Better Off Undead Read online

  “You know what’s crazy?” he said. “Supposedly they use these chemicals to protect the crops from destructive insects, but those chemicals are killing the bees—and the farmers need the bees to grow the crops. It’s mad stupid.”

  “And we’re, like, screwed?” I asked.

  “Yep,” Zander agreed. “It’s not good for anybody, but it’s really bad for the bees.”

  “So you want to work with Ms. Fjord’s honeybees,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Zander replied. “It won’t change the world, but it might, you know, change the world … a little bit.”

  “It’s better than nothing,” I said.

  “That’s what I think,” Zander agreed, chomping on my final chip.

  TROUBLE IN P.E.

  I sat on the bench in front of my gym locker. The guys from class moved around, got undressed, dressed, tossed balled-up shirts and pants into small lockers, slammed the metal doors shut, joked and blustered, talked sports, complained about teachers, and, finally, hustled out the door. They all accomplished this while avoiding looking directly at each other’s semi-undressed bodies.

  Even non-zombies, I realized, felt uncomfortable in their own skin.

  At last, I was alone. Or nearly alone. I sensed a few others in the row of lockers behind me, heard them talking in whispers. Footsteps came closer, and Daryl Northrup sat on the bench beside me. There was plenty of room, tons of it, but he sidled up too close. I sat still, unmoving, my hands on my lap, waiting for him to go away. Daryl wasn’t a guy I wanted to cross.

  “Yo, Adrian!” Daryl said, his voice about three notches above cheerful. The tone was false, a lie.

  I didn’t reply. Daryl wasn’t a “How ya doing?” kind of guy. In fact, this was the first time he’d ever spoken to me. I mostly tried to avoid guys like Daryl Northrup. I studied the tile floor. Daryl sniffed in an exaggerated way, the way a three-year-old might noisily sniff a flower. “Stinks in here, don’t it?” he commented. “I mean, crap, it’s totally disgusting.”

  I heard laughter from behind me. Daryl was talking to me, but not really talking to me at all. It was a one-man performance put on for a faceless audience snickering behind the row of lockers. I glanced at my combination lock. I could spin the dial, yank it open, ignore him. Instead, my nervous fingers clutched at the bottom of my shirt. I made an effort to press my hands against my thighs, the way a relaxed person might.

  Daryl kept talking. “It smells like something died in here, you know what I’m saying? Like a rat ate some poison, then crawled into the walls and died. Do you smell it, Adrian? Because I sure do. Isn’t that right? Like a disgusting rat just up and died?”

  I didn’t say a word. Didn’t move a muscle. Instead, I waited. Time would pass, it always does. Things would change, bells would ring, and Daryl Northrup would one day be dead and buried in the ground with worms crawling through his eye sockets. I pictured that in my mind, and it helped me feel a little better.

  At times like these, I try to think happy thoughts.

  “You know what they should do?” Daryl said to me. “Do you?”

  He waited, obviously expecting an answer.

  I glanced sideways in his direction. Shook my head. I had no idea what they should do.

  “They need to fumigate this place. We’ve got to get rid of the disgusting smell around here. It’s not fit for humans, don’t you think, Adrian? Wouldn’t we all be better off if the dead-animal stink was gone completely?”

  More laughter rippled from behind me, drifting over the lockers. A door swung open and a voice echoed in the room. Ms. Caputo, our P.E. teacher. “All right, boys. Get a move on! We’re headed outside for our track-and-field unit. No excuses, let’s go!”

  Daryl slowly rose, as though standing up was a big chore. He stood there, towering over me. His open right hand violently shot forward and smashed into a locker, blam! The noise thundered and echoed in the room. If my heart had been functional, it would have skipped a beat. Instead, I sat there, calm as a clam, waiting for this to end.

  For it all to end.

  “We need to get rid of these rats, that’s what I say!” Daryl sputtered, and he skulked past me.

  I never left the locker room for class. Just not into it. Health and fitness was another one of those concepts you have to let go of after you die. I was never going to score a touchdown for the home team. The cheerleaders were never going to spell out my name. In horror, maybe, but never with pride. So I hung out by my lonesome, counting tiles, wondering if I could maybe ask for a note from Dr. Halpert: Please excuse Adrian Lazarus from P.E. on account of the fact he’s dead.

