“I think Rogue just had an orgasm,” Malia says, reaching daintily for a sugar cookie.
“Mmmmmphghg” I mumble around a second cookie, accidentally spraying some crumbs. I think I might be about to cry, it’s so amazing.
“Alright, girls, please don’t choke on anything. And I’ll take that,” she plucks the wine bottle out of Malia’s hand and takes a few long swallows, then places it on the wall.
“Where did y’all find all this?” Alcohol and chocolate were some of the first things to go when this all started. Ben started hanging with the Jackals because they had stolen all the booze in a thirty-mile radius.
“Mason and Perce found the wine and chocolate when they got here. Most of the wine bottles had been broken, but there were a couple left. Perce was all for getting smashed on it and eating every piece of chocolate that night, but Mason wanted to save it for a special occasion.
“So he just let you take a bottle of wine, and he made us cookies.”
“I actually didn’t know about the wine when I told him about this.” Lisa frowns at Malia.
Malia giggles again. “I’ll make it up to him later.”
Lisa rolls her eyes, but Malia and I are too far gone to notice. For the first time in a long time, tears are pouring from my eyes. The good kind.
“You’re gonna have to— “she hiccups— “make it up to Perce too.”
“Wait, you and Perce?” Lucia asks, looking hurt.
“It was— “I begin, trying to tell her what I feel about him. But I stop myself, suddenly at a loss for what to say.
“I just— “I start again, but she turns toward the door, grabbing a cookie.
“This is stupid. I’m gonna go and see if the guys want any cookies.”
“Oh no you don’t,” Lisa says, stepping in front of her and crossing her arms. “As the unofficial Mom of the Hunters, I am ordering you to stay for this slumber party. Now sit on the bed and start getting ready to talk about boys.”
Lucia glares at her, but Lisa uses all of her considerable height and mom-like authority and glares right back. Lucia sits on the bed.
“Babe,” Malia says from her position on the bed, reaching up to pat her back. “You’re 13. Perce is way too old for you.”
“How old is he?” I ask.
“Nineteen,” Malia says. “Wait a minute, Rogue, how old are you?”
“Twenty.”
Malia laughs. “I thought you were so much younger. You seem so innocent.”
“I am. Well. Not anymore.”
Lisa laughs. “Come on,” she beckons to the other girls, who until now have been standing around the bed in a circle, watching us warily. Tavi is here, as well as Normani, who doesn’t seem to be at all irritated about my connection with Perce. Janet’s here, too, as well as some of the other girls I’ve trained with before but don’t know by name.
Tavi’s the first to flop down on the bed, but when she does, Normani and a girl I shot archery with once, with long black hair and green eyes, lie on either side of her. Lucia and Janet wind up next to me.
Lisa places the plate of cookies in the middle of us. “Alright. Now it’s a party. Let’s go around and talk about boys.”
“Wait,” the girl next to Tavi raises a hand. “What if we don’t want to talk about boys?”
“Is it a love thing, Laura?” Lisa asks.
Laura’s blush is visible even beneath her skin, “I think so.”
“Then it’s going in the circle.”
Malia’s still on her back, staring at the ceiling. She’s got a glazed look in her eyes, and I’m pretty sure she’s going to pass out right there.
Until, in one fluid motion, she sits up, yells, “Mason story first.” And grabs a cookie.
“Well I was gonna do this diplomatically, but— “Lisa mumbles.
“Actually,” Malia holds up a finger, chocolate smeared on her chin. “I have too many Mason stories. What do y’all want to know?”
“When did you know that you were in love with Mason?” Lucia asks immediately, eyes bright.
Malia settles back on the bed, cross-legged, hands on her knees. “When I first saw him.”
“No way,” I interject. “Love at first sight?”
“I don’t know what it was,” Malia says. “But I got here, bleeding, exhausted. I jumped—well, fell—in the pool to wash off and drink some water, and I was practically dead on my feet when I wandered up.”
