And it was wide open.
It wasn’t that Rory had been wrong about what would happen to it during the riots; it was clear that it had been jammed like the other one quite recently, but someone had since taken a bulldozer to it, cutting a clear, wide path through the twisted metal wreckage. Wheels and bumpers and hunks of sheet metal were mashed up against the railings on both sides, spilling out at the entrance. Whoever had been there before us had been going the other way.
I wanted to enjoy Rory’s grateful, congratulatory squeeze of my shoulders, but all I could think about was whether Peter had always felt that astronomically lucky every time one of his plans went right.
The sky was just starting to redden by that time, closer to our last lodging than usual, thanks to the large animal transport’s top speed of about seventy, but with the Mississippi already behind us and a clear shot ahead, Rory didn’t fight as hard as she might have when Hector pointed out that, with how little there was to the immediate east of us, if we wanted to sleep between walls that night, we might want to start finding them pretty soon.
Norman said, “I have an idea.”
Believe it or not, even Norman could kind of tell when people were really, really, exceptionally far from the right mood for jokes of varying levels of taste, and he had even less love for negotiating plans than I had, so he hadn’t ventured saying much that day. He took the map insistently at that point and directed us across a short distance of side streets, short enough to avoid answering the obvious question, “Where are we going?”
I wouldn’t have recognized the old-fashioned mansion myself if it hadn’t been for the sign out front, but I had a classical enough education to put it together pretty fast after that.
“Graceland?”
“Home of The King,” Norman confirmed. “I always hoped to see it someday. Plus, it looks like a pretty decent fortress, don’t you think?”
It was, but that was because, again, someone else had been there first. After pulling up to within a few yards of the porch and beating away a few straggling zombies to get our essential bags as far as the front door, Norman had the presence of mind to try the knob before I could resort to Peter’s crowbar. It was securely latched but not locked, so there was nothing to repair or jury-rig to get it locked behind us. The windows were already barricaded from the inside, there was a smell of recently burning gasoline, and the flowers laid lovingly on the living room coffee table had only just begun to lose their petals. Someone, maybe the same someone who had been at the controls of that bulldozer, had held at least a night’s vigil there before moving on.
Norman took a breath, and I saw the smell register with him, too. “You guys make sure that end’s secure?” he suggested, nodding further along the right side of the hallway. “Meet me back here? I want to check something.”
He headed in the other direction, wrench in one hand, padded Whack-a-Mole mallet in the other.
Hector, Rory, and I made sure there was no one inside with us on our side, living or dead, hiding behind the bed or the baby grand piano or the retro fifties TV, and then went back to the living room to wait. The side Norman had claimed for himself to scout was much larger, and the thought of him alone in it made me a little nervous, but I knew that if anything had gone wrong, we would have heard screams of one kind or another.
The daylight was just getting difficult to see by when I got up, ready to go looking for him. And that was when I heard the grinding of a motor in the distance, and the overhead lights flickered once, twice, three times, and then stayed lit, with a cheerful, yellowish tint.
Norman appeared at the top of the stairs across the hallway, grinning almost as broadly as his makeup always made him seem to, and beckoned.
We followed him past a kitchen with that display of plastic fruit you see in all disused, historical kitchens’ fruit bowls, a room full of plastic houseplants and thick green carpeting on every surface, down the stairs past a smaller, almost claustrophobic room with a pool table in the middle, its walls and ceiling completely covered in fabric, and into the one room of the mansion I’d actually heard about in advance. I think my mind had filed it incorrectly under “Urban Myth.”
Into one wall was set a row of three separate televisions, each showing a different DVD menu screen. I’m pretty sure most of the rest of the setup was Norman’s. The little table in the middle of all the blue and yellow living room set pieces was piled with DVD cases and a snack bar assortment of candy and crackerjacks.
A menu board hung from the ceiling, turned backward, with letters scrawled hurriedly across the blank side in sharpie.
LMNOE.
“None of us are having a good day,” Norman started in his best announcer voice. “Hell, none of us are having a good week. No one’s denying that.” Then he hyped up the announcer quality to his voice in the way that always meant he was trying to say something he actually meant and hoped no one would take too much notice. “And I know I’m not always the easiest person to be around, especially at bad times. But I do know something about good times, and I don’t think anyone can deny that we all seriously need one of those, especially if we’re going to have our heads together enough to cheer Lis up properly when we find her, which is the whole idea, right?” He picked up the first few cases on the DVD stack and held them up. “Now, I don’t know a lot about gas-powered generators, so I don’t know how long the power will last on half a tank, and of course, all I could find in the gift shop were old Elvis movies, and I’m not saying they’ll be great, but on three TVs at once and after our fair share of this”—he pushed back a pile of yellow throw pillows obscuring what looked like half the bar—“I think they’ll do, considering that this might very well be the Last Movie Night On Earth.”
