chapter Thirty - two
"What about my tiara?" Amanda called to a fleeing Taft.
Taft ran across the gym and let himself out through a side door. Of course, that option was no longer available to us. Our only escape route was through the sea of zombies.
"This sucks!" Amanda groused after he was gone.
"Yeah," I agreed. "Big-time."
Zombies continued filing in.
The music started up again: "She Blinded Me with Science," by Thomas Dolby.
Amanda rushed over to join Heather and the other girl ghouls. She started barking out orders. But the Zombiettes weren't paying her any attention. Heather bared her teeth and grabbed Amanda by the arm.
"Stop it!" Amanda shrieked. She tried to pull away, but Heather's grip was too strong.
"Hhhhhhh." Heather's lips parted.
Without thinking, I raced across the room and rapped her sharply on the nose with my rolled-up program.
"Yeeee!" She released Amanda, letting out a high-pitched whine.
"Sorry about that By the way, cute top," I called as I
pulled Amanda away.
"Where are we going?" she squawked.
"I don't know."
The gym was quickly filling up with angry zombies. We had three, four minutes tops before we'd be attacked. I began looking around for another escape route, or a weapon, anything that could prolong our ordeal.
That's when I noticed the ropes.
I yanked Amanda over to the wall and pulled on the cord releasing the ropes from the ceiling. Four thick, braided ropes dropped down.
Amanda eyed the ropes, her nose in the air. "What?"
"It's our only way out, Amanda. We'll climb them, and stay up until Sybil can rescue us."
"Sybil isn't going to rescue us."
She was probably right about that.
"She might. We have to try."
"This is a thousand-dollar Chanel ball gown!" Amanda whined. "It has no business on the ropes."
Somehow, I had to get Amanda to climb the rope. "Look," I said, pointing at the swarm of zombies nearing us. "Goths. You're about to become a Goth for all eternity."
She eyed the Goths with disdain. "Ugh! That monochromatic color scheme. How boring."
"I know."
"And I believe they apply their makeup with a trowel."
"I know."
"And talk about bad hair days. I've never seen one with a good hair day."
"1 know!" I exclaimed as the Goths got closer. "And you'll have to listen to Goth pop ... Evanescence."
She brightened a bit. "I could handle Evanescence. That Amy Lee's got--"
"Okay, forget about the Goth pop. Just keep thinking black. Nothing but black. Everyday black. All black, all the time ... Black."
"Oh, my goodness!" Amanda shrieked, shooting the nearing Goths one last withering glance.
She began to climb.
I scrambled up the adjacent rope as the zombies closed in. The thick hemp ripped into my hands and knees. My palms burned with the pain of a thousand paper cuts, yet this time I continued upward.
Just then the song changed. "You Keep Me Hangin' On" filled the air.
Amanda struggled up the rope in the voluminous ball gown. The zombies below swatted at her heels. One snatched at her shoe, and she kicked it off as she shimmied up and out of reach. "My arms are killing me!" she called.
My arms hurt as well. I was grateful for the little practice Mrs. Mars had insisted I get in gym class. But I still wasn't in any kind of shape, and my feeble muscles screamed in protest.
"Hang in there," I called back. I looked down at the horde of zombies gathering below and was surprised to see they were no longer divided into cliques. Prep zombies stood shoulder-to-shoulder with nerds, stoner nerds with emos--all working together to get at us.
At that moment thoughts of Sybil flared through my mind. She'd called her desire to change the school's social structure a silly idea. But it wasn't. She had actually gotten various groups to roam with one another. It's not like they were hanging out
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or anything--they were zombies. But she got them to coexist peacefully, not snarking at one another, or gossiping behind one another's backs, or getting jealous when one of their friends liked a cute boy. The zombies had just one thing in common-- they were zombies. But we kids have a whole lot in common. Shouldn't it be easier for us to hang together?
A wave of shame flooded through me. While I had been busy living out the lie of being the most popular girl at school, Sybil had realized that being popular wasn't the be-all and end-all of high school existence. To her, we were all the same.
Some of the zombies started jumping to get at us. They pushed and shoved one another to be first in line to dig their teeth into us. This sent the ropes swinging back and forth. The swinging motion made it harder to hang on. They were inadvertently shaking the ropes the way one might shake a tree to make an apple fall.
"Stop that!" Amanda yelled down at the zombies. She looked at me. "I can't hold on much longer." She looked down again. "Look, there's Kim Travers. She's a mathlete. Maybe she'll bite me. I've always wanted to be good at math." I could tell from the look on her face she was giving in to the idea of becoming a zombie. Her grip loosened.
"I don't think it works like that, Amanda," I said quickly. "All you'll be is a math geek zombie."
"Oh?" she said as she considered this. Her grip on the rope tightened.
The gym had fifteen-foot windows that looked out onto the campus. Through them I could see the walkways that wound through campus, lined with light posts that gave off soft yellow light. The world outside was quiet, green, safe. It seemed warm and inviting.
Since middle school I'd been an outsider wanting in. Now,
as I hung high above the gym floor teeming with zombies, I wanted out.
"Hey, Amanda, remember Baron Chomsky and Milton Sharp?"
"Who?"
"Two geek boys, one imitates James Bond all the time and the other wears T-shirts with goofy cartoon characters on them."
"Hello? I have other things on my mind right now." She gestured toward the moaning horde below.
