Zombie (3 page)

The hallways swell inside with dudes stopping, pressing, and pushing each other to see the girls, like it was their first time. Once guys find a clear line of vision, they freeze and hold. There has to be a name for this. Is there a word for it? Can I call it something? Hotnified? Yes. Yup. That’s it. We’re
hotnified
. We’re hotnified, watching the girls.

My dangerous daydream continues, the girls white-pantied and strutting around in slow motion to a rock ‘n’ roll soundtrack, when the small, Asian Brother sprints across the cafe, bullet-like, and hurls himself through the double doors to the outside area. I expect to see him do some kind of back flip or combo leg-swipe kick or crazy
mid-air jujitsu. Instead, it looks more like hand-to-hand combat. He grabs boys by their collars and elbows and flings them away from the sexy, girl zombies come to infect and devour the Byron Hall Boys. The boys laugh and slide their bags onto their backs and go back inside the building. The girls are unphased, unmoved, and extend their hands to the Asian Brother as an introduction.

I push my way through the crowd of horny high school perverts, their faces pressed to the doors and windows, practically licking the glass, the fucks. I edge my way to the front of these boner boys and head outside, pulled in like some kind of sexual riptide.

The air is dead outside, breezeless, hot and heavy with humidity, like the girls brought all of this hot, sexy air with them. I sit at a bench and, smooth as all hell, stoop to tie both shoes that are already double-knotted. The girls, still undressed in my head, circle the Brother. Seeing girls in short skirts pass by makes my pecker shiver for sure, so I can only imagine how the entire school of horny bastards feels.

“Ladies, you must leave,” the small, Asian Brother says. “No girls on school.” He shakes his head. “Three thirty, then you return.” He taps the face of his watch. “Then girls on campus.”

“What’s your name, Brother?” a girl asks, a tan girl with dark, red hair. She looks over at me and without even thinking or anything I raise my fucking hand and wave to her with a big old goof-ball smile on my face. She doesn’t smile back. Fuck me.

“I am Brother Lee,” he says.

“We’re looking for the drama department,” the girl with dark, red hair says. She hands him a stack of papers. “We are members of the drama club at Prudence High, Brother Lee, and are working on the Byron Hall Fall drama, but we need to turn these in before auditions.”

“You bring after school,” Brother Lee says. “I’m no mailman.” Brother Lee crosses his arms over his chest. “I look like mailman to you?”

“No, Brother,” the super model says, “you don’t look like a mailman at all. They have better uniforms.” She smiles at him.

“I don’t think this is funny,” he says.

She touches his arm and says, “They are our parental permission slips. We need to give them to Father Vincent Gibbs.”

“You wait to last minute,” Brother Lee says, shaking his head in disapproval, but even Brother Lee is powerless against the plaid skirt and teenage shaved legs. “Follow me. No walking.” He rushes down the sidewalk toward the lecture hall building, herding them away from the rest of us, like cattle away from a cliff; although in this scenario the girls seem more like the cliff and the rest of us the cattle.

The girls march single file past Brother Lee, who follows quickly behind them. The girl with the dark red hair looks at me over her shoulder again, but still without a smile, not at all like in the movies, like in those rom-coms—the movies where two souls are destined to be together and love one another and get married but for an hour and a half they keep missing each other, either by chance or fate, or by some kind of bullshit, until one rainy or sunny or snowy day their lives crash together and they see each other for the very first time. The girl passes by the boy and smiles over her shoulder and the boy returns the smile, maybe adding a wave, but she doesn’t see the wave because the guy that she’s with is her boyfriend who distracts her. The smile is what I’m really talking about here, the smile that says they will meet up again soon. Then, the girl falls out of love with her fuckneck boyfriend just as the boy is about to settle for some plain girl who is good enough for him, when in the nick of time the boy and the girl wind up at a public park feeding birds, or at a library browsing books in the same section, or strolling through a grocery store in the produce section—his hands squeezing cantaloupe melons as she digs her way through a bin of avocadoes—and they see each other again, but this time it will be the last time they see each other like strangers and the first time they see each other as friends.

Yeah, this girl that I like doesn’t look at me like that in the slightest. This girl looks at me like she thinks I’m just another pervert, like she knows I undressed her, got her completely naked in my head.

