Zombie Blondes (17 page)

Greg sits down on the edge of the bed and places his hand next to him like an invitation for me to join him. His eyes drawing me closer and it surprises me how easy it is for him to convince me. I hold my arms out like a bird and let myself fall backward on the mattress. Then I let my fingers walk toward his until we’re holding hands again.

We both start to laugh and for the first time since I came inside, we both begin to feel normal. Like ourselves. Like we feel when we’re alone. Like we’re the only two people in the world.

“So tell me the truth, am I the only girl who’s ever been on your bed?” I ask, half kidding and half wondering. I already sort of know the answer. The girls have told me all about him. Told me how I’m the first girl he’s liked in forever. But that doesn’t mean anything. Not really. There could be some secret girlfriend somewhere that no one knew about. And when he answers no in a shy way, I know that there is someone and I perk up.

“Who was it?” I ask. I’m not jealous at all. I’m more excited than jealous. Excited to find out something The Blondes didn’t know. I guess since I started hanging out with them, I’ve gotten a little taste for gossip.

“Just some girl,” Greg says. “But we weren’t right for each other, you know. Besides, she didn’t live here long.”

“Oh,” I say. Another someone who came and went isn’t so exciting. Not in this place. And after my curiosity is satisfied, my jealousy starts to act up. “Was she prettier than me?” I ask.

“Not even close,” he says. I don’t care whether or not it’s the truth, it makes me happy just that he said it.

He reaches over and touches the soft hairs on the back of my neck. Leans closer and pushes himself against me. And I’m ready to kiss him when I notice the stain on the back of his shirt. A trickle of dots like a chain of islands on a map, colored in red.

Greg’s eyes follow mine and he pulls away when he sees that I’m looking at the blood just beneath his shoulder. “This is nothing,” he says before I have the chance to ask. “Don’t worry, it’s not mine.” He tells me it happened at practice. One of the guys got scraped up a little. Says it happens all the time and it amazes me sometimes how casual he can be about violence and still be so gentle with me.

“Is he all right?” I ask.

“Yeah, he’s fine,” Greg says as he stands up. He pulls the stained T-shirt over his head and tosses it to the floor. I’ve never had any boy undress in front of me and I can’t keep from staring. I can see every muscle in his back and chest when he bends to grab another shirt. I think about how easily
he could wrap his arms around me and make me vanish. It sort of frightens me and excites me at the same time. So much so that I sit up, too, and end up standing on the other side of the bed from him as he pulls a clean shirt over his ghost white skin.

I run my finger over the top of his desk, brushing aside pens and pencils and anything that comes across my path. Barely looking at the things I touch, just trying to keep from looking at Greg until my heart slows down.

He walks around the bed. Comes toward me and I take a deep breath. Watching his faint reflection in the glass side of an aquarium perched on the far corner of a bookshelf. I point to it before he has the chance to say anything. “That’s not a snake in there, is it?” I demand.

“Nah, it’s just a grasshopper,” he says, laughing at the disgusted look that crept over my face when I still thought there was a chance he kept a snake only a few feet from his bed.

“
Why
would you have a grasshopper in an aquarium?” I ask, confused but relieved.

“Not just any grasshopper,” Greg says. “That grasshopper is undefeated in ten fights.”

“Fighting grasshoppers?” I wrinkle my forehead and make my voice higher to let him know I have no idea what he’s talking about.

“You’ve never made grasshoppers fight?” he asks. Showing his surprise by opening his eyes wide when I shake my head. Then he explains how it works. How you hold one in each fist and bring their faces close together. He says the stronger one will end up chewing the other’s face to bits.

“That’s gross,” I say, holding my hand up for him to stop
telling me any more about it. He shrugs his shoulders. Says it’s no big deal. Tells me that the football team has tournaments every Friday before a game.

I turn my hips away from him because I don’t want to hear about it. That’s when he puts his hands on my sides and says he’s sorry. I feel his words against the back of my neck and feel myself giving in.

Forgiving him.

