Zombie Blondes (20 page)

I try to sit up, but I’m not as ready as I thought. All the blood rushes to my head and someone takes hold of me from behind, lowering me back down. My eyes adjust to the light and things come into focus. I can see Meredith standing next to me, her hands behind her back and leaning slightly to the side as her foot taps slow and steady like the snow falling outside. She looks like a ceramic figure, a toy left out for attention. Morgan is whispering in her ear. Her hands moving as she speaks but there are no words. None that I can hear anyway and it’s like watching television with
the sound turned off.

It will come back, though.

Slowly the way seeing does when I blink.

From the looks on the faces towering over me, I’m not so sure I want it to return. I’m sure when I do, the first thing I’ll be told is that I’m off the squad. I must be such an embarrassment to them, fainting in front of the entire school like that. Some impression I made—I bet the bored spectators woke up then. I’m sure they didn’t have to fake their laughter. I doubt Greg will ever talk to me again, either. Not after I ruined the pep rally, bringing it to a sudden end when I crashed to the floor.

“She’s such a waste of time,” the words making their way from Morgan’s mouth and drifting down to me. Maggie is standing next to her now, in front of her, arms crossed and eyes peering at me. “I told you we should’ve just gotten rid of her.” Morgan smirks, proud of the fact she’d known all along that I was worthless.

Maggie tosses her hair over her shoulder and glances at Morgan. Shutting her up with the look she saves to remind us all that we were nothing until the day she first talked to us. That we were no one until she named us. When she turns back to face me, the look grows stronger, like it’s been building inside her, just waiting for me to make a mistake. Waiting to lash out at me for not being as perfect as the rest of her clones.

I want to say I’m sorry, but the words don’t come out of me. They get stuck somewhere inside and I’m afraid to say them. Afraid they’ll only make things worse as Maggie
kneels down and places one hand over mine and the other on my forehead so that I can’t lift my head. Trapped like an animal caught in wire jaws. And when she smiles, she’s letting me know that she owns me completely.

“What happened out there, Madison?” she asks like a school nurse does when she thinks you’re faking an illness to get out of class. Commanding me to talk like I’m a pet. Her least favorite pet and she wants me to know it.

“Nothing,” I whisper, feeling ready to cry.

I wish the snow could fall so fast that it covered up the last two weeks and I could start over once it melted. If I could go back, I wouldn’t have starved myself for days and gotten so weak that I started hallucinating and passed out. Maybe I never would have tried out, either. It’s the stress of trying to fit in that’s made me so on edge lately. Made my senses distort reality and imagine things that can’t be true.

Maggie’s fingers begin to move through my hair like the legs of a spider. She makes her voice into a soothing sound the way people do when trying to get an infant to stop squealing. And when I finally feel brave enough to look her in the eye, it’s comforting to see she’s not angry. “It could happen to anyone,” she says and I see Morgan roll her eyes and put her hands on her hips, disappointed at my being given a second chance to make things right.

I start to tell Maggie that I don’t know what came over me, that I just got overwhelmed and nervous, but Maggie puts her hand in front of my mouth. She tells me it’s okay. “As long as you promise it won’t happen during the game tomorrow,” she says with a laugh that is echoed by the
other girls.

“But . . . am I still on the squad?” I ask.

The mood in the locker room changes the instant the words come out.

“No one ever gets thrown off the squad once you’re on,” Meredith explains to me.

“Nothing you did was so bad that it can’t be fixed,” Maggie says. “The pep rally was almost over, anyway. And besides, it’s kind of boring listening to the same stupid speeches every time.”

“Yeah?” I ask. They seemed so serious that I never thought they’d think that way, too. But my perception has been off lately. And I guess I’m not so different from the rest of them because Maggie assures me that they can’t stand listening to the principal and Mr. Johnson, the football coach, any more than I could. To prove it, she curls her hands into fists and begins imitating the coach by grunting and foaming at the mouth in an exaggerated impersonation.

I start to feel better as I begin to laugh. My headache fades and I feel strong enough to sit up. Maybe fainting wasn’t such a big deal after all. I mean, if I think about it, probably no one was laughing at me over it. They’re probably more worried that I’m hurt or something. And anyway, the school day ended ten minutes early because of it. I’m probably a hero to some of them.

