Sally had dropped hints about wanting something from the jewelry case at Mount’s, but the things in there were five hundred plus. What would that have earned him? Roses equaled breasts and a box of truffles equaled a hand up her skirt and a hairpiece equaled a hand down his pants and Corbin didn’t like how it made him feel when it was over. Once he heard Saylor and Sally laughing about how guys only wanted one thing, and they rolled their eyes in disgust. God, he was interested in sex! One day he’d gotten aroused just by looking at the bottle of extra-virgin olive oil in the pantry.
But Sally wasn’t interested? It was just how she rewarded him for doing what she wanted? Was she laughing inside as he squeezed her ass, marking just how long and how far he could go to the number of truffles he’d put in the box? It was humiliating to consider that while he was marveling at the smoothness of her skin, hoping that she liked his touch and worried that he could be doing it wrong, she was thinking you stupid horny pathetic chump and checking the time over his shoulder.
Were all girls like that? Deep down? He didn’t know.
They had done nothing but fight over the two parties since Thanksgiving. Now it was the day of the parties and they were still fighting. At lunch they sat in her car and she stroked his inner thigh, whispering that she only wanted to be with him, just say yes, please say yes, she’d be so happy, he’d have such a good time. Her hand moved a little faster, full of promise if he agreed. He said no and took her hand away. Then she pouted beautifully and drew him to her, uncurling his fingers and pressing them to her breast, pleading between kisses, asking if he might like to stay over tonight since her parents were gone and her grandmother practically in a coma by sundown.
Sex or his friends.
There would be other Welcome Mat parties.
His hand fell away. Her mood changed on a dime from sweet to furious. “Oh my God, I can’t be at the party without my boyfriend! I mean, like what’s the point of having a guy if he’s not even there? What the fuck, Corbin, are you a fag or something? Give a little and get a little, or does what I got not interest you?”
This was whoring on both of their parts, and the jibe about homosexuality was too far. She knew damn well that he wasn’t gay. He was starting to think that she was, seeing how her interest in his body was a valve shut on and off dependent on how much he spent or ceded to her demands. Maybe guys were for exchange and girls were for love to her, and he thought dyke and felt ugly.
He got out of the car, a strong gust of wind nearly knocking him back in it. The bell rang and he walked off, the pressure in his jeans deflating rapidly. Sex or his friends, his friends or sex, and what if this was the only chance he ever had? How likely was that?
People shouted and threw garbage at the trashcan, eager to get to their afternoon classes since beyond them was freedom. A pudding cup missed the can and fell to the concrete, and he remembered how his had looked cupped in Zaley’s hands. Was that wrong of him to share it? Inconsiderate of Sally? He hadn’t delivered it to Zaley with a covert message, any more than there would have been with Elania or Quinn or Micah. Other people gave her the extra from their lunches, a bag of carrots and celery, a yogurt, a string cheese. Zaley tried to turn it all down, so embarrassed about forgetting her lunch that her cheeks were pink. Even Tom donated his second soda, and Shelly blushed to have offered a bag of pretzels before remembering the district edict against Sombra C students sharing food.
They always did that in Welcome Mat if someone forgot lunch, or dug out coins from their backpacks so that person could pick up a burger at the cafeteria. He’d shared with a dozen people over the years, and they shared with him. They had done it with Brennan only last week. The quiet sophomore with some hearing loss who didn’t speak in sign language, by the way, and well over a month of visiting the club would have told Sally that if she weren’t so relentlessly focused on herself. Corbin wondered if he should apologize for her while he was catching the kid up to speed on video games tonight after the party. They were both going over to Stephen’s.
But Zaley was an ex so they should hate each other? He hated that the president had been assassinated. He hated to imagine his mother’s cancer coming back and he hated that a culler picked off two little Sombra C girls in Minnesota playing with dolls on their porch. It hadn’t worked out between him and Zaley (in small, strange ways, it was okay because her reticence was so frustrating, her acquiescence too boring) but was there a rule that he had to hate her as a consequence? He was still a little peeved and bewildered with her at being dumped, yet hate was far too strong a word for what he felt. Corbin just didn’t understand women, and a porn girlfriend was looking better and better.