But later, when we’re making out on his bed, I wonder if I’m the only one still thinking about it or if his head is filled with the image of grasshoppers biting each other’s faces off, too. And if he is, does it scare him the way it scares me?

After a week of being on the squad, the drama that was
swirling around me has gone away as quickly as it came. There’re no more rumors circulating the halls about me. I don’t get the silent treatment anymore in my classes. Even Morgan and Miranda aren’t really enemies anymore. I wouldn’t call them best friends or anything like that, but I don’t think they hate me, either.

The only person who seems to hate me now is Lukas.

He hasn’t talked to me since that night at my house when the sheriff chased him away. I tried to apologize to him. I told him how I swore to the sheriff that he hadn’t done anything and how I asked him to leave Lukas alone.

Lukas told me he didn’t need my help. Told me to leave him alone as he punched the locker next to mine. From where he was standing, Greg thought he was trying to punch
me. He’d heard about what happened at my house and so he was already angry at Lukas. Greg charged at him like I’d seen him charge at opponents on the football field.

I covered my eyes as Lukas’s skinny body twisted and bent like the injured bodies strewn over the field during the game he’d taken me to. When I heard him get slammed against the floor, I screamed. I yelled at Greg to get off him. Begged until a teacher rushed into the hall and pulled them apart. Since Lukas is the outcast and Greg’s a football player, Lukas was the one to get dragged to the office. I thought about going there and explaining the whole thing, but I knew Lukas would just get angrier at me for interfering.

I tried but I couldn’t stay mad at Greg. From what he saw, I guess he was doing the right thing. It was sort of romantic in a brutish jock kind of way. And it only bothered me up till the moment he kissed me there in the hall, in front of everyone. It’s strange how the violence that seems to linger on him is always erased whenever our mouths touch.

But even though it’s been almost a week, I still can’t help feeling bad about me and Lukas. I feel like I let him down. I mean, I sort of did exactly what he said I was going to do the first time we met. I fell in with the Blondes and became one of the popular girls. Now I sit with them at lunch and watch him sitting alone. Every so often, I think I catch him looking at me with the same hateful look I saw in his eyes when he warned me to stay away from Maggie in the first place.

I just wish he’d talk to me so that I could tell him how wrong he was. I’m worried that he’s going to drive himself
crazy with all his comics and outrageous theories unless I can get through to him. But that doesn’t seem likely. I’m pretty sure he never wants to speak to me again.

“God, will you just forget about him already?” Melissa says when she catches me glancing over in the direction of where Lukas is. “What is it with you and that freak? You’re going out with one of the hottest boys in school and I still see you looking at him once a day.”

“He’s not so bad,” I say. “Besides, Morgan was friends with him, too, once upon a time,” I add in my own defense.

Meredith laughs. “He said that?”

“Yeah, why? It’s not true?” I ask.

“Look, you don’t have to worry about him anymore,” Melissa says. “You’re cool now. You can forget about him. Let him disappear into thin air, okay?”

I laugh and try to make it into a joke. “Yeah, I guess. Just an old habit.”

“Like chewing your nails?” Meredith asks. Changing the subject to start me on the way to forgetting about him. Grabbing my hand and showing my bitten fingernails to Melissa. “Really, you have to stop that,” she says in a friendly enough way.

“I know,” I say, taking a closer look and wishing I could stop just like that. Maybe it’ll be easier once my dad gets back two days from now. I still get too nervous at night sometimes to quit. It’s really before bed that kills me. “I swear that I will soon.”

Meredith smiles. “I know you will,” she says, less like an encouragement and more like a threat.

It’s just part of being one of them, though. They’ll always
demand that I change something about myself until I’m perfect. It doesn’t really get on my nerves. I guess that’s because I like who they want me to be more than I like who I am. I mean, they’re only trying to make me better. And I’m not so sure conformity is a bad thing in that case. Like my new diet. I only pack a lunch of carrot sticks, yogurt, and bottled water now like the rest of them. It’s much healthier than what I ate before. Even if my stomach cramps up with hunger every so often, I know that’s only because I was eating too much before. The rest of the girls only eat this much and they have more energy than most two people combined.

