by Paula Guran
First Kisses from Beyond the Grave
Nik Houser
My mother says I’m handsome. I believe her. It’s something she’s always said and it’s always done me, more or less, the same amount of good.
“You’re so lucky to be so smart and handsome!” she hollered from the porch as I waited for the bus to my new school. I remember the air was drastically cool for the tail end of summer, but I didn’t want to go back in that house for a jacket and risk a second hug, a second kiss goodbye. I’d lost track of how many times Mom had said, “Don’t worry, you’ll make friends in no time!” but I could stand no more of those either. It was one of her favorite phrases, as though the clay of creation was mine to shape and mold into a brand-new clique of ostracized freaks with whom I had nothing in common save the fact that the social trapeze had snapped between our fingers somewhere between our eleventh and twelfth years.
So I stood at the curb, freezing like an idiot. I looked back at my mom standing in the open doorway, unwavering optimism painted over her face in great broad strokes. One of her legs hovered at a forty-five-degree angle from the other, so that Mouselini, our cat, wouldn’t bolt out the door.
I smiled thinly, then looked back across the street where my best friend Art White snickered as he waited for our bus. At the sight of him, my head snapped back like a spider had swung in front of my face. I squished my eyes shut, then opened them, like a cartoon, which is what I must have looked like to the casual passerby, staring in astonishment as I was at the empty sidewalk across the street where my dead friend had stood only a moment before.
The morning after Art let all his blood run down the bathtub drain (rumor has it his mom kept running into the bathroom with cups, pitchers, and ice cube trays, trying to save some of it, some of him, before it all got away), the school bus stopped in front of his house. For years it had always stopped in front of his house and I’d always crossed the street to get on, just as I did that morning. Like always, I lurched to the back row of seats and propped myself against the window, reflexively leaving room for my pal, though I knew he would not be joining me.
The bus driver idled in front of Art’s house. An uncomfortable silence fell over the crowded transport, something my English teacher Ms. Crane might refer to as a “pregnant pause.” The driver was the only one on board who didn’t already know. Everybody else had seen it on the news the previous night, had spread word via email and cell phones, text messages for the dead. Ask not for whom the cell tones, the cell tones for thee.
Gus the Bus looked up at me through the broad rearview mirror.
“I’m only waitin’ another minute.”
A month later, when I got the notice in the mail which informed me that I would be spending my latter three years of high school away from the boys and girls I had grown to love and loathe respectively, my mother was as positive as ever. It was June by then. School was out and Art was in the ground, missing his finals by a week.
“What a great opportunity!” Mom said when I was done reading the letter aloud at the dinner table. “You can meet new people and . . . ” I glared at her across the table as she struggled to maintain her unwavering optimism . . . make new friends.”
“You said the same thing to your cousin when he was sent to Riker’s Island,” Pop reminded her, looking over his glasses at the seven o’clock news on mute. My old man was nearsighted, but he loved the condescending erudition of looking over his tortoise-shell rims at whatever questionable piece of Creation happened to fall under his scrutiny.
“And he was so smart and handsome, too,” Mom replied absently.
When the ghost of Art White had come and gone, I pulled the Notice of School District Transfer out of my pocket. It read like a draft notice, or one of those letters you get with a folded American flag to inform you that your child has been killed in action:
Dear Mr. Henry,
As superintendent of the Northside Public School District, it is my responsibility to inform you that as of September 1st, 2004, in an effort to further integrate our public schools, your street address will no longer be included in our district’s educational zone roster and will henceforth be transferred to the Middle Plain School District. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
Sincerely,
J.R. Sneider, Jr.
Superintendent, Northside Public School District
No sooner had I finished reading my own death sentence than the familiar, noisome expulsion of school bus air brakes sounded off at the far end of my street. I looked up for the bus, but saw nothing— only the familiar line of SUVs parked along the curbs and in driveways. A stiff breeze picked up and made me shiver with cold for the first time since last April when the previous winter exhaled its death rattle. Or maybe it was the sudden silence that ran that chill up my spine. The street was dead quiet, a far cry from the familiar din of leaf-blowers, garbage trucks, and protein shake blenders that usually accompanied Monday mornings on our fair boulev—
CREEEEEE-SWOOSH!
The door to the school bus swung open in front of me, coming within an inch of my face and exhaling a cloud of dusty, tomb-like air.
Startled by its sudden appearance, I backpedaled on the wet grass, tripped on a sprinkler, and fell flat on my back.
I lay there for a second, staring up at the overcast sky, trying to breathe. It had been a long time since I’d had the wind knocked out of me, and for a second I thought I was dying. At last the airlock in my chest opened up and I sat bolt upright, panting, and stared up at the great black school bus humming cantankerously in front of my house like a hearse built for group rates.
Where the fuck did that come from?
I looked up through the open door, at the driver staring ahead at the road, black jeans and a gray hooded sweatshirt draped over his wire-hanger frame. The sweatshirt’s hood covered his eyes as he slowly turned his head toward me. The rest of his body remained frozen in place, both hands glued to the steering wheel.
