“Driver?”
His shoulders kind of hunch when he hears my voice through the open partition that separates us. He hasn’t quite gotten used to driving a zombie around yet.
“Sir?” His voice is as hoarse as mine, but not from decades of drying vocal chords or even years of not speaking to another living – or un-living – soul. I can smell the smoke stained into his clothes from way in the backseat.
“Can you… can you pull into that diner up on the right?”
He flashes me a look, half-impatient, half-relieved, in the rearview mirror.
Next to me, so close she’s practically on my lap, Cara’s hand digs into my own. It’s soft and warm against my undead skin.
“Sir?” asks the driver.
“Rex?” asks Cara.
“Trust me,” I tell them both, without looking at either.
Cara sits up straighter. “Rex, honey?”
She looks perturbed, her long, oval face downcast as the running lights inside the white stretch limo reflect off her dark brown eyes. They’re accented tonight with just the right amount of dark eye shadow to match her maroon lip gloss, which of course matches her short maroon dress. “We’re gonna be late.”
The driver gives me one last look before hitting the blinker. I nod and on it goes.
Cara says no more, but shifts away on the seat until there is enough space for another person between us.
The diner is called, simply, “Dave’s” and we’re right on time. I look around, figuring Chester might be the kind of nervous dude who shows up an hour early, just to ruin all my hard work this week, but there’s no sign of his dilapidated bike anywhere.
So far, so good.
The car stops in front of the curb and the driver gets out, opening Cara’s door. She slides from the car reluctantly, but I’m already on the curb and in front of the diner.
She looks at it, face crumpling from the other side of the limo. It’s like she doesn’t want to get too far from the car, in case she might never see it again. As if her entire senior prom is attached to the cheesy white stretch and, if it leaves, everything goes with it.
Her voice is sad and soft, which it gets sometimes right before it gets hoarse with rage. “I thought… I thought we were going to Garibaldi’s Trattoria downtown?”
I shrug. “We will, I just… indulge me, all right?”
She frowns at the limo driver, a middle aged guy with white hair already. He nods and gently shuts the door as she walks over to me, awkward in her high black heels. Even before I turn to the door, I hear the flick of the driver’s lighter.
There is a bell over the diner door that chimes when I open it. Cara walks in, already frowning.
A waitress, a fellow Shuffler, croaks without looking up from the cash register, “Find a seat wherever you like.”
It shouldn’t be hard. It’s prom night, and the place is practically deserted. I head for a booth in the back and Cara follows. She goes to sit along the wall, in the seat facing the door, but I don’t want her to see Chester until after I’ve had a chance to explain.
I beat her to the seat, not the easiest thing to do when your prom date is the captain of the girls’ volleyball team, and when she gets cute and tries to slink beside me, I kind of linger at the edge of the booth and say, “We should probably talk face to face for a change.”
I’ve never been a booth-sharer and she is and this is as good a time as any, I suppose, to break her from the habit.
She harrumphs down across from me, slamming her little black clamshell shaped purse on the pink paper placemat. “So far, by the way, you’re sucking the life out of my prom. I just wanted you to know.”
My ears perk up. “That’s why we’re here, actually.”
“Yeah, like I said, to suck the life out of my prom.”
“Well, Cara, it’s more like… to derail your prom.”
She rolls her eyes, not getting it. “God, I hate when you get all philosophical.”
The waitress shuffles over, two greasy menus in hand. She kind of ignores me and focuses on Cara. “What can I get you to drink, Hon? Ooohh, I love the dress.”
Cara brightens. She’s sensitive about her muscular arms and legs and went back and forth, for weeks, about wearing such a revealing dress.
Cara goes into instant “girly” mode. “You think? It’s not too much?”
The Shuffler – her nametag says “VERA” in all capital letters – waves a pen in solidarity. “From what most girls wear these days, honey? It’s downright demure.”
Cara snuggles into the back of her booth with satisfaction. “Thanks! I’ll have a coffee, I guess.” Then she leans into Vera and adds, “I hope we’re not staying long enough for dinner.”
Well, I think but don’t say, you’re not, anyway.
“Same for me,” I add. Vera nods and turns toward the cash register with a quick wink to Cara.
It’s like that, between zombies. There’s this kind of begrudging acceptance of each other, but we’re all too self-conscious about actually being one to, you know, associate with one another.
At school, it’s the same. There are maybe a dozen zombies at Nightshade High, under the Undead Education Act of 2017, and I know them all but rarely hang out with any.
