Gods & Monsters

by Saffron A Kent

  “They took Abel, didn’t they? They took him.” Tears stream down my cheeks, my body frail and useless. I try to get up from the bed but my legs are trembling so badly. “I need to… I need to go tell them to let him go. Nothing happened between us. He didn’t do anything. He loves the camera, you know, and I told him to take my photos. It was me. I wanted it. I —”

  Sky squeezes my shoulder. “I know. That’s why you have to listen to me. They released him, okay? He spent the night in prison but they released him.”

  “They did?”

  “Yeah. They let him go on one condition. They want him to leave town. Tonight.”

  “What? He-he can’t…”

  Sky looks over my shoulder. “That’s why I’m here. I talked to him, okay? He’s the one who sent me here. He didn’t think it was safe to call you with everything.” She stares me in the eyes. “He’s leaving, Evie. They’re forcing him to go and he wanted you to know that he’s okay and that he loves you and…” She sighs. “He told me to tell you that he won’t make you choose. Between him and your parents. He won’t put you in that position. He…”

  I can’t hear anything. Her words are gibberish to me right now.

  He won’t make me choose? What’s that supposed to mean? Is that a joke?

  There is no choice. No choice at all. It’s him. It’ll always be him.

  “I choose him. I’ll always choose him.” I repeat the thoughts in my head.

  “What?”

  “Yeah. He’s an idiot. There’s no choice. No contest.”

  “Okay. And that means what?”

  “It means...” I take a deep breath. “I’ll go with him.”

  I can’t believe I’m thinking about this, thinking about running away. Like David and Delilah. But I am.

  Because he’s my Abel. I love him more than anything else in the world. Just the thought of being with him fills me with electric energy. For the first time after last night, I can feel my heartbeats. I can feel my limbs. The numbness is vanishing.

  “Oh my God, really?” Sky’s eyes are wide and excited.

  That alone should tell me that it’s a crazy idea but fuck it. Fuck everything. I go where he goes. I can’t stay here. I can’t stay where no one will listen to me. I can feel their judgmental eyes jabbing into my flesh. I can hear their whispers, calling me names. My mom saying I’m a slut when nothing even happened between us, when I’m still a virgin. My dad breaking Abel’s camera when it was something we did out of love. He cheapened it, made it look like a crime.

  “Yeah.” I swallow, saliva scraping my throat. “I-I can’t live without him.”

  Maybe this is what happened with Delilah, too. Maybe she faced the same challenge, the same dilemma. She chose love and I’m going to choose love, too.

  “It’s crazy,” I whisper. “But I need to do it.”

  Goosebumps erupt over my skin. The fine hair on my body stands taut, defying gravity. Defying the laws, the rules. Every atom in my body buzzes, rippling with energy. I feel warm in my bones.

  “What’s love without a little bit of crazy?”

  Sky smiles, which quickly morphs into a big, giant grin, and even though I’m weak and terrified and so fucking angry, I can’t help but grin back. I probably giggle too. So inappropriate at a time like this. But it’s exactly right.

  For once in my goddamn life, I’m going to be brave. I’m going to be reckless. I’m fucking going to be in love.

  Soon our few minutes are up and I walk her to the front door, under my dad’s scrutinizing eyes and hug her, tightly.

  “I’ll miss you,” I whisper.

  “Me too.”

  “Tell him to meet me at the bend of the road at midnight. Tell him I’ll be there.”

  “Okay.”

  I spend the day feeling light, feeling alive. I swallow down the morning after pill my mom got for me because she doesn’t want me to get pregnant, even though I’ve never had sex. Not to mention my parents want me to go to this hardcore bible camp over the summer. Because what the hell is wrong with me if I let a boy take my picture naked?

  “What good is having children if they are going to humiliate you in front of the entire world?” my mom says. “You bring them up a certain way, you make sacrifices for them, and this is how they repay you. This is how they sully the good name of their parents. This is how innocent girls end up on the internet.”

  Except, I don’t think I’m that innocent anymore. My innocence was lost the moment my mother decided to parade me half-naked in front of the world.

  They decide to tell the whole town that Abel Adams raped me, and if I deny it, they’ll send me somewhere even worse than bible camp. I can only assume it’s the mental hospital where they give you electric shocks to alter your brain chemistry. I’m guessing my mom has the prescription ready as well. Mrs. Weatherby’s husband is a psychiatrist.

  She was the one who set my world on fire. She saw me walking upstairs to Abel’s apartment and decided to babble to everyone she knew. It took her forty minutes to gather everyone and tell my mom.

  Forty minutes.

  I was only up in Abel’s apartment for forty minutes and it felt like forty days. It felt like forty seconds.

  In the evening, I sit beside my parents, pray and eat their food. These are the people who should’ve supported me. These are the people who should’ve listened to me, or at least let me put my clothes back on before dragging me out of my boyfriend’s apartment.