I stood up, grabbed my sprinkler-soaked backpack, and looked back at my house, an are-you-seeing-what-I’m-seeing? face pointed at the empty doorway. Mom was gone. Only Mouselini stood on the front step, eyes wide and tail shocked-up, a tremulous rumble sounding from the depths of his twelve-year-old gut like a drawstring dolly that’s been buried alive.
Behind me, the bus’s engine revved, once. I turned and started up its steps, heard the door close behind me while the driver’s hands remained on the wheel. At the top step I paused and stared down at my chauffeur, at the empty black space where the shade of his hood covered his eyes.
“Morning.” I slipped on the thin, polite smile I saved for teachers, strangers, extended family.
I looked back at the empty bus. The seats and windows were in decent condition, but dusty and tired-looking, as though the great vehicle had only just been called back into service after decades of neglect.
“First to get on, last to get off, I guess.” Again that thin smile, more for myself than the driver now.
The driver turned his pale, expressionless face back to the road as the houses, cars, and trees began to slip slowly past the windows. The bus betrayed no perceptible shudder or lurch when we pulled away from my home, as though we remained still while the stage set of the neighborhood was drawn back to the flies.
When I first received the notice of transfer, I thought my folks were responsible. I wasn’t exactly inconsolable after Art leapfrogged over his elders into the Great Beyond, but I wasn’t the same either. I lost weight, stopped sleeping, stopped jerking off. I think the fact that I put down my penis worried the ’rents more than putting down my fork. They’d read that loss of libido was a common part of the grieving process for any close friend or relative. But they also knew that he was my only close friend, and that I was dreading the fall. More than any summer before, the phonetics of the forthcoming season sounded to me, and to them, like some dramatic plunge I was about to take, a forty-foot dive into a glass of water.
&nbs
p; Mom and Pop were both teachers at my school. Having them with me at home, with their lingering smells of chalk dust and textbooks, the tiny snowflakes of spiral-bound notebook paper torn from its binding caught unmelting in the hems of their clothes, was like bringing the funeral home with me. It was because of this that I started to wonder if maybe the transfer wouldn’t be so bad.
Strangely enough, however, it was when I suggested this very notion, and the uncharacteristically positive outlook inherent therein, that my folks started worrying, in earnest, about my mental well-being.
As the bus drove on, the sky grew dark. My surroundings grew increasingly unfamiliar as we passed into a stretch of suburbs which had taken an early turn toward fall and even winter. On the street below, the bus’s enormous tires scattered decay-colored leaves across sidewalks that crumbled into the road like rows of rotting teeth. It soon became apparent that we would be making no other stops.
Jesus Christ, I thought as we passed into the overcast farmlands beyond the city—a bleak stretch of wild, untended wheat interrupted only by the occasional skeleton of a burned-out barn, I’ve been transferred to Deliverance High. The sky was nearly black. The sight of it took me back to the tornado drills we practiced on days like this in the second grade, when we would duck under our desks with our thickest textbooks held tight over our heads, a mere three hundred pages of long division standing between us and total, whirling annihilation.
Eventually, the rolling fields gave way to a vast stretch of incinerated woodlands—black, emaciated cedars reaching out to the day-for-night sky like the arms of the damned on Judgment Day. I opened my mouth to holler down the row of seats, to casually inquire about the fire which had apparently torn through this area. But when I opened my mouth, the nervous vacuum inside me would let no words escape. I looked up at the mirror suspended above the driver, at the yawning sweatshirt hood which now absorbed his features entirely, then at the massive fog bank rushing toward us as we began to accelerate.
The landscape was quickly erased by the fog, as though we’d traveled beyond the borders of Nature’s grand composition and were barreling toward the edge of God’s very canvas. I closed my eyes, felt the bus shimmy and shake as it continued to accelerate. Every bump in the road felt like the one that would dislodge a wheel, every turn was the road ending at a thousand-foot cliff.
“Please, God,” I muttered to myself, a knee-jerk theological reaction. “Please.”
The word itself was the prayer, not so much asking for a safe arrival, but to simply let me keep everything that I had and was, to finish the things I’d planned to do. The bus shook and shivered, tires screaming against the road. All my blood pressed against the surface of my skin in a centrifuge of fear. Everything that had ever happened to me: birth, laughter, friends, growing up, jerking off, Christmas, was boiled down to one word—
“PLEASE!” I screamed, my cry punctuated by the sound of the bus’s door folding into itself as we came to a gentle stop. We were there.
I marched down the aisle on wobbly sea legs, bracing myself on the rubbery, crimson seatbacks. When I came to the driver I stopped to say something nasty, or sarcastic, or grateful, but when I saw his hands gripping the wheel, knuckles pressed against their gloved surfaces like only bone hid beneath, I thought better of it and climbed down the stairs to the curb.
“A fucking cemetery?” I asked myself aloud.
I surveyed the endless rows of tombstones to which I’d been delivered. No school. No students. Nothing but graves, trees, hills, fog.
I turned around to get back on the bus and ask the driver wh—
The bus was gone.
I looked down either side of the empty road, swallowed entirely by mist after ten yards in either direction. The driver had taken off as silently as he had arrived at my house that morning.
