Authors: Megan Kelley Hall
You’d think after writing a book about dead kids, and dead kids falling in love with living kids and vice versa, that I’d have been a little more battle ready. I may officially be an author of young adult books, but I’d grown up thinking I would be a horror author, and so I read all the introductions to great horror novels and anthologies. These were usually autobiographical in nature, and almost invariably the intros had some anecdote about the social awkwardness of being a horror author. I gathered that it was weird enough being a “normal” author (World to author: What is it you really do?), but horror authors, it seemed, dealt with another level of bizarre social awkwardness entirely. Some of their experiences I read about included having their books banned, getting ostracized by the local PTA at their children’s schools, being accosted constantly by armchair psychoanalysts, or—one of my favorites—fielding questions like “Ever et raw meat?” (one posed to Mr. Stephen King, who has many such anecdotes). A horror author clearly had to deal with a segment of the public that was less than adoring and, in many cases, downright hostile. Maybe I should have done more to guard myself against such hostility.
There was a pause as I took note of the woman’s posture, her tone, the glint in her eyes. She wanted to fight. Did I? Am I the guy who writes about dead kids? A hundred responses, mostly defensive, many belligerent, sprang to my mind. Responses about judging books by covers and did you actually read the book or do you actually read any books and much, much worse. As a writer, you don’t get to tell someone the meaning of what they just read. That’s the job of the book itself. You can, however, talk about what informed the writing, what your mood was, and what was going on in your head when you were writing the story.
The initial idea for
Generation Dead
came from some newsmagazine show I’d seen on violence in schools. According to the program, it was becoming all the rage in schools across America to videotape planned fights or random acts of violence and put them up on YouTube for the entire world to enjoy. The show ran a number of the actual clips of young people hurting other young people. One of the clips featured a little boy in a coat that was too big for him waiting for the bus to arrive. A much larger boy ran into the frame and punched the smaller boy in the face, dropping him to the pavement. The little boy sat, alone and crying, bleeding from his nose and mouth.
We’ve all got our horror pressure points. That was mine. That’s what I wrote about.
Well, really I wrote a love story. That’s what it says on the dedication page, anyway:
For Kim, a love story.
The back cover copy of the book promises love and romance and those topics are what, presumably, the marketing efforts will highlight. And if you ask me, I will tell you I wrote a love story. It just happens to be a love story with zombies. Teenage zombies.
But the damaged boy crying on the pavement is in the book, too, as are the damaged boys that attacked and filmed him. You won’t see them as you see Tommy, the living-impaired boy who falls for Phoebe, the traditionally biotic girl who notices that Tommy is different from all the other boys in her class in more ways than the obvious one. The YouTube victim and his assailants aren’t physical characters in the book, but they are there lurking somewhere under the surface of the story.
I think the zombies were my brain’s (my braaaaaiiiiiin’s!) way of coping with what to me was a truly horrific subject. Cthulhu scares me. Dracula is creepy, and I fear the Rough Beast slouching toward Bethlehem, but the idea (no, not the idea, the reality) of a kid injuring another kid for no other reason than the entertainment value he assumes to be inherent in the act absolutely horrifies me. The zombies allowed me to inject humor into a subject matter that, if I dwelled on it for too long, would put me in the deepest blue funk imaginable. The zombies helped me cope.
And zombies are, of course, wicked cool.
I wrote a story that thrilled me and gripped me emotionally.
Generation Dead
made me laugh, it made me sad, and it scared me. Writing about love and death and zombies and being young and never growing old taught me so much. I wrote about things that were important to me, and while I may not have known what I was trying to do when I started, by the time I finished I had a very clear sense of what I’d written and what I was trying to do as a writer. And I care very deeply about those kids—the kids on YouTube and the kids in my book. My dead kids are not “dead kids” in the sense that the tight-lipped woman was implying.
