DOUBLE FEATURE:
Attack of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies
And
Bride of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies
By
Brent Hartinger
PUBLISHED BY:
Buddha Kitty, Inc. on Smashwords
Copyright © 2011 by Brent Hartinger
Smashwords Edition License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.
* * * * *
DOUBLE FEATURE
Book 1: Attack of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies
By
Brent Hartinger
For Michael Jensen, who is all the protection I need against zombies
Special thanks to Tom Baer, Tim Cathersal, Harold Hartinger, Danny Oryshchyn, and James Venturini.
I was standing far from daylight, deep in an echoing corridor of stone. The air was dry and dusty, and all around me, lifeless bodies lurched and groaned.
Then my best friend Gunnar motioned to me and my other best friend Min from over by a bulletin board next to a row of lockers. "Russ! Min!" he said. "You have to come see this!"
I was standing in the concrete hallways of Robert L. Goodkind High School, surrounded by sleep-deprived high school students. Hey, it was 8 a.m.—what'd you expect?
Why the zombies-in-a-crypt imagery? Well, that's just me, Russel Middlebrook—always trying to be cute. But it also had something to do with the flier that my best friend Gunnar had seen on that bulletin board.
ZOMBIES WANTED, it read. Below that in smaller print it said:
Teenagers needed as extras for upcoming horror film, Attack of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies, to be produced in local area. Come let us turn you into gruesome, monstrous zombies!
Then there was contact info.
"They're filming a zombie movie in town, and they need teenagers to be extras, isn't that cool, we should totally do it!" Gunnar was saying, all without taking a breath. I hadn't seen him this excited since he found lamprey eels in the creek near our houses.
Let's face it, Gunnar was kind of a geek. But I loved that he got so obsessive about things, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else. He was originally from Norway, which has nothing to do with anything, but he has this slight accent (which people used to make fun of him for), so I figured it was something you should know.
"Aren't they kind of late for zombies?" Min said. "Halloween was two weeks ago." She was right. It was already the second week in November.
"They're filming the movie," Gunnar said. "Not releasing it."
"And what's a 'brain zombie'?" I asked.
"I know," Min said. "Brain zombies? That doesn't even make sense."
"I'm sure it's explained in the script!" Gunnar said loudly. "Look, do you guys want to do it or not? I know Em will!" Em was Gunnar's girlfriend, who was just as geeky as he was (in a good way).
"I don't know," Min said. She was the school egghead, but she wasn't your typical Chow Mein Brain (her term, not mine). For one thing, she wasn't at all shy and submissive. She was actually pretty in-your-face. Example: she had recently put purple streaks in her hair. And she was bi and open about it. Still, she loved monster movies, so I would have thought she would have wanted to be in one.
I looked at her. "What's wrong?"
"Huh?" she said. "Nothing."
But I like to think I'm a pretty observant guy, and I knew she was lying. Min was lonely. She'd had bad luck lately, with both guys and girls. I could relate. I'm gay, and before I came out the previous spring, I had felt like the only gay person in the universe. But I had a boyfriend now, this great guy named Otto (who, unfortunately, lived eight hundred miles away).
"This zombie thing could be fun," I said to Min.
"Yes, maybe." She stared past me, down the hall.
"We'd all be together, at least."
Min met my gaze. "No, we won't. Not really."
"Yeah, we will!" Gunnar said. "Why wouldn't we be?"
Min sighed. "Because people are always alone. Sure, we're 'together,' but not really. We all might be doing the same thing, being zombie extras on this movie set. But we wouldn't ever really know what the others are thinking or feeling. It'd be a completely different experience for each of us."
Needless to say, not only was Min in-your-face, she could also be full of it. But at least now I knew I'd been right about her feeling lonely.
"Please," I said. "Zombie guts are zombie guts are zombie guts." This was a play on that poem, "A rose is a rose is a rose." Trust me, I didn't go around quoting Gertrude Stein to just anyone. But I knew Min, being full of it, would get the reference.
"Are they?" she said. "Zombie guts might mean one thing to you, but something completely different to me. Even if we were always together, which we won't be, it wouldn't be the same experience at all. I bet you ten dollars that if we do this, we'll have completely different experiences."
"Yeah, but that doesn't mean—"
Suddenly Gunnar erupted (and interrupted). "Enough with the boring philosophy talk!" he said. "Are we going to do the zombie movie or not?"
"Oh, calm down," I said matter-of-factly. "Extras in a horror movie? Of course the three of us are going to do something as cool as that."
* * * * *
So a couple of days later, Min, Gunnar, Em, and I trundled off to this informational meeting for extras who wanted to be in Attack of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies. It was held in the afternoon in the auditorium of a local high school, one that had been closed for the year for remodeling. About forty other teenagers shifted uncomfortably on squeaky wooden seats. I hardly recognized anyone—almost everybody else must have come from the other high schools in the surrounding area. The somewhat meager turnout surprised me, since I couldn't imagine any teenager not wanting to play a zombie in a real movie. Then again, I'd learned long ago—and had been reminded so many times in my life!—that what interested me didn't necessarily interest other people my age.
There were a few wannabe divas from the schools' various drama clubs, but most of the other people who'd showed up were pretty clearly geeks. The teenage zombies in this movie were going to be doubly scary: in addition to mangled faces and intestines hanging out, they would all have an irritating knowledge of calculus and old Star Trek reruns.
"Carrots and peas," Gunnar said out of the blue.
"What?" I said.
"That's what movie extras are supposed to say to make it look like they're really talking," he explained. "They don't say real words, they just repeat the phrase 'carrots and peas' over and over again."
"Really?" Em said. "That's very interesting!"
"The thing I don't get," I said, "is why they didn't film this movie over the summer."