“Feeling better?” Maggie asks and I smile. I tell her I can’t believe I did that, but that I’m fine now. “Good,” she says, “because we’ve got something we need to do.”

The other girls move in closer, too excited to keep still. I move my eyes back and forth and bite my lip trying to figure
out what Maggie’s hinting about. The sun breaks through the clouds for a brief moment, making a tiny halo appear above her golden hair and it dawns on me even before Maggie says it.

“We’ve got to bleach your hair before tomorrow so that you’ll be as perfect as the rest of us,” she says, taking a few loose strands of my straw-colored hair in her hand and twisting them into the light where they don’t sparkle the way hers does. It will, though. Soon enough, it will.

My vision is reduced to tiny slits just below the blindfold and
I can barely make out the red
M
tattooed on the chest of my uniform in the dim light. I keep my head down and my eyes focused on it to keep my mind off the parade of hands tugging and pulling me forward. I slide my feet over the floor, trying not to stumble as I’m dragged through the maze of benches and lockers.

“Can’t I take this off?” I ask the voices that float around me like so much static on the radio when the stations go in and out of range.

“I told you, you have to wear it,” Maggie says from somewhere in front of me, somewhere in the darkness. “It’ll keep the bleach from getting in your eyes.” But if it’s such a safety precaution, I wonder why they didn’t wait until we were in the other room before tying the shadows over my
eyes, instead of already doing it while I was on the bench.

I try to manage my steps, try to keep pace and not trip over the feet of those leading me to the equipment room where they say is the best place to dye my hair because there’s a sink and a chair and everything we need to make me as blond as the winter sunshine.

The deadbolt clicks and I hear the heavy door creak open inches away. The sour, rotting smell of dead mice seeps into my nostrils and my stomach turns over. Four hands clutch at each of my arms and pull me to the source of the odor. I hesitate and they pull harder. “It’s really nasty,” I protest, struggling to get my hands free so that I can cover my mouth and nose to keep from gagging.

“Don’t be so stupid,” Morgan says. “The bleach will kill the smell in a second.” She gives me a little shove as she finishes speaking and I fall back into an invisible chair placed there to catch me. There’s a rustling through boxes and the shuffling of feet around me and I try to peek by rubbing my shoulder against the blindfold to push it up and let more of the room into view.

Someone grabs the loose ends of the scarf, pulls my head back like yanking a dog’s leash to keep it away from something it’s not supposed to get into. Then the last remaining light is sealed off when the knot is cinched tighter at the back of my head.

I can sense the figures moving around me like ghosts moving behind the walls of my house at night. My breathing grows quick and scattered at the clattering sound of glass and the silence of my friends. I only hear the whispering rise and fall of their lungs when they exhale. The whistling air sounds
like a pit of snakes hissing with pointed tongues.

“Maybe I shouldn’t do this,” I say, sounding as worried as I can.

“Don’t be scared,” Meredith’s familiar voice says close to my ear.

“I’m not,” I lie. “It’s just, you know, I should make sure it’s okay with my dad first.” They tell me not to be such a child. That it’s no big deal. But I keep arguing with them because something doesn’t feel right. Nothing has felt right all day and I make up my mind to start listening to my instincts.

I go to stand up but I’m quickly pushed back down. Pinned to the chair and held tight by a series of hands holding my elbows and wrists. Warm breath on my cheek as someone slithers in close, putting her knee into my stomach as she speaks. “Maybe you’d like it better if I had my dad take you away to a foster home,” Maggie says.

I can tell by the way she says it that it’s not just a threat. She’d actually go through with it. And for the first time since meeting her, I know exactly how mean she can be.

I swallow any fight I have left in me and shut up.

“Slide the chair over and lean her head back into the sink,” Maggie orders once she’s released me. The instructions are carried out immediately. The screeching scrape of metal against the floor fills the room. My head makes a dull noise when it hits against the base of the sink. Then nothing, as if everyone else has evaporated and left only the low swishing of socks sweeping across the floor.