Cara fiddles with her hair nervously, looks at her reflection in the giant plate glass window beside her. Her first reaction is to frown, but I think she’s beautiful. Always have, and not just because her flesh is soft and warm.
“So, Rex, why are we here?”
She fiddles with the strap of her purse, which is like little black chain link or something, and makes rasping sounds across the chipped linoleum table top the whole time.
“I, well, I guess I’ll just come right out and say it: I can’t go to prom with you.”
She shakes her head, not taking me seriously; again. “This again? Dude, I told you, you won’t be the only zombie there. There are, like, four or five of you going this year.”
“It’s not that, Cara.”
“Then what is it?” Her eyes are hopeful, not believing me, not wanting to believe me.
“Cara, you knew when we hooked up that I was… different.”
She looks at my gray skin, my dark eyes, the rented tux bagging off my bony body and says, eyes sarcastically round, “You don’t say?”
I shake my head. “I mean, that there was more between us than just me being undead.”
She shoots a frustrated sigh out of her barely parted lips, the kind that flip up her short bangs. “So far, there’s been nothing between us.” She says it with the same air of frustration she always does.
“Yeah, that’s my point. Even though it may be legal now, it’s just not… natural… for us to be together.”
“So why did you say ‘yes’ then, Rex? I mean, we’re here, the dress, the tux, the limo. You just spent forty-five minutes posing for pictures with my family, and were delightfully charming the whole time. Then, the minute we get around the block, you drag me into this—”
Suddenly Vera shuffles into view, silencing Cara as she deposits two cups of coffee in front of us. From the crook of one finger materializes a dented can of creamer. “Sugar’s on the table,” she says, mostly to Cara. “Help yourself.”
“Yourself.” Not, “yourselves.”
I sigh and use neither; it just upsets my stomach anyway.
Cara uses both, because she’s nervous and probably hasn’t eaten all day to fit into that dress and wants something to do with her hands, probably, instead of wrap them around my neck.
She sips it, twice, to make sure it’s good and then looks back across the table at me. “So, what is this? You’re breaking up with me? Tonight?”
I shrug. She doesn’t expect a non-answer.
“What?” She puts her coffee cup down with a clatter that sends a few creamy brown drops spilling over into the saucer. “You are?”
“I’m not breaking up with you, Cara. I’m just… I can’t take you to prom
.”
She clinks her spoon and straightens her placemat and a little more coffee sloshes into her saucer. “When… when did you decide this?”
“Last week.”
She looks like she’s been punched. I look away.
“And you’re just telling me now?”
“I’m sorry, Cara. This isn’t easy.”
She huffs. “For you? Sure it is.”
“No, it isn’t. But I can’t do this anymore. I can’t… I can’t go to another prom.”
“So you went last year, big deal.”
I give her my shocked face. She gives me her sarcastic face. “Cara, just how long do you think I’ve been re-alive?”
She looks me up and down. “Awhile.”
“You’re not curious? How long I’ve been like this?”
She shrugs. “I just assumed it happened in the Outbreak of 2015? Or maybe the one a few years before that?”
“I wish,” I sigh, and for once I truly mean it. Oh, to only be a few years re-old rather than a few decades reanimated.
“So, just… how old are you?” Her voice is hesitant, her fingers frozen on either side of her coffee cup. I like her new shade of maroon nail polish. I should have told her that earlier, before all… this.
Now I’ll never get the chance.
“You don’t want to know.”
Her voice cracks a little, and if my heart wasn’t already as dried out and twisted as a sock you find in the back of the dryer, it would twist a little more. “Yeah, if you’re dropping out of prom, I want to know.”
I sigh. “You know Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Slayer?”
Her face gets that crumply look again. “Yeah.”
“Well, let’s just say I knew him back when he was Abraham Lincoln, Diaper Defiler.”
“That’s not funny, Rex.”
“I know it’s not.”
She sags at the shoulders, like all the energy’s just gone out of her. She looked the same when I stumbled into Detention a few months back. Dean Mortimer wasn’t there yet, and we were the only two “sentenced” for the afternoon, so I sat a few chairs away, just in case she was anti-Shuffler.
You never know how a mortal will react, especially a pretty, popular one like Cara Fleming. Ace yearbook photographer. Captain of the girls’ volleyball team. Probably headed to State, or better, on an athletic scholarship. Or an academic one; take your pick since, no doubt, she’d qualify for both. You know the type. Not exactly fall-in-love-with-a-zombie material, if you know what I mean.
She sniffed a little after a minute or two, to let me know it was okay to break the ice. I took one look at her and said, “What are you in for?”
