Modern Monsters (Entangled Teen)

by Kelley York

  “Victor.” Autumn extends a hand, touches my cheek, tries to coax me into looking up at her. “We have to do something.”

  I force a deep breath into my lungs and out again, despite how tight and disorganized my insides feel. “I need to t-talk to him.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea. We need to—”

  “No. He’s my best friend. I can’t just t-take someone else’s word for it without t-talking to him.”

  Autumn runs a hand over her face. She’s as tired as I am. And while my concern has shifted involuntarily toward my closest friend, I know she’s still focused on Callie. I should be, too. But I’m not sure how to balance my worry for them both. Autumn’s whole social world is Callie. Mine is Brett.

  Brett couldn’t do this. He wouldn’t.

  There’s some misunderstanding. Patrick is full of shit.

  “I’ll drive you, if you want,” she offers.

  Logically, that would be best. But my brain isn’t clear enough yet to talk to Brett. I need some air. I need some silence. I need— “I can walk.” If my sense of direction isn’t skewed, Brett’s shouldn’t be more than thirty minutes away. I can use my phone if I need directions.

  Autumn gets up at the same time I do, brows knit together. “Vic, you don’t have to do this alone.”

  Looking at her face, I think I really understand why Autumn has wanted to help so much these last few weeks. It isn’t just because she cares about me, or about Callie. It’s because she’s felt so helpless to undo what happened to her best friend, helpless to control anything about this situation. If it were anyone else but Brett, I would gladly bring her along, but this is something I have to do. This is something I need to tackle on my own.

  I cup her cheeks in my hands, bowing down until our foreheads touch. She’s struggling to stay composed, to keep from crying any more, and I wonder what else she said to Patrick, what Patrick said to her.

  “I need to do this alone,” I murmur, covering her mouth with a kiss before she can protest. Autumn’s fingers curl against my chest, twisting the fabric of my shirt to hold me where I am, and her mouth is soft but so insistent and desperate in the way she kisses me back, as though I can somehow fix all of this with a wave of my hand. God, I would if I could.

  When I pull away, she closes her eyes, taking a deep breath and straightening up. Of all the moments in my life I could have picked to gather the courage to kiss Autumn Dixon, and this is it. Desperate and sad and raw, and tasting of tears. Still, Autumn tries to smile through it. “Call me when you need me.”

  That’s all I need. To know she’ll be there when this is over, that if somehow—some way—Brett is gone out of my life, I won’t be all alone.

  I underestimated the walk to Brett’s. It takes me closer to fifty minutes in the heat as opposed to thirty. The only car in Brett’s driveway when I get there is his, and for a second my stomach lurches at the thought that he went somewhere with his parents, and no one is home.

  The key Mrs. Mason gave me is still on my key chain. I don’t think twice before using it, and my throat won’t even cooperate enough to call out Brett’s name. He isn’t in the living room or the kitchen. Further investigation leads me upstairs, where I hear the shower going in the hall. Brett’s shower.

  My hands have gone clammy and numb. I step into Brett’s room, making a straight line for his cell phone, which is sitting ominously on his desk, near his glasses and homework. I wrap my fingers around the rubber casing and turn on the screen, stopping only when my gaze is caught by the corkboard behind Brett’s desk.

  I’ve seen it a hundred times before. It’s not like the photographs I’m looking at now are any different than they were the first, second, third, hundredth time I looked at them. Now, maybe, I’m viewing them with more brevity and each image of Brett and me—from grade school to high school and every summer, holiday, birthday in between—stabs my heart a littler deeper.

  “Vic?”

  I turn around, his phone in hand. Brett steps into his room in sweatpants and a T-shirt, towel around his shoulders and short, wet hair plastered to his forehead.

  “What’re you doing?”

  This is stupid. I should just tell him. I should tell him what Patrick told me so he can explain and put my worries to rest. “I j-just got here from talking to Patrick.”

  Brett blinks. He slides the towel off and chucks it into his laundry basket. “Why would you go see him?”

