Adventures of a Middle School Zombie (16 page)

I couldn’t watch. And I couldn’t turn away.

A part of me was looking ahead to when paramedics arrived, wondering if I would be able to say anything to Luke but “I told you so.”

I expected Luke to run out of bounds. He wouldn’t escape the hit, but he could make it a glancing blow. Instead, he stood his ground, drawing back his arm.

Oh no, he was going to pass. And in doing so, leave his entire body open.

Joe was closing in rapidly, determined to take Luke into next week. And that was when Luke let it fly.

I always knew he had a pretty good arm. With that wiry build, he could really snap it and get some power behind it.

But I had no clue how accurate he could be.

The ball spiraled perfectly without a hint of wobble. And it burned through the air, a groin-seeking missile that struck its target squarely with a disquieting thump.

Joe, who a split second before had been 150 pounds of hurtling fury, hit the ground like 150 pounds of cherry Jell-O, hands wedged between his legs.

“… ! … ! … !” Joe screamed. Or tried to scream. His mouth moved, but nothing came out.

At the same time, Robbie was picking himself up off the deck and hustling over to his friend. He knelt down beside him.

“Dude, you’re going to be OK, just breathe,” he said.

“(Squeak).” I am really sure Joe was trying to squeeze out a few curse words, but first his nuts were going to have to return to their original position. And that was going to take a while.

Robbie popped up and took a step toward Luke, but Javon appeared out of nowhere and stood between the two. “Not today, Robbie,” he said.

Robbie took a step backward as if to size up the situation. He knew Javon was one of the few kids in school who could give him a good fight.

“Part of the game,” Javon continued. “It happens. Just an incomplete pass, so it’s third down.” Javon looked at Luke, then turned to the rest of the team as we returned to our side of the ball. “Huddle up.”

Robbie stood where he was until Dwight tapped him on the shoulder.

“Huddle up,” Dwight said.

Instead, Robbie returned to Joe. “Get up.”

Joe, who was just starting to breathe again, didn’t move.

“I said, get up,” Robbie said, grabbing Joe under his shoulder and yanking him to his feet. “Suck it up. Don’t be such a wuss.”

He pulled Joe toward the rest of his team, Joe limping, still cradling his privates. “Dude, just let me sit out a play or two.”

“No, ain’t gonna happen, we’re already a man down, get it together.” Robbie shoved him, sending Joe right back to the ground.

The bell rang. Robbie gave everyone a look that said, “This game is not over.” But it was. The bell told us so. When he realized he was going to be the only one still on the field, he stepped over Joe and headed back to class.

“Luke, what the hell,” I said as we left the field.

“Pretty cool, huh?” he said, smiling.

“But what just happened?”

“Javon came to me last week since he knew you and I were friends. He overheard Robbie and Joe and Ben talking about putting the hurt on the Zom-boy, or something like that. They were planning it for today, after school. Javon asked me if I wanted to do something to put them off their game.”

“So this whole thing was planned?”

“Oh yeah. Javon was keeping an eye on how they were playing defense and figured out when it would best to run. So when I went to that last huddle, Javon said ‘Nutjob’ and I knew what it was. We were the only ones. He just told everyone else to go deep.”

“You weren’t scared?”

“A little. But I’ve been practicing. Throwing the football through a tire from about ten feet. As hard as I could.”

“How did you even think of something like that?”

“Javon saw it in a football movie.
The Longest Pass
or something like that. There was this big dude killing the other team, so the quarterback says to go ahead and let that guy in, and just when he—”

“Hey, wait up!”

Looking behind me, I saw Javon lift Joe to his feet, then he jogged over to us.

“Luke, man, that pass was dead-on,” Javon said.

“Thanks. I knew it was kill or be killed at that point.”

“Why did you do it?” I said. My eyes met Javon’s. “What’s it to you?”

“Weird, right? When I heard them talking about it, I thought it was pretty uncool. But I walked away without saying a word. You know, whatever happens, happens.

