Falling From the Sky (4 page)

Ridge, 0. Micah, 1.

Each house on the reservation looks the same – a white square with a gray roof. The same green door is tucked in between two perfectly rectangular glass panes on each house. They remind me of kindergarten classroom drawings when everyone had to draw family pictures. We all drew the same boxy red-bricked house with a high black roof and two symmetrical yellow-crayon-filled square windows.

We pull up to one of the houses, which doesn’t look much different from the rest except for the string of paper lanterns hanging around the porch.

“It’s pretty simple,” Micah says.

He looks away, and I fear for a second that he heard my thoughts – my judgmental thoughts about how plain, simple, and outdated these houses look – and now I’m the one who’s embarrassed.

“Nah, it’s cool,” I say, trying to keep my tone as neutral as possible. “I’ve never been on a reservation.”

I focus on the lanterns until Micah opens his door to get out of the truck. I grab my bottle of Gatorade from the cup holder and follow. There’s a single tree outside of his house with skulls nailed to the trunk. I do a quick head count. Twelve of them. For the most part, they’re small, like squirrel and rabbit skulls, but the giant horse skull in the center creeps me out. I wonder who unlucky number thirteen is going to be.

Micah fumbles with his keys before opening the front door.

“Pretty cool, huh?” he asks. “Got it all – dogs, rabbits, squirrels, otters, a horse…no humans, though. Not yet anyway.”

He flashes this sneaky grin and motions me inside. I actually hesitate for a second after that human skull remark. He walks ahead of me, flipping the light switches as he moves across the room. The lighting is dim, like hotel lamps that don’t fully light up the room. A flat display case hangs on the living room wall. The stones inside are arranged like a sunshine with a spear in the middle and arrowheads sprouting out like rays of light. I try my best not to stare, but he catches me anyway.

“Those were in the tourist museum at one time, at the edge of the reservation. Didn’t get enough business to stay open, though,” he says. “My grandfather took some stuff from it before they shut it down. He wanted to keep as much of our history as he could.”

“What did they do with the rest of it?” I ask.

“It’s locked away in the old museum,” Micah says. “It’s all classified stuff, though. I’ve never even seen what all they have, and it’s kind of unfair since I am a Jocolnu native. That’s probably where they keep the zombie legends. I’d do anything to find out the real stories.”

He stares at the display for a moment before he turns and walks down the hallway, motioning for me to follow. His bedroom is at the end of the hall, and it feels more comfortable than the living room. Clean clothes are stacked up in front of his dresser, some with hangers inside the shirts, like they were bound for his closet but never made the actual journey. Xbox game cases cover his carpet. It reminds me of my own bedroom back home.

“Make yourself at home,” Micah says.

He tosses me a game controller and digs through a mess of wires to hook it into the box.

I lean back on his bed. It’s so much better than the beds at camp. It actually feels like a bed rather than a stone cot. The black sheets are worn, unlike those stale hospital sheets at Dunson Hills. The painting above the bed catches my attention, and I roll onto my stomach to see it right side up. It’s a graffiti painting of a city skyline with red streaks across the sky, forming a sunset. The buildings are gray outlined in silver with bright yellow and orange windows. The initials TRL are scribbled across the bottom corner.

“Okay, see if you can log in,” Micah says.

I sit up and grab the game controller beside me. Nothing registers on the screen regardless of which button I press.

Micah sighs. “That’s Abby’s apple juice controller. Toss it here.”

I toss it to him, and he unplugs it from the box.

“She spilled apple juice in one of them. I can’t ever remember which one. It’s this one, obviously. I’ve got others in Zoey’s old room. May take me a few minutes to find them, though,” he says.

He takes the defective controller with him and closes his bedroom door on his way out. I stand up and walk over to the dresser to get a better glimpse of the photographs tucked into the edges of the mirror. Abby, Jade, and his sister Zoey take up most of them. There’s an older couple in one of them, probably his grandparents. A few Native American kids sit on rocks at the river in another. But there’s one hidden behind a professional five-by-seven of Abby and Jade.

