Another revised excerpt from my eternally-in-progress novel, Normal Tastes.
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Lying in his hospital bed, his left wrist handcuffed to it, Zach thinks he must have suffered brain damage from that ass-whooping back in his cell, ’cause a song he hasn’t heard since high school, “Closer”—not that Nineties hit “Closer” about, uh, bleeping like an animal, by that cool American band Nine Inch Nails, a band that’s grown on him over the past year, but the other “Closer,” the more recent one, by, uhhh, that not quite as cool American band the Chainsmokers?—well, that song keeps playing in his head. In that song, the male singer runs into his ex-girlfriend at a hotel bar after four years, and that couple ends up bleeping, presumably not like animals. Or maybe just like animals. Who knows?
Zach doesn’t really hate that song; the guest singer—a woman named Halsey—has a nice body, plus how can he hate any song that gives a shout-out to another cool Nineties band he’s started liking, Blink-182, also American? No, it’s just that the song reminds him of the time he attended the morp, or reverse prom, an event held every autumn in his high-school gymnasium. Unlike the regular old springtime prom, open to only juniors and seniors, the morp was open to only freshmen and sophomores. Also, if you felt like it, you didn’t have to wear a tux or gown; you could wear whatever you wanted. And you could go alone. And no slow, goopy prom tunes—the morp played much more exciting music: the latest in rock, rap, hip-hop, and techno-electro-dance-whatever-you-wanna-call-it.
He attended his first and only morp when he was sixteen, one Friday night in November Twenty-Sixteen, about a week and a half after the presidential election. He’d donned his usual outfit of jeans, sneakers, and T-shirt. Specifically his newest T-shirt, the one he’d bought at the mall for just that occasion, a T-shirt that showed a full-color drawing of his favorite videogame character, Gunner. Usually Gunner looked freaking badass, but here he looked freaking cute: disembodied round head—full-on view, giant eyes, chubby cheeks, toothy smile—above his catchphrase MAKE THE RUBBLE BOUNCE in puffy, candy-colored letters.
Zach hadn’t brought a date, because he wanted to enjoy himself on his own. He needed a break from girls. A break from striking out with girls, to be exact. He preferred porn girls lately anyway, whenever he had a chance to check them out on his phone or computer, on websites his parents hadn’t already blocked.
After arriving on time for the morp, eight PM, he got down to business. He strolled to the refreshments table near the boys’ locker room and drank Slammin’ Berry Cola from one of those deluxe clear plastic cups that the best events have, cups you probably wouldn’t find at the poorer schools in town. He hung out with the guys from school: pimply, dateless guys like him, guys he considered his friends, since they liked videogames too. He drank more Slammin’ Berry Cola from another clear plastic cup. And he joined the thirty or so dancers on the basketball court for several songs, the first time he’d danced in public in, well, ever. He swayed left to right, swayed back and forth, pistoned his arms forward, and spun around in circles. He even twerked, squatting a little and wiggling his butt. And best of all, after he’d finished dancing, several morpers, male and female, applauded, and it wasn’t sarcastic slow applause but regular, sincere applause with even a little bit of whistling. So they’d watched his performance and liked it. He took a bow.
A minute later, standing by the refreshments table, drinking his third cup of Slammin’ Berry Cola so far that evening, basking in the afterglow of peer approval, he realized that for a brief moment on the dance floor, he’d turned into that most prestigious of dudes, a cool dude, someone almost all the cliques at that high school liked: the jocks, the goths, the art geeks, the band geeks, the drama geeks, the loners, the stoners, the skaters, the smarties, the normies, the trendies, and—last but most certainly not least—the hotties. If he could make that transformation permanent and move beyond his own clique, the gamers, a pretty fun clique but a limiting one regarding the female attention he received, then he could—
Gretchen Bove, a girl from his social studies class, walked up to him, carrying a cup of cola-slash-pop.
“Hey hey, Zach,” she said.
“Hey hey,” he said.
“You’re a great dancer.”
“Thanks. Just one of my many talents.”
“Yeeeah.” As usual, her voice sounded as if her batteries had nearly died.
“Nice costume, by the way.”
