I Kissed a Zombie, and I Liked It Read online

  “Even during the night?”

  He nods.

  “So you never get to sleep a full eight hours?”

  He shakes his head sadly as he starts to pour a bit of the stuff from the flask into the coffee. It smells a bit like the car. “I tried to invent something that would automatically pour some down my throat in the night, but it didn’t work well enough that I could count on it. And I couldn’t count on myself to swallow it in my sleep.”

  “Oh my God, that’s tragic!” I say.

  He shrugs. “Just my cross to bear.”

  “It’s not just allergies, is it?” I ask.

  “It’s complicated,” he said. “But I’m not going to die of it or anything, as long as I keep taking this stuff. And it’s not contagious or anything, so don’t worry.”

  He takes a sip of the coffee and cringes.

  “Does it taste bad?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “I don’t taste much, honestly,” he said. “My taste buds aren’t what they used to be.”

  Something about all this sort of triggers a mother instinct in me or something—I just want to cuddle up to him and say that everything will be okay. Suddenly, the vampire thing makes a little more sense to me. There really is something hot about guys with tragic stories.

  His eyes, I notice for the first time, have this glazed, world-weary look. Seventeen and already world-weary. Wilhelm and Friedrich, the vampires, don’t look that jaded, and they’re like two hundred years old, at least. Obviously, this guy is deep.

  “So,” he says, “what did you say in the review?”

  I was hoping he wouldn’t ask that. But I don’t have a lie thought up, and anyway, I know he’ll see it sooner or later.

  “It wasn’t a good review,” I say. “I just wrote about the band. Not the special guest.”

  I don’t mention that I actually sent it in before he sang a note. I don’t really want to admit that.

  He takes another sip of his coffee-and-medicine cocktail. “Well,” he says slowly, “that’s understandable. I know the band sucks. It’s just the only one in town that would let me sing.”

  “You can do better,” I say.

  He gets a sort of mischievous grin.

  “What would you have said about me, if you were writing about the special guest?” he asks.

  I think. “Well,” I say nervously, “I think I would have started by saying that the part-time member of the band from West Des Moines was the best-looking guy in the group.”

  He smiles shyly, and I keep going.

  “Then I would have said he had a more convincing goth look than anyone, even the vampire. He really had the look of a corpse that just crawled out of the grave. And I mean that as a compliment. His throaty whisper betrayed a world-weariness beyond his years, but sounded absolutely genuine.”

  He’s really smiling now, and I know I have him.

  “Anything else?”

  “I’d say that the measure of a good singer isn’t how strong his voice is, or how pretty it is, but whether he sounds like he really understands the songs he’s singing. Doug, special guest of the Sorry Marios, picked two songs that few guys in town have ever heard, let alone understand, but it’s clear from the first note that Doug understands every word. He’s going to be a rock star for sure.”

  “Thanks,” he says.

  “It’s true,” I insist. “You could totally be a star.”

  “Nah,” he says sadly. “Not me.”

  “Yes you will,” I argue. “Maybe not, like, multiplatinum, but you’ll be critically acclaimed, at least.”

  “Rock stars have to sing more than two songs per night,” he says.

  My heart sinks. Not out of disappointment for myself, but for him. He’s right, of course.

  “You could record an album, though,” I say. “You don’t need to sing more than a couple of songs a day to do an album.”

  “I guess so,” he says. “Maybe someday.”

  “I’ll help you,” I say. “I’m going to make you a star. Not playing live much will be part of your mystique.”

  He smiles a little. “So that’s what this is about?” he asks. “Riding my coattails to fame and glory?”

  I can’t tell if he’s teasing or not, but I decide to assume he isn’t, just to be on the safe side.

  “No,” I tell him. “That’s not why I’m going out with you. I just like you.”

  I smile.

  He smiles back.

  I move my hand over so it’s right on top of his, not just up against it, and lean over. He suddenly looks really nervous.

  “There’re a lot of things I can’t do,” he says. “With my … health.”

