Unfinished Business

CHAPTER 11: BLANCHE EXPLAINS ZOMBIES

I sat on the beanbag in Blanche's room once again, tossing a Rubik's cube into the air and catching it again. I couldn't hit a target, and I couldn't solve the puzzle, but I could do this. The radio sitting on the windowsill was playing some song that I had never heard before. It was some pop song from the 80s, I guessed. It made Blanche happy, at least. She hummed along while laying flat on her back on her bed. Somehow, it was familiar enough to me that I could half-mumble, half-sing along under my breath.

Blanche finally broke the relative silence between us. "How was school?"

I caught the cube again and looked over at her. "What?"

"Don't think we didn't notice you sneaking out to town and everything. We saw."

"I didn't sneak. I told you guys I was going out to take care of things."

"You told Mama Lamartine. You didn't tell me you were going up to the high school. You know I love that place."

I didn't know that, actually. It wasn't like that mattered. "We live in town. You could have come along. I couldn't have stopped you."

"We're not alive. Jasper was totally convinced that you were going to visit your family, but you didn't. You just kept walking."

"What does being alive have to do with anything? I'm not alive, either." I tossed the cube again.

"It's not the being alive part, it's the walking past where you used to live without a second thought part. How come?"

I caught the Rubik's cube by the barest bit of the tip of my fingers. "How come, what?"

"How come you didn't go look at them? See what they're missing and all that?"

The Rubik's cube tumbled off of the tips of my fingers and hit the ground; it rolled over itself in a blur of color. I hesitated before speaking again, then stammered. "I'm kind of... This is going to sound horrible, but I think I'm avoiding them? A little bit. I'm avoiding them a little bit. I-- no, I don't want to go back. And see my mother crying? Crying over me? Over a girl she barely knew? No thank you. Can we talk about something else? Can we do something else?"

"I guess," Balance sighed. "Since I'm sure you don't have, like, any ideas about what we could do--"

(I did, actually, but I wasn't about to tell her that.)

"--I'm going to ask you this: do you know much of anything about being undead like this?"

I shook my head. "There hasn't been much time to get acquainted with the idea, no."

"Fantastic. We'll start at the beginning, then."

Like I was some sort of high school freshman, Blanche gave me a whole undead-orientation spiel. I tried my hardest to listen, I really did. There's something wrong with my brain, though, and I didn't catch a lot of it. Some of it stuck, though.

She demonstrated all kinds of things that (she assumed) I didn't realize that I could do. Once was the ability to walk through walls (which I had already discovered for myself)f. Then there was the ability to regenerate my skin and bones, granted that they weren't damaged before I died. The gaping hole where my belly button used to be was going to stay there, no matter how much I didn't want it to. And I couldn't feel pain. Neither could she. Blanche demonstrated that by stabbing her hand with a dirty fork from a plate under her bed.

"Think of old-fashioned zombies," she continued, pulling the utensil out of her flesh. I hated the sound it made, but it wasn't like I could interrupt her to say so. "Like, Night Of The Living Dead old. Totally grody, right? But it's very necessary to understand what's going on here."