She snorted. It sounded so kind and generous and embarrassed and angry at the same time. It was hard to concentrate on what she was saying, but it must have happened in practice because she still had her little white volleyball shorts on, and one of her shin guards was missing, and her sleeves were rolled up and her tan skin looked so young and supple.
She said, she actually said, “Hello, my eyes are up here,” but in a weird way, like maybe she didn’t mind if my mind was dining on her flesh.
I looked away and put a hand over my face. She seemed to like that. The Dean never showed up, and we could have left at any time, but we sat there, just talking. Talking, talking, until Detention was supposed to be over. Then we talked for twenty minutes more.
I walked her home because she’d missed her ride. She asked me in, said her Mom wasn’t home, but I declined. It was a short walk back to school, where I had my bike. I asked her, instead, if maybe she’d like me to walk her to school the next day. She thought for a minute and then nodded before shutting the door, quick, before she could change her mind.
I thought it might be awkward the next morning, like maybe she’d regret agreeing to it but do it anyway, out of guilt, but no. She came out of the door with two bananas, and handed me one. When I told her I couldn’t eat human food, she blushed and tossed them both in the nearest bush.
It picked up right where we’d left off the day before, and we started hanging on the regular. A month or so later, she asked me to prom. It was senior year, she said. She hadn’t gone steady with anyone for months, she said. I’d look good in a tux, she said.
Really good, she said. (And I had to agree; tuxedos are about the only things we zombies look good in. Even girl Shufflers. It’s a true fact.)
So I agreed. But now, now… I’ve done this so many times, and it’s not right. I just can’t do it anymore.
“Don’t you see?” I ask. “I’m way older than you. I’m… I’m ancient. It would be like you going to prom with one of your friend’s dads or something.”
“Yeah,” she jokes hopefully. “But not like one of my friend’s granddads, right?”
“No,” I admit, “but… do you even want to get close to going there?”
She looks at me closely then, and I can feel her doing the math as she scans the lines on my face, the toughness of the skin at my throat. Still, after all that, the twinkle in her eyes doesn’t really diminish.
“This should be your night, Cara. A night to hang out with friends your age. With a guy your age.”
“No one else will go with me,” she admits, then quickly catches herself. “You know what I mean. I didn’t ask anybody else, is what I mean. I like this. I like us. I want to go with you. You’re the boy I want to spend this night with, Rex.”
She reaches over and touches my hand. It’s never bothered her, ever, the temperature of my skin. Not now, not that one time last week when we finally kissed, under the bleachers after she snuck out of Home Ec to meet me. It was stupid, I know, to lead her on, but her lips. I dare you to look at those lips, dead or alive, and not want to kiss them.
And that was when I knew I couldn’t go to prom with her. The minute after we kissed. Someone, someone human should be enjoying those lips, and she should be enjoying some human’s.
“That’s just it,” I growl, in a way I rarely do around her. “I’m not a boy.”
Her hand clenches mine even harder. “That’s what I like about you, Rex. You’re not a boy.”
The bell over the door dings and the waitress looks up. She blinks twice at the tall, goofy guy in the powder blue tuxedo I lent him.
He looks up at me and I motion he should sit at the empty counter. He nods, apples in his cheeks, the dewy look of sweat on his forehead, just beneath his chestnut brown curls.
“I’m not going to rob you of your senior prom, Cara. I may be one of the living dead, but I’m not a total dick.”
“Oh really?”
“Yeah, really.”
“So, then, tell me… how is you standing me up at the last minute not, like, the most dickish move ever?”
“Because. Because… I found you a replacement.”
Her eyes narrow, her shoulders tense. “How’s that?”
I sit up a little straighter and grip her hand. She only pulls back, a little. “Do you trust me?”
Her voice sounds hurt and her eyes get a little misty. “I thought I did.”
“Listen, forget tonight. Did you trust me this morning?”
She pauses, nods. “Yes.”
“So trust me now. I found you a replacement, and though you may not swoon when you hear who it is, you have to trust me that, if you open yourself up to it, you will have an awesome night if you go with this guy.”
“That is probably the worst introduction I’ve ever heard. He must have three heads or something.”
I watch Chester Poindexter dump too much sugar in his coffee. “Not quite, but… I know you, Cara. I know the you inside of you. I know how important it is to spend prom night with someone who is absolutely in love with you.”
“Unlike you, you mean?”
“You know how I feel, Cara. I mean, mortal love. I mean, same age as you love; physical love. And trust me, this guy loves you intensely.”