Brother Lee escorts the girls to the lecture hall building as they disappear.

I walk back into the even hallway of the school by the cafe and realize I am still smiling and when I stop smiling it makes me feel sad for some reason. Because she never smiled back.

B
yron Hall is prime zombie real estate—one hallway in every direction. No second floor. No basement that I’m aware of. Just a series of interconnected hallways. I can picture the undead, brain- and flesh-eating hoards clambering over each other, coming at me, crashing through doors and windows, swinging their arms around in a jerky motion, regurgitating goo. This school would be a perfect place to set an ambush, actually, if I were a zombie. Plenty of food in a concentrated area with few available exits and a low ratio of hero opportunities.

An axe sleeps behind a clear glass panel, the word
FIRE
printed across the glass in red. I make a mental note of its location—by the cafe, next to the patio, on the wall—for defense. Just in case of a siege. No, Armageddon.

The same two Christian Brothers and a fat furry blue jay roam the halls now, making their way from the front entrance toward the cafe. So far I have been able to avoid the Brothers and mascot. And Brother Lee for that matter, who has resumed his post in the cafe, pacing along the all, hands behind his back.

A group of bulked-up boys, six of them, dressed in plaid, punch and slap each other in the arm and neck like a bunch of fucking morons, in a my-dick-is-bigger-than-yours kind of way. They are the Plaids. The other kids in the hall instinctively move out of their way, clearing a path so as not to draw any unnecessary or added attention. I expect to be picked up and slammed into a locker. I’ve seen what they do to underclassman, but they pass by like they don’t even see me.

A white kid with one gigantic pimple in the middle of his forehead, like a Muslim or Hindu or whoever wears the religious red dots on their foreheads, approaches me as I reenter the school and tries to sell me an elevator pass. He wears a Half-Windsor. His pimple looks like it could erupt any second. Sound the sirens. Mandatory evacuation. Stat.

“You don’t have one?” he says, all worried for my well-being.

“Nope.”

“My God. It’s a good thing you ran into me then. This your lucky day.”

“I didn’t run into you. You tapped me on the shoulder.”

“You like to run your mouth like my bitch ex-girlfriend.” He opens his hand like a puppet and quacks it at me. “One left. Twenty bucks and it’s all yours.” He dangles a scrap of paper with the words
elivater pass
printed in red ink.

“The school is a giant hallway,” I say. “Byron
Hall
,” I say, still maintaining Zombie Survival Code #1: Avoid eye contact. “There are no elevators. Go find yourself another monkey.”

“Fucking freshman.” He lowers his sad piece of paper and waits, scanning the crowd, before approaching some other unsuspecting kid. Poor bastards. Both of them—the douchecloset trying to make a buck and the newbie boy lost in a wilderness of cheap cologne and plaid apparel.

Sometimes you only need to use the first Zombie Survival Code to get out of a jam, but other times you need to combine Codes. For example, ZSC #1 mixed with ZSC #2: Keep quiet. It’s all about the eyes. People underestimate how frightening it can be to engage in a conversation with a person who’s actively avoiding eye contact. That’s the thing about zombies, the undead don’t use eyes like humans. Zombies’ eyes are cross hairs on some high-powered rifle, or lasers on a heat-seeking missile. Their eyes don’t engage but seek with the ultimate intention to destroy and devour.

Two Christian Brothers flank me in the hallway—the same two at the top of the circle earlier. The giant blue jay still stands beside the Brothers too. The blue jay’s head is humongous and bobbles
around. Kids pass by and punch the blue jay’s tail. Blue feathers flutter everywhere.

“Welcome to Byron Hall,” one Brother says. “I’m Brother Bill and this is Brother Fred.”

“And this is our school mascot—Byron the Blue Jay,” Brother Fred says.

The blue jay raises a wing. More feathers. It covers its beak with a wing and laughs—the fuck. I wish I was in the zombie samurai movie
Versus
. I’d smash its fat, furry blue jay head in with my book bag full of summer reading I didn’t bother with. I’d say things in Chinese or Japanese or Korean and my subtitles would be in yellow beneath me for all to see. I’d make those sounds that they make—
aye-cha
and
oye-oh
. I’d be a motherfucking kung fu black belt badass. For sure.

