Adventures of a Middle School Zombie (13 page)

Wait, what was I thinking? It was a prank. I could no more turn anyone into a zombie than a bite from a dachshund could turn someone into a wiener dog.

Ha, Robbie as a wiener dog.

“What are you smiling about?” Anna said. “Having zombie company?”

“Huh, what?” Wiener-dog Robbie. That would be cool.

Luke looked at the flyer, looked at me, back to the flyer, back to me.

“Why would you suddenly change your mind now?” he said.

“Because things are finally dying down,” I said.

“I get it. Funny.”

“Dude, I gave up undead puns years ago. No, I really just want to blend in for a while. Besides, did you notice the fine print before? That’s a direct shot at me.”

I had shared with Luke my doubts about the dance. I really liked Anna, but how would she be treated when everyone saw us at the dance together, like a couple? Sometimes I got the feeling even Luke was getting tired of being a bit of an outcast, and he was my best friend.

Luke looked at the flyer again, posted in the cafeteria. In big black letters at the top it said, “Fall Dance.” Below that, “Let warm hearts cure the season chill,” and at the bottom, in tiny print, was “‘Warm hearts’ does in no way imply the exclusion of those with unwarm hearts.”

Luke peeled the tape from the bottom two corners and folded the paper just above the fine print. He slowly tore it across the fold, crumpled the strip into a ball, and tossed it into the trash can.

“There, better?”

“Oh, yeah, much better. Now I feel so welcome.” Word of my run-in with Principal Buckley had spread quickly, thanks to a memo he’d sent out to teachers the following week (with orders to post it in every classroom). In it, he ordered teachers to ensure all classroom activities were “undead-friendly” and indicated that failure to include the “heartbeat-challenged” would be subject to penalty. And penalty meant one of two things: supervising detention for a week or coaching the teams for the annual end-of-semester flag football game between the seventh and eighth graders. Actually, the penalty was coaching the seventh graders, since the team’s only goal each year was to survive with no debilitating injuries.

Not that I had been blending in before, but the memo made it a lot more difficult. That, and the return of Robbie.

The news of the Bloodiest Period (leave it to middle-school kids to give it a double meaning) spread even more quickly than Principal Buckley’s memo. What surprised me was the number of comments on Facebook that said Robbie had it coming. As Pine Hollow’s No. 1 bully, he’d made quite a few enemies among the physically weaker set, for who it seemed I was now the poster boy. The week Robbie was gone was one of the best of my life, up there with the time Mom and Dad and I went to Hawaii, and I snorkeled without actually needing a snorkel.

I’d kept up my disinformation campaign on Facebook, updating the status to “Undead and loving it” and posting photos and comments from some of Hollywood’s best zombies. My favorite was by the half-zombie from
The Walking Dead
, who commented, “Still trying to pull myself together.”

The Wikipedia page was not nearly as popular. Someone added a section called “This is total bull,” which quoted a bunch of made-up scientific studies to disprove the existence of zombies entirely (I took offense). I did the only thing I could do. I added an “Oh yeah?” section with additional zombie proof added by fictional researchers. It was almost as if you couldn’t trust Wikipedia.

I went on Twitter once or twice a day searching for zombie-related tweets. The traffic was especially hot on the day after the prank, and this was the cleverest: “Rob Zombie? Out. Rob is Zombie? In. #undeadrevenge.”

But it came to a dead stop the day after with this one: “@deadjed, you are going to be all the way dead when I get back. Your little friends too. #nozombieshere.”

That extra space I’d been getting in the hallway disappeared with this tweet. I overheard the conversations at lunch and in the hallways. Robbie was just fine. Better than ever, in fact, and completely zombie-proof.

The next day, this tweet: “How many zombies does it take to change a light bulb? None, it’s lights out for them. #reallydeadjed.”

Then this: “If you cut a zombie, does it bleed? Let you know Thursday when I’m back. #remembertodismember.”

On Wednesday, Luke said, “I was just thinking how Twitter is for losers. I’m going to sign off for good. You should, too; what a waste of time.”

“Luke, I’ve already seen Robbie’s tweets,” I said.

Luke shook his head. “Anybody can talk tough on Twitter.”

“And Robbie can punch tough in person.”

“There is that.”

I’d made Robbie look like a fool in front of everyone who feared him. He had only despised me before that. Now he hated me. He was going to do whatever it took to make my life—or at least my undeath—miserable. I’d known payback was coming the moment I started thinking of ways to stand up to Robbie. But that didn’t make it any less frightening.

Thursday morning I called Luke, told him I wasn’t going to school. Just wasn’t feeling right, I said.

“That’s how you feel every day,” Luke said. “Goes with the zombie territory.”

I smiled for what I figured would probably be the last time in a very long while.

“True, but today is a little worse than usual.”

“Jed, I’ll be there for you this time. I promise. Going to go full Luke on them.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

He laughed, then got way too serious. “No way you’re going to face this alone. Let me come over, we’ll head out, see what happens. We’ll get through it. If you’re alone, I don’t like your odds.”

“Like I said, staying home today, but thanks.”

I hated lying to Luke, but I had to do this alone. Otherwise, it was only going to get worse.

I waited a half hour and headed out. I knew Luke would already be in class. Hey, maybe Robbie would get tired of waiting. Maybe he would be spotted by a teacher and forced to go to class.

