"What's your combination?" I asked the locker.

"Six . . . six . . . five," the voice muttered hollowly.

At last the locker opened and out spilled the lanky, woe-begotten creature inside.

"You'd think with all the brains they ate, those f.u.c.king zombies would be like, geniuses, right?"

The kid bent down, dusted himself off. His voice sounded familiar. At first I was unsure. It sounded deeper and farther away than when I'd last heard it, a certain knowledge of things beyond haunting its cadence. But the sarcasm was unmistakable, and when he finally straightened himself up and showed me his bloodless, trademark smirk, all doubt vanished.

"Art?" I gasped, dropping my backpack into a splat of green, luminous jelly at my feet. I looked down at the long, deep canyons he'd cut into his arms only three months before. "Is that you?"

"Holy s.h.i.t, man," my friend laughed, dead eyes wide with friendly astonishment. He leaned forward, pressed his cold, stiff chest against mine and hugged me. "Welcome to Purgatory High!"

"English, History, Health, Woodshop, Geometry, P.E.?"

Behind the registrar's desk, a skeleton in a moth-bitten sky blue pantsuit stared blankly up at me through a pair of faded pink reading gla.s.ses as I read my schedule aloud. Behind me, Art sat reading an old newspaper.

"Would you look at that," he muttered to himself. "Ollie North sold guns to Iran. Wait a minute . . . " He flipped over the newspaper, examined the date, then shrugged. "News to me," he obliged, and continued reading.

"Is that it?" I looked up from my schedule to the registrar, at the heavy layer of foundation mortared evenly across the surface of her skull, punctuated by two slashes of red-light-red lipstick, explosions of rouge, and neon-blue eye shadow, all watched over by a magnificent, Babel Tower beehive hairdo. A regular Bloomingdale's Day of the Dead Special.

"Is there a problem?" the secretary asked. Her rusty screen-door voice rose up from the center of her rib cage and escaped through two empty eye sockets adorned by a set of outrageously long false eyelashes.

"What do dead people need Geometry for?"

"You're not dead."

"I know. And yet I find myself asking the same question. I mean, come on, Health? You don't have health. You're dead!"

"This is Middle Plain High, young man. Purgatory High, if you will. Good little boys and girls, who die the right way, aren't sent here."

"Wait a minute. You mean I got transferred to like, Juvenile Hall for the d.a.m.ned?" I threw up my hands. "That's great! Fantastic! Whatever. Doesn't matter." I leaned on the counter. "The point is I'm, you know, alive. Right? So obviously there's been a mistake. I shouldn't be here."

"That's what they all say."

By the time we got back to first period, Homeroom was over and English cla.s.s had begun.

"Ah, Mr. Henry, welcome to our cla.s.s." Mr. Marley stood in front of the blackboard, dressed in a turn-of-the-century waistcoat, dusty gray pantaloons and a powdered wig lying limp over his scalp, as though it had been ridiculed and debased by larger, more imposing wigs until all sense of pride or decorum had been wrung from its monochrome curls. Draped across the pedagogue's chest, over his arms, and around his legs was a seemingly endless length of rusty chains from which a series of padlocks and strong boxes rattled and clanged with his every movement.

I stood at the head of the cla.s.s, staring at the erudite, emaciated apparition. He returned my gaze with polite impatience, no doubt accustomed to new students gawking at him.

"Chains you forged in life?" I asked casually.

He nodded like I'd asked if he'd gotten a haircut.

"Okey-dokey," I replied and turned to search for an empty seat.

As Mr. Marley began the lecture, I surveyed my cla.s.smates from the back row. I watched a gargoyle pa.s.s notes to a drowned drama queen covered over with seaweed and bright patches of dried brine. A studious nerd, the noose with which he'd hung himself still hanging around his neck, took notes while a bright red she-devil in a cheerleader's uniform giggled behind him.

Not much different than a regular high school, Art scribbled on a sc.r.a.p of paper and pa.s.sed to me. Right?

In the exact moment I finished reading the note, an anonymous spitball slammed into the five-inch-tall aborted fetus taking notes in front of me. He was dressed in a tiny basketball jersey and warm-up pants.

"What up, n.i.g.g.a'?!" the tiny voice hollered up at me, mistaking me for the perpetrator of the spitball. "You got a m.u.t.h.af.u.c.kin' problem!? You wanna piece a'this, son?!"

"No thanks," I said in the distracted fashion that warded off most every gangster and jock at my old school. I jotted down my response to Art's note: Not as such.

History cla.s.s, as it turned out, was History of Everything. Purgatory High, apparently, had dug its foundations outside of the conventional s.p.a.ce-time continuum, and could look at the history of the universe from a fairly objective vantage.

