Katzenjammer

  Dedication

  For everyone who changed,

  and everyone who never had a chance

  Epigraph

  I cannot make you understand.

  I cannot make anyone understand

  what is happening inside me.

  I cannot even explain it to myself.

  —Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Eyeholes

  .1.......

  Cat

  .2.......

  Inhale

  .3.......

  Chair

  .4.......

  Square

  .5.......

  Fragile

  .6.......

  Frostblood

  .7.......

  Boundaries

  .8.......

  Catherine

  .9.......

  Here, Kitty Cat

  .10.......

  Admins

  .11.......

  Taxidermy

  .12.......

  The Brothers Blumenthal

  .13.......

  Crack

  .14.......

  Boiler

  .15.......

  Dreamless

  .16.......

  Handguards

  .17.......

  Staring

  .18.......

  Homeroom

  .19.......

  Flimsy

  .20.......

  Time

  .21.......

  Loud Noodle

  .22.......

  Fingers

  .23.......

  Knifeworld

  .24.......

  Five-Finger Fillet

  .25.......

  Nothing You Can Do

  .26.......

  Funsies

  .27.......

  Bloop Bloop

  .28.......

  New Game

  .29.......

  Exhale

  .30.......

  Painful Hollow

  .31.......

  Blades

  .32.......

  I Come With Knives

  .33.......

  A Thousand Little Cuts

  .34.......

  Flower Valley

  .35.......

  The Blinding

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Francesca Zappia

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Eyeholes

  My eyes are gone.

  That figures.

  I stare into the mirror in the girls’ locker room for a full two minutes, examining the new emptiness in the eyeholes of my mask. Then I wait another minute before I jam a finger two knuckles deep into my eye socket.

  Nothing there. I should be scrambling my own brains.

  Question of the day: What’s stranger—trying to scramble your own brains, or wishing you could?

  Whatever. It’s not like I need eyes anyway.

  I dunk my head under the sink faucet and let the water run over my hair. I once used the showers to clean up, but now they only spray blood. Not just when you turn them on, but all the time, hot and thick and sticky, and it weirdly reminds me of that opening scene in Carrie. Red rain hits the tiles and I imagine a chorus of girls chanting Plug it up, plug it up.

  I wish the showers would plug it up. It reeks.

  I stare at myself in the mirror and wonder how I got here, stuck inside School, with the plumbing full of blood and my face looking like this.

  I don’t remember.

  None of us do.

  .1.......

  The moment I think I don’t remember, the first memory comes unbidden and crystal clear.

  I was six. I sat in the middle of the school gymnasium while they sorted us into our classes and passed us off to our teachers on the first day of first grade. A Wonderful Day of Firsts. The first time I wore the blue corduroy dress with the overall straps. The first time I was around a lot of other kids my age without Mom or Dad there.

  My name was called. I knew my name then, but not now, and in the memory it’s a garbled noise. A finger pointed to my destination, a group of kids in the far corner. Mr. Lahm’s class. I clambered to my feet—adorable in my shiny saddle shoes—and hurried to join them.

  Six girls, five boys. I sat down beside a girl with curly brown hair and purple pants. She said hello and told me her name was Priscilla, but I could call her Sissy, because Priscilla sounded like the name of one of those fancy white cats that eat food off glass plates. I thought about telling her that Sissy wasn’t very good, either, but I wanted to make friends.

  The boy sitting on Sissy’s other side kept looking at me, so I thought he might want to make friends, too. But when he saw me staring back at him, he put his fingers in front of his eyes and waggled them in opposite directions, like his eyes looked different ways. Him and the boy next to him started laughing, and it didn’t sound very friendly.

  Every time he looked at me that day, he did that with his fingers.

  That was the clearest part of the memory. How horrible he looked, making fun of me.

  Cat

  Well. I guess I do remember something.

  I lather up my hair with the hand soap from the dispensers, rinse it out again, and dry it off with the locker room towels that have thankfully remained blood-free. Then I wipe the water droplets off my mask. The edges of the towel dip into my empty eye sockets once or twice and I jump every time, even though I don’t feel anything.

  The others may be concerned that I’ve lost my eyes. I need to remember to be careful when I see them, so they know I’m still me.

  When I’m clean—when my head is clean, since I’ve had issues taking my clothes off lately—I neatly fold the towel on the shelf above the sinks, comb my blackglove fingers through my blacksheet hair, and recheck my mask one last time to make sure nothing else has changed today.

  Nope. Still a cat.

  Of all the ways students have changed inside this school, a cat mask made of hardened flesh is on the boring end of the spectrum. I can’t make the expressions I used to, and now I guess I don’t have eyes, but at least I am still myself.

  I can’t say as much for some of the others.

  .2.......

  The second memory comes all at once, instantly.

  Ryan Lancaster was the name of the boy who made fun of my lazy eye on the first day of school. The other kids stopped laughing after a while, so he moved on to other things to get their attention.

