Everyone smiles as we think about Jesse, but Kaboom carries on talking like he can’t hear me. “I propose we bring Nadia into our group.”
This has an immediate reaction. “No way!” shout all the girls together. Ah, Nadia, the only person KC hates more than Nemesis. Actually, their mutual hate of Nadia is one thing KC and Nemesis have in common. Kaboom has had a thing for her ever since she arrived; in fact, just about every guy here has had a thing for her. Kaboom has even been competing with Buck for her attention. Maybe he thinks admission to an exclusive club will tip the balance in his favor. Can’t say I blame him for trying.
“We have good chemistry together…” Kaboom says defensively.
“Yeah, the toxic kind,” retorts KC.
Nadia was part of the group that ran into the high school/refugee center with us. She’s the one with the tiny voice and the elfin features that caught everyone’s eye. Her parents never came home on the Lost Day, but her nanny took care of her until their home was breached. They lived farther away than anyone else but they could cover more ground because they came in a Humvee. Unfortunately, that Humvee fell into the same ditch trap the other cars fell in, at least that’s what Nadia claimed. Once we got over the trauma of the first night, she became the center of attention. Even KC had to admit to me that when she first met her she couldn’t take her eyes off her. “She’s so cute it’s unreal. She looks like a doll!” she said. There was no jealousy in her voice, just admiration.
And Nadia really is something to look at. She’s like a little fairy with her small delicate frame and pixie-like face. Her high cheekbones and dimples make you go, “Oh, how sweet!” and her eyes are so intensely blue they put a hold on you. You simply cannot look away from them. She has perfectly smooth and lightly tanned skin that makes her look even more like a doll than a real person. And if her looks weren’t mesmerizing enough, the sound of her voice is. She can say something mean and bitchy and it still makes people go, “Awwww…” It’s tiny and musical and makes her seem all the more adorable. She can make anything she says sound either arresting or dainty, which is good because she doesn’t say anything with substance. The difference between her and Stacy is that you don’t mind hearing whatever Nadia has to say as long as you can hear that voice while you admire her perfect features.
Linus cuts through my Nadia-centered thoughts. “She’s too stupid to keep our secrets—she’ll get us all thrown out!”
“I don’t think she’s as stupid as she looks. I think she fakes it so she can manipulate people more easily,” KC adds.
“Nah, with those looks she doesn’t need any help with manipulation…all she has to do is bat her eyes, say a guy’s name, and she’s got him,” growls Mouse.
“She’s been spoiled her whole life. You guys continue to spoil her, and she’ll bring us all down if it will get her what she wants!” Nemesis pounds her fist on the ground while she speaks. “I heard that her nanny drove her here and only pretended to get stuck in the ditch. She made Nadia get out and run for the gate so she could drive back to her secure mansion and live out her Nadia-free life in luxury.”
“Yeah, who’s ever heard of a Humvee getting stuck anywhere? And her nanny didn’t make it in with her,” Doom points out.
“I like Nadia,” Puddles speaks up, albeit softly. “She’s nice to me.”
Nemesis spits out “She’s nice to every guy, you dolt! She just wants the attention; she doesn’t care who she gets it from. All eyes have been on her ever since she got here and still it’s not enough, she has to stick her nose in your business and be a part of everything. She won’t rest till she’s back to being the center of attention!”
I can see Kaboom is about to go off in defense of his beloved, but Ghost diffuses the situation by calmly stating: “I understand your feelings and reasons for wanting Nadia to be part of the group, but you need to think of her safety. She’s so sweet and innocent…”
At this KC huffs and balls up her fists, but then a knowing look passes between her and Ghost and she calms down.
“Do you really want to put her safety at risk by associating her with our group? Mouse is right, look what happened to KC and me,” Ghost continues. “Do you want to put Nadia in that kind of danger?”
“Yes!” shouts Nemesis, but Kaboom looks thoughtful and answers, “No, you’re right.” He looks up at Nemesis with a threat in his eyes. “But I put her safety above yours!”