Which brings us back to Danny’s First Critic. She taught me something. She taught me that I’m better off without the armor, because no matter how much I fortify it, no matter how well oiled the plates are, and no matter how tightly I weave the chain links, there’s no way it can really protect me. An arrow can always slip through; a swung club could always bruise. And that’s okay, really, because it is as much a part of my job to feel as it is to make others feel.
I’m glad I’d left the armor at home. If I’d prepared for battle, I don’t think I would have answered her in quite the same way, and I don’t think my answer, in turn, would have made her grim expression soften. I don’t think she would have done what she did next, which was pick up the advanced reader copy of the book and add it to the considerable pile she had already amassed. She didn’t go as far as to have me sign it, but she took the book.
“No,” I’d told her, “I’m the guy who writes about kids who’re trying to live.”
There is a girl in your seventh-grade class. She is not exceptionally pretty. She isn’t rich or all that great of a singer. She is no more or less popular than you. You are friends with each other’s friends, but you are not friends.
There are meaner girls than this one. Your school is teeming with them. Down every hallway lurk bigger snobs and scarier gossips. And yet, for some reason, ever since your elementary school and this girl’s elementary school flowed together into one great big middle school, this is the girl who makes you feel the most uncomfortable in your skin.
In the mornings, she and her friends stand outside the cul-de-sac where the bus drops off, handing out religious pamphlets. When you don’t take one—and you never take one—she is the girl who always asks, loudly enough for the whole bus full of kids to hear, why you want to burn in hell for all eternity. This is the worst, but not the last, of it. In gym, she flirts with the boys you have crushes on. In English, your favorite class, she challenges the things you say about the reading assignment to the point where you are dumbstruck, even though you know the answer. On the rare occasions when you and your friends are being mean girls—once, at a slumber party, after the first girl fell asleep, you and your friends soaked her extra underwear and put it in the freezer—this girl rolls over in her sleeping bag and catches you, singles you out, makes you feel worse than your own mother did when she heard about the incident.
This girl may not even know it, but she has perfected the art of making you feel as if everything you do, everything you say, and especially everything you
don’t
say is under her scrutiny, and wrong.
You are not good at comebacks. This isn’t something that will ever change, by the way, even twenty years down the road. The words that were
nowhere near
the tip of your tongue at the critical moment begin to haunt you. They keep you up at night. You lie in bed, replaying the dialogue that left you speechless earlier that day. The way this girl kept pressing you to talk about why you weren’t going to the school dance—in front of the boy you wish had asked you.
Here’s the difference: In your mind, you’re wearing cooler clothes. You visualize every detail, down to the way your socks are scrunched (this is Texas, after all). Your cheeks don’t turn bright red and your voice doesn’t shake and you don’t spit out a lame and unconvincing excuse about your grandparents coming into town. In your mind, you say something funny, really funny, that makes the boy who was pretending not to hear your conversation laugh out loud. Also, it shuts the girl up. For a change.
The fantasy of a perfect conversation becomes a nightly ritual. You don’t know it yet, but this is the beginning of your career as a writer. And this girl—the one you cannot stand—planted the seed in you. In your imagination, you are the smartest, funniest version of yourself. You are inventing the person you want to practice being, and she’s brilliant. So brilliant someone should write a book about her.
You grow up a little bit. Some things change and some don’t. The girl stops handing out those little blue copies of the New Testament, but she still makes you tongue-tied most of the time. At least the cute boy from gym class doesn’t do that anymore. It’s easy to say the thing that makes him laugh. Another dance is coming up. You have a date.
Years later, you leave home. In college, you meet people who remind you of this girl. The difference is you don’t let them get under your skin. All those nights, all those scenes you played out in your head—it’s as if they have given you wings. You’ve even started writing a few of them down. Before you know it, you’ve written a book. You call it
The Betrayal of Natalie Hargrove
.
No.
Look.
I am not the timid little thing you remember. These are not the hallways that you owned. This is not the place where things worked backward, where feral children ruled the world.
