?” I ask, showing up at Hazel’s door 15 minutes before we usually leave for school.
She takes one look at my face and says, “Jesus, what happened to you? And where the hell did you get that god-awful beret?”
I clutch the beret tightly and say, “It was in the back of my closet. I thought, you know, it would detract from my face.” In reality, of course, I need it to cover the lightning hole in my head (but that info’s strictly on a need-to-know basis).
“It’s not working,” Hazel says, dragging me toward her room.
We wave to Hazel’s parents as they argue over the last piece of toast in the kitchen.
“Hey, Maddy,” they shout before just as enthusiastically going back to arguing.
Hazel’s mom pauses from the argument as we disappear up the stairs. “Nice beret,” she calls.
“Bon appétit,” Hazel’s dad says.
Upstairs I sit at Hazel’s vanity (yes, not only is Hazel the one girl on the planet with an actual vanity in her room; she actually uses it regularly). Staring at my pale face in the mirror, I say with panic in my voice, “I tried doing something myself, Hazel, but then I gave up, wiped it off, and came over here.”
“Well”—Hazel pats my shoulder and then opens up a tackle box full of makeup on either side of the vanity mirror—”you’ve come to the right place.”
“I just—”
She stands there, hands on hips, gawking at me staring at myself in the mirror. “What …is …going on here? Are you sick? You didn’t look this bad when I saw you last night. What gives?”
(I nearly gasp. Was it really only last night? With all that’s happened, it feels like a lifetime ago that I stood in my driveway waving Hazel off yesterday.)
She pinches my cheek and yanks her hand away as if she’s touched a hot iron. “Yikes, Maddy, you’re cold. I mean, ice-cold. Are you sure you feel up to school today?”
“I feel fine, Hazel. I just, I dunno, maybe I’m allergic to my new face cream or something. Can you just make me look less …less …”
“Dead?” She smirks.
I avoid her eyes and nod as she gets to work. I watch in amazement as she brings color to my cheeks, shades over the dark circles under my eyes, and fills out my thinning lips with color, but not too much. I’m so dumbfounded by the before-and-after transformation that I don’t even protest as she goes to take off my beret. That is, until I hear a gasp and look away from my reflection to see hers in the mirror. She’s staring at the top of my head. My spot!
“What is this?”
I stand abruptly, grabbing a fresh barrette off her vanity and working speedily to cover the spot back up. “Nothing, just …I don’t know, actually. I woke up this morning and …there it was; I must have fallen out of bed and hit my head on the nightstand or something. If I did, I don’t remember.”
She cocks her head in that “I don’t believe you” way. “I think you’d remember hitting your head that hard, Maddy. I mean, you have a huge, black bruise on the top of your head. I touched it. It’s not even a bruise; it’s like a …scab.”
“It doesn’t hurt.” At least that’s not a lie.
She makes her “just saw a spider” face. “It sure looks like it hurts. It hurts me to look at it; I can tell you that much.”
“That’s why I covered it up,” I say, not addressi
ng her insensitive dig.
We’re getting late for school now, and she follows me back down the stairs. Her parents have gone off to work, leaving the kitchen a mess, but Hazel barely looks at it as we traipse out the door. She gets in my passenger seat and, before she can protest, I yank on the steering wheel and turn back toward my house.
“Hey,” she shouts, “you’re going the wrong way.”
“I forgot something.” I’m scoping the driveway for signs of Stamp. I’ve been thinking, you know, when I didn’t show up at the party last night, he’d at least come looking for me this morning. I mean, it’s the gentlemanly thing to do, is it not? Make sure the girl you asked to Aaron’s party who never showed up is still alive? (Or undead, whatevs.)
Unless, of course, he asked every girl he bumped into yesterday to the party and can’t keep track of them all by the next morning. Is that it, Stamp? Are you a serial-bumper-turned-party-inviter? (Please, oh please, don’t let him be a jerk. Not after the night I’ve had; the night I’m still having.) I cruise by the empty driveway, see nothing there, not even Dad’s coroner’s wagon, and swiftly step on the gas.