She takes a deep breath. “Maybe it was the exhaustion, but have you ever had this feeling, like someone was supposed to be there? Like your lives are these two threads, and they went through an infinitely complicated series of small choices and random events and big decisions, and it was all leading to a point where those two threads met?”
“Like soul mates,” this comes from the another girl I don’t know, next to Laura. It’s hard to tell from where I’m sitting, but I think they’re holding hands.
Malia smiles. “I don’t know about soulmates, Andra. I just know that I was looking at my feet, willing them to go in front of the other, and I heard his voice—I felt it here. She touches a spot just beneath her ribs. “It echoed. And I knew.”
“So what did you do?” Normani says sardonically. “Fall on your knees and propose marriage?”
Malia snorts. “I didn’t do anything, are you kidding me? I had been walking for weeks, and there was this boy who was making me feel like the world was reorienting itself. It scared the shit out of me. I told him I wanted some food and water and then I pretty much collapsed on the porch.”
“Do you know how Mason felt, that first day?” I ask. I wonder if it’s possible to feel that way when someone else doesn’t, whether you can have all these feelings highlighting someone in neon signs, and you’re just on the periphery of their vision, just another object in the distance.
Malia smiles. “You’ll have to ask him. I don’t sell his secrets. But the first time we kissed, two weeks later, on top of the roof, Mason leaned toward me and said, ‘Finally.”
Everyone sighs. Tavi buries her head on the comforter. “That is literally the cutest thing I’ve ever heard,” she yells, her voice slightly muffled by the sheets.
Malia smiles, looking down. She looks like a little kid, giggling over the cute boy in her class.
“Lisa, what about you?” Traina asks.
“Oh you don’t want to hear about me. I’m too old,” she says.
“You’re not old! You’re what, 40?”
Lisa winces.
“Oh come on,” Malia demands. “Us young people think everyone over 30 looks the same.”
“Thanks.”
“Please?” Lucia asks. “How did you and Jeffrey get together?”
“It’s a long story, you don’t want to hear all of it!’
“Yes we do!” Tavi protests. “Please!”
“Fine. Well I guess I should start by saying that I did not want to fall in love again. I’m older, I’ve already done the whole husband and kids thing.”
“What happened to them?”
Lisa takes a swig of wine. “They died.” She drinks again. None of us ask her to elaborate. We can all guess how it happened.
“So I was wandering over on the outskirts of Austin, trying to figure out if I even wanted to stay alive anymore, looking for food and moving at night so that the Jackals wouldn’t surprise me. I— “she swallows— “I’d pretty much decided to run headlong at the first group of zombies I saw and blow my head off in front of them, when he found me.”
“Found you?” I ask.
“Found.” She confirms. “Found. I was sitting on top of this huge hill—there are a lot of them over in that part of Texas, looking around to see if anyone was coming. And he just walks up the hill, comes up to me like I’m his long lost friend. He says, ‘Hey babe, haven’t seen you in a while, wanna go catch up?”
“Wait, he knew you?”
“No, he didn’t. But I was so distracted by trying to see if he was serious, trying to make su
re he wasn’t some psycho who was gonna stab me or something, that I completely missed the group of zombies that passed right under us. By the time I looked at them, they were too far away. And now I had to deal with this idiot,” she laughs a little at this, “Still babbling about some random town that I’ve never been to, and I— “
“He saved your life.” Malia says softly.
“In more ways than one. He saves my life every day. He taught me that I could move on, that I hadn’t been damaged too much to love again.”
Everyone’s quiet for a minute, save for the sound of munching. Lisa gets up and puts the wine on the bedside table.
“But enough about me. I wanna hear about Laura.” Lisa smiles at her, and she ducks her head, squeezing Andra’s hand. Andra keeps her gaze down, on the comforter, but I can see the blush coloring her cheeks.
She pushes a lock of silky hair behind her ear, still looking embarrassed, and mumbles, “It’s not a story like any of yours.”
“That’s okay. Trust me, I did not have any romantic stories until I was way older than you.” Malia giggles. “They were more like I-wish-I-could-crawl-into-a-hole-forever stories.”
