Slasher Girls & Monster Boys

by April Genevieve Tucholke

  “Who are you?”

  He broke out into another smile. A smile that belonged in the hallways of our school, in the dark of the movie theater, or in the bright of the diner, but not here. “I thought you would never ask.”

  “Make her put the knife down,” I said.

  The knife fell to the floor.

  “Just because you asked me to.”

  “Who are you, Damien?”

  “Dear old Dad probably wouldn’t do the same. Or maybe he would. There’s a misconception about him—about both of us. Just because he is who he is doesn’t mean he doesn’t love. And I love too, Marnie—”

  “Dear old Dad?”

  He looked down pointedly. I inhaled. My brain circling his meaning but refusing to land.

  “I bet you’ve heard the story. My favorite one about him. He falls in love with a girl and takes her home. Only her family doesn’t approve. Literally no one approves, and she’s persuaded to leave him. Only, she can’t resist and she comes back to him. Again and again and again. In fact, every year she ends up spending half her year with him and half with her family.”

  Was he talking about . . . Wait. Was he talking about Persephone and Hades? Aka the devil kidnapping his bride and forcing her to spend half the year in the Underworld? But the way he was talking . . . like it was some kind of beautiful love story, and more importantly, like the devil was his . . . father?

  I wanted to laugh. A joke. An elaborate, insane joke. The cool kids playing a joke on the monster girl who lived in the ghost house. Everly was in on it. And Damien too. And I’d known—I’d known not to get involved. My lungs contracted painfully. But there was relief mixed in with the hurt. I wasn’t Carrie at the prom. I had no supernatural abilities. No way to wipe out my enemies. I was just a girl getting my heart broken into a million pieces.

  Then I did laugh. The anger filling me up. And I let it, wishing for a second that I actually did have the power to take Damien out with a sigh.

  “You totally got me. And wow, you really committed, Damien. Bravo. You win. You’re a first-class asshole. Just like her.”

  “You don’t believe me,” he said, shaking his head.

  He nodded at Everly then, and she picked up the knife. In one swift move she sliced one of her wrists. She cocked her head as if genuinely surprised by the sight of her own blood. “What the hell?” I shrieked, running over and grabbing the knife from her, tossing it to the floor. She went down all at once—deadweight. I tore off my sweater, crouched, wrapped it around her wrist. A red stain bloomed on the fabric. “What did you do? Did you give her something?” It had to be drugs. No one cut their wrists because the cutest guy in school ordered them to. I looked up at him. “Call 911!”

  He took a step back; he looked disappointed in me. This wasn’t an act or a trick. He believed it. And somehow he’d pulled Everly into his delusion.

  “You think you’re the devil,” I said. The dad stuff. The dogs.

  “His son, actually.”

  Oh my god, he was mentally ill. I finally liked someone, and he thought he was the Antichrist.

  I grabbed my phone and dialed, but it flew out of my hand and hit the wall across the room, shattering into pieces.

  I stared at Damien.

  It was never me.

  He was doing this. He was doing all of this. But how?

  “Everly—we have to go. Let’s go!” I pulled her closer to me. I could feel her trembling, half-conscious.

  “It’s only a flesh wound.” Damien sighed. “She’ll be fine. If that’s what you really want.”

  “Do you hear yourself? I thought she was one of your friends!”

  He laughed. “I don’t have friends. Only subjects.” He smiled at me. “What you said in class, Marnie . . . about wanting to know the monster?”

  “It wasn’t an invitation. I wanted to get an A. Ms. Demetrios likes someone to play . . . devil’s advocate. I didn’t mean it literally.”

  Damien laughed at “devil’s advocate.” But then his face fell. He looked struck for the briefest of moments, like he’d made a miscalculation. Then just as quickly, his pretty features rearranged themselves back into calm resolution.

  “What you said, you meant. I know it. I felt it.”

  “Maybe your evil Spidey senses are off. You don’t know me.”

  “Maybe you don’t know yourself, Marnie.”

