Return of the Jed (3 page)

The lunch ladies preferred spontaneity over dietary regulations, so occasionally they would spin the Wheel of Meat to determine the day’s menu. One of our favorites was “Whatever fits in a taco,” but it mostly came up, “Mystery stew.”

The wheel was one of the many victims of the tragic cafeteria fire that brought the school year to a flaming close. For me it was a fitting end to a very rough time as a seventh grader. Still, I would have been fine if the cafetorium hadn’t burned down all metaphor-like.

Though the fire department was still investigating the cause, I knew exactly what started it—an ill-advised experiment at the science fair when the nerds of the Tech Club (who were also the closeted members of the NZN Network) tried to prove I was a danger to Pine Hollow and the world at large.

Thankfully no one was injured too much, and a few days later Principal Buckley showed off plans for a new cafeteria featuring a state-of-the-art Fry-O-Lator guaranteed to lower saturated-fat content in school lunches by up to four percent, ushering in an era of slightly less obese middle school students. Technology was so amazing.

Still, I was going to miss the Wheel of Meat.

Well, until it showed up on Luke’s lawn.

“Luke, just one question,” I said. “Why?”

“Why would anyone leave it behind?” Luke said. “No clue, not when you realize this beauty launched a thousand lunches. The history alone staggers the mind. Over the years, no telling how many kids nursed stomach aches as they headed to fifth period thanks to the ingenuity of the cafeteria ladies. You can’t just leave something like this behind.”

“Where did you find it, exactly?”

“In the smoldering ruins. OK, the ruins weren’t so smoldering by the time I lifted it. I also had to convince some insurance dude to let me take it. Once I explained to him its significance, he said something about health laws, and made me promise him I wouldn’t tell anyone where I got it. Score!”

I shook my head. Only Luke would think the Wheel of Meat was a valuable relic.

“I hate to break it to you, but Dad and I are almost finished packing, and this is not going to fit,” I said. “Besides, why would you want to bring this to Mexico?”

“Mexico? You thought I was dragging this across the street to take south of the border? Dude, sometimes you have to keep your brain-deadness in check.”

“So why are you dragging this thing across the street?”

“Because I can’t carry it, duh. You know how heavy this thing is? With great responsibility comes great weight.”

“No, that’s not what I meant,” I said. “Why isn’t this thing in your room since you love it so much?”

“My mom doesn’t quite feel the way I do. She said that when I got back from Mexico, the Wheel of Meat would be the Wheel of Misfortune because she was going to trash it. Can’t let that happen. Future generations must see the Wheel of Meat and learn. So I’m keeping it in your garage until we get back.”

“You know we’re leaving in about an hour. Instead of worrying about the wheel, you should be packing.”

“Packing? That took me five minutes.” Luke tilted his head toward the porch. “Bag’s right there. Maybe you can grab it for me.”

“Fine,” I said, leaving Luke to the Wheel of Meat. I took the two steps onto his porch in a single bound, but all I could see was a lumpy white trash bag with a yellow plastic strap.

Oh, man.

I hefted it, guessing it held maybe three days’ worth of clothes. And we were going to be gone two months.

I made a mental note—when rooming with Luke, don’t inhale. Sometimes it paid to be a zombie, and avoidance of Luke stench was one of the better perks.

Grasping the bundle by its plastic throat, I hefted it over my shoulder and trudged back home, passing Luke about halfway as he struggled with the well-done Wheel of Meat. I flung open the Man Van’s side door and threw Luke’s bag on top of the pile of suitcases.

“Jed, we’re going to be generating enough trash without taking our own,” Dad said from behind the wheel. He made some notations on a clipboard, turning to face me. “Luggage, check. Water, check. Snacks, check. But right here, where it says, ‘Excess trash’? No check. That’s intentional. If we for some reason we want to acquire more trash, I am sure the number of trash bins along the way will meet our needs.”

Dad’s humor was as uncool as his job.

“Funny stuff,” I said. “That’s Luke’s bag.”

“Ah, now it’s all coming together,” Dad said. “A trash bag is very Lukian. But does he know our plans don’t include daily visits to a Laundromat?”

“Probably, because he has no idea what a Laundromat even is,” I said. “As far as he knows, a wash fairy goes into the Magic Hamper and turns his dirty clothes clean before folding them and putting them back in the dresser.”

“I wish I believed in the wash fairy,” Dad said. “Oh wait, I do. It’s your mom. Or is that sexist?”

“Very sexist.” I may be a zombie, but it does not mean I don’t have a sensitive side.

I cared less about the trash bag. I was just happy Luke was coming along. We’d had a rough spring semester at Pine Hollow. He’d thought I was a monster; I’d thought he was a traitor.

Now, here I was, willing to keep his Wheel of Meat for him. We’d come a long way.

“Need a hand with that?” I asked Luke as he pulled the wheel up our driveway.

“Sure could, thanks.”

“Here.” I gave my left hand a quick yank, detaching it at my wrist, offering it to him.

“I walked right into that, didn’t I”

“Yup,” I said. “Never gets old.”

The Man Van rumbled on at a steady sixty-five mph along a freeway that was voted “Most Ugly Stretch of Anything Anywhere” by Luke and me. We saw, in order: brown grass, barbwire fences, taller brown grass, dirt, and stuff that could have been tall bushes or short trees. Who cared?

At least Tread had settled in quite nicely. I had lined his crate with his favorite blanket and secured his plastic den to the floor with duct tape (it wasn’t just for reattaching limbs). It turned out a zombie dog needed a lot fewer bathroom breaks than non-zombie dogs, yet another checkmark in the Advantage-Undead column.

