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1

It takes the human body approximately a year to rot away to bones. Before that, the corpse becomes jerky and mummifies. The jaw unhinges and the eyes shrivel away to nothing. A pretty gross process, but the dead are dead so they don't mind.

When I was five, I got my first taste of mortality. 

My grandmother, Ethel, had decided that death was more preferable to babysitting and watching reruns of Wheel of Fortune, and had decided to check out early. As you can imagine, this left a lasting impact on me, and from then on, I would hold funerals for the neighborhood kid's dead pets, shriveled lizards, and spiders. I even went as far as to request a black coffin for my thirteenth birthday, which my parents immediately denied.

Death was nothing to fear. The Victorians learned quickly, while certainly soul-crushingly devastating when it came down to it, there was no need to fight. Or was there?

Could a corpse be raised into a living being or would it become some obsequious servant and have no real mind of its own?

"Hey, Sunshine!" A paper ball punches me in the back of the head, interrupting my thoughts. "Heard you were in the cemetery last night. You bone any dead girls?" Eugene Wilder and his friends squawk with laughter.

At some point after puberty, Eugene bad assigned himself resident bad boy of our small town and the rest of his brainless goons had followed. He drove a motorcycle and almost always had three girls hanging off of his arms. He was also ridiculously pretty in a weird grungy way. But I would have gladly taken death over being seen as one of his loyal fanboys.

"Just your mom," I reply smoothly.

Eugene stops laughing, and he glares like he wants to recreate King Henry's beheading of Anne Boleyn with me. Fortunately, the teacher walks in carrying a container of dead frogs.

"Welcome, my little amoebas," Professor Smith announces. "Today we'll be taking part in one of the most backward science lessons known to man. The dissection of a dead frog!"

I can practically feel Eugene's eyes boring into the back of my head. Maybe bringing up his mom wasn't a good idea. But it wasn't like I was lying, I had gone to the cemetery last night.

Professor Smith starts handing out frogs like he's at a family barbeque, picking them out one by one with a pair of tongs. They're robust little things, grown in some lab before being harvested for the benefit of sick individuals. When Mr. Smith finally reaches my table, he eyes me, a frog clutched between his tongs. "No funny business, alright, Brown?"

"Of course not, Mr. Smith," I reply with an innocent smile. By "funny business", I'm certain he's referencing the South American Goliath spiders I let loose in his room last semester. To be fair, one or two occasionally crawl across someone's lap, and the class implodes until it's captured. 

Smith sets the frog down and moves on, leaving me to my own devices. Or, so I think. 

"Everyone partner up," He calls a second later, and the class erupts, chairs squealing as everyone grabs their best friend.

Since my only friend is my imminent death, I'm left alone with an unobstructed view of Eugene Wilder making a cutthroat motion in my direction with a plastic scalpel. 

"Darcy Brown, Eugene Wilder." Mr. Smith sighs. "Partner up. Now."

It's like I'm trapped in some kind of nightmare and can't escape. I don't move, so Eugene ends up picking up his things and comes over. He drops his backpack beside mine. Then he sits, chair squeaking as he leans forward. "Guess it's just you and me, huh, McCreepy? Fair warning, if you touch me with your gothy hands, I'm driving this scalpel through your eye." His use of clever imagery is astounding.

I pick up my scalpel, determined to ignore him, but it's kind of impossible when he's inches from my face. At least he smells nice, like testosterone-fueled body wash and the blood of a lesser man.

The instructions are simple. We cut out each organ and match it up to the picture on the chart, which is a waste of a perfectly good frog. I glance over at Eugene again and see him texting one of his girlfriends from underneath the table. Fine by me. I can easily earn us an A+ without his help.

A moment later, I'm cutting into the frog and opening up its chest to stare inside. All its organs are compact and tiny, but the real gem is the brain. A heart can continue beating, but without a brain, there's no chance of waking up. Of course, Eugene Wilder was the exception, he never had a brain, to begin with.

"Wonderful job, Kim!" Mr. Smith gushes as he hovers over Kim Chiu's desk. She's gone and staked several tiny organs to her mat with surgical precision. She's such a show-off.

"Think she'll start asking for fava beans and a nice Chianti to go with that frog?" Eugene asks suddenly.

I turn to see him watching Kim with just as much interest as me, surprised that he's paying attention at all, let alone quoting Hannibal Lecter. "Maybe. I didn't take you as a Silence of the Lambs type of guy," I reply.

Eugene's expressions closes, and it's like the blinds come down and the lights go off. "Are you going to cut the fucking frog open or what?" He demands.

And we're back to square one.

"I was thinking about doing something a little more extreme," I tell him, and open my backpack. "They used to reanimate dead bodies back in the eighteenth century using electric probes. You've seen Frankenstein, right?"

"Yeah, great memory. Amy Santiago was going down on me in my grandma's living room." Eugene says and props his head up with one hand.

"Didn't need to know that, but okay." I roll my eyes and open up my skull pencil case. Inside I have my phone charger and some paper clips, which I use to make tiny probes. "They would insert probes into the ears, mouth, and anus to trigger a reaction," I explain. "So they weren't really bringing dead people to life, they were just watching their muscles contract."

Eugene laughs, then stops cold. "You're not serious."

I hand him a probe. "Go deep, my good sir."

I don't expect him to do it, but he takes the probe and picks up the frog, flipping it over a few times. It's clear he's not sure where its ass actually is, but when I try to help, he yanks away and hisses like a feral animal. Be still my beating heart.

While Eugene gets intimate with the amphibian, I connect the other end of the probes to my phone charger. It's supposed to be a simple trick. The electricity runs through the probes and into the frog, it croaks a little and comes to life.

What I don't expect is for Eugene to still be holding onto the frog. When I plug in my charger, the electricity jumps from the frog, and into Eugene. It sounds neat and tidy, but the explosion is so loud and devastating that the lights black out. Screams erupt. I hear a gurgling noise, and then Eugene falls over in his chair.

"Everyone stay calm!" Mr. Smith calls out, and I hear him stumbling around, most likely searching for a flashlight. "Wilder, get off the floor!"

Eugene starts convulsing, and I shoot to my feet. "He's having a seizure! Call 911!"