Zombie Blondes by Brian James Page B

wasp nest left over from a summer some time ago. My cheerleading dreams in a similar state of deterioration.
    “I’m sorry,” he says.
    “No, you’re not,” I say back to him.
    I can see the start of a smile as he lets his head drop from his hands and looks down at his tattered shoelaces. Not the kind of little-boy smile he normally has, more like the smile of an old man smiling at the stupidity of someone younger. “You’re right, I’m not,” he says and can’t help himself from laughing.
    I sit up and hit him halfheartedly. “You’re a jerk,” I say but I can’t keep from laughing, either. I guess it’s about the only way left to look at it. At least with him. Laughing about it is what will make us friends again. And it actually feels good to laugh. Feels good to have someone to laugh about it with. It makes the whole thing seem less serious. Besides, I have a whole ten days alone to feel miserable.
    I move closer to him until our bodies are leaning together like we’re Siamese. Rest my head on his shoulder and let out a deep breath and he can tell I’m more upset than I let on. Puts his arm around my shoulder as the last rays of sun go down and the first stars poke through the sky like moth holes in an old blanket.
    “Your hands are like ice,” he says, wrapping his fingers around mine.
    I shiver in response and he helps me up.
    “Let’s go inside,” he says as somewhere down the block a dog barks and a light switches on in one of the few homes beside mine that is lived in. I do the same, switching on the lamp and filling the room with electric daylight.
    I head straight for the couch and wrap myself in its sunken cushions. Lukas circles around the room once. Examining the things lying around like visitors admiring artifacts in a cheap museum. “Where’s your dad?” he asks. “Is he going to be back soon?”
    I pull my legs up onto the couch and sink even lower. Shaking my head at his total lack of intuition. Even for a boy, he’s pretty pathetic. “Shut up and come sit down next to me already,” I say.
    A confused-puppy look shows in his brown eyes, but he comes anyway. Sinks in beside me and we listen to wind rushing against the roof and the creaking of the beams. Silent and alone together and I have the feeling we’re going to get used to times like this.

EIGHT
    My dad bought me a dream catcher for my twelfth birthday to keep the nightmares away. I was always having them every time we came to a new house. He told me that he had it blessed by some Native American tribe at a casino. It doesn’t work at all, though. But it’s still the first thing I hang up in my room whenever we move in. It’s just a habit, I guess. Besides, I like the way it looks when the sun shines through it. The colors make even the dreariest room look sort of pretty. But the nightmares still find their way through the tightly woven fabric and visit me in my sleep.
    Tonight, my nightmare took place in the school gym. I’m not sure if it was any specific gym. More like a combination of all the ones I’ve ever been in, sort of swirled together the way dreams do with places. But the army of bleach-blond girls in black skirts told me that wherever it was, I was supposedto recognize it as Maplecrest.
    They came in a pack and surrounded me as if I were a prop in one of their routines, only in my dream Morgan was the leader ordering the others. She ordered them to tie me to a wooden pillar that sprang up through the center of the basketball court like the trunk of an ancient tree that wasn’t there only a moment before.
    The rope felt like thick wool. Scratchy and rough as it dug into my skin, deeper each time the girls danced around the beam to latch me tighter to it. I heard the clapping of hands from an unseen audience off in the distance. Clapping to the rhythm of their feet as the cheerleaders skipped like little Candy Land kids around a maypole, like in movies about children in foreign countries that are always