"Lots of reasons," Gunnar said. "Maybe they didn't have their financing in place. Maybe they needed the outdoor shots to be autumn-specific. That's the thing about filmmaking—you need to be flexible."
"But most of their extras are high school students," I pointed out. "During the week, we'll be in class all day!"
"So that's when they'll shoot the scenes that don't need extras in the background."
Gunnar had obviously done his research. I knew right then that he had suddenly become an expert on absolutely everything related to making movies.
A few minutes later, two guys plodded out onstage. They looked younger than I would have thought, like college students (freshmen, not seniors). I wondered if they were extras who had gotten lost backstage.
Then they introduced themselves as the producer and director of Attack of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies.
"In Hollywood, being young is a good thing," Gunnar whispered.
"So," the producer said, "you guys want to be zombies, huh?"
The crowd immediately whooped it up. They didn't care that the producer and the director were only shaving twice a week. They wanted to be zombies!
The producer and director smirked at each other. They were young, but cocky, and we were reacting exactly the way they wanted.
The producer went on to explain how they would be filming Attack of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies at that school for the next three weeks, but that they'd only need us extras on the weekends and on the Friday of Thanksgiving break (we'd all get Thanksgiving itself off).
"During the week," the director said, "we'll be shooting the scenes that don't need extras in the background."
Gunnar grinned at me like the Cheshire cat who had just spoken the words "I told you so." I rolled my eyes.
The producer told us we'd be playing high school students, but that over the course of the filming we'd be gradually turning into zombies. He also mentioned the "rules" of the set, which I won't bore you with here, except to say that under no circumstances were we supposed to talk to the stars. I couldn't help but notice that the producer was talking as if we'd all already agreed to be zombie extras. Which I guess we had. But still, isn't that one of the techniques they use to get people to join cults?
Finally, the producer asked us if we had any questions.
Gunnar's hand shot up. "Will you be making your own fake blood, or will you be buying it premade?" he asked. "Because you can make great fake blood with nothing but corn syrup and red food coloring!"
Not one teenager in the auditorium laughed at Gunnar's question—which tells you a lot about the geekiness level of the gathering.
The producer looked at the director.
"Well," the director said, "we'll have to leave the technical questions for our special effects supervisor, who isn't here tonight."
Disappointment settled over the room like a blanket.
"Does anyone have any schedule-related questions?" the producer said brightly. "Anything like that?"
Min raised her hand. "How much will we be paid?" she asked, and Gunnar shot her a foul look.
The producer chuckled. "Fair enough. Well, this is a nonunion production, so you won't be paid according to the SAG scale."
"SAG stands for the Screen Actors Guild," Gunnar whispered.
For the record, I was already bored with Gunnar's knowledge of moviemaking.
"But you'll each get fifty-eight dollars a day," the producer went on. "And we will, of course, provide meals."
We were going to be paid fifty-eight dollars a day? This was great news! After all, we hadn't come for the pay, but for the experience (or, according to Min, for all of our separate, individual, and completely unique experiences!). We were also there to keep Gunnar's head from exploding.
"So that's all for tonight," the producer said. "I've got some release forms that you need to sign, and you need to have your parents sign if you're under the age of—"
Suddenly a mangled, green-skinned man burst from backstage. Tattered clothing dangled from his angular body; mustard-yellow eyes stared blankly forward. He stumbled, zombielike, toward the producer and director, who had not yet noticed him.
Down in the seats, we would-be extras gasped in surprise.
The producer and director jerked around to face the zombie. But it was too late to run. The creature was upon them, grabbing the director's arm and twisting it right out of its socket. The director screamed, and blood spurted as if from a hose. Meanwhile, the zombie started munching on the dismembered arm, actually biting off pieces of flesh. The producer started to run, so the zombie threw the arm aside and went after him, catching him and clawing at his chest with dirt-caked fingernails. The producer howled as bloody streaks oozed out into his shirt and a clear liquid soaked the crotch of his pants.
Needless to say, the crowd went absolutely nuts—both laughing and screaming hysterically, since nobody was completely sure exactly what was going on. All I know is we were transfixed, which I'm sure was the reaction the producer and director had intended.
Once the zombie had reduced both the producer and the director to quivering masses of flesh and little jets of pulsing blood, the creature lumbered off backstage again.
The whole room fell silent again as we gaped at the now-immobile corpses up onstage.
Then suddenly the producer and director leaped up onto their feet, laughing and slapping each other on the back. The director's dismembered arm had been fake, and he pulled his real arm up out of his shirt. (Presumably, the wet stain in the producer's crotch had been faked too—a very realistic touch!)
"Okay, so we lied!" the producer said. "The special effects supervisor is here tonight!" He winked in Gunnar's direction. "And for the record, we do make our own blood!"
The crowd roared again. Meanwhile, the producer introduced the "zombie," who came back out onstage to explain everything that they had just done to make it look like we had witnessed a vicious monster attack.
Okay, so Gunnar had been right. This whole movie thing was going to be incredibly cool!
* * * * *
Finally, the meeting really came to an end (no more zombie attacks). The producer and director passed out the release forms, and we were free to go.
We were working our way to the back of the auditorium with the rest of the crowd and were almost to the exit when I suddenly spotted a very familiar face.
Kevin Land.
Long story short: Kevin had been my first boyfriend, this baseball jock with dark hair and an impish grin. He wore a light blue work sweatshirt that had been spattered with red paint (and boy, did he fill it out nicely!). Basically, Kevin was hotter than jalapenos. He was also sweet and gentle and oh-so-cuddly.