  My grip tightens around the phone. I have to force it to relax. “He has pictures on his phone from the night of the party. Of Callie.”

  Brett pauses, straightens, turns to watch me with a serious crease to his brow. “What?”

  “Patrick has pictures of Callie. He said he took them for someone.” I don’t stutter, but the tone of my voice wavers like I’m regretting every word that is coming out of my mouth.

  “Jesus.” Brett combs his fingers through his hair, but he doesn’t move from his spot. If anything, his gaze has grown more intense. “We should call my dad. Let me see my phone.”

  Reflex almost has me handing it to him. I want to. If I could pretend I don’t have a reason to mistrust Brett right now, my world would be a much brighter place. “I n-need to look at the pictures on your phone, Brett.”

  His mouth downturns. “No, you don’t. Let’s call my dad.”

  He extends his hand, waiting.

  I lift the phone, breathe deeply, and turn on the screen again, punch in the pass code I’ve known since the day he got the phone, and open to Brett’s photos.

  “You’re overreacting, Vic,” he says quietly.

  No response. I’m too busy skimming through Brett’s phone, flipping through pictures from the night of the party, of which there are plenty. A number of them of himself and Aaron, himself and Patrick.

  There are no pictures of Callie. I lower the phone. Tears prick my eyes.

  “Feel better?” Brett hasn’t lowered his hand. “Can I have it now, please?”

  Does it prove anything? I don’t know. I want it to. My eyes are burning with fighting back tears, and I step forward to hand over the phone.

  It beeps once, and the still-active screen presents me with a pop-up from Patrick that reads:

  I told about callie. The cops know about both of us. Sorry

  The cops know.

  Patrick was telling the truth.

  Did Autumn leave him so racked with guilt that he had to tell? Or did he know his secret was out and didn’t want to wait around for the police to show up at his door?

  Either way, I can see the anger settling over Brett’s features, darkening his eyes, curling his mouth. The last time I saw that look was when he cornered Aaron in the parking lot, an act that now makes my chest tight with how wrong it was. Brett snatches the phone from my hand and turns away. He drags in a shaky breath. He types something back to Patrick and chucks the phone to the bed. His hands go to his hair, gripping the short strands fiercely in frustration. “Fucking moron…”

  “Brett. What did you do?”

  He turns halfway to look at me, raising a finger. “This is your chance to leave it alone, Vic. They have no evidence against me, and Patrick had the pictures.”

  God, my throat is so dry and my eyes feel like they’re going to spill over. “You did it. You raped Callie.”

  “I was drunk,” he groans. “I was fucking drunk and she was barely conscious, she can’t remember hardly any of it! I didn’t even remember it at first!”

  “Oh, please. You weren’t that drunk. You were sober enough to drive yourself home. She remembers enough. She remembers it happened.”

  “So I should throw away my whole life, my whole future, for one mistake? Vic…” He closes the distance between us, his hands clasping the back of my neck to force me to look right at him, and I’ve never seen Brett look so crazed and frightened, so unlike himself. “I’m eighteen. She’s a minor. If I were prosecuted…that’s it. I’m gone. I’d be labeled as a sex offender for life even if
I got a short sentence. No future for me. No Ivy League college. I’m going places in my life, yeah?”

  I try to blink back the tears and only succeed in catching a few in my lashes. “What’d you do with the pictures?”

  “What?”

  “Patrick said he took pictures.” And it was obvious he didn’t have all of them.

  Brett’s mouth twitches and he says, “They’re gone.” But he ruins it by casting a quick glance at his laptop. He does have them. And deleting them now isn’t going to keep the cops from recovering them.

  “You were going to let someone else take the fall for it. You were going to let me take the fall.”

  He shakes his head quickly, like I can’t possibly understand. “That was never my intention. I didn’t care if it was someone else, but you—no. That’s why I asked Dad to take care of your case. You, Aaron, Patrick…you’re still seventeen. You might be tried as minors and your record would be sealed when you hit eighteen. Dad could’ve gotten you off with a light sentence.”

