REGGIE PUNCHED HENRY ROBINSON HARD IN THE shoulder.
“I told you, man,” Reggie said as he slammed his locker shut. “I don’t eat dogs.”
“Ow, sorry,” Henry complained. He bent down to pick up a couple of the LOST DOG fliers that he’d dropped when Reggie hit him. “I just had to ask. You guys are unpredictable.”
“You really are,” Adam DeCarlo chimed in, rubbing the spot on his neck where I’d gnashed open his jugular. “Seriously.”
I wasn’t paying any attention to my friends. We were gathered around Reggie’s locker like we always were before homeroom, in perfect position to watch the daily Procession of the Bobbleheads. I was locked in, of singular purpose. This was the day that I’d talk to her.
“Here they come,” I whispered. The guys all groaned or rolled their eyes, but I didn’t care.
The doors to the parking lot flew open and in walked the Bobbleheads, fresh from a prehomeroom session of cigarettes and car revving. They were beautiful and glowing, all of them, in their letterman jackets and cheerleading skirts, their gaping bite wounds all bandaged with branded Abercrombie gauze. All of them except for their leader—Amanda Blake—she was something else entirely.
Unlike her tanned and perfect-skinned brethren, Amanda possessed that ashen, newly dead look that really got me going. She flipped her blonde-and-black-streaked hair over her shoulder, plucked a licorice-colored piece of chewing gum out of her mouth, and smacked it onto the freshly polished glass of the RRHS trophy case. She kept her eyes straight ahead the whole time.
“Oh, to be that gum,” I said longingly.
I started forward hesitantly, my planned opening gambit something about a geography assignment we could help each other with.
“Uh, hey, durrrrr—”
She didn’t even glance in my direction. Maybe I wouldn’t make my big move today after all. The vibe didn’t seem right.
I shrank back to where my friends stood, but they were gone, off to class. The Bobbleheads passed in a stampede of polo shirts and jeggings, and then the hallway was empty except for me and some brown-haired girl digging through her locker across the way. The bell rang. We were late.
Vaguely, I became aware of a tickling sensation on my upper lip. At the same time, I realized this was a dream.
The brown-haired girl closed her locker and turned to face me. It was Cass, looking more normal and healthy than I’d ever seen her. No giant bags under her eyes, no doped-up space-cadet gaze, no crusty, bloody nose remnants. Her hair was brushed and pulled back in a cascade-y ponytail. She was dressed in a retro-looking button-down blouse thing and a funky skirt, way nicer than any of the crappy thrift-store stuff from the road. I shouldn’t say that I realized how cute she was for the first time right then—obviously I’d noticed if she was manifesting in my dream this way—but whoa. Right on, Cass.
“Hey,” she said, smiling. Her voice was clearer somehow than the voices of my friends had been, like she cut through dream static or something.
“Hey yourself,” I replied. I was happy to see her.
I felt a strange sizzling sensation in my brain.
“Don’t freak out,” Cass said, as if reading my mind.
“You’re in my dream,” I said. “In my head.”
“Sort of,” she replied. “Technically, I’ve pulled your unconscious mind onto the astral plane with me and this is how you’re processing it.”
“You’re like Freddy Krueger.”
“It’s actua—”
“Uh, hold up,” I said, staring at her as something potentially disastrous occurred to me. “Can you see, like, all my thoughts?”
“Well, it doesn’t work exactly like that, but—”
Suddenly, every dirty movie I’d ever watched began playing out simultaneously inside my old high school. It was like one of those dreams where you show up to class naked, except on ecstasy and in stereo. Loud moans and cheesy jazz music spilled out from every classroom. Cass grimaced.
“Try not thinking about that, please,” Cass yelled over all the fake orgasms, some of which were still buffering even in my dream space.
I tried not to think about all my lurking sex memories, which involved putting both my fingers to my temples because that’s how you control psychic powers. Just like that, RRHS was quiet again and we were alone.
“Sorry,” I said, pushing a hand awkwardly through my curly, non-mohawked head of hair.
“It’s okay,” Cass replied, blushing. “The id can get a little gross sometimes, I guess.”
I didn’t know what the hell an id was, but I made a real, concerted effort to control my thoughts, which isn’t actually something I have a whole ton of experience with. I focused on Cass.
“So, you can just pop into my brain whenever, huh?”
She looked away from me. “Um, yeah.”
“And do you?”