“What guy, Rex? What guy?”
I pause
. Humans don’t scare me often, at least unless they have direct access to a chainsaw, flamethrower or bazooka, but the shrieks of a disappointed girl are nothing to sneeze at. “Before I tell you, you have to promise not to scream.”
“Oh my God!” I can hear Chester’s coffee cup clatter against his saucer from five booths away. “Who did you get to replace you, Rex? My Dad? Coach Wannamaker? That one janitor with the boil on the end of his nose?”
“No, no, it’s nothing like that.” I lean over the booth to shoosh her. “It’s just, he’s not the captain of the football team or that foreign exchange student I see you drooling over at B Lunch.”
“You saw that?”
“I’m undead, Cara, not blind.”
Even now, even after all I’ve said to her, she looks contrite. “Oh, sorry.”
“That’s just it, Cara. You need a living boy, a human boy, a boy-boy, to share this night with you. I can’t rob another teenage girl of one of the most important nights of her life.”
“Okay, so, if I can’t go with you, and it IS so important, then… why not replace yourself with the captain of the football team or that juicy foreign exchange student. I mean, do a girl a solid why don’t you?”
“Juicy? Really?”
She’s losing her patience. “Just answer the question, Rex.”
“Because those guys aren’t for you, Cara. Those guys will want just one thing from tonight, and even if you do, too, the guy I replaced myself with is a whole lot better. For you.”
She rolls her eyes. “What’s wrong with you? Who are you looking at back there? Why do you…” She gets it; suddenly and blindingly. Her date – her prom date – is behind her. “Oh God, he’s already here, isn’t he?”
“Please don’t turn around yet—”
It’s too late. She turns, spots Chester and then turns right back around. Fortunately, he was wiping coffee off of his boutonniere so he didn’t see her panicked reaction.
Now it’s Cara’s turn to lean over the table. “Chester? Chester Poindexter? Even his name is a joke! Are you kidding me? That’s who I’m supposed to spend prom with?”
“You have to trust me, Cara.”
“Why? How? In what universe is spending prom with Chester – Chester! – supposed to complete my life?”
She picks her coffee cup up and then puts it down nervously. Then picks it up again, holds it in front of her mouth. She’s been twisting it around in its saucer while we talk, and now the lipstick stain is facing me.
“I asked you to trust me.”
She opens her mouth to fight, to fuss, but shuts it again; nods, somberly. “Okay, I will.”
I don’t expect that. Not. At. All. I start to ramble, suddenly, inexplicably, stupidly: “I sit behind him in art. He draws you, constantly. Not in that gross way some guys will, all half-naked in armor riding a giant dragon between your legs, but your face. He gets it right, too, like he’s really studied it. The wisps of your hair, tucked behind your ears. The way your eyes get big when you’re excited, the shade of your favorite lipstick.”
I can see her eyes softening even as she shakes her head. “And he’s funny,” I blurt, as if running out of time. “I sit a table away from him in B-Lunch and hear him with his friends.”
“Friends? Why don’t you call it what it is, Rex: The daily meeting of the Nerds Who Think ‘Revenge of the Nerds’ is a Rocky Movie Society?”
I snort. “Okay, but… so what? While he’s with his… friends… he’s funny, the funniest of that group.”
“That’s like saying he’s the cutest one in that group.”
“Well, he is.”
She frowns, then slides her cup toward the edge of her stained placemat. I go to speak more, to defend Chester more. To tell her about his gentle brown fingers when he sketches her, that time I followed him home from school and watched how he took care of his grandmother, made her dinner, wheeled her in front of the TV. How he lost his parents in the first infestation. How he lives in a crappy neighborhood. Rides a crappy bike to school, the works.
But she is already opening her compact, looking at it, sliding a wisp of hair behind her ear, reapplying makeup, sucking in her cheeks, letting them out with a sigh of minty fresh breath.
“Okay, Rex,” she says with finality, standing up and smoothing down her snug maroon dress. I stare at her black stockings, the tall shoes, her legs for miles and there is suddenly a wisp of regret shuddering through my dried, cracking veins. “You asked me to trust you, so I’m going to trust you.”
I look up, catch her eye. “And… and you’re going to have a nice time?”
She looks away from me, toward Chester. I turn slightly and follow her gaze. Chester sees her, eyes getting all buggy, and stands, wiping his sweaty palms on the sides of his light blue dress pants. He smiles, that gentle smile I’ve been studying for days.