  His words make me cold all over. “So it was okay if my life got ruined because of jail.”

  The laugh Brett lets out is sharp and acidic as he pushes me back and steps away. “What life? Jesus Christ, Vic! You’re barely graduating. If you go to college, it’ll be some crappy community place. I didn’t want you to get involved in this, and I had no idea Callie would pinpoint you. That’s why I had Patrick snatch Aaron’s phone and slip that picture on there. He’s an asshole. You and I both would’ve been fine. Dad even said so.”

  I close my eyes for a moment. “Your dad knew.”

  Brett’s fingers tighten. I can feel them against my vertebrae, begging me to look at him. “I didn’t know who else to tell,” he whispers. “I thought I was just…going nuts. After I found out you had gone through Aaron’s phone, I had to tell him. I didn’t know what to do.”

  And Mr. Mason wanted to protect him.

  I don’t know who I’m looking at, but it isn’t my best friend since grade school. It isn’t the Brett who stood up for me, who taught me to ride a bike, who helped me pass all of my high school finals. Because the Brett I knew would never hurt someone like this and then not take responsibility for it.

  Or maybe he would have done this, and I’ve really never known him at all.

  He presses his forehead to mine and I think he’s close to tears, too. This is a look I’ve never wanted to see on him. Such unbridled fear and uncertainty.

  “Vic. I need you to do this for me. I swear to God, it was a mistake. I’ve worked so hard to get where I am and I fucked up, I know I did…but tell them I was with you. Tell them Patrick is lying. The two of us against him, we can do it. You’re my best friend. You’re all I’ve got. Please, Vic. Please.”

  I am small.

  Helpless.

  “I’ve worked so hard not to be ordinary,” Brett says.

  Heartbreak: crushing and overwhelming grief, anguish, distress.

  Everything I’ve lived up until this point, most of my existence, my social life, has revolved around my best friend. Trying to make him proud, trying to make him happy. Playing his secretary and puppying around while he made friends and I lurked on the sidelines.

  Some small inkling of me feels like…he’s almost right. He has this big, beautiful future full of endless possibilities. He could become president; he could cure Ebola or cancer. He could invent something. Go into space… There has never been anything I thought Brett couldn’t do.

  Me? I’m a useless waste of space who can barely manage a coherent sentence. He’s right: I’ll be lucky if I get into college. It’ll be a miracle if I graduate from college. If I end up doing anything more with my life than flipping burgers.

  And yet…

  For any mistake I’ve ever made, I never would have set Brett up as my whipping boy. I never would have sacrificed him to save myself. I never would have let anyone take the fall for my mistakes. If spending time with Autumn has taught me anything about myself, it’s that I don’t have to be brilliant or extraordinary to be special. I’m worth something more than being a scapegoat.

  An image flashes across the forefront of my brain, of Brett and Callie the day she returned to school. Callie’s fear, about how she might walk right by her rapist and never even know it. In the end, her rapist walked her to class and tried to comfort her.

  I don’t know what the right answer is for me…

  But I know what the right answer is for Callie. I have to protect her after I failed to do so the night Brett assaulted her.

  I take a step away, pulling Brett’s hands from my neck, my shoulder. “I love you, man, and you’re my best friend. But if you’re really sorry…you’ll plead guilty and take your punishment.”

  Brett’s face crumples. He stares at me like I’m a stranger to him.

  That feeling is mutual.

  My chest hurts. It’s hard to breathe. I’m on the precipice of falling to pieces and I just want to get outside and get some fresh air.

  He doesn’t try to stop me.

  I bolt down the stairs two at a time and dash outside. Even when my feet hit the sidewalk, I don’t stop. I need to run, to get away from Brett’s house and the memories there, away from the looming monster I’m going to be partially responsible for bringing down on him and Patrick.

  Eventually, I stop running because I can’t breathe and my legs are wobbling. I keep walking. I walk all the way to work and every inch of me hurts, and Amjad looks up at me when I step inside like he’s seen a ghost.

  “Victor, what happened? What’s wrong?”