“It’s not that,” Laura says in a small voice. “it’s just, I still don’t even know if she really liked me.”
I prop my chin on my hands. “Spill.”
“So we were at this carnival. This happened a year ago or so, before.” Laura says. Andra turns to look directly at her, and I can tell that Laura feels her gaze; her whole body tenses in awareness. “And I was just looking at her at first, because she was so beautiful. She had short red hair and green eyes and this weird tattoo of a dragon on her wrist, and I remember thinking, “No way do I even have half a shot with her, even if she isn’t straight.”
“So what happened?” Janet asks, leaning forward eagerly.
“Well, I was with my mom and my brothers, so I didn’t want to do anything too obvious. They always tease me relentlessly when I find someone cute.”
“I hear that,” Tavi mutters.
Next to her, Normani sits up. “Tavi thinks Mikey looks hot when he works out!”
Tavi puts her head in his hands. “This is not happening.”
“Okay, before we derail,” Lisa calls as everyone starts giggling, and Malia mutters, “Well you’re not wrong.”
“Laura was telling something really cute, so can we please continue?”
Laura looks down, “So um, I thought it would be a good idea to just sort of accidentally-on-purpose end up next to her on the rollercoaster. I mean, it’s scary, right, and” she blushes. “We’d have to sit really close to each other.”
“So how’d you manage that?”
“I pretended to need to sit in the middle because I was scared, and she wanted to go by herself because she was with this guy and girl who were clearly dating, and we ended up next to each other.”
“Okay wait,” Janet interrupts. “Are you seriously telling me this whole story is about you sitting next to a pretty girl. Babe,” she gestures around the room, “You’re sitting next to like six or seven of us right now.”
“I’m with her, dude,” Normani stretches. “Where’s the sex?”
“I told you it was different!” Laura protests. “We didn’t kiss or anything. We were going up the first hill, the biggest one, and she just reached out and grabbed my hand.”
Andra interrupts, “Tell them what she said, tell them what she said!” Laura glares at her.
I hand her another cookie and poke her in the side, “Come on, what did she say?”
Laura’s still shaking her head, so the rest of us join in, begging and pleading, until she finally says, “She said, ‘If I was going to plummet to my death with anyone, I’m glad it could be you.”
Janet snorts, “I don’t even know if that’s a compliment.”
Laura’s face falls. “I thought she meant it like one.”
“Then it was a compliment,” I protest over Janet’s eye rolls. “It’s actually not that bad a line.”
Janet’s still looking skeptical, and I can tell Laura notices. She’s looking scared and sad, like she maybe wants to cry.
“So what happened after the ride ended?” I ask, trying to distract her.
“Well, nothing,” she admits. “But she kind of buried her head in my shoulder while we were on the ride, and when she got out, she leaned in and kissed me. Right here,” she points to her cheek, and as she does so, her eyes light up. She said, “See you next time.”
“Okay, that’s actually really cute.” Normani admits. “Did you ever see her again?”
“No.” Andra sighs. “She’s just my mystery carnival girl.”
I think of Perce. And I’m talking before I can stop myself, “But even though you never saw her again, you have that moment. That moment where the whole world faded away, and you saw something most of us spend our entire lives searching for.”
Laura smiles. “She was sooo pretty,” she sighs, taking a bite of the cookie. “God, I wish— “She stops.
“You wish what?” Lisa tips her head to the side.
“I wish that was the biggest thing I had to worry about. You know I spent like two months daydreaming about her, wondering if I’d ever run into her again. And now it’s all just,” she sighs. “I mean, we’re here trying to make this like a normal girls’ night, but it isn’t. This isn’t just a sleepover with junk food and girl talk. Because those are always made like it’s the most important thing in the world to be there, like there’s a future ahead for all of us, and we—“
“We don’t even know if we’ll make it another day, much less to another weekend,” Janet finishes solemnly.
“And I gotta say,” Malia adds, “Overall, dating opportunities are pretty thin in the post-zombie apocalyptic world.” Everyone laughs.