Sounds like the perfect boyfriend, right? Well, he was, except for one small thing. I came out of the closet at school, and he didn't. Which sounds like a small deal, except it's not. When two guys are dating and only one of them is out of the closet, eventually the in-the-closet one will be forced to choose between the closet and the other guy. In my case, Kevin chose the closet, and he'd been a real jerk about it. In other words, he wasn't so sweet and gentle and cuddly after all. So I had no choice but to dump him. Which isn't to say I didn't miss him, sometimes a lot.
I know this is confusing. The point is, I now had this great new boyfriend, Otto, so the whole thing was moot anyway.
I'd seen Kevin since we broke up, at school and stuff. But he and I ran in different circles—really different circles. Basically, he was popular, and I wasn't. Which meant that while I had seen him, I hadn't ever talked to him. But somehow running into him here seemed different than seeing him at school.
"Kevin?" I said. I'm pretty sure I looked happy, in spite of everything.
"Kevin!" Min said. She didn't look or sound happy at all. On the contrary, she seemed annoyed.
He nodded and grinned—the impish smile I mentioned earlier. "Hey, Russel," he said. "Hey, Min." But it was like he was deliberately avoiding looking at her.
"Uh, what are you doing here?" I asked him. I figured he had to have been waiting for someone—a friend, a tutor, maybe even (gulp) a new boyfriend.
"Well, I wanted to be a zombie."
"Is that right?" This was actually Min, not me.
"Yeah," Kevin said. "That was pretty cool, what they did, huh?"
"Huh?" I said. "Oh, yeah, it was. So you came here to be a movie extra too?"
"Yeah, I saw that poster in the hallway, and I thought it looked really interesting."
"What a coincidence," Min said.
I, meanwhile, was thinking, This is not possible! Kevin was going to be in Attack of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies too? Talk about the dead rising up out of the grave!
But now we were both working on the same project. So suddenly Kevin Land was talking to me again. This was the last thing in the world I wanted (more or less).
"Russel," Min insisted. "We should go." Gunnar and Em had somehow already passed us and were probably waiting in the parking lot.
"Yeah," I said. "Sure. Well," I said to Kevin. "See you." Min was pulling me away.
"Hey, Russel?" Kevin said. I turned. "We should get together sometime. Just to talk."
Just to talk? Well, what else would we do? (Get your mind out of the gutter!)
"I mean it!" Min said. "We really have to go."
Before I could give Kevin an answer, Min was literally dragging me away. If I hadn't been so stunned by the whole Kevin-suddenly-reappearing thing, I probably would have wondered what the hell had gotten into her.
* * * * *
So Kevin Land was back in my life. I could not believe it. At that point, I couldn't imagine anything that would make my life any more complicated.
Then I got home from zombie practice. I walked past the living room, where my parents were taking down the Halloween decorations.
My mom immediately turned to confront me. She was clutching a white candle in the shape of a skull, something that had been set on the fireplace mantel.
"Russel," she whispered, like just saying the word was this great, terrible burden.
My dad looked over at me too. "Russel, please come in here," he said, also choking out the words. "We need to talk." He was holding a paper coffin against his chest like a security blanket.
"Talk?" I said. This wasn't good, but I couldn't exactly walk away. I pushed my way through the strands of fake spiderwebs that hung, partially unpinned, from the arch that led into the living room.
I had barely gotten two feet when my mom suddenly blurted, "Is it true? Are you gay?"
Un-fricking-believable. The exact same day that Kevin had zombied his way back into my life, my parents had somehow also discovered that I'm gay!
My parents. Oh, God, how do I explain my parents?
My dad first, since he's easier.
He's an investment counselor. That means he meets with people and helps them figure out how to invest their money.
That's pretty much it.
I don't mean to be mean. But his job is his life. He is not a complicated person. He just loves his job—stocks and bonds and plastic binders and rubber bands and PowerPoint projections. He's big and friendly and a little goofy-looking. I used to joke he looked like Mr. Clean, except with no earring and slightly more hair.
My mom, meanwhile, is a complicated person. She works as the office manager at a dentist's office, but that's just her job. She does a million other things—gourmet cooking, handball, volunteer work with disabled kids, bonsai gardening. As for the rest, she's a bundle of contradictions. She clips fifty-cent coupons, but she'll spend five hundred dollars on a pair of shoes. She never yells, but she's often angry. She looks fantastic—trim and sophisticated—but all she ever eats is dessert.
Mostly, she just really, really, really, really cares what other people think about her. Go back to the bonsai tree thing for a second. Bonsai trees look great, but it sure doesn't come easy. They have to be trimmed and wired and kept in tiny pots with bound roots. The trees probably don't like it much, but then again, it's not about the trees. It's all about the way they look, the fact that they're perfect.
My mom is like that with everything. It had something to do with her upbringing. Her father died young, leaving her mom and brother and her very poor. But according to my mom, being poor doesn't mean you can't have dignity. I have no idea what this means exactly, but it has something to do with not having a couch on your front porch.
Anyway, since I was her son, I was a reflection on her. So she really, really, really, really cared what people thought of me. Good grades were nonnegotiable, and fluorescent green shoelaces were an offense against God and nature. Even worse, they were "tacky," which is apparently the worst thing in the world you can be.
In other words, look perfect. Be a bonsai tree.
Needless to say, my parents and I didn't have a lot in common.
A house. Some DNA.
That's about it. Sometimes it was like they lived on one continent and I lived on another. Sure, we talked, but more like it was on the phone and the connection was horrible. Plus the customs and practices on their continent were just so different from the customs and practices on mine. To say anything complicated required so much background information that after a while it just became easier to never say anything real at all.
"Did you brush your teeth?"
"Yes."
"Did you pick up grapes when you were at the store?"
"No, you said not to get them if they were too expensive."
