Destroy All Monsters
Page 9
Yet he deigned to hang around with us anyway.
He hugged me hard. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said, and didn’t ask, Why? Because I already knew the answer: You only come by when you need something.
“Come on,” he said, and took me by the hand and led me upstairs.
It was exactly what I needed.
There was only now. Only us. He was good at it. And when we were together, I wasn’t angry or sad or scared. I was just . . . alive.
This weird thing we have, it started when my depression was at its worst. When I felt so alone I could almost scream. When I felt like the weight pressing down on my chest would crack my rib cage and crush my heart. I loved him for it, for how he made me feel, for how much he cared about me, for continuing to do this even though it couldn’t have been easy—because I suspected he wanted more.
Afterward, two squirrels fought and chattered in the tree below us.
“Dirty little things,” I said, watching them through his bedroom window.
“I kind of like them,” Connor said. We were spooned together. His bare skin was cool to the touch, but the heat of him warmed me up. This part was almost better than the sex itself.
“You would,” I said.
“What does that mean?” he said, laughing.
“It means that you’re a good person,” I said. “We’re not all like you. Some of us are monsters.”
Eighteen
Solomon
Two terra-octopi chattered and fought, in the tree above us. A perpetual problem, in the Underbridge. The side of Radha’s hut was covered in dried ink.
“Dirty little things,” Ash said.
“They really are,” I said, marveling at the fact that she was almost using full sentences now.
“I’ll be right back,” Niv said, getting up from the floor where we sat. “I need to contact the Palace. See if I can connect with somebody there who trusts me.”
“Okay,” Ash said. “Tell my mom hello.”
I laughed. Her sense of humor was returning too.
“Four slow knocks is me,” Niv said, demonstrating on the door. “Anyone else, hide Ash in the back room. Okay?” He disappeared into the Underbridge.
Ash looked around the little house. Every inch of it was familiar and beloved to me, every cluttered shelf and worn-out appliance and sprig of dried herbs hanging from the walls, but I wondered how it would appear to someone used to living in a palace.
Her voice was barely a whisper, so low I didn’t hear her at first when she said: “This is where you went.”
“Not right away,” I said. “I lived down at the docks for a while. Sleeping wherever I could find a safe, dark space to curl up.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, but her words were slurring and her eyes were getting a glazed look. Were the palace sorcerers working to strengthen their spell?
I took her hand, and pressed it to my face. Smelled the faint ginger scent of her.
“You’re so warm,” she said.
“You’re so cold,” I told her.
“I—”
But whatever else she had to say, she couldn’t say it.
“It’s okay,” I said. “We’re okay.”
She smiled, squeezed my hand very faintly.
Four knocks at the door, and I let Niv back in.
“No luck,” he said. “It’s chaos over there. Stupid to even try. The princess is missing—of course it’s madness. But—” And he handed me the Clarion. “There is some good news. You did it.” My photo was on the front page: a line of broken othersiders; the Shield standing in front of them. “You exposed him. Showed the world his face.”
My stomach clenched. “I did exactly what he wanted me to do.”
“Maybe. But now that we know who he is, we can fight back. He released a statement, outlining his goals. He wants the queen to abdicate, he wants to break all othersiders, he wants to destroy all monsters in the city.”
I took the paper, read it fast. I turned the page; tucked inside was a flyer. A propaganda-style image that showed a deep blue rendering of the Shield towering over a bloodred city skyline, with the words “The Truth Will Be Revealed” across the top. At the bottom it said:
“What Queen Carmen doesn’t want you to know is what will be her undoing”
Radha came in, her bright red sari instantly making me smile.
“How’s Quang?” I asked.
“He’s amazing,” she said. “Still trying to run his restaurant like . . . nothing happened. He jokes like any other day, but when you look in his eyes you can see the pain. Connor will cheer him up, I hope.”
“Solomon, outside with me,” Niv said.
We went. A banner hung from a nearby tree, for the upcoming Unmasking Day celebration. Happy kids in dinosaur masks. I remembered being a happy kid. Even if I’d also been a miserable one.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“This,” Niv said, and kissed me on the mouth.
My body betrayed me, and I kissed him back. My lips were greedy, selfish bastards. I wanted to pull away, push him back, but when his arms wrapped around me, my own wrapped around him.
I kissed him for a long time. And then I said, without moving, “Stop.”
“Why?” he said.
“Because I can’t.”
“So?”
“So I don’t feel the same way about you,” I said.
“With all due respect, Mr. Front Page Photographer, that’s bullshit.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You’re telling me you don’t feel anything right now?”
It took me so long to say Nothing that I knew he knew I was lying.
“Fine,” he said. “I get it.”
“You don’t,” I said.
“Then explain it to me.”
“I can’t.”
Our arms were still around each other.
“Is it about me?” he asked. “Or about you?”
“Little bit of both.”
I tried my best not to look him in the eye when I finally stepped away. But I couldn’t help it. His eyes were wet and wide with surprise, with sadness. When he tried to smile, it just made it worse.
