Bad Taste in Boys Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2011 by Carrie Harris

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  www.randomhouse.com/teens

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Harris, Carrie.

  Bad taste in boys / by Carrie Harris. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Future physician Kate Grable is horrified when her high school’s football coach gives team members steroids, but the drugs turn players into zombies and Kate must find an antidote before the flesh-eating monsters get to her or her friends.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89806-8

  [1. Zombies—Fiction. 2. Football—Fiction. 3. Steroids—Fiction. 4. High schools—Fiction. 5. Schools—Fiction. 6. Horror stories.] I. Title.

  PZ7.H241228Bad 2011

  [Fic]—dc22

  2010040027

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment

  and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am lucky to hang with some very cool people. I’d like to thank all my friends, both online and off, for making me feel cool by association. And when I said I wanted to be a writer, and you didn’t laugh in my face? I really appreciated that.

  I have some awesomesauce writer friends too. In particular, I need to thank Kiki Hamilton, Amy Holder, Amelia Nichols, Ellen Oh, Laura Riken, Natalie Whipple, and Kiersten White for helping make sure I don’t sound like an idiot. I send you all hugs, sparkles, and ninjas with flowers.

  My agent, Kate Schafer Testerman, is made of win. Thank you for sending me pictures of zombie shoes, as well as the deft-handling-of-the-business stuff and the keeping-me-relatively-sane stuff. I’m also lucky to work with some fabulous people at Delacorte Press. Thanks to the entire crew for making me feel like a rock star, and especially to my fabulous editor, Wendy Loggia, for taking a chance on my little book of zombie mayhem. My gratitude goes out to my family, particularly my mom, Mom and Dad Harris, Keith, and Sarah. Thanks for listening to me ramble on about zombies all the time and for not having me committed. Connor, Lily, and Renee, you inspired me to take a risk and follow my dreams. Thanks for putting up with all the hours I spend on the computer and for calling me over every time there’s a zombie cartoon on TV. And supermegahuge thanks to Andy, fabulous husband and go-to guy for everything related to medicine, combat, and boob jokes. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you. And yes, you told me so.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  About the Author

  ou’re one of those genius types,” said Coach, nudging me with a beefy elbow. “Make yourself useful for once. Say something inspirational.”

  Morning football practice had just ended and I was standing in a hallway that stank of sweat and industrial cleaner, holding the door while the varsity team hauled their pitiful butts into the locker room. As the student trainer, I handled random sprains and strains, and in my spare time I pushed Gatorade like it was the nectar of the gods. But motivating the worst football team in existence? Couldn’t do it.

  The only thing I could think of was “Look! Naked cheerleaders!” Not exactly appropriate.

  Coach elbowed me again.

  “What do you want me to say?” I asked, shifting away from him. “They don’t suck?”

  I wasn’t trying to be insulting, just honest. Earlier one of our linebackers had given himself a bloody nose by falling on his own fist, and it had gotten worse from there. Now our players looked so depressed that I thought they might commit hara-kiri.

  Aaron Kingsman, the starting quarterback, trudged past. He usually nodded at me, and once he even smiled. Sad but true: that smile was the highlight of my junior year. Today he didn’t even look up. He had a little cut above his right eyebrow, a bead of blood poised at one end. I wanted to give him first aid but couldn’t find a way to make the offer sound reasonable. I had to say something, though.

  “Nice hustle out there!” I bleated, blinking behind my glasses. They were a holdover from my formerly one-hundred-percent geeky self. Now, thanks to my friends and some expensive antifrizz conditioner, I was only fifty percent.

  Aaron hunched over farther and pushed through the door.

  “Way to step up, Grable.” Coach made his best attempt at sarcasm. It wasn’t one of his strong points. “Put this stuff away, at least, will ya?”

  He handed me the keys to his office. They were on a ring the size of my steering wheel. I had no idea why one man needed so many keys. I’d counted them once: ninety-one and a half—one was broken. That key ring was heavier than I was.

  Coach launched into his usual load-of-rubbish postpractice speech before the locker room door closed, leaving me in the hallway with an entirely different load of rubbish: the Gatorade cart, clipboard, keys, and the first-aid kit. I performed my usual juggling act down the hall: push the cart two feet, drop the key ring, pick it up, lose the clipboard in the struggle, retrieve the scattered paper, push the cart another two feet, reassemble the clipboard, nearly knock the Gatorade over, and so on. On days like this, I had to chant “Kate Grable, MD” to keep from quitting. All the annoyance would be worth it when I got into a pre-med program next year.

  “Kate Grable, MD. Kate Grable, MD.” Coach’s office had one of those perennially malfunctioning fluorescent bulbs that infested our school. I didn’t risk turning it on, because I was an epileptic. I hadn’t had a seizure in almost a year, but before that I’d had them practically every week. It was a force of habit to avoid things that might trigger them. Flashing bulbs had always been a guaranteed ticket to seizuretown.