“Thank you.” She’d always looked as if people never gave her a second look: not too rich, not too poor, not too tacky or sexy or whatever. In other words, she’d always looked like every other middle-to-upper-middle-class teenage girl, only more so, with a flat chest, but this time—well, you apparently could wear whatever you wanted to the morp, for Gretchen wore a brown top hat; a long stringy purple wig; a frilly low-cut maroon dress; a black leather vest, open, held together in front with a thousand black leather belts; a thousand more black leather belts around each wrist; brown tights; and black leather knee-high boots, sort of like the boots Zach’s grandpa used to wear as that pirate in those YouTube videos. She still had a flat chest, though.
“You supposed to be someone in particular?” Zach asked.
“Yeah. Vertiline Lewis?”
“Who?”
“Vertiline Lewis. From this graphic novel called Vertiline?”
“Never heard of it.”
“It’s the best graphic novel ever. It takes place on Earth in the year…well, they don’t say the exact year, but it kind of looks like the Victorian era in a steampunk kind of way? With some manga thrown in? Know what I’m talking about?”
“Uh-huh.” Zach did know what she was talking about.
“So anyway. Vertiline, she’s, like, this alien from outer space, an alien in human form, a real supergenius who—”
“Is she an illegal alien?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Good. ’Cause if she was, Donald Trump would be pissed.”
“Ha ha, yeah, he would. But I don’t think they have illegal aliens in that universe. So anyway, Vertiline, she lives in this huge metropolis called Dreme City? Spelled D-R-E-M-E?”
“How’s the ‘City’ part spelled?”
“The usual way. C-I-T-Y?”
“Darn.”
“Yeeeah, uh, ha ha ha. So anyway, it’s, like, this futuristic city in the past, with lots of blimps and—”
“Belt buckles, apparently.”
“Yeah.”
“And she has all sorts of adventures, right?”
“Right. That’s ’cause, in order to make a living, she runs this, like, firm or business or something called Scientific Investigative Services? Or S.I.S.? Sis, get it? And she has this all-female crew called the Sisters, who—”
“Dress up like nuns?”
“No, they wear ordinary clothes.”
“Like Vertiline does?”
“Yeeeah, I guess. So anyway, she and the Sisters, they investigate, like, strange phenomena? Like flying saucers and mutated animals and so on?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Plus she’s on the run from, like, bounty hunters from her planet, for reasons the book doesn’t go into? Maybe they’ll mention them in the sequel, if they have a sequel. I hope they do, ’cause I love this book. I highly recommend it.”
“Uh-huh.”
The Chainsmokers song started playing.
“So have you read any good books lately?” Gretchen asked.
“Yeah,” Zach said. “Let’s see. Uh, oh yeah, To Kill a Mockingbird.”
“I’ve read that. It’s a great book.”
“I dunno. It disappointed me a little. It turned out it wasn’t a how-to book.”
“Yeeeah, okay, ha ha.”
“Maybe I should write my own version: To Kill a Mockingbird for Reals. I’d describe how to, like, smash its head in with a sledgehammer? Or, like, how to blow it to pieces with a shotgun? Or, like, like, likety-like like like like like?”
“Yeeeah, ha ha ha. Excuse me.”
Gretchen walked away. Zach waved goodbye to her.
In retrospect, or so he feels lying in the hospital, maybe he shouldn’t have been such a wiseass. Or asswipe. Or anything else with “ass” in its name. She did show some interest in him, unlike the other girls at school. Too bad he’d never bothered talking to her again.
Ah, who cares? He has more important things to worry about now.
But he might have—no, he should have—stopped being so assy for once. He should have overlooked her flat chest and gotten to know her better. They could have ended up liking each other. And they could have ended up having sex. He wouldn’t have almost died a virgin from that prison beating.
But virginity’s cool now, according to some article he read somewhere on the Internet.
Ha, fake news. Ha ha. Ha.
Zach starts crying. After several seconds, he starts crying harder. He’s actually wailing, something he hasn’t done since childhood. The uniformed corrections officer, sitting as usual next to him, doesn’t look up from his, the officer’s, phone.
Copyright © 2025 by David V. Matthews
DAVID V. MATTHEWS 