“But,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder, “I know what it’s like to be singled out. To only want to fit in because you’re so tired of being noticed. Not for what you do, just for what you look like.”

I didn’t want to believe it. “I thought we were past all that. This isn’t the sixties.”

“No, it’s not. But yeah, around here I’ve felt alone sometimes. Almost isolated. Until I made a choice. If I wasn’t going to blend in, then I was going to stand out. You know? And it’s been a lot better standing out. I highly recommend it.

“Anyway, I gotta get to class,” he said. “Just keep an eye on Robbie, OK? I think he got a hint that I’m on your side, which will make him a little more cautious. But he’s still going to try to make you pay.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That will never change.”

The three of us went our separate ways as the one-minute bell rang.

Javon certainly stood out. He was great at almost every sport, had the lead role in the school play, and in seventh grade was named scholar-athlete of the year. Everyone liked him.

He was just a cool guy who happened to be black. But before he was cool, maybe he was just known in our pretty white neighborhood as the black kid, standing out for something as superficial as skin color. I stood out too, because of the way I was born.

“Javon!” I yelled. “Javon!”

He turned around just as he opened the door to one of the halls. “What?”

“Football tomorrow?”

“Sure.” He disappeared inside.

The last bell rang. I was late.

I looked at the red and yellow menu that stretched above the length of the counter, awash in the glare of the fluorescent lights.

Anna and I stood shoulder to shoulder, both scanning the offerings, even though I was going to order the same thing I’d ordered the last hundred times I’d been to the Burger Bucket.

Anna was gazing at the Bucket Lite menu, which had just two items: Bucket of Salad and Bucket of Yogurt Parfait (which was really just an eight-ounce portion, according to the description, stretching the whole “bucket” label).

“I’ll have the salad with creamy Italian,” she said. The guy behind the counter, who I’d seen picking up his brother at our school, punched the order into his terminal.

“Drink?”

“Yes, a Coke please.”

“Size?”

“Um, how big is the bucket of beverage?”

“It’s one-hundred-twenty-eight ounces, and you have to give us a few minutes to pour.”

“I’ll have a medium, then, thanks.”

Anna and I had been getting along even better after the dance. We weren’t quite hanging out at lunch (her friends still gave me looks somewhere between dislike and dismissal, though I was still one of the few who got any reaction from them at all, so I took that as a good sign). But we would talk a few minutes between classes every day.

A few days after the dance, I even asked her to a movie. A real date. Just walked up to her at the bus stop after school and said, “Anna, I was thinking, we should go to a movie sometime.”

But I didn’t stop there.

“Saturday. This Saturday. What do you think?”

“Sure,” she said. “Sounds fun.”

It’s one of those really romantic moments that, when you tell friends, is just a little too personal to share everything. So when I told Luke about it, I just said I asked her out and she said yeah. That way, the really cool stuff is still between Anna and me.

I waited a few days to text her, just so I wouldn’t seem too anxious, and I was kind of nervous when she waited a day to text me back, but she said OK, and after that we still talked between classes. I wasn’t afraid at all that she would back out. Mostly, anyway.

Almost as good, Dad agreed to do the driving without me having to beg.

“So this is actually a date this time?” he said.

“No, just hanging out,” I said, before totally blowing the cool thing. “OK, it’s pretty much a date. For me, anyway.”

“Sounds good,” Dad said. “Tell you what. We won’t even take the ManVan. We’ll do the real car for you.”

Next, I just had to pick the right movie. Something R was out of the question, obviously. But I didn’t want anything lame like PG. Had to go PG-13. Some action, but not too much. But more violence than romance, because I didn’t want her to think I was hitting on her, even though I sort of was.

It took me three days, but I found a movie I was comfortable with:
Illegal Alien
, about an extraterrestrial who crashes in Mexico, gets in trouble with a drug gang, and has to flee to the US, where he is caught by a female Border Patrol officer, who happens to be the only person who believes his story about coming from outer space.

