He shows up just after Art Class, lingering at the door, looking down at his feet as the Normals flood past. Flood? These days, it’s more like a trickle. Still, there are just enough humans left to throw him a quick elbow on the way out the door.
The Art Teacher, a skinny hipster dude named Flynn – no “Mr.,” no first name, just “Flynn” – looks up from his pin-covered messenger bag and says, “Looks like your not-so-secret admirer’s back.”
Just like that; right in front of him. Flynn hustles out of the room and, only when it’s safe, when it’s just me sitting there, does the zombie walk in. Sorry, what’s it they liked to be called now? Oh, right; Shufflers. The Shuffler shuffles in.
His voice is dry and husky. Not sexy husky, like in a cologne ad, but corn husk husky; dry and papery and thin. I stifle a shiver. “Hi Sara.”
He wears a nametag; they all do. Ever since the Reanimation Reform School Act of 2017, letting zombies back in school, they’ve had standard uniforms and nametags. It’s even got an official bar code at the bottom. Just above that, it says, “Zed.” But that’s not his name. That’s not his real name.
“Hi Zed. How was school today?”
He shrugs, the rough fabric of his pale blue uniform scratching against his broad shoulders. It’s like a cotton track suit thingie, pale blue, with white stripes down the sides of the arms and legs. He’s tall and thin, so the cuffs of his sleeves stop just above the bony part of his wrist and his pants legs reveal the stiff white tube socks he wears inside his generic black Value Mart sneakers.
His real name is Brody, and we dated for most of freshman year. He was the cutest boy I ever dated. Not the cutest boy ever, but definitely the cutest boy I ever dated. (Out of three, ever, so… do with that what you will.) I felt so lucky to have him; all my girlfriends told me so.
He was tall and strapping, then, a kicker for the JV football team, starting forward in basketball, swam backstroke for the swim team, the whole ball of jockstrap wax. He wore tracks pants exclusively, navy blue or garnet or black with white stripes up the side, so this look isn’t completely different, but surreal knowing what’s happened in the world, and not just our world, since freshman year.
He was a fan of soft, thin ironic T-shirts that clung to his chest. My favorite was the one with the gingerbread man who had a broken leg, shouting “Oh Snap!” in one of those white cartoon bubbles over his head. He wore it every Monday, he said, just for me.
We broke up when I dropped my favorite journaling pen under my BFF Mindy’s bed during a Saturday night sleepover. He hadn’t worn his “Oh, Snap!” shirt in awhile and when I asked him why, he said he’d left it in a locker and needed to wash it first.
Instead, I found it curled up in a ball under Mindy’s bed.
I didn’t show it to her. She was downstairs making Bagel Bites at the time. I just spritzed it with an ounce of Mindy’s trademark Eau De Tramp perfume, shoved it in my messenger bag and, when I saw him the following Monday, tossed it at his stupid, big, fat jock head.
“Mindy thought you might like this back,” I said with a trembling voice nowhere near as cool as it had sounded when I’d practiced it three times in the student parking lot that morning.
He looked at the shirt, looked at me, blinked twice and shoved it in his locker. Then he turned around and sauntered into homeroom.
We never spoke again.
That is, until he showed up after Art Class last week, completely clueless, wearing his light blue uniform and asking me to help him make a Valentine’s Day card for April Patterson.
“Brody?” I’d said, hardly believing he’d survived not one, not two, but three zombie outbreaks in the last two years.
He hadn’t come back to school the year before, so I figured the Shufflers had gotten him, like most of the rest of the football or swim or basketball team.
But there he was, big as life. And here he is, sliding into the chair across from me, slinking the generic red book bag off his back and onto the desk in front of him.
It’s a kid’s book bag, like you’d get a preschooler, with little yellow busses and green apples and baseballs all over it. I can tell just from the way it sags on the desk it’s mostly empty, but not quite. He unzips it, carefully, with his long gray fingers.
I watch him as he roots around inside. His black hair is cut close to his skull, now. It was once curly, almost bushy. I used to love to run my hands through it. His face was never fat, but it was always full and now it’s gaunt, his cheeks so hollow they cast their own shadows. His gray skin is tight so that his eyes are a little bulgy and, when he smiles, he is all yellow teeth and white gums and cold air.
“See,” he croaks, sliding the last few Valentines I did for him. He has this expression on his face, like a kindergartner handing over his drawings and hoping you won’t laugh at them. “Will you help me?”
I roll my eyes. “Zed, we’re running out of girls’ names here.”
I sound madder than I really am, because maybe I’m a little – okay, a lot – jealous. I know the Shufflers aren’t supposed to remember anything before they turn but, really?
Okay, so I don’t expect him to remember all our Sunday night cuddles or dinner and a movie date nights or secret names for each other, but… does he have to ask me to make him a Valentine’s Day card for every other Normal girl left at Nightshade High?
And who even does that anymore, right? Makes, or even gives, girls Valentine’s Day cards? Shufflers, that’s who. After the Angry Phase, which the government discovered lasts exactly 19 days, if they’re fed brains regularly, the Shufflers are docile, manageable, even educable. But they’re, like, permanent fifth graders, always wanting candy – zombies are freak addicted to sugar, FYI – and clutching to their random red backpacks and sending grown girls Valentine’s Day cards.
Forget that Sandy and Brie and Val and every other chick he’s had me make cards for all week will just laugh in his face, tear them up and toss them at his feet tomorrow when he hands them all out, how about he asks me to make one for, well… me?
“Who’s today’s victim?” I ask, pulling some scrap construction paper, scissors and glue from the supply closet behind me. He watches me with a funny, uncomprehending face as I walk back to our little cluster of desks. “I mean, who’s the lucky girl?”