  STICKS AND STONES

  Let’s list the names:

  I am shuffler, ankle-dragger, shape-shifter, howler, freak. I am living dead, soulless corpse, brain-sucker, crawler, spitter, wraith, wuss, dumb butt, flailer, mutant, hant. I am gorgon, raver, basilisk, shambling undead, moaner, groaner, ghoul, death talker, puke machine, shade, half-life, cadaver, wailer, flailer, biter, roamer, feeder, lurcher, loser, infected fleshbag, vermin, oddball, slob, dipstick, drooler, death rattler, human fail.

  I am other, alien, outcast, misfit, and I live in your town.

  I am zombie, and names will never hurt me.

  But inside, I’m a flower rising up through a crack in the sidewalk. I’m a hawk riding the upswells of wind, an athlete leaping hurdles, heart pumping, blood pulsing …

  Inside, in the places that no one can see, I’m freaking amazing.

  THE GIRL WHO COULD READ MINDS

  And so it went. I dragged myself up and down the hallways, into classrooms, through days and weeks. I drank three formaldehyde shakes a day. Applied the creams, administered the eye drops. My outward appearance didn’t get any better, but it didn’t get much worse. At least my limbs weren’t falling off. My mom experimented with different flavors for the shakes, and I liked green-berry best. Otherwise, my appetite had all but disappeared, which was definitely … weird. I was living on Airheads, Laffy Taffy, and whatever other candy Zander shared with me. He was a sugar addict and had maybe the worst diet in the world. Zander claimed candy was safer than the fake food produced in the big, corporate farm factories. “Genetically modified organisms,” he said ominously. “GMOs. Who knows what that stuff does to you? I don’t want to be some corporation’s human guinea pig.”

  I was like, shrug, I guess.

  At home, things weren’t terrible. My mother had normalized to her routine of showing houses, meeting clients, negotiating deals, and chasing big bucks. Plus, she was meditating more than ever. I wondered if she hoped to levitate someday. Anyway, Mom was too busy to give us grief. Dane went to preschool happily, and we got along fine, same as always. Most nights, I heated up a frozen pizza for him or ordered takeout from the Chinese place. Dane was crazy for chicken lo mein, fortune cookies, and cans of soda. He constantly stuffed his chubby little munchkin face with Cheez-Its. The truth is, I liked my kid brother a lot. Besides Zander, Dane was the one person who treated me the same as always. I guess he needed a big brother, dead or alive.

  School was a different story. I was worse than unpopular. I was now an afterthought, an absence, a black hole in the universe. I was invisible except for the times when I appeared as a target for the creeps, like a duck in a shooting gallery. Here’s a quick story, about the first time I met Gia Demeter.

  On Tuesdays, I had exactly four minutes to get from math to band class, which was way on the other side of the building. I navigated through crowded hallways, plodded down a flight of stairs on my bad ankle, and stopped at my locker. I fumbled with the dial, twiddling like a lunatic. Dry patches of skin flaked off my fingers. Time was ticking and I still had to reach the darkest, dankest corner of the middle school, where the rented violas and French horns were kept. Not mission impossible, but my assignment left no time for lollygagging (not that I lollygagged, because who does, really).

  Mr. Steel, my music teacher, was clear: “I do not tolerate lateness,” he informed the clas
s. Every time somebody came in after the bell, he did a pantomime of crossing his arms, shutting his mouth midsentence, and staring at that person with laser-beam eyeballs until the student took a seat. Mr. Steel wanted you to know that he thought you were the lowest thing on earth—a bug, a worm—just for coming in two minutes late.

  So I tried to get there on time. And sometimes I made it.

  Down the hallway loped predatory Daryl Northrup, shoulders rolling, cool and free. Despite myself, I secretly admired the guy. He was my opposite. The alpha dog, leader of the pack, not a worry in the world—and I stupidly made the mistake of making eye contact.

