Zombies: The Recent Dead (54 page)

“No. I do. At least to me,” Justine said.

“I was amazing,” Pearl suddenly announced. She was still wearing stage makeup. Up close, her rouge was bright and overwhelming and sick. It was how Justine had pictured scarlet fever might look.

Justine sighed. “I’m sorry. Here, I got you flowers. And a cheeseburger, if you want it.”

Pearl smiled for a moment. “A cold cheeseburger, ew.” But she rolled her eyes as she took the flowers. “Great, flowers. I already got some from my supportive parents! Oh wait, they didn’t come to the fucking play. I got some from my boyfriend! Oh, wait, I don’t have a boyfriend.”

“Pearl, did something happen?”

“For college,” said Pearl, “I am moving to a city where all the cute boys have Asian fetishes. For real.” She sighed hopelessly.

“Come on, tell me what’s wrong,” said Justine. Pearl stared at the floor and started scratching the inside of her left elbow, where the skin was already hot pink. “Stop scratching,” Justine said, and put out her hand. Pearl got in one more good scratch and then sat on her hand.

She said, “That’s cool you got laid. I got totally freaking rejected. That’s why I left the cast party early. What if you actually liked Greg, like you cared about him and wanted him to be your boyfriend instead of just using him to see if you could have sex with a teenager. . . .” Justine flinched. “But he didn’t like you back because there were so many better-looking girls swarming around? And maybe he
would
have liked you if those girls weren’t there? You’re decent-looking, so maybe you don’t know what I mean, and you’re not a teenager anymore, so life doesn’t suck as much. But it happens to me all the time. Because I’m ugly, and everyone else is turning beautiful.”

There was no point in telling Pearl that everything would be fine.

“I think you’re lovely,” said Justine. “These boys just don’t appreciate it yet. You’re going to be glad that you didn’t involve yourself with all these high school shitheads when you get to college. Your whole world’s going to open up.”

“
Glad
?” said Pearl.

“Bad word,” said Justine quickly. “Sorry. I’ll go to the play again tomorrow. I won’t be a skank during intermission again. We can go get dinner after.”

Pearl kicked the air. “Doesn’t matter. The other performances have been cancelled. Everyone got sick at the cast party. Marla told me. People were throwing up in line for the bathroom. It sounded awful.”

“You’re kidding.” Justine told Pearl about Rebecca. Pearl sat up so straight that her chair yawed and nearly toppled.

“I knew it!” she said. “It’s the pretty girl anemia. I know this sounds sick, but I don’t care—whatever they have, I want it. It’s not just me. You should see what’s going on at school. Everyone’s trying to catch it. They’re hanging out with the pretty girls, trying to touch them. I even saw—” Here Pearl lowered her voice. “Well, I didn’t see it myself, but I heard that someone got someone’s tampon out of that thing, the period box, from the bathroom stall, and they were going to do something with it.” She shuddered.

“I wish you hadn’t told me that,” said Justine. The cheeseburger was trapped like a hairball somewhere between her chest and her stomach. It wasn’t going anywhere.

“It might not be true. They were making fun of this one girl who was acting all desperate.”

“It’s sad,” said Justine. “You know, people used to have parties where they’d deliberately catch smallpox from someone, like a mild case so they’d be immune after. But I don’t know what those girls are doing.”

“Maybe it’s better than being ugly forever.”

“Pearl—you’re so young. Nothing is forever right now. I remember how it felt when I was in high school,” said Justine. She tried not to pull out her high school mastery often, with Pearl.

Pearl rested her hand on her eyes, a snottily mature gesture. “No offense. But you’re being close-minded and acting
so incredibly old
. I can’t deal with this right now.”

“Fine, I’ll go,” said Justine, standing. “I was only trying to help. Pearl . . . ”

“You actually don’t know anything,” said Pearl.

When Justine left Pearl’s house, she saw that Pearl had already turned off her lights. The whole house was dark now.

A question: was Justine beautiful? It was hard to say. She occupied a certain middle ground. She “cleaned up well,” if “cleaning up” meant applying various paints and powders and unguents to her face until she looked like a high-contrast Photoshop job of herself. But she no longer knew what she looked like. Whenever she drifted while working and her laptop grayed out, she would see herself reflected in the dark LCD, and she could not tell if the screen distorted her face or if that was the face itself.

