HEAVY SHIT, MAN. JUST HEAVY SHIT ALL THE TIME. Eating people/rodents, new psychic friends reminding you of your personal death toll, government conspiracies, zombie road gangs, crazy old men with possible zombie cures.
A lot going on.
I’d developed an appreciation for the normal moments, you know? Those little pockets of time when nothing stupid was happening, when the universe was like, Shh, dude, take a breath for a second and don’t think about how lame I am.
For instance, Amanda stood in the open bathroom door, steam rolling out from behind her. She was wearing a red polka-dot bra and matching underwear. I’m not sure when she’d stolen those, but it was really cool that she’d hidden them from me. Keep the whole air-of-mystery thing going. If I were a cartoon character, I’d have exaggeratedly wiped the steam off my oversized glasses, then rolled my tongue up and shoved it back in my mouth.
Instead I just stared.
She’d been showering when I got back to the room, so I’d stretched out on the lumpy hotel bed and killed time with a public-access show about monster trucks. My shirt was half off. Because I’d been scratching my belly.
I realize I’m not exactly keeping up in the sexy department, okay?
“I cannot believe you’re my girlfriend,” I said, thinking out loud.
Yeah, I went there. Girlfriend. Alert the Facebook community—it’s time for a status change! Resurrect all the friends I ate two weeks ago so that I can sprint past them getting high fives before tearing through one of those paper banners pep-rally style—it’s got CONGRATULATIONS ON ALL THAT BOOTY, JAKE painted on it—and then I bust out my most epic dance moves (sprinkler, so much sprinkler) while the marching band knocks out a rendition of Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On.” And one of those male cheerleader guys does backflips in the background.
It’s cool. No big deal.
“I can’t believe it either,” Amanda said, smirking at me.
I sat up a little bit. “So, before—when you took off. Do you want to, uh, talk about that?”
“Not particularly.”
“All right, cool,” I said, nodding, accustomed to the Amanda Blake method of bottling up feelings. “But you’re okay?”
“Don’t I look okay?”
“Obviously, you look better than okay,” I replied. “But I mean in the emotional sense. Like, is your inner Amanda wearing her happy underwear?”
“Oh my god, you’re corny.” She sighed, awkwardly adjusting one of her bra straps. “She just bugs me, all right? I don’t trust her.”
I waved this off. It’d only been a few days and I already felt like I’d had this conversation about Cass a billion times.
“She’s totally harmless,” I said. “I mean, except for the omega-level psychic powers, but I don’t think she’d use those against us.”
“Not against you, maybe.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Dude, she’s totally crushing on you,” Amanda said, hitting me with a level stare, like I was an idiot. “Little psychic stalker.”
“What?” I snorted. “No, she’s not. Wait—really?”
“And you encourage it!” Amanda exclaimed, hands on her hips. “Oh, Cass, aren’t you going to swim with us? Wanna see my butt?”
“Jeez, we were in a pool. Is it so wrong to wonder if she might want to swim?”
“You gave her a fucking hat.”
“I was just being nice!” I scuffed a hand through my hair, thinking back to my conversations with Cass. Trying to remember what, exactly? Her making eyes at me or something? They were all just normal, PG, nothing-to-see-here chats. Maybe I was in my boxers before. Big deal. “You’re being crazy.”
“I’m a girl, stupid. I have a sixth sense for these things. No psychic powers necessary.”
I pointed at her, grinning, because my realization was profoundly amazing, perhaps the hugest affirmation of the Jake Stephens charm in recorded history.
“You’re jealous,” I declared.
“Ha! Unlikely.”
“Then, like, territorial,” I revised. “Possessive!”
“Get over yourself,” Amanda replied, rolling her eyes. “It just needed pointing out because you’re so freaking oblivious.”
“You keep saying that—”
“I’m in my underwear here, Jake,” she said. “Before that, I was showering for like ninety minutes. Waiting for you.”