  “Well,” I say, “can you kiss girls?”

  He nods, and I lean over and give him our first kiss. Whatever it is that he has makes his mouth cold and dry, and I can taste the medicine on him, but he leans into the kiss.

  If you really like someone, it doesn’t matter what their mouth feels or tastes like. The kiss is still awesome.

  The whole rest of the night is a bit of a blur.

  It’s the same feeling I got the first time I heard the harmonica solo on “Oh Yoko” by John Lennon. The song is already ecstatically happy, but when the harmonica comes in, it sounds like pure, wild happiness distilled perfectly into a few seconds of music.

  One date, and I’ve got “Head Over Heels” by Tears for Fears playing in my head on an endless loop.

  5

  The next morning, I wake up terrified. What if I’m coming on too strong? What if he thinks I’m some kind of freak? What if he’s lying in bed thinking, “I never should have made a playlist for that girl, now I’ll never get rid of her”?

  Then I pick up my phone. Three text messages.

  The first is from Sadie: “HOW DID IT GO?”

  The second is from her, too: “WELLLL?????”

  And the third is from him: “Second date?”

  I immediately text him back: “Hell yeah!”

  Then I collapse on my bed and enjoy that “butterflies in the stomach” feeling. I’ve felt the butterflies before from time to time, but this is the first time I haven’t sort of wanted to attack them with a flyswatter.

  I wander (well, skip) downstairs just after noon and find my parents at the kitchen table, sipping coffee and eating donuts. My mom’s reading a financial magazine while Dad works on his new book. He wrote one called Music Scrapbooking Ideas—he’s kind of a pioneer in the field of scrapbooking for men and hipsters. His book sold well enough that now he’s working on a follow-up called (get this) MORE Music Scrapbooking Ideas.

  I always thought it was kind of lame, but this morning I can’t help but imagine being Mom’s age and making a music scrapbook with Doug.

  After one date! What kind of an idiot am I? I’m not one of those girls, like Michelle and Marie and all the other great thinkers of our day. But suddenly, I sort of have an idea of why girls like that are the way they are. I still think they’re idiots, but at least I understand where they’re coming from. How can you not want to feel like this all the time?

  Sadie texts me three more times before I finally call her back.

  “Well?” she asks.

  “It was great,” I say. “He made me a playlist and we went to the Noir Café.”

  “Fan-cy,” she says. “What’s he like?”

  “He’s awesome,” I say. “And I feel so bad for him. He’s got some disease that keeps him from being able to sing or talk much, and he has to take medicine every four hours.”

  “Oh God,” she says. “What disease is it?”

  “I didn’t ask,” I gush. “He seemed kind of embarrassed by it.”

  “Hot,” says Sadie. “An embarrassing disease. Unless it’s like, an STD or something.”

  “I don’t think it is,” I say. “I mean, he said it isn’t contagious. Aren’t all STDs contagious, like, by definition?”

  “Hmmm,” she says. “I think so.”

  “So whatever it is, he has t
o take medicine for it every four hours, it makes his throat kind of weak, and I think it makes his skin look kind of weird.”

  “Was he wearing the same kind of goth makeup as on Friday?”

  “Yeah,” I say, “but I don’t even think it’s makeup. He just looks like that ’cause of the disease.”

  “Maybe he has a spastic colon,” Sadie muses thoughtfully. “Doesn’t that turn people weird colors?”

  “Ew,” I say.

  “Big Daddy has a spastic colon,” she says in a fake Southern accent. “That’s why he’s all yella.” She’s quoting Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Tennessee Williams, of course.

  “You think that’s it?”

  “That would explain why he seemed embarrassed,” she says. “No one wants to talk about their colon on the first date.”

  “But he’s not yellow,” I say. “He’s kind of gray.”

  “Weird,” she says. “But I bet it’s some kind of gross digestive thing.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “But still. It just, like … makes me want to hug him and make it all better. Is that, like, unfeminist of me, or something?”

  She laughs again. “I don’t think so,” she says. “Not if it makes you happy.”