But there were people enough in the world to tell her what she looked like. Some days it seemed as though everyone in the whole world wanted her to know what she looked like—the way they shouted from cars, beamed her subliminal messages from TV screens and movie theaters and magazines. If only they would all shut the fuck up. If only she had been taught not to listen. It was too late to save herself; she wondered if it was too late to save Pearl.

The next day, Justine woke up late. Her mother had already gone to work, leaving a note on the fridge that read:
Tried to wake you up but you were completely dead. Sorry! Oatmeal on the stove. Love, Mom.

The street by the coffee shop was blocked off. Justine parked as close as she could and walked over. Where the coffee shop had been, there was a huge, puffy white tent that wiggled in the breeze like a fat ghost, shuddering away from the metal spikes impaling each corner of it to the cement. Small crowds of people, some in neon yellow Hazmat suits, huddled near the entrance. Justine came closer. A person in a Hazmat suit emerged from the tent. Justine saw rows and rows of flaps inside, like fluttering laundry lines.

“Excuse me,” said the Hazmat suit, in a sexless voice. “Sorry, Miss.” The suit’s mask was black, silvered with a reflective sheen. The suit put its big mitt of a hand up. “You can’t come in.”

“What’s going on? I work here.”

“You must return to your home and await further instructions. This town is under quarantine.”

“Is this about Rebecca? She was sick. We called an ambulance for her last night.”

“Oh, Rebecca,” sighed the suit. “Rebecca Norbeck is dead. We are with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. You may have something very bad here. Four girls died in the night.”

Justine shook her head. Rebecca might have been puking her guts out, but even so, she’d never looked better. She, above all, had been so pleased with her new beauty. She would come into the coffee shop and order big foofy drinks, sipping at them with a thrilled, almost cross-eyed screwball comedienne expression, except Justine knew that she was only pretending. Those drinks grew cold on the table, full to the brim. Nevertheless, in the last two weeks, Rebecca had acted like everything was delicious, especially the love-struck boys and girls who stood awkwardly at her table, trying to make conversation as she put away the vampire novels that she never finished reading anymore.

“No, I don’t think so,” said Justine. “I just saw her last night. She was sick, but not that bad.”

“The virus works quickly. This coffee shop may be a vector. The high school is a vector. The body-piercing parlor is a vector. Anything the young people have touched is a vector. Please—go home, await further instructions. Although,” and the suit cocked its head with a loud crinkle, “You may be too old to get it. We’ve been wondering about that.”

“I feel fine,” Justine said, distracted. “So how many girls have gotten sick?”

“Feeling fine is one thing. Do you feel pretty?”

“What?”

“Never mind. Just go home. If you have any little high school girlfriends, please tell them to stay in their homes and call this hotline number.” The suit produced a card from its thigh pocket and handed it to Justine. “The rate of infection is growing. The virus grows ever more virulent. You must warn all of your unpopular friends as well. The beauty sickness is no longer co-morbid with popularity. It is trickling down.”

The suit politely waved her away from the entrance. When Justine reached the roadblock, the suit was gone. In the crowds, she saw people she recognized. Lots of parental types, swarming around the tents and anyone with a clipboard. Justine turned away. She wanted to jump back in time, warn the girls as they chose door number two, the beauty prize—she would tell them that death was waiting there,
don’t do it
, but maybe they wouldn’t have listened. Justine called Pearl. Nobody answered. Her heart beat faster as she started her car.

Justine pulled up in front of the high school and saw Pearl’s friend Marla standing at the curb by herself, crying. Crowds of people were working around the high school, blocking off the entrances and setting up tents around the many buildings.

When Marla saw Justine, she waved frantically, the too-long sleeves of her hoodie flapping.

Marla yanked the car door open and threw herself inside. “They kidnapped Pearl!” she told Justine. Some girls had followed them out of school. Marla and Pearl had waited at the front, too afraid to walk home. The girls surrounded them and dragged Pearl into their car.

“It’s because of that blog,” said Marla, sniffling. “They were pissed. They didn’t like what Pearl said about them. I told her not to post that stuff, but she said if those bitches don’t understand that YouTube videos are on the actual Internet for everyone to see, then it’s their own fault. You have to find her.”

