the zombie
in the bathtub.

Mom said I should be Sherlock Holmes for Halloween again, but Calista had a way better idea.

A zombie.

“With ripped-up clothes and blood and everything?” I asked her when we were walking through the racks of kids’ shirts at the Housing Works thrift shop. We’d taken the bus all the way up to 90th Street to get there. Calista said it was the best one, that they had all the best stuff for cheap. She also said that thrift stores were the best places to find Halloween costumes, but so far I didn’t see anything that a zombie would wear. “I want it to look like I’m dead and all my guts are hanging out,” I said. Calista nodded and held up a pair of pants to my legs, to see if they would fit, I guess. “And fangs. I want to have fangs.”

“Zombies don’t have fangs,” Calista told me.

“Oh,” I said, and I frowned. I’d really wanted to have fangs.

When Calista saw my face, she laughed. “You can be a fanged zombie if you want, Albie.”

That made me smile.

My zombie outfit from the thrift store cost $7.85. Really it was just pants and a shirt—it didn’t look like zombie clothes at all. But Calista said we could fix it so it did. After the thrift store, we went to Duane Reade and got a bottle of red hair dye, then we headed home.

“And now,” Calista said while I swung the bags beside her, “we make magic.”

• • •

It turned out that the way to make magic was to rip up my new thrift store clothes with a pair of scissors. Calista did most of the ripping.

“Brains!” I shouted while Calista ripped, because all zombies cared about was eating brains, and I needed to practice.

“Louder,” Calista told me.

“BRAINS!” I shouted, louder.

“Much better.”

I kept practicing while Calista showed me how to pour the dye over the clothes in the bathtub.

“Brains! Mmm, brains!”

Calista laughed.

It turned out zombies didn’t just care about brains. One of the other things they should care about, according to Harriet, the cleaning lady who came once a week and who was about a million years old, was staining the bathtub. She came to clean while me and Calista were hanging the zombie clothes up in my room to dry, and we didn’t realize she was there, actually, because she has her own key so she doesn’t use the buzzer or anything, and all of a sudden, we heard all this screaming coming from the bathroom. And me and Calista ran-ran-ran down the hall from my bedroom, and when we were right outside the bathroom, Calista put a hand on my chest like she wanted me to stay in the hallway while she figured out what was going on. Only no way was I staying all by myself in the hallway if there was someone being murdered in our bathroom, which is what it sounded like, what with all the screaming and everything. So I ignored Calista’s hand on my chest and peeked inside too.

It wasn’t anybody being murdered. It was Harriet the cleaning lady, which I guess maybe I should’ve figured out.

Harriet looked up from the bathtub when she saw us—me and Calista in the doorway—and she stopped screaming that terrible scream, only her mouth was still open, so it looked like she might start up again any minute. And then she spent a few seconds looking back and forth between me and Calista and the bathtub, which was smeared with zombie blood. I was still holding the zombified shirt in my hand, and I finally realized that Harriet had been doing all that screaming because she thought we’d been murdered. And that was kind of funny, I thought, all of us thinking that someone else had been murdered, when really no one had been murdered at all. It had just been a Halloween zombie in the bathtub. Which was why I started laughing.

Harriet did not start laughing. She did not seem to think that zombies were very funny.

“I’m not cleaning that up,” she told me. And then she stomped out of the bathroom and hollered at Calista if she knew where my parents kept the aspirin, and then she spent the next hour lying on the couch with a cool washcloth over her eyes while Calista and I scrubbed the tub clean.

But anyway, the zombie costume turned out pretty great.