"Okay, love you! Let's be sure and talk again in three months."
Still, this is where things get complicated. Sure, my parents and I didn't have a lot in common, but they were my parents, and I did love them. They had done their best raising me, which was pretty darn good. I mean, they'd never chained me up in a closet (although that's setting the bar kind of low, isn't it?).
In all seriousness, my parents had always looked out for me. I think about all the buckets of vomit my mom had cleaned up when I was sick. How fun was that? Or the time when I was eight and I slammed my finger in the car door, and my dad held me in his arms all the way to the emergency room.
My parents had also taught me how to get by in the world, to look both ways before crossing the street, and not to jam the screwdriver into the wall outlet. They'd taught me the difference between right and wrong—that it wasn't okay to lie and steal, or stare at the man with no nose.
My parents were good, decent people. They gave money to charity, and they voted. They didn't litter. They didn't make fun of the homeless, or laugh at insult humor, or tolerate racial stereotypes. And they loved me—I had never before doubted that.
Which is why I was so surprised by the way they reacted to my being gay.
* * * * *
First I needed to know just what they knew.
Back in the living room with my parents, I asked, "What are you talking about?" This was in response to my mom's question about my being gay. I tried my best to sound confused, yet casual, determined to get to the bottom of this "misunderstanding," but a pit had already opened deep in my stomach.
"A friend of mine said her son said you're a member of the school's gay-straight alliance!" my mom said. She said this pointedly, like she was accusing me of some terrible crime. Which, if you think green shoelaces are an offense against God, I guess it is.
So my mom knew about our gay-straight alliance (technically, a gay-straight -bisexual alliance, but I sure wasn't going to correct her!). I know it might sound strange that it had taken a whole eight months for word to get around to her, but it really wasn't. It wasn't just my parents and I who lived on different continents. It was all teenagers, and all adults. And eight months is about how long it takes for gossip to get from one continent to another, at least without the Internet, which my parents hardly ever used.
"I am a member of the gay-straight alliance," I said. "Wouldn't you be? It's a question of civil rights. But that doesn't mean I'm gay!" Now I tried to sound shocked at the suggestion, but not, of course, offended.
"Then I went looking in your room," my mom said. "And I found this."
She threw the skull onto the love seat and snatched up something from the coffee table. It was a magazine that Otto had sent me. Not a porno one, mind you. Just a gay teen magazine.
It was so incredibly wrong of her to be looking in my room without my permission! If she'd had a question about my sexuality, she could have asked. True, I might have evaded the question. I was good at that. (For example, I had just finished saying that being a member of the gay-straight alliance didn't necessarily mean I was gay . . . which is technically true!) But I had never lied to my parents before, and I wasn't about to start now.
I took a deep breath. "It's true," I said. "What you said before."
You know how animals look right after the crash of thunder—incredibly alert with the fur on their backs sticking up? That's how I felt. As for my parents' total invasion of my privacy in going through my things, I'd decided to let that go for now.
My parents were momentarily speechless. My mom sank down onto the couch next to a couple of paper gravestones—Halloween decorations still to be put away.
"But Russel!" she said. "Why didn't you tell us?"
She was kidding, right?
"You're confused!" my dad said, still hugging the paper coffin. "That's it, isn't it? Lots of kids go through a phase like this. I know I did."
This caught me by surprise. My dad went through a "gay" phase? But I didn't even want to take a single step down that avenue of thought.
"I'm not confused," I said, trying to keep my voice even, confident. "I've known for a long time. Maybe forever."
This was true. Being gay was never that big a deal for me. Maybe it was because I always felt so unbelievably different from other kids in so many other ways anyway—this was just one more thing. What had been a big deal was figuring out how I was going to live my whole life without anyone ever finding out. I hadn't counted on the fact that not telling people would make me feel so dishonest, so schizophrenic, and so incredibly lonely. So that previous spring, I had finally decided that maybe I could both be gay and tell people about it.
"But you can't know!" my mom was saying. "Russel, you're only sixteen years old!"
"Almost seventeen," I said. My birthday was in a month.
I thought about trying to explain—that I did know I was gay. That I wasn't going through some phase, that I wasn't "questioning my sexuality." For me, being gay was just finally finding the word to describe the way I'd always felt. And the word did fit, perfectly. I knew I was gay exactly the way I knew I was a boy, or had red hair (more auburn, really).
But I also knew, just as certainly, that my parents couldn't hear this. Not now, anyway.
"Why don't we talk about this later?" I said.
"Russel!" my dad said. "I think you really need to think about this!"
And then my mom said, "But, Russel! Homosexuality is disgusting!"
I need to stop here for a second. I know I've been making jokes about this whole little episode. Looking back, it's funny to think how my parents reacted. Ha, ha. But it didn't feel funny at the time. People like to say that we gay people don't know what it's like to experience "real" discrimination—that we were never slaves, that we never had our land stolen from us, that we were never put in concentration camps (wait, yes, we were—okay, bad example). But let me say here and now that being rejected by your own parents just for being yourself is really, really tough. Sure, other minorities have had it bad (like it's some contest!), but at least they grew up in families surrounded by people just like themselves. No matter how bad they had it, no matter how bad the discrimination is or was, at least most of them had one another.
Meanwhile, most of us gay people grow up surrounded by people who we know don't understand us and who, if they knew the truth, might very well completely reject us. Then when they finally do learn the truth, most of our parents do reject us, at least for a little while. And there is nothing—and I mean nothing!—like being rejected by your own parents, even if you don't have anything in common with them. These are still the people who raised you, who are supposed to love you unconditionally.
Just something to think about, okay?
Anyway, there I was, and my mom had just said to me, "But, Russel! Homosexuality is disgusting!"
