Zombie

by J. R. Angelella

  Before school started, he took me shopping for new sport coats, buttoned-down collared shirts, and khaki pants. I learned all about French cuffs, and the subtle differences between straight, spread, tab, and pin collars. Exciting fucking times, seriously. He said, “This is how a man should dress.” He said, “A man should dress like he could be buried in what he’s wearing.” Dad took the new clothes to this Italian tailor in Little Italy near the Inner Harbor to get them fitted or cropped or whatever. Angelo Christini—this old, silver-haired Italian with a humped back, who spoke with a thick accent and shook his hands when he spoke. He smelled like leather. Angelo made me wear my clothes and stand on a small stool in front of mirrors as he measured me. It didn’t feel quite right when he ran his tape measure up the inside of my legs. I looked to Dad for help and wanted to ask him if this was at all normal—to be felt up by an old Italian man—but Dad couldn’t be bothered while he walked around the shop, flipping through racks of vintage Italian silk suits for sale and two-tone leather loafers. When the clothes came back, they fit like skin. Dad said, “Don’t you even think about growing taller or getting fat. I paid a fortune for these.” Now I’m the best-dressed freshman anyone’s ever seen, surviving among a zombie army of plaid motherfuckers with pants at their asses.

  Someone jogging past knocks into me. His corduroys make a zwip-zwip sound as he passes. I say, “Excuse me,” but he doesn’t even know I exist. Kids shake lockers loose and greet each other with arm punches and big bear hugs.

  I overhear summer vacation stories.

  Someone fucked some local girl in Costa Rica while on vacation with his parents.

  Some other guy lost his virginity to a college chick tour guide at Princeton.

  Another guy got wasted visiting his brother in Chicago and ended up taking a dump on second base at Wrigley Field.

  Another guy did his first line of coke at a movie premiere party in Los Angeles.

  One says he, his girlfriend, and her sister all got drunk off cherry-grape Jell-O shots and ended up fucking in their parents’ bed.

  Another says he knows the password to get into this sick underground club where they do fucked-up shit, so that if anyone wants to go, to let him know by Wednesday.

  My summer?

  Consisted of cutting the grass of all the houses on my father’s realtor list. “The lawn of a home tells a story.” He sold more houses this summer than any other year.

  Other than cutting pantloads of grass, I:

  Saw my neighbor, Tricia, naked.

  4

  Tricia was home from Harvard for the summer.

  One night, I was sitting in the dark of my room, alone, on a wicker chair. Yes, wicker, don’t get me started, something my mom put in my room. And I looked out my window and saw a light on across the way—a table lamp on a nightstand turned low. It was a bedroom—light blue walls, framed photos, teddy bears and ribbons or awards of some kind pinned to a corkboard hung from the wall. All things from another time and place. A tiny TV, blue screen glowing, and an open closet of well-organized clothes.

  Then she entered.

  She wore tight-fitted blue jeans that made her butt look great and a V-neck sweater, offering a nice amount of top boobage, as far as I could tell. I turned off the light in my room and moved closer to the window. Tricia closed the door behind her and removed her sweater, pulling it over her head just as she disappeared into her closet. I had been so close to seeing her bra. Her room was empty, with only the light from the TV on the end table brightening the room, when she re-emerged. She wore a lacy white bra and white thigh-high stockings. She sat on the edge of her bed and clasped her garter to the stockings. A black minidress hung from a hanger on the back of the door and she yanked it down and slid into it. There was a makeup table with three mirrors. She sat in front of it and powdered her face and applied eye shadow and lip liner and all the things those girl magazines like Allure and Cosmo and Marie Claire tell girls to do or not to do.

  She looked into her reflection and saw something behind her. I don’t know how, but she did. She saw me, peaking though the blades of my blinds, two white eyes watching her. She walked to her window. Her room was not visible from the street or the side yard separating our houses, only my room could see into hers and hers into mine. If we were only closer in age maybe there would have been two tin cans attached on either end of a string strung between us. She stood, staring back into the darkness of my room. She said something and I thought for a second she was trying to tell me something, but she spoke over her shoulder then, yelling to someone else. She stepped away from the window and closed her bedroom door before returning to the window, sliding one strap of her bra off of her shoulder.

