Night of the Zombie Chickens

by Julie Mata

  For a moment, I’m afraid tears are actually going to spill all over my Tater Tots, which would be the final humiliation, not to mention making the taters inedible. My stomach is queasy and my face feels like there’s steam rising off it.

  Then a hand at a nearby table shoots up. Someone’s waving at me, trying to get my attention. I focus on who it is, and my stomach sinks even lower. Margaret Yorkel. There’s an empty space next to her. There’s a bunch of empty spaces. The only one sitting with her is Doris Drayburn, who’s half a step up from Margaret on the social ladder, mainly because Doris doesn’t have bright red hair and freckles and crooked teeth.

  Doris has the opposite problem. She has hair so mousy it’s practically not even a color, and it matches her eyes. She has thick black glasses, and she always wears brown because that’s her favorite color. Doris is practically a genius. I’ve heard she’ll be studying high school level math and science next year. She’s never gotten a B on her report card, except for gym class because she’s really uncoordinated.

  Doris is staring at me, munching on a Tater Tot with a sour look on her face, like she’s eating a pickle instead of a fake potato. Of course, she always looks sour so it may not be because of me. If I sit with Margaret and Doris, my shaky social standing will plummet into the toilet. It will be like admitting, yes, this is my lot in life, this is where I belong, with the misfits and social outcasts. It’s so not fair because I don’t belong there at all. I’ve always had friends—but all of them are sitting with Lydia right now and ignoring me.

  I only have a split second to decide—should I pretend I don’t see Margaret and go to the nurse’s office? I would have to put down my tray somewhere and everyone would watch as I walked alone out of the lunchroom. It would be too humiliating. I gaze around the crowded room, but panic has set in and I can’t focus. Where’s Kendall ­Carlton, who sits behind me in math class? We have fun joking around together. I could sit with her. Or what about Grace Devlin from Spanish? A blurred sea of faces stares back at me and no one else raises a hand to invite me over.

  Then I think about Lydia standing up for Margaret the day before. No one expects the two of them to become best buddies because of that. If I eat lunch with Margaret and Doris, it just means I’m sitting with someone else for a day. Tomorrow, things will go back to normal. In the meantime, I can be nice to Margaret, who is trying very hard to get my attention. I can show my classmates that I’m not as petty as they are. In fact, sitting with Margaret will be a daring act of rebellion against the established social order.

  I give Margaret a big smile, and then I sit down next to her, my head held high. I stuff a Tater Tot in my mouth, trying for casual. It tastes like salted plastic. Margaret leans close and stares into my face.

  “Are you and Alyssa having a fight?” There’s so much sympathy dripping from her words that I feel a fresh round of tears spring up. I close my eyes, try to swallow the Tater Tot, and gag. Margaret slaps me on the back and I finally choke it down. She peers over at Alyssa, trying to think of something nice to say. “It’s kind of crowded around Alyssa, but that’s just because you were late. I’m sure she wishes you were over there. You’ll see, tomorrow will be different....” She trails off and takes a bite of her sandwich.

  Even though that’s exactly what I was thinking a moment ago, I shrug and poke my fork at another Tater Tot. I want to say, “Sure, I’ll catch a seat over there tomorrow. No big deal.” That’s what I want to say, but the words stick in my throat. My eyes are burning, my heart is still pounding, and there’s a sour, rejected feeling in the pit of my stomach. I open my mouth to agree with Margaret. Instead, resentment pours out.

  “I’d much rather sit with you guys,” I say, lying through my teeth. “I wouldn’t sit with Alyssa if she were the only person in the cafeteria. I mean, look at her.” I stab my fork in her direction. “Sucking up to Lydia, trying to be Miss Popular. I hate that kind of thing.”

  Doris glances over at me, probably surprised at the savagery in my voice.

  “I’m not sitting with her tomorrow, or the day after, or any other day,” I continue loudly. “Alyssa is a sucky friend.”

  Some girls at the next table glance over, and I know Alyssa will hear about my comment by the end of the day. Well, good, I think stubbornly. She deserves it. Margaret is watching me with a worried look, so I try to muster the energy to smile at her.