And things were going so well as we sat in the theater, I put my hand a few inches from hers, and she didn’t move it. And as we shared popcorn, sometimes we reached for it together, and she didn’t pull back.

A great evening all around, and on the way home my dad had a suggestion.

“You guys wanna stop for a late-night snack?” he said. “My treat.”

“Yeah, sure,” Anna said.

And that’s how we found ourselves at the Burger Bucket at around ten p.m., so it was still pretty busy.

“I loved this place when I was your age,” Dad said as we pulled in. “My buddies and I would hang out totally scoping the ladies, you know what I mean? And—”

“Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“Could you do two things for us?”

“Absolutely. Name it.”

“Just wait here for us? And never ever say ‘scoping the ladies’ again?”

“Uh, sure. You bet.”

At the counter, I made sure to do the gentlemanly thing and let Anna order first. When she was done the, clerk looked at me, finger poised over the touch pad.

“May I please have the Bucket o’ Burgers, medium sized, and a small bucket of fries with the barbecue dipping oil?” I said.

“You want the fries spicy or extra soaked?”

“No, regular, please.”

“Drink?”

“Just water.”

“Water?”

“Please.”

“You know I have to go into the back and get, like, a plastic cup for that, right? Because we can’t use our soda cups, in case you were thinking about dumping out the water and getting a Coke or something.”

“Sure, that’s OK.”

“OK for you, but I gotta go into the back. That might take a few minutes … hey, you’re that one kid.”

“Huh?”

“The dead kid, right? My brother told me about you.”

“He told you what?”

“That there’s a dead kid in his school, what do you think? That’s pretty much all you need to know to start a conversation about it. ‘Hey bro, the principal announced today that there’s a dead kid in school.’ And I’m, ‘Dude, aren’t there rules about having bodies in school?’ I mean,
Weekend at Bernie’s
is funny and all, but not so much if the dead guy is at school, right? And my brother’s like, ‘No, the kid is dead but he’s alive, a zombie.’ That’s crazy stuff, you know. And nothing personal, but you look like a zombie, with the skin and the hair. And your girl here all dressed in black. She your corpse bride or something?”

Anna took a step back, turned, and said, “I’m going to get us a table.”

What I wanted to do was reach across the counter and throttle the guy. What I did was shake my head and say, “That was incredibly uncool.”

“Hey, I said nothing personal. So what is it like, the whole death thing, ’cause it would seem pretty awesome.”

“Seriously, after what you just said, you think I’m going to talk to you?” I took the twenty-dollar bill Dad had given me and crumpled it into a ball. I was going to throw it in the kid’s face, then I remembered he was going to be handling our food. So I tossed it onto the counter, where it bounced a few times.

“Keep the change,” I said, really hoping there was change.

“Yeah, thanks,” he said. “Look, sorry man, you probably get that a lot. I was just … I’ll bring your food out to you when it’s ready, OK?”

I nodded and weaved through the tables, nearly all of them occupied by teens, or teens and their families, with a sprinkling of single people who probably didn’t have a better place to be. I sat opposite Anna at the small table she occupied in the corner. “Some people, huh?”

Anna kept her eyes on the table. “People just want to judge you without knowing a thing about you. I am so tired of that.”

“I’m pretty used to it,” I said. “Ever since I was eight or nine, when kids start to notice differences.”

“There was that innocence back then, wasn’t there?”

“I remember one time when I was little, in first grade, we all made these construction-paper hats, and at the end of class we could trade, so me and another guy traded. So when my mom picked me up, she asked me if I made my hat, and I said no, that I traded. She said, ‘With who?’ And I pointed at the kid wearing my hat, and I said, ‘That kid.’ She said, ‘Which? There are so many.’ And I said, ‘The brown kid.’ My mom said, ‘But most of them are brown.’ And I’m thinking my mom is crazy because the kid was the only one who was brown. So I pointed again and said, ‘There, the brown kid with that red and yellow hat. And she says, ‘Oh, the black kid.’ And I said, ‘No, he’s brown, that brown kid.’ My mom just laughed.”