Bonnie looked at the detention slip in her hand and made a small, slight, “tssking” sound with her tongue. She hated detention with a passion, but she just couldn’t manage to stay out of trouble.
Maybe it was because she was bored with school, or just Catfish Cove High school, or maybe just plain Catfish Cove.
The detention slip was crinkled and worn, no surprise there since she got it all the way back in homeroom when Jeremy Chippendale kept tapping her on the shoulder. Was it her fault she turned around and smacked him in the ear? Wouldn’t YOU?
Of course, her teacher Mr. Whiffle yanked off another pink detention form from his dwindling pad, scribbled in Bonnie’s name without even looking down and handed it to her with that smug, self-satisfied smile of his.
“I should just get a rubber stamp made, Bonnie,” he joked to the enjoyment of the entire class, “save me the strain of having to fill so many of these out.” As if to emphasize how much of a loser she was, Mr. Whiffle waved his hand in the air like it was sprained or something.
At the time, Bonnie’s face had flared red. She blushed now, just thinking about it. Stupid Mr. Whiffle and his stupid detention pad and stupid Jeremy Chippendale with his stupid pencil that loved to tap on her shoulder until he finally got a rise out of her.
Why didn’t HE ever get detention?
The Detention Room was up the hall and to the left, but she lingered in the hallway as other students grabbed their backpacks and folders and headed for the bus loop or student parking lot.
They swirled around her like cattle in a stampede, bustling and pushing and shoving and shouting and texting and spilling out of the school as she stood there, left behind as usual.
She was hungry and tired and there were about a bazillion better things she could be doing rather than listening to Dean Winters rattle on for 20 minutes about the rules for Detention.
She shivered just thinking about it, leaning down to grab a sip of water from the fountain at the end of C-Wing. She was just standing there, taking a drink, when someone bumped into her from behind. She nearly chipped her front tooth on the faucet and turned, cursing, to find a tall, skinny dude shuffling away.
“Hey,” she cried out, touching her lip gingerly with her fingers. Already she could tell it was getting puffy and, when she pulled her finger back, there was blood.
Blood. Actual blood.
HER blood!
The dude kept walking but she followed, a few steps behind, quickly catching up as the dude lurched forward like he was sick or something.
“Hey, creep!” she shouted, blood still sticky – HER blood – on the tip of her finger. “Look where you’re going.”
He stopped, cocked his head, and gradually turned. Slowly, so slowly. She just wanted to shake him and yank him around, but he looked… odd. Off, or something. She didn’t dare touch him.
And when at last he’d turned to face her, Bonnie froze in place. His skin was gray and there was a smear on his chin that could have been blood. No, no, it had to be blood. What else could it be?
His eyes were hooded and yellow and his nostrils flared as he sniffed her from three feet away. He looked bigger now than he had from behind, bigger and grayer and uglier and meaner.
The fight went out of her, quickly, all those recent headlines about zombie infestations at schools all over the country filling her head. Hadn’t there been one in North Carolina last month? And, what, South Carolina last week? Those both seemed so distant but now, staring at this gray, hulking, blood-on-his-chin creep, they didn’t seem so far away at all.
She fumbled in her purse, backing up step by step as he stood there, tall and gray and sniffing. Sniffing, sniffing her, like she was something good and ripe and smart to eat.
She found a ballpoint pen at the bottom of her purse, pink and glittery (of course!), and held it up like a weapon. “Back off,” she growled, feeling a little silly now that she’d calmed down. After all, the dude could have just been sick, and eaten some chocolate pudding, or had a cold or something.
“Please, please, please have a cold or something,” she thought to herself as she stood, pen in hand, waiting for something… anything… to happen.
He wasn’t walking toward her, wasn’t growling or begging for her “brains!” Fact is, he wasn’t doing much of anything at all!
“Hey,” she said, waving the pink, glittery pen but staying put. “Dude, can you hear me?”
He inched forward, grunting, a vacant look in her eyes. The closer he got, the less and less the dark stain on his chin looked like pudding. Bonnie took a step back. “Okay, okay, chill dude, you can hear me. What… what’s your name?”
He didn’t look familiar, and she made it a habit to know all the guys in school. Not “know” them, know them, in the biblical sense per se, but just to be aware of potential boyfriend material, that’s all. Particularly the tall ones; she liked the tall ones. Not so much the gray ones with yellow teeth and vacant, black eyes and pudding stains on their chins, but he WAS tall.
She’d give him that.
But this guy? Nope; tall or not, she’d never seen him before. He stood there, blankly, looking at her. His hair was shoulder length, blond and greasy. He wore black jeans and a gray tank top that was almost the color of his skin. He was thin, but wiry.
Finally, he spoke. “Gary,” he said. “I think… I think that’s my name.”
She took another step back without even realizing it. His voice was cold; it sounded cold, it felt cold, even from a few feet away. Deep and hoarse, like he’d been screaming for days – or smoking for years – or both. And he looked too young for that.
“Okay, Gary, well… watch where you’re going.” Her voice sounded soft and thin, almost girlish, in comparison.
She’d almost forgotten why she stopped him in the first place, but the taste of fresh blood from her lip suddenly reminded her. She rubbed it, again, finding less blood this time.
When she looked back at Gary, he had crept closer to her. And now he was looking at her finger, too. But differently than she was; he was staring at it… hungrily.
Licking his lips. Flaring his nostrils appreciatively. Sniffing her, sniffing it. The blood, in the air, on her finger.
She gulped and turned around, but realized she was at the end of the hall. The only way out was through the cafeteria, and those doors were already locked down tight for the night.
She tried them anyway, rattling the red double doors with the metal handles, but they jingled and jangled with the sounds of the chains double bolted on the other side.
She turned to find Gary inching forward, his legs awkward and jangly, like he couldn’t quite remember how they worked but couldn’t wait to reach her at the same time.
Bonnie stood, her back to the cafeteria doors, trapped, rummaging through her purse. The pen wouldn’t work.He was too big and she was too scared to use it anyway.
Her lipstick? No.
Mirror? No.
Then she found the tin of breath mints she used whenever a cute guy sat in front of her in class. It didn’t happen often, apparently, as there were plenty left in the tin!
As he shuffled forward she threw them at his feet. They were red and white, cinnamon and round, and though he didn’t move very fast he kept moving. He stepped on one, then two, arms reaching out to steady himself as his feet flew out from beneath him.
He fell on his back with a sickening “thud” as his head hit the linoleum floor, something greasy or mushy or bloody making squishing noises as he struggled to get back up.
She sprinted past him, his hands flailing for her sneakers but she beat them back with her backpack. She didn’t turn until she was at the other end of the hall, watching him squirm on his back like a beetle who couldn’t figure out how to turn over.
She leaned against the wall, watching from afar, still clutching the empty breath mint tin in her hand. She heard footsteps down the hall, turned to the right and saw Dean Winters standing in fron
t of the Detention Room.
Her first instinct was to scream out, to warn him, but to her left was the school’s main entrance, open and inviting, begging her to run, to run away and leave Gary and his bloody chin and gray skin behind.
She chose left, and was home before the first news bulletin broke into her mother’s favorite soap opera. When she saw it, saw the school in the background, the reporter standing there in front of the doors she’d bolted through, Bonnie didn’t even have to hear what he was saying to start screaming.
It took hours for her mother to get her to stop…