But probably not. Sure enough, Robbie was in front of the school to meet me. Joe and Ben, too, who’d kept themselves scarce while Robbie was laid up fighting nonexistent zombie germs.

Everyone else was in class. It was just us. Cozy.

“If it ain’t Dead Jed,” Robbie said, stepping up and putting his face inches from mine. “I’ve been looking forward to this, Zom-boy.”

Suddenly, I felt an intense pressure just below my ribcage, and then a fire racing through my chest. Robbie stepped back, revealing the hilt of a small screwdriver sticking out my left side. I grabbed it and pulled, two inches of almost needle-thin metal coming out.

He stabbed me. That SOB just walked up and stabbed me.

Robbie’s smile widened to an impossible length. “I learned some really cool things while I was getting stuck like that in the hospital,” he said. “Did you know that red-colored syrup mixed with a small amount of the stuff that apparently keeps you going really isn’t harmful? And that it only takes several days of testing and probing and dissecting to figure that out?”

He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed.

“The worst thing you can give me,” he said, “is a
rash
. I can live with that. Which is more than you can say.”

He turned and walked away, followed by Ben and Joe. Joe looked back, pointed his index finger at me, and curled it, as if pulling a trigger.

I could only stand there. I looked at the hole in my shirt, conscious of the screwdriver in my hand. I centered the blade over the hole and plunged it back in. A shockwave of pain disappeared almost as soon as it swept through me. I dropped my hand, the screwdriver still buried in my torso. I played with the idea of going to class just like that before I took it out and put it in my pocket.

As excited as I was to go to the dance with Anna, I was giving it much more serious thought as the day approached. I remembered how nervous I was in the few days after I asked her out. I didn’t even want to talk to her, fearing she would use it as an excuse to change her mind. I imagined it would go something like this:

Me: “Hi.”

Her: “I don’t want to go to the dance with you.”

Me: “OK.”

And that would pretty much be it. I thought even making eye contact with her kinda put things at risk. I wanted to let sleeping dates lie. So maybe I was the weird one.

When some people had noticed Anna and me talking a little more at lunch, I started getting funny looks in the hallways. Funnier than usual. I worried about her reputation, what people would think of someone who might have a thing for an undead guy.

Turns out there was more to it than that.

One morning, Ray Knowles came up to me before school. I was sitting on one of the few seventh-grade-friendly benches and going through my backpack, hoping my math homework wasn’t really on my bureau at home, which was the last place I’d seen it.

“Hey, DJ—I mean Jed.”

“Uh, hey, G-Ray—I mean Ray.” Robbie had bestowed that name on Ray many weeks ago when the morning announcements included one about Ray winning the Chess Club’s first tournament, muttering so only about half the class could hear: “That is so gay, Ray. Ah, Gay Ray. The G-Ray.” What Robbie lacked in wit he made up for with a misguided belief in his cleverness.

Ray and I looked at one another, and I was glad to see he at least wasn’t wearing a Disney T-shirt anymore (which, sorry, was somewhat gay). OK, so the replacement was a Tony Hawk shirt about seven years after Tony Hawk was cool, but it was better than a surfing Goofy shouting “Cowabunga dude.”

I looked down and returned to my search, pulling out another sheaf of papers and hoping the worksheet would be among them.

“Is it true?” he said.

“Is what true?”

“That you and that Anna chick are going to the dance?” Hearing
chick
come out of Ray’s mouth was like hearing Luke say a word like
modicum
. It was an awkward fit.

“Yeah, I guess. Why?”

“Because, I don’t know, but I’ve heard that Anna is kind of different.”

“How so?”

“Just, I guess, dark. Have you seen her profile on Facebook, and listened to any of those songs she links to?”

“Not really.” What I really wanted to say was, “How the hell are you her Facebook friend?” but then that would bring a question right back to me—“Why aren’t you?” So I let it go.

“OK, I was just curious … Look, not that we’re major friends or anything, but have you thought that maybe she doesn’t like
who
you are as much as
what
you are?”

I did not like where this was going. “You mean that I am oxygen-deficient?”

“If you mean that you are dead, then yeah,” Ray said.

“Really, you air-sucker? And who are you to tell me this? Do you know Anna, have you ever spoken to her? Because I seriously doubt she would give the time of day to a chess-playing nerd whose only distinction is being the last kid on campus whose mom still dresses him.”

“Fine, whatever, DJ, man, I was just trying to help.”

“Really?” I said, dropping my papers on the bench and standing. “By sharing an opinion no one cares about? And where do you get off calling me DJ, Gay Ray?”

This was where things really could only end one way. In many cases, confrontations involved kids from different social strata: a jock vs. a goth, or a smoker vs. a nerd. Heated words would be exchanged, and the member of the lower class would get the heck out of there, thus meeting expectations, with no one losing face.

But Ray and I were close enough on the social ladder that neither of us could back out without looking like a coward.

“What did you call me?”

“Totally … Gay … Ray.” Only I never got to the Ray part, because by “Gay,” my fist was on its way to Ray’s chin. Where it landed. Solidly. As did Ray, onto the concrete.

I had just beaten up a four-foot seven, eighty-five-pound chess player. Ray had taken the brunt of a few months’ worth of me playing the victim. I was going to have to live with that.

Well, be dead with it.

Ray, who’d probably seen it coming, just not so quickly, rubbed his chin. Tears had formed in eyes—eyes that never left me as he got to his feet. Without a word, he turned and walked away.