  I propped open the door, put the clipboard on Coach’s desk, and flipped through a million keys before I found the right one for the med cabinet. I had to put away Mike Luzier’s EpiPen. Mike had a bee allergy and the mental capacity of a newt. We weren’t supposed to leave the Epi out at night; Coach seemed to think there was a serious black-market epinephrine trade.

  When I was putting the Epi in the cabinet, I noticed an unfamiliar rack of medication vials on the top shelf. The labels were blank, which instantly set off my med-geek alarm. I labeled all our drugs, and I was quite proud of my cataloging system. Even Coach could find his way around the cabinet, and he had problems following directions. Heck, he had problems reading words of more than one syllable.

  I picked up the rack and a u
sed syringe tumbled out. I yelped as the needle landed in the toe of my shoe. Carefully I extracted the needle and wrapped it in a big wad of paper towels. Coach had an ancient dispenser in his office; it squealed loud enough to raise the dead.

  I wasn’t sure what to make of this. Our trainer, Dr. Ho, was in charge of delivering and dispensing team meds. Everyone forgets things once in a while, but there was no way he’d leave a syringe uncapped. And Coach was the only other person with access to the med cabinet.

  “Holy crap, are these steroids?” I whispered, staring down at the lump of towel in my hand. If the meds were legit, the Ho would have given me the rack for check-in. Legal drugs don’t require secrecy and unmarked vials. I was pondering this when I heard the boom of the locker room door as it flew open and hit the wall.

  I knew what that sound meant: Coach was coming. I slammed the office door to buy some time, vaulted the desk with more physical prowess than I knew I had, and shoved the rack back into the cabinet.

  “Grable?” He knocked. “You in there?”

  Duh. The door had one of those automatic locks, which meant the desk vault had been completely unnecessary. I took a deep breath and turned the handle.

  “Hey, Coach!” My voice was so perky that I wanted to punch myself.

  “Grable.” His eyes flicked over to the cabinet on his way in. It happened so fast I almost thought I’d imagined it.

  “Clean up your crap, will ya?” he said, sitting down at his desk and scowling at the wad of paper towels. He picked it up, and I half expected him to stick himself with the needle, but apparently he was a lot luckier than I was.

  “Sorry about that!” I held out my hand. “I’ll throw it out for you.”

  He gave me an odd look before dropping it into the wastebasket at his feet. There went my evidence. I wasn’t going to go Dumpster diving for it, though. Reforming geeks like me avoided Dumpsters at all costs.

  I had a few minutes before first period, so I stopped by the computer lab to look up the Ho’s office number. I knew he’d be at the exhibition game after school, but this couldn’t wait. I found a listing for Dr. Randy Ho—Gynecology and Acupuncture. The thought of combining those two particular services made me want to permanently staple my knees together, but at least I was pretty sure I had the right guy. I remember Coach threw a fit when the only volunteer for the position was a “girly doctor.”

  I went out to the quad to make the call since it was the only place I wouldn’t get lynched for using my cell. The Ho’s phone rang nine times. I was just about to hang up when someone finally decided to answer.

  “Dr. Ho’s office,” said a bored-sounding female.

  “I’ve got an emergency. Could I talk to Dr. Ho?”

  “If you have a medical emergency, you should call nine-one-one immediately.”

  “Not a medical emergency. An I‑need-to-talk-to-Dr.-Ho-right-away emergency.”

  She gave me a long-suffering sigh. “What kind of emergency?”

  “Uh …”

  “Gynecology or acupuncture?”

  What the heck would an acupuncture-related emergency be like? The idea was so ridiculous that I couldn’t keep from snorting.

  “I’m waiting,” she snapped.

  “Look, my name is Kate Grable. I’m the student trainer for the Bayview High football team. I need to talk to Dr. Ho. It’s important.”

  “He’s not in the office.”

  “Could you please let him know I need to talk to him before the exhibition game tonight?”

  “If you insist, Katie.” And then she hung up on me. I thought about calling her back and correcting her on the name thing but decided it wasn’t worth it.

  I walked out of the quad and into the hallway, which was much less crowded than usual.

  “Hey, Kate! How’re you?” chirped some girl I only vaguely recognized. Did I know her from Key Club? My friend Kiki had talked me into joining all kinds of social organizations, even though I hated going to meetings and could never remember anyone’s name. I kept waiting for someone to realize that geeks like me didn’t belong in Key Club, but it hadn’t happened yet.

  “I’m late,” I said, waving a hand as I hurried down the hall. I was the compulsively early type, but in this case my lateness was justified. I was worried about my players collapsing on the field due to unregulated steroid use. There was an empty slot in the tray, not to mention the used syringe in the cabinet.

  I wasn’t going to let that slide.

  ou’ll be my lab partner today, won’t you, Kate?” Kiki Carlyle asked approximately five seconds after I got the first demerit of my life for being late to AP Biology.