  One of his targets was Sissy. Everything about her. The size of her perm. The size of her stomach. The amount of hair on her arms. How she liked her peanut butter sandwiches cut right down the middle instead of diagonally.

  One day in gym class, we had to play kickball. Sissy moved to the plate as the teacher rolled her the ball, and when she kicked it, it soared over the infield, past the outfield, and hit the fence. Our team cheered; Sissy ran to first base as fast as she could, which wasn’t very fast at all.

  Not fair! Ryan Lancaster yelled from the outfield, instead of running to get the ball. Sissy moved on to second base.

  Why is it not fair, Ryan? the gym teacher yelled back.

  Because, only boys can hit the ball that far, but she’s on the girls’ team! She’s not a girl, she’s a boy!

  Sissy stumbled halfway between second and third. I’m not a boy! she yelled back.

  Liar!

  I’m not a liar!

  Sissy’s a boy! Ryan called.

  No, I’m not!

  The chanting started. Sissy’s a boy! Sissy’s a boy!

  Quiet, all of you! the gym teacher yelled. The field fell silent. I sunk against the chain-link of the backstop and wished I could disappear. The teacher rounded us up and herded us back inside. I trailed at the end of the line with Sissy behind me, her face red and tears dribbling down her cheeks, though she bit her bottom lip in a valiant effort not to cry.

  I thought I might be able to say something to make her feel better, but all I could think was I’m so glad it’s not me.

  Inhale

  When I leave the locker room, the long hallway behind the gyms is a little wider than it was before, the ceiling a little higher. The doors have spread farther out along the wall. School is inhaling. The entire building has stretched itself up and out like a tall man climbing from a tiny car. It’s much better than when School exhales, because then we spend months crawling around constricted passageways and shrunken classrooms, the desks and chairs and file cabinets and bookshelves crowding in, and we hope we don’t get stuck somewhere we can’t escape.

  Another plus is that when the hallways get bigger, they get darker. Makes lots of nooks and crannies to hide in. When the hallways are small, they’re all superbright, and there’s no way to avoid anyone. School is weird like that. I think it likes to mess with us.

  What am I saying? Of course it likes to mess with us.

  It trapped us here.

  .3.......

  Why are the memories coming now?

  I liked to draw. In fourth grade we had to take a different mandatory recreation class every day: Tuesday was music, Wednesday was gym, Thursday was library, and Monday and Friday were art. Art class was basically a paper and crayons party, but the teacher sat me in a corner of the room with a pencil and I drew the first thing that came to me—an owl perched on a tree made of hands.

  Then Ryan Lancaster ran b
y, scribbled black crayon across my page, and said, It wasn’t that good anyway, what are you angry about? The teacher made him go to the principal’s office, but Ryan didn’t seem upset about it.

  School taught me that I liked to draw, but home was where I could do it without protecting the picture at the same time.

  Mom and Dad loved that I did art things. Well, Mom loved it, and Dad was okay with it, though he clung to the idea of me playing tennis. He wanted more championship trophies to add to his collection, but with my name on them instead of his. He never got them, and only complained about it on my birthdays and Christmas, when he and Mom presented me with another crop of sketchbooks, pencils, markers, brushes, paints, canvas. Everything I needed to empty my head of the images that grew there like parasites. Surreal landscapes, twisting hallways, subtle gleams in the darkness like knife edges at night.

  They’re all so dark, Dad said one day, watching over my shoulder as I worked at the kitchen table. Why don’t you paint things like a blue sky, or a field of flowers, or a bird flying on a breeze? Something happy that your mom can put on the fridge.

  She can put these on the fridge, I said.

  Maybe just one flower? he asked.

  There are no flowers where I live, I said.

  Chair

  It figures that the memories that come back to me now are the useless ones, the ones that explain nothing about how I got here, how we all got here.

  I hug the walls and creep to the English hallway. I move carefully. I can’t call out for Jeffrey because I can’t risk alerting whatever might be out here. That’s what School does. There is no speaking in the hallways out of fear of what or who will hear. Because there’s always the possibility that the person who responds to you is not the one who wants to help.

  My long-sleeved shirt and pants and shoes and gloves are all black, so I blend in well. Some of the others aren’t so lucky—they changed in ways that are too distracting to ignore. But not me. Whenever I want, I disappear into the shadows. Even my eyes can’t give me away now.

  Mrs. Remley is the only one in her classroom when I arrive. Strange. Usually Jeffrey arrives before me. Like the rest of the building, the room is illuminated by vague sources of light just out of your field of vision; when you turn to look, the light changes. Mrs. Remley sits behind her desk, her varnish gleaming dully. I brush dust off her and scoot her up to the desk once again. Someone must have come in here and pulled her out without realizing who she was. But who, though? Jeffrey and I are the only ones who use this room. And Mrs. Remley rarely moves herself.

  Footsteps sound in the hallway outside.

  .4.......

  I met Jeffrey in middle school.

  It was a Tuesday.

  The cafeteria was serving pizza sticks, and the cafeteria only served pizza sticks on Tuesdays. I was in line for pizza sticks behind a kid wearing a sweater vest. I was trying to comprehend the sweater vest when a group of boys in football shirts came up, said hi to Sweater Vest, and cut him in line.