  I dragged Everly and looked back at the door, where Cerberus and Erebus appeared to have several more heads than before. I tripped. But held tight to Everly. If she weren’t bleeding, I’d be running. I could be running now, getting away from here, from all this. What had she ever done for me? I pushed down the thought. I couldn’t leave her. I wouldn’t. I wasn’t that person.

  “I lied before when I said I thought you were less boring than everyone else. I will never lie to you again. I knew already. Just today in class you wished you had the power to get rid of her. I know what you think. I know every dirty thought and every sweet one. I know what movies you like and how much you hate your dad and that you sometimes wish your mother had just taken you with her.”

  My stomach twisted. “What I think and what I actually do are two different things. That’s what makes us good or evil. I am not like you.”

  “I didn’t have a choice in that,” he said. “I never had a choice. I killed my own mother before I went to kindergarten. Not because I wanted to, because I was a kid who was jealous and angry and didn’t know what he was capable of. My dad was different. It was harder. He tried to kill me. It was self-defense. I didn’t want to. I didn’t.”

  “You have a choice now.” I was inching us closer to the door as I spoke, Everly still shaking, eyes closed.

  “I choose you.”

  I stopped. These words—I’d wanted to hear them for so long. And here they were. And they were awful. “Will you let her live if I let you have me?” My voice was hoarse.

  He shook his head. “Free will. You have to come to me because you want to.”

  “Why, though? Why me? What is wrong with me that you’d pick me?”

  “I have seen inside you, Marnie. We’re more alike than you think. You have darkness and light. Bitterness and compassion. And I can give you power.”

  “And what—I sign over my soul?”

  “I want to share what I have with someone. With you.” Damien looked at me. “Even a monster wants to be loved.”

  “You have your fans. You have Everly. She’s literally willing to kill herself for you—you don’t need me—”

  “You should hear their thoughts.” He shook his head dismissively.

  There was silence, and I realized, ashamed, that I was waiting to hear how I was different.

  “But you, Marnie. You were the first broken thing I ever met who didn’t want to be someone else. Who didn’t want to be fixed. You wanted out of that house. But you never wanted to be Everly. You never wanted to be anyone else. Even Everly wants to be someone else. Probably a Kardashian, but still . . . Even I, when I started to realize what I was. I wanted to change. I wanted to heal instead of hurt. I would kill things, small things, and try to bring them back to life. My power didn’t work that way. I didn’t work that way. And eventually, I had to accept that.”

  A vision of Damien and a roomful of dead crows flashed across my mind. I shuddered. Damien was lost. He was a broken thing too. But he also broke others.

  “And my soul?” I asked again. I let Everly go, easing her to the floor and stepping closer to Damien.

  “Is yours. I only want your heart.”

  “You promise not to kill anyone,” I said, moving still closer to him. Close enough to kiss, though my mind screamed to run. But I felt the pull again. The power. I had slipped the knife in my pocket when I’d wrapped Everly’s wrist with my sweater. I slipped it out again now. I kissed him, deeply, revulsion war
ring with wanting.

  The knife went in easier than I thought it would. Blood gushed from his neck. A look of surprise crossed his pretty face. And a hint of a smile.

  I pulled Everly from the floor, dragging her. “Run!”

  The dogs came straight at us, teeth bared, glinting in the candlelight. I braced myself. But it was the barest brush—they’d raced past us to their owner, sniffing and whining.

  A hoarse laugh rose in my throat.

  Damien didn’t need me.

  He had his dogs.

  × × ×

  We made it to the neighbors’ house. They promised to call the police. They were an elderly couple, gray-haired and slow-moving.

  We sat in their opulent drawing room. Me cradling Everly, who looked at me in weary surprise as the old couple went searching for bandages and blankets.

  “Why did you help me?” she asked, her eyes watery, exhausted.

  I shrugged. “I couldn’t let that happen to you. You didn’t deserve that.”

  “I mean, why did you disobey the master? You are so lucky, you have been chosen.” Her eyes glazed over, lids lowering.

