I Kissed a Zombie, and I Liked It

by Adam Selzer

  “I’ll have a life,” I tell him. “I’ll have a life for you. I’ll do enough living for both of us. I have to.”

  He smiles a little. “Go to college,” he says. “Have a lot of babies. Break a lot of hearts. And realize every minute of it.”

  “I’ll break a ton of them,” I say over a sniffle. “And I’ll realize every, every minute of life. I promise.”

  “No you won’t,” he says. “You can’t. But try your hardest. For me. And everyone else my age who’s in here.”

  I cuddle up and hold him for what seems like hours. It is hours. I kiss his broken face. I try to reattach his ear, but it keeps falling off. We whisper back and forth a bit, just little nothings.

  Then he’s silent, like he’s building his strength back up. I can tell he’s in pain—like maybe he’s going into frenzy mode.

  Then there’s a voice above us.

  “Hey.”

  I look up and Fred is standing over me.

  “Go away!” I shout through my tears.

  “Will is gone,” he says. “Mrs. Smollet found out what he was doing, and he’s in massive trouble. He’s already being transported back to Romania to face the council. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know he was going to have me … blackmail you. He said it was going to be a prank.”

  “Leave us alone,” I say.

  “I brought this for him,” he says, nodding to Doug.

  And he hands me down a bit of something gooey. Part of the brain from the jar. He holds it above the edge of the grave, but not over it, since he can’t come in.

  “Thanks,” I say, standing up and taking it.

  Fred says “I’m sorry” again, then disappears.

  I put the handful of brain into Doug’s mouth. He swallows a bit, then sort of smiles.

  “God,” he says, “that’s the stuff.”

  “Does it feel better now?”

  “The pain is gone.”

  He’s still weak, and still clearly deteriorating, but at least he’s not in pain. He smiles a little.

  “I’m never going to forgive the vampires for making those other zombies,” I say. “The zombies saved my ass from Will by showing up when they did, but … but …”

  “I made the zombies,” he says. “It wasn’t the vampires.”

  “What?” I ask.

  He looks embarrassed. “One night I did the zombie operation over a bunch of graves. It was stupid of me. Stupid. And I totally screwed it up, too. People could have been killed. People who weren’t already dead. I let you think it was the vampires or Megamart because I was embarrassed. I didn’t think you’d like me anymore.”

  I don’t know what to say. How could he have done something so stupid? Was he trying to create his own zombie army or something? I might not have liked him anymore if I’d known he was doing something like that.

  “Why did you do it?” I ask.

  “Sometimes I just have to build, remember?” he says. “But building that many … it was an accident.”

  “How the hell do you accidentally raise the dead?” I ask.

  “I only wanted to do it to one of them,” he says. “And I didn’t know that nothing happens at first when you do the operation. I thought I heard the grave is supposed to glow or something if you do it right. I didn’t see any glow the first time, so I kept doing it over and over. I didn’t know I was doing it right every time. And I thought they were all done now. I thought those ones yesterday were the last of them.”

  I should be furious. But this is no time to be mad at him. And anyway, I just can’t be mad when I look at him.

  I guess you can’t help doing stupid things now and then. Especially when your brain is partially rotten.

  I just kiss his face again.

  Boys.

  “I love you, Gonk,” he says.

  “I love you,” I say back.

  “Realize it,” he says. “Live enough for everyone in here who didn’t get to.”

  And I hold him, even when he can’t move or talk anymore, whispering that I love him in his ear over and over again.

  The sun is just rising over the cemetery when Doug starts to crumble.

  EPILOGUE

  You know how hearing a certain song or smelling a certain smell can, like, send you back in time?

  It’s been six months since Doug went back to being dead full-time, and now it almost seems like the whole thing happened to someone else, not to me. But whenever I hear a song that he loved or smell formaldehyde, I feel like I’m with Doug again. I start to miss him all over again. And those songs and smells will still probably take me back just as powerfully when I’m a hundred years old, with a bunch of great-grandkids running around my ankles and asking to see my belly-button ring.

  I thought going to school so far away from home would help me move on, but there are so many things that remind me of him every day. Practically every guy in Seattle has a record collection exactly like Doug’s: Cohen, Neutral Milk Hotel, Nick Drake. Everything except all the original cast recordings he had. So I hear the songs that take me back six months all the time, and I smell formaldehyde in the science building three days a week.

  Everything that happened on prom night is sort of a haze to me now. I would probably remember it all clearly if I thought about it hard enough, but I don’t want to. I can’t. Even though I haven’t cried in weeks now, and I feel like I’ve turned a few corners, there are certain things I’m not quite ready to think about.

  The part I can remember is that the sun rose, and I started hearing Sadie’s voice above me. She and Trinity and my parents and everyone else I didn’t want to see helped me out of Doug’s grave and took me home, where I just collapsed on my bed and went blank for a while.

  The hardest thing for me, honestly, was doing the laundry and taking a shower. Doug had crumbled right on me. I got most of the dust into his casket, but some had to be washed off. It was really tragic.

  I didn’t go to school that Monday. Or the day after that. There’s no point going to school when you’re so miserable that you can’t even stand up straight.

  I got an e-mail on Wednesday from Mrs. Smollet, apologizing for Wilhelm’s behavior. She swore she’d make sure I never, ever had to hear from him again, and apologized for having helped him get permission to make me into a vampire. Apparently, she thought I was just one of those idiot girls who have a real thing for any and all dead guys. She never once said “I am one stupid vampire” in the letter, but she should have.

  After the attack, there was a wave of antizombie prejudice in town for a couple of days, mostly among people too ignorant to know that any zombie that’s been out of the grave more than an hour or so isn’t the slightest bit dangerous, no matter how many talking heads on the news tell them otherwise. There were some meetings and calls to the mayor demanding that he “do something to protect us,” despite the fact that there were no zombies left in town. He pushed for new laws restricting access to cemeteries after dark, which didn’t really do a damn thing other than give the cops an excuse to shut down parties at 1518 Bartleby Way but at least made him look like he was doing something, I guess. The cemeteries did their part by locking their gates after dark, so any zombies that rose up wouldn’t be able to get out.

  When a few weeks had gone by, I started to realize that what happened with Doug, as painful as it was, was probably the best way things could have ended. I mean, even if he hadn’t gone back to being dead full-time, our relationship probably had an expiration date. I could have pushed it back awhile by going to Drake instead of Seattle, but I would only have been delaying the inevitable.

  I sometimes wonder if I would have actually converted. I had figured out that it was a bad idea, but, well, it’s hard to argue with love, even when it’s making you do something really stupid.

  When I got back to school, everyone told me that Doug and I had actually been named prom king and queen. Sadie did some investigative reporting and confirmed that it was supposed to be Fred and Michelle (it’s all politi
cs—Doug didn’t go to our high school when he was alive, which cost him votes), but after people realized he was dying (for good, this time), they made us king and queen out of pity. I think it was pretty nice of them, really.

  My last article for the paper didn’t end up being about the party at 1518 Bartleby Way. It was about the time I spent with Michelle, talking her out of “converting.” It wasn’t easy to reason with an idiot, but I finally talked her out of dying and got her to stop hanging around on those stupid message boards. Fred understood. He never wanted her to convert, anyway. He wasn’t ready for that kind of commitment.

  The article ended up spreading all over the Internet. School nurses e-mailed me and told me they were going to give copies to girls in their schools who were thinking about going post-human. I started getting a lot of offers to do interviews for documentaries and TV shows and stuff, but I turned them all down.

  I’m not really ready to talk about it without crying yet.

  Because even though I know that Doug and I probably wouldn’t have worked out, I don’t feel like I’ll ever stop loving him.

  I made up my mind, after Doug died (or went back to being dead full-time), to wear black every day for a year and a day out of mourning, which I think is a tradition in some religions or something. But everyone else already wore black most every day anyway, so no one really noticed. I only made it about six weeks before I talked myself into wearing jeans and a red T-shirt. After all, I promised him I would live. I promised to notice every, every minute of life, and you can’t do that while you’re depressed. I had to move on.

  I did start going to temple just so I could read the Kaddish prayer—the prayer for the dead—for him. A few people had issues with reading it for someone who was already dead when he died, but I don’t care. He was alive to me when he was undead.

  Mom and Dad were amazing. They let me mope around and cry for weeks, like I was some sort of vampire or something. They never once said, “Maybe this is for the best, Alley,” even though we all knew that it probably was. They never said, “Well, he was already dead,” or “At least this happened before you converted,” or anything else I’d imagined they would say.

  Around graduation, I felt like I’d never love anyone else as long as I lived. But now that I’m away from the whole scene, living in a whole other world, I guess I have more perspective. I was so blinded by that combination of lust and loneliness that I hadn’t even realized Doug was a zombie, let alone admitted any of his other flaws. Sure, we liked the same music and everything, but how far does that really take a relationship in the end? The fact that he made those zombies and never told the cemetery people to step up security was just dumb, and that thing about leaving me waiting for him at the party was really not cool. If he’d kept up acting like that, we would have started fighting sooner or later. We never had our first fight, or anything to be all that bitter about. Instead, he’ll just live on in my heart as my first, most tragic love. The one I’ll think about every time I hear a Leonard Cohen song.

  I thought it was the most tragic thing in the world when Doug died. But I guess I’ve come to realize that we were both incredibly, unbelievably, breathtakingly lucky that we even got what time together we had. I mean, who gets to have a love affair after they die? Doug is just about the luckiest corpse in history, if you get right down to it. The most tragic part is that he had to work at Megamart.

  It was about a month before I could even bear to see how the recordings I made of him had come out. They turned out fairly well—and the pop song he sang at the party is actually the best one. It’s really kind of a brilliant song. If I ever find just the right band, I’ll have them add music behind his vocals. There’re enough songs for a good EP, at least. It’ll be a perfect way to honor his memory.

  And now I’ve moved on to living the life I promised him I would.

  It’s kind of ironic that the only place I can hang out and have some coffee between classes now that I’m in Seattle is a Wackfords Coffee, the same chain store we had on Cedar Avenue. I never went to the one in Cornersville Trace, but I’m in this one on campus almost every day when I have an hour to kill between classes. Not enough time to go clear back to the dorm, but enough time to relax with some coffee. It beats having six lousy minutes between classes.

  Between classes one day I move up to the front of the Wackfords line, and the guy in the green apron behind the counter notices my book.

  “What are you reading?” he asks.

  Six months ago, the first thing I would have said was “What? You don’t know how to read the title on the cover?”

  But instead, I tell him.

  “The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini,” I say.

  “Is it any good?” he asks.

  “Yeah,” I say. “He spends a lot of time bragging about how great he is, though. He claims to have won every war Italy fought all by himself. It gets a little annoying.”

  “Well,” says the guy, “if his autobiography is still in print, he must have been at least a little bit great.”

  Six months ago, I would have said something about how some other jerk’s book is probably still in print. Maybe his attempt at a joke was a swing and a miss, but it wasn’t offensively embarrassing or anything.

  “You ever read it?” I ask instead.

  He shakes his head. “I’m more into modern classics than classic classics,” he says.

  I can think of so many zingers and one-liners to throw at this guy. Six months ago, I would have used all of them, and as I marched away from the counter, I would have smugly thought about what a loser the guy was. About what nerve he had to hit on me.

  But a lot of things have changed.

  I decide to give him a chance.

  I take a seat with my coffee, and a few minutes later the guy gets a break. He takes off his apron and walks around to the front of the counter.

  “You want to sit down?” I ask.

  He smiles and has a seat at my little rectangular table.

  I can already think of plenty of things that are wrong with this guy.

  But there is a crack in everything….

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Adam Selzer was born in Des Moines and now lives in Chicago, where he writes humorous books for young readers by day and runs ghost tours by night. (If you can find two cooler jobs than those, take them!) He is the author of How to Get Suspended and Influence People, Pirates of the Retail Wasteland, I Put a Spell on You, Andrew North Blows Up the World, and The Smart Aleck’s Guide to American History, and he is just famous enough to have a page on Wikipedia.

  LITTLE-KNOWN AND PARTIALLY TRUE FACTS ABOUT ADAM:

  Adam was raised by wild Iowan orangutans, a very rare form of ape. They tried their hardest.

  He was the inspiration for the movie Bedtime for Bonzo, which starred Ronald Reagan and a chimpanzee.

  He writes true crime under the name William “Wild Bill” Griffith.

  He is occasionally known to dress up as “Obi-Wan Quixote.”

  He is the second cowboy from the left in the famous “Lost Thunderbird” photo.

  He invented the Franklin stove.

  To get the real truth about Adam, check out his Web site, www.adamselzer.com. And don’t forget to check out www.ikissedazombie.com for cool extras like a downloadable book sound track, book trailers, and more!

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Adam Selzer

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! www.randomhouse.com/teens

  Educators and librarians, for a varie
ty of teaching tools, visit us at www.randomhouse.com/teachers

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Selzer, Adam.

  I kissed a zombie, and I liked it / Adam Selzer. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Living in the post-human era when the undead are part of everyday life, high schooler Alley breaks her no-dating rule when Doug catches her eye, but classmate Will demands to turn her into a vampire and her zombie boyfriend may be unable to stop him.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89667-5

  [1. Supernatural—Fiction. 2. Dating (Social customs)—Fiction. 3. Vampires— Fiction. 4. Zombies—Fiction. 5. High schools—Fiction. 6. Schools—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.S4652Iad 2010

  [Fic]—dc22

  2009024052

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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