In that moment, I felt the thing they called me.
I felt like a monster.
Nineteen
Ash
By the time I got there, all the excitement was over. The cop cars had driven off. The hauling company had brought the dumpster, and it was full of ruined carpets, curtains, books, furniture.
Jewel Gomez’s house, flooded out. Someone broke in while they were away for the weekend, stopped up the sinks and tubs and both her toilets, started the water.
“No sign of forced entry,” I overheard a neighbor say.
Jewel wasn’t home, and she didn’t answer when I called her. I sent a text—Hope you’re doing okay, let me know if you need anything—complete with a GIF of a corgi puppy cuddle pile.
She sent me a thank you–themed GIF. We giffed back and forth for a while.
Next morning, the high school hallway was all grief and anger and betrayal. When I looked through the lens, everything was green and brown. Great slimy bubbles hung in the air around Jewel, splattering and popping. She stood beside her locker, pretending to look at something on her phone. I kept my camera aimed at her, but I did not take a picture. Her unhappiness was palpable, so much so that snapping the shutter would have felt exploitative. The stink of garbage filled the high school hallway.
“Hey,” I said, stepping closer.
“Ash, hey,” she said. She was dressed all in shades of blue, the better to blend in with the walls of Hudson High. The better to make herself invisible.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“Thanks.”
“You feeling okay? If you want to skip school, go up to Crossgates Mall or something, I got you.”
She laughed.
It was a joke, after all. Super-religious Jewel never broke a rule.
&nb
sp; “Well, let me know if there’s anything I can do. I can’t imagine how scary it must be, to have something like that happen.”
“I’m fine,” she said.
“I wouldn’t be,” I said. “It’s okay to not be fine.”
She nodded. “I feel . . .” And she took a long time but I didn’t try to nudge her along. “I feel like I’ll never feel safe in that house again.”
I nodded. “Yeah. I get that.”
Betrayal, I thought. That’s what I was seeing in the air around her. How did I know? How could I tell the difference between guilt and betrayal? I wasn’t sure. But since that day along the tracks with Solomon, when I’d held his trained penny in my hand, my understanding of the things I could see had gotten sharper. Stronger. Like I could read them now in a way I couldn’t before.
“Do the cops have any theories about who did it?”
She rolled her eyes. “No,” she said. “And they don’t care.”
Betrayal. Jewel feels betrayed by someone—maybe someone here. “And you? Do you have any theories?”
“My books all got ruined,” she said, her eyes on fire. I knew how much her books mattered to her. She spent a lot of money on them. Bought new ones every week. Posted pictures of them online. Made memes out of her favorite quotes. She had a blog and everything.
“That sucks.”
“No,” she said. “You don’t understand. They should have been fine. My house flooded, but the water didn’t rise very high. Someone took all the books off my bookshelves, and put them on the floor.”
“Shit,” I said, and then apologized for the profanity.
She nodded. “Whoever did this? They knew us. Knew me.”
“Who?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. Yet. But when I find out? I’m going to punish them.” She didn’t curse, but the anger in her voice was just as frightening as a swear word would have been.
Shouts, from down the hall. Loud laughter. Which is when we all learned why the stink of garbage was so strong. Someone had taken all the trash bags out of the dumpsters behind the school, and ripped them open and dumped their contents in every classroom.
It pretty much scrapped first period, as everyone was busy cleaning up and wondering at what kind of vengeance the administration would rain down on us.
All day long, I looked for whoever wrecked Jewel’s house. Watched faces, with and without my camera. I saw an awful lot of ultramarine tendrils. I knew without question what they symbolized. Guilt. But the thing is, guilt about what? Checking out those websites your parents told you were off-limits? Sneaking around behind your girlfriend’s back? Or breaking and entering and destruction of property? One guilt looked like any other.
I even had some of my own. Because Jewel hadn’t been on Sheffield’s radar, before the two of us confronted him in the hallway together. Had I brought this on her?
That’s when I noticed Bobby Eckels. Football player; second string, I thought. Even with the naked eye, you could see that he was twitchy. Through the lens the darkness I saw around him was fresher, rawer. When he caught me staring, his lips peeled back almost involuntarily into a snarl.
The football team . . . Sheffield.
That was when the idea popped into my head fully formed.
Maybe that was my photo project.
Maybe that was the Truth with a capital T that I could uncover.
The people doing these things. The monsters among us.
After school, I sidled up to Sheffield.
“Ash,” he said, sliding his headphones down around his neck. They were oversize, ostentatious. Expensive.
“Word is, when it comes to the football team, you kinda run the show.”
He smiled. His button nose wrinkled. “Those guys are my friends,” he said. “They could have cut me out when I hurt my knee and couldn’t play anymore, but they let me keep on tagging along.”
“People say you do a lot more than tag along.”
He shrugged. “Coach Barrett lets me help with strategy sometimes. Lets me come to games. He says we’re a lot alike, him and me. Survivors. Why the interest?”
