✴ She Was A Teenage Zombie ✴

Chapter Four

The general consensus at school the next day was that Skinny, the junkie everyone thought he was, died alone in the woods.

Through whispers down the hallway, I heard that the police had great difficulty, at the beginning, in finding his body. When I’d spoken over the phone, I told them he was by the cliff, about a mile away from the camping grounds’ parking lot. I guess that wasn’t enough of a clue, because his body wasn’t recovered until the next morning. They found the baggie of heroin on the rocks atop the cliffside, and concluded Skinny was just another statistic in the opioid crisis.

I don’t know what compelled me to go to school that day–nobody would’ve blamed me if I didn’t. When I woke up the next morning, Angela had rushed into my room to tell me the news, and I stared, emotionless at her. She must’ve thought I was some insane sociopath, but I was still reliving the event in my head–I still felt his heartbeat, thumping gently against my chest.

When I shuffled down the hallway, people stared. Word had traveled pretty fast, which was common in a small town like ours. Skinny and I were known to be inseparable, with frequent rumors circulating of our gay love or the fact we were somehow related. When I was discussed, I was referred to as “The Guy Skinny’s Always With” or “Skinny’s Friend.” If I had a brother, it would be him.

If they knew what had happened, if they knew I was there when he died, the whispers would be so different.

When I arrived in Chemistry, on-time for the first time ever, the class stared intently to witness my inevitable mental breakdown. I pulled out my stool next to Claudia and tried to keep my head low, staring at the interesting scribbles on the lab table.

“Collin, are you okay?” Claudia whispered, leaning in close to me. I shot her a dry look, but she didn’t take the hint. “I heard about what happened. I’m so sorry.”

What was she sorry for? I could never understand why people used that phrase at funerals, or to give condolences, or what-have-you. If there was anyone who should be sorry, it should be me. I’d fucked up again, as I always have, but I couldn’t plead apathy in the face of this momentous fuck-up–this mattered. It wasn’t failing a test, it wasn’t being a useless pothead, it was murder, neglect, the weight of every massive mistake I’d ever made, leading only to the worst possible conclusion.

The most I could muster was a weak, “Yeah.”

“So, um,” she said after a long while. “Did you give Thomas my number?”

I’d completely forgotten I ever had a conversation with her, and even if I had remembered, there was no telling if I would’ve actually done it. We locked eyes for a moment–her big, stretched-out brown puppy-dog eyes staring deep into mine. “Claudia, you never gave me a number to give.”

She blushed a bright pink. “Oh! How could I forget? I’m so scatterbrained sometimes…” She then scribbled down a ten-digit number on a ripped-off piece of scrap paper and slid it across to me. “He can call me whenever–I’m usually up ‘til three, playing World of Witchcraft. Don’t tell him that–he’s a sports guy, he probably doesn’t know what that is.”

I barely even knew what that was. My eyes drifted to the number in front of me, which I then slipped into my jeans pocket. I just wanted to get this class over with. I just wanted to curl up into my bed and never wake up.

“That’s the allure of him, y’know? If this school were a kingdom,” she explained, with a tinge of wishfulness, “I’d be the mysterious sorceress in the outskirts, residing in a tall tower. He’d be the prince, always wanting more for himself, plagued by his moral obligations.”

“What are we talking about right now?”

She ignored me and continued. “A girl can dream, and I dream a lot.”

Claudia spoke like she was on a script, regurgitating lines from her favorite fantasy romance novels and TV dramas. I stared at her deeply, trying to understand how someone so distant from reality could be speaking to me now, when I was closer to my own reality than I’d ever known. How could I get so lucky?

The class passed without much fanfare, and after the novelty of staring at the kid that just lost his best friend wore off, nobody really paid much attention to me. I made my way down the hallway, where I saw Lowell leaning against his locker, his eyebrows furrowed together as he swore beneath his breath–he was fumbling with his phone, calling someone over and over to no avail.

When I caught his eye, he stopped me.

“Collin, where–?”

“If we’re gonna talk about this,” I stated, “We’re doing it outside.”

There was a brief period of silence before he followed me out the side door, down the steps, and to the alleyway–the alleyway where we’d smoked that joint with Skinny. I pushed it out of my head. I couldn’t deal with it. I couldn’t fathom it.

He started again, as I pulled a cigarette from my backpack and lit the tip. Leaning against the brick wall, I brought the filter to my lips. “I don’t know where to start, honestly. Like… I can’t believe this even happened.”

I nodded.

“Like,” he threw his hands in the air, incredulously, “We just saw him yesterday! Everything was fine. I didn’t think he… I didn’t think Skinny would do something like that. I thought he was just a pothead. Y’know, like normal.”

“Mm.”

“And I know you were with him.”

My eyes darted to his, and that’s when I realized he was eerily close to me, leaning against the wall with his forearm against it. He was staring down at me, with this look of concern on his face–he spoke like it was an accusation, but his eyes were so wide, I couldn’t tell.

“We left together, yeah.”

“Okay, ‘cause that’s what I was thinking’, but I didn’t tell anyone. I don’t wanna, you know, spread false rumors or whatever.”

“What do you think happened?” I asked flatly, exhaling a billow of smoke.