  I turned on the light in my room. No more hiding. I was fully clothed and standing like her at my window, staring back. I raised my hand. She reached down to her nightstand and turned off the light, leaving only the TV on behind her—a blue tinted glow. Her silhouette stood there in the backlit room, still and almost naked. Not in a sexual way, though, or at least it didn’t feel sexual at the time. It was more like she was educating me on how a woman’s body looked, like a specimen. She pushed the other strap off her shoulder, unclasped the bra with one hand, and held her other arm across her chest with the other. Her bra fell from her body to the floor and as fast as this was all happening, her blinds flicked shut. It was over.

  For the rest of the summer, I found myself sitting in front of my bedroom window, hoping that lightning would strike twice.

  I watched, and then waited to watch again, and that’s all that happened.

  5

  On my way to my first class, Algebra, I hear it. The word.

  Someone calls me a name. Someone else, or maybe the same person, I can’t be certain, grabs my book bag and yanks it the fuck down, forcing it to the ground. Someone kicks me in the back of my knees, snapping me shut like a metal folding chair. I hit the floor. Avoid them. Don’t look at them. Avert the eyes. Find some other focal point. My arm burns like it’s on fire, but no fire, no smoke, no burning flesh of any kind. Then I make out several voices, each saying that word, that one word that must either be the word of the day, or the word of the school, a word that St. John Baptist de La Salle, the Christian Brother who founded this LaSallian tradition of teaching delinquents and orphans, that St. John Baptist de La Salle himself would never, one hopes, have associated with his manner of education.

  This is the one word heard at every corner of this school, in every classroom of this school, at every moment that exists in this school.

  That word?

  Faggot.

  Yup.

  I’d be lying if I say I wasn’t surprised at the level of creativity and enthusiasm with which the word is used. It’s not mentioned anywhere in the admissions literature, but you’re a faggot the second you pass through the front doors of the building. Immediately faggotized. One can be a faggot for simply standing in the hallway. Or breathing. Or walking. Or watching. Or sorting through a backpack. Or answering a teacher’s question. Or turning in homework. Or answering a teacher’s question incorrectly. Or not turning in your homework.

  Fag.

  Faggot.

  Faggy.

  Fagboy.

  Fagbaby.

  Fagola.

  Fagina, like vagina.

  Faggotress, like princess except with the clever forgery of the word faggot as some kind of surprising and inspired prefix.

  These are the words that my attackers call me.

  The Plaids stand over me—six plaid motherfuckers, one wearing more than the next. One of them clears phlegm from his throat, sucking it back first, then pursing it out of his mouth. It forms, icicle-like, from his lips, slowly stretching down before snapping loose and landing on my chest. The other Plaids laugh and hit each other in the shoulders and arms like a family of Mongoloid monkeys when the spit hits my chest.

  “Fuck you, you motherfuckers,” I say, swinging my leg up in what I believe to be a roundhouse
kick. I haven’t the faintest idea what a roundhouse kick is supposed to look like. Mine looks totally sad and pathetic.

  They systematically and symmetrically attack.

  One of them grabs my arm.

  Another grabs my other arm.

  One guy grabs my leg.

  Another grabs my other leg.

  They lift me into the air above the hard floor, belly-up, like a coffin being carried out to the hearse. It feels like they are going to pull me apart limb by limb. I twist to break free, and their hands tighten around my wrists and ankles. I can’t see the faces but know everyone around me must be smiling their asses off at the freshman getting fucked up.

  I choke on the sickening stench of cologne wafting off them, rubbed into their faces and shirts and hands and arms. I know that I should be afraid or surprised, but somehow I knew this would happen. It was just a matter of time before the plaid douchebags caught up with me. I’m more embarrassed, I think, than anything else, knowing that everyone around me is watching. The more I think about being the centerpiece of dorkdom, the more my throat burns and I become angry and can taste rage rising up inside me.