  I collapse onto my bed and just enjoy the butterflies again, even though they frankly scare the hell out of me. I’m not the kind of girl who wants to hug guys and make them feel all better! I’m the kind of girl who makes out with guys and sends them on their way so I can say funny things about them that will end up in Peter’s column!

  A long time ago, Trinity and I made a list of types of guys you should never date. We add to it every now and then. It includes things like never date a guy whose computer costs more than his car (you’ll never get him to pay attention to you except over instant messages), never date a guy who has a pet lizard (he’s probably into weird stuff in bed) and never under any circumstances go on a second date with a guy who says the word “married” on the first date (he’ll turn out to be a mama’s boy or a religious type).

  Doug didn’t do any of those, but I can think of a bunch of ways he would fit into the list. He drives a powder blue car, the kind of car that has “drugged-up loser who works at the Jiffy Lube and is obsessed with heavy metal” written all over it. He has that weird smell—which could mean a lot of things, though in his case I know it’s from medicine. And he wore the same suit two days in a row. Guys who do that usually have some sort of irritating political reason for not changing clothes or bathing every day.

  But looking back, wasn’t the whole point of that list to make us feel better about not dating anyone? Trinity hasn’t added anything to it since she started dating Troy, a lame guy who works at Wackfords, the corporate coffee shop on Cedar Avenue, and wears sandals in the winter. He’s violated the list nine different ways (I counted), and she still seems happy with him. Isn’t it generally known that you have to overlook flaws in people you date, to some extent? I mean, you expect them to overlook your flaws. It’s only fair that you overlook some of theirs.

  “So, how did it end?” Sadie asks. “Did you act out that Leonard Cohen song he sang?”

  “No!” I say. “And that song’s about a dead girl, anyway.”

  “Really?” she asks.

  “Yeah,” I say. “It’s about an affair he had with Janis Joplin.”

  “Wow,” she says. “You can be Janis Joplin to his Leonard Cohen.”

  “I’m rolling my eyes right now,” I say. “So far back into my head that I can see my frontal lobe.”

  But I’m not. I’ve pictured that a lot. Him as Leonard Cohen and me as Janis Joplin. Not just acting out the song, but being that kind of couple. The kind that creates beautiful music, so beautiful that in fifty years there will be a movie called Doug and Alley: A Love Story about how we changed popular culture forever. Janis and Leonard weren’t like that—I think it was just a short affair that no one even knew about until way after she died—but you get the idea. We could be what they could have been.

  “So, do I need to find a date for prom, or what?” she asks. “Are you going with him instead of going with me to just make fun of stuff?”

  “No offense, because I was looking forward to going with you, but I hope so,” I say.

  “Don’t worry,” she says. “I’ll get a date, too.”

  “What if he doesn’t ask me?”

  “Then you can tag along with us anyway,” says Sadie. “And we still have to shop for our dresses regardless. You wanna hit the mall?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll be there in twenty minutes. And I’ll bet you ten bucks I have a date by then.”

  “You’re on.”

  Well, that’s a bit of pressure. I mean, going to prom with just Sadie and some other single people to make fun of things would be okay, but I don’t see how tagging along on a date wouldn’t make me feel like a pathetic third wheel.

  Sure enough, when she arrives twenty minutes later, she already has a date lined up.

  “With who?” I ask.

  “Peter,” she says with a shrug.

  “Peter’s gay,” I say.

  “I know,” she says. “He’s as close to Tennessee Williams as I can get on short notice.”

  I breathe a sigh of relief. Even if Doug doesn’t ask me to prom and I end up tagging along, I won’t be tagging along on a real romantic date or anything.

  “You’re insane,” I say.

  “You should talk!” she says. “And it’s not like Peter isn’t good-looking.”

  “True.”

  We drive off toward the mall. I haven’t been there in ages. I buy most of my clothes online or in the thrift stores around Drake University and Grandview College. Hanging around at the mall sort of lost its appeal for me as soon as I got a license and could drive myself anywhere better.