  Doris gazes at me through her Coke-bottle glasses. “I don’t think sucky is a word.”

  Have these girls not heard of contacts?

  “It’s probably considered slang,” she goes on. “They do include colloquialisms in the dictionary, so it could officially be a word. I’m just not sure. It would be fun to look it up and see.”

  Fun? With a supreme effort, I manage not to roll my eyes.

  “Yeah, that would be fun,” Margaret agrees, but she doesn’t sound too excited. Maybe there’s hope for Margaret after all.

  By the end of the day, sick despair is hardening into anger. Who does Alyssa think she is, dumping me like yesterday’s flat soda and picking up some fruity, artificial new flavor of the day? We’ve spent the last two years saying how glad we were not to be one of Lydia’s hangers-on, and now Alyssa’s suddenly camping with the enemy. And she clawed her way next to Lydia at my expense. The enormity of the betrayal is almost too much to take in. I got braces, lost my best friend, and became a loser, all in one week.

  When Alyssa marches over to my locker at the end of the day, she has the nerve to act like she’s mad at me. She leans against a locker and gives me a cold stare.

  “Jennifer Adams said you called me a sucky friend.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  Alyssa has decided that the best defense is an over-the-top offense. She flicks back her long hair. “I can’t believe you would say that.”

  Normally I would never carry on an argument in a school hallway where anyone can and will listen in, but I’m so mad I don’t care.

  “Stop acting all innocent,” I snap. “You make fun of my family, you laugh at me behind my back, and you don’t even save me a seat at lunch. You’re so sucky, you don’t even deserve to be called a friend.”

  “I was talking about your dog, not your family, and it was just for fun. Can’t you take a joke? And you didn’t show up for lunch. How am I supposed to know you’re going to stroll in fifteen minutes late? You weren’t there and then Lydia and Emily and Sara sat down. I can’t believe you’re acting like such a baby.”

  Sure enough, the entire hallway has gone quiet. Everyone, even the boys, are watching Kate Walden and Alyssa Jensen fight—hoping, no doubt, we’ll start rolling on the floor, ripping each other’s hair out. I find myself picturing it as if it were a scene in a movie. Close-ups of angry faces. Cutaway of me slamming shut my locker. Maybe a dolly shot down the hallway...

  I refocus with an effort. It’s not a movie. It’s a fight with my best friend. “Baby?” I flare. “You are a pathetic wannabe. Trying to be Lydia’s best buddy...”

  “There’s nothing wrong with having other friends,” Alyssa cuts in coldly.

  “Stop acting like you don’t know what I’m talking about!” I practically scream at her.

  I see something flicker in her face—is it anger, or guilt? She bites her lower lip. I should stop right there and let her make the next move. But once again I can’t seem to shut up. Maybe I’m a little jealous. Of course Lydia wants to be friends with Alyssa. She has shiny blond hair and she’s pretty and she looks like she should be in high school. Clearly Lydia doesn’t want to be friends with me.

  “Or maybe you really don’t know what I’m talking about,” I go on recklessly. “Maybe this is yet another blond moment for Duh-lyssa Jensen.” I pretend to flick my hair away from my face and say in my best Alyssa voice: “Huh? Homework? I have long blond hair, so I don’t need to be smart. Everyone loves dumb blondes, right?”

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sp; Alyssa’s face turns red. She shakes her head but can’t think of a thing to say. The girl desperately needs a scriptwriter. Finally she spits out, “You suck,” and stomps away.

  I grab my books and hurry outside, ignoring the stares. I feel like a zombie that’s just been stabbed through the heart with a pair of scissors.

  As soon as I get home that afternoon, I go straight to my room and throw myself on my bed. I stare at the ceiling, tears oozing from my eyelids and rolling onto the pillow. When I try to piece together what happened, exactly where things went wrong, I keep coming back to my mother and her chickens. If we lived in a regular house in town like normal people, Lydia wouldn’t have seen a hen poop, Wilma wouldn’t be rolling in the stuff, Derek wouldn’t be shooting it from his slingshot, and it wouldn’t be falling off my shoe at school. If we hadn’t moved to this run-down farmette in the middle of nowhere, I would still be hanging out with Alyssa and other kids in the neighborhood. I would still have friends and a life.