  The fifth guy jerks my head up to face my feet—my legs each still held by a bitchass Plaid.

  The sixth guy, this beefy bitch with buzzed blond hair, whose neck is thicker than his goddamn head, steps between my legs which are spread apart like a wishbone. He leans over me, closing his eyes, almost sweetly, and inhales. He waves his hand over my junk, smelling my dick, bringing the scent to his nose, the way you do with burning chemicals in a science lab.

  Selective hearing. No audio. Silence. Peace. Tranquility. A meadow. No sound.

  “God, I love that smell. Smells like,” the beefy bitch says, staring into the distance, like a general surveying a battlefield. He says, “smells like freshman.”

  “Pussy,” another says.

  “Beaver,” another says.

  “Twat,” another says.

  “Cunt,” another says.

  “Snatch,” another says.

  Wow. We have a gaggle of thesaurus enthusiasts on our hands here. What original motherfuckers. If only I had a Minigun for a leg like Cherry Darling in Planet Terror, this would all be over. I’d mow them all down without even blinking.

  The five plaid monkeys drop me to the floor again. I land on my side. I lie there, experiencing the stillness and quiet. The floor is sticky and cold. Feet shuffle around me. Khaki-ed and corduroyed legs swing past. A fire alarm is on the wall, but no axe.

  I could pull the lever. I could sound the alarm. I could create a real chaos.

  The sixth plaid fuckface kicks my legs, bends over, and pulls off my shoes, throwing each in opposite directions. The plaid monkeys walk away like everyone else, goddamn guiltless and gutless, blending into the mass of sport coats and knots and off-colored khakis, jumping up on each other’s backs, slapping each other in the face, punching each other in the arm hard, screaming, “DEAD ARM.” The blond fuck turns around, walking backwards. He points at me, where I’m still lying on the floor. He smiles as another plaid monkey smashes into him, knocking him down the middle hallway.

  Brother Lee appears at the end of the hallway as the Plaids disappear. He narrows his eyes, then looks around for evidence, for someone to come forward with information, but my fellow faggots disperse. Not one faggot says a word. Like it never happened. Eyewitness amnesia. And this faggot takes the heat. Brother Lee snaps his fingers at me and I stand, still shoeless, like it never even happened. He shakes his head and taps his watch at me like he did with the girls from Prudence before he vanishes around the corner.

  Zombie Survival Code #3: Forget the past.

  6

  I gather my shoes from off the floor, ripped from my feet and chucked down the hallway, each shoe in a different direction. The piece of paper with my combination is gone, disappeared, nowhere to be found. I slide on my shoes and am now an official enemy of my locker.

  A half-eaten chocolate donut with rainbow sprinkles lowers into my sightline.

  “Chocolate-chocolate, chocolate-dipped donut? Best fucking thing in the world.”

  I decline.

  “Suit yourself,” he says, taking another bite. His pants are dark khakis, not plaid, and this somehow puts me at ease. “Shake it off,” he says. “They’re not worth it.” The kid is short, my height, with buzzed black hair. His face looks like a mountain—craggy nose, sharp chin, bulging eyes, big floppy ears. His thin black tie falls short to the middle of his chest, tied in a perfect Windsor knot. “Don’t take it personally.”

  “Hard to take it any other way,” I say.

  “They love to pick on freshman.” He jams the rest of the chocolate donut with chocolate icing and white sprinkles into his mouth and then speaks with his mouth full. “Cam Dillard and his Plaid Lackeys. They are the sad benchmark by which success is measured here at The Hall.”

  “Is it that obvious that I’m a freshman?”

  “Obvious as a sledgehammer, but don’t take it personally. All you need to do is see Cam and them dance and you’ll feel vindicated.” He does the robot dance. “They look retarded.”

  “I’d like to see that,” I say.