Nemesis sighs, “Doesn’t everybody?”
GHOST
KC was amazing when she took Stacy out, but now that the adrenaline is gone, she’s changed. She’s more serious, but less focused. She no longer laughs as easily as she used to, no matter how silly or random something is. I remember Eric once telling me, “You never forget your first kill. Their face will haunt you the rest of your days.” I’m guessing that Eric was a well-trained soldier when he had his first kill, better equipped to handle death. KC’s just a traumatized fifteen-year-old girl. I wish she were willing to talk about what happened. I wonder if she feels the same way I do: We weren’t exactly naïve before we were trapped in that locker room, but knowing someone tried to kill us strips away the last shred of trust and innocence we had going for us.
I don’t know what to say to restore KC’s smile, but I found something yesterday that might help both of us. It’s dinnertime, so the hallways are mostly empty as I look for her. I know that she’s not had much of an appetite lately, so the one place she will not be is the cafeteria. It didn’t take me too long to find her; she’s in the library as usual. She’s pretending to read while she stares aimlessly into space. She’s probably going over and over again what happened in her mind, wondering how she could have done things differently. Maybe she’s just trying to get the image of Stacy’s stabbing out of her mind. A look at the book she’s holding confirms my suspicions, because the title of the book she’s supposedly reading is How to Excel in Cheerleading.
She is so lost in her thoughts, I end up having to grab her shoulders and gently shake her to get her complete attention. She reacts as if she thinks I’m talking to someone else and not to her. She’s slightly irritated that I’m interrupting her deep funk, but perks up when I tell her that I’ve found something interesting on that big boulder at one of the school entrances. She willingly gets up and puts the book back on the table, taking a look at it for the first time. Her lips part into an “O” at the sophomoric title. She’s clearly embarrassed by what she’s been holding in front of her face for the last hour or so and quickly pushes it away from her before she follows me into the hall.
“What’s this about the Rock?” she asks.
“You’ll see” is all I can say, so she fills in the silence by explaining about the painting of the Rock, how only those who have earned the right to paint it get to paint it. I ask her what one has to do to earn the right and she explains that it’s not an individual thing but more of a group effort, so a school club or sports team would have to earn a trophy or go to the finals or do something unusual, something that would get the school noticed for all the right reasons and get them in the paper. She tells me that there was once an individual who earned the right to paint the Rock by himself by breaking some record on a long-distance run, but all he did was paint “Whatever,” on one side and, “Bet you wish you went out with me now Becky Hamill!” on the other.
While she talks, we walk, right up to Mr. Cromwell’s classroom on the second floor. It conveniently looks over the Rock; in fact, he’s the one who pointed out what was on it to me. He also kindly lent me the keys to his classroom. I really like Mr. Cromwell.
KC doesn’t ask where I got the keys as I unlock the door, instead she just bounds over to the window as soon as she’s through it. Her excitement drops down to melancholy when she looks out over the grounds. “I don’t see anything on it” she says, clearly disappointed.
“What did you think you would find?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe a guard sitting on it picking his
nose? A bunch of mice having a party on top? Something exotic like a scarlet ibis?”
“We’re too far north for one of those, despite what that short story says,” I reply. “I know, I had to read that too for English.”
“Well then, what did you want to show me?” She’s clearly frustrated, but I’m okay with that; at least she’s focusing on me instead of what she did to Stacy.
“I want to show you what’s written on the Rock.”
“Um, I’m not really able to read stuff that far away…” she starts to say, but stops when she sees me reach into the drawer in Mr. Cromwell’s desk and pull out a pair of binoculars.
“Where did you get those?” she asks in surprise. “I thought the soldiers took all the useful stuff from your kit!”
“I got these from one of the bags that belonged to the ‘disappeared.’ You know, the ones Jesse found hidden behind that panel in the bathroom.”
“That’s great!” she says before taking them from my hands. “Thanks!”