For a moment, I was afraid this gesture would finally make me implode under the pressure of shutting out the Unspeakable Past, along with the bits of the present that seemed to belong there, and burst into tears; that’s how strong a contender it was for the sweetest thing I’d ever heard in my life. I was even more afraid when Norman poured and offered the first extra-strong rum and coke to Rory, that her requisite “Not if you were the last man on earth” was going to be enough to ruin it. I waited for it through agonizing seconds of silence to find out. It didn’t come.
Instead, she took the glass and knocked it back in two gulps.
“Yeah, I think I could go for a good time,” she said.
Norman’s confidence returned to full strength, and he poured a full round of drinks, which we all accepted without a moment’s hesitation, and raised his glass.
“To The Eagle Scout,” he started.
“To The Eagle Scout,” we echoed.
“To Peter.”
“To Claire.”
“Couldn’t have gotten this far without them.”
I don’t remember who proposed what toast after that. I know we drank “to The King,” “to being alive so far,” “to friendship,” and “to the LMNOE,” before Rory started calling it “the LMAO” and giggling whenever she tried to remember what it was really called. Norman turned on three copies of Live a Little, Love a Little, almost perfectly in sync, which by then, as he’d predicted, seemed like the most awesome movie in the world.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Head over Heels
I’d learned how to swallow the taste of liquor and keep it down from a few of my parents’ parties already, but the LMNOE was the first time I had enough of it at once to feel more of an effect than a tingle of warmth in my chest and on my skin. I’d known the theory, of course, the way it makes it difficult to balance and think things through before you blurt them out, but I guess that’s another one of those things, like big empty spaces, that you can’t really understand until you feel them.
Now that I know, I’ll keep it in mind if I ever have a secret or any dignity worth keeping. Luckily, on that particular night, we were all due for a lot more blurting and a lot less thinking.
One of us in particular.
“I know I’m kinda crazy,” Rory told us, in that lazy way that alcohol makes your tongue move, like Caleb’s chocolate bar voice, but with really chewy peanut butter smeared on top. “I know, I do, but thanks for doing this with me anyway. Thanks. I haven’t said that often enough, have I?”
“A little more often would be nice,” Hector agreed diplomatically. Halfway into Blue Hawaii, I had this really brilliant theory floating around in my head about why Rory had never even mentioned the possibility of ditching us when we’d insisted on stopping for so long in Tulsa, something about a family in the hand being worth two in the bush, and how that was totally what we were, but right about then, this amazing guitar riff started resonating through the walls from upstairs, and I stopped trying to put it into words.
There was something about that tune. I recognized it, from somewhere in the past, but from a good part that hadn’t had all its goodness crushed out and put forever off-limits. I strained to focus on it for a moment, and then it fit into place.
Hector had written it, back before that rejection letter, back before he had stopped playing.
Hector was playing the guitar. Hector was playing the guitar. And that was kind of a huge deal.
I rolled over the back of the couch and did my best to run up the stairs even though my feet never seemed to be completely under me, and the hallway seemed to have two ends to it, both of them in front of me. Norman and Rory followed, both feeling the wall for support.
Hector looked up at us for a moment with a shy but subtly confident smile and went back to concentrating. If the Tulsa Zoo large animal vet had good odds of being the greatest doctor left alive, who was to say he wasn’t the greatest musician?
I don’t know if it was a testament to how little he’d had to drink so far, comparatively, or how much the rest of us had had, but that music wasn’t just the best I’d heard since the Unspeakable Past, it was flat out the best I’d heard. It was the kind that grabs you by the rib cage with something stronger than its volume, the kind that you can feel as intensely as real happiness or sadness, but isn’t either of those things. The kind that makes you want to play it, even if you don’t know where to find middle C, the kind that makes you need to move to it, do it, be part of it, be in it the way it’s in you.
Norman was swaying, too, like I was, with something more than a chemically-induced lapse of equilibrium. If he’d been thinking more clearly, I was sure he would have made the usual move of an exaggerated bow to Rory, asking her if he could have this dance, maybe even realizing that after the way the LMNOE (and more importantly, the words “when we find Lis”) had finally gotten through to her, translated a small sample of his true awesomeness into her language, this would almost certainly be the time she would accept. But I was glad that, in his haze, he seemed to have forgotten that she was there, so he linked his arms into their comfortable, habitual fit with mine instead.
Dancing with Norman had always been a pretty exhausting experience, even when there wasn’t any arcade game footwork involved. You can’t command the attention of a dance circle for long, even at a particularly lame school formal, without pulling out at least most of the stops. He could do that pretty well by himself for most of an evening. In whatever fatal moments my own date spent succumbing to heat or thirst, I had always known to be prepared for plenty of ridiculously exaggerated gyration, getting my hands however dirty the floor happened to be, and resurrecting moves that everyone still knows the names of even though they haven’t been cool since the seventies.
That would have been fine for our present surroundings, actually; the floor was immaculate, and the seventies would have been forward thinking, but just a few moments after we fell in sync with each other, after just one clumsy flip that would have been more at home in the twenties, Hector for some reason insisted on skipping to the slowest part of his song, still irresistible in its movements but utterly incompatible with the Batusi or the Electric Slide.