But me? I was bored out of my brain-dead skull.

After a million miles, I finally said it.

“Are we there yet?”

“Yes, we’re there,” Dad said in his flat “I checked out of this conversation ten minutes before it started” tone. “Go ahead and hop out.”

“But we’re going sixty-five miles an hour.”

“Details.”

I unbuckled my seatbelt—when you’re undead, certain safety measures seemed silly—and lifted myself over the center console filled with the cellophane wrappers from our microwave-burrito lunch, courtesy of the stop we made about 500,000 miles ago at the Slurp ‘N’ Go (with all of us wearing the baseball caps to prove it).

I slipped into the seat next to Luke. Riding shotgun wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, especially when the driver was in no mood for conversation. It wasn’t my fault that microwave burritos had a certain effect on zombies.

“As long as you are no longer a toxic waste dump, you can visit,” Luke said. “But the second Mt. Jed erupts—again—you are banished to the forbidden zone.” He jerked his thumb to the back, where our bags were packed with all the finesse of a Tetris game gone horribly wrong.

“I’m fine now, things have settled,” I said. “For the most part.”

I looked out the window at a landscape that remained as bleak as my plans to become a professional athlete. “Pretty ugly, huh?”

“You’re not so bad.”

“That not what I—”

“I know,” Luke said. “But if you’re going to lob a softball my way, I’m going to smack it out of the park.”

I looked from the window back at Luke. There was still one thing bugging me, a question I’d wanted to ask even before we started. But I was afraid if I asked too early, Luke wouldn’t be here.

“How did you convince your parents to let you come?” I asked. “I thought they were as freaked out over the Tread thing as you were?”

I did not see much of Luke after I brought Tread to undeadness. He felt as badly as I did when the stray ran from us and into the path of an oncoming car. Neither one of us expected we’d ever
see
the canine now known as Tread.

But as a longtime member of the walking dead, I was OK with walking the dead. Luke refused to accept what happened, as if I’d been Frankenstein cooking up a monster.

Fortunately, that was all water under the bridge over the River Styx. Luke adjusted to it, and he always knew Tread was a special case, that I could not just go around turning the recently expired into the newly undead. He also helped me defend myself against the nerds who started the NZN Network at school, that loose association of the overlooked and ignored who wanted me expelled because of the notoriety I gained as a victim. They feared my presence recruited bullies, leading them to be the focus of more beatings.

While the strength of our friendship brought Luke back into the zombie fold, his parents still worried me. They were always nice to me, but I suspected them to have anti-zombie-ist tendencies, like the time Luke and I were roughhousing and my right leg came off in mid-kick, knocking over a lamp.

“Honestly, Jed,” Luke’s mom had said as I hopped to retrieve the limb. “You people come apart at the slightest thing.”

I could only imagine the reaction when Luke told his parents about Tread.

“Mom didn’t want me to go,” Luke said. “But I think it was more about Mexico than you. Mom is kind of a, you know …”

“Bigot?”

“Sometimes, yeah. Dad thought the trip was cool, a great way to expose myself to another culture.”

“Promise me you won’t expose yourself to Mexico and get us kicked out of an entire country.”

“You know what I mean. Jerk.”

“Go on,” I said.

“Dad was never worried about the zombie thing,” Luke said. “Something about you biting me when we were five and fighting over
LEGOS
.”

“I remember that. You said you were Godzilla, and you stomped my city, then you screamed ‘
LEGO
Godzilla fire breath,’ put a bunch of blocks in your mouth and spit them at me.”

“Yeah, those were good times. Anyway, I didn’t turn into a zombie, bumbling around and drooling on myself—”

“Unless you’re around a girl you really like,” I said, ignoring the zombie stereotype.

“Mom is fairly OK with me playing with the undead, and once I promised her I’d stay away from the water and the food and the people—you know, anything that makes Mexico
Mexico
—she was fine. So here I am.”

Luke put an arm around me and squeezed my shoulders. “But I am worried about who isn’t here. How did Anna take it?”

My stomach suddenly hurt as if I’d taken a body blow from a heavyweight boxer.

Anna was my pretty-much girlfriend who’d gotten to know me because she thought I could turn her into a zombie, and then liked me because I couldn’t. And then really liked me because we had so much in common. I really liked her too, mostly because she helped me stand up for myself (and she was right there to back me up if I didn’t).

I leaned back in my seat and closed my eyes. I thought about Anna, specifically the day a week before when I’d told her about Mexico, and that we’d be apart for a whole summer.

She took it well. Almost too well.

Against my better wishes, the scene replayed itself for like the millionth time.

The scene started as it always did.

Anna and I sat in my backyard, where Tread searched for a bone. The bone happened to be part of his left front leg, hampering his digging abilities. Being able to remove his limbs was a blessing and a curse. Tread always had a bone to gnaw on, but at great sacrifice to his mobility.

“I have something to tell you,” I said.

“If it’s that you burped, I already know. I smelled it a few minutes ago.”

“Huh? No, I, um, no.” Her response threw me because while the undead are known for emitting various bodily gasses, I hadn’t burped.

“Jed, kidding,” she said. “What’s up?”

She slid her hand into mine, smoothly and naturally. We’d definitely become boyfriend-girlfriend over spring semester, even if neither of us really said it out loud. We held hands, talked and texted every day, and sometimes when we walked, she would put her arm around my waist, and I would act as if it were no big deal, putting my arm over her shoulder so it wouldn’t slide off because I was so nervous. There was nothing more embarrassing than losing a limb every time a girl showed you a little affection.