Zombie (22 page)

I dig out loose change from my book bag and place a call to Dad from the pay phone by the front office. Dad doesn’t answer his cell, so I hang up and call our landline.

Sock Boy calls me a faggot and then punches me in the shoulder as he passes behind me in the hallway. I think about how Short Kid kicked Sock Boy in the nuts earlier. His punch was nothing compared to that, I’m sure. I felt the pain from that kick and I only watched it happen.

The answering machine picks up, and I say my name as instructed, when Dad answers.

He says he’s sorry.

He says that whatever I found in his office is not what I think it is. He says there’s an explanation. He says that everything’s going to be okay. He explains that his car has been on the blink lately, which is why he’s not been picking me up after school.

He says his phone battery is fried and doesn’t hold a charge anymore, which is why he doesn’t call back sometimes.

He asks me to believe him.

He asks me if I believe him.

The only thing I say the entire phone call is my name.

I
n any hallway, everyone talks about the mixer. Moving between the even and odd hallways, teachers bitch about having to chaperon. They compare past mixer war stories, cop to lies they’ve told to avoid chaperoning, and question the sexual stability of the students.

In the middle hallway by the chapel, Brothers don’t say much of anything about the mixer, except to remind each other that Father Vincent’s daily 5:30
P.M
. mass will be held an hour earlier to accommodate for the setup. They call it the
Monthly Mixer Mass
.

Outside of English class, the frequency of student conversations hums with excitement. They discuss haircuts and barber-shop straight razor shaves, plan to buy new kicks at the mall, brag about their new celebrity cologne for men called
Humpmaster
, explain the various approaches to
man-scaping
their junk, curse their whore ex-girlfriends that will be in attendance, and run down the list of fuckable Prudence High girls.

Mr. Rembrandt’s room is dark; little natural light finding its way through the overcast sky. A final few lockers slam shut in the hallway. A student rushes past, carrying his book bag in the crook of his elbows like a football. Brother Lee chases him, shortly thereafter, a blazing streak of soundless, black tunic. The man is truly God’s chosen ninja. Mr. Rembrandt enters the room and closes the door behind him.

“
The Tragical History of Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark
. This is the full title.” Mr. Rembrandt sits behind the desk at the front of the room and puts his feet up on the corner, his hands behind his head,
leaning back in his chair. “We have it right there in the title—this play is a tragedy. It’s the tragical history of this devout yet damaged son, Hamlet.” He is quiet again as he looks over us. He drops his feet from the corner of the desk with force, his chair slamming and scraping against the floor. He stalks the aisles of desks. “Do I have your attention?” he asks. “I wonder if my students are sometimes tragic.” He places his fucked-up hand on Mykel’s shoulder and raises his voice. “
To be, or not to be: that is the question: / Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, / And by opposing end them
.” He claps his hands together again in succession. “The most famous of quotations—to be or not to be.” He holds up his hands, like he’s about to slow someone down, then makes a revolver (minus his pinkies, of course!) with his left hand and puts it inside his mouth and pulls the imaginary trigger, pantomiming the recoil and head snap, providing what sounds to me to be a near-perfect gunshot sound effect. “Kill me now, please. How dull are those lines. We all know those lines.
To be. Not to be
. To exist. Suicide, yes. Tragic, yes. It’s in the title, yes. Hamlet is a sad sack of shit, yes. But is he not more than that? At the end, I see Hamlet celebrating total redemption.” Mr. Rembrandt holds out his arms like Christ on the Cross. He says, “Volunteers?” Then after a while, he says it again. “Volunteers? Volunteers?”

Students raise their hands and are selected. They speak quickly when called upon—nervous, anxious, fearful. Students answer questions that haven’t been asked, quoting lines from the play as evidence to support their claims. Someone mentions the poisoned sword. Someone speaks about Hamlet’s sanity, his madness of self. Someone says that Hamlet suffered from an Oedipal Complex, that the only thing he wanted to do was fuck his mother.

None of this has to do with me. Or all of it does. I’m not sure. I don’t raise my hand. I don’t speak at all. I don’t answer any hypothetical question or quote dick from the play. From the moment he entered the room, we haven’t taken our eyes off one another. At his desk. Leaning back in his chair. Stalking the aisles. Quoting Hamlet.
Fuck him. We lock in on each other. He knows that I know something, but he doesn’t know what or how much.