She looks through them and stops talking while she picks out what has been painted or scrawled across the Rock with Sharpies. “It’s covered in quotes!” she says after a couple of minutes. “Who wrote all that stuff? When was it written?”
I shrug even though she’s not looking at me. “Your guess is as good as mine. This is, I mean, was, I mean, still is your school. Nothing on there has anything to do with Mclean High. What kind of club did you have here that would write those things?”
KC pulls her gaze away from the Rock and brings it back to me. “There isn’t a club or team that would write that mess. None of the sayings are related. It’s almost like some kids slipped out every now and then and put their mark on the one sure and permanent thing around here.” She turns her attention back to the window and what lay beyond. “The writing looks old and weather-beaten. No one has been out there for a couple of months at least.”
“Your eyesight is better than mine,” I lie. “Can you read some of the graffiti to me?”
“Well I’ve been trying to, but so much has been washed away…give me a moment…”
And that’s when she starts to smile. I’ve already read what’s on the Rock. It made me smile too. If there were refugees sneaking out to scribble out their feelings on a landmark, they didn’t do it to post words of warning or give written form to their anguish. No, they did it to vent the sudden seriousness of their lives through the balm of humor. In other words, the graffiti was just that, graffiti. What decorated the Rock was the written equivalent of a prank, and what made them feel good is what makes us feel good now.
KC reads slowly at first as she pieces together the worn-away words. “Here’s one…‘Tolkien is Hobbit-forming.’”
“Sounds like that was written by an English lit student.”
KC carries on reading. “How about this one written across the top in a crescent like a rainbow? ‘If the zombie apocalypse started in Vegas, why didn’t it stay in Vegas?’”
“That’s kind of funny…” I start to say, but KC interrupts me. “Wait, here’s one that’s even better: ‘What would MacGyver do?’”
“I don’t get that one.”
“That’s because it’s a pretty old reference. My mother said there was a show on when she was young about this guy, MacGyver, who would escape or solve every fix he found himself in with whatever bits and pieces were lying around. A bit like you, really. She said the contraptions were so ridiculously implausible it was funny. She once told me that they used to say ‘Why do we send soldiers into war when all we have to do is send MacGyver over with a pack of sewing needles and some chewing gum?’”
“Good to know,” I say. What I really mean is that it’s good to know that she thinks I’m smart enough to fix things with whatever we’ve got. I could get used to this sort of identity; it’s really flattering.
“Here’s one I don’t get,” she says. “It’s in quotation marks. It says ‘I am a rock’—Simon and Garfunkel.”
Now it’s my turn to know more than her. “That’s even older than your MacGyver reference. It’s from a hit a duo called Simon and Garfunkel had in the seventies.”
“Got it. It’s a double entendre. It’s a bit weak though. Wait, here’s one from my favorite show The Big Bang Theory! Oh, I’ve just got to show this to Houston. He always wanted a chance to paint the Rock! I think he’d like it much better the way it is now.”
“What does it say?” We never had a TV. Some of Eric’s paranoia found its way into my mother’s style of upbringing, and she was convinced that TV would rot our brains.
“It says ‘This rock would beat paper, scissors, lizard, and Spock!”
I think that would take too long to explain to me, so I ask her what else she can make out.
“I can’t tell if someone’s trying to be funny or serious with this one; I’m hoping funny, because if they’re serious than I’m scared.”
“What does it say?”
“’All I need to know, I learned in prison.’”
“Oh.”
“Here’s a better one—‘I’ve got mood poisoning, must be something I hate.’”
“I saw that on Tumblr once. What about the one written at the bottom?” I actually did have trouble making that one out.
“Give me a moment,” KC says, a look of concentration on her face. “Okay, here we go…‘I just want to live long enough for my driving to terrify people.’ That’s funny; my mother didn’t wait to get old to start doing that.”
I remember her mother’s frantic driving the night we came here, and I believe her.