“It was an accident, obviously. I mean, nobody intentionally ODs on heroin.” He shrugged, “Like, I don’t think he got murdered or something. I thought you guys just left and he… wandered off.”

“What else do you know?”

The question seemingly caught him off-guard. He had to reorganize his thoughts for a moment, and then he continued, “I know they found him in the Walten Woods. He died the night before, I guess after he left Ralphina’s house.” He nodded, “And I don’t mean this in a… you know, in a fucked-up way, but, I mean, you left with him.” I met his eyes. “So, you must’ve known something.”

“I don’t know what you’re trying to say.”

“Someone had to have reported it,” Lowell dropped, his words turning cold. “And you were the last person he was with.”

He was close. He was so fucking close. “We go to the woods a lot. I think his family must’ve reported him missing.” Lowell didn’t know that, under any circumstance, the Ortega family would never call the police about their son.

Lowell shrugged. “Yeah, but, I mean… They found him so fast.”

“Are you trying to accuse me of something?”

He threw his hands up in front of himself. “Dude, calm down. I’m not the fucking feds. I nearly murdered a guy in front of you, and you haven’t talked.” He raised his thick, dark eyebrows. “Why would I talk either?”

“‘Cause I’m not about that type of stuff. I’ve never hurt anyone.”

“I’m not saying you hurt him, I’m just saying there’s a piece you’re not telling me.”

It finally erupted out of me, like boiling metal spilling from my lips. I spat, “He told me he was heading to the woods for something. I don’t know what. Then I come to school today and everyone’s talking to me about this. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know what happened to him.”

“Okay, okay–”

“And, no, I know you’re thinking it–I don’t mess with dope. I know I look like it. I don’t do that,” I continued to spill, the cigarette shaking between my fingers. “I don’t know why that happened to Skinny. There’s so many shitty fucking people in this world, and God takes the coolest fucking person this town ever had. I don’t get it. I really don’t.” I wiped at my eyes, trying to keep the tears from forming. “He was the only friend–No, the only person I cared about, and he’s fucking dead.”

Lowell let these words hang in the air for a moment, letting my breaths fill the space between us. The cigarette made its way to my lips again, and stressed, I puffed another hit. My hands continued to shake, but oddly enough, Lowell stood firmly, calmly, with this sense of understanding. It drove me crazy.

There was silence.

“His funeral’s Friday night. You gonna be there?”

Skinny’s funeral was at six, and at six-thirty I was in my room, lighting my bong.

It was one I bought when I had to be around fifteen, and it reflected my tastes at the time–black glass with turquoise accents, sculpted into the shape of a large skull. It cost me around $50 back then, and I considered it a pretty serious investment. I didn’t even smoke that much back then, but I thought it looked cool enough to spend money on. Skinny was the one that mainly pressured me to buy it, because Skinny was really into that type of thing.

It was us against everyone else. Just him–this short, scrawny, goth kid–and me–a slightly taller, scrawny burn-out. We sat next to each other in every class, sat together everyday at lunch, hung out from the end of school until midnight, and started it all over again the next day. He was the only one like that for me.

Skinny was the one that got me into Nine Inch Nails, my favorite band of all time. We had to be like 14 at the time, and he lended me his copy of The Downward Spiral on CD. I played that disk everyday until my CD player broke. I loved that shit. We were even planning to go see them in concert, but the tickets were like $100 a piece, and neither of us had jobs. Skinny made money selling weed, but the closest show was in New York City, and neither of us had cars. It just became a pipe dream, like something we’d do “after college”--that’s what he’d always say, as if either of us were going to college.

It’s so weird how all those plans, all those dreams, can just leave in an instant, and leave nothing behind at all.

After doing a rip, I pulled out my guitar and started strumming along. Playing guitar was probably the only thing I did that didn’t make me a complete degenerate, and I don’t think I’m that bad at it. I’d been playing for years, and it was one of my favorite things to show Skinny, because whenever I started playing, he would sing along in this terrible fucking voice. Then I’d join in, and then we’d fuck up the lyrics, and then eventually we’re just singing gibberish, and then one of the guitar strings would pop, and we would laugh so hard Skinny would vomit.

Our favorite song to fuck up was “Hurt”, because Skinny thought the song really sucked. He thought it was hilarious, and it was his least favorite song on the album. He called it a “pussy song”--a Skinnyism. I still don’t know what makes a song a pussy song, but the main diagnostic was how much of a pussy it made the singer sound like. According to Skinny, Nine Inch Nails made a lot of pussy songs, and according to Skinny, that’s why he liked playing them so much, because he thought they were funny.

I started strumming it out of impulse. Bm-D-E-Bm-D-E-Bm-D-E… Over and over and over again.

It was a simple song, and I liked the simplicity of it, but after the fourth or so cycle, I stared down at my guitar. I remembered the lyrics–”The needle tears a hole, the old familiar sting”--but I couldn’t sing it. I couldn’t get it out. My eyes brushed over the wood of my guitar, the stickers across its front, and landed on a Sharpie scribble Skinny had left in the corner. He’d signed it, with some words below it I couldn’t make out. I’d never seen that scribble before.

How had I never seen it before?