He claps his hands together and says, “Mr. Barker. Are you with us? I am sure you have a busy weekend. Chasing skirt. But what do you think? Let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s go.”

I say, “The Hamlet at the end is not the Hamlet he used to be.”

I say, “I think you are confusing
redemption
with
utter ruin
.”

T
he five hallways of Byron Hall are fucked with kids after class. Locker doors slamming shut, if heard just right, echo gunshots. Laughter that hacks and rolls through the hallways. Fake fighting—fists punching arms and legs, bodies checking other bodies into metal lockers. Chairs scraping across floors. Desks banging into desks. Erasers wiping boards. Cell phones being turned from silent to ring tones and beeps and buzzing and bird calls. Names yelled out, usually last names because no one ever has a first name at Byron Hall. Hence, the clusterfuck.

At my locker, I see it—my lock on backwards. Balls.

I take off my shoe, retrieve my secret paper, read the combination, kneel and feel pain shoot through my leg from where the plaid fucks deadlegged me in the cafe earlier. My cheek to the cold metal of the locker, I lift the lock as far up as it’ll go, trying to read the numbers, and twist the combination as quickly as possible so as not to draw any more attention to myself. I set on the correct succession of numbers and tug, but it doesn’t budge.

The overheard stories attack me like an epileptic seizure. Stories grabbing at some semblance of cool.

Someone dropped four tabs of acid and watched twenty-nine hours of dwarf porn.

Another fucked a girl in his family’s minivan. He wore a cock-ring, but never wore a condom.

Another fucked a girl in the bathroom of a fast food restaurant where he works. He made a copy of the security surveillance tapes and is hosting a viewing party tonight before the mixer.

One did lines of coke with his dad off a tackle box while they fished at the Loch Raven Reservoir. They didn’t catch a thing.

Another fucked his old babysitter, 10 years older than him.

Another traveled to Canada and bought Oxy. As a side note, his new black market pharmacy is operational.

Brother Bill and Brother Jack pass in their long tunics and squeaky black shoes but never stop to help me with my locker, even though they clearly see me on my knees, trying to hit the right combination to my backwards lock. No words of wisdom today for the new student. Fuck the freshman. No pearls of knowledge for the weak. Only mountains of bullshit.

“Mr. Barker,” Brother Bill says, “we are not in the chapel. Get off your knees. Get off the ground.”

“Yes, Brother,” I say.

Brother Fred says, “We walk here at Byron Hall. We are not animals.”

“Yes, Brother,” I say.

They have no giant blue jay mascot trailing them today, like some kind of Christian zoo gang. Brother Fred looks for more infractions. The Brothers disappear into the crowd.

Do you know the story of Moses parting the Red Sea? Well, instead of Moses parting the Red Sea and saving Jews and killing Romans, the weak kids part like the sea for the Plaids to walk through. Must be a game day. Cam and his Mongoloid fucks appear in the hallway, still in their tracksuits, standing over me, this backwards lock business most probably their doing. I ready myself for a collision. I spin around, fists high, expecting to be slammed to the floor, reduced to a pile of dust. But the Plaids—they step through
the parted hallway, passing me. Nothing happens. They continue down the hallway, never looking back, absorbed into a teenage current of sport coats and Limp Dicks. I lower my fists. It’s then that I realize that they aren’t out for me. They’re out for them.

It happens like the glass of a broken kaleidoscope. Six of them. Shoulder to shoulder. That sickening stench of cologne whips around, rubbed into faces and shirts and hands and arms.

“It smells like a whole lot of faggotry over here,” Cam says, pushing Dirtbag Kid and Super Shy Kid into the lockers. “Smells like a faggot girl and his faggot girlfriend are doing faggot things together in very faggot ways.” The Plaid Monkeys circle around and move in on them. “God love the gays. I don’t know how you do it. The asshole is such a small space.”

“Queers,” a plaid bitch says.

“Fairies,” another says.

“Fudgepackers,” another bitch says.

“Cumsuckers,” another bitch says.