"I know, but it looks like we're going to be up here for a while. Do you know who I'm talking about?"
She thought about it for like a nanosecond. "Yes, I know who you mean." She was clearly annoyed with the conversation.
"I was just wondering if you'd seen them around?"
"I can't remember. I don't keep tabs on geeks."
"Of course you don't. But I mean, since everyone else is a zombie, they would have been easy to spot."
The floor below had become a virtual sea of zombies, all aching to get at us.
She sighed. "If you must know, I've seen them quite a bit. They were always giving the jock zombies wedgies, or hanging kick me signs on their backs, or placing morsels of food on their heads. So childish."
"Yeah," I said, smiling as I pictured Baron toying with the zombies. I recalled the look of pride on his face the day he'd shown me and Sybil the wedgie he'd given the jock zombie. "Did you know they disappeared a few days ago?"
"I couldn't care less. I'm going to disappear in a few minutes if you don't figure out a way to get us out of here."
I ignored her snarky tone. "Did you know they invented an antidote that could change everyone back?"
Her eyes widened, and I could tell she was hearing this for the first time. "What? And they didn't use it? Idiots! I guess they thought they'd be better off keeping everything as it is so they could be big shots."
No, that was me.
'If I'd had a cure, I would have changed things back a long time ago. You have no idea how hard it is being popular when there's no one to flaunt it in front of."
Actually, I did know.
'That's probably why Principal Tart locked them in the boiler room."
My body stiffened as my eyes widened.
"At the time I thought it was some kind of detention for teasing the zombies. But he probably wanted them and their antidote out of the way."
It was good knowing what had happened to my friends. I wondered if they were still among the living. Before I could deal with that, however, there was something I needed to get off my chest.
"You know, Amanda, for as far back as I can remember I've wanted to be you."
"Well, of course you do. Who wants to be a nobody?"
"Back when I thought you were a zombie, I would have let you bite me, so that I might roam the halls of Salesian by your side for all eternity. Before you became a zombie, I wanted to hang with you. If you'd said, 'Margot, you look cute today ,'I would have rejoiced, and if you'd said, 'I hate those shoes' I would have taken them home and burned them."
Note to self: You really have to start writing some of this stuff down--it's brilliant!
I continued: "What a fool I've been wasting my time on you."
The smug smile that graced her lips slowly faded. She hung there above the zombies, staring at me. Her eyes narrowed.
"I've never liked you."
"You just asked me to hang out with you next semester."
"I don't need to like you to hang with you," she said.
"Is that why you stopped talking to me after seventh-grade summer camp?" The question flew from my lips so quickly I didn't realize I was going to ask it. It was a question I'd been torturing myself about since I was twelve years old. I knew the answer would never free me from the years of pain the snub had caused. Still, I had to know. As I stared at her, waiting for her reply, a lump formed in my throat.
"Oh, that," she said. "I guess I did like you until that summer."
"What did I do to make you guys stop talking to me?"
"Okay. You know how every night when we went to our bunks we always gossiped about someone? Remember how much we looked forward to lying in bed in the darkness, gossiping?"
I nodded.
"Well, after you went home sick, we gossiped about you. We made a bunch of stuff up--like we always did--but this time, it was about you."
"What kind of stuff?"
"The usual. You smelled bad; you talked about us behind our backs; you didn't know how to dress. You know?"
I was getting a sinking feeling, because I did know. We'd said those same things about other girls all the time. Not so much fun when it was about me.
"And since you weren't there to defend yourself, we all decided we hated you."
"But that's not fair," I said. It was the voice of a twelve-year-old girl. I could feel myself getting sick to my stomach, like
I had when they first stopped talking to me. "It wasn't true. You guys just made up a bunch of lies."
She shrugged. "You asked, I told," she said in a dismissive tone.
"We used to do everything together. I thought we were friends."
"We were friends," she replied. If there was a hint of remorse in her words, I didn't hear it.
"All these years I thought I'd done something wrong. I tried so hard to get you to like me again." My words were filled with years of anguish.
"Really?" She seemed surprised.
"Yeah!" It was embarrassing admitting it.
"Let me give you some advice. The next time you want someone to like you, try sucking up to them a little more."
Hadn't thought of that. I guess I just wanted her to like me for me. What a concept--liking someone for who they are.
"You're the worst kind of person, you know that?" I suddenly said.
She thought about this for a second. "Of course you'd say that. You're a nobody. I'd rather be me than you any day."
I knew she'd say something like that. Sadly, there was a time when I'd rather have been her than me, too. I'd been blinded by all of Amanda's surface glitter.
I realized as I hung there that getting the chicken pox that seventh-grade summer was actually a blessing in disguise, because it allowed me to meet Sybil. Sybil would never tell lies about me behind my back, or desert me. She was an amazing person, a great friend. I hadn't been taking care of that friendship--until now.
I looked Amanda in the eye. "I know you think you're better than me. That's what makes girls like you so sad. Your
reality is clouded by some distorted image of yourself. People like me help you keep that image alive by wanting to hang with you, fawning over you all the time. But I'm not doing that anymore." I took a deep, cleansing breath and let it out slowly. It felt soo good. "By the way, I'm not a nobody. I'm somebody. The name's Johnson, Margotyean Johnson."
And with that, I released my grip on the rope and dropped, plummeting into the outstretched arms of the zombies below.