In Which Zombies Do Not Attack (And My Apartment is Fairly Safe From Zombie Invasion, Anyway)
an excerpt

It’s very nearly three in the afternoon. Emma is moving her glance from the clock to Mr. Ward’s face to the corner of her notebook, where a small flower is the center of spreading vines, taking over her margins like a hoard of invading Huns. That ties it back to the lesson, she tells herself, and it’s fine that she’s sitting there, listening to the tick-tick-tick instead of his voice—and it’s not even a terribly bad voice, it’s just that it’s very nearly three in the afternoon and she has a piano recital in very nearly five hours and she’s nervous nervous nervous.

It’s not even that she’s afraid of messing up. She is, of course, she is, but messing up a recital wouldn’t be as bad as doing it perfectly. She’s not even sure why that scares her. It doesn’t even make sense. But doing every single note as written, perfect, perfect—it’s the idea of flawless execution, she thinks. It’s a frightening phrase.

*

She’s folding sheets. It’s not particularly important, not an event she can look back on later as significant, as life-altering, but it’s a moment just the same. It’s the moment she stands there and thinks: these are my hands, these are the sheets, and they are not the same thing. She thinks: my hands are not the sheets and I am not the air.

She is not the air. She is solid, existing and stable and bounded. She is a girl standing in her bedroom folding sheets. She is not the air.

*

Jamie had a crush. This, he felt, was a suitable reason for moping about in his bed for most of the day, taking breaks only to bang his head into walls, scarf down boxes of Cap’n Crunch, and do things related to personal hygiene. A crush in itself, of course, was not the end of the world or anything related. It was, in fact, something to be looked upon with, if not exactly happiness, some manner of excitement. Jamie would have welcomed any old regular crush. The problem was in the specifics of this particular crush.

For starters, it was a crush on someone he had never met in his life. It wasn’t an actor or singer or anything like that, not the sort of crush everyone has on a celebrity or fifteen. It was on someone he had met on the internet. This would have been bad enough in itself if not for the delightful added bonus that the object of his crush, in addition to potentially being a deranged serial killer maniac, was also… a guy.

Even this, even all this would be — while admittedly not exactly cause for jumping for joy — would at least be something resembling okay if Jamie were gay. Jamie was not gay. In fact, Jamie considered himself the very opposite of gay, or at least a reasonable sort of opposite that did not consist of going around raping little girls, or older girls, or any women in general, or people in general for that matter, or animals, or anything else capable of being raped. Jamie hated how his mind got off topic like that when he was in the middle of some perfectly good emotional crisis time. Back to the point, which was that Jamie was not gay. Jamie had no problem with gay people. Jamie was pretty sure he had some gay friends — they’d not yet gotten around to admitting it, but Jamie saw the way they acted around each other and figured it would happen sooner or later (probably sooner). Jamie would not have minded being gay himself, except for the simple yet important fact that he wasn’t. He was pretty sure he wasn’t. He had never had any interest in anyone even remotely male up until this point.

It was all terribly, terribly upsetting business. Jamie did not like it. It made his Cap’n Crunch taste funny.