Cass didn’t answer right away. My mind spiraled away from me, matching what I felt now—I can only describe it as itchy frying-pan brain—with past incidents, like on the highway when I’d stopped Cass from collapsing in front of Truncheon. It was as if I’d just chugged a bottle of ADD pills. Connections were being made. The opposite of my id brain, the analytical, nonpervy part, was working overtime.
I blinked, uh, mentally, and Cass and I were no longer in RRHS. We were in a gas-station bathroom filthy with trucker viscera, and we were standing really close together. I was holding her face, actually, like we’d just finished kissing. She was covered in my barf.
“Ew,” she said. “Come on.”
“Whoa!” I yelped, letting go of her face and stepping back. “You were in my head then?”
Cass hesitated. I saw it flicker across her face because my signal-picking-up was way more finely attuned here. She considered lying to me.
“It was my job, Jake,” Cass said, trying to sound blasé about it, but I could tell recalling this moment, my first kiss with Amanda, really bugged her. “I was tracking you. I just happened to peek in and . . .”
Cass trailed off. She looked down at her puke-stained outfit, focused for a second, and was back in the new duds she’d been rocking at RRHS.
“For the record, I’m not really cool with that,” I said. “The peeping, I mean.”
“I know. You shouldn’t be,” Cass said quietly. “I’m really sorry. For what it’s worth, I’ve stopped doing it.”
“Well, all right,” I said. Because what else could I say? I didn’t have any precedent for how long to stay mad after psychic violations. Anyway, I had more important theories to test out.
I gazed down at myself and tried to picture my body in polished, blue-and-white Mega Man armor. Bloop. It appeared. And it wasn’t even heavy!
“Also for the record,” I added, “this lucid dreaming shit is amazing.”
Cass smiled at me, looking relieved that I wasn’t mad at her. I mean, maybe if I’d really chewed on it, I could’ve gotten myself worked up about the whole invasion-of-privacy thing. But she hadn’t, like, done anything bad with my brain access. A little snooping, sure, but I’d be all up in everyone’s business if I had psychic powers. And if she could sift through all my weird-ass thoughts and still want to hang out with me, well, that was kind of flattering, I guess.
It also occurred to me, now that the initial shock of dream chatting had passed, that maybe I should be serious. If Cass was dipping into my subconscious, something could be wrong. Just like that, my preposterous armor was gone and I found myself clad in my normal jeans and T-shirt.
“So, you guys are safe, right?” I asked. “You’re not, like, a dream ghost?”
Cass shook her head. “There’s no such thing as dream ghosts.”
“Oh, that’s where we’re drawing the line on crazy things existing? Good to know.”
Cass laughed and walked to the bathroom door. I followed her and we stepped onto the football field behind RRHS. Once upon a time, Amanda and I had sprinted across this field in a full-on zombie frenzy. That seemed like so long ago.
“We’re fine. Safe,” Cass said hurriedly, like she wanted to get off the subject. “How are you?”
The two syringes of the Kope Brothers’ magical, slightly horrible mystery cure appeared in my hand. At first I tried to conceal them behind my back, but what was the point? I had to break the news sometime and considering the level of psychic oversharing I was prone to in here, I figured it’d be best to get on with it.
“I found the cure,” I said, showing her the injectors, which in my dream space finally glowed. “Well, a sort of nice zombie warlord gave them to me. Except I didn’t get enough and I don’t know—”
Cass touched my arm, cutting me off. “Jake, it’s okay. We’ll figure something out. But right now we seriously need to get out of Iowa. Des Moines especially.”
As we walked across the football field, I noticed storm clouds gathering over the end zone.
“Yeah, it sucks here,” I replied, “but what’s the hurry? I think I can still talk him into giving me another vial.”
Cass shook her head. “No time. The NCD is coming. The army. It’s going to be bad.”
“Eh, Reggie said they’ve tried stuff before and—”
“It’s not going to be like before,” Cass insisted. “No more little squads running extractions. They’re going to torch everyone and everything. Zombies, humans, probably anything with a heartbeat.”
I smelled smoke. Barbecue smoke, like someone was cooking hamburgers and hot dogs, but the ominous kind!
“Okay, you’re scaring me,” I said.
“I’m back at Truncheon’s garage,” Cass replied. “Do you remember where that is? Can you make it to me?”
I blinked. “Wait. It’s just you?”
“We have to get out,” Cass said, ignoring me. “Like, right now.”
I stopped in the middle of the field. “Uh, what aren’t you telling me? What happened to Amanda?”
Cass stood in front of me and stared down at her feet. “I don’t know how to tell you this.”
