Free Help! My Brother's a Zombie! by Annie Graves

J ack looked at us.
    He had dark circles under his eyes, as if he did not get much sleep.
    â€˜I’ve never told anybody this before,’ he whispered, ‘but I have an older brother.’

    â€˜Rubbish,’ said someone.
    Everyone knows Jack is an only child.

    â€˜No, really,’ said Jack. ‘My parents keep him locked in the attic. I think he’s a zombie.’
    Somebody gave a nervous giggle.
    â€˜Look, you’re supposed to tell a story, not tell us stupid stuff about your family.’
    â€˜I’m telling you,’ said Jack, ‘his name is Stephen and he’s a zombie. Do you want to hear about him or don’t you?’
    Nobody said anything, so after a short silence, Jack began to speak …

    He was a lot older than me, Stephen, but he never minded taking lots of time to teach me things.
    Things like how to choose the best twigs to make a catapult out of.
    Or how to give a proper Chinese burn, the kind that hurts for days and days and days.
    He made me practise on the kid next door. (That kid deserved it. He was dead mean. We saw him kicking a puppy once.)

    Just after Stephen started secondary school, the change began.
    When he got home from school, he didn’t have much time to play with me.
    And even when he did, he wasn’t really there. His head was somewhere else, somewhere far away where I wasn’t invited.
    He didn’t like me any more.
    I tried being really nice to him, but that only annoyed him.
    He was mean to Mum and Dad as well.
    He started staying up late at night, and it was really hard to get him up for school in the mornings.

    All he wanted to do was hang out with his friends. I would see them on the street together, all thin and shuffly.
    Their eyes would be flicking around like they were looking for a way out.
    Only they weren’t trapped.
    And then there was the smell.
    Like socks that someone wore in a football match and then left under a bed for six months.
    Like the puddles you find on street corners when there has been no rain.
    Then he stopped taking showers. I never liked showers myself. They always seemed like a big waste of time. You have one and then, a day or two later, you have to have another, all over again. It all seemed a bit pointless.
    But Stephen stopped showering completely.
    Mum and Dad tried to make him, but he was too big for them to manage.

    Sometimes, flies would land on him, and crawl across his face and clothes.
    After a while, he stopped bothering to brush them off.

    He looked sick all the time. I said to Mum, ‘Stephen’s green!’
    She told me that Stephen was growing up and that it was all part of being a teenager.
    She said the smell was a part of it, too.
    Next time we went shopping, we bought him some deodorant.
    And we got scented candles for every room in the house.
    Mum said that would make things a bit better.

    Things didn’t get better, though.
    They got worse and worse.
    Stephen got grumpier and shufflier and smellier until, one night at the dinner table, he tried to take a bite out of my arm.
    That was it.
    When I came back from school the next day, Mum and Dad told me that they had sent Stephen to a boarding school for troubled kids.
    They said he needed better care than they could give him here.
    But it seemed to me like they were looking for a way out of the room when they were talking to me, and I’m not sure that I ever really believed them.
    Things went back to normal for a while.
    Then one day I needed to get one of the Christmas decorations from the attic.
    It was the star and I needed it for this spaceship I was building in my room.
    The attic door used to be a normal, wooden-looking one. But now it was big and made of metal. It had five different types of lock on it.
    I asked Dad about it and he said I was not allowed to go near the attic any more.

    When someone tells me not to do something, it usually makes me want to do it even more.
    That’s how it was with