The Impossible Knife of Memory(34)
Finn would show up at my locker one day and then he wouldn’t the next. Was I supposed to return the gesture and go to his locker before he could take the next step, make the next move, whatever that might be? One minute we’d be riffing about conspiracy theories, the next we’d be arguing so loudly about mandatory military service (I was for it; he, being a privileged wuss, was not) that we got kicked out of the library. And then we didn’t say a word to each other the whole drive home.
Which was another thing—I couldn’t talk about this to him. And/or he couldn’t/wouldn’t talk about it to me, assuming he wanted to, assuming the entire drama wasn’t a product of my estrogen poisoning or a symptom of a brain tumor caused by eating so many gallons of artificially colored, high-fructose corn syrup–enhanced plastic food products when I was younger. (Truck stops are not known for their selection of organic fruits and vegetables.) I watched all the couples and almost-couples around me, frantically trying to understand how this stuff worked and was more confused than ever.
Gracie was no help. The situation at her house went to DEFCON 4 when her dad moved out. The next day, her little brother refused to go to school. Mrs. Rappaport carried him out to the car and tried to shove him in, even though he was kicking and screaming. Gracie grabbed her mom’s arm to make her stop and Mrs. Rappaport turned around and slapped Gracie’s face. The neighbor who saw the whole thing called the police.
The only relationship I’d ever seen my father in was with Trish and for most of those years, he was on the other side of the world from us. When he was finally discharged, the two of them turned our apartment into a battlefield. Even if their relationship had been less than awful, there was no way to talk to him. The gloaming that closed over us in the cemetery had crawled inside his skin. He didn’t want to talk or eat. He just sat in front of the TV.
So I couldn’t talk to Finn about what I wanted to talk to him about, I couldn’t talk to Gracie about anything other than how awful her parents were, and my dad was a bigger mystery than ever.
To make matters worse (was that possible?), I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted with Finn. Did I like him? My opinion about that changed several times a day. Did I want him to like me? Ditto. How could I like him, how could he like me, if we didn’t know each other? The little I was able to learn about his family (perfect, middle-class people, apparently) made me pretty sure that he’d run screaming if he ever met my father. That would be a logical reaction, of course, but did I really want to fall in love (fall in “like”?) with someone who didn’t give my dad a chance? We had to get to know each other. Gradually. Baby steps. In order to do that, we’d have to break down and talk about things that were more significant than font size in online newspapers and his fevered delusions about his time studying telekinesis with a group of monks in a Himalayan ice cave.
I had no idea how to do that.
I started to cyber-stalk him late on Wednesday night, but it made me so disgusted with myself that I played hours of Skulkrushr III instead and thus flunked the next day’s Chinese vocab quiz. I wrote an apology note to my teacher in Chinese. She told me that I had actually written something about pigs and umbrellas.
At one level? None of this mattered. It was hard enough surviving day to day, both navigating the hordes at Zombie High and listening to the bomb that had started ticking inside my father’s head. A little flirting with Finn? That wouldn’t hurt. But I concluded that it couldn’t go any further. When we met after school for precalc tutoring, I made sure that there was always a table between us. And when I was in his car, I kept my backpack on my lap, my face turned to the window and my attitude set to the frost level of “Don’t Touch.”
Despite this strategy, the hordes gossiped about us. Girls in my gym class asked me flat out what Finn was like. That’s how I found out that his family had moved to the district only a year earlier and that he had led the swim team to the state title, but decided not to swim this year and no one could figure out why. I also learned that those same girls were pissed off; they’d assumed he was gay, because why else wouldn’t he have tried to hook up with them before?
I dialed up my serial killer glare and eventually they walked away.
Even the teachers noticed. Mr. Diaz walked past my locker when Finn was there and said, “For the love of all that is holy, you two, please don’t breed.”
Seriously?
The sex thing, that was the undercurrent, the electrically charged wire that ran through all of this nonsense. I’d been eavesdropping on zombie sex conversations since school started. Most of them, I thought, were totally made up. But now I found myself doubting that conclusion. What did The Rules say about this? If everyone was really having sex, then why was it paradoxically a hush-hush-whisper thing and a scream-it-online-and-in-the-cafeteria thing? If everybody was really having sex, why weren’t more girls sporting baby bumps? I knew the statistics. I also knew the closest abortion clinic was more than a hundred miles away. Most of my classmates couldn’t remember to tie their shoes in the morning. I had no faith in their ability to use birth control. Either nobody was getting laid and everybody was lying about it or the school was putting contraceptives in the oatmeal raisin cookies.
No wonder the zombies were crazy. They thought they were supposed to practice breeding before they learned how to do their own laundry. They talked about it, thought about it, maybe did it, all while going through the motions of attending class and learning stuff so that they could go forth and become productive adults. Whatever that was supposed to mean. It was enough to make me want to flee into the mountains and live out my life as a hermit, as long as I could find a hideaway that had a decent public library within walking distance and toilets that flushed, because Porta-Potties were the worst.