Dead City

Zues?" I said. "His computer. He named it." Then she whispered conspiratorially, "He acts like it's a person." "I do not," he said as we walked down the hall toward his room. "You gave it a birthday party," she said. Grayson stopped walking for a moment. "Annual hard-drive maintenance and software upgrades do not count as a birthday party." "No," she said. "But singing 'Happy Birthday' to it does." He took a deep breath. They've obviously been through this before. "You know I was testing the new voice-recognition software." Natalie looked at me. "Birthday party.

I hate zombies. I know that sound prejudiced. I'm sure some zombies are really nice to kittens and love their parents. But it's been my experience that most are not the kind of people you want sending you friend requests.

If this had been a public-school locker room, there would have been some gray jumbo-sized garbage cans nearby, and I probably could've taken care of cleanup by myself. But apparently the girls of St. Andrew's don't throw anything away, because all they had was a tiny wastebasket and some recycling bins. There were bins for paper, plastic, and glass, but none for rotting corpses. Go figure.

I've never had much luck with New Year's resolutions. Last year I only lasted three days before realizing I couldn't survive without junk food. And the year before that, when my sister and I promised not to argue anymore, we didn't even make it to the end of my dad's New Year's Eve party. I'll spare you the gory details, but fruit punch and guacamole were involved. So was dry cleaning.

He was tall like a basketball player, and superthin. His hair had been dyed shoe-polish black, and he had dark circles under his eyes. He wore mismatched earrings and, judging by the splotches along his jawline, he also wore makeup. Very bad makeup. Even by New York subway standards he was weird.

(If yours is not available, you can always steal your sister’s.)

Death is part of the natural order of life,” she would explain. “You shouldn’t be scared of it. You should be respectful of it.

My mom had mismatched eyes. It’s called “heterochromia,” and I have it too. My left eye is blue and my right is green, just like hers. She said it was our special genetic bond.

To say that Grayson’s little brothers are loud is like saying jet engines are kind of noisy. They sounded like a troop of howler monkeys as they raced down the hallway toward his room.

I mean it, guys," I said. "Why don't you play Two Foot Trivia instead? It's just as fun and much safer." "First of all, this is completely safe," Grayson replied. "Second, if we had both feet down, we'd just be asking each other trivia questions." "Which would be lame," added Alex. "But isn't that what you're doing right now?" I asked. "No," Grayson said defensively. "Balancing on one foot makes it a sport.

We’ll have to go down into Dead City.

(But it was still better than our class visit to the wastewater treatment plant.)