Free Absolutely Almost by Lisa Graff

eating brains, and I needed to practice.
    â€œLouder,” Calista told me.
    â€œ
BRAINS!
” I shouted, louder.
    â€œMuch better.”
    I kept practicing while Calista showed me how to pour the dye over the clothes in the bathtub.
    â€œ
Brains! Mmm, brains!
”
    Calista laughed.
    It turned out zombies didn’t just care about brains. One of the other things they
should
care about, according to Harriet, the cleaning lady who came once a week and who was about a million years old, was staining the bathtub. She came to clean while me and Calista were hanging the zombie clothes up in my room to dry, and we didn’t realize she was there, actually, because she has her own key so she doesn’t use the buzzer or anything, and all of a sudden, we heard all this
screaming
coming from the bathroom. And me and Calista ran-ran-ran down the hall from my bedroom, and when we were right outside the bathroom, Calista put a hand on my chest like she wanted me to stay in the hallway while she figured out what was going on. Only no way was I staying all by myself in the hallway if there was someone being
murdered
in our bathroom, which is what it sounded like, what with all the screaming and everything. So I ignored Calista’s hand on my chest and peeked inside too.
    It wasn’t anybody being murdered. It was Harriet the cleaning lady, which I guess maybe I should’ve figured out.
    Harriet looked up from the bathtub when she saw us—me and Calista in the doorway—and she stopped screaming that terrible scream, only her mouth was still open, so it looked like she might start up again any minute. And then she spent a few seconds looking back and forth between me and Calista and the bathtub, which was smeared with zombie blood. I was still holding the zombified shirt in my hand, and I finally realized that Harriet had been doing all that screaming because she thought
we’d
been murdered. And that was kind of funny, I thought, all of us thinking that someone else had been murdered, when really no one had been murdered at all. It had just been a Halloween zombie in the bathtub. Which was why I started laughing.
    Harriet did not start laughing. She did not seem to think that zombies were very funny.
    â€œI’m not cleaning that up,” she told me. And then she stomped out of the bathroom and hollered at Calista if she knew where my parents kept the aspirin, and then she spent the next hour lying on the couch with a cool washcloth over her eyes while Calista and I scrubbed the tub clean.
    But anyway, the zombie costume turned out pretty great.

a fresh piece
of paper.

    W hen we finished with my homework on Wednesday, Calista said she wanted to do some drawing.
    â€œWhat kind of drawing?” I asked.
    â€œHow about people?” she said. “Cartoons, maybe, like in
Captain Underpants.
”
    â€œCan we draw superheroes?” I asked. “I want to make my own superhero.” I knew exactly the one I wanted to do.
    â€œSure,” Calista said, so we got out the markers and paper.
    Calista’s superhero looked amazing. It was a girl superhero, and Calista named her Art Girl. She had curly hair and a paintbrush in one hand and one of those wooden things artist people put their thumbs through that has all the colors of paint on it. Also, she had a cape.
    Calista said superheroes always had capes.
    Calista sure was good at drawing. She was using the exact same markers as me, but somehow when she drew with them, her drawings looked a million times better than mine. My superhero was supposed to be Donut Man, the best superhero anybody ever invented. But he just looked like a blobby stick.
    â€œWhat are you doing?” Calista asked when she looked over at me.
    I had my head down on the table, close to her hand so I could watch while she drew, and my right hand was up in the air, gripped tight around the marker. “I’m trying to see if I’m holding it wrong,” I