During fifth period, he wondered if he would even be able to go through with sex, worrying all the while that Sally was laughing at his efforts. Internally mocking and grossed out, tucking away risible moments to giggle over with Saylor later. Humiliation rose within him. Whatever they did in class made no impression, and then he was walking to sixth period government close by. Elania almost exploded out the door with a furious expression and tears in her eyes. She didn’t see Corbin, and he didn’t call to her. This was a rough class for both of them, and there was nothing to say that they hadn’t said a hundred times.
He didn’t like Mr. Dayze. Very few did. Using current events to illustrate points in their studies was fine, but the man did it oddly. The president was killed? Then today let’s talk about the line of succession! Quiz tomorrow! Overweight DeAngelo transferred in outrage after Mr. Dayze called him Hubba-Hubba Rosenberg and made jokes about having moobs. Corbin missed having DeAngelo there to make faces at about this class.
Worst were the debates, the teacher pitting the most foolish, oppositional students against one another and goading them on. Abortion, religion, euthanasia, confinement points, the girl who believed President Pitch would set everything to rights purely based on her womanhood versus the boy who thought the new vice president Liam Herald should lead a coup and overthrow her to put a man back in power . . . Mr. Dayze thought interesting ideas were unveiled this way, choosing a supremacist for each viewpoint. This tone-deaf, ham-handed approach didn’t do it for Corbin. Elania was spitting the day of the welfare debate when the teacher selected her to represent the pro side. It was the first and only time he’d called on her for anything. It felt like a slap, this unexpected reminder that by the way, she was the black student in the room, and naturally welfare was an issue she was familiar with and would defend.
There was no nuance, no gray space in this class. How was debate to happen when everyone was clinging to a militant position and screaming? Corbin wished Jonathan Penner made visits to schools. He was someone who looked at an issue from every conceivable angle and coalesced them into the most ethical response. The only good thing about Mr. Dayze’s debates was that it usually sent Corbin home to search out Penner’s lectures. Drown out the shouting with rationality, and he wondered what the man would say to the class debate of Cullers: Murderers or Heroes?
But there was no debate scheduled for today, just bags of popcorn, a television, and an old zombie movie named ZomBall. Corbin looked at the teacher in disbelief. He thought he was being cool, showing an R-rated movie and flouting school rules that teachers couldn’t show anything above PG without soliciting permission slips from parents. Every DVD on his desk had a zombie theme.
So this was what had made Elania angry. It was a terrible twenty-year-old comedy about a zombie football league, arms and ears falling off at hits to be sewn back on randomly. One team member vanished altogether, and his various pieces were distributed among the others. Another character was made up of half a member from the red team and half a member of the blue team, the two heads fighting over which team the body belonged to and the body spinning in circles every time the character caught the ball. Yet another player was male on one side and female on the other. He/she flirted with almost everyone, turning around to present whichever side was interested in the latest target.
It was so callous to show this movie with what had been going on in the world. After eight or nine minutes of it, a girl asked if they could watch something else. Mr. Dayze said, “What? This is great!” and crunched on his popcorn. Other murmured protests cropped up around the room and were ignored.
Corbin was not going to watch this movie. He was so enraged that his head hurt. Dad was gone on his last business trip for the year and Corbin was frightened every time the plane swooped his father away. Shepherds were running amok, yanking people out of cars and off buses for saliva checks, filling windowless vans with Sombra Cs and driving away to hidden confinement points. In Mississippi, a building had been packed with stamped (two percents, five percents, ten percents, even a person who didn’t have Sombra C and was just in the wrong place at the wrong time) and torched it. And people with Sombra C were retaliating. Yesterday a man had blown himself up like the little boy in Hawaii. He had had his stamp illegally removed and gone to a Shepherd meeting, pretending to be a new recruit, and exploded. The Shepherds who didn’t die were now infected themselves. The police force, the National Guard, the Armed Forces brought back from the Middle East, everyone was stretched to the limit. Dad flew off into this madness over and over, and one day he might not fly back.