His face brightens. At least, as much as it can these days. “Becky.”
“Becky Simpson?” I ask, picturing the redhead with the braces who was actually first to sign the “Anti-Shuffler” petition after the government passed the Reanimation Reform School Bill. “How well do you know Becky Simpson?”
He nods, analyzing the other three cards I’ve already made him. There is an innocent quality to him now, a sadness about his face, an emptiness in his eyes that makes me wish I’d taken it easier on him after the “Mindy Incident,” as it was known forever after. (By me, anyway.)
I know, I know, no reason to forgive the cheating dog, but it would be nice if my last memory of him – alive, anyway – wasn’t the back of his curly black head as he slammed that locker and broke my heart.
We sit quietly in the empty classroom, listening to the end of day sounds as they drift away in the halls. The school empties quickly these days. It’s a ghost school, really.
Half of the students at Nightshade High never made it through the first two outbreaks and, by the time they’d re-opened school after the third and hopefully final outbreak last year, three-fourths were gone.
Teachers, too. Now pretty much if you’re an adult without a criminal record – and I’m not even sure how thorough they are about checking that lately – who can count to ten, you can teach at Nightshade High.
Take our Art Teacher, Flynn, for example. I think his only qualification for teaching Art is reading tattoo magazines behind his Teacher’s Manual while he sits at his desk, feet up, every period.
And I know for a fact that our gym teacher, Mrs. Crueller, smokes three packs a day. One pack in front of us, and
two on her many, many breaks. Still, it’s better than staying at the women’s shelter where most of us Zorphans – orphans via zombie attack = “Zorphans” – were forced to stay once the government came in and found that most of us were living in parentless homes.
The Shelter is an old hotel downtown, and I bunk with three other chicks, two of which are going to community college and one of which never leaves the room. I spend a lot of time in the lounge downstairs, watching bad game show reruns or walking the streets until curfew every night.
Still, it’s better than the Detention Center where “Zed” and the other school-age zombies live. At least we have bad game show re-runs and a chance to get outdoors. Those guys are on lock-down whenever they’re not in school. No wonder so many of them came back, despite not being able to read, mostly, or write, hardly.
Zed/Brody watches carefully as I cut out a red heart and paste it to a full sheet of pink paper. I draw little frills in silver glitter pen around the heart, and then a simple message inside: “Will you be mine?”
I don’t sign it, because I’m hoping to convince Zed to just slip the Valentines in the girls’ lockers and deliver them anonymously, thus saving major face, tons of embarrassment and, if the chicks’ boyfriends find out, a major butt kicking.
When I’m done, I drizzle out some plain white glue from a tube and then sprinkle red and silver and gold glitter over it. Zed always likes this part the best; I can see his eyes light up even as I reach for the tubes of glitter.
I almost hate to finish, because I know then that he has to go back to his world and I have to go back to mine. I look at it carefully before handing it over, teasing out the moment. What I’m really doing is looking out from behind the card at his eyes. They are most gentle and kind when waiting, when sitting silently, when they are dark but soft.
Then I hand the card over and he smiles, with yellow teeth and a white tongue, sliding the card roughly on top of the others. There are kiddy scissors in a little glass jar in the middle of every art table, and Zed points at them.
“Can I… borrow one?”
I shake my head immediately. Every day it’s drummed into us how much trouble we’ll be in if we “aid or abet” any of the Shufflers in hurting a Normal, or human, person. We’re talking, like, getting kicked out of school, banned from college, even jail time.
“The guards don’t search me anymore,” he whines in his croaky voice.
“So what if they get a wild hair and decide to today of all days?”
He shakes his head. “They won’t.”
I stop, look from the jar to his crinkled face. “Why do you need them? I mean, I can change whatever you want on those cards right here, right now?”
He shrugs and sounds the least bit defensive. “I’d like to do some of it myself.”
I roll my eyes. The thought of Zed making his own Valentine’s Day card is almost more than I can bear. Who knows, maybe it’ll save him some grief when he shows up tomorrow with a bunch of scrap paper, and can’t tell who to give them to anymore.
Before I can change my mind, I take a pair out of the jar and slide them over. Right away he puts them in the zipper pocket of his backpack but I say, “Not there, in your pants.”
“But I might cut myself,” he says, automatically, but it’s only his Normal brain talking. We both know he can’t feel any pain. “Oh yeah…” He puts them in his waistband and smiles, standing up and turning without another word.
The Art Room feels empty without him, and I listen to Zed/Brody pad down the hall in his squeaky, generic sneakers. I start worrying about the scissors and, to cover my tracks, take a pair out of another table’s jar and put them in mine.
I leave the school, noting the Sentinels standing guard out front in their lethal black uniforms and crisp berets. They eye me angrily as I tighten the straps of my backpack and start the long walk home.
The acrid smell of smoke greets my nose, a familiar friend on these quiet, solitary afternoons. One by one they are burning down the old houses, even the ones that are perfectly habitable. It’s cheaper than demolishing them, and safer than letting families move back in when there might be one of the Abandoned lurking in the basement, or the attic, or some crawlspace or laundry hamper.
The Shufflers get fed government approved, medically removed brains on the regular, but the zombies who didn’t get caught in the round-ups after each outbreak, the “Abandoned” as they’re called, have been known to last weeks, even months, sucking the brains out of rats and squirrels and even pigeons and doves as they lurk in the hundreds of empty homes left behind by those who didn’t make it. Or, like me, those who did make it but weren’t allowed to return home without another living family member present.