In other words, I was disgusting.
I just stared at my parents. It was like I suddenly didn't know them. It was like they had both ripped off rubber masks, and I could see their real faces for the first time—faces that were terrifying and evil and lifeless, just like, well, zombies.
* * * * *
I desperately needed to talk to someone. I was all set to IM Min or Gunnar when I noticed an e-mail in my in-box.
An e-mail from Kevin.
I meant what I said. I really need to talk to you, okay?
He needed to talk to me, and I needed to talk to a friend. Kevin was a friend, right? So before I could stop myself, I found myself IMing Kevin and asking if he wanted to meet me at the park between our houses.
* * * * *
We met at this picnic gazebo. It had been built at the edge of a swamp that bordered the park, but since the swamp stank of methane, the picnic gazebo did too. This was the place where we used to meet when we'd been boyfriends, so even though it stunk to high heaven, it was still a romantic place to me. In the months since our ill-fated affair, I'd gotten, um, aroused every time I smelled sulfur.
By this point I was already 90 percent certain that my IMing Kevin had been a mistake. Meeting at the stinky picnic gazebo, with all its history, was just compounding the mistake. But I'd said I was coming, so it would have been rude to just not show up.
He was waiting for me underneath the gazebo.
"Russel!" he said, too loudly. "Thanks for coming!"
"Yeah, well, something just happened. I needed to talk to someone."
"Yeah?"
"My parents just found out I'm gay. They found a magazine."
Now this was very strange. Notice how I didn't tell him who the magazine was from? It was almost like I didn't want him knowing I had a boyfriend. What was that about?
"Oh, man!" Kevin said. "What'd they do?"
I told Kevin the whole horrible encounter.
"Gosh, Russel, I'm so sorry!" He sort of shuffled nervously, and I could tell he was thinking about hugging me. But in the end he didn't move any closer, which made me feel relieved and disappointed at the same time. "Are you okay?"
"I don't know," I said. "I guess so. I mean, I think so. My parents can't stay mad forever, right?" I did feel better. Talking to Kevin, just saying everything out loud, had helped. "Hey, what did you want to talk to me about anyway?"
"Huh? Oh, you mean my e-mail. Well, it's funny, because it's a little like you. I'm coming out. Well, not to my parents, but to my friends. At school, I mean."
Time screeched to a halt, leaving skid marks in the bottom of my stomach. Kevin was coming out? This was a very big deal.
I shook my head. "I don't believe it," I said. It was kind of a jerky thing to say, but I couldn't help myself.
"No, I am," he said. "Really!"
I peered at him. "When?"
"Soon. I want to tell my buddies on the baseball team first. So they don't hear it from someone else. I know I need to tell them one at a time."
So he'd actually given this some thought. Was he really going to go through with it? I had my doubts.
"Well," I said. "That is some big news. How do you feel?"
He bobbed and weaved. "Scared. But excited too. It just feels right. Anyway, I wanted to tell you right away."
Something about that statement seemed unfinished. Like there was more he wanted to say.
"Wow," I said again. "Well, that's great. And I'm glad you told me."
"So," he said.
"Yeah," I said.
"I knew you'd be surprised."
"I am. I really am."
"But it feels good," Kevin said. "Really, really good."
"Well, I'm happy for you."
Why did it suddenly feel like the conversation had come to a standstill? Now we were just spinning our wheels.
There was something that wasn't being said here—the real reason why Kevin had wanted to tell me he was coming out. It was obvious, right? Or was it? Maybe I was just flattering myself.
The thing is, I didn't want to know what was not being said here. I had a boyfriend, right? And I was very happy with him. The fact that Kevin was coming out—if he ever actually did—didn't change anything at all. Kevin had been a real jerk to me, and there was no taking that back.
"Well, look," I said. "I should get home. School night and all, right?"
"Russel?" Kevin said.
"Good luck with your friends!" I said, starting to leave. Suddenly the most important thing in the world was getting away from him.
But Kevin wasn't going to let me get away that easily. Before I could get five feet, he spoke the words that had been hanging in the air like levitating water balloons; as he spoke them, they splashed down right on top of me.
"Russel," he whispered. "I still love you. I'm so sorry I hurt you before, and if you'll have me, I wanna get back together again."
So Kevin wanted to get back together. I guess I'd known this all along. Why else would he have wanted to "talk"? But I had a new boyfriend now, that great guy named Otto, and I really, really loved him. So why hadn't I stopped Kevin from saying his horrible and horribly exciting words?
In my defense, I found the courage to mention Otto at last.
"Kevin," I said. "I'm sorry. I have a new boyfriend."
"You do?" Kevin couldn't have looked more surprised if I'd told him I was really a werewolf. What was so damn surprising about my having a new boyfriend? Did he think I was such a loser that I'd never find anyone again? But I couldn't blame Kevin for not being aware of Otto. He had no way of knowing about him. Otto didn't go to our school, and Kevin and I hadn't talked for eight months.
"His name is Otto," I said. "I met him at summer camp. He's a really great guy."
Note to world: Ex-boyfriends really don't want to hear details about how great a new boyfriend is, especially when they're hearing about him for the very first time.
"Oh," Kevin said.
"He lives almost eight hundred miles away." Now why had I told Kevin that? Because it sounded suspiciously like a mixed message.
"Oh?"
"But we're really, really happy," I added quickly—lamely.
"Well," Kevin said. "I'm really happy for you. Really." He hesitated. "I should probably get going. Hey, are you gonna be okay about your parents?"
"Yeah," I said. "I'm much better. Thanks for listening."
"Uh-huh."
And then he was the one walking away from me.
