“School? Are you demented? What do you-” Langhorne jabbed me in the back. Hard. “Oh. Right. School, really?”
Alice Langhorne nodded grimly.
“All right,” I said. “Hang on.” I stepped into my shoes. “I’m ready; let’s go.”
“No you are not, young lady.”
“What now?”
“You can’t go to school like that. You march right upstairs and put on a clean dress and brush your hair. The boys will wait. Won’t you?”
“Yes, Miz Langhorne.”
Knowing it was pointless to argue, I climbed the stairs while Alice invited the boys in and offered them milk and cookies. Little Bobby Rubio was at the top of the stairs, staring down.
“Are you going to play school?” he asked me, as I brushed past.
“I guess so.”
“Can I play, too?”
“Go ask Alice.”
I went into my designated room and examined the clothes in the closet. They had belonged to a girl exactly my size though much younger. Taking off my filthy velvet dress, I put on a clean cotton one-a sunny yellow number with black polka dots. Then I brushed my hair into some semblance of order and tied it with a bow. Flying back downstairs, I was intercepted by Langhorne, who spit-shined my face and handed me a sack lunch before letting me out the door.
“Have a nice day at school!” she called after us.
Getting into the car, I was struck anew by the boys’ weirdly preppy appearance. Jake’s copper-colored hair was parted into two lobes in front and buzzed short at the sides, the stubble shaved in a peculiar grid pattern. He wore a V-neck sweater over a dress shirt, baggy golf pants, and brown-and-white gaiters.
“Hi, Jake,” I said.
“Hi, Lulu. What do you think of Bess?”
“Bess?” My first thought was Basic Enlisted Submarine School.
“Bessie, my new car-well, maybe not new… ”
“Oh. Nice.”
“Nice? You wouldn’t believe what we went through to find this thing and get it running. It’s a Model T Roadster-is that awesome or what? We looked up antique car dealers in three different counties before we found it.”
“Why?”
“Why? Why do you think?” He waved a comic book in my face. “Mood! Atmosphere! The power of suggestion! It’s an experiment in Xombie psychology, and we’re the subjects. Haven’t the officers drilled you about this?”
“No. Just Langhorne.”
“Oh.” Abashed, Jake said, “Well, we all got the full spiel during the night-you’re lucky you missed it.”
Lucky. Right. Well, I supposed I had no one but myself to blame. They drove me through deserted neighborhoods to the local high school. Arriving, I was surprised to see hundreds of students milling around the entrance. I was not used to seeing Xombies wearing clothes, much less carrying books and backpacks. From a distance, they did not resemble Xombies at all. Only about fifty of them were from the boat, the rest were freshly groomed strangers.
Crowd noise was muted; there was little talking and less laughter. Harvey Coombs, Dan Robles, Ed Albemarle, and several other officers from the boat were patrolling the crowd like ominous shepherds, preventing anyone from straying too far.
“Hi, Ed,” I said, as Albemarle passed me.
Lemuel hissed, “We’re supposed to call him Principal Albemarle.”
“Oh, really?” As Fred Cowper’s proxy on the sub, I was accustomed to giving the orders, not taking them. “What happens if I don’t?”
“Then you get sent to Detention.”
“Ah… ”
Clearly, most of these “students” were random Xombies rustled up during the night and given a crash course in campus life. With no humans around, they were quite docile-in fact, hard to distinguish from the treated Blues. It really brought home the fact that in a totally human-free world, my blood was no longer needed to keep the peace. I was obsolete. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that or what it would mean for me.
The bell rang, and everyone started filing inside. Waiting my turn at the back of the line, I noticed a car racing toward the school. It was a silver Jaguar with the top down. As it screeched into a handicapped parking slot, the driver vaulted out of his seat and landed lightly on the sidewalk. Despite his aviator sunglasses and disco outfit, I recognized Kyle Hancock.
Kyle strutted up the path like an urban cowboy, and when he reached me, he threw his arm around my shoulder, and said, “Hello, baaaaby. Can I have a burger with that shake?”
Shrugging his arm off, I said, “Smooth. Who are you supposed to be? Superfly?”
“I’m MC Ricky Ricardo, honey. The Afro-Cuban Revolution. Babaloooo! Question is, who are you supposed to be?”
“That’s actually a good question… ”
“Well, in that case, why don’t you and I blow this chicken shack and take a ride in my X-K-E?” He put his arm back around my shoulder and tried to steer me away.
I resisted slightly, but it was more trouble than it was worth. Actually, I was glad for the excuse to get out of school. Just then, a large hand settled on the back of Kyle’s neck. Before the boy could react, the hand squeezed tight and hoisted him off his feet.
It was Lemuel. Shaking Kyle like a rat, the larger boy said, “Nobody messes with my girl.” Then he punched Kyle square in the face. Kyle’s sunglasses fractured, mirrored shards embedding in flesh and bone as his nose squashed flat and his face actually inverted. He bounced off Lemuel’s fist and sailed backward across the grass. The crowd watched all this impassively, then turned away.
“Gee,” I said. “You really didn’t have to do that.”
“I kind of did,” said Lemuel sheepishly. “It’s in the book.”
Picking glass out of his face, Kyle yelled, “But you didn’t have to mean it!”
The first day of school was always a little strange. New classes, new faces, new locker combinations-it was a lot to learn. Unless you just didn’t care. That was the challenge of Xombie High: teaching those who had no reason to work. The time factor alone was nearly impossible since Maenad consciousness was not easily synched to a clock. Five minutes here, an hour there-it was like posting stop signs for the wind.
To a Xombie, the rate at which time passed was completely optional. We were not trapped in the here and now, chained to the present like students watching a clock. Exes were never bored or impatient because if we didn’t like what was going on, we simply skipped ahead in time, leaving our inert bodies for however long was necessary-hours, days, weeks… perhaps years or centuries-until body and mind could reunite under more pleasant circumstances. To us, this leap was instantaneous; there was no mental gap.
Therefore, in order for school to function, we had to deliberately imprison our minds in the present and obey a schedule, like circus lions jumping through hoops. For us creatures from the boat, this was not so difficult-we were accustomed to a degree of effort and self-control. The challenge was that we were expected to impart this work ethic to the wild-caught Exes, the free-range and the rogue, who had no such inhibitions.
Fortunately, the newbies learned fast. All of us did. At least at first, Langhorne’s experiment was far more successful than I ever imagined possible. With no actual humans around to distract us or remind us what monsters we were, we eagerly convinced ourselves we were people again. Nostalgia spread among us like a new disease, so that even the zombiest of Xombies was soon putting on hair gel and yammering “Gosh!” and “Gee whiz!”
Classes were fairly interesting, and there were only two subjects being taught: Xombiology 101 and Ex Ed. The first was a kind of Xombies for Dummies tutorial on everything that was known about the Maenad condition, given by the resident authority, Alice Langhorne, PhD. The second was a primer on how to create a utopian society by modeling idealized human behavior, such as that found in “wholesome” 1950s Americana. Not just comic books, but television shows, movies, and children’s literature. The idea was to use these materials as How-to-Be-Human handbooks-make it so simple even a Xombie could understand. It helped that wild Xombies had a moony fascination with Clears and were inclined to do what they said.