  I don’t begin to know what to say. He flips the door sign to Be back later and ushers me into the back, pulls up a folding chair for me to sit, and I hunch over, breathing in, breathing out, trying to gather the pieces of myself back up. I’m vaguely aware of Amjad taking a bottle of beer from the freezers and placing it against the back of my neck. Surprisingly, the shock of cold helps me focus.

  I have no idea how long we sit there like that. Once my breathing has evened out, Amjad takes a seat across from me. I roll the bottle of beer along the nape of my neck, then press it to my forehead. Pretty sure he can’t sell this now.

  “What happened?” he asks gently.

  I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to do anything, is what I mean to say.

  What I actually say is the truth.

  I say everything. The story comes spitting out in fragments and stuttered pieces that I have no idea if they are making sense. I tell him about the party, about how guilty I’ve felt, about Autumn and Brett, about my dad, about how my best friend is going to jail and I know I’ve made the right decision but I don’t know how to feel at peace with it. I just need to say it or my chest is going to burst.

  Amjad listens to everything with patience. He leans forward, elbows on his knees, and his voice is so soft, the way I would picture a father’s voice to sound. “You are making a right choice, Victor. Focus on the light you’ll be shedding over that poor girl.”

  Is that what it will do, I wonder? If I testify against Brett, if he and Patrick go to jail, will Callie feel better? I have to think this is what she would want, because what happened to her was not okay.

  Amjad has to get back to work, but he tells me to hang out in back as long as I need to. Which I do. I go behind the freezers and let the cold air wash over me, soothing the heat that’s sunken into my bones from the run-slash-walk here. Only then do I text Autumn to let her know where I am, that I’m all right, that I can walk home because I don’t want her to worry about me. She texts back within thirty seconds to say she’s on her way.

  I let Amjad know I’m okay and heading home, and go outside to wait. A phone call to Sherrigan and Carter is due, even if they haven’t returned my last one. Might as well tell them what they missed, though I sum it up for them on the limited voicemail time I’m given. Patrick and Brett are the culprits—but they’ll probably know that by the time they listen to this—and I can give a statement if needed. I
know Autumn will, too.

  She pulls up to the front of the store just as I’m finishing my message. I get into the car and her arms immediately find their way around me, holding tight, practically putting her in my lap, and I don’t think I realized how much I needed that until now. I nestle my face into the warm curve of her neck and breathe in deep.

  When I finally pull away, it’s to give her a smile that I hope is as reassuring as I mean for it to be. “I’m okay.”

  Autumn’s eyes are a little glassy. She blinks a few times and smiles back, managing to get her almost-tears under control. “I’m really proud of you. I know it wasn’t easy to do.”

  No. It wasn’t. Truthfully, I wonder if I would have the ability to do it again. If I could have walked into that house if I’d been 100 percent certain of what I was going to find. I like to think I would, but who knows?

  “Can we go home?” I ask. The weight of the day is pressing down on me, and for once, I’m desperate to feel the comfort of my own house around me. I’d even like to see Mom, just for a sense of normality.

  Autumn says, “Of course we can,” and shifts back properly into her seat.

  Mom isn’t home when we get there. I get changed into pajamas because I fully intend on sitting around doing nothing the rest of the night, and Autumn sits with me on the couch while I lay my head in her lap, and she pets my hair as I drift in and out of sleep and dreams.

  Autumn is gone before Mom gets home. She said she needed to go to Callie’s and find out if she heard anything from the police yet, and if not, to fill her in. I have a feeling Callie’s family would be the first to know. Autumn asks if I want to go with her, but I’m not sure it’s a good idea. Callie knows me, sure, but we aren’t close and I don’t know how her parents would feel having me there.

  Instead I continue watching TV until Mom gets home. She puts her things away and I hear her in the kitchen for a while—probably putting something in to bake—but then she emerges and takes a seat on the couch beside me. At first I wait for her to say something, but I think she’s just…watching television with me. Or trying to. Not sure she’s getting the humor of South Park.