So Kevin wanted to get back together with me, so much so that he was willing to come out at school. Or so he said. It remained to be seen if he would ever actually do it. I had my doubts, especially now that I'd turned him down flat (more or less). The last time Kevin had had to choose between me and his own popularity, he'd chosen his popularity—to the point where he'd even actually stood there with his jock friends calling me names for being gay. That was a hard thing to forget.
I headed off in the opposite direction from Kevin. But the pit in my stomach, the one that had first opened when I realized my parents knew what they knew, hadn't gone away. If anything, it was even bigger than before.
* * * * *
When I got home that night, I slipped in the back door. I could hear my parents talking in the kitchen, but I somehow managed to creep past them. I felt like the main character in some monster movie, trying to get out of the house before the creatures realize I'm there. Only in my case, I was just trying to get to my bedroom.
Once there, I immediately IMed Otto. I was well aware that he should have been the first person whom I told about my parents. I felt guilty, like I'd cheated on him, which I guess in a way I had.
My user name was "Smuggler" (for no reason I can explain). Otto's was "OttoManEmpire" (because, well, his name is Otto).
Smuggler: Hey you. Big news. My parents found out about me.
OttoManEmpire: No WAY! How?
I explained it all, but I didn't mention that it was the magazine he had sent me, because I didn't want him to feel responsible.
OttoManEmpire: How do you feel? Are you okay?
Kevin had asked me the same question. I had to think about it before I could answer Otto. How did I feel? So much had happened in such a short period of time, but none of it made much sense. I felt like a leper examining myself for injuries that I knew were there but that I couldn't quite feel.
Smuggler: I'm not sure it's hit me yet.
OttoManEmpire: Yeah, I felt that way too at first.
He had told his parents in August, a few weeks after he'd got home from summer camp. They had been surprised and concerned, but they hadn't called him disgusting.
Smuggler: What's it like with your parents now?
OttoManEmpire: Okay. I told them, and then they never talked about it again. So things basically went back to normal. It's never come up.
Smuggler: Figures.
OttoManEmpire: What you need now is support. Someone you can talk to in person (and who'll give you a hug!). Min or Gunnar around?
Smuggler: I already talked to one friend.
I felt guilty that I hadn't specified that that "friend" was Kevin. At least I hadn't let him hug me.
OttoManEmpire: That's what helped me. The support of my friends.
Otto hadn't told just his parents he was gay—he'd also told all his friends, and even come out at school. My meeting him that summer had changed his whole life, which was cool, but it made me feel strange too. Responsible.
OttoManEmpire: Do your parents know about me?
Smuggler: No. But they might figure it out. They know you're coming for Thanksgiving.
Otto was coming to visit me over the break the following week. We'd been planning it for a while now. I'd already told him about Attack of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies, and even picked up a form to mail to him so he could get it signed by his parents and be an extra too, at least for a day or two.
OttoManEmpire: Do you think I should still come visit?
Smuggler: YES! I really really really still want you to come!
I also sent him six "party face" emoticons. And I wasn't lying with my answer. I really did want him to come. My parents' learning I was gay and Kevin saying he wanted to get back together had left me all confused and my emotions jumbled. But I wasn't confused about my feelings toward Otto. I still remembered Otto's and my last night together, at camp that summer. We had snuck out onto the lake in a rowboat after dark, and we'd cried and kissed and held each other, and told each other how much we were in love. My feelings for him then had been stronger than anything I'd ever experienced, even stronger than what I'd felt for Kevin all those months ago.
OttoManEmpire: But what will your parents say? Especially if we sleep in the same bedroom.
He sent me a "winking face" emoticon.
Smuggler: Who cares? This is my house too!
This was, of course, a gross oversimplification. But I figured I could deal with all that later.
Smuggler: Otto?
OttoManEmpire: Yeah?
Smuggler: I love you. You know that, right?
OttoManEmpire: Of course. And I love you too.
Smuggler: No! I mean I really, really, really love you!
This was absolutely true. There was nothing that I wanted more than to see Otto again, to spend time floating on the calm, moonlit water in the quiet little rowboat of our love. I want to kiss him, and rest my head on his chest, and smell his hair, and massage the muscles in the back of his neck. I knew it wouldn't change what had happened with my parents, but for as long as we were together, the world would at least feel right.
But as absolutely true as all this was, in the back of my mind was this nagging little feeling that, even now, I kind of wanted to kiss and rest my head and all the rest with Kevin too.
* * * * *
The next day at school, I told Min and Gunnar all about what had happened with my parents. They were very supportive and said all the right things, just like I knew they would.
I didn't tell them about Kevin. Which felt weird. It was like I'd spent all day lifting weights with my right arm, but not my left. I felt out of balance.
Why didn't I tell Min? Partly it was because I knew exactly how she would react. She would say go tell Kevin to take a flying leap. And she would have a point. Kevin had treated me pretty badly all those months before. Min also had her own issues with Kevin. She'd wanted him to stand up for this kid that everyone was bullying, but he never had.
Anyway, this new situation was more complicated than how Min would see it. She was great, but she could be kind of, um, uncompromising. This is not necessarily a bad thing. She was the kind of friend who calls you on your crap. Everyone should have a friend like her.
But that's not where I was right then. I was still working things through in my mind. Meanwhile, I knew that Gunnar wouldn't judge me. He'd made mistakes too. He was more human. So he just seemed like the better friend to talk to—safer.
On nonrainy days, Gunnar and I rode to school together on our bikes. I decided to tell him about Kevin on the way home.
"It's really incredible the number of big directors who got their start on horror movies," Gunnar was saying as we rode. "James Cameron, Peter Jackson, Sam Raimi, Francis Ford Coppola, Oliver Stone. Even Steven Spielberg!" Needless to say, Gunnar was still obsessing over the making of movies.