“Waiting for—” I gulped. “I thought you might be, uh, fetal-ball shower-crying or something.”
“Yeah, no.” She shook her head, glancing at the screen. “And I find you out here watching . . . monster trucks?”
“They’re kinda awesome.”
“Jake.” She sighed. “You suck at sexy banter.”
“Is that what we’re doing? I thought we were arguing.”
“We’re transitioning.”
“Oh, okay.” I cleared my throat, going for a deeper register. I picked up the remote. “Check me out, baby. I’m about to hit the power button on these monster trucks. And then I’m gonna turn the volume up. On this macking we’re about to do.”
Amanda fought back a smile.
“That’ll do,” she said.
Two things about what happened next:
1) That bra had a front clasp. Seriously, the best.
2) It was kinda perfect, although maybe we were just getting good at it. But it also had that melancholy end-of-vacation vibe, as if we both somehow knew this might be our last chance to hook up for a while. No three-star hotels in Iowa. Just zombies and weirdness.
Enjoy the quiet moments, right? Even if they’re not quiet in the literal sense.
A small, angry voice woke me up later that night. It was an authority voice, the kind you hear on bitter, middle-aged dudes like my uncle Joe who think they know everything and are always lecturing you at Thanksgiving dinner about the right to bear arms. I opened one eye into a slit, not wanting to give away my position in case our room was being invaded by a well-regulated militia of Uncle Joes.
It was Amanda, watching a clip from Fox News on our laptop. Some old fuckface with a waterfall-sized comb-over and a chin like a deflating hot-air balloon was hollering right into the camera. Scrolling and flashing text graphics that said things like escalating violence, red alert, and declining morals to blame surrounded his bloated face.
“—want to talk about moral decay in this country, you need look no further than New Jersey,” the anchor ranted. “You’ve got this rat, this idiot, Kyle Blake, taking this cockamamie story about his sister—the school shooter, and her little coward accomplice—he takes this story about her to some newspapers that used to have integrity, that used to know the meaning of journalism, but are now just glorified tabloids, liberal rags—”
A black-and-white picture of Amanda’s brother, Kyle, appeared in the corner of the screen. He looked grim and beaten up—literally, his left eye swollen closed. I realized it was a mug shot.
“And I’m not even going to glorify this nitwit’s story with a recap. He doesn’t deserve it. This toad is basically—those kids’ bodies, they aren’t even cold in the ground—and he’s running his mouth, trying to snatch up some spotlight. These bleeding hearts talking about the first amendment, talking to me about freedom of speech—well, it’s not free, and this bottom-feeder is going to find that out. You ask me, they should sit him down right next to his sister when it comes time for the needle to get passed around—”
Amanda stabbed the PAUSE key. She had other tabs open in the browser, all stories about her brother and his crazy conspiracy theories, stories about his arrest for “agitation,” all stuff we’d missed being on the road the last few days. All stuff that was sort of our fault.
Amanda touched her brother’s face on the screen. I figured I should probably stop pretending to be asleep and propped myself up on an elbow. She didn’t look over at me. Maybe she was too pissed off to move.
“How much did you see?” she asked through gritted teeth.
“Too much,” I replied. “Like, enough to give me brain damage. I’m sorry about your brother.”
She slapped the laptop closed and tossed it to the end of the bed. “I want this to be over, Jake. I want it to be over so bad.”
“I know,” I replied. “Me too.”
“Do you?” she asked sharply. “Because sometimes it seems like you’re just having fun. Like this is some road-trip vacation or whatever.”
I didn’t say anything back. She was right—sometimes I was like that. Maybe too often, I don’t know. Maybe I stretched Jake Day and similar moments of awesomeness too far. But the alternative, thinking about the horrible shit that was happening, like, every second? I’d go nuts.
After a minute, Amanda pushed her forehead into my chest. I lay back with her curled up against me, slowly stroking her hair.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly.
“It’s okay.”
