The Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell Read Online Free PDF Page B

to lounge on the play equipment—not using it, of course, since that would have been so uncool, but sitting on it, dangling their feet off the edges of it, and pretending as hard as they could that they were still comfortable without a ceiling above their heads. A few of the girls wandered over to the grass and sat down, choosing bravery in order to get the privacy they so desperately craved.
    There were twelve students in the class. None of them would survive to the end of the school day. But they didn’t know that, not then, not with the fresh, cool air filling their lungs and the sky glimmering blue through the cracks in the clouds. They went about their business like this wasn’t the last day of their lives. For Nathan Patterson and Joseph Lee, this meant waiting until their teacher was distracted and then ducking into the space beneath the slide, where they could browse the contents of Joseph’s phone in peace. Joseph was a whiz with computers—there were already three private high schools jockeying for him to come to them, once he graduated from middle school—and he had been able to bypass the parental controls installed by his father with an ease that approached unreal. As a consequence, he was the only kid in class whose data plan came with all the pornography the Internet had to offer.
    Joseph and Nathan sat down under the slide, staring wide-eyed at the various naked women, all of them striking poses that looked uncomfortable but somehow enticing, like there was an important component sitting just outside of their reach.
    â€œDude, look at her boobs ,” said Nathan.
    â€œI’m looking,” confirmed Joseph. He was less enthralled by his companion: after all, the magical fountain of breasts and butts and other parts went home with him at night, where he could look until his eyes were hot and his mouth was dry. He tried to have fresh things every day, though, just to keep Nathan from getting too jealous. So far, Nate—who was a good guy, if a little slow—hadn’t realized just how inequitable their friendship was. Joseph didn’t want to start getting asked to jailbreak his friends’ phones. It would begin with one person, but it never stayed that way, and if the teacher found out…
    Joseph didn’t have to be a genius to know what the consequences of unlocking the phones of everyone in class would be. Being a genius just made the images clearer and harder to ignore. He didn’t like getting in trouble. This would be trouble on a nuclear scale.
    There was a certain irony that neither boy would have appreciated, had it been pointed out to them then or later. Because Joseph Lee didn’t want to get in trouble, he and Nathan hid what they were doing from their teacher. Because Scott Ribar hadn’t wanted to get in trouble, he had hidden his injury from his teacher, and from the guards who performed his blood test at the school gates. Had school security known that a student had been bleeding on the playground, they would have closed it down for the rest of the day, bringing out the canisters of bleach and the black lights and the bloodstain detection equipment. The fourth grade would have missed their recess. Everyone would have missed recess the next day. But no one would have been hurt.
    Scott Ribar was too small to amplify, and had little to fear from biological contamination. He could have touched infected blood a hundred times and never risked anything more than a lecture and a thorough decontamination. That didn’t mean the Kellis-Amberlee virus had spared him. It lived all throughout his body, protecting him from the little trials that had haunted childhoods for a thousand years. He had never suffered from a cold, he had never wasted a beautiful day throwing up or sniffling and being forbidden to go outside. Thanks to Kellis-Amberlee and his yearly flu shots, he had never been really sick a day in his life.
    But Kellis-Amberlee was