“You said you guys were safe,” I said, my voice rising with panic.
“She is safe,” Cass replied. “She just, um, bailed.”
“On you?”
“On us.”
They appeared on the bleachers over Cass’s shoulder. It was Amanda and that hunky head-wound guy we’d rescued from Truncheon’s meat wagon. She had a blanket thrown over her shoulders and he had his arms around her and they were making out. I stared at this wide-eyed from the fifty-yard line until Cass tracked my gaze, turned around, and gasped. Immediately, Amanda and the Headwound Heartbreaker, as he’ll one day be referred to in the death-metal song I write about him, blinked out of existence.
“Sorry, sorry,” Cass said quickly. “You weren’t supposed to see that. My subconscious must have—”
I cut her off. “That—that happened?”
Thunder pealed nearby.
Cass nodded solemnly. “That guy, Cody, he’s a zombie now. They—I don’t know, Jake—they hit it off, I guess.”
“Oh,” was about all I could muster.
“They drove off somewhere,” Cass continued, even though I really wished she wouldn’t. “I’m not sure where.”
“We were in love,” I said dumbly.
Cass gently patted me on the back. “I don’t know what to say, Jake. I guess she changed her mind.”
It felt like someone had pulled a chair out from under me and then broken that chair across my back. Part of me half suspected this would happen sooner or later—that Amanda would come to her senses, our whirlwind love affair written off as an unfortunate side effect of first turning undead. The other part of me—the apparently self-deluding part that believed it was possible to dig past superficialities and social statuses and get at something real—unfortunately, that’s the part of my mind I’d been listening to.
“Did she say anything about me?” I asked Cass. “Did I—I don’t know—do something wrong?”
“Um, I guess she just got tired of waiting,” Cass replied, frowning. “You know how girls like that are.”
The grass on the football field had turned brown and dead. A wintery wind carried in brittle leaves. From somewhere, the discordant electric-violin solo from Severed Lung’s seminal breakup song “Sadness and Longing for the Rest of My Days (Until the Pavement Rushes Up to Meet Me)” jangled into my ears. So this is what happened in a lucid dream when you got really bummed out.
“Are you all right?” Cass asked, her head tilted, biting her lip.
“I’d like to wake up now,” I said. “I don’t want you in my head right now.”
“I know you’re hurting,” Cass said, touching my arm. “But will you still meet me at Truncheon’s? We really do need to go, Jake.”
I nodded. “Sure. What the hell.”
Her smile was big and relieved, but she quickly toned it down.
“We can cure you,” Cass said, trying to cheer me up. “And then, if you’re still up for it, we can do the road-trip thing. I need to go to San Diego and you can come. Have you ever been to California?”
I shook my head. I kept glancing toward the bleachers, half expecting Amanda and Cody to reappear. Actually, if I focused on it, they did start to flicker back into existence. Except it was a slightly changed version: Cody was supermuscular, they made out with lots of tongue, and Amanda kept laughing cruelly in my direction.
Meanwhile, Cass started ticking off things on her fingers. “No more rotten smells. Fish tacos. Good music. Cowboy hats. I promise, Jake, I’ll get you through this.”
I glanced away from the bleachers. “Cass. I want to wake up.”
My chest opened up like the trapdoor on a cuckoo clock and spit out my heart. It was all gray and shriveled and flopped around in the grass like a fish out of water. Cass and I both watched until it split open with a farting noise, the insides completely hollow.
“Wow,” Cass said.
“Sorry,” I replied. “Emo.”
“No, I’m sorry,” Cass said. “I shouldn’t be, um, making plans right now. You need time.”
I looked at her and tried for a casual shrug, but my shoulders were stuck in slouch mode. “It’s okay. It’s not your fault. Let’s just get the hell out of this butthole state.”
She stared at me for a second like she wanted to say something more, but whatever it was, she swallowed it. Instead, she went on her tippy-toes and kissed me on the cheek.
“Things will get better, I promise,” she said.
I felt exhausted, which is a really incongruous feeling to have in the midst of a dream. I wanted to sink into that black, dreamless, nothingness part of sleep, turn my mind off, and not think about anything for a while.
I forced a smile for Cass, although being psychic I’m sure she could tell it wasn’t the genuine article. “Yeah, so.” I glanced down at my dead heart in the grass. “Let’s, uh, forget the awkward parts of this happened and just say good-bye, okay?”
“Sure, Jake,” Cass replied. “See you soon. And hurry.”
The football field opened up beneath me and I plummeted into that deep sleep I’d yearned for.