Everything about this was wrong. Gripping his desk, Corbin thought about picking up his backpack and walking out of the room. People were looking at one another, their eyes shifting between the television and the door. No one made the first move. Few were opening their plastic bags of popcorn. Some settled back in resignation and took out cell phones to send messages or play games; others flicked on digital readers. One girl had her backpack on the desk, hugging it to her chest and torn with indecision.
A zombie disintegrated into a cloud of dust. Mr. Dayze was the only one who laughed. “Come on! It’s funny!”
“No, it’s not. We don’t want to see this,” blurted Corbin. No one backed him up, ready to let him take the fall. The girl hugged her backpack more tightly as others nudged each other and whispered.
“Well then, I’ll just tell you what I told my other classes,” Mr. Dayze said, and waved a referral in the air. Heads turned attentively to the screen, a Pavlovian response. But Corbin didn’t look, wouldn’t look. A pit in his throat slid to his stomach and down to his groin as he stood. He had never gotten a referral in his life, or served detention, never even had his name on the board to lose recess in elementary school!
Mr. Dayze watched Corbin weave through the aisles, the heads turning away from the screen to observe his progress. The slip was so light in its damnation, the thinnest paper with the line for the name left blank and uncooperative written preemptively beside Reason for Referral.
Eyes bored holes in his back, and the door swung shut behind him. No one else came out. They should have; they should have flooded out; but that was their choice, and this was his. He walked down to the office and let himself in the student entrance. The secretary was on the phone and waved him to the chairs.
Kicked out of class. He didn’t know what happened now, a meeting with the principal or a counselor, a call home to his mother. That did not trouble him, stiff-backed with rage and the insult of the slip in his fingers firing his temper further. He owned his decision.
He was going to both parties tonight, and Sally would have to deal. Six to eight at the Country Club, give her the necklace and drive to Blue Hill. That was final. If she broke up with him before he gave over the necklace, it could be returned to the store for a refund. If she didn’t, then they were having a serious talk after Christmas about how he wasn’t going to ditch his friends to be with her. That could not be a condition of their relationship, Corbin giving one hundred percent and she delivering zero. And she wasn’t going to hold sex over his head like a carrot.
The secretary’s phone call went on and on, minutes ticking away to the bell on the clock over her head. The golf cart rumbled back and forth outside the windows. The plastic top of it was cracked from the riot on the first day of school, and protected by streaks of silver duct tape.
The referral had a line for Corbin to sign his initials. He wasn’t going to sign it, agreeing with the reason. The television stations had pulled cartoons with zombies; the radio didn’t play songs with zombie in the lyrics. A horror show that traditionally sported zombies for villains went on hiatus and returned months later with a focus on vampires. Was Mr. Dayze oblivious to how many millions of people had died since the summer? No. He liked being risqué. That was all.
Hanging up, the secretary sent Corbin to the counselor. Her lips tightened imperceptibly when he explained, and she glanced at the time. Then she stepped out to speak to someone, Corbin unable to hear anything save the burble of lowered voices, and he was excused to the library to finish out the period. To his question about his permanent record, the counselor said not to worry about it.
So there wasn’t going to be a consequence for his actions. Tomorrow he’d make a fake referral slip and pose it by Bleu Cheese doing her bad dog pose with a paw over her eyes. He hadn’t updated The Daily Cheese since the day the president was murdered, and had just posted a picture of the sea of candles held up in the streets of New York City.
In the library, he chose a carrel far in the back and took out his phone. There was a text message from Sally. He made the phone read it to him, her desperate words transformed to a monotone about not leaving her without a date hours before the party. And how was she to get home if he went to Blue Hill?