  I heard the door open, but realized too late that I hadn’t heard sirens. When I looked up, he was there.

  The neighbors belonged to him. Of course. Everly too.

  His neck was healed. He was wearing a fresh blue shirt. You hear that phrase—“devastatingly handsome.” This is what it looked like.

  “Let’s get you home.” He gently pulled me up from the couch. I didn’t even notice Everly had crawled away. “I don’t want you to miss curfew.”

  He put a hand on my back—was he going to kill me or kiss me?

  “What happens now?” I asked. Or maybe I screamed.

  “I take you home. I try again tomorrow.”

  “I will never love you,” I said. Or maybe I was still screaming.

  “You do already. You just need time to admit it.”

  I shook my head. “You’re crazy,” I said. Or maybe I was crying.

  “This morning, you thought that you couldn’t kill someone. Tonight you didn’t hesitate.”

  I said something, or maybe nothing.

  “Lucky girl, so ungrateful,” the old woman said, cutting a glance at me as she bent over Everly’s wound in the front hall.

  Lucky girl? It was the third time I’d heard it today. Everly, the waitress, and now this old woman.

  World domination, Damien had said, and I’d laughed.

  He’d started with his neighbors. I recalled the way the classroom full of kids stopped chanting when he talked, the deferential looks even Ms. Demetrios gave him. How many people in town already worshiped him? How would I ever get away?

  He took my hand and led me to the car.

  What would happen if I ran? Would his love for me stop him from coming after me? I would find my moment. Bide my time.

  A thought—not mine—pushed into my head.

  I like hide-and-seek.

  Damien winked at me. Then he held open the door, like nothing had happened, like we had eaten our burgers and drunk our shakes and held hands, and he would drive me home and kiss me outside my front door.

  I slipped inside the car.

  “I had to wait until you were ready. It was so hard, Marnie. Watching you all those years. But I knew the day would come when we could be together. When we didn’t have to be alone anymore.”

  We pulled into my overgrown driveway. The lights in my house were all off.

  Damien glanced at me, something like hope on his face. He was planning for us. A future.

  I put my fingers around the door handle. I’d begun the night wanting to erase the stain of what my mom did. I’d wanted to erase the last few days of wild thoughts and anger and everything that had been building in me for years and years. Only Damien didn’t. He wanted me to embrace them—the anger, the spite, the malice. To embrace him. He wanted me to embrace myself. The dark, scary parts and all.

  I looked at my bleak little house, where no one cared a thing about me. I looked at Damien, who would put the world at my feet if I wanted him to.

  A thought, errant and wrong crept in and took root.

  What if I didn’t run?

  Then:

  Monster Marnie . . . Monster Marnie . . .

  The words pushed into my head, but they weren’t coming from Damien or Everly or anyone else . . . and they didn’t sound so bad.

  THE FLICKER, THE FINGERS, THE BEAT, THE SIGH*

  APRIL GENEVIEVE TUCHOLKE

  She was looking at me when the car hit her, straight at me, eyes round and wide behind the square, black, nerd-cool frames. Her body hit the windshield, thud, brakes, screaming, yellow hair fanning out like the sinking summer sun.

  × × ×

  “Is the flask empty?”

  Grace leaned up from the backseat and hit me on the arm, palm slapping the meat of my shoulder. “Yo, brother, is the flask empty?”

  “Long gone, sis.” The pink thermos was rolling around on the floor by my feet, nothing left but a watery slush of melted ice, coffee, and vodka.

  She sighed, and slunk back.

  “You’ve drunk enough, Grace.” Scout’s voice was snappy, like her eyes.

  I looked over at my girlfriend, slim hands on the wheel, pointed chin, flattish nose, narrow shoulders, long black hair. Pale blue moonshine was pouring through the windshield and coating her in its eerie glow. Damn, she was beautiful.

  “Stop staring at me.” Scout laughed her low, bubbly laugh.

  “I can’t.”

  “Moonlight always makes you dreamy and sentimental, T.”

  “I’m an artist. We’re all dreamy and sentimental.”