I restarted my strumming, trying not to get distracted. “I hurt myself today, to see if I still feel,” and then the next line, “I focus on the pain, the only thing that’s real.” I was singing under my breath, trying to concentrate on the strumming pattern instead. “The needle tears a hole,” and then the other, “The old familiar…” I stopped, “...sting.”

I stared down at my guitar. I stared at the scribble. I stared at my hands, and I stared at my arms. I stared at my fingertips. I stared forward.

I strummed again. “The needle tears a hole…” I continued, “The old… sting…”

My arms sunk, lowering the guitar to the floor. I stared forward, at the floorboards and the bong, and the room around me. I stared down, and then I started to cry.

My face felt hot to the touch, my hands were covering my eyes, and the tears were falling like plump beetles crawling down my face. I gripped at the skin on my face, blubbering and sobbing as I stared at my guitar, as I stared at the bong. Air stopped pumping into my lungs, my eyes stopped focusing on the room, my head started racing, and nothing made sense. It felt like reality itself was thumping with every beat of my heart.

“Fuck!” I yelled it, no, screamed it, and rose to my feet.

I winded my foot back and shot the bong across the room, shattering the top of the base into a million glass shards. “Fuck!” I grabbed at my face and toppled over, my knees hitting the floor as I sobbed. Everything was hell.

“Ah… Ehhh…” It came out drained and stretched out, like I was crying out for help that wouldn’t come, that shouldn’t come. “I… Fuck!” I turned to the blue drywall and busted my fist through it, punching a hole, then kicked the bottom of the wall, over and over and over again. The hole got bigger and bigger and bigger, until the floor was covered in blue powder and chunks of the wall. By the end of it, it was about a foot tall and two feet wide, and when I finished kicking, I started punching again.

Then I felt Angela’s hands on my shoulders, and she pulled me back from the wall, tears still pouring down my face. She was yelling at me, but I couldn’t hear her. I couldn’t. I turned to face her and crumpled into her arms, sobbing louder and louder. I felt her blouse against my face, I felt her nails against my back. “I’m sorry…” I cried, my tears muffled into her shoulder. “I’m sorry… I’m so sorry.”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” She pushed me off her, staring down at me, with indignation but also fear behind her eyes.

“I didn’t–I didn’t mean… I didn’t–didn’t–didn’t want it to happen…” I sobbed into her arm, snot leaking from my nose, my forehead pounding. “I can’t… can’t do this anymore. I can’t do it anymore.”

“Collin–”

“I want to fucking–I wanna fucking k–” I stopped, “I don’t want to be here,” I screamed at her. “Everything’s too much. Everyone’s so much. I can’t deal with it. I can’t deal with this shit.” I was shaking at that point, feeling a mixture of fury and desperation, anger and contempt within myself. “Get out of my fucking room.”

She stepped back, holding her hands up. “Collin, calm down. Did you cut yourself?”

That stopped me cold. “...No?”

“Why are you bleeding?” She pointed to my hands and ankles, where blood was dripping. I began to realize I couldn’t feel my fingers, and as I stared down at my hands, I realized blood was dripping from each knuckle.

“I–I…”

“If you don’t calm down right now, I’m calling the fucking police, Collin.”

“I…” I stared at her, and then down at my hands again. The blood was oozing from my knuckles, my veins were popping out of my thin, sickly arms. My shoulders lowered. “I… okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay.” I breathed out. “I’m sorry.”

“Why are you bleeding?” she repeated, her voice lower but still firm. I stepped to the side to show her the wall, and she breathed out heavily. “Again?”

I nodded.

“Why aren’t you going to Skinny’s funeral?”

The tears started forming in my eyes again. I grasped at my arms, looking to the side. “It’s open-casket.”

“What?”

“It’s open-casket,” I said again, wiping at my tears. “I don’t want to see him like that. I’ll visit his… his grave, I’ll talk to his family, I’ll leave him fucking flowers, but…” I breathed in, “I don’t want to see his face… like that.”

She was silent for a few moments, and I still couldn’t look her in the eye. There was this stillness between us, like there was mutual understanding but also contempt, like she knew what I was saying, but hated that I felt that way.

Angela said at last, “Why don’t you go to the cemetery tonight, after everything?” I looked up at her blank expression. “You can say goodbye without all that.”

“I…” I thought about it, and then I looked at the smashed bong in the corner of the room. “I’ll do that, I guess.”

She said firmly, “Then tomorrow, you and Terry are gonna fix the drywall, before Mom kills both of us.”

“Alright.”

She was quiet again. “Do you want bandages? For your hands?”

I swallowed thickly. “Yes.”

“Okay,” she said, exhaling. She stared down at my hands again, and then at the wall. “I know this is hard for you, but you gotta stop this shit.”

“I know.”

“Like, if Mom was around right now, or if I wasn’t used to all your… emotional stuff, we’d have sent you to Walten Hospital months ago.” I followed her to the bathroom, blood dripping from my fingertips and knuckles. I’d probably have to clean that up later. “‘Cause, honestly, Collin, I don’t want to see you in a psych ward, but you kind of deserve being in a psych ward.” I sat down on the toilet, watching her as she grabbed gauze and tape from the closet.

“I know I’m crazy,” I said sheepishly.

