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  The bus got so heavy, it blew out all the tires. Then some of the mob kids started freaking out and jumping out of the school bus windows.

  Yeah…they got expelled.

  Wow, talk about a crazy first few weeks of school…

  Friday

  Today in the cafeteria, Big Mouth Jeff was bragging about how well he did scaring the miners on his Scare exam.

  When he saw me, he started talking about how he was going to beat everyone else at the Spelling Bee.

  Man, he just gets me so mad when he acts cocky like that!

  I couldn’t help it. I just blurted out the first thing that came into my head.

  “Well, I bet you won’t beat me!”

  “Oh yeah, you want to put down a wager on that?”

  “Any time, any place!”

  “I’ll bet you my Zbox 360 that I’ll win,” Jeff said. “But it won’t matter because you don’t have anything I want.”

  All of a sudden the entire cafeteria said a big, “Oooooohhh!!!”

  “Well, how about a ScareStation 465!” I yelled out before I got a chance to think about what I was saying.

  Then the entire cafeteria said, “Oooooohhh!!!”

  “It’s a bet. If I win, I get your ScareStation 465. If you win, you get my Zbox 360.”

  Then the entire cafeteria said, “Oooooohhh!!!”

  After it was all over, Skelee came over to me and asked really serious like, “You don’t have a ScareStation 465 do you?”

  “Nope.”

  “So I guess you’d better win the Spelling bee then?”

  “Yep.”

  “And you probably don’t have any idea how you’re going to do that, right?”

  “Nope.”

  “I figured. Alright, I’ll get all of the guys together tomorrow so we can figure out some crazy idea to get you out of this situation.”

  “Yep.”

  Saturday

  Today all the guys came together to help me beat Big Mouth Jeff at the Spelling Bee.

  Skelee, Creepy, and Slimey were all there. Steve was going to meet up with us later.

  “Zombie, you do know that Jeff was last year’s student representative for our school at the National Minecraft Spelling Bee, right?” Skelee asked. “And he was only a 7th grader back then.”

  Gulp.

  “Uh, no, I didn’t know that. I just knew that he can spell ‘Shepherd.’”

  “Zombie, you’ve got nothing to worry about. You spell great,” Creepy said.

  “Did you just say Zombie ‘smells’ great?” Skelee said.

  “No, I said that Zombie ‘spells’ great!”

  “Uh Oh, Creepy’s got that lisp again.”

  “Stop it, you guys, that’s not funny. You know I’ve been working really hard on it.”

  All of a sudden, Steve walked up.

  “Sup guys!”

  “Steve!”

  “So, Zombie, I heard you’re going up against Big Mouth Jeff for the school Spelling Bee championships.”

  “Yeah… I’m kinda nervous about it.”

  “You bet something you don’t have, didn’t you?” Steve asked.

  “Uh…yeah.”

  “Well, let’s do this. What’s the plan?”

  “Help Zombie memorize a bunch of words, I guess,” Slimey said.

  “Uh, I just have a small problem, you guys. Since I’ve been going through puberty, I’ve sort of been losing my memory.”

  “For real?”

  “Yeah, my Dad said it’s because I’m losing the last traces of my baby brain. Kind of like when you lose your baby teeth.”

  “Does that mean you’re going to grow another one?” Steve asked.

  “Naw, Dad just said that once a Zombie passes puberty, you just have one big hollow skull. It’s great for a nice infestation of grubs, or even a bird’s nest.”

  “Whoa.”

  “Makes a really cool drum sound if you bang it at the right spot, too.”

  “So wait a minute. In order to win this Spelling Bee, you’ve to go memorize like a thousand words…and you’re losing your memory?” Skelee asked.

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “Oh OK, just checking. So what’s the plan?”

  None of us could come up with an idea of how I was going to beat Jeff at the Spelling Bee.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” Steve said suddenly. “If you’re losing your memory, shouldn’t Jeff be losing his too, since he’s a Zombie?”

  “Well, Jeff is kind of special,” I said. “He always has been. For some reason he’s always been good at whatever he does. He’s pretty much won every competition he’s ever been in.”

  All of us got quiet after the last thing I said.

  Man, a spelling mod would come in really handy right now…

  Sunday

  “Hey Dad, how come Zombies start losing our memory when we go through puberty?”

  “Well, Zombie, when we’re born we have a little brain about the size of a walnut. It’s supposed to help us to learn most of things we’re ever going to need in life. Once we go through puberty, our brains shrink to about the size of a pea.”

  “So Dad, does that mean you’re a ‘pea-brain’?”

  “Well, yes, I guess it does, son.”

  “So then how do you remember really important things that you need to know?”

  “Well, son, that’s what the Zombie-net is for. You just type in something that you need to remember and there it is.”

  “What if I wanted to win a contest like a school Spelling Bee?”

