Zaley flew through the last of her work, eager to investigate the box. They never had much. Red tablecloths with snowflakes, an artificial tree with lights embedded in it and a handful of ornaments thrown on the branches, Elania’s Hanukkah table, sporadically a Solstice table, too. One year Zaley had made dozens of paper snowmen and snowflakes, trees and doves, but the big room swallowed them up.
When her assignments were done, she shoved everything into her backpack and opened the box. It was packed neatly but tightly, strings of lights looped and tied to keep them from tangling, a silver garland, and boxes of pinecone and bird ornaments. Beneath the boxes was a bag of battery-operated tea lights, both red and white, and those would look so lovely with their fake flickers on the tables. Zaley turned on a white one and set it at her side as she unearthed the box to its bottom. There were pathway lights shaped like candy canes, tiny trees made of ornaments, a box with red bulb earrings that flashed, and a nutcracker.
“We can just chuck it all in the trash,” Micah said over her shoulder.
“No!” Zaley protested. She adored the earrings, which she pulled out to keep for herself. “It’s going to be beautiful. Can we go over a little earlier for more time to set this up?”
“Sure, whatever.” A cell rang and Micah picked up. “Hey, lover!”
It was Austin, and none of Zaley’s business how those two flirted so she held her peace. She still felt badly for Elania, even if Elania never seemed to care. Zaley would have been devastated if it was Corbin. Would he be sad when she died? Yes, he would cry, the way he cried when she broke up with him. They had both cried. He wanted to know why but how could she even start to explain? One day long ago they had talked about their wedding, a silly conversation about having it at Halloween with everyone in costume, and he said but first I have to ask your father for your hand, so we adhere to at least one tradition.
Oh God. How could she possibly stay together with him? The apocalypse that scene would bring about, Corbin called every vile name that existed and thrown out of the house. Judged for the cut of his eyes and nothing more! He was proud of his heritage, both German and Chinese, baking stollen at Christmas for Zaley to try and showing her the envelopes with lucky money his parents made for the children of the family at Chinese New Year. He wasn’t fluent in either language, but simple words in both came easily from his tongue. She loved that richness, and being welcome within it. Her family was English, French, and Italian, but none of it meant much of anything.
Imagining Corbin’s face at her father’s tirade . . . she could not meet those eyes after that, to have the sweetness of their relationship shoved in their faces as something ugly. Corbin and his parents were so tender with one another, and his mom’s cancer devastated him. Those were his roots being eaten by her illness, and he felt her pain as his own. If Zaley were standing over her father’s grave, she didn’t expect that she would feel a thing. It made her feel like a disgusting human being. What kind of daughter didn’t cry at the death of her father?
But she wouldn’t. She was just going to feel hollow.
It terrified her, what her English teacher had said last year. No matter how far you go, no matter where you hide, one day you will turn into your parents. One day she’d be reveling in the gore on the television, and standing outside a restroom stall asking their adolescent and fully functional daughter if she needed help in there. It would be better to not have children at all than have one and keep it a helpless infant in perpetuity. Better to not have a daughter glaring behind that stall door and feeling embarrassed and incompetent. Zaley could not marry or have children, not when she had to keep them safe from what she would become.
She repacked the box, all but the earrings and the flickering tealight on the floor. Something in it comforted her. “Is it really all right if I stay tomorrow night, too?”
The call with Austin having ended, Micah was staring pensively out the window. She ran her fingers through her multi-colored hair and said, “Yeah, it’s fine.”
Once it was late, Zaley went up to her room with the tealight. She had forgotten to pack pajamas. There was a nub of a lock on the door, so she could sleep in her T-shirt and not worry about being surprised. Too wired for bed, she sat on the chair by the window and put the tealight on the sill. A yellow streak on the glass trembled with it.
When people hit their limit, some left notes. She knew this from television and books, those neatly folded letters containing terse messages with an apology, of not being able to take it any more. Others had no words to write. Which was better? What did Zaley want to say, if anything? It was so overused that it was a cliché, not being able to take it any more, but it fit to perfection. She couldn’t take it.