I turn back and watch Cara blush. She turns back to me. “I’m going to give it my best, Rex.”
She takes a step forward, away from me, toward him. Her heels are loud and cold on the tile floor. Then she turns, leans back. “I’m going to try and enjoy myself, and then we’re never going to speak again.”
“Wait, what?” I rise to stand and she smirks, gently pushing me back into my seat.
“What’d you think was going to happen, Rex? I’ve been looking forward to this night for weeks, months even. You dump me at the last minute, replace yourself with some guy I barely know and, what? We’re going to talk about it tomorrow like a couple of BFFs? Not gonna happen…”
I nod, suddenly jealous. I listen to her heels clap on the tiles, listen to Chester’s coffee cup clatter as he stands, listening to his voice crack as he says, “H-h-h-i Cara.”
Hers is smoother. “Hi Chester. Thanks… thanks for being my date at the last minute.”
There is an awkward pause where I swear I can hear Chester’s eyelashes trembling, then the chime of the bell over the door. I turn toward the plate glass window at my side and see Chester open the back door of the limo for her. I smile to see the expression on his smooth, brown face. It’s like he can’t decide which to be more jazzed about: an actual limo or him holding a limo door open for Cara Wells.
THE Cara Wells.
She smiles at the gesture, making me regret that I didn’t do the same earlier tonight when I had the chance. Chester helps her inside, his smile wide and anxious with the mere touch of her hand. When the last of her heel disappears inside, he turns to find me looking at him.
He nods and does one of his gentle, bashful waves. Then nods again, then turns and slides inside quickly, as if I might change my mind and reveal this has all been some cruel, practical joke.
I watch the limo peel away from the curb, then sit in absolute silence. No, that’s not quite right. With Cara gone, I can suddenly hear the soft music playing overhead. Something instrumental, a guitar maybe. Something by the Beatles? The Stones?
Soft shoes walk over and the waitress slides the light blue “Zombies Only” menu in front of me. I sit back and loosen my stiff, black bowtie.
“What’s good?” I ask.
Her zombie eyes stare back, gray and soft. “The brain smoothie’s on special,” she says, voice hoarse, pen poised in her grayish-green fingers.
I smirk. “Yeah, but is it good?”
She shrugs, looks busy. Uninterested. “It’s mostly scraps.”
I think of the hundred bucks I’d given Chester, to show Cara a good time. It left me mostly broke until the government sends me my monthly allowance check next week. “Sounds good to me.”
She nods, writes it down out of habit. “Prom night?”
I finish undoing my tie. “How’d you guess?”
Another shrug. “You’re throwing in the towel, huh?”
I look up with a questioning glance. She’s been background noise for most of the evening, but now I take a closer look. She’s young. By that I mean, she can pass for young. No zombie is young, even a new one. But they look like their age w
hen they died, for the most part. And they look that way forever.
She was probably reanimated in her early 30s. Maybe even her late 20s.
“Towel?”
She waves a dish rag at my tux, so crisp and polished and new. “Giving up on proms,” she explains.
“I guess.”
She nods. “How many you been to, all told?”
“Two while I was alive, almost thirty since I’ve been dead.”
“That why you broke up with the little hottie there? Sent her off with a living date?”
I shrug. “Pretty much.”
She nods, but doesn’t go anywhere. So I ask, “You think it was the right decision?”
“Doesn’t matter what I think, prom boy.”
Then she stands and starts away. She stops, leans back in. “But I’ll put it this way: your brain smoothie’s on me, just because.”
I smile, then slide out of my jacket. I take out my cell phone, expecting a text from Cara any minute. Something rueful and sarcastic, like, “Thnx!” or “Booooring,” but nothing comes.
Not then, not after Vera brings me my brain smoothie, not after she takes it away, not when the diner is closing and Vera gently, with a smile, tells me I don’t have to go home but I can’t stay there any longer.
I walk home, checking the cell phone every few minutes. Nothing. I think about walking out to the school, peeking in the gym all duded up for prom. I don’t sleep, not really, and walking a few miles or more a day is nothing when you can’t really feel your legs, but I decide against it.
I’ve made my bed, now I have to lie in it. I just hope I’ve made the right choice for Cara, and that Chester isn’t disappointed by going on a date with the girl of his dreams.
I don’t think he will be. He strikes me as the kind of guy that even if he is disappointed, even if Cara dumps him and runs off with her friends to cry in the punch bowl – which I don’t think she’ll do – he’d still sketch pictures of her in Art Class on Monday morning.
At least, I hope so anyway…