"Oh," I said.
"But it's not surprising. Horror really lends itself to low-budget filmmaking. The stories are pretty straightforward, and a lot of what makes a film scary is the camera work, and what's implied on-screen, not what's actually shown. Audiences are also more forgiving of technical flaws, at least if the film is scary. Plus horror is one of the few genres where you can get a distribution deal and promote the movie even with no stars."
"Ah," I said.
Gunnar looked over at me. "Sorry. I'm going on, aren't I? You're still freaked about your parents, aren't you?"
Gunnar acted like he had OCD and ADD, but that didn't mean he was completely clueless. He might not have been as observant as I was, but he did okay in a pinch.
"It's not that," I said.
"Then what?"
I sighed. "Kevin."
"Kevin Land? What does he have to do with anything?"
"He wants to get back together."
"You are kidding me!"
"No." I explained how I'd run into him at the movie meeting, how he'd e-mailed me afterward, and how we'd met by the stinky picnic gazebo.
"That must be kind of flattering," Gunnar said. "To have him coming crawling back to you and everything."
I laughed. "Yeah. I guess it is. But it's not just that. Kevin told me he's decided to come out."
Gunnar knew why I'd broken up with Kevin, so he knew exactly what this meant.
"Yikes," he said. "Do you think he really will?"
"He might. What do you think I should do?"
"About Kevin?"
"Yeah."
He stared at me for a second. "You're really asking my opinion?"
"Of course," I said. "Why not?"
"Well, it's just that no one's ever really asked me for relationship advice before. Why would they? What do I know about relationships?"
"Well, you do have a girlfriend now, you know."
"I know! Sometimes I still can't believe it." Gunnar thought a second longer. "If Kevin did come out, would you want to get back together with him?"
That was the million-dollar question. Gunnar had zeroed right in on it. Maybe I'd been wrong not to ask him relationship advice earlier.
"I don't know," I admitted.
"So it's kind of a possibility?" Gunnar asked.
"Maybe."
We kept riding. Our bikes squeaked. My balls needed readjusting, but I couldn't do it without losing my balance.
"What about Otto?" he said at last. There was no judgment in his voice, just like I'd thought.
"God, I love Otto. I really do. No doubt about that."
"But?"
"But he lives eight hundred miles away!" I said. "And I'm almost seventeen years old. If he were here, there would be no question that I would stay with him. But what kind of relationship can we have living that far apart? I'll see him a week or two every year, at most. That's not a relationship, it's a pen pal. And we can stay friends. And maybe someday we'll live closer together, so we can pursue a real relationship. There's nothing to keep that from happening. This thing with Kevin, it's not really about Kevin. It's about me. About where I am in life."
"But?"
"But I do love Otto. And Otto loves me. And meeting me, it's changed his whole life. If I broke up with him, he would be devastated. I'm sure he'd think it was his entire fault. It might be forever until he trusted someone again. And why would I really be breaking up with him? Just because there's someone who lives closer? What kind of crappy reason is that? Maybe I'm just making excuses so I can get back together with Kevin."
"But?"
"But I can't stay with someone out of guilt or obligation. I'd just end up resenting him in the long run, and that's not doing anyone any favors. And if I'm making excuses to get together with Kevin, maybe that's because I want to get together with Kevin."
Gunnar fell silent. Sometimes—very rarely, but sometimes—he knew when to stop talking.
"Maybe you'll see things more clearly when Otto visits next week," Gunnar said at last.
"This is true," I said.
"And Kevin might not come out at all. He said he would, but who knows if he will? If he doesn't, you don't have a problem. You don't have to choose."
"I know," I said. I'd already thought about this. In fact, I put the odds of Kevin actually coming out at less than fifty-fifty.
"But if he does?" Gunnar said. "What are you going to do? Who are you going to pick?"
"Gunnar," I said, "if this were a book, I just might skip ahead to the end. Because right now, I have absolutely no idea."
* * * * *
That afternoon after school, I tried doing the sneak-in-the-back-door thing again, but my parents were once again waiting for me in the living room. My dad got home from work at sixty-forty every night. I had never known him to come home early, not even when our washing machine overflowed. So I knew this was a very big deal.
Great, I thought. This was just what I needed.
"What," I said. Notice there is no question mark.
"Russel," my dad said. "We need to talk."
They needed to talk? Well, I sure hoped they were going to start by apologizing for calling me disgusting! Even so, I wasn't going to sit down on the love seat across from them. For one thing, I felt no love whatsoever. So if they wanted to talk, I would do it standing up.
"We want to understand," my dad said. "This is hard for us. It's a shock."
I guess this made sense. I'd had my whole life to get used to the idea. They'd barely had twenty-four hours.
I stared at my parents, trying to figure out what to say. I couldn't help but notice that there was dirt under my mom's fingernails. She'd probably been out back fiddling with her bonsai trees—her way to work out stress.
"This is just who I am," I said at last. "I know it's upsetting to you. But most of what you hear about gay people, the stereotypes you see on television, that isn't true. Most of us are just normal people."
"Homosexuality is a sin," my mom said.
Oh, so now I was a sinner too? This was their idea of "talking," of trying to understand? By calling me a sinner?
"Russel," my dad said, "we know that adolescence is a very confusing time."
Yes, I thought to myself. And my dad had gone through a "gay" phase. We'd covered this yesterday.
"I'm not confused," I said. "I'm really not. I know this is new for you, but it's not for me. I've thought about it a lot. I know what I feel. I've known for years." I'd said all this to them once before, but maybe they needed to hear it twice.
"We still think you should talk to someone," my dad said.
"What?" I said. "Why?"
"Because homosexuality is a sin!" my mom shouted.