And where should she do this? She could march downstairs for a knife but that was awful; Micah’s mothers were being very kind to let her stay over and they shouldn’t have to clean up Zaley’s mess. At home? Mom might find her too soon, call the ambulance, snatch Zaley up like a toddler as she ran for that heavenly light and carry her back from death.
I gave you life and you took it away. God might say that in disapproval if Zaley turned up prematurely at the gates. What right had she to throw away His gift? She was not being beaten or molested at home; she was not bullied at school or infirm with disease. She had food and shelter and friends. One stumbling block in screwy parents and she gave up? What did that say about her? How could she be so weak? She could get sent to hell for that. There was no way it could be worse than the Mattazollo home.
She could go to the ocean.
With her tealight and pictures, the amethyst bracelet around her wrist as proof that once she’d been loved, and a note apologizing to the person who found her. Zaley didn’t want to die. She just wanted this pain to stop. But first she had the party tomorrow evening, that box of darling decorations, and she was going all out to make that rented room grand for everyone to enjoy. Then they had something sweet to remember her by.
Something moved in the darkness below. Zaley was afraid a burglar was down there, or that her mother was creeping around to check on her, but the figure moved away from the house. A little moonlight revealed only Micah, who opened a gate in the fence and went into the neighbor’s yard. What she was doing Zaley did not know or care, probably meeting up with Austin. Should she tell Elania? No. It was all over school how her boyfriend behaved with girls, and maybe they were on the outs. One date a month, sporadic hugs, a candy cane gram last week, it was so dispassionate. It hadn’t been like that between Zaley and Corbin. That was how Zaley was going to judge the boys in her life, if they would dash across a school for her, just to ask if she was all right after an exam. If they had eyes only for her, not her and some other girl. Or it was how she’d judge them, were she not about to meet her limit.
Picking up the tealight, Zaley set it on the nightstand and undressed without turning on the overhead. The twelfth of October to the twenty-first of December . . . it was not as tidy as twelve to twelve but had an interesting inversion of the numbers. Every year she had passed her death date and not known its significance. Finishing up at school, reading by a Christmas tree, decorating cookies, all of those other December twenty-firsts had had no meaning beyond themselves.
But she could not go to the ocean in the dark after the party, nor would she stay another night at this house. She’d have Micah drop her off at home and then . . . in her room, with the desk and bed blocking the door. That was where the mess of her death should be, not ruining someone’s walk on the beach, or for the Cambornes to discover in horror and betrayal in their own house. By the time anyone broke past Zaley’s furniture or pried the boards off the windows, she’d be gone.
Not to death, no, that seemed frightening. To the ferry bobbing under her feet in the waterlogged caldera, her neck arched back to look up to those whitewashed churches, the blue domes kissing the sky. About to see the wall frescoes made in a time before time, to walk the ruins of the Temple of Apollo, Zaley was not coming to an end b
ut disembarking to some new beginning.
Whispering thank you to the tealight for being her companion, she climbed into bed and felt her spirits lighten.
Tomorrow was her last day.
She would make it a good one.
Corbin
He was tired of fighting.
Ruining her life, he was ruining Sally’s entire life by wanting to go to the Welcome Mat party rather than the one at the South Haven Country Club. Next year they would all be flung across the country in different colleges and this was their last Christmas together before time so cruelly divided them. How could he even think to spend it apart from his girlfriend?
Yet it was her crowd at the Country Club, not Corbin’s. He had lunch with her crowd two or three times a week but that had not turned acquaintances into friends. Those kids had a common bond in sports, another in music, a third in dress, a fourth in owning cars, they had more money and different interests than Corbin. Some were dicks, most were nice enough, yet they did not interest him, and he did not interest them. Lunches were amiable affairs. If he never went to another one, he would not miss them.
The parties ran at similar times, the one at South Haven from six to ten, the one for Welcome Mat from six-thirty to ten-thirty. He suggested going to the first from six to eight and then driving to Blue Hill for the second half of the other party. That seemed fair. His idea was met with instant rejection. Whatever was he thinking? That they’d just get up from their table and say goodbye in the middle of the party? Why couldn’t he do this one thing for her? After all, she put up with his Welcome Mat meetings three times a week!