  Of course, I also wouldn’t have a movie called Night of the Zombie Chickens. I shove this thought aside. I could have called it Night of the Zombie Dogs or Night of the Zombie Hamsters. Any animal would be easier to work with than our poltergeist poultry, with their beady eyes and evil hearts.

  What kind of parent drags her kids away from all their friends? And why did my father agree to it? He could have put his foot down and said, “Let us think of the children.” But no one said that; no one thought about me. I can hardly blame Alyssa for wanting a best friend who lives close by.

  When I think of her, an even bigger knot wedges in my throat. Does she really like Lydia better than she likes me? It’s such a silly question that I snort out loud. Lydia is popular and pretty. She’s funny and does crazy things. When you’re Lydia’s friend, you’re at the center of a whirlwind and there’s never a dull moment. How can I compete with that? They’ve probably been hanging out together at the park for a while and Alyssa never told me. Maybe Lydia has been making fun of my movie behind my back.

  Maybe everyone is laughing at me behind my back—poor, pathetic Crapkate, pretending to be a movie director. How lame is that? Why did I ever think I wanted to make movies, anyway?

  I wish I had a magic crystal ball so I could figure out what everybody is really thinking. Lydia seemed excited about being in my movie, but then she treated the shoot like a big joke. Alyssa said she was sorry about the way she acted, but then she kept acting that way. And I wanted to make up with Alyssa, but instead I screamed mean things at her.

  The world suddenly seems murky, like someone’s taken all the nice, crisp lines of a picture and smudged them. Things have never been so twisted up and confusing. A chill creeps inside me as I wonder if this is only the beginning. Is this what growing up is really like, where things get so complicated that you don’t know who you are anymore? Maybe all the TV shows and magazines are lying—maybe it’s not so cool to be an adult after all.

  By the time my mother calls me for dinner, my head is throbbing and so are my teeth. I tell her I’m not hungry and that I don’t feel well, but she insists I come down and sit with them anyway. Of course, when one of her hens gets sick, she babies it like it’s a newborn infant. I drag myself into my chair at the dinner table and gaze at my plate. Baked chicken. I shove it away. The last thing I want to eat is a dead chicken.

  “What’s the matter?” my dad asks. “Not hungry?”

  I shake my head.

  “If she doesn’t eat, she doesn’t get dessert,” Derek pipes up. “Right, mom? That means I can have her cookies.”

  “You’re such a baby,” I mumble. The thought of him getting my dessert does make me reconsider the chicken. I stab it with my fork. This actually feels kind of good, so I stab it again.

  “Bad day?” my mom asks.

  I nod. Stab.

  “You’re not supposed to play with your food, Dumbo,” Derek says. “Right, mom?”

  “Enough, Derek,” my father warns.

  “She’s playing with her food. That means no dessert,” Derek whines.

  “Yes, I had a bad day,” I say loudly. “And no, you can’t have my dessert. I’ll give it to Wilma before you get a crumb.”

  Wilma perks up at her name and shoves her snout in my lap. I slip her a piece of chicken.

  “Chocolate chips are bad for dogs,” Derek fires back.

  “Wilma has a cast-iron stomach. She can eat anything.”

  “Mom! She’s going to make Wilma sick.”

  All this for a couple of chocolate chip cookies. My parents look at each other across the table, no doubt wishing they had decided to raise gerbils instead of children. Can whiny kids drive parents to divorce?

  “Shut up, Derek!” I bark.

  “Kate, that’s enough. Derek, one more word and Wilma will be eating your dessert, too.” My mother looks frazzled. My dad rubs his eyes. He looks tired as he turns to me.

  “Kate, tell us what happened.”

  I shake my head. The last thing I want to do is talk about my day over dinner. “It’s nothing,” I mutter.

  “Something must have happened,” my dad says. “You look terrible.”