It’s a picture of Micah. And another guy. It looks like it was taken at a zoo. There are hot pink flowers in the background. And flamingos standing in murky water. Micah and the other guy look too friendly to be just friends. It reminds me of the picture I have of Samantha and me on my phone. We took it right after we started dating, when she was still hot and I wasn’t a train wreck.

I tuck the photo back into its hiding place and sit on the bed. Micah returns with a handful of Xbox controllers. He has more than one person ever should.

“Where’d you get all those?” I ask.

“I stole them,” he replies. He looks at me and waits for my reaction. I say nothing, and he laughs.

“I’m kidding,” he says. “Zoey’s dating a guy who gets his hands on a lot of devices. He doesn’t like Xbox, though. So I get them.”

I force a smile. “My girlfriend hates Xbox. She just doesn’t see how it can be fun.”

Micah tosses me a new controller and unwraps a stick of blue rock candy that he grabbed off his dresser.

“My ex was the same way,” he says, shoving the candy into his mouth mid-sentence.

My gut feeling says the guy in the picture is his ex, so I pry for more details.

“Samantha thinks it’s stupid,” I say. “She’d rather be shopping.”

Micah sits on the bed next to me and tabs through his saved games until he comes to
Zombie Sanctuary 3
.

“Same here,” he says. He rattles the candy against his teeth before pulling it from his mouth. “Taylor couldn’t see the point in video games because they didn’t ‘change anything about real life’…like Abercrombie actually did.”

Taylor. How conveniently unisex! I can’t think of another line to throw out to him. I don’t think he would take the bait anyway. I decide to play dumb and go in for the kill.

“So, this uh, Taylor, did she, um–”

The piercing screams and hollow growls from Micah’s TV swallow my attempt at another question.

“Damn!” he shouts. He shoves the rock candy stick back into his mouth, reaches for a remote, and the little green lines hurry across the screen like they’re running backward.

“I must’ve hit the volume somewhere along the way,” he says, his teeth still holding the candy in his mouth.

The logo of
Zombie Sanctuary 3
oozes down his screen like brain juice. Micah grabs my controller, tabs over to the new player option, and types in my name. The opening scene of level one fades into view, and Micah hands me my controller. So much for Taylor.

“Ready to be a zombie?” he asks.

I breathe in and glide my fingers around the controller. It feels so foreign.

“As ready as I’m going to be,” I answer.

Two hours and four levels later, I realize I’m the world’s worst zombie. After being slayed by a human for the tenth time, I stopped counting. Micah didn’t. I think I topped out at twenty-eight, if he counted correctly. Micah wasn’t any help at all in level three while I searched through a cabinet full of organs looking for a brain. My strength level fell to zero every time, and we had to start the level over. It never takes me that long when I play a human level.

“Maybe
I’m
the one who needs to go to zombie camp,” I say.

Micah laughs and nods in agreement. “You suck at being a zombie.”

I lie back on his bed and stare at the glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling. They’re arranged like shooting stars sprouting out of his light bulb.

“I might get better,” I say.

He leans back next to me. “It’s a good thing we started playing early because it’s going to take all summer to finish at this rate.”

“I
said
I might get better,” I re-emphasize.

He props up on one elbow. “Yeah, you might. But I seriously doubt it, human.”

I doubt it too. I don’t know if it’s playing
Zombie Sanctuary 3
again that has me failing as a gamer or if my zombie skills are just that awful. I force myself to sit up even though I could just lie here all night staring at his artificial stars.

I grab Micah’s cell phone off the bed.

“You took a picture of the movie poster, didn’t you?” I ask him.

He nods and looks sort of embarrassed. “Why?”

“I’m going to send it to my phone,” I tell him. I scroll through his phone until I find the graphics folder, but it prompts me to enter a pin code. “What’s your code?”

“Zero, three, zero, six,” he says.

I type in 0306. The scroll bar on the side of the screen shrinks when I open the folder of pictures. He has a ton saved, mostly of Abby and Jade and completely random things like street signs and railroad tracks.

“March sixth?” I ask, taking a wild guess at what 0306 may represent.

Micah nods. “My birthday.”

I replace the wallpaper on my own phone with the movie poster for
Brain Surgery
. I notice the time while admiring how the image fits almost perfectly on the screen.