“You’re not just crazy, Collin.” She looked to the side when she came back over to me, averting my eyes. “I don’t want you to blow up at me again, but I need to ask you something.” She was staring at my arms.

“What?”

“Do you know what Skinny died from?”

My voice was hollow and quiet. “I don’t know.” I paused. “Drugs, I think.”

“You think?”

I looked her in her eyes. They were sunken in, tired. “Heroin.” I continued to stare, my eyes growing wet. “I think he did heroin.”

“Oh, Collin–” she interjected me, her voice drained.

“I don’t know why… he would do that.” She started wrapping my fingers with gauze, stinging me. “We’d smoke weed and stuff, but–”

“Have you shot up, too?”

My stomach dropped, with a heavy, cold thickness that surged up into my throat. I was cold. Lifeless. I didn’t feel anything at that moment. I felt like an electric current was rolling through me. I felt like my brain was disconnected.

She reiterated her question. “Like, did you do it with him?”

I couldn’t look her in the eye. If I spoke, if I let her know, it would ruin everything. I couldn’t let her know about it, but I’d given her all the pieces to the story, and all she had to do was put them together.

“Collin.”

I didn’t respond.

Miraculously, she dropped the topic altogether. “If… this, this kind of outburst, happens again, I’m calling the police.” She taped up the gauze, making my hands into big, mummified mittens. “I’m glad you’re not a gun kid, though.”

“A what?”

“Like one of those ROTC kids obsessed with guns.” She smiled to herself. “I don’t have to worry about you hurting anyone else. All you do is hurt yourself.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“But why, Collin? I can’t understand why.”

“I don’t know,” I said low, watching her finish bandaging me. “It just feels right.”

She didn’t say anything to that, and then chuckled to herself. “‘Feels right?’”

“Angela, do you hate anyone?”

She stopped wrapping my fingers for a second and glanced down at me. Her body was still, but her eyes were glancing all around me, confused. “No, why?”

“Like, not even on TV? Or in movies? Or in school?”

“I mean,” she exhaled. Angela thought about it for a few moments. “I guess I hate some people. Or I’ve hated people before. Why?”

“If you hated someone that much, don’t you want to see them… I don’t know, be in pain?” She finished bandaging my fingers and stepped back, staring down at me. “That’s how I feel. I hate everyone, but I hate myself the most. I guess I feel like… like if I was a character, in a movie or a book or a show, I’d deserve to have these things done to me, or to somehow ruin my own life. I just feel like it’s my fate.”

“In your own fucked-up sort of perspective, I get it,” she said, beginning to walk out of the bathroom. She turned back to look at me. “Remember. Tomorrow. Drywall.”

I tried to give her a thumbs up, but my bandages made my fingers too stiff.

“And go to the cemetery,” she said, exiting the room. “You need it.”

Like the idiot I was, I didn’t go to the cemetery first–I went to the Walten Woods.

I didn’t know what possessed me to do such a thing, but the second I sat down in the driver’s seat of my crappy 1995 Nissan Altima, I had this sudden urge to return to the scene of the crime at breakneck speed.

There was nothing to be found there, and if I wanted to actually return to the cliffside, it’d be at least a thirty minute walk through the pitch-black forest landscape before I even saw some semblance of the river. It didn’t matter, as I’d already quickly emerged from my car and was trekking through the beginnings of the main trail, my hands shoved deep in my pockets, as if to cover the blood I felt on them.

From what I heard, the police weren’t in there too long. It was a “typical” case–not like some small town murder, with a Dateline documentary and news coverage and all that shit. There was no manhunt for some deranged killer, nor a sentimental plea from the victim’s parents. We’d had one of those a few years ago, but I had to be thirteen at the time, and I don’t remember much of the details.

No, Skinny’s case was different, in that it wasn’t very unique. A borderline-high-school-dropout overdosing on heroin in some backroad location was pretty common in rural Massachusetts. Skinny could be easily profiled, in that he was a young, scrappy, biracial teenage boy with a history of getting caught smoking outside school. He wasn’t a grade-A student, and he was relatively private about his personal life. There was nobody that the police could interview that would discourage the theory that Skinny was a dope addict that bit off more than he could chew. Nobody except me, and I was still waiting on that phone call.

As I shuffled through the dark woods, I retraced my steps of that night. Skinny and I were messing around at first, hitting each other with branches like it was a sword fight to the death. He was way too happy to be given this gift by Tracy.

Tracy.

A sudden rush of anger overtook me, accompanied by a deep pit in my stomach. Why would she give that type of thing to Skinny, without even asking? Why would Skinny take a random bag of illegal substances so brazenly? How did Lowell not know that his girlfriend, the one he spent all his time watching over, wasn’t shooting up? If only she’d told us what it was, instead of that vague-ass answer, this would’ve all been avoided. Skinny wouldn’t do heroin–he wasn’t a complete junkie.

I say that, but that was a part of me that grew angrier by that thought–that that’s what his legacy would always be.

And that’s when the thoughts came–the thoughts that I always tried to subside, and the thoughts I went to therapy for. The thoughts that overtook my teenage years and plagued me too many times to count–the thoughts that Skinny would be there to usually subside. It was the thought that I wish I had Skinny’s dad’s Beretta, and I wished I killed myself when I still had the chance.

