The specialest movie was one we’d watch during sleepovers— we being all the kids who’d ditch our homes every night to be in each other’s, a dozen of us, in four different houses at first. A network of hand signals and whispers, as cars pulled up to summer camp pick-up, letting him know which house his crush would be at tonight, and guess who’s bringing shoofly pie from last weekend’s state fair. It was like that for a while, before siblings with cigarette breath slipped through sliding doors and saw us pretending to be zoos on all fours. One of them said it was weird to their date the next day, who almost choked on her popcorn and said her fucker of a little sister did the same thing— not a zoo, but a sleepover.
The sleepovers worked while summer was aglow and on and on and on until it wasn’t, until the answers to the mandatory summer break math packets weren’t passed in bunk beds in the dead of sleepless nights. The dead, rising on the projector screen set up by somebody’s mom who was never home so that her kid would never be bored. The other kids gawked at what their moms who gave them too many hugs couldn’t afford. The dead rising, despite the bullets and the gore, the worms in their cheeks and jaws and eyeballs, the new comic relief friend of the hero turned before our very eyes.
That one zombie DVD got handed back and forth. We watched it ‘til it was funny, then it was lost. Maybe it went through every secret sleepover that summer— almost a hundred in all, if you count the kids in nearby neighborhoods who tried pulling the same as us. Nothing for the cops to do, after neverending calls of child packs stalking the night, but tell parents to keep their goddamn eyes out. Kids are smarter than they think. And in a blink, we were back in school with glued-down bedroom windows, newly memorized rules, siblings who secretly wished they’d done something so elaborate at that age. Us kids who had shared blankets after exchanging names, now never saying “hey” in hallways— in backpacks and uniforms and the same zombie flick burnt into our brains, different bus routes and clubs and lunch tables and rumors on our backs. Hard to keep track of who hung out with who when everyone was sneaking out at once.
Thank God no one died. Not that we lacked for opportunities. Crossing busy intersections, thumbing it there and back, falling on tail bones on driveways after the neighbor kids hesitated to catch us. In the dark, in our solitary bedrooms, we remember: Jessica, Joseph, Judy, Jerry, Terri, Tony, Oscar, Timothy, not remembering much else but that movie we kept watching— the way the dead lost everything but their hunger— arms straight out, mouths agape, almost like praise, crosses of wood driven into zombies’ hearts but that didn’t work. That’s how the girl who shouldn’t have gone off from the group got ate.
The last shot was her eyeball going wide and flooded red as blackened teeth in slo-mo came down. No one, the first night we watched it, knew what came next. We all closed our eyes tight. At least I did. I thought, this is great, but not yet, I can’t look. Cut to black and exhale. I loosened my grip on the quilt somebody’s mother made and looked around. Everyone else looked to make sure no one saw if they were afraid. We were all afraid.
We couldn’t fall asleep in the big silence, thinking, what if the dead come? But the morning came, and death was not a place our friends stayed. Our friends were motionless, under basement blankets as dawn brought alarms and goodbyes— not even faces remembered, just the sound of their laughs and jokes about rotting brains, parents soon awake.
The next night, somebody’s else’s place. Another kid under this same blanket. A crush in some other bed with DVD in hand, scratched to shit until it couldn’t play but by then we all had to have seen it, sex scenes, death scenes and all.
The Summer of Sleepovers gave way to yet another year of grades, girls and boys and boys and boys and girls and girls saying they kissed that summer when the other couldn’t say. It happened so fast. They went for the nearest embrace in the projector light. They were half-awake. They couldn’t explain. It didn’t happen that way.
The kid who introduced the movie moved to another state. The movie doesn’t show up when I try to search its name. The DVD must’ve ended up like an older sibling’s ashtray, cleaned up by a mom in disgust months later. What really happened with those sleepovers, she must’ve asked her youngest and her neighbors and her friends and the librarians and her coworkers and the social workers and the guidance counselor and the camp director and her oldest, right as the van was packed with dorm room furniture and he was about to go away. But the stories weren’t the same. It’s like the kids all had and lost one incandescent brain.
I don’t know you anymore, but if you’re like me, you try and find what remains.