  Scout had lean limbs and chubby toes. She read Tolstoy and did yoga and made curry chicken and grape salad sandwiches on buttery croissants. She was going to Harvard. Her parents had a hole-in-the-wall diner and that was all they had. But she was going to Harvard.

  Finals were over, graduation a few days away, and this was the first night in months Scout hadn’t worked or studied past midnight.

  “Answer my damn question, Theodore.”

  I looked back at Asher. He had his hands all over my sister and a huge grin on his face. Asher had been my best friend since the sixth grade. He was the high school quarterback, beefy and alpha, such a cliché. But he was always up for anything and always in a good mood. He was dating my sister and I was cool with it. Grace had a dark side, and he evened her out. They looked good together. Both had brown curly hair and big blue eyes. Grace’s friends gave them the couple name Gasher, and said their babies were going to be soooooocuuuuute.

  “Don’t call me Theodore. And stop groping each other, Gasher. My eyes are bleeding.”

  Grace groaned. “We are Grace and Asher. Don’t combine our names. It makes me hate the world.” My sister pushed Asher away and leaned against the door. “I’m glad the flask is empty. I feel sick. Mixing locally distilled vodka and locally roasted espresso. What were we thinking?”

  “We were thinking PORTLAND.” Asher kissed my sister’s neck and then hit me in the side with his fist. “Theodore, answer the question. This is important. We’ve done best seventies horror flick, best eighties horror flick . . . what’s the best nineties? Because I say Army of Darkness and I know best. Hail to the king, baby.”

  Asher pawed at my sister and she laughed and slapped his hands away.

  “Everyone knows the best nineties horror film is Silence of the Lambs.” Scout glanced back over her shoulder, and her long hair swished against my arm.

  “You would say that.”

  She looked at me, and raised her black eyebrows.

  I lowered my voice, so Gasher wouldn’t hear me in the backseat. “You and Clarice. You have certain things in common.”

  “Don�
��t analyze me, T,” she said, snappy, snappy. But then she put her fingers on the collar of my shirt, knuckles rubbing softly against my skin. “We’re supposed to be celebrating, not going full Spellbound on each other. For tonight I’m dumb as a post and ambitious as a pothead in Eugene. All right?”

  Scout had worked her ass off senior year. But we’d all needed this. Road trip to the city. Late-night eats at the food carts, crazy PDX food like avocado milkshakes and fried plantain crepes. Getting lost in the biggest indie bookstore in the world, a whole block long. Running through Nob Hill, the twinkling lights a yellow-white blur. Getting olive oil ice cream at the Salt & Straw. Asher whooping and laughing for no reason, picking up the girls and throwing them over his shoulder like they weighed nothing. Everyone but me sipping iced Stumptown espresso and Crater Lake vodka from a pink Hydro Flask in Scout’s purse.

  I’d let Scout drive even though she’d been drinking and I hadn’t. No one told Scout no.

  I loved how my girlfriend drove. Aggressive. Confident. In control. Elbows perfectly bent at ninety-degree angles. Queen of the damn road in her sensible blue Toyota Corolla.

  “The Sixth Sense. Scream.” Grace, answering Asher’s question. “Best nineties horror movies, hands down.”

  I spun around. “No way. The Blair Witch Project. People thought it was real. Three kids in the woods, lost, hearing creepy noises . . . it felt real. That movie scared the hell out of me.”

  Asher put his hands up in the air. “That was a one-concept indie with a jerky camera that gave people motion sickness. Let’s agree to disagree. Moving on . . . what’s the scariest urban legend?”

  “Oh, I’ve got this one.” Scout looked sideways at me and shivered, her torso and shoulders wriggling sexily. “You’re driving alone at night on a deserted back road, but someone is hiding in the backseat of your car. Your eyes meet his in the rearview mirror as moonlight gleams off the butcher knife he holds in his hand . . .”

  Grace screamed, a shrill, fake scream. Asher put his hands over his ears. “Stop with the shrieking, Grace. Seriously.”