I pulled out my phone at that moment, while I was still at the edge of the woods. I still had a single. Quickly, I selected Lowell from my Contacts–for what reason he gave me his number, I’ll never know–and I dialed him.

I didn’t know who else to speak to, and as my thoughts continued to race, I thought about the cliffside. I thought about jumping off into the cold water, and swimming out as far as I could. I wished I brought a rope so I could–

He picked up. “You called?”

“I need you to do something for me.”

“The funeral was tonight, where were you?” He paused on the other end. “Are you okay? You sound like you just ran a fuckin’ mile.”

“I’m gonna give you a phone number, okay? I need you to give it to Thomas.” I held the crumpled-up piece of paper in my hands.

There was a short silence. “What’s this about, dude? You’re freakin’ me out.”

“This girl in my class wants to call him. She won’t stop bugging me about it. Can you just give him this number?” My voice was growing aggressive, and emotional, and the thoughts kept piling on. I kept thinking about when Skinny died, and he was convulsing, and I kept wishing that I was–

“Aight, uh… How important is this right now?”

“Very fucking important.”

“Jeez, dude. Alright. Uh,” there was shuffling on the other end, “I got a pen and paper.”

I recited it slowly over the phone, my face hot with tears. I didn’t know why I was doing this–anything to get those thoughts out of my head, anything to distract me.

“Aight, got it. And, uh, who’s this girl again?”

“Claudia. Claudia Crawford.”

“I’ve heard of her, I think. Is she cute? I don’t wanna give my boy some ugly bitch’s number.”

“She’s fine. She’s not ugly.”

There was a period of silence. “Nice ass?”

“I mean,” I pinched the bridge of my nose. Despite how stupid this conversation was, I could feel my heartbeat slow down a bit. “I don’t… I’m not really–”

“Answer the question, O’Connor. This is important.”

“She’s got a pretty nice ass, yeah.”

“Okay,” he said at last. “Is she fat?”

“Dude, just give Thomas the fucking number.”

That’s when I heard him snickering on the other end. “I’m with him now, man. He just put it in his phone.”

“Are you being serious or am I gonna have to call again?”

That’s when I heard a soft, “Hello!” from the other end. It was definitely Thomas. I don’t think Lowell could create that type of joy or enthusiasm.

Lowell came back on the line. “How bad does she want Ralphina? Like, is this some stalker-level shit?”

“She wants a phone call.”

There was a pause. “Man, where are you right now? Are you good?”

“I’m in Walten Woods.”

“Now why the fuck are you in Walten Woods?”

My train of thought was suddenly broken by a crack of wood a few feet beside me. It startled me a bit, more so because bears were common in this area, and I didn’t want to get turned into ground beef. I had half a mind to just turn and run back, but my feet were cemented to the floor as I stared into the darkness.

There was a figure–a tall one. A large one, and as I stared, it moved closer to me. It lumbered, moving closer and closer like a falling tree, and it was heading straight for where I was standing.

“O’Connor? Do I gotta head over there?”

I could’ve ran. I should’ve ran. But there was something nailing me there, sticking me deep to the trail’s tracks. All I could do was stare at the man-shaped creature stepping towards me, and that’s when I saw something–something too familiar for me to discredit.

When I saw Lowell transform at that party, he had to be about seven feet tall, at the most. This creature, one I could only discern as something akin to Lowell’s power, had to be about ten to twelve feet in height, with thick saliva dripping to the forest floor below. Its head was a wolf’s, with perky, strained ears and a long snout–piercing eyes and a quivering nose. Its claws were about the size of my forearm, and it stood with them ready, ready to strike.

I couldn’t help it. I screamed. I hung up the phone.

And then I ran.

I drove until I got to the cemetery, and when I finally passed the gates, I collapsed into the wet grass. My skin was cold, yet sweating through my clothes. Thoughts raced through my mind, decisions, decisions, who do I call? What do I do? I struggled to breathe, grasping at my chest as I stared up into the night sky, watching the crescent moon overhead.

I’d finally gotten the image of my beast out of my head, but my vision of their eyes remained.

I sat up. The grass was damp beneath my legs, trickling cold water droplets onto my skin. It was dark in the cemetery, with every lamppost out and only a handful of stars in the sky. Most importantly though, I seemed to be alone, with no sign of the massive figure anywhere. I grabbed at my chest, trying to calm down my thumping heart.

When my heartbeat went down, I considered just going home. No, I kind of just assumed I was gonna leave as soon as possible, with the cemetery as simply refuge. If Skinny were with me, he wouldn’t have blamed me for leaving. I’d seen something I didn’t understand, and something I couldn’t quite shake. I wondered if I was dreaming again.

With the knowledge my next move would be visiting Skinny’s grave, my high heart rate returned.

All things considered, I would rather go back and have a coffee with the monstrous figure than visit Skinny’s gravestone. The idea of it made me shake with fear, with guilt, with a feeling I couldn’t place. Visiting him would be like visiting the gravesite of all my biggest mistakes, and I wasn’t ready for it. Did that make me a bad person? Was I the worst person I’d ever known? I mean, definitely, because I didn’t know many people, but did this choice–to not visit him–make me evil?

