Free Adventures of a Middle School Zombie by Scott Craven

Mr. Landrum picked up without missing a beat, “please retrieve the four racks from the refrigerator.”
    I made my way to the large white box in the corner under the American flag and pulled on the door to reveal racks, each containing a single layer of metal trays. One by one, I placed the racks on the desk in front of the room, seeing that every tray contained a fat green frog, each with all four legs pinned to the corners. But something wasn’t right. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Once finished, I returned to my seat.
    “Thank you, Jed,” Mr. Landrum said. “Now, will one lab partner for each station come up and take a tray.”
    I waited just a moment to time it right. I stood and walked up the aisle, right behind Anna.
    “Hey.”
    She turned her head. “Hey.”
    Anna sat up near the front, so I never got to talk to her in Biology, especially since Mr. Landrum loved to send “vocal offenders” to detention.
    “How’s everything?” I said. There were undead butterflies in my chest.
    “Good, you?”
    “Yeah, good.”
    Anna took the tray and returned to her seat. I slipped off cloud nine, took the tray that had been beneath hers, and swam upstream through the rest of those getting their frogs. I nearly dropped the tray when a stray elbow knocked it, but I recovered in time and realized what was wrong.
    The frog moved.
    Not just because I juggled the tray. No, he tensed up when it happened (I was guessing it was a he, anyway). His muscles bunched under his green skin, standing out like cords.
    I put the frog in front of Dustin. Others were just beginning to return to their stations, holding their frogs.
    “Dustin,” I said. “It’s alive.”
    “No, it’s like this,” he said. “It’s aalllliive. See, much creepier.”
    “Dude, it’s really alive. Like, still living. Like, breathing and stuff.”
    “I’m pretty sure that’s impossible since being dead implies you aren’t alive.” Dustin looked from the frog to me. “Present company excluded, of course.”
    “Sure. But I’m telling you that this frog is still with us.”
    Mr. Landrum cleared his throat.
    “If I may have everyone’s attention, please, before I hand out the scalpels. Some of you may have noticed these particular frogs are still alive.”
    A chorus of “Eww”s rolled across the room.
    I nudged Dustin. “Told you.”
    We looked closer. The frog’s chest fluttered as if he was breathing really fast. Or maybe it was his heart beating. Guess we were about to find out.
    “Each one of these frogs has been carefully pithed,” Mr. Landrum said. “What that means is a needle was inserted into their brains and rotated, effectively scrambling it.”
    I thought about my dad’s inside-the-egg scrambler, which had a small plastic rod the size of a toothpick jutting up from a motor. He shoved the egg down on the rod and hit the “On” button, causing the needle to spin. After about ten seconds, he flipped it off and cracked the egg to reveal a milky, yellow substance that poured easily into the skillet.
    Now all I could imagine was a milky, gray substance.
    “In effect,” Mr. Landrum went on, “these frogs are alive, but they feel nothing. No pain, no sense of their surroundings. Just an emptiness. And what this allows us to do is peek inside and see how everything works, just like opening the hood of a car with the engine running. Though the frogs are alive, they are actually dead when it comes to our definitions.”
    “Weird,” Luke said. “Not the living dead, but the dead living. Creepy.”
    That’s exactly what they were. The dead living. Heart beating, lungs breathing, blood moving through them. But they couldn’t feel a thing. And we were just going to cut them open, probe around as their lungs continued to breathe and hearts continued to pump.
    My hand shot up.
    “Mr. Landrum, I don’t think I can do this,” I said, without waiting on him to call on me. I stood up. “I’m going with the