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  “She always looks terrible,” Derek pipes up.

  My dad points a fork at him. “That’s cookie number one, buddy. You want to go for two?”

  Derek gets a hangdog look and shakes his head.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I say. “Just forget about it.”

  My parents exchange another look. Then my mother actually mouths the word hormones at my dad.

  “Can you not do that, please?” I say loudly. “I’m sitting right here.”

  My mother sighs. We all pick at our food. I think about Lydia and her parents. They probably used to all sit down together at dinner, just like we do. Lydia and her sister probably thought everything was fine, and all that time their father had a girlfriend on the side.

  I stare at my dad. Suddenly it feels like I don’t know him at all. He spends most of his day at work with strangers. It’s like he has a whole life apart from us. He has secrets we don’t know about. And complications. Could he really decide to leave us behind one day, like Lydia’s dad? How could anyone be so important to him that he would abandon his family?

  My dad is frowning at his chicken. I wish again that I had a crystal ball so I could find out what he’s thinking. It doesn’t seem fair that my life is falling apart and I have to worry about my parents.

  “Well,” my mother finally says, “if it makes you feel any better, I had a bad day, too.”

  I’m not sure why this is supposed to make me feel better. I’ve completely lost my appetite, but I eye the chicken anyway, trying to figure out how little I can eat and still get dessert.

  “What happened?” my dad asks.

  My mother slathers butter on a piece of bread. “One of my hens has a prolapsed vent.”

  “That sounds bad,” Derek says in a superconcerned voice. “What does that mean?” It’s completely obvious that he’s trying to suck up and get his cookie back, but of course my parents don’t realize it.

  My mother nods. “It is bad. A prolapsed vent is when the lower part of the oviduct turns inside out and comes out through the vent.”

  Derek and I stare at each other. I know better than to ask, but he’s trying to win points.

  “The what comes through the what?”

  My mother smiles at him. “The oviduct is like the fallopian tube. So the egg travels down the tube and the vent is where the egg comes out. Sometimes, hens lay an egg that’s too big and it makes their oviduct come out and you have to push it back in. Hemorrhoid cream is supposed to help; isn’t that funny?” My mother says all this matter-of-factly. She takes a bite of her chicken. “The problem is, the vent got bloody and then the other hens started to peck at it.”

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nbsp; I’m so revolted I can only stare at her, but Derek screws up his face and shouts, “Gross!”

  “I know,” my mother says, warming to her topic. “I had to separate the hen from the others. I read that they’ll keep pecking at her vent, and they can even pull out her intestines—”

  “Do we have to talk about this at dinner!” I shout. Even my dad’s face looks green. He’s probably just as sick of chickens as I am. Maybe that’s why he spends so much time behind closed doors talking on the phone. “This is not what normal families talk about! It’s disgusting!”

  My mother puts down her fork. “You do not have to shout, Kate.”

  All the horrible feelings from the day swell inside me until I need to either scream or burst into tears again. So I keep screaming. “Yes I do! It’s the only way you hear anything! I don’t want to hear about the chickens’ bloody intestines, or their parasites or their worms!” I shove myself back from the table. “All we ever hear about anymore are your stupid hens! They’re all you think about! I’m sick of them! They’ve ruined my life and so have you, and you don’t even care!”

  I can feel more tears coming, so I jump up and run for the door. I catch a glimpse of my mother’s face. She looks stunned.

  “Kate!” my dad calls.

  “You should have said no!” I scream at him. He looks confused, but by then I’m already out of the room and up the stairs.

  I slam shut my door. “I hate everything!” I shout.

  I’m still in shock, but I’m not sure if it’s because of the gruesome hen story or the fact that I just screamed at my mother. What has happened to me? A couple of years ago, I wouldn’t have dreamed of yelling at her. My mom and I were buddies. That was when she paid attention to me.

  Is this what happens when kids grow up? Do parents lose interest? Sometimes I wish my mother would still do things like push the hair out of my face and say, “Anybody in there?” I used to complain whenever she did it, so that’s probably why she stopped. Still, she should know better than to listen to every little thing I say.