I sat up and grabbed my knees close, trying not to hyperventilate. My chest was rising and sinking fast, my breath cold against my legs. I struggled to think. Where was he even buried? Would they even put “Skinny” on his tombstone? Is that nickname the only thing still connecting me to the memory of him?

I laid back down on the grass, in between the circle of gravestones that surrounded me. The cemetery was a bit overgrown, with trees looming overhead, only allowing me a glimpse at the stars and the moon, but I didn’t mind. Even as my heart accelerated, I still felt a bit at peace.

Whenever I was anxious like this, or whenever I was about to submit to an hour-long panic attack, I’d think of this one time, with Skinny.

We were about nine or ten years old, I don’t really remember, and it was one of the typical nights where Mrs. Thatcher and Mr. Ortega would kick Skinny out of their home. I don’t like judging people’s parenting capabilities, since I don’t really fully understand if having a kid is truly that difficult, but Mrs. Thatcher and Mr. Ortega were terrible parents. Like, in every sense of the word. Calling them a “Mrs.” and a “Mr.” doesn’t even feel right, since neither of them were married. They just had Skinny and a bunch of other cretins and they all lived in the same house together.

Thatcher was the closest you could get to a deadbeat mom while still holding a job. She worked at Cane’s on the highway, slinging chicken strips and sandwiches for $8.00 an hour. Sometimes she’d be working there for 12-hour shifts, and sometimes she’d be at home for weeks at a time, sitting on the couch and smoking cigarettes. It depended on her mood. Ortega was a retired construction foreman, being about thirty years older than Thatcher. The family used to joke that Ortega’s age had something to do with how fucked the kids turned out.

Skinny was the latest concoction from the Thatcher-Ortega household, being the youngest at that point with two older siblings. Since then, the family has had three more kids, I think, giving them six kids in total–well, five now, but that’s besides the point.

We were nine, and at the time, Ortega would only let the family watch Cosmos: A Personal Voyage on the family TV, because for whatever reason he hated modern television. He also thought the Spanish soap operas were too womanly for his taste, and he hated the news. Besides the occasional sports game, it was Cosmos for years.

Skinny and I thought Cosmos was cool enough, but Skinny thought it was much cooler than I did. He was obsessed with space, to the point he glued those little fluorescent glow-in-the-dark stars to the ceiling of his bedroom, much to the dismay of his two siblings sleeping with him. During school, he would sketch out planets all day–not even actual planets like Venus or Jupiter, but imaginary ones that he thought were somehow out there, like the one he made up for me–Collinus, a planet inhabited by only hot alien girls and racecars, because I really liked NASCAR at the time for some reason. Despite the numerous problems with that society, I loved it, and Skinny and I would talk about Planet Collinus all the time.

Skinny had a plan once, though, on how we could actually get to Planet Collinus. At the time, I thought it was completely foolproof–we would construct a spaceship out of a refrigerator box and some duct tape, and then, somehow, we would push the spaceship off Skinny’s roof. The acceleration of pushing the vessel off the roof would create a wormhole, as specified in Cosmos, and we would be transported to Planet Collinus. I remember exactly how it went.

“Skinny,” I remember myself saying, as we sat on the ledge of his family’s one-floor flat. “Are you sure that Planet Collinus is even real?”

Skinny was bent over in front of me on the roof, applying the final touches of duct tape to the edges of the refrigerator box. We’d scribbled our names on the box, because in Skinny’s mind, if we actually made it to Planet Collinus, we might forget our names from amnesia. I still don’t know how amnesia correlates to space travel but I thought the concept was cool at the time.

“Collin, I literally saw it in the sky last night. It was blue, like we talked about.” He paused, adding one more strip of tape for emphasis. “Now can you help me inside? We’re about to make history.”

“Shouldn’t I go in, too?”

“We need someone to tell our parents where we went,” Skinny stated intelligently. “I’ll come back for you when I get my ship fixed.”

“Oh, okay.”

“And remember,” he said, looking me in the eye. “Even when I’m in another universe–”

“You’re still my best friend.”

“Fuck yeah,” he said, squeezing his small body into the box. I watched as he cocooned himself with the cardboard and closed the flaps behind him. His voice was muffled. “Okay, push me off.”

“I’ll see you on the other side,” I said quietly, and then, with a running start, I pushed the spaceship off the roof.

Skinny had a broken arm for the rest of the summer. He wanted to attempt it again, but I had mercy on his other arm.

I remember that story all the time, that moment where my hands met the cardboard. I remember the sound of his bone snapping, and his voice screaming into a painful cry. I remember trying to lower myself off the roof, and then realizing that the ladder we placed fell down, and I was stuck for everyone to see–stuck for everyone to notice that I’d pushed my best friend off the roof.

But the thing I remember the most, the thing that sticks out vividly in my memory, is the way he laughed after his pain had settled. I stared down at him from the roof, with his arm twisted and fractured in a million different spots. He was laughing, like he’d just gone on a waterpark ride. He stared up at me. “Collin, I think I broke my fucking arm.”

“Are–Are you okay?!” I tried lowering myself off the roof, but it was way too high for me to make a safe landing.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” he said, sitting up. There was a wince of pain in his eyes. The cardboard spaceship was next to him, crumpled and sunken in. He smiled at it, then at me. “You wanna go again?”