You and Connor’s dad are not “survivors,” I thought, but didn’t say it. “I have this photo project. I’d like to take pictures of the team,” I said.
Sheffield nodded, tilted his head to the side like it deserved careful consideration. Didn’t answer right away.
Look at his face and you’d see an angel. I knew there was more behind his perfect facade.
“There’s a party,” he said. “Most of the guys will be there. Come hang out with us, and we can talk about it.”
I frowned. “Can’t I just come to the next practice? Or a game? When everyone’s together?”
“You’re asking for a lot,” he said. “I’m happy to help you out, but I can’t just make people trust you.”
I thought of Bobby, flinching. Furious with me for daring to make eye contact.
“Fine,” I said.
“I’ll text you the information. Give me your number.” He leaned closer when he said it, made his smile slimier.
The idea of him having my number made me instantly queasy.
“DM me,” I said. “I follow you on—”
“Your number,” he said. “That way I can call you, if I need to.”
“Fine,” I said, and gave it to him.
Later, I reached into my pocket to pull out my phone, and almost burned myself on something.
Solomon’s trained penny. It was hot, way hotter than it should have been just from sitting in my pocket.
I held it, and I could see him. Not like some blinding vision or waking dream— This was so clear it could have been a memory, except I was pretty sure I had never seen it before. A shabby little hut under a very big bridge. Solomon, staring into my eyes.
I headed for the classroom where he was supposed to be. Of course he wasn’t there—but Mr. Taglia was, speaking to the teacher. I waited in the doorway.
“You’re looking for him too,” Taglia said to me, on his way out.
“Yeah. Is this about Child Protective Services?”
He frowned, and rubbed his beard. “They sent someone. She’s in my office now. And that’s the last step, before they send the police to do what they call a ‘wellness check.’ So if you see him, or talk to him, you have to get him to come in and meet with a caseworker. You know how cops are, in this town. And if Solomon gets an attitude with them . . .”
Mr. Taglia didn’t finish the sentence, but he didn’t need to. I could think up plenty of nightmare worst-case scenarios on my own.
I pinched Solomon’s trained penny between my fingers, felt its sharp edges cut.
Calm down, Ash. You know how this goes. He is not your responsibility. There’s nothing you can do to help him.
Except, I didn’t buy that.
I couldn’t. He was broken, but I had to believe that he could be fixed. And I had to believe that there was something I could do to help him. Even if it was something that would make him hate me forever.
Twenty
Solomon
I pinched Ash’s penny between my fingers. Its sharp edges cut into my skin. I don’t know why, but the pain made me feel the teeny-tiniest bit better.
“Make a fist,” Radha said. “Make two fists.”
She sat at the table beside Ash, her strong hands probing at the princess’s arms and shoulders.
“Can you feel that?”
Ash nodded.
Radha didn’t like to talk about her othersider ability, but I knew it had something to do with the body. Back in the day, she had been some kind of bad-ass warrior, a member of an elite othersider self-defense unit that used to patrol the city and protect our people, before the Darkside Police Department cracked down on them. “Surprise is important,” she said, when I was a kid and asked her what she could do. “Can’t have word getting out about what you can do. When the time comes to use your ability on someone, you don’t want them to know what’s com
ing.”
But Radha was well-known in the Underbridge for being able to track magic in the body, and help when there were blockages or defects. She’d agreed to take a look at Ash, see if there was something she could do. Secretly I hoped that maybe she could gain some insight into how the Palace sorcerers were continuing to control Ash, and whether there was any possibility of reversing it.
I sat down beside them. After fifteen minutes of tiny adjustments and questions, Radha sat back and shut her eyes.
“Anything?” I asked.
“It’s powerful magic,” she said. “Very complex. The combined spells of at least a dozen different sorcerers. She’s strong, to be standing here despite it.”
“Can you tell what her ability is?”
“It’s not something that manipulates the elements, or any other class of object,” Radha said. “Otherwise I’d see evidence of it in her muscles. Whatever it is, it’s been buried too deep, and for too long.”
“How do you feel, Ash?”
The Refugee Princess looked into my eyes, but did not seem to see anything. I took her hand.
She was broken, but I had to believe that she could be fixed. And I had to believe that there was something I could do to help her.
“The queen!” cried Connor, running into the room.
“What about her?” I asked, grabbing hold of him under the arms and hoisting him up into the air. He shrieked in delight.
“The queen is going to make a speech!”
“Wow,” I said, because the queen never makes speeches. Barely comes out onto her balcony anymore. “What’s the occasion?”
“People are scared,” Niv said, following him in from the other room. The radio was still squawking away in there. “Attacks, home invasions. Vandalism. Just yesterday a library got flooded out. Half the city is angry at the other half, and each half blames the other.”
Little Connor reached out his arms for Niv, and I handed him over. I’d avoided eye contact or alone time with Niv, ever since he kissed me, but it made me deeply happy to see how well he got along with Connor. Like, if Connor liked him, maybe he wasn’t such a bad person after all. Maybe I was wrong not to trust him.