She didn’t put up with it, and that made him angry. Sally came to Welcome Mat and participated half-heartedly, snubbing the Sombra C students and constantly checking the time on her phone. Then she passed him notes or pleaded in whispers to go outside and back to her friends. Once she had a dentist appointment in the middle of the day and he was so relieved to have a guilt-free lunch in his club. She was suspicious of Zaley (she might try to steal Corbin away); she was scared of the Sombra C students (which led to another fight with her demanding Corbin throw them out as president of the club); she thought the rest of the kids were dweebs (Who studied at lunch? And especially the hobby boys building mechanical devices, what dorks!); and why did they do such stupid stuff hidden away in that room?
Sally was proud to belong to the coolest crowd on campus. She wanted to be seen as someone who had received that coveted invitation. The students of Welcome Mat had no right to build robot cars like kids and send them zipping around with big grins and high fives. They had no right to sequester themselves up there in Mr. Tran’s room and have fun watching movies and talking when they should be down by the auditorium casting envious looks at the crowd they were not cool enough to join.
She hadn’t actually said the last part, but Corbin thought that that was what she believed. If her pinnacle was not being recognized, then was it really a pinnacle? If no one treated her as an honored guest in Welcome Mat, there to spruce it up with her presence, then she did not know what to do. Corbin was embarrassed after her presentation on Chinese women in the media last week. Not for the content, which had merit, but because she took over the conversation about who wanted a turn next and confronted Micah on why she’d never done a piece. Rattling through the clipboard, she read off that Austin had done a piece on black men, Corbin on kung-fu Asians with a guest appearance from Stephen, Elania no less than three on Jews, two on the politics of black women’s hair (Sally laughed incredulously, because how was hair political?), and one on multiple births in the past twelve months alone. Muslim portrayals, mental illness, Tourette’s, feminism, single mothers, conservatives, liberals, atheists, weight, nerds, a joke piece by DeAngelo on the inaccurate depiction of wizards on April Fool’s, another on blondes by Quinn, and why hadn’t Micah done anything when she’d belonged to the club since ninth grade?
Rushing to smooth it over, Zaley explained that this was a voluntary gig only, no pressure or expectations. No one had to do anything. Sally couldn’t hear it, since it was coming from Zaley. Zaley was the enemy as a former girlfriend of Corbin’s. Zaley had forgotten her lunch on purpose just to manipulate Corbin into feeling bad and obligated to help. And Corbin fell for it! Sally viewed the chocolate pudding cup that he gave over one day as a betrayal on par with a sneak blowjob.
Coolly eyeing Sally and the clipboard, Micah asked what exactly she was supposed to do a piece on. Being Irish? French? Straight? Agnostic? That made everyone squirm. They all knew what the piece should be, the big difference between their parents and hers. With a calculated show of innocence, Micah pressed Sally on what about her was so special that she should do a piece on it? Corbin prayed for Sally to drop it, but she considered herself above this crowd, the one among them with the right to say anything and have them agree. Sally was mad at Micah for playing dumb, not just agreeing and asking to have her name written down. The pen was already in Sally’s hand.
Did she have the guts to call Micah out? She did. Because, you know, like you have gay moms and people think that’s gross. So you could, like, reeducate them. She had no concept of how disrespectful she was being of the club’s basic tenets. Micah never signed the clipboard for a piece or offered herself up as a subject for Offensive Question Friday. Why wasn’t anyone’s business. But that wasn’t how Sally saw it. She’d bared her soul in her piece, and now it was Micah’s turn to do the same. And maybe that new deaf kid Brennan could do one on sign language! Sally whipped her hands around to demonstrate just as Brennan pushed by the curtain to dump his lunch trash in the garbage.