Eventually, Ortega came out from the backdoor after hearing all the racket. He stared at me with blood-red fury, his face burning like fireplace embers. “Collin, what the fuck did you do?”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I whimpered, sitting on the edge of the roof and pulling my knees to my chest. I still couldn’t get down. “It was an accident.”

“Did you push my boy off the roof?” he screamed up at me, but then Skinny nudged him in the leg.

“I pushed myself off the roof,” he stated firmly. “Dad, come on. Don’t get mad.”

Ortega went off again, screaming and shouting at both me and Skinny. He was screaming so much, there was spit dripping from his lip, and bloodshot veins in his eyes. Throughout the entirety of this ordeal, however, Skinny remained smiling.

That’s what I remember the most–his smile.

And that’s why when I opened my eyes, after recounting this convoluted and confusing memory, I froze where I laid. Someone was smiling down at me.

A girl.

My first thought, in the darkness of the night sky, was that it was the freaky figure from the woods, about to rip my face open and eat my brain. I started shrieking, sitting up as fast as I could, and in doing so, the girl fell back into the grass on her butt, staring at me widely. Now with the high ground, I could get a good look at her face.

The first thing I noticed were her eyes–big, bright yet sunken-in, with a pinkish glow around her irises. Her eyelashes were long and delicate, like spider legs, as if quickly manicured with mascara and dipped in tar. She stared at me, unblinking. Her skin was taut and rough, stretched out across her face in an uncanny way, and had a viridescent tint, ranging from deep forest greens to mint tones around her eyes.

The girl had stitches, cuts, scrapes, and scars around the edges of her head, too–mostly around her jawline and eyes, and one painfully deep stitch across her neck. Her matted, clumpy hair was almost covering her eyes, tied down with two plump pigtails, and she seemed to have dyed it some cheap purplish-blue color. Between the green skin, bulging eyes, bloated lips, and where we were currently, I could discern who she was.

She looked absolutely freakish.

I was left speechless, my screams disappearing. I stared at her in amazement and fear, watching as she slowly rose from the ground, her eyes never leaving me.

“Eh…” My breath was caught in my throat, and although I wanted to run and scream and hide, my feet were planted to the cemetery ground. I was forced to stare at her. I was forced to engage. My heart stopped beating in my chest. I had a few choices, all of them fruitless. If I ran, I’d run into the creature. If I stayed there, this girl would eat my brains.

I shrieked again and wound my foot back, ready to strike her in the head.

Then she spoke back. Well, screamed back.

“Wait, stop! Don’t hurt me!” She covered her face with her bead-bracelet-covered arms, wincing in prepared pain. I stopped, standing there with my foot up. She was a foot–literally–in front of me, cowering on the ground. We stared at each other. I met her eyes again.

She was definitely human. She had to be human. I was losing my fucking mind.

I stumbled back, lowering my foot. “I–I…”

“Did I scare you?” she said quickly, lowering her arms. She looked like a burn victim covered in green face paint, hiding beneath a purple wig. Even if we weren’t in a cemetery, I probably would’ve shit my pants. “I’m sorry, I’m just lost.”

“Oh.” I caught my breath in my throat, my heart still beating fast. I felt like I was in a dream, or in a purgatory between reality and fiction. I couldn’t fathom everything that had happened in the past hour or so. “Who–Um… Are you okay?” I bent down a bit. She was a lot shorter than me. “You look kinda–”

“Who are you?” Suddenly, it was her turn to be off-put. The arms returned, guarding me from getting a good look at her. There was a brief period of silence between us. She stared at my shirt, and I stared at her hair. I analyzed her face for any resemblance of anyone I’d ever met, and she counted the facial hair on my upper lip. We surveyed each other like this for a good thirty seconds, and then I answered her.

“I’m visiting the cemetery.”

“We’re by the cemetery?” she asked incredulously, her eyes darting around, taking in the tombstones and mausoleums that surrounded us. She felt the dirt beneath us, the coarse gravel within it, and the wet blades of grass sticking to the bottom of our shoes. Her eyes were even wider than before. “We’re–Uh–Am I…?” She caught a glimpse of her hands, rough and pale, and analyzed them further. She began to shake, noticing her own green skin, and the tips of gangrene that sunk into her fingertips.

She stared up at me. I stared back.

I had to think fast. She looked like she was about to cry.

“I was running from someone, and I wanted to run by the cemetery to hide,” I stated flatly, trying to cut off her train of thought. There was a 50/50 shot I’d just encountered a zombie, albeit a pretty coherent one. If this was a dream, anyway, that would be my line of thinking. “Now you go.” I was still hoping she was some cosplay freak that ended up in a meat grinder.

“I…” She slowly rose from the ground, still staring at her hands. She wasn’t focusing on me, or her hands really. “I just woke up, I think, from a really long sleep.”

That literally answered none of my questions. “You fell asleep? Here?”