“I thought you said you forgot something,” Hazel says as we speed toward school.
I shrug, cursing her stupid photographic memory. “I just suddenly remembered I didn’t forget.”
“Okay”—she turns in her seat to face me—”what’s the deal with you? I leave your house last night, you’re Maddy. Young, pretty, warm skin, tan skin. You show up on my doorstep this morning, and everything—I mean everything—has changed. Suddenly your skin is white, your body’s cold, you look like death warmed over, with enormous circles under your eyes, you’ve got a huge black …hole, scab, circle thingy in the middle of your head, you’re wearing a beret, for Pete’s sake, and now you say you’re remembering not forgetting things you thought you forgot in the first place. So …what gives?”
“Hazel, I don’t know. The spot, the skin, the cold—the beret—I can’t explain it.”
“You’re lying to me.” She sits back in a huff, arms folded, as we inch up the long line toward the junior/senior parking lot. “You’re hiding something.”
“I’m not.”
“You are, Maddy. It started yesterday with this Stamp character. I mean, first you bump into him in the halls; next thing I know you’re walking back from the cemetery with him, and you tell me last night nothing happened? Then today you show up like this? Something’s not adding up, Maddy.”
“Hazel, honestly, I’m not—”
“You remember what I said to you 11 years ago when I made you my best friend?”
“How could I forget?” I sigh, miserably, staring at the steering wheel since we’re only going less than zero miles per hour.
“What’d I say to you, Maddy?”
“You said if I ever lied to you, if I ever hid anything from you, we wouldn’t be friends anymore.”
“That’s right, Maddy. I don’t take this friendship crap lightly; you know that about me. I don’t know if you caught some virus you don’t want anybody to know about, if you’re pregnant or hung over or strung out or dying or what, but if you can’t tell your best friend about it, well, then maybe you’re not best friend material after all.”
We’re parked now, but I have the feeling that, even if we were still three blocks from school, Hazel would have stomped off and slammed the door on me, if only to have the final word, like she does right now. I sit there alone in my car, engine ticking, second bell ringing, kids streaming past, alone, and burst into tears.
Only …no tears. No water, no snot, no …nothing.
“Oh, great,” I say to I-don’t-know-who. “Now I can’t even cry. “
15
Reversal of Fortune
NOT SURPRISINGLY, Hazel gives me the cold shoulder later that morning in Home Ec. I mean, we’re supposed to be writing down recipes for our end-of-semester five-course-meal project, but basically she’s just texting her other friends while I flip listlessly through a couple of the ancient recipe books from Ms. Haskins’ library. (Although, if I had any other friends, I guess I’d be doing the same.)
This happens to us every so often. Maybe two, three times a year. I mean, girls, back me up here: that’s normal, right? You spend 99 percent of your time with the same person every day and, odds are, you’re going to snap eventually.
Usually I can joke her out of anything, but today I’m not in the joking mood, so I figure I’ll annoy her to death. (Sorry, bad joke, wrong class, wrong day, wrong lifetime.)
“Hey, Hazel,” I say in a singsong voice as she focuses on her jeweled pink cell phone. “What do you think about possibly preparing roasted turkey with sage and sausage stuffing for our end-of-the-year project?”
Nothing; she doesn’t even look up from her phone. I smile to myself and ask, “Hey, Hazel, what do you think about possibly preparing roast pork and sauerkraut for our end-of-the-year project?”
With each question, my voice grows less sing-songy and more passive-aggressive, until toward the end there I’m practically shouting as I turn the recipe book pages. “Hey, Hazel, what do you think about possibly preparing pheasant under glass with roasted parsnips for our end-of-the-year project?”
It goes on like that, ad infinitum, well, until even I can’t take it anymore. Finally, I practically scream one last suggestion. “Hey, Hazel, what do you think about possibly preparing a big, fat, heaping dish of ‘kiss my ass; I’d never lie to you’ with a side order of ‘go to hell; I haven’t done anything wrong’ for our end-of-the-year project? Hmm, how’s that sounding to ya?”