  They’re going to eat all the pizza sticks! was the first brilliant thing out of my mouth.

  Sweater Vest turned around. I’d seen him a few times in the halls but never paid attention to him. He had these big brown eyes and thick blond-brown eyebrows like honey caterpillars. Honeypillars. Like they could wrap you up and keep you warm on a cold winter day. They pushed together in the middle when he looked at me.

  He said, I’m really sorry; you can go ahead of me.

  Are you sure? I asked.

  I was surprised because usually when a large group of popular kids cut in line, everyone pretended like nothing had happened and that was that.

  He nodded, so I took his spot, and I got the last pizza sticks.

  Later, I watched him sit at the far end of the same table with the football guys, off by himself. With nachos.

  I tapped him on the shoulder and said, Do you want to sit with me and my friend? You can have half my pizza sticks.

  He looked to where I pointed, to the table where Sissy sat with her back to the wall, picking the ham out of a chef’s salad.

  Sure, he said.

  I said, My name’s ( ), and I like pizza sticks.

  He said, My name’s Jeffrey, and I’ve never gotten any pizza sticks.

  Square

  “Cat! Oh, Cat, good, you’re here!”

  Jeffrey appears in the doorway to Mrs. Remley’s room. I want to hiss at him to learn to walk more quietly. He turns the corner too tightly and his head grazes the doorframe, making him recoil. He’s gotten pretty good at avoiding corners, but every once in a while he’ll get excited and forget that his head is a cardboard box. He holds a hand flat against its short side and blinks at me, dazed.

  I feel a jolt in my chest whenever I see Jeffrey, a warmth that reassures me we will be okay even though we are stuck in this place. The jolt is entirely about who Jeffrey is and not at all about what he looks like now. Jeffrey’s face is a crude crayon drawing, just two big circle eyes and a rectangle mouth filled with square white teeth. When he blinks, his eyes flip between open circle and closed line, like an animation with only two frames.

  He straightens his blue sweater vest and looks around like someone might have seen his blunder, though he knows Mrs. Remley would never make fun of her students.

  “Cat,” he begins again, a little slower. “It’s terrible—you have to come see—”

  He stops when I take a step toward him, and I know I’ve put myself in enough light for him to see my eyes. Lack of. Straight eyebrow lines appear on his forehead, furrowing a cardboard ridge between them. The sides of his rectangle mouth curve downward.

  “Cat?”

  “I’m okay,” I say. My voice is too loud inside these dusty classroom walls. “What do I have to see?”

  His shoulders slump and he flattens a hand over his face, over one closed eye. “God, Cat. I thought you were gone.”

  “Nope,” I say. “Still here.”

  He peeks over his hand. One of his pupils is colored in; the other is an empty circle. “You can see?”

  “I can see whatever it is you need to show me.” Now I’m less concerned about my eyes and more about Jeffrey rushing in here. Jeffrey doesn’t rush. He might get anxious, but he does it with the genial air of a game show host trying to shine a shit prize. Jeffrey is the calmest sea, because he has to be, because he’s the one who keeps the peace between us.

  All of us—the ones who have changed and the ones who haven’t.

  .5.......

  Most of us had been together since middle school.

  By “been together,” I don’t mean we had been friends since middle school. I mean middle school was the first time we were all in a building together. And by “us,” I mean all of us, not just me and Jeffrey and Sissy and Ryan Lancaster, but the others, too. I remember that much.

  I remember sitting down to watch the announcements and seeing tall, pale Julie Wisnowski reading off the school news in first period. I remember no one in class listening, because Lane Castillo was too busy recounting her various weekend adventures in an obnoxiously loud voice. I remember a river of faces passing in the hallway, familiar but distant, people I saw every day and would never know.

  I remember the small caravan of almost-friends I traveled with from class to class, and I remember them mostly because I think we all knew we stuck together out of necessity. One of us alone in the hallway was a target. All of us together were just more faces in the river, moving slowly but steadily toward the sea, where we’d be free.

  I didn’t mind not being good friends with any of them. Sissy and I were the kind of friends who didn’t really see each other outside of school, but while we were there, we had each other’s backs. We’d known each other too long not to do that much, at least. But she was best friends with Julie, so I was on my own most of the time. Until Jeffrey came along, I mean, because post-Jeffrey life was much better than pre-Jeffrey life. And Jeffrey was one of those people who was in all of your classes, but you never noticed him until you looked. The quiet kid who sat in the middle of the room and kept his head down and did all his work and wore a sweater vest.

  A lot of us were like that. And by “us” I mean us. Not them. A lot of people think what happens happens because we ask for it—because we’re too loud, or too strange, or too persistent. But most of us are like Jeffrey. Trying to keep our heads down, trying to get out alive, but they find us. The Lane Castillos of the world. The Raph Johnsons. The Jake Blumenthals. They found us in the river, and they chose us for their long, sick games.