Diary of a Teenage Zombie

Dear Diary,
My therapist is a f%$#ing idiot …
I studied the mostly blank page in front of me, the
congealed ink from that erased expletive now
smeared across my fingertips and making a sticky
mess. I considered rubbing the excess across the front of
my school jersey but knew that Mum would chuck a mental
come laundry day.
That would serve her right, though. Seeing a therapist
was her stupid idea, one encouraged wholeheartedly by my
father, who was certain that I had more issues than the
weekly gossip rag. They were blindly led by the misconception
that my nail-picking, nostril-flaring therapist was a
superhero with a prescription pad, destined to protect my
precarious mental health, but they were wrong.
Dr Chalmers is a flame-haired geek, fixated on tinkering
with my mind, like a toddler preoccupied with the possibilities
of their bellybutton hidey-hole. She’d been the one to
suggest this diary writing campaign, that I should probe at
my thoughts and feelings, bring forth my innermost demons,
and capture them in messy italic. What I suspected really
fascinated the good doctor was my reluctance to talk at all.
Oh, yes. Dr Chalmers could poke and prod all she liked
and try to uncover my secret—my condition—but that was
2
Kristy Berridge
something I could never allow. You see, people who discover
my secret tend to get dead pretty quick.
I glanced down at the page once more, uncertain how
to continue or if that was even wise. Spilling such intimate
secrets where eyes could see them was plain stupid. Did I
really want to be executed? Could I really leave my mum,
dad and little brother Jack behind to fend for themselves?
Actually, my family would probably be better off without
me. It had to be difficult for them to live with the constant
threat of death—to sleep down the hall from a flippant teen
who constantly violated the most basic of human rights.
Who could feel safe living with a person that craved human
sushi?
Confused?
The day I started looking at my little brother Jack as an
appetiser I was, too. I mean, who would have thought that
I, Katie Palmer—all-round socially-accepted high school
sweetheart—would turn out to be one of the walking dead.
Surprise!
I don’t usually run around advertising my flesh-eating
nature. It makes the regular folk flip-out; I’ve had more
than one loaded shotgun pointed in my general direction.
I even had someone throw a javelin at me once. That hurt
like a bitch but healed quite quickly once I ate the smirking
bastard’s face off. Let’s just say that for a high school athletics
coach, he hadn’t run particularly fast at all.
But I digress. How did I become a zombie? That’s a
perfectly logical question, with an unfortunate answer and
consequences that have changed the face of the planet. I still
get mad when I think about the loss and millions of dead
loved ones. That was probably why my Mum had insisted on
therapy.