“Great. So what the fuck am I supposed to do now?”
As if in response, a lone crow cackled down at me from a nearby tree and took off over the stones. I watched him glide, then turn to croak at me again. A third time I watched him cruise out a dozen yards, double back, and let out another sonorous cackle.
“I’m already looking back at this and wondering what the fuck I was thinking,” I said. I hopped the low wooden fence and followed the old black bird into the cemetery.
Most of the headstones were for people who’d died before I was born. Some dated within the year. Covered with moss and undergrowth, the sweat stains of finality and neglect, grave markers of every size and shape, from hand-carved mausoleums to wooden planks nailed together in cross formation, covered the surrounding hills in rows so crooked the caretaker had to be either cross-eyed, blind, or both.
When the old crow and I crested the last hill I looked back at the boneyard, at so many stones like goose bumps running up the spine of some tired leviathan.
I turned around to see where the crow had led me—a vista no less gloomy and depressing than the graveyard.
My new school was flat and broad and as featureless as it was silent. With a resigned sigh, I crossed a field of knee-high weeds, at either end of which stood a tall, crooked football goal, and hiked up the parking circle to the empty campus. The building itself was gray and unremarkable. The front door was unlocked. Inside, the lights were out. The only light came from the windows that lined a hallway to my right. The other side of the hall was lined with blue lockers, with the occasional break where a classroom door could be found. The tiled floor was white and clean. I started walking to see if anyone was home. All in all, it looked like your basic high school on a still, overcast Sunday afternoon. It was, however, Monday morning, and by now I was more annoyed than intimidated. I could be at my old school now, getting depressed, getting bored, getting horny. But instead I found myself wandering the empty halls of a forei—
What the fuck was that?
I whirled around, heart suddenly racing, more nervous than I’d let myself believe, and spied a tall locker door hanging halfway open a few yards away.
Whatever.
I turned back to where I was headed an—
“Who the fuck is there?!” I shouted, spinning around when the locker slammed shut behind me, its flat echo continuing past me down the hall.
“WHO—”
The locker creaked halfway open, slowly.
Someone’s in there.
I took a step back with one foot, a step forward with the other, half brave and half smart. The front foot won. Slowly, I made my way toward the locker, sliding along the windows that lined the opposite wall to try and get a peek around the open door. The combination latch was missing. Only two rough screw holes remained where the lock had been torn off. I opened my mouth to say something to whoever was inside, some idle threat, but the vacuum inside my stomach had started up again, so that all I could manage was to slowly reach out, curl my fingers around the rusty locker door, and—
BA-RIIIING!!! went the homeroom bell. I jumped, slipped, cracked my head on the floor.
I stared up at the ceiling. The homeroom bell rang in my ears, bounced off the tile under my head. My first reaction was to panic that I was late, but once the combination of shock, terror, and pain had ebbed to a dull throb between my ears, I asked myself, “Late for what?” I didn’t expect an answer.
Then the sounds came.
Something stirred outside.
I stood up and looked out the window at the hideous, skinless face staring in at me.
“Late,” moaned the walking corpse on the opposite side of the glass. He looked about my age, his face puffed out in gaseous boils of decomposition. The flesh of his jaw hung loose, exposing a bloated green tongue laminated in pus and mud. He wore blue jeans and a varsity letterman’s jacket. A backpack hung from his right shoulder. Dirt littered his unkempt hair, filled the spaces between his teeth.
I didn’t even know I was screaming. The sound of my terror echoed down the hall, harmonizing with the great earthy rumble rising up from the ground outside as the tiled floor beneath m
y feet began to quake. Scared beyond coordination, I stumbled back on stilted legs and crashed into the wall of lockers behind me. My eyes stayed glued to the window, growing ever wider. Scores of rotten, worm-riddled bodies staggered from the cemetery beyond the football field, dusting the consecrated earth from their team jackets and cheerleader uniforms as they stalked en masse toward the school. No sooner had the first of the walking dead reached the parking lot than a ghostly white school bus pulled into the parking circle and expulsed a swarm of iridescent vapors who drifted toward the school dragging their souls and sack lunches behind them.
Thisisadreamthisisadreamthisisafuckingnightmare, I chanted in my head, pinching myself over and over until a trail of stinging, bloody fingernail marks lit up my arm like Christmas tree lights.
“You’ll want to get those looked at.” A voice from inside the locker behind me.
Again I shrieked, turned around, staggered into the middle of the hallway, surrounded by drifting, translucent ghouls from the white school bus. Twenty yards to my left, the front doors of the school opened, admitting the horde of teenage undead as they made their way inside like a river of coagulating blood. I looked back at the talking locker, which was now open. A tall, pale kid stepped out from within. He stretched out his folded arms and yawned, exposing two rows of healthy white razor-sharp teeth.
“Hey, watch it!” warned a female voice. The tall boy’s clothes wavered in an unseen breeze.
“Fuckin’ vapors.” A second kid emerged from the next locker down, his face as gaunt and bloodless as his neighbor’s. Beside him, one of the walking dead from outside bumped into a locker and fiddled clumsily with its combination.
