Zombie

It was Griffin Wilson who proposed the theory of de-evolution. He sat two rows behind me in Organic Chem, the very definition of an evil genius. He was the first to take the Great Leap Backward.

Everybody knows because Tricia Gedding was in the nurse's office with him. She was in the other cot, behind a paper curtain, faking her period to get out of a pop quiz in Perspectives on Eastern Civ. She said she heard the loud beep! but didn't think anything of it. When Tricia Gedding and the school nurse found him on his own cot, they thought Griffin Wilson was the resuscitation doll everybody uses to practice CPR. He was hardly breathing, barely moving a muscle. They thought it was a joke because his wallet was still clenched between his teeth and he still had the electrical wires pasted to either side of his forehead.

His hands were still holding a dictionary-size box, still paralyzed, pressing a big, red button. Everyone's seen this box so often that they hardly recognized it, but it had been hanging on the office wall: the defibrillator. That emergency heart shocker. He must have taken it down and read the instructions. He simply took the waxed paper off the gluey parts and pasted the electrodes on either side of his temporal lobes. It's basically a peel-and-stick lobotomy. It's so easy a 16-year-old can do it.

In Miss Chen's English class, we learned 'To be or not to be,' but there's a big gray area in between. Maybe in Shakespeare times people only had two options. Griffin Wilson, he knew the SATs were just the gateway to a big lifetime of bullshit. To getting married and going to college. To paying taxes and trying to raise a kid who's not a school shooter. And Griffin Wilson knew drugs are only a patch. After drugs, you're always going to need more drugs.

The problem with being talented and gifted is sometimes you get too smart. My uncle Henry says the importance of eating a good breakfast is because your brain is still growing. But nobody talks about how, sometimes, your brain can get just too big.

We're basically big animals, evolved to break open shells and eat raw oysters, but now we're expected to keep track of all 300 Kardashian sisters and 800 Baldwin brothers. Seriously, at the rate they reproduce the Kardashians and the Baldwins are going to wipe out all other species of humans. The rest of us, you and me, we're just evolutionary dead ends waiting to wink out.

You could ask Griffin Wilson anything. Ask him who signed the Treaty of Ghent. He'd be like that cartoon magician on TV who says, 'Watch me pull a rabbit out of my head.' Abracadabra, and he'd know the answer. In Organic Chem, he could talk string theory until he was anoxic, but what he really wanted to be was happy. Not just not sad, he wanted to be happy the way a dog is happy. Not constantly jerked this way and that by flaming instant messages and changes in the federal tax code. He didn't want to die either. He wanted to be—and not to be—but at the same time. That's what a pioneering genius he was.

The principal of student affairs made Tricia Gedding swear to not tell a living soul, but you know how that goes. The school district was afraid of copycats. Those defibrillators are everywhere these days.

Since that day in the nurse's office, Griffin Wilson has never seemed happier. He's always giggling too loud and wiping spit off his chin with his sleeve. The special ed teachers clap their hands and heap him with praise just for using the toilet. Talk about a double standard. The rest of us are fighting tooth and nail for whatever garbage career we can get, while Griffin Wilson is going to be thrilled with penny candy and reruns of Fraggle Rock for the rest of his life. How he was before, he was miserable unless he won every chess tournament. The way he is now, just yesterday, he took out his dick and jerked off on the school bus. And when Mrs. Ramirez pulled over and left the driver's seat to chase him down the aisle he shouted, 'Watch me pull a rabbit out of my pants,' and he squirted come on her uniform shirt. He was laughing the whole time.

Lobotomized or not, he still knows the value of a signature catchphrase. Instead of being just another grade grubber, now he's the life of the party.

The voltage even cleared up his acne.

It's hard to argue with results like that.

It wasn't a week after he'd turned zombie that Tricia Gedding went to the gym where she does Zumba and got the defibrillator off the wall in the girls' locker room. After her self-administered peel-and-stick procedure in a bathroom stall, she doesn't care where she gets her period. Her best friend, Brie Phillips, got to the defibrillator they keep next to the bathrooms at the Home Depot, and now she walks down the street, rain or shine, with no pants on. We're not talking about the scum of the school. We're talking about class president and head cheerleader. The best and the brightest. Everybody who played first string on all the sports teams. It took every defibrillator between here and Canada, but since then, when they play football nobody plays by the rules. And even when they get skunked, they're always grinning and slapping high fives.