  “Well, I’m sorry, son, but there are some things we Zombies were just never meant to do in life. Why don’t you try Zombie Pig Farming? Zombies have been known to be really great at that.”

  I could already see my ScareStation 465 going down the vortex, along with the little respect that I could’ve had as an eighth grader.

  But I still don’t understand how Big Mouth Jeff is able to do it. He’s a Zombie, so how come he can remember things so well?

  You know, if I got a mod that could help me remember things better, I could win the Spelling Bee real easy.

  What am I thinking? That’s cheating again.

  Why is cheating so easy but trying to just get through middle school is so hard?

  Man, the life of a 12 year old Zombie has just way too much drama…

  I went to go see Steve later, and I told him about my idea of using a mod to remember things better.

  I kind of knew that he was going to tell me not to do it, but I just needed somebody to talk me out of it.

  “So what do you think?” I asked Steve.

  “I think it’s a great idea.”

  “You do?”

  “Not really, but since you’re losing your memory, you probably won’t remember that we had this conversation.”

  “C’mon Steve, I’m serious. Really, what do you think?”

  “Well, you know, I cheated once, and I got away with it too. I passed my test, and nobody ever found out.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah, and I’ve never forgotten it,” Steve said with a sad look on his face.

  I would’ve never thought in a million years that Steve would cheat at anything.

  “But, you know Zombie, it’s a lot harder to cheat than it is to study.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you only have to study for a few days to pass a test and then you forget about it. But if you cheat, you have to remember it for the rest of your life.”

  Wow. That was deep.

  So, I decided to skip the memory mod idea. But I still needed to find a way to win the Spelling Bee.

  Well, I may still have enough of my brain to remember
some words. Like I bet I can spell Shepherd.

  S–H–E–P … Uh.

  Man! I’m still choking like I did in Spelling class.

  I’m going to need to find a way to remember if I get stuck.

  But what am I going to do?

  Monday

  I had detention again today with Mr. Matsumoto.

  This time there were 2 other kids there because they had to retake the Scaring exam too. There was a skeleton girl named Tibia and a Slime boy named Erol.

  When we got to the classroom, we found a note from Mr. Matsumoto telling us to meet him at the school Zombie animal farm.

  We went around to the Zombie animal farm in the back of the school. When we got there Mr. Matsumoto was knee deep in mud, making faces at some pigs and sheep. All they did was stare back at him.

  We just looked at each other, like he was crazy.

  “Mr. Matsumoto, what are you doing?”

  “When I was a boy in my country, we didn’t have fancy training equipment or fancy technology to make us scary. So we had to practice with what nature provided for us.”

  Either Mr. Matsumoto was crazy or he really did learn how to scare miners by practicing on pigs and sheep.

  “What you need to do is picture in your mind the scariest, ugliest, most hideous human you can imagine. Then you become that human. And when the time is right…”

  “HYEEEEEAAAAAAHHHHHUURRRGHHHHHZZZOOWWIIIIEEEEE!!!!!”

  Next thing I know the sheep just fell right over. I thought it was dead.

  The pig turned from pink to white and ran away as fast as it could.

  Whoa.

  “Zombie-san, you try it.”

  So I found a sheep and I stared at it for a little bit. Then I yelled:

  “HYEEEEEAAAAAAHHHHUURRRGHHHHHZZZOOWWIIIIEEEEE!!!!!”

  But the sheep just stood there looking at me.

  Come on Sheep, be scared!

  “Zombie-san, you have to let it come from inside. Reach in and tap all of your passion, strength and imagination, and then let it out!”

  This time I took a deep breath, and I stared at the sheep. I thought about the scariest, ugliest, most hideous human I could imagine. I couldn’t think of any so I just thought about what Big Mouth Jeff would look like if he was human. And then I imagined Big Mouth Jeff taking my ScareStation 465. All of a sudden I yelled at the top of my voice…

  “HYEEEAAAAAHHHHUURRRGHHHHZZZOOWWIIIIEEEEE!!!!!”

  But nothing happened.

  Then suddenly, the sheep started leaning over little by little, and then ‘PLOP,’ it tipped over like it was dead.

  “I did it! Mr. Matsumoto, I did it!”

  “Well done, Zombie-san,” he said.

  Wow, who’d ever think that a baby faced Zombie like me could scare a sheep into fainting.

  I guess I really can do anything if put my mind to it.

  Even if it is the size of a pea…

  Tuesday

  Today we went on a field trip to the Museum of Mob Natural History.

  It was really cool. We got to learn about all of our mob ancestors and how they lived.

  Skelee saw a picture of his great, great grandpa Yellowbone at the Museum. His great, great grandpa was the one they named the Yellowbone National Park after. We found out they called him Yellowbone because he was the only survivor when a Creeper exploded in a highlighter factory.