My clothes are better, too, now that nearly every girl on the squad has given me old outfits of theirs. Practically new clothes and all of them look great on me. And they’ve all been really good about not making it feel like charity. None of them has made fun of me for being poor or anything like that. They keep saying that we’re family and they don’t mind helping out one of their own.

My grades have also gone up.

They always say kids in sports do better in school—I just didn’t know that it happened automatically. I don’t study any more or anything like that, but I keep getting As on tests. My dad can’t wait to see those. He barely believes me when I tell him over the phone.

There’s only one thing that kind of makes me feel weird about being one of them. That’s the name-change thing. I don’t understand why they do it. I mean, not really. I get that it’s part of showing allegiance and all that, but it doesn’t
seem necessary to me.

“Have you decided on one yet?” Maggie asks me.

“Not yet,” I mumble, trying to avoid the subject.

“Well, you have to soon. Your first pep rally is Friday and you need a new name by then,” she says, making it clear that it’s an order. No more stalling, I have to pick one of the three choices she gave me. Montana, Mackenzie, or Madison.

I sigh at the thought of being called by any one of those names. Name changes are for people in the witness protection program, not high school cheerleaders.

“Why is that so important?” I ask.

I regret asking right away as the conversations on either side of the lunch table go silent. All eyes turn to me and then to Maggie, who looks at me coldly. Her blue eyes narrow like the sky before a winter storm. I’ve seen Maggie get mad at Morgan before or at other girls when they mess up in practice, but she’s never given me that icy stare.

“It’s just . . . I like my name,” I explain.

Maggie blinks and keeps her patience with me. “But your name doesn’t begin with an
M
like everyone else’s. That’s why you need a new one.”

“Yeah . . . but I mean, so what?” I ask, almost in a whisper.

“ ‘So what?’ ” Maggie whispers back as she leans across the table. Her strawberry lips trembling as she lets the words slip from her mouth slowly so that I don’t miss their importance. “ ‘So what’ is that our job is to make sure every single person in this town supports the Death Squad. We need to show how completely loyal we are even if that means giving up
part of ourselves. We do that by giving up our names, get it?”

I nod slowly to all the faces staring at me with a seriousness that they usually save for practice. “I get it,” I say. I get that it’s important to all of them and that should be enough for it to be important to me, too. “I’ll pick one,” the syllables scratching the back of my dry throat as I say it.

Maggie smiles at me. She puts her hand on top of mine and says she knows it might feel strange, but promises me that I’ll get used to it. I’m not so sure about that, but I tell her I think she’s right, anyway.

I go back to eating my lunch and the conversations that had been cut off start up again without missing a beat. I see Greg coming over from his table and I wave. All my concerns about changing names go away and I’m beginning to think I can get used to anything as long as I have him.

I let my
hand slide slowly down the side of Greg’s cheek after our mouths give each other space to breathe.

“See you tomorrow,” I say.

“Yeah. Tomorrow,” Greg says. His face switching from pink to pale as the diner sign flickers on and off above his head. Some of his friends are still inside and I can see them in their varsity jackets, shuffling from table to table like children playing musical chairs.

Our fingertips linger together for a second before slipping apart. I start to walk away, still facing him. I take careful, backward steps until I’m in front of the building next to the diner. I wave one last time and he waves back and I already miss his closeness.

The town is deserted as I move through it like a shadow. The stores have all closed for the night and the lights have been turned off behind their large shop windows. The wind picks up as I walk. I look once over my shoulder and see Greg is still there, watching me as I turn the corner. The thought of him will keep me warm as I make my way home. It’s a little scary sometimes the way he can make me feel. So nervous and safe at the same time. So completely his, like a stuffed animal that loves being loved. I don’t know what it is exactly. I only know that I like it. That I like being around him.

The days have dwindled down to nothing with the approach of winter. The purple sky of evening is fading quickly and I know it won’t last me the whole way home. Even as I hurry my steps, night is already moving in to take over. The streetlights glow brighter. The space between growing blacker. The creaking of the tree trunks swaying in the wind getting louder. The loneliness of the world around me makes it easy to drift away.