Waiting for whatever is supposed to happen next makes me feel sick to my stomach. I want to get out of the chair
and scream at them all to stop, but it’s like I don’t have a tongue and I don’t have limbs. And I’m blind to the shadows that crawl like animals around their kill. The dream sensation of teeth chewing open my skin creeps along my spine at the touch of fingernails scratching lightly against my scalp.

I don’t expect it when the warm water suddenly soaks my hair. No sound of running faucets to get me prepared and I have to bite my tongue to keep from screaming out. It burns like gasoline against my skin and I figure out that it’s not water at all but bleach, melting the color from each strand of hair to be washed down the drain.

There’s a moment then when nobody’s hands are holding me down and I know it’s my only chance. I tell myself that if I could see what’s going on, it wouldn’t be so bad. I reach up and dig my fingers under the blindfold and pull it up over my eyes. I see Morgan make a desperate attempt to stop me, but by the time she grabs hold of my wrist and bends it back it’s too late.

I see everything.

The metal shelves against the wall, stacked with countless glass jars that shimmer like rubies in the flickering fluorescent light. Filled with heavy red water, only thicker. Each has a strip of masking tape across the front with a name written in black marker. Names I know. Names that begin with the same letter. Hundreds of them, from floor to ceiling like books in a library.

I don’t realize what they are until I see the one in Meredith’s pale hands. The fresh smell of Magic Marker chemicals still lingers where my fake name has been scrawled onto the
label. Madison. And I notice that it isn’t a jar at all, but more like the containers in a hospital that connect to tubes and drain into the patient.

I am the patient.

The blood in the jar is supposed to go inside of me.

It’s supposed to go inside me the same way other jars are going inside Miranda and Melissa in the far corner of the room. Lying down on cots with their eyes rolled back in their heads and only the white parts showing beneath pink eyelids. Plastic tubes stuck in their arms and sucking out the liquid like straws where it will run blue through their veins.

I make a noise to talk but nothing comes out.

“Sit back,” Morgan shouts. She’s holding my wrist so tightly that she cuts off the circulation. I can feel my fingers going numb. I can see the skin turning white like the pavement in the snowstorm. White like them. White like a zombie with someone else’s blood to keep them alive.

I see it all now the way I should have seen it before. See it in the electric stare of dead eyes. The snarl of chapped lips that reveal sharp teeth for biting through bones. Death chants and disappearances. The pale skin of corpses that try to hide under makeup. But they can’t hide anymore. Not once they see that I figured it out. It’s like a switch turns on inside them.

The pupils of their eyes start to glow like rust through the electric blue.

A series of rashes breaks out on their perfect porcelain skin.

Their pretty faces have become distorted masks like in my nightmares.

“No . . . no . . . no,” I stutter, not able to really speak clearly or even think clearly as I struggle to stand up. Morgan lashes toward me with her mouth open and her hands held like claws. So fast like blurry images sped up on a movie screen. Slicing through the plastic chair with a swipe of her hands. A laceration in the fabric where my face had been an instant before.

They all reach for me then, but I manage to get through the grasp of their dead arms laced with spider veins that show through more when they’re angry. Communicating with one another by growling and snarling instead of words as I rush for the door. Grabbing at the handle in a panic, my fingers slip. Slip again and I start to scream as they start to get closer because I know if I don’t get out before they capture me that I won’t come out alive. I won’t come out until I’m like them.

Meredith drops the jar in her hands to the floor and the shattering glass breaks like rain. Blood splatters against my leg and I stare for a split second too long. Long enough for Meredith to grab my arm and twist it behind my back in a sudden shot of pain.

“You’re not leaving,” she growls in a heavy voice. The air escapes my lungs in a weak gasp of breath when she slams me against the wall. I feel the heat from her mouth on my skin. The stench of old rotting wounds makes me gag as she breathes on me. Twisting my arm like a twig that’s ready to snap. “You’re either one of us or you’re one of them.”

Pushing me harder against the wall and crushing the bones in my face. My cheek pressed against a piece of paper,
smearing onto my skin the ink of names that are crossed off. The last name on the list is Diana’s. A thin red line runs through the letters and makes me shudder because I know what it means without having to be told.