  Daryl’s expression changed immediately. Without breaking stride, he lowered his shoulder, gave me a hard bump into the locker, and said from the corner of his mouth, “Get a life, zombie boy.”

  Great advice, don’t you think? I’ll work on that.

  But you know what else I thought? This is sort of pathetic, but I’ll admit it: I thought, I wish we could be friends.

  “No, you don’t.”

  I turned to see an extremely tall girl standing beside me. A toothpick with pointy elbows and long legs. Her name was Gia Demeter—that’s all I knew about her. Not from around here, new to town. She had lank black hair, a pointy beak, and pale skin. Her hands dangled at her sides like white tarantulas. Gia looked at me through unusually large, round eyes, her head tilted slightly forward. I stepped back, uncomfortable under her green-eyed gaze.

  Was she talking to me?

  I grumbled a few words about minding your own business, then returned to spinning the dial on the locker. I was seriously going to be late for band class. But for the unlife of me, I couldn’t remember my combination.

  “That guy,” she said, “is never going be your friend. It’s a bad wish.” Her voice was calm and as flat as a tortilla. No emotion at all. “You shouldn’t waste wishes like that.”

  Okay, pretty weird, right? But instead of freaking me out, it just made me angry. I snapped, “What do you know about anything? You don’t know me.”

  I turned away to fumble with my combination lock.

  “Twenty-two right, eleven left, seven right,” she said, and walked away.

  I called after her. “Hey, how’d you know my combination?”

  “Psychic powers,” she replied, turning to face me. And after a beat, “We’ve been locker neighbors since school started, not that you’ve noticed. You mumble your combination out loud every time you turn the dial.”

  I felt like an idiot, like a guy who couldn’t tie his shoelaces without telling himself a story about the bunny that runs around the tree and down the hole.

  “It’s cute,” she said, teeth sparkling with a mouth full of rubber bands and metal.

  Cute? Seriously?

  Didn’t she realize I was dead?

  DEAD BAT ON THE SIDE OF THE ROAD

  After a month of school, I felt … nothing. Not angry, or sad, or lonely. Mostly I felt numb.

  I had embraced my inner zombie.

  The dead part of me.

  The weird thing was, the more I watched kids at school, the more they looked like me. As if I were staring into a fun-house mirror that multiplied my image by the dozen. Zombies, zombies everywhere.

  For example, Desmond Richardson was in a few of my classes, average in every way. Dez watched the right television shows, rooted for the right teams, wore the standard sweatshirt and jeans and the popular sneakers. He had erased whatever might have been singular about his personality—whatever might have set him apart in any way. Now he fit in perfectly. On the surface, there was nothing different about Dez from everyone else in seventh grade. Most days Dez came into class dead tired, dragging his feet, shoulders slumped, lids barely lifted, eyes glassy.

  And it wasn’t just him.

  When I looked around school, I realized that I was surrounded by semi-zombies, a crowd of conformists shuffling down the halls to science lab and social studies. They stayed up too late, rose too early, and looked like zonked-out cadavers wandering the halls in hopes of making honor roll—or at least surviving till the bell rang and they were released. And those were the kids who called me zombie, freak face, gimp, flyboy, loser. I got the irony of that, I really did.

  After the last bell rang, I usually found Zander waiting by the main doors. We hated the bus, its foul smells and many terrors, so most days we walked home together. Today he was leaning against the wall, his head tilted toward the pages of a slender book: Hive Mind: The Secret Life of Honeybees. All around him, the building was rapidly emptying, a liquid rush of students sloshing out the doors.

  Deep into his reading, Zander could have been stranded on Mars for all he knew. He chewed on a Twizzler.

  I tapped him on the shoulder and we walked.

  Lately, in these last warm afternoons of early autumn, I’d been followed by a small but persistent swarm of flies. They must have been attracted to my smell. I’d taken to splashing on massive quantities of cologne to counter the stench of decay. It only made me reek of swamp. And still the flies loved me.

  MaryAnne Lester, a girl in my English class, had even said to me, “I pray that some day you boys will learn that slathering yourselves in lime-scented antiperspirant is not a substitute for a shower!”

  She had a point.

