Capítulo 8: Chapter 8: Is Everybody Dead Around Here?

Death. I smelled death. It was like I'd never left that stupid tomb.

Except, last night Gus and the tomb had smelled bad, but nothing like this. This was as if fifty Guses were crowded into Bobby Dumwhipple's sweaty gym locker without ventilation for three weeks in August. Which was actually possible, since dead people didn’t need to eat or sleep or anything. They could all just stand there in the closet, hunched together, playing Rock, Paper, Intestines.

So if last night was what one dead guy in a tomb smelled like. What was this?

As I walked past the main office, I was hit with an even stronger whiff of death and my knees gave out. I stumbled to the ground, and the students merely altered the flow of their foot traffic, flowing around me as if I were a pebble thrown into a swiftly-running stream. They probably all thought I was drunk. Heck, if I’d seen me throw my arm in front of my face and then drop to my knees, I’d think I was much more than drunk. I crawled on my hands and knees, unable to stand properly, until I was a few yards past the office, at which point I pulled myself to my feet and leaned against the wall. Here it was bad, but back there, in front of the main office...

I looked back down the hall through the windows of the office. The usual administrative crew busied themselves behind desks, drinking coffee, going about their day. Students filtered through with their issues in need of official attention. And I knew. I knew without a shadow of a dead guy of a doubt.

Someone in that office was dead.

Probably someone who spent a lot of time in there, day after day, going about their job and stinking up the joint. We had a dead person working in administration. How does that happen? How does a dead person get a job? Or did they have the job when they died and they just never bothered to leave? Does anyone know? Did the dead person even know?

I’d been in the office plenty of times so far this year and had no idea who the walking corpse could be. And if there was one right here in my school, where else were they? Just how many dead people was I going to run into day after day? I was getting an inkling into just how much this new window on the world was going to suck.

I struggled through first period and was ready to claw my eyes out in second if Mrs. Morrow delved into the inner workings of one more of Aesop’s Fables. Both times I’d grabbed a seat by a window so I could stick my nose into the fresh air from time to time - which again must have convinced everyone that I was on something.

Worst of all was third period. Algebra. Zoe was in my Algebra class. She sat where she always sat, second row, third from the door. Normally I sat in the third row one seat over - not directly behind her like a stalker probably would, but at an angle so I saw a bit of her profile whenever I stole a glance. I was smooth like that.

Today, however, I walked past my usual seat and took up shop in the back against the window. Was it me or did this classroom smell worse than the first two I’d been in today? I couldn’t tell, but I opened the window wide and begged the fresh air to wash over me. As in my other classes, this created a domino effect of kids being forced out of their habitual seats, and much grumbling ensued, but there was enough chaos that most kids couldn’t tell who’d started the whole musical chairs thing so nobody fingered me as the culprit.

Danny Zucker, of course, was determined to sit next to me, adding to the seating upheaval. He tried to make chit-chat throughout the class, I ignored him. He made chit-chat anyway. I willed the period to end. Near as I could tell, Zoe only bothered to look back at me once, a strange mixture of confusion and concern on her face. She mimed thumbing her fingers over a keypad and I got that she hoped I’d text her with what was going on. I played dumb. What was I supposed to say? Sorry about acting weird but all the dead people in the school are making it difficult for me to breathe?

The true bummer was that she looked especially hot today, dressed in a retro rock T-shirt proudly cataloging a Warrant tour from the 80’s - again, probably her Mom’s. I wanted to let her know that I found the shirt attractive, and that I got the statement she was making about the objectivity of women that was rampant during those lost years and how her wearing the shirt was a perfect metaphor for the modern female’s triumph over sexism because while her Mom had worn the shirt in a sad, pathetic way, Zoe now wore it with a fierce, proud, warrior-like ethos.

But instead I stuck my head out of the windows and took a big whiff. The moment was lost.

The rest of the period was gut-wrenchingly frustrating because my inner visions of geometric doodles went into overdrive, this being a math class and all.

By the time fourth period American History rolled around, I had my routine down. I was getting used to the stench, much like someone being slowly digested in the belly of the Sarlacc on Tatooine over a thousand years would eventually get used to the experience, but then I walked into Mr. Hickey’s class and it was time to chop the nose off. I’m serious, you could have shoved fresh manure up my nostrils and it would have been better. The smell was emanating with such a powerful force, it was difficult to walk against the tide and into the room. I quickly lurched to the back corner next to a window, cranked the window open, and stuck my head out, gasping for breath.

“Is there a problem, Mr. Thornwood?” Asked Mr. Hickey, eyeing me with amusement.

I waited a moment to get a few decent breaths in before bringing my head back inside to face the music. I couldn’t talk for fear of opening my mouth, so I just shook my head and hoped he’d leave me alone.

No such luck.

“You look horrible, young man. Do you need to visit the nurse’s office?”

Since the nurse’s office was actually a room off the main office - the one that housed a dead person - I had no desire to go there. In fact, for all I knew, the nurse was the dead one. Wouldn’t that be ironic?

“I’m OK,” I managed to say. Mr. Hickey shrugged his shoulders and turned to write something on the Smartboard, probably thinking he was being cool by ignoring a student’s obvious hangover.

When he turned away, I noticed a very specific drop on the foul odor scale. It was still God-awful, mind you, but when he wasn’t facing me it was only bad enough to the point where I felt as if chopping my head off could actually make things better.

Which is when I realized that Mr. Hickey was dead, too.

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