  As a matter of fact, when we step inside, I realize that I haven’t really been there at all since the whole goth thing took off. There were always a handful of goths hanging around the food court, but this is the first time I’ve seen goths at the sporting goods store.

  What’s really weird is that it’s practically empty. I guess ever since all the strip malls sprouted up like weeds and that giant new mall opened in West Des Moines, no one wants to go to this one anymore. There’s just, like, a cluster of goths here and there, almost like rival gangs (as if gangs hadn’t been played out since the early nineties), plus some moms out with young kids, avoiding the goths. Maybe hanging out at the mall has just gone out of style, along with gangs.

  There are several types of goth groups hanging around. They all look about the same, since they’re all just wearing black, but the sporting-goods-store goths are acting like jackasses, knocking each other’s hats off and probably farting out loud, the country goths are wearing bigger belt buckles than the others and the “real” goths are huddled up against the wall over by the ATM. The food-court goths are drinking cans of Dr Pepper and eating chili fries, possibly because they look like bloody guts.

  We’re just about to head into a dress shop when one of the groups starts moving toward us. Only this is no ordinary gaggle of goths: it’s Will and his clan.

  “Alley,” Will says.

  “Hey, man,” I say casually.

  He just glares at me.

  “Read the review, eh?” I ask.

  He glares harder, which sort of confirms it.

  “Well, I was a little hasty, to be honest,” I say. “The other singer was fantastic.”

  “Doug is not an official part of the band,” says Will solemnly. “And you have offended my clan.”

  “Oh, deal with it,” I say. “What are you gonna do? Bite my neck?”

  He glares harder—he’s a lot better at glaring than he is at drumming. Some vampires don’t mind jokes about sleeping in coffins or biting necks or any of the other stuff they only do in movies (at least since they discovered the vegetable compound back in the Civil War days), but others get pretty offended. Obviously, Will is one of the latter group.<
br />
  “You are making a mistake with your affections,” he says.

  “Jesus,” I say. “You’ve been in America since before my parents were born, and you still talk like a German guy who just learned English from watching the BBC!”

  “You can’t blame him,” Sadie chuckles. “It works on all the other girls.”

  “When a girl turns down your advances, the polite thing to do is just move on,” I tell him.

  “For the news travels fast,” he says ominously, like he’s telling me some big secret. “Of your affections.”

  One of the others in the clan says, “He means we all know about you and Doug Benchley.”

  “Oh,” I say.

  This makes me a bit nervous—how do they know? Did they do some kind of vampire spying thing?

  “You are making a mistake,” he says again.

  “I can take care of myself,” I say. “Remember how I can open up a can of Coke all by myself?”

  “I’ve even seen her open bottles,” says Sadie. “And a pickle jar, once.”

  “I have waited to find you, you know,” he says. “I have waited all my years for a girl just like you.”

  “You can wait a little while longer, then,” I say.

  Sometimes I think vampires have spent centuries just honing their pickup lines. But I’m immune to pickup lines.

  Will just shakes his head and goes back to glaring at me. Even when he turns to look at the others who are there with him, I can still feel his eyes on me. When a vampire glares at you, man, you stay glared at.

  And the group starts to move on.

  “Your boyfriend is dead,” he hisses at me as he walks past.

  The group moves away from us and heads over to the poster shop.

  “Oh, shlabotnik,” I say. “Is he saying he’s going to beat up on Doug?”

  For just a second, I get scared. I don’t want anything to happen to Doug.

  “Kinda sounds like it,” says Sadie. “He can’t do that, though.”

  “Why not?” I ask. “I mean, vampires can lift, like, fifty times their own weight. I know they haven’t killed anyone in about a hundred years, but it’s not like they signed a treaty!”

  “Yeah they did,” says Sadie. “If a vampire attacks a human, they get brought to trial by the Vampire Council of Elders. They actually signed a treaty, too. It was part of the agreement when the government agreed to leave them to their own affairs.”