“You’ve gotta get me back to camp,” I tell him.

Being in a real bedroom actually makes me miss my own. I dread those rock hard camp beds even more now. And the white ceiling tiles. It looks more like a rehab clinic than a sports camp.

I look back at Micah. He hasn’t moved. His black hair blends into his black sheets, and his cheek bones look even more predominant when he’s lying back. I stand up and stretch a hand out to pull him up.

“We have to go, zombie boy,” I say.

He smiles. “I’ll have you converted before the summer’s over. Don’t worry.”

CHAPTER FOUR

I wedge a bottle of Gatorade into Terrence’s extra cup holder. I’m glad Coach Bennett is a church man. Practices are always cut short on Wednesdays. Terrence and I are headed to his cousin’s to play a real game of street ball. My phone buzzes as Terrence cranks his car and pulls out of the camp’s parking lot.

The text is from Micah.

Are we on for this weekend? Our zombies are getting sorta hungry, you know.

Weekend plans would be nice if I hadn’t seen that hidden picture of him and that blonde guy. I don’t reply. Terrence turns down his radio and looks over at me.

“Is that your girlfriend?” he asks. “I just assume by that look on your face.”

I jerk the visor down so I can see myself in the mirror.

“What look?” I ask.

“Dread,” Terrence says. “Like you just got the worst message ever and don’t want to reply but you know you have to.”

The phone buzzes again. I open Micah’s message and ignore Terrence’s assumption.

Braaaaaaaiiinnnnsss!

I push the visor back up so I can’t see my stupid smile in the mirror. I don’t have to see it. I know I look stupid.

“Uh oh,” Terrence says, glancing between me and the street. “She’s sexting you, right? Let me see. I won’t tell her.”

I open the glove compartment and stick my phone in there for safe keeping. And to prevent myself from replying to Micah with Xbox excitement. If I text back too soon, I’ll look like a desperate, needy chick. No way in hell.

“It’s not Samantha,” I say. “It’s Micah, that guy from the mall.”

“Oh, so
he’s
sexting you?” Terrence asks.

“Not quite,” I say. “He was talking about Xbox games, which is sexier than anything Samantha ever texts me.”

Terrence laughs. “Well, I know not to ever text you about Xbox then.”

The downtown buildings near his cousin Demetrice’s apartment line the streets outside my window. They all look the same, just like the houses on Micah’s reservation. None of these buildings have those damn paper lanterns hanging from the roofs, though. It’s almost like Micah wants everyone to know he’s a little bit different. I don’t think I can go back.

“I think Micah likes guys,” I say, more to the car door than to Terrence.

“Not down with the rainbow?” he asks from the driver’s seat.

My eyes remain focused on the buildings outside. I sort of wish I could just disappear into one of them, preferably an abandoned one, and sleep until school starts back this fall.

“It’s okay,” I say. “If that’s his thing, I mean. I just…I don’t know.”

I force myself to turn around and explain the too-friendly-to-be-just-friends photo. Then I spill my fears to Terrence’s dashboard about how I think Micah may try to get with me or may get the wrong impression if I hang out with him too much.

“And when we got to his house, it was just like the others,” I say. “Except he had paper lanterns hanging from the porch. If that isn’t gay, then what is? He wants to hang out again this weekend.”

Terrence slams his palms against his steering wheel, laughing like he’s high and this is the funniest thing in the world.

“McCoy,” he says. “Lanterns don’t make someone gay. Maybe his mom put them up? Or his sister? His nieces might have. It doesn’t mean the boy is gay.”

He has a point. I could see Abby or Jade wanting to hang them up, to add some color or to be different or because they’re pretty or some girly shit like that.

We pull up next to a small basketball court between two apartment complexes. A group of guys are already out there, shooting a ball around. Terrence parks on some loose gravel but doesn’t get out of the car.

“What are you going to do?” he asks. He nods to his glove compartment. “About Micah.”

I shrug. “I don’t know.”

“You can’t just ignore him,” he says.

His car dings a few times after he opens his door. He drops the keys in the cup holder and motions for me to come on. I might not be able to ignore Micah forever, but I can for now.