Not to be defeated, Norman twirled me, and to even things up, I twirled him back, which made us both a little dizzy, I guess, because after that we just leaned against each other, each supporting the other’s weight, drifting in an unhurried, multi-pointed turn, something like a waltz with a whole extra beat to savor in every measure. I kept thinking that I should do something impressive, attention-grabbing, exceptional—I was so content where I was, like lying in bed on a cold morning, that I kept watching the shiny wall panels go by in a loop, drifting in that circle, in that song, its notes so perfectly spaced that your heart synchronizes to it, two pulses for every beat. I know it’s not only my heart that does that because I could hear Norman’s, too through the shoulder where my head was resting. That feeling of extra sharpness was back, somehow coexisting with the drunken blur, making me notice every bit of what I could sense, like there was going to be a test on it later. I could hear his heartbeat and feel the coarse, feathery texture of his hair and smell a blend of the theatrical paint I was learning to associate with him, and that same old aerosol body spray I always had, the kind that’s supposed to smell like rain or something but just smells like the ultimate generic body spray because what the hell does falling water smell like anyway?
He felt the way he had every night and every day on the road, the way he had on the morning when the Unspeakable Past ended while we waited for the cops to show up and set whatever would come next in motion; the way he had on countless days before then when we played video games in the basement or paintball in the backyard; whenever I got dumped or had embarrassing love poetry read to me in a public forum; whenever one of us did better than, or worse than, or exactly the way we expected to in class; any time a hug was cool, any time when it wasn’t, and an appropriately inappropriate body slam would have to do instead.
It was a good feeling, another good thing from the past, a bit of goodness I was still allowed to acknowledge. I didn’t want that song to end, fading out like my expensive anti-stress alarm clock used to fade in, forcing me out of bed.
Norman took the cue for the big finish like he always did and dipped me. I couldn’t find my feet again once I’d let them go, so I gave in and sprawled flat on the deep, soft carpet.
“Sorry!” Norman exclaimed when he saw me on the ground, thinking he’d dropped me, and offered a hand to help me up. I shook my head. That was probably the best call I could have made. I’d have been more likely to pull him down, the way he was wobbling, than he would have been to pull me up.
Hector put down the guitar and called out to Rory, who was closest to the stairway, but she was on the floor, too, a bottle of sparkly vodka still in hand, eyes drooped almost shut. So Hector went downstairs to turn up the volume of the last movie on earth’s music, to fill the silence left after his playing.
Norman kept moving to it and tried once more to coax me into joining. I shook my head again, motioning that I wasn’t about to try to stand up. I kept staring up at the room that was still rotating gently, enjoying that same floating feeling that you get when you twist the chains of the swing set until you’re so dizzy you fall down.
There was a time, before a certain Valentine’s Day, when Norman would have grabbed Hector as his next dance partner without a second thought to keep the party going, but as things were then, as smashed as we all were, he only paused for the tiniest little awkward moment before picking up the guitar and tangoing it across the room with him instead.
Not that Hector seemed to mind the reprieve at all. He pried the vodka bottle from Rory’s unconscious grip and stretched out next to me with it, offering a sip.
I passed. I’d hit enough-is-enough territory, but he had plenty of wiggle room left, so he gulped what looked like the equivalent of at least three more shots while we watched Rory sleep and Norman do the twist with the guitar, oblivious to us.
“So,” Hector said after a few minutes, “Claire sure found herself a looker, didn’t she?”
“Yeah, no kidding,” I muttered in agreement.
“I mean, he was really
something,” Hector pressed.
“Uh . . .” I blanked out on a response for a while.
Norman, Hector, and I had never talked much about the breakup that had solidified our friendship. Not that any of us were unclear on the reason we were free from the usual ex’s tension, the reason Norman was currently dancing alone with a guitar, the reason why, whenever the three of us shared some equivalent of a bed, I was always the one in the middle. It was just one of those things, like the time Hector had spent without music, like the Unspeakable Past, that had always taken better friends not to talk about.
If Hector was trying to cross that line, this was something serious, something that required real listening, which I wasn’t sure I was chemically capable of at that moment, but I did my best.
“Yeah, he was something,” I said. “A little on the slutty side, but something.”
“Completely on the slutty side,” Hector agreed. “Admit it, he had you hot for him.”
“Sure, yeah, of course he did,” I said. “And you.”
He smirked a little guiltily. “I’m only human.”
We watched Norman dance a little longer.
“So why didn’t you stay?” he asked.
That question was a lot more confusing than whether or not Caleb Summers had been devastatingly handsome, so I blurted honestly and without thinking, “Why would I?”
“For him,” Hector pushed, “to get yourself one of who knows how many completely gorgeous guys there are left on the planet. Why wouldn’t you?”
“Why wouldn’t you?” I turned it around on him.
“Completely different situation,” he said, shaking his head. “You actually had a chance.”
Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know Of) Page 13