In that moment, Corbin hated Sally’s pug nose and short eyelashes, her pink nails, the sway of her bangs and the trill of her voice. She went through the letters of her name in sign language and asked Brennan with loud and terrible exaggeration if that was right. The poor guy looked at her blankly and said in a normal speaking voice, “I have no idea. What are you doing?” Micah burst into laughter, shy Brennan scurried away, and Corbin wanted to smack his forehead in frustration like a cartoon character.
Mom once said to his father that Sally was going to make some man’s life miserable one day. Overhearing the remark, Corbin had blown up in defense of her. She was smart. She was pretty. She was . . .
She was a spoiled bitch who thought she was the center of the universe, and he didn’t care if he ever touched her again. He’d rather watch porn on his laptop. At least those chicks didn’t text him eighty times a day and whine that he wasn’t doing enough for them. They didn’t resent his dog, for God’s sake, or think he was weird for listening to the news rather than watching ten reality shows and talking about the characters like they were close friends and worst enemies. They didn’t think he had gotten dyslexia to irritate them.
He knew how her mind worked. If her boyfriend was choosing the loser party over the cool one, then was the cool one really that cool? Of course it was cool! The tickets were fifty dollars, for starters. It was at the nicest club in the area. Everyone was going to be dressed up, Sally in a strapless sequined blue ball gown (and she was going to die if someone else wore the same kind! Just die!), Yanni in a short black-and-pink ruffled disaster (it was so ugly! Like a lingerie dress!), Saylor in green with a slutty slit up the front to show her leg (but rocking it like she rocked everything she put on and it cost four hundred dollars!). The guys were in suits and ties (no silly penguin ties, Corbie! Wear snowflakes or just a blue one to match my outfit). A DJ and a Christmas tree with presents underneath, a slip of vodka in the drinks, a dance floor and fake snow sifting down on a red sleigh where they could pose for pictures . . .
It was the party everyone wanted to attend, but not everyone could afford. So it made those chosen few special. They would get buzzed and dance and some frisky duo lock themselves in the bathroom and become the talk of the event. Someone would drink too much and barf outside in the bushes; couples break up or come together; a car in the parking lot would have suspiciously
steamy windows and make gossip fly. You wouldn’t leave a movie in the middle, would you? It was Sally’s Christmas, and Sally’s Christmas started with Sally’s party and Sally’s friends and Sally’s presents under the tree.
But it was Corbin’s Christmas, too.
Why had she ever wanted to date him? Of the guys in her crowd, two were former boyfriends of hers, others in relationships of their own, there were single ones she must have dismissed for one reason or another. Too heavy, too pimply, too abrasive . . . Corbin was well liked around campus, someone who wasn’t quite in her circle but wouldn’t drop her down much either. He was convenient. It would have been perfect if he had been content to dump his own crowd and substitute hers. Bizarrely, his Princess Glam costume on Halloween had increased his standing among her friends. They still came to him joking for spells to ace their exams, and he tapped their heads and said poof to make it happen. Sally fell into furious hysterics when he turned up in that costume, yet could not break up with him when her own crowd found it so funny. What a jerk thing that had been for him to do, and it hadn’t worked to break them up anyway.
And why was he dating her? She had come up to him at school last May, sat on his lap and said when are you going to ask me out, Corbin Li? So he did. It was exciting to have a girl so impatient to be noticed by him that when he hadn’t noticed back, she confronted him. He found out they were dating from her HomeBase page less than a week later, and changed his hastily to match. It was easier then to overlook how different they were. Now it was in his face all the time. If she wasn’t sitting in his lap, they had absolutely nothing to talk about. And when she was in his lap, they weren’t talking.
It was cruel to break up with her the week before Christmas, and he had already gotten her a gift. That cost two hundred dollars, a sterling silver necklace with a beaded heart pendant. After her polite but strained reaction to the necklace he’d made at Mom’s craft table for her birthday, he knew not to make her anything else. The more he thought about that, the more it bugged him, too. Zaley wore the amethyst bracelet several times a week until they broke up, and there hadn’t been any strain in her thanks. It was why he made another piece for Sally, figuring a girl would like that. But no, Sally and Zaley were very different girls. Zaley made him slide it up her wrist the second she opened the present and kissed the breath out of him.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 23