Without so much as a glance in my direction, Hazel stands up, pockets her phone, grabs her bag, walks to the back of the room, and asks Ms. Haskins for a pass during the last 15 minutes of class.
She never returns.
Not long after she’s gone, Ms. Haskins walks over to me. Her voice all concerned-like, she says, “Maddy, are you …okay?”
Her tone is only vaguely teacherly; it’s like she’s talking to a friend at a bar or restaurant or something. With her husky, breathy voice, she sounds at least five years younger—and ten shades cooler.
I’m all ready to lie, to perk up, get chipper, and blow her away with some great, enthusiastic, pompom, “ooh-rah” BS, but there’s something about the authentic concern in her eyes, so I kind of sigh, deflate from the shoulders on down, and say, honestly, “I don’t know, Ms. Haskins.” I wasn’t going to, but something about an adult taking an interest in me at this very vulnerable minute crumbles my resolve.
She sits atop Hazel’s empty stool. “Did you catch something from Hazel?”
I don’t know what to do with that. Either my brain isn’t working right, or the question is so ridiculous my overworked system can’t handle it right now.
Ms. Haskins clears her throat. “Well, she just asked me for a pass, saying she wasn’t feeling well, and I couldn’t help but notice that, well, you don’t look so hot yourself …”
I shake my head. “It’s not Hazel, Ms. Haskins. I just …woke up like this.”
No one’s quite saying what “this” is yet, but it’s obviously something, what with all the stares in the hall and now Ms. Haskins’ worried face. If I thought I could become a zombie overnight and put on some makeup and go to school the next day and no one would notice, well, I guess I’ve got another think coming.
“I’m trying to be tactful here, Maddy, but you don’t look …how should I say this? I guess I’ll say it: you don’t look well. At all. Is there anyone who can drive you home?”
“Drive me home? Right now? We still have four periods left. I mean, if I leave now I’ll miss Art.”
Ms. Haskins doesn’t answer, but I figure if a teacher is telling you to go home, there’s a reason for it.
“Is it that bad?” I say, looking down at her $200 shoes. Again, she doesn’t say anything, just keeps looking at me until I brave her sorrowful expression and look back. She finally nods, biting her lip, and hands me
an office pass so I can go check out.
I thank her, embarrassed, thoroughly, and get up to walk out. I’m watching Ms. Haskins walk back to her desk, wanting her to turn around so I can thank her again, to let her know I appreciate her honesty, when I spot Bones and Dahlia lounging in their own little corner of the room.
I’ve seen hundreds of stares this morning, but this is a first: smiles. Bones and Dahlia are smiling as I catch their eyes. I shiver. What with their pale skin, pronounced cheekbones, and those spooky yellow eyes, it’s not a good look on them.
And suddenly I remember their threat: “Sooner or later, you’re going to have to face us alone.”
So I make a simple plan for the day: Stay close to people you know.
16
Man Troubles
UNFORTUNATELY, THAT’S NOT so easy. First Hazel thought I was lying to her and brushed me off in Home Ec. Then, the minute I walk into Art class, strike number two is pretty clear: Stamp has turned on me as well.
How do I know? Well, it starts when the sub for Mrs. Witherspoon greets me with a hearty “Hello there. Mrs. Witherspoon’s judging an art show in Tallahassee this weekend, so we’ll be having a ‘free day’ in art this morning. Why don’t you grab a seat and sit wherever you like? You can thank me later.”
Then I see that Stamp’s already gotten the message, given that he’s surrounded himself with no less than five slobbering Art Chicks who are hanging on his every word. He’s talking about last night’s party (natch) when I sit down—alone—a few tables away.
“ …then I told him, I’m not drinking out of that beer bong unless you fill it with two cans. None of this wussy one-beer crap for me.”
And, oh, the girls do laugh—and laugh and laugh and laugh.
I sneer, open my pad, and begin sketching (for some odd reason) two beer cans sprung to life and attacking a certain tall, dark, and handsome football kicker.
“So who was there?” one of the Art Chicks asks, loudly enough for them to hear in the cafeteria (three schools away).
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