Cam snatches Super Shy Kid’s book bag from his hands, opens it, and pulls out
Zombie Strippers!
“What the fuck is this?” Cam asks. “
Zombie Strippers!
Seriously?”

“Cam,” I say, pushing my way through the crowd, trying to divert the attention on to me. “Stop. Leave them alone. It’s my movie, not theirs.” But no one can hear me.

“Are you two the ones we’ve heard all those gay bathroom rumors about?” Cam asks, pointing at each of them with the DVD box.

I call out Cam’s name again and barrel through the hallway. Some shithead plaid throws a hard punch into my stomach, which knocks the air out of me but doesn’t take me down. I keep my balance, hunched over, and focus on regaining my breath. But the shithead plaid follows his punch up with a knee to my face. My hands are already close to my face so I am able to protect myself, but not well enough to keep my balance as I slam into a locker.

Dirtbag Boy runs to my side and kneels and asks if I’m okay, but I can’t breathe or talk or move at all.

“Cam,” Dirtbag Boy says. “What I’m going to say to you I am only going to say once, so pay very close attention. Apologize.”

“Let it be, Frank,” Super Shy Kid says. “It’s not worth it. Please.”

“Not unless Cam complies,” Frank says. Dirtbag Boy has a name—Frank.

“I’m sorry,” Cam says to Frank. “Complies?”

Frank moves out into the middle of the circle and jumps repeatedly, like he did on the diving board, except now there’s grunting and his hands turned to fists. He makes a sound after each jump.
Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha
. No one knows what to make of it, at first, but the Plaids bury their laughter and close in on him fast, but not fast enough.

Frank bends his doughy body into a power crouch, before spin-kicking his leg at a low angle, sweeping the Plaids to the floor with a single leg swipe. Cam watches his friends drop like bowling pins and charges Frank from the side. Cam cocks his right hand and aims it at Frank’s face. Frank ducks and weaves away from the punch only to grab Cam’s elbow and wrist, bending them up behind his back. He drops his elbow down on Cam’s back.

Watching it, I can’t help but tip up onto my toes to alleviate the pain Cam must be experiencing. Frank doesn’t stop, though, and jabs Cam on the ribs with his free hand, now a fist. This cuts Cam down to his knees without words, gasping for air, his voice gone. Frank tightens his grip on Cam’s elbow and wrist, separating them from one another. Father Vincent runs into the brawl, waving his arms around like a spazball.

“Frank, let him go.” Father Vincent puts his hands on the other Plaids keeping them from going in to help. “Whatever happened, it’s over. It’s done. Let him go, please. Let him go.”

Frank finally releases Cam, who drags his ass off the floor, stumbling into the lockers. Father Vincent checks Cam’s arm before instructing one of the Plaids to take Cam to the school nurse, immediately. Cam tries to walk, but his legs are weak and buckle. Another Plaid helps to carry him off and they disappear. Father
Vincent directs the hallway traffic to resume its normal speed. He approaches Frank and puts his arm over his shoulder.

“You know that this can’t go unpunished,” Father Vincent says.

“I know,” Frank says.

“What happened? What did they do?”

“They didn’t apologize to Jeremy,” he says.

Father Vincent and Frank help me to my feet. It hurts to breath and it feels like my lungs have been punctured with spears, but I’m otherwise okay.

“Thanks,” I say to Frank. “For everything.”

“This is Anthony,” Franks says, standing next to Super Shy Kid.

Anthony hands me the DVD.

“I think it’s best if I give this back to you,” Anthony says.

“Right,” I say. “No shit.” There’s no hiding it from anyone anymore.

“Father Vincent, I want to say two things to you before you go. First, I watched
The Greatest Story Ever Told
.”

He smiles and shakes my hand, like I have won some political race.

“Jeremy, that’s just terrific. What did you think of it?” he asks.

“I wouldn’t go setting up any double features between it and the latest George Romero zombie flick,” I say. “But that being said, remember that thing you said to me about the possibility?”

“I do,” he says.

“I believe in the possibility now.”

Father Vincent makes the Sign of the Cross and says, “God Bless you, son.” Then he says, “What’s the second thing?”

I hold the DVD Anthony returned to me out to Father Vincent and say, “The second thing—I was wondering if you wanted to borrow
Zombie Strippers!
?”