You remember the girl who played possum. She went limp and you knew how to bend her, your puppet, your perfect soft thing. But maybe one day her muscles tensed. She opened her eyes and she saw you trying to hide in the shadows. But it was day, and you were exposed. It was day, and light favors goodness. She could see through the place where a heart should have been. She could see through you, and those veils and mirrors you thought indestructible ripped and shattered into a million pieces.
You remember. This was the day she stopped playing dead.
Was this it? Was this the thing that broke you, the insult that turned you rabid? Was she too much life for you to smother?
You tried. The way something rabid tries.
Now.
There are years and miles and heartbeats between us. There is a big, beautiful world and you are not in it. You live in a small place, and it is not here. It is the only place that will take you—locked away, dark. You are fighting the walls, thrashing around and trying to gain power. But you are the small one now. You are the tiny speck of a thing. You are a ghost, and ghosts are not solid. They are not flesh, not a thing that breathes, not my heart beating.
This is.
Take a good look at my life now, my heart beating. This is the world I have built and it is my own. This breath, this blood, this music—all mine. This is how things grow, how they reach toward the sun. You can have that little speck of yesterday, the place where ghosts roam, that broken, rotten thing. I do not need it anymore. There is tomorrow, and another tomorrow after that. There is today, and it is not yours.
Now.
Look at everything around me so solid. This is light, my beautiful thing. These are my hands and here are the things they touch. This is what gentle looks like. These are my eyes, wide and trusting. Look, my hands are not fists. They are open. This is what brave looks like.
Yes.
There are people with hearts all around me. Not holes. Not empty places to see through. Yes. Solid. I am reaching for them and they are reaching, too. Look. Light. This is love and it is stronger than you.
It started in kindergarten.
I was tall. Taller than all the kids in my class, taller than most kids in the next grade; in a few years, I’d be taller than my teachers, but at five years old, I was long haired, shy, gangly, and, above all, tall.
There was a boy who was not tall. Let’s call him Dickie. Dickie was the smallest boy in our class and I was the tallest girl. That was all it took.
Dickie would torment me. He’d hit me with blocks. He’d poke me with pencils. He’d call me names I didn’t understand and when I’d tattle to the teacher, she’d tell me to sit down. I had made one or two new friends when I’d transferred to this new school, but most often I’d sit by myself on the edge of the blacktop during recess and read a book. Dickie, however, would not leave me alone. He led a group of boys and girls. He’d dare them to tag me as they ran by or surround my spot by the crab apple tree and call me nasty names. I’d try to ignore them, tightening my arms and legs and keeping an eye on my book as the words started to swim. When I’d had enough, I’d stand up all of a sudden and the kids would scatter, squealing. I remember the look on Dickie’s face—he was joyously terrified.
Then I’d sit down and go back to reading.
Later, I’d run home crying.
This pattern continued throughout elementary and middle school. The name-calling became smoother, delivered with a sneer. The poking with pencils graduated to elbowing. The taggish slaps became a snatch to snap a bra strap that wasn’t even there—it set the tone for my days at school: Middle School Hell.
Now I was taller than the principal, wearing glasses and braces and there was nowhere to hide.
I no longer cried. I was tired and hated school and would fantasize loudly to all my friends about how my family was going to move and I was going to get out of this stupid town before the end of the year. (When my father didn’t accept the offer to move to Seattle, I was crushed.) I had to face it: I was stuck until high school graduation—thirteen years of Dickie.
I was eleven years old and five foot eight. I joined the basketball team. My job was to stand in the middle of the court with my arms raised, preventing most kids from even seeing the net. I was a wall, which pretty much describes my entire middle school experience: I stood there and I took it. Day after day. Year after year. But secretly I wanted—just once—to set aside my parents’ hippie values of Love and Peace and Togetherness on Earth and grab any of these yappy little dogs by the scruffs of their necks and . . . but that wasn’t very Zen. Instead, I swallowed it down and wrote novels at home.