They continue to be young and hot, but they no longer worry about the day when they won't be.

It's suicide, but it's not. The newspaper won't report the actual numbers. Newspapers flatter themselves. Anymore, Tricia Gedding's Facebook page has a larger readership than our daily paper. Mass media, my foot. They cover the front page with unemployment and war, and they don't think that has a negative effect? My uncle Henry reads me an article about a proposed change in state law. Officials want a 10-day waiting period on the sale of all heart defibrillators. They're talking about mandatory background checks and mental health screenings. But it's not the law, not yet.

My uncle Henry looks up from the newspaper article and eyes me across breakfast. He levels me this stern look and asks, 'If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you?'

My uncle's what I have instead of a mom and dad. He won't acknowledge it, but there's a good life over the edge of that cliff. There's a lifetime supply of handicapped parking permits. Uncle Henry doesn't understand that all my friends have already jumped.

They may be 'differently abled,' but my friends are still hooking up. More than ever, these days. They have smoking-hot bodies and the brains of infants. They have the best of both worlds. LeQuisha Jefferson stuck her tongue inside Hannah Finermann during Beginning Carpentry Arts, made her squeal and squirm right there, leaned up against the drill press. And Laura Lynn Marshall? She sucked off Frank Randall in the back of International Cuisine Lab with everybody watching. All their falafels got scorched, and nobody made a federal case out of it.

After pushing the red defibrillator button, yeah, a person suffers some consequences, but he doesn't know he's suffering. Once he undergoes a push-button lobotomy a kid can get away with murder.

During study hall, I asked Boris Declan if it hurt. He was sitting there in the lunchroom with the red burn marks still fresh on either side of his forehead. He had his pants down around his knees. I asked if the shock was painful, and he didn't answer, not right away. He just took his fingers out of his ass and sniffed them, thoughtfully. He was last year's junior prom king.

In a lot of ways he's more chill now than he ever was. With his ass hanging out in the middle of the cafeteria, he offers me a sniff and I tell him, 'No, thank you.'

He says he doesn't remember anything. Boris Declan grins this sloppy, dopey smile. He taps a dirty finger to the burn mark on one side of his face. He points this same butt-stained finger to make me look across the way. On the wall where he's pointing is this guidance counselor poster that shows white birds flapping their wings against a blue sky. Under that are the words actual happiness only happens by accident printed in dreamy writing. The school hung that poster to hide the shadow of where another defibrillator used to hang.

It's clear that wherever Boris Declan ends up in life it's going to be the right place. He's already living in brain trauma nirvana. The school district was right about copycats.

No offense to Jesus, but the meek won't inherit the earth. To judge from reality TV the loudmouths will get their hands on everything. And I say, let them. The Kardashians and the Baldwins are like some invasive species. Like kudzu or zebra mussels. Let them battle over the control of the crappy real world.

For a long time I listened to my uncle and didn't jump. Anymore, I don't know. The newspaper warns us about terrorist anthrax bombs and virulent new strains of meningitis, and the only comfort newspapers can offer is a coupon for 20 cents off on underarm deodorant.

To have no worries, no regrets—it's pretty appealing. So many of the cool kids at my school have elected to self-fry that, anymore, only the losers are left. The losers and the naturally occurring pinheads. The situation is so dire that I'm a shoo-in to be valedictorian. That's how come my uncle Henry is shipping me off. He thinks that by relocating me to Twin Falls he can postpone the inevitable.

So we're sitting at the airport, waiting by the gate for our flight to board, and I ask to go to the bathroom. In the men's room I pretend to wash my hands so I can look in the mirror. My uncle asked me, one time, why I looked in mirrors so much, and I told him it wasn't vanity so much as it was nostalgia. Every mirror shows me what little is