“What’s your name?” Brother Bill asks.

“Jeremy Barker,” I say, extending my hand.

Brother Bill shakes my hand, his tunic swaying over his shoes like a skirt.

“You must be Jackson Barker’s little brother,” Brother Fred says.

“My word,” Brother Bill says. “Can’t be.” Brother Bill holds his hands up in surrender. “That’s really dating me. I don’t like to think about our legacy students.” He laughs. “Are you getting used to wearing a sport coat and tie?”

The words
Limp Dick
scream in my head. I refrain from telling them my father’s philosophy on knots. Sometimes people don’t need to know everything that you know. Like how this building would be the worst possible place to fortify against a Zombie Apocalypse. How they need to build levels and create smaller spaces. Like in the remake of
Dawn
. Watch
Dawn
, then schedule a meeting with me to discuss zombie security and preventative zombie architecture. A second level. A fortified basement with a secret elevator to the roof for helicopter evac. More axes. I could tell them this. But I don’t. Instead, I stick to the zombie basics. ZSC #1: Avoid eye contact. ZSC #2: Keep damn quiet.

“I bet you’re really excited to be following in your brother’s
footsteps. I mean, you must know this place like the back of your hand?” Brother Fred says, his hands behind his back.

“What’s Jackson doing now?” Brother Bill asks.

Avert eyes.

“I bet he’s graduated from college. Probably has a good job.” Brother Fred puffs his chest out a bit, proud to have been a part of a success story, of a solid tradition of excellence that is The Hall.

Quiet.

“We won’t keep you,” Brother Bill says, finally.

They walk off together with the fucking blue jay behind them. The Brothers latch onto another kid in the crowd, asking him questions, following him down the hallway and around the corner out of sight. The fat bitch blue jay follows, leaving everything behind him bluer.

Sometimes being silent is the easiest thing in the world.

The hallway is crammed with kids, pushing each other against lockers, pulling on wrinkled sport coats, combing their freshly gelled hair, tying last-minute knots before class. Kids roam in packs of plaid shirts with striped ties, plaid sport coats with solid ties. It hurts to look at for too long. Some sport coats look two sizes too big, like they were blindly grabbed off the rack, while others should be behind glass in a Ye-Olde-fifties museum. Pants don’t fit like pants should fit—at the waist. Instead, they hang down to the ass, a hand at the crotch to hold them up or a wide, waddling stance. I’d never be able to pull it off. And Dad would probably kill me before I left the house.

Before school started, he took me shopping for new sport coats, buttoned-down collared shirts, and khaki pants. I learned all about French cuffs, and the subtle differences between straight, spread, tab, and pin collars. Exciting fucking times, seriously. He said, “This is how a man should dress.” He said, “A man should dress like he could be buried in what he’s wearing.” Dad took the new clothes to this Italian tailor in Little Italy near the Inner Harbor to get them fitted or cropped or whatever. Angelo Christini—this old, silver-haired Italian with a humped back, who spoke with a thick accent and shook his hands when he spoke. He smelled like leather.
Angelo made me wear my clothes and stand on a small stool in front of mirrors as he measured me. It didn’t feel quite right when he ran his tape measure up the inside of my legs. I looked to Dad for help and wanted to ask him if this was at all normal—to be felt up by an old Italian man—but Dad couldn’t be bothered while he walked around the shop, flipping through racks of vintage Italian silk suits for sale and two-tone leather loafers. When the clothes came back, they fit like skin. Dad said, “Don’t you even think about growing taller or getting fat. I paid a fortune for these.” Now I’m the best-dressed freshman anyone’s ever seen, surviving among a zombie army of plaid motherfuckers with pants at their asses.

Someone jogging past knocks into me. His corduroys make a
zwip-zwip
sound as he passes. I say, “Excuse me,” but he doesn’t even know I exist. Kids shake lockers loose and greet each other with arm punches and big bear hugs.

I overhear summer vacation stories.

Someone fucked some local girl in Costa Rica while on vacation with his parents.

Some other guy lost his virginity to a college chick tour guide at Princeton.

Another guy got wasted visiting his brother in Chicago and ended up taking a dump on second base at Wrigley Field.

Another guy did his first line of coke at a movie premiere party in Los Angeles.