“Oh boy,” sighed Justine. “I will. Just . . . don’t touch your face anymore. Don’t touch anything. You don’t want to get sick.”

Marla shrugged. They were silent for a long time, while Justine drove to Marla’s house. A few other buildings had been encircled by the white tents, and the CDC people walked in and out, their movements softened by their awkward suits so that they looked like astronauts, not even on Earth but already in space, drifting from station to station.

Marla burst into tears again. “I hate Pearl. I’m all alone now.” Her face was blotchy, her eyes like slits in an overripe fruit. “I’m going to be the only one.”

Justine didn’t need to ask what she meant.

On the lawn in front of Pearl’s house, six girls stood in a circle. Justine recognized some of them from the coffee shop and the YouTube video. Deanna and Katie were cheerleaders, and with them were Khadija and Nora, who were, respectively, president and activities coordinator of the school manga and anime interest club. The other two girls Justine didn’t recognize.

The suit had said that beauty was no longer co-morbid with popularity. It was true. Weeks ago, these girls had started out in different social worlds, but you couldn’t even tell by their clothes anymore. As they changed, they had all started wearing older-brother-style sweatshirts and gym shorts and huge flannel shirts and flip-flops, as if the normal world of normal-looking people had lost all interest to them. They had stopped grabbing at beauty; now they swam in it; they breathed it in and out.

Justine got out of her car. The girls, even the ones who’d been muscular or rounded or stocky, were now all equally spindly. She could take them. But as she walked past them to Pearl’s front door, she was afraid. They looked as still and perfect as mannequins. It was scarier than dealing with something that seemed alive. They were like girl-shaped landmines.

She banged on the door and rang the doorbell. “Pearl,” she shouted. “Pearl! Let me in!” No one answered. She turned around to face the girls.

“What did you do with her?” she said. Deanna shrugged. They all did, their lips curling up at the edges like burning paper.

“This is serious. People are dying. You’re all in danger.” As Justine spoke, she knew how weak and lame she sounded.

The girls shrugged again. Justine wanted to pull the sidewalk out from under them, to knock them over like bowling pins. Anything to plow through the total brick wall of teenage stoicism.

Justine said, “Where are her parents?”

“They’re all at that big meeting for parents,” said Nora. “It’s too late, though.”

“What’s too late?”

“I don’t know,” said Nora. “Stuff.”

They laughed. They glided closer, moving to surround Justine. She was nervous. They were so damn tall, and their faces blocked out the world around her in a circle of horrible loveliness, creating an alien ecosystem in which Justine—imperfect, spotted, human—could not breathe.

“Pearl doesn’t want to talk to you,” said Deanna. “She doesn’t feel well.”

“Don’t lie to me. You’re not her friends.”

“Like you are. How old are you again? Fifty billion?”

“It’s creepy you want to be Pearl’s friend,” said Khadija, in a lilting, lispy voice.
Iths creepy you wanna be Pearlth fren.

“Fuck off,” said Justine. “Get out of here, or I’m calling the police.”

“Fine,” one of them said. “Do it.”

They stood there, pushing their sleeves up. Justine was afraid again—these girls didn’t seem sick, no, they were fierce and wicked. She pushed Nora, but realized her mistake as soon as she felt Nora’s shoulder, all tendon and bone like a pig knuckle. Nora fell onto Khadija, and Khadija stumbled into another girl. They screamed like normal girls. Nora stood up and pulled down the neck of her sweatshirt over her shoulder. She already had a bruise as big as an apple, a deep red one that seemed to pulse and grow more vivid as they looked.

“Look what you did!”

“Holy shit,” gasped Justine. There was no way. She hadn’t done anything. Perhaps something lurking beneath her surface was capable of punching a teenage girl, but she had only pushed a little. “It was an accident.”

“We’re calling the police on you,” yelled Deanna.

“Nora, you need to go to the hospital,” said Justine. “This isn’t normal.” Justine reached into her pockets to find the card that the suit had given her, but then the girls stepped even closer.

“You’re not normal, bitch,” said Nora.

Khadija lifted a fist, and her T-shirt sleeve shifted to reveal an evil bruise blossoming right where Nora had bumped into her.