“No, I…” She looked off for a moment, lost in thought. “I don’t really remember. One second everything was dark, and now–I mean, it’s still dark. It’s night. But, like, now I’m awake. For the first time, I think.” She rose to her feet, still looking off to the side. Then, like a switch was flipped in her brain, she turned to me quickly and smiled. Her shaky hands stiffened and her expression widened into an exaggerated smile. Her hair even bounced. “Who were you running from?”

“Er, I–”

She got close to me then, completely invading my personal space. Somehow, that quiet, scared girl had shifted into complete giddiness, hopping all around me with a big, goofy smile on her face. “Were you running from someone? Or a ghost? Or a murderer? Oh my God, please tell me it was a murderer.”

She had to be about six inches away from my face, her hands clasped together like a kid on Christmas.

“Are you alright?” I took a step back.

“I just woke up after ten fucking years! Yeah, I’m alright,” she said, throwing her hands in the air and laughing. “You really believed that schtick? I’ve been up for, like, a week now. Or maybe a few days. I don’t know. My concept of time is kinda screwed up.” She turned away from me, playing with the chunky bracelets on her arm. “Five years in the fuckin’ crypt. Man, I gotta take a shower. I probably reek.” She glanced at me up and down. “Wait, who are you again?”

“I was hiding in the–” I tried to repeat, but she cut me off.

“No, like who are you?” Then she grabbed my face with her gangly zombie hands, squeezing my cheeks together and analyzing every pore. “You don’t look familiar.”

I pushed her away. “My name’s Collin.”

“Okay, and mine’s Abby, but, I mean, who are you, exactly?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m just tryna gather what type of person you are,” she said flatly, glancing down at her nails. “Because ever since I woke up, I’ve been kinda bummin’ it in the cemetery, hiding whenever people come to visit their dead moms. I need a place to crash for the foreseeable future.”

I was speechless. “Wha… huh?”

“You know, like a place that doesn’t smell like death.”

“No, I got that, but… No, I still can’t believe this is real.” I sat down in the grass, gripping my head with my hands. “This has got to be a dream.”

“What? Am I that unbelievable?” She knelt down to be face-to-face with me. Up close, she didn’t look so bad. For a girl that was rotting beneath the ground for ten years, she didn’t look a day past three days deceased. “You’re like twenty-something, right? You’ve definitely got your own pad by now.”

I looked up from between my hands. “I’m eighteen.”

“Oh, sweet! Me, too. Well, I was eighteen when I died. I don’t know if those five subterranean years count.” She laid down on the grass, staring up at the stars. In the position she was laying–that being in front of me with her knees up–I could see directly between her legs. Well, I saw between them for a second, and then I covered my eyes with my hands tightly, for modesty. “You live with your folks?”

“My mom, and my sister.”

“Ooh, sounds fun.” She was wearing these big, chunky leather boots, and they were right in my face as I contemplated my life up to that point. She sat up, being a few inches from my face. “Do you guys have a spare room? Or am I gonna have to stay in your bed?”

My face turned red and hot.

“Oh my God, you’re so easy,” she said, slapping me–hard–on the shoulder. “I’m joking. I’ll sleep in the bathtub or something.” She clasped her hands together. “No, wait. We can build a fort, like with pillows and cushions, and I can live in that. O-M-G, like a sleepover. That would be so sick.”

“I’m not letting you stay at my house.”

Her eyes darkened. She cocked her head to the side. “Why?”

“Because…” I mused, and then I spat, incredulously, “Because you’re a fucking reanimated corpse!”

Her lips contorted into a pout. “So I have some character. You say it like it’s a bad thing.”

“It is a bad thing! A very bad thing! You’re literally green.” I plugged my nose. “And you smell so, so bad right now.”

“I can freshen up a bit,” she paused, “At your place.”

“I don’t need you to freshen up. I need to wake up, because this has to be a dream. This isn’t real.” My voice was getting louder and louder, more frantic with each passing breath. “This isn’t fucking real. I’m not here. I’m not fucking here. Everything’s fine. I’m not here.” I grabbed at my head, pulling my knees close to me. I think I started shaking.

She was quiet for a moment, staring at me with those big, pinkish eyes and long eyelashes. A stretched-out doll of death, seated in front of me, analyzing every inch of skin on my face. Her voice became low. “Is something wrong?”

My hands were covering my eyes, hiding the tears from falling. I was such a crybaby. “I’m here to visit… a friend.”

“In the cemetery?”

“Yeah,” I nodded weakly, still covering my face from her sight.

“Was it the new tombstone they put in today?” She stood up, bending over to speak to me on the ground. “The one for the boy.”

I uncovered my eyes. “You saw the funeral?”

“I saw it from the bushes. I couldn’t make out much.”

Suddenly, I grew even more disgusted with myself, that even a stranger could witness the event without shedding a tear, while I was left shaking being within the cemetery gates. It haunted me that out of all the people to see Skinny before they put him six feet below, it was a zombie, watching over him like a raven of death.

And she didn’t even know him.

“His tomb’s near there. The bushes, I mean. I can show you if you want.” She interrupted my train of thought by extending her hand out to me. Her nails were manicured, dull and pink with years of dirt beneath her fingertips. She left the hand to hang in the air. Still.

“I…” I exhaled sharply, looking askance. “No… I’m not ready yet.”

She lowered her palm, but still stared with concern. “Well… Why don’t you show me your house then?”

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