"To help you sort out your feelings," my dad quickly interjected. "To help you make sense of it."
Apparently when my parents said "talk," they meant they wanted to talk to me, but not listen to a single word I said in response. Did they really think that would work? If so, well, in a nutshell, they were nuts.
"I told you before," I said. "My feelings don't need sorting out!" Well, okay, maybe they did, but about Kevin and Otto, and how to deal with my parents not listening to me. But not about being gay.
"Just talk to him," my dad said. "Is that too much to ask?"
"Who?" I said.
"Father Franklin."
"Our priest?" My family was Catholic. We went to mass every Sunday. But to tell the truth, the whole "religion" thing had never really worked for me. I considered myself spiritual, and hopefully somewhat moral. But being moral because someone gives you a list of rules to follow (and warns you you'll be punished if you don't), well, that always seemed to me to kind of miss the point. And how can anyone honestly believe that their religion is the "right" one when 99 percent of people just adopt the religion of their parents? But I knew the Catholic thing was important to my parents, so I had always played along.
Still, I wondered where all this talk of sinning and religion was coming from all of a sudden. My parents hadn't mentioned any of this when they'd first found out about me. Then they'd just been worried about what people would think. It's like they were upset because of the way it made them feel, but now they were retroactively applying religion to it, to justify their preexisting feelings.
I'm not saying my parents were hypocrites. I'm just putting it out there, okay?
"Russel, you can't be gay!" my mom said, erupting again with a regularity that was suddenly not unlike Old Faithful. "What would our friends say?"
I give up: it's true, my parents were hypocrites.
"He'll help you," my dad interjected. "Father Franklin? He's good at this kind of thing."
"I don't need help," I repeated. "You guys sound like you're the ones who need the help. Why don't you talk to Father Franklin?"
"We can all talk to him together if you'd like."
That was all I needed. Three against one!
"No, that's okay," I said.
"So you'll talk to him?" my dad asked me.
At that point, it seemed like there was only one thing I could say to get my parents to shut up. Besides, they were my parents. What could I do?
'Yeah," I said. "I'll talk to the damn priest."
That Saturday, we had our first day of extra work on Attack of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies. We had a wardrobe-and-makeup call at eight in the morning, so Gunnar and Em picked me up at seven-thirty. Min wasn't with us—she had her own car and lived on the opposite side of town anyway.
I felt like crap on a cracker. I am so not a morning person.
As we drove to the shoot, Gunnar enlightened us on another aspect of moviemaking.
"That board they knock together before every scene?" he said. "That's called a clapper board. They use it to keep track of each take in postproduction. They record the sound and the film image on two different machines, you know? So they need some way to make sure that the image matches up with the right sound track."
"I thought they rerecorded all the dialogue anyway," Em said.
"Not always," he said. "Sometimes they try to keep the on-set dialogue, because it looks and sounds more natural."
We drove into the school parking lot, and I spotted Min and Kevin over by his car. It looked like they were talking. I wondered what they were talking about.
We pulled up next to them, and I climbed out of the car.
"Hey," I said.
"Morning!" Kevin said.
Min just rolled her eyes. I wasn't sure what that was about. Had they been talking about me?
We walked toward the school as a group.
"Why do we need makeup anyway?" Kevin said, a little too loudly. "They're not turning us into zombies yet. Aren't we just normal teenagers today?"
"It's so our faces don't shine in the movie lights," Gunnar said. "It won't be full makeup."
"Well, what about wardrobe?" Kevin said. "Don't we already dress like normal teenagers? We are normal teenagers."
Even Gunnar didn't have an answer for that one.
Soon I found myself walking side by side with Kevin. "Isn't it funny?" he said, talking too loudly again. "We get up this early every morning. But today it seems early. Is it just because it's Saturday?"
"Probably," I said. But to myself, I was wondering why I hadn't ever noticed before how Kevin's voice got louder when he got nervous. What exactly was he nervous about?
Just inside the school, there were a couple of production assistants waiting for us at a table. They took our parental release forms (I had told my dad it was "a school project," which it sort of was). Then they gave us each a plastic number, and said they'd call when it was our turn to be made pretty. I was number two.
Finally, a production assistant led us to the school cafeteria, which she referred to as the "hospitality suite." There was only one other person waiting inside, a girl.
Min immediately dropped her plastic number.
I bent down to pick it up for her. "Oops," I said, giving it back. "You dropped this."
She didn't answer.
The producers had set out some food—doughnuts, bagels, fruit, and juice—on one of the cafeteria tables. Min headed over to check it out. Maybe it was early morning hunger that was distracting her.
Meanwhile, Gunnar was still talking. "I bet they story-boarded this whole movie," he said. "That's when they illustrate the film, like in a giant comic book. They show all the angles, and how the camera is going to move. It's especially important on a film like this one, one with lots of action."
"I made a comic book once," Kevin said. "In the sixth grade. Problem was, my teacher wanted it to be about Jamestown, and I wanted it to be about Batman."
"Sometimes they storyboard the whole movie," Gunnar was saying. "And sometimes they only do it for the action scenes. It depends on the director."
"I did the whole story of Jamestown," Kevin said. "But if you look in the background in some of the panels, you can see Batman in the distance."
My head throbbed. It was only eight fifteen in the morning, but between Kevin's nervous prattle and Gunnar's ongoing film seminar, I was almost ready to call it a day.
* * * * *
It was true what they say about making movies: it's mostly just a lot of sitting around. But for a newbie like me, just watching them arrange the lights and position the cameras was interesting.
For Gunnar, meanwhile, it was like a spaceship had descended from the sky in the shape of a gigantic electric birthday cake, and aliens had emerged in the form of naked women with enormous breasts.