Before I could say anything else, a big chunk of her hair came loose in my hand, a rotten piece of scalp dangling from the roots.
“Oh shoot,” I said. “You’re—”
Amanda snapped into a sitting position and grabbed the hair away from me. She looked mortified in more ways than one. Even in the dim light, I could see her skin had turned that congealed gray. Her eyes glistened with tears. She leapt off the bed, away from me.
“Goddamn it, I thought I could hold it off,” she said, covering her face and running for the bathroom.
“Not like I haven’t seen it before,” I replied. “It’s okay.”
“Stop saying that,” she snapped, her words slurring a little. She stopped in the bathroom doorway to shake the chunk of scalp and hair at me. “Nothing about this is okay, Jake!”
“Okay, okay,” I said, trying to calm her down, not realizing that I was okaying totally on reflex. “Shit.”
Amanda let loose a frustrated zombie sound, then slammed and locked the bathroom door. I climbed out of bed and tried the doorknob, making sure she was locked inside.
“I’m going to get you something from the car,” I called through the door. “Stay in there, all right? No rampaging.”
She thumped something against the door in reply—maybe her hand, maybe her forehead—and then let out a throaty, sorrowful moan. Could be she’d already gone full zombie, but I didn’t think so. That was thirty percent undead hunger and seventy percent human sadness locked behind that bathroom door.
I yanked on some clothes and hustled out of our room. The hallway was quiet. No guests poked their heads out, curious about the monster sounds from down the hall, so we had luck and good soundproofing on our side. The elevator doors hissed open a half second after I thumbed the button.
“Whoa!” I shouted, surprised, as I crashed into Cass getting off the elevator.
She looked stunned to see me. Or maybe just stunned in general, actually. She wobbled backward into the elevator, which, granting that I’m concealing a lot of muscle mass under this unassuming frame of mine, still seemed like an overreaction, like she was already woozy. I hadn’t bumped her that hard. I instinctively touched her arm to steady her, and she gratefully clasped her free hand over mine, sighing.
That’s when I noticed she had a wad of tissues stuffed up against her nose, bloodstained, and was a friendly ghost shade of pale.
“Jeez, what happened to you?”
“Nothing,” Cass replied, all nasally and distant. “Fine.”
“Um, really?” I still hadn’t taken my hand off her arm. “Because you look all messed up, Cass.”
“Nope. All good,” she replied, almost like she was wasted. I wondered how much of that twelve-pack she’d plowed through downstairs. To illustrate how all good she was, Cass made an expansive gesture with her tissue-holding hand, inadvertently flicking some blood onto the elevator wall.
The elevator doors buzzed and tried to close. Cass jumped at the loud noise and at the same time some clarity returned to her eyes. She looked from me to the blood she’d splattered on the wall, her eyes widening in embarrassment.
“Oh no,” she said. “I just did that.”
“It’s okay,” I replied, cringing at another use of what was apparently my phrase of the night. “It’s not even the grossest thing I’ve seen in the last ten minutes.”
“Oh good,” Cass said, still a little loopy. “I’m gonna go now.”
Cass dropped her hand off mine and I let go of her arm. We did an awkward little spin-dance in the elevator, trading places. She peered down the hall like she was trying to figure out where to go next. I hit the button for the lobby, but held the doors open for another second.
“Hey, I just have to go down and get something real quick. Should I, like, check on you? Are you going to barf?”
Cass shook her head. A couple strands of hair ended up hanging suspended from her blood-sticky nostril.
“No,” she said quickly. “Just bed now. See you in the morning.”
“Are you su—?”
She cut me off. “I can get you in tomorrow, Jake. Into Iowa. For sure.”
“Yeah, that’s the plan,” I replied.
“No, no, I was lying before, but now I can do it for real. Promise.” She smiled at me. There was a little blood in her teeth. “Good night, cute boy.”
“Uh, good night.”
I let the elevator doors close.
So much for the quiet moments.