  Slimey learned that according to research Slimes may be a more advanced evolutionary form of snot.

  Creepy was really interested in finding out where his ancestors came from. There was a rumor going around that Creepers came from a programming mistake at Mojang, when they were trying to make a pig.

  But the rumors weren’t true. But they do think that Creepers, like Zombies, were part of a human military experiment that went wrong. This is what they think Creepers looked like before the experiment:

  We got to the Zombie exhibit and they were having a special exhibit called, “What Makes Zombies Tick.”

  The part that I was really interested in was the “Zombie Pea Brain” exhibit. It showed the inside of a Zombie head and what a Zombie pea brain looks like.

  It was awesome.

  The part that was really cool was what it said about the Zombie brain. It said:

  The typical Zombie’s “pea-sized” brain, though small, is very powerful. It’s kind of like the CPU of a computer. It houses enough information to help a Zombie live a normal Zombie life, but with some limitations.

  One of those limitations is a Zombie’s inability to maintain long-term memory. It is said that a Zombie can only remember the information that it learned in the first few years of life, or what it heard within the last 3 hours.

  But then it said something that I thought was really interesting. It said:

  Though a Zombie’s pea-brain is unable to store long-term memory, Zombies have a remarkable sense of imagination. Because of this, Zombies have been known to recall previous information with great accuracy in moments of intense imagination.

  There are accounts of Zombies remembering events that happened hundreds of years prior, even though their pea-brain does not have the capability to retain this information.

  Though research is still being conducted to explain why this happens, this phenomenon is still unexplained…

  Wow. That would explain why my parents always said I have a wild imagination.

  The good thing is that it said that I can remember things I hear in the past 3 hours. So I guess I’ll just have to study 3 hours before the Spelling Bee.

  But how am I going to remember 1000 words in 3 hours?

  Wednesday

  I retook my Scare exam today.

  …And I aced it!

  I followed Mr. Matsumoto’s advice and I just imagined I was an ugly, scary, hideous human named Big Mouth Jeff. It worked like a charm

  It also helped that the miner I scared was an 8 year old girl.

  Hey, as long as she was in the mines, she was fair game. It wasn’t my fault it was “Bring Your Daughter to Work Day” for the miners.

  “Well done, Zombie-san,” Mr. Matsumoto said. “You have a very rare gift.”

  “You mean my terrifyingly scary miner scaring skills?”

  “No, you still have a baby face. But your ability to imagine yourself into becoming scary is very powerful.”

  “Just remember Zombie-san, if you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything. You just need to use your imagination.”

  Wow. Coming from the 10 time Scare champion of the Moblympics, that meant a lot.

  I was really happy I passed my Scare exam. But, I still needed to come up with a way to win that Spelling Bee.

  I guess I’m just going to have to study and hope that I remember some of the words.

  Now, what day is the Spelling Bee again? Uh…

  Oh man, I think I’m in trouble…

  Thursday

  I got a list of words to study for the Spelling Bee today.

  I’m probably going to forget most of the words by the Spelling Bee tomorrow, but I have to at least give it a try.

  Creepy decided to help me out. But he’s not the best speller in the world. He still thinks you spell the word Creeper with a ‘K.’

  I started with the most misspelled words from previous Minecraft Spelling Bees. Words like:

  Obsidian

  Netherrack

  Lapis Lazuli

  Mycelium

  Enchantment

  Cauldron

  Cobblestone

  Podzol

  Prismarine

  Mutton

  Shepherd

  and Pickaxe

  I spent the whole day trying to remember these. But, for some reason
I kept forgetting them every 3 hours.

  I saw Big Mouth Jeff later today. He was bragging again about how he had at least 1000 words memorized.

  1000 Words! How in the world did he do that?

  I am so doomed. I’m going to choke and forget all of the words, and I’m going to lose the Spelling Bee. Then I’m going to have to tell everybody that I lied and I don’t have a ScareStation 465. And if my parents do buy it for me, I’m going to have to give it to Jeff.

  Man, I still don’t know how Jeff can memorize so many words. It’s like he’s using a mod to spell better or something…

  Huh?

  Wait a minute… No way!

  That little… I bet he’s cheating!

  But how am I going to prove that he is? I mean, I can’t just accuse him of cheating in front of everybody. And if he is using a mod, how’s he doing it?

  I decided to ask the only person I know that ever cheated and got away with it. I went to see Steve.

  “Hey Steve, you said you cheated and got away with it right?”

  “Yeah, but don’t remind me.”

  “Well, how did you do it? I mean, how were able to pass your test?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Well, I think that Big Mouth Jeff is cheating, and that’s how he’s able to memorize so many words.”

  “Well, if he is, he’s probably using a mod to make his brain grow bigger. That’s what I did when I passed my exam.”

  “How did you activate it before your test?”