  I watch my dad’s hands as he eats the soup. He broke Abel’s camera with them. He punched him with them. His knuckles are swollen and busted. I hope it hurts. I hope it stings the way his desertion stung me.

  Once dinner is done, I go upstairs. I count the hours and when it’s time to turn in for the night, my dad comes inside my room. Actually, he doesn’t. He stands at the threshold, like he can’t bear to be in the same room with me.

  “I bailed him out. I want you to know that. I’m not your enemy, Evie. You’re my baby. You’re the one thing that I love the most in the world. And that’s why I can’t let him be your downfall.” His eyes are red; tears are stuck to his eyelashes. “Because that’s what’s going to happen if you don’t get out now. That boy will be your downfall. Look what he already made you do. The pictures. The way you were…” He blinks, like I do when I need to get rid of the salty water. “It’s not right. But it’s just the way we love, you and I. I can’t let it happen to you because it happened to me. So tomorrow morning, you’re going to that camp and purging yourself of this… madness.”

  I’m his daughter. I can’t watch him cry. It’s in my genetic makeup to hurt for him when he’s sad, even though I want him to hurt. So I get up from the bed and go to him. He’s stiff when I put my arms around and hug him. He doesn’t hug me back.

  “I love you, Dad,” I tell him because I won’t see him for a while. Maybe I’ll never see him because if he can’t accept Abel and my love for him, then we’re done.

  But do you ever get done with your parents? Do you ever get done with where you come from?

  He leaves, probably thinking that tomorrow morning I’ll go to the camp and be his old Evie again.

  But old Evie is gone. There is no Evie.

  There’s only Abel’s Pixie, and she’ll be gone before the sun comes up and lights up this part of the world where monsters live.

  ***

  The clock strikes midnight and I creep out of my room.

  Funnily enough, my parents bought this house when I was born because they needed a bigger place. Before me, they lived in town. Mom didn’t want this house because it was so close to the Adams family. But my dad loved the land, so they bought it. I wonder if it was one of the last arguments he ever won, before his love drowned him.

  I skip over the loose floorboards scattered throughout the house and close the door behind me. Compared to the inside, outside is loud. Thunder and lightning and rain. So much rain. The ground has disappeared and all I can see is thick streams of water. Lik
e the entire earth is flooded by the ocean and I have to swim to get across.

  With one last look at the house that stands silent and dark, I take off.

  I run and run, carrying a small backpack with only a handful of possessions from my old life, water splashing over my bare calves. Rain stabs me like tiny knives, delivering me small deaths. I won’t be surprised if I find red splotches of blood on my white dress.

  But I don’t care. I know nothing can kill me tonight. Abel’s Pixie is immortal and so is our love.

  Everything is covered by the dark clouds. No stars or moon. Wind is my only friend. It’s fierce and it carries me forward, like I’ve grown wings.

  Finally, I reach the bend in the road, far away from my house, from the corn fields, the woods, from everything that I’ve ever known.

  My feet stop when I see him. He’s only a silhouette, a dark figure, but it’s enough to stutter my heart.

  In the next second, the sky cracks open and showers him in wet light and I can see him: the hair stuck to his forehead, the silver cross around his neck. He stands beside his truck, back leaning against the door, drenched and alone. When he sees me, he stands up straight and alert. We watch each other for a beat. I don’t know what I’m waiting for until he opens his arms, big and wide, beckoning me.

  A tear-tinted laugh escapes me and I fly to him on legs turned wings. He carries me off the ground as soon as I crash into his body and hugs me tight. His scent hits my nose and I feel like I can breathe again.

  “God, Pixie. You scared me there for a minute,” he pants into my ear. “For a second I thought you wouldn’t show up. I thought something happened. They did something to you. I thought… that I’d never see you again. That I’d be alone.” His voice shivers, breaks at the end.

  My eyes feel hot as the sky cries with me. “You never have to be alone.”

  “You were supposed to go to college. I —”

  “Fuck college. Fuck everything. Nothing matters to me but you.”

  “This is it. We can never come back here again. You sure about this? About…” Swallowing, he says in a small voice, “Me?”

  There’s a world of vulnerability in his words. It cuts me deep. Until last night, he was confident, aggressive. He was going to take me from my school because I was attending prom with another guy. But now, he sounds so fragile. I hug him even tighter. “Yeah. You’re the only thing I’m sure about.”

  He chuckles. “Let’s do this, then.”

  I move away to look at him. From this close, I can see that his face is swollen, pockmarked with bruises and cuts. “What’d they do to you?”

  “Nothing I couldn’t handle.” He gives me his signature lopsided smile through his busted lip. It squeezes my heart to see him making jokes.

  Why is it so easy for people to hate but not to understand? Why is it so easy to judge and conclude but not to take a