  I took it as a compliment, though. MaryAnne hadn’t singled me out. I was just as malodorous as all the other boys. I had made the team!

  Zander asked if I wanted to go to Leo’s for a slice.

  I told him I sure did.

  In case anybody’s wondering, I could eat food; I just didn’t digest it in a normal way. I would chew and swallow like everybody else, but my body didn’t seem to process the nutrition efficiently. The food came and soon left, as if transported by a conveyor belt.

  Sorry, maybe that’s too much information.

  Zander and I debated what makes a great slice. I claimed it was the sauce. Zander was sure it was the crust, which he liked thin and slightly burnt. Either way, we agreed that Leo’s served the best pizza in town. It had a few small tables where we could sit, sip a cold drink, and chill.

  I kept seeing my mother’s face as we trudged through the streets. Whenever she got a new house to sell, she put up a sign in front of it. Free advertising. The sign was a buttery golden color with the words FOR SALE in fat red letters. Above it was a photo of my capable, confident mom, with the tagline ANOTHER ROSIE LAZARUS LISTING.

  I couldn’t walk three blocks without seeing one of those stupid signs. There she was, watching over me, the Real Estate Queen. And lately that’s where I saw her most, since she wasn’t home much anymore. She said it was the demands of the job, but I wondered if having a zombie in the house drove her away. I mean, wouldn’t you want to get out if your kid was a reanimated corpse, decomposing on the living room couch?

  Boy, I would. And I’m me. I couldn’t blame her if she hated me.

  Zander narrowed his eyes, stopped in front of a house, and pointed toward a bush. “Wow, check that out.”

  We walked onto the lawn and stood near the base of an oak tree. It was a dead bat. Zander found a stick and gently poked it. He took a long look.

  I said, “I’ve never seen a dead bat before.”

  It was entirely brown, except for the area around its nose, which was white. The body looked like a mouse’s, but with the head of a tiny pig. Its ears were comically large, I guess for the radar thingy that helps bats fly at night. Echolocation, that’s the word. Up close, its glossy wings looked like thin plastic, stretched from forelimbs to hind legs. All in all, an exotic creature that was perfectly adapted to a strange life.

  Zander looked up at me, blinking. “This is so sad.”

  “It’s a dead bat,” I said. “What’s sad about it?”

  “It’s like the honeybees,” Zander said. “Remember Ms. Fjord talking about bats?”

  I told Zander that perhaps I might not have been paying any attention whatsoever on the day of the bat story. Ms. Fj
ord, after all, told a lot of stories—it was hard to keep track. “Is this on the test?” we’d ask. And if it wasn’t, we’d tune her out.

  She didn’t seem to care about tests as much as other teachers did, which many of her students found confusing. Tests were how we were measured, after all. As one kid asked, “If there’s no test, what’s the point?”

  Zander was kneeling beside the dead bat. “This isn’t just about one dead bat, Adrian. There’s a plague all across the eastern states,” my friend, the walking, talking, weird-fact encyclopedia, told me. “More than seven million dead bats in the last five years.”

  “Okay, that’s pretty bad.”

  “It’s way worse than pretty bad,” Zander countered. He reached into his back pocket and ripped off another Twizzler. He offered me one. Since there was something fundamentally gross about staring at a bat while chewing on a Twizzler, I declined. Zander explained, “Bats eat insects. And insects spread disease … to people. Bats in New York and some other states have been almost completely wiped out by white-nose syndrome.”

  He pointed with the stick at the bat’s nose. It was strangely white.

  “How do you know this stuff?” I asked. “What do you do all day?”

  “You know I don’t care about sports,” Zander said. “That frees up a lot of time for reading.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Think about all the basketball statistics you know,” Zander challenged me. “All that useless information cluttering your brain.”

  “So instead of knowing that Kobe Bryant won five championship rings…”

  Zander nodded. “I know that brown bats are headed for the endangered species list.”

  “Do you think any of this stuff … explains me?”

  Zander laughed. “Adrian, nothing explains you! All I know is nature is off balance. Climate change. Polar bears losing their habitat, dying out. Honeybees and bats disappearing. Zombies appearing.”