“I will pick you up at a quarter to six,” Corbin said clearly, so that his phone recorded it. “Make sure Saylor or Yanni can take you home. Or else you should drive your own car, and I will meet you there. Your choice.” The app never got Saylor or Yanni right (and why would it?) so he painstakingly corrected sailor and yacht.
Her sulky answer was reduced to the monotone. Meet you there. It was meant to wound him, but it didn’t. The fight was over. This was his deal, take it or leave it. He was a virgin (God, how much longer was that going to last? Forever since he was picking a porn girlfriend on Bazongas tomorrow) and it made him a boy, but it hadn’t been a boy who walked out of Mr. Dayze’s room.
The bell rang and he went to his locker to unload textbooks, thinking of how to tell his mother about this. Be good, respect your teachers, do your work, listen hard . . . She knew he did these things. She would trust he hadn’t been kicked out for screwing off. There was no reason to tell her, no note going home, no call. He still wanted her to know that he did this and wasn’t sorry. Corbin respected his teachers. This teacher didn’t respect his students.
He received a text from Elania. Heard you walked out.
Yeah.
I wish I’d done the same.
Two students from the class walked by. They looked at him and shifted their gazes to the ground, the pace of their feet picking up. Maybe they were embarrassed that they hadn’t walked out with him, or justified their decision since the movie was a comedy and totally unrelated to Sombra C. It was not his concern. He had made the right call. Corbin slammed shut the locker door and walked out of school with his head held high.
Elania
In the darkness, there is light.
When the triplets were infants and she felt like she had lost her parents to them, that they had been a team torn asunder by these tiny wailing boys covered in spit-up and poop, Elania once packed her bag and ran away. She hadn’t known where to go and ended up at her school, sitting on a bench by her locked classroom and crying as evening slipped to night. The custodian found her there. Mr. Beebee was a sour old man who moved through campus sullenly cleaning up, but he had been kind. She had not known that he could be kind, and she never looked at him the same way again, or called him Mr. Peepee like the other kids did. He called home and kept her company until Mom came, Elania bracing herself to be scolded and grounded. Mom sat on the bench and looked out to the shadows, and she was crying, too.
The babies were so very, very hard. But Mom said that
they were not going to stay babies forever. One day they would walk and talk and stop yelling, they would see Elania as their big sister and she’d be special to them like no other girl in this world. The light in this darkness was that time moved, it never stopped moving, and every day their family battled through brought that light closer, made it bigger.
And Mom had been right, about everything but the yelling. When her parents were kept late at work last week, Elania had gone over to the elementary school to pick up the boys. Dozens of children on the playground turned at the outbreak of excited yells LANILANILANI, three brown heads bobbing through the hubbub in her direction. Conor reached her first and wanted his shoe tied, Cormac threw his arms around her waist so she couldn’t, Percy tripped into her quick catch and they walked out of the school as a single unit. No other girl in the world could have caused such a commotion. When the boys were grating on her nerves, whining or arguing, telling her every tedious detail of the stupid Fart War game popular at recess, she knew that this time was passing. They weren’t always going to be obsessed with boogars and farts and pirates. One day she’d count the boys as friends.
Aunt Tawnie saw a lot of darkness in her home hospice care work. Some people had no one to see them into death save her; others had plenty yet would have been better off alone. Even as one mother lay dying, her five adult children fought viciously over who got the television, the car, a certain portrait. Toward the very end, the youngest daughter sat with the mother on the pretense of holding her hand in comfort, and Aunt Tawnie walked in on the wedding ring being worked off the unconscious mother’s gnarled finger. Pain and fear and anger and regret, old betrayals, fresh grievances, these were dark places in which to work, dark families, dark lives, and dark deaths. It was hard for her aunt to find the light in the worst ones when first she began this work. Now it was easier. These were not her people after all, and that wasn’t a candle flame but a torch in her heart. When the patient died, Aunt Tawnie walked out of the house whereas the relatives screaming miserably over the silver stayed.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 24