  I used to think anyone over the age of three who went by the name Kiki deserved to be drawn and quartered with a spork. Then I got to know Kiki Carlyle, and, well—she was just about the nicest person I’d ever met. Kiki was a Triple‑B: blond, busty, and brainy. She was the senior class president, head varsity cheerleader, and front-runner for salutatorian. In the halls, she said hi to everybody, even the nobodies. If she didn’t have the word perfect tattooed on her behind, she should have.

  She’d moved to Bayview halfway through freshman year, and we got assigned to the same table in earth sciences. She’d pulled me out of social purgatory, and we’d been friends ever since. We’d even stayed close when she was dating Aaron Kingsman last year. I’d been jealous, sure, but I couldn’t get mad at her.

  Kiki was a great lab partner. She pulled her own weight instead of expecting me to do all the work. It became even easier to work with her once she and Aaron broke up; I no longer had to feel guilty about crushing on her boyfriend. I actually wanted to be his lab partner, especially after he outscored me on the first bio test and left me with a B+ and the conviction that he was the most perfect guy on the planet. But it was never going to happen, because he always paired up with Mike Luzier, a total jerk who for some strange reason was his best friend.

  Mrs. Mihalovic instructed everyone to gather around and watch her demonstrate the dissection process. We were doing fetal pigs. I was so excited I’d practically memorized the book. It was pretty disappointing when Mrs. M started reviewing basic dissection techniques; I wanted to start cutting so badly. But Kiki seemed content to hang in the back of the room with me. We sat at our station and didn’t even pretend to listen.

  “Sooo … what are you doing after the game tonight?” she asked, playing with an empty dissection tray.

  That night was the annual homecoming varsity/JV game. After it was over, I planned to follow Aaron to the parking lot like the desperate semistalker I truly was. I couldn’t exactly say that, though, so I fiddled with the end of my braid and shrugged.

  “I’m having a bonfire, and I really think you should come,” she said.

  “On a school night?” I asked.

  “We’ve got homecoming week events every other night, and my parents come back into town on Saturday. If I don’t do it tonight, I can’t do it at all. So what do you think?”

  I sighed. “If you haven’t noticed, I’m not exactly the party type.” Especially after what had happened at the last party I’d gone to.

  “Yeah, but Rocky will be there, and she’ll be sad if you don’t show. Don’t you dare tell me you have to study. You could get straight As with one brain tied behind your back.”

  Rocky Miccuci was my best friend. On the surface, we were total opposites. She was the star of the choir … and I was really great at dissecting frogs. She had long curly hair that belonged in a shampoo commercial, and she liked to wear tiny dresses that would fit her five-year-old sister. She had the body for it too, unlike me, who had the body of a string bean and looked like the kind of girl who belonged in a library doing research on weird medical mysteries.

  In fact, I had been that girl … up until last year, when I’d started branching out socially. But still.

  Rocky and I had been friends since grade school, even during my übergeek years when I was last to be picked for everything there was to b
e picked for. She was always on me to get out and be social. “The swirlies are in the past!” she’d say. “You aren’t the queen geek anymore.”

  Kiki was waiting for a response to her invitation, so I shrugged again.

  “I’ll talk to Rocky in choir,” she said, giving me a smile of such brightness that I suspected my corneas might be irrevocably damaged. “We’ll double-team you.”

  “Fine,” I huffed. “I’ll clear my busy social schedule if it means that much to you.”

  Kiki threw her arms up in triumph, knocking the dissection tray to the floor.

  “Girls!” Mrs. M said, waving a small scalpel at us. “You’ve finished your discussion just in time.”

  I drove straight home after eighth period. Dad was still at work, and my mom was teaching theoretical physics for two semesters in Germany. Mom and I were supposed to Skype at three-thirty. I wanted to get back to school before Coach, though, so I nuked a plate of spaghetti before going to the computer.

  I sat at my dad’s desk and ate while the laptop booted up. Armstrong, our dog, stared at me with his most pitiful expression until I gave him a noodle. He loved pasta, and I was a sucker for his cute doggy face.

  Mom appeared on the screen just as I shoved a huge bite into my mouth. Sauce dribbled down my chin.

  “Guten Tag!” she said.

  “Mmph!”

  She laughed. “Early dinner, huh?”

  “Gotta leave for the game in a half hour. It’s homecoming week,” I said, covering my mouth with one hand to avoid spewing tomato sauce all over the screen. “I’m sorry. I should have told you before.”

  “That’s all right; I have about a hundred projects to grade tonight anyway. But I didn’t want to miss our weekly chat.” She smiled at me. “I miss you.”

  “Miss you too, Mom.”

  “So did you talk to him yet?”

  About a month ago, when I was desperate for conversation material, I’d made the mistake of telling her about my crush on Aaron. And ever since, she’d been pestering me to ask him out. I could barely string together two words in his presence; something told me that wasn’t going to happen.