"Dude." Art put a hand on my shoulder, "I don't think it's a good idea for you to go in there."

"You mean about me gaining potentially hazardous foreknowledge of mankind's future which I could use to alter the course of human events?"

"Huh? No, I mean I got this joint from Lenny Baker and we should go smoke it."

"Nah, I'll pa.s.s, this whole day's been like one long, bad trip anyway."

"Suit yourself."

Over the next forty-five minutes I learned that (a) I would never be famous, (b) mankind would never be conquered by super-intelligent robots of our own design, and (c) ipso facto, my lifelong ambition of being the leader of the human resistance against their t.i.tanium-plated tyranny would never be fulfilled.

Such is life.

Next was Health Cla.s.s.

On my way into the cla.s.sroom, Missy Nefert.i.ti, a hot little mummified number shrinkwrapped in a layer of Egyptian cotton no thicker than an anorexic neutrino, stumbled behind me in the hallway, spilling the contents of her purse at my feet.

"Thanks," she said absently as I knelt to help her.

I picked up a small, pearly jar which contained her brain, then another for her liver, and a third for her lungs.

"Where's the one for your heart?" I asked as we stood up together.

"No room," she replied. "I'd have to carry a bigger purse."

Five minutes into Health Cla.s.s Ms. Tenenbaum-Forrester, a decomposing zombie, announced that this week would be s.e.xual Education and Awareness Week. It was at this point that I raised my hand, looked into my teacher's deflated, rotten-tomato eyes, and respectfully asked to be excused.

Lunch was no better.

"You gonna eat those brains?" Art asked from across our table. Roland, the gangster fetus from first period, sat to my left, poised on Missy Nefert.i.ti's lap and free-styling to all who would listen, most notably, her big round gazungas.

"Ask George." I pointed to the towering zombie in a Middle Plain High basketball jersey sitting beside me. "They're his anyway."

Without a word, Art reached over the table and speared a forkful of gray matter from my tray.

"So what do you think so far, man?" He gestured at our surroundings with his fork.

I turned around, glanced back at the lunch line where a tall vampire dressed in fishnet tights and a Joy Division T-shirt leaned over the serving area and sank his teeth into the lunch lady's neck. I looked back at my friend sucking the dendrites from an oblongata kabob.

"I think you should chew with your mouth closed."

That afternoon, when the last horn of the apocalypse rang out the end of the school day, Art and I wandered back through the cemetery as our fellow students made their way to their graves, loaded up with that night's homework.

"Hey, Art," I said. "I've been meaning to-"

"Think fast!" interrupted a distant voice.

I turned around in time to throw up my hands and block a dive-bombing football before it spread my nose over my face like a warm pad of b.u.t.ter.

"Sorry about that, new guy!" From the direction of the dive-bombing pigskin, a burly, middle-aged man as wide as he was tall, dressed in a shimmering red leotard, hurdled a nearby tombstone and landed in front of us.

"You teach my gym cla.s.s." I spoke to his huge, waxed handlebar mustache.

"That's right," the strong man agreed. "I was watching you today. You looked good. You've got good moves."

"I sat in a tree while everyone else ran around the track."

"Yeah, well, you've got to be in good shape to climb trees, right?"

"I was smoking two cigarettes at once."

"And that's the kind of go-getter att.i.tude we need on our football roster, son! That little sneak attack earlier was my subtle way of testing potential new recruits!"

"There's a football team here?"

"Of course!"

"Do you get hoa.r.s.e very often?"

"Excuse me?"

"Nothing. Besides, I didn't even catch the ball."

"But you managed to block it, which is better than most, let me tell you. So whad'ya say, son?"

"Um, no thanks. I'm not really what you'd call a team player."

There was a pause here, where I could almost hear the magnetic tape inside the coach's head reach the end of its reel and start rewinding itself for the next recruit.

"Well hey, no hard feelings!" he said and patted me on the back. He scanned the horizon and found his mark.

"Hey, DeMarco! Think fast!"

We turned and kept walking.

"Isn't Tim DeMarco deaf?" Art asked.

I shrugged, stared at my feet. We walked in silence for a time, weaving around the tombstones. Angels etched in granite stared up at us from stones marking the graves of children. Dead leaves pressed into the ground underfoot.

"I dunno," Art said at last.

"Huh?" I looked up at my friend.

"I don't know why I did it." My friend stared down at the dark little rivers running up the topography of his forearms, the barren, tilled flesh. "You know how, like, when you're trying to do something that takes a long time, like fixing something, or balancing something, and after a bunch of tries you finally just throw it at the wall because you're so frustrated? I don't know- that was how I felt about pretty much everything, I guess. I just sort of threw my life at the wall. I was tired of trying to fix it. Of course, it was only after I showed up here that I realized it wasn't broken to start with, just not finished yet. I dunno. That's what the school counselor told me. I guess that makes sense."