KC’s smile droops a little. “They’re getting a little more serious. The frivolous quotes are the oldest, like they were written back when people thought this was all temporary and they’d be going back home soon. The fresher the paint, the more serious the saying.”
“Like what?” I ask. I’m wishing I had studied all the writing on the Rock before I brought KC here, not just the ones that made me chuckle.
“Like this one—‘Be nice to others, the whole world is a small town now.’”
“That doesn’t sound too bad to me.” I think KC’s reading too much into this.
“Here’s another: ‘It’s just a bad day, not a bad life.’”
“That’s just good advice.”
“How about this, ‘So were you condescending and witty on the Internet? Did that confidence transfer well into this life?’”
“That’s a bit harsh—” I start to say, but KC’s on a roll now.
“And there’s this one: ‘I found happiness in my back yard, then I got evicted.”
I’m starting to regret bringing KC here. I didn’t want her mind back on our problems. I just wanted to lift her out of them with a bit of levity, even if it was just for a little while. I’m about to pull her away from the window, gently, of course, but she says something that stops me in my tracks.
“Here’s the most recent one. The paint hasn’t had a chance to chip away. In fact it looks almost brand-new. It was hard to spot before because the words are not all linked together. They take up space here and there but if you follow them in a curved line they all link up. I think one of the guards or soldiers wrote it.” How did I not pick up on this? I bet MacGyver would have noticed.
“What makes you think it was them?”
“I don’t know exactly; I just do. But think about it, if anyone tries to leave these days, they’ll get shot. At least that’s what I’ve been told. And I believe it.”
I believe it too. I don’t think it’s something they’d say just to keep us indoors; they really would shoot us. “So what does it say?” I ask, even though I’m afraid of the answer.
It says, “They watch from the trees.”
KC
“Remind me again why we’re doing this?”
“Because it’s mandatory,” replies Mom.
“No, I get that, but why are we primping like we care?”
Our resident psychiatrist-spy (or psycho-spy as we�
�ve started to call her) and her mini-me, Nadia, thought that morale was low and the one thing that would lift our spirits would be a party. Most of us have lost all track of time here, but she insists it is Halloween; therefore it should be a costume party. We were encouraged to be as creative as possible with what we could find around the high school to make up our costumes. Nemesis had found where the getups from the Drama Club were kept and picked out an outfit for me. This was uncool on two levels: one, it came from Nemesis, and two, it was pretty.
I don’t trust the reasons behind the party and I’m not intending to do more than pin some spare socks on a T-shirt and call myself static cling, but my mother agreed with Nemesis that this dress was just the thing for me. Worse than agreeing with Nemesis was the fact that she was insisting, nay, demanding that I wear it. She made me shower and gave me her allotment of conditioner on top of mine to tame my frizzy locks. Now she’s slowly dragging her brush through them, trying to smooth my hair along with my bad mood. “I don’t understand what your problem is with this outfit. It’s not like we dressed you up in Bo-Peep lace and frills! This dress should be right up your street; it was used for the role of the wicked queen in Snow White.”
Okay, I have to admit she’s right. It’s black and purple and form-fitting and long…but it doesn’t look evil enough without the big black headdress and mask that’s supposed to go with it. “Is that what I’m supposed to tell others when they ask about my costume? That I’m the wicked and vain queen from Snow White?”
“Sounds good to me!” Nemesis has just popped her head around the door. The sound of her cheerful voice makes me wince.
I take one look at her and think, “Great, she looks…just great.” She’s also chosen a dress from the Drama Club trunk, something white and tight and perfect on her. She swirls around for us so we can admire her picture-perfect looks.
“It’s the dress from the ‘Bride of Frankenstein!’” she cheerfully announces, clearly pleased with herself. She sits herself down next to me on my cot and before I know it, she’s got a makeup pallet out and is applying blush to my cheeks. “Hey stop that!” I protest, but she just brushes me off.
Notes from a Necrophobe Page 16