“Come on, you have Mason,” Lucia protests. “You can’t even say that!”
“Mason and I are the exception,” Malia says. “I mean, look at Rogue over here.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I can’t believe she’s doing this, calling me out in front of everyone.
“You and Perce,” she says. “I know what happened on the roof.”
“Ooooh” they all start giggling, and Lisa mocks, “Oh Perce, your eyes are so pretty. Please stare at the stars with me, and— “she makes a mock seductive pose, running a hand over her middle, “Other things.”
“Dear God, woman, there are children here,” I say, trying to sound like her lewdness is of no consequence to me.
“Oh don’t worry,” Malia says, “Lucia, Andra, and Laura already know everything they need to know. Cool Mom Lisa over here took care of that. As for the rest of y’all, I hope your mamas taught you right.”
“Oh my mom didn’t teach me anything,” Normani laughs. “I picked it all up on my own.”
“You are such a slut!” Tavi smacks her with a pillow.
“Um excuse you, miss I’m-going-on-a-midnight-run-with-Mikey.”
Tavi smacks her. “I told you not to tell anyone about that,”
Janet giggles, and everyone else is laughing now, too.
“Okay, hold up,” Lisa says. “As Mom here, I gotta ask, are any of the under sixteen year-old girls doing any adult things? Because when you do, there are things you need to know. And obtain.”
Lucia, Laura, and Andra all shake their heads. “I wish,” Lucia says, glaring at me.
“You. Are. Thirteen.” Malia yells. “He’s too old for you!”
“He doesn’t deserve her,” Lucia grumbles. “She doesn’t even like him— “
“Oh, and he likes her?” Malia argues. “Just like he ‘liked’ Normani and everyone else?”
“Oh that makes me feel awesome, thanks guys” Normani rolls her eyes, winking at me like we share a secret. I look down. I was hoping to avoid getting directly involved in the conversation over Perce’s reputation.
“Hold up, bitch,” Malia winks at me. “We’re hearing this story, the rooftop one.
That’s so romantic.”
“Sounds like a really weird Disney movie,” Andra snorts. Lucia laughs.
“You seem to already know what happened on the roof.” I shrug, but inside I’m reliving it, his lips on mine, his eyes wide and dark, the way my hands and my body had moved almost without my permission, like my body knew things I didn’t, what I didn’t even know I wanted.
And a couple of weeks ago, in that closet…
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t wish we hadn’t been interrupted. I’d be lying if I hadn’t nearly run to his door every night since then.
“Rogue,” Lisa asks quietly. “Was that your first time?”
I look up at Lisa. Her eyebrows have almost formed a line, like I’m a difficult math problem she’s trying to figure out.
“Yeah,” I say quietly.
It was my first time. It was supposed to be with someone I cared about, someone I could love, someone I could see myself growing old with.
And instead it was someone who said he didn’t love me, who told me flat out that he just cared about me, but didn’t know why. Someone with soft lips and intoxicating embraces who knew what I was thinking, but didn’t care to answer it with anything but now, now, now.
Maybe I wasn’t in love with him, but I didn’t want him to stop. And even though I always wanted my first time to be with someone I loved, I can’t bring myself to regret it.”
“Didn’t he know? That you were a virgin?” Laura pipes up.
“Yeah, doesn’t it hurt or something?” Andra asks.
“That’s embarrassing,” Lisa says. “We’ve been over this. If he knows what he’s doing, it’s virtually painless.”
“And Perce definitely knows what he’s doing,” Normani smirks, sending everyone into titters of laughter. Everyone, that is, except me. The images of that night are still racing through my head, filling me with a mixture of shame and longing. And the knowledge that Normani, next to me, probably felt exactly the same to him, doesn’t make me feel any better.
I remember the way Perce kissed me, the day he’d convinced me to stay and fight. Was that all I was? Succumbing to a guy with beautiful eyes who whispered that I was important to him in the dark?
Call Me Zombie: Volume I: Rose Page 15