I didn't know what to say. It had been a long summer, during which I'd developed a staggering resentment for my best pal and his cowardly exit. I was angry at how selfish he could be, leaving me alone with this f.u.c.ked-up world.

At last we came upon the road which had led me from my front door to Death's door that morning. The sky was overcast and still, as it had been all day.

"I was pretty mad," I said at last, staring down at the uneven pavement.

Art let out a long breath, like he'd been holding it in for a while.

"I'm sorry, man," he said. He looked wistfully up at the treetops across the street. "If I could change anything . . . If I could go back and change anything I'd ever done, or left undone . . . I'd have felt up Suzie Newman at the Freshman Homecoming Dance."

I laughed and punched his shoulder as hard as I could, heard something crack under the putty-like flesh.

"Had I but known she'd become the biggest s.l.u.t in our f.u.c.king cla.s.s!" he entreated the clouds overhead, throwing his head back melodramatically and clenching his fists until the squeal of air brakes s.n.a.t.c.hed the laughter out of our throats and tossed it on the ground like so much loaded dice.

We stood at the edge of the road, staring up at the hooded driver and his great black bus idling restlessly.

"Well, uh," Art backed away slowly. His eyes never left the driver. "I'll see you tomorrow man."

"Dude, wait!" I jogged a couple of steps to where my friend stood poised to sprint back through the boneyard. "You should come back with me," I whispered, and reached out for his shoulder. No sooner had my hand touched him then a bolt of lightning screamed out of the sky and seized my forearm in a cataclysmic Indian burn. The shock of the bolt knocked me back six feet through the dazzling, electrified air. I landed at the edge of the road, the wind knocked out of me, head buzzing like a pressure cooker full of hornets. I stood up slowly, gasping, reaching for the stars that swirled around my smoking head. By the time the Big Bang orbiting my head had dissipated in the encroaching dusk, my friend was gone.

I looked down at my arm, which was turning green, then up at the sky. Broad, rumbling thunderheads stared back at me like a reproachful parent. I remembered my uncle telling me about the time he was struck by lightning during his barnstorming days. He said it was like "G.o.d put a hand on my shoulder." He also said it "hurt like a motherf.u.c.ker."

I craned my neck for a last glance at my friend, but there was no one, not even a crow.

"See you tomorrow," I said to cemetery, the vast stone harvest.

My only a.s.signment that night was to memorize a poem of my choice, which I did, while nursing my fried appendage back to life and listening to my folks converse politely about their student, Ginger Banks, who had been brutally slain at school that afternoon. The cadence of John Donne bounced around my brain, playing tag with phrases like "teeth marks," "ma.s.sive trauma," and "still at large."

Once my homework was done I could eat, as had been the rule of my family since my first day of kindergarten. The table was set with the summer dishes, though the brisk, teasing breath of fall could be felt in the breeze coming through the propped kitchen door. Autumn was my season-so haughty, yet s.e.xy, it always reminded me of an aloof librarian with a brain full of Hawthorne and rabid, s.e.xual fantasies.

Both my parents had a habit of reading at the table. You could always tell what kind of mood they were in by what they were reading. Grading papers meant they didn't want to talk. A newspaper meant they wanted to talk, but not about themselves, that the outside world would do just fine. A novel meant they were feeling romantic, while poetry meant I was going to sleep in the garage if I didn't want to lie awake to the sound of groans, spanking noises, and all manner of nauseating aural hullabaloo. Dr. Mengele, for all his crimes against nature and man, unknowingly left one form of torture untapped throughout his long years of evil: the sound of your own parents talking dirty to each other.

When I sat down at the table that night, I saw a folded New York Times beside my mother's plate, and a book of two thousand crossword puzzles adorning my father's place setting. I was safe. The table was set with two polite candles, three steaming chicken potpies, a bowl of green beans, and news of a bloodbath.

"I don't know what this world is coming to," my mother said, one hand on her paper, the other around her fork. "That poor girl."

"Didn't you used to have a crush on her, Zack?" My father glanced over the rim of his gla.s.ses at my blurred visage.

I shrugged and blew on a spoonful of thick, under-salted chowder. My mother was allergic to salt.

I thought about Ginger Banks, about her fiery red hair, and the first time I'd ever whacked off. She was the one I'd thought about on that distant autumn afternoon not so dissimilar from the evening we were presently enjoying. I'd always imagined her pubic hair as a tiny, quivering lick of flame where her warm, rosy thighs came together. I remember e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.n.g. far less than I thought I would.

"And in the women's lavatory of all places," my mother continued.