  “The first Hall mixer is in a few days,” he says. “They’ll be there in all their plaid glory. You have to come and see for yourself.”

  “Jocks?” I ask.

  “Something like that.” He looks away. “Varsity soccer.” Then slapping his chest, he says, “My name’s Ryan, but people call me Zink. I’m the human sieve also known as the varsity soccer goalie.”

  “Jock?” I ask.

  “Something like that.” Zink adjusts the weight of his book bag from one shoulder to another. “We’re teammates, not friends. Huge difference.” He extends his hand to me. “What’s your name, freshman?”

  “Jeremy,” I say, noticing the sweet perfection of his Windsor knot.

  We shake hands. Classroom doors slam shut in a staggered crescendo down the hallway. Bodies disappear. Lockers rest in their tiny frames. A short, fat, old man with thin, white hair appears. He wears a blue tracksuit and carries a clipboard. The hallway suddenly seems smaller.

  “Mr. Zinkle,” he barks.

  “Coach O’Bannon,” Zink says, startled to see this ogre of a man, this tree trunk of a dwarf, the only one not wearing a tie.

  “Are we lollygagging like a Miss Fairy Mary? Let’s get on to class.” He slaps the clipboard with his other hand and continues down the hallway.

  “Soccer coach?” I ask.

  “Cam and Coach and me—we’re one big happy family,” Zink says. “You got class?”

  “Algebra, supposedly,” I say. “You?”

  “Calculus waits for no man, Barks.” Zink adjusts his perfect Windsor knot. “How do I look?” he asks. He looks like he doesn’t necessarily belong at this school. A little too well dressed. A little too nice. A little too much of everything. “Smile, Barks. Keeps you looking fresh-faced and full of zest.”

  More guys pass by and knock into me, guys flowing in both directions, late to class, rushing, careless, dead to anyone else. I adjust my Limp Dick, and dust off the elbows of my sport coat. Blue feathers stick to the bottom of my shoes. When the hallway empties, I see my secret slip of paper, crumpled on the floor by a row of lockers, torn with only the last number left behind—1.

  I am spit-covered and sick.

  7

  The bathroom by the gym is quiet and empty, a perfect place to skip my first day of Algebra. Not even a leaky spigot drips in the background—the cliché of all high school bathroom clichés. The bathroom actually smells like it has recently been cleaned, maybe disinfected is the right word. An antiseptic smell holds the air hostage. The stall walls crack unfunny mother jokes back at me. Swear words angle and curve around diagrams of drug use. Stick-figure illustrations of sexual positions fill the space between. According to my stall, my mother, as in the universal usage of your mother, sucks semen through a straw. This particular message is a
ccompanied by an interesting illustration that looks less like the image and more like a walrus with a party hat. The creativity and artistry signal a higher calling—a prison-wall scribe, a graffiti tagger.

  The bathroom door squeaks open as feet shuffle across the tile. Whispers spit from lips, eager and immediate. I lift my feet from the floor to the toilet seat and hug my knees to my chest.

  “Check the stalls,” a guy says.

  “No one’s here, Paul,” the other guy says in a deeper voice.

  “Please.”

  The first stall door slams opens. Whether the door was pushed or kicked, I can’t tell, but judging by the force, the heavy sound, I’d say kicked. With aggression. The second door slams open. Followed by the third.

  “See,” the other guy says. “Nothing.”

  “Don’t forget to check the last stall.”

  “You’re so paranoid.”

  “I’ll feel better once I lock this door.” Then, a loud click echoes as the bathroom door locks into place.

  Class, please note, the following will be on the final exam. This situation is not only theoretically, but also technically referred to as being fucked. This is not to be confused with getting fucked.

  A hand grips the top of my stall and pushes it open, but not all the way and the guy never looks in. He walks back across the bathroom.

  “Paul?” he says.

  Paul shushes him.

  “Paul?” he says softer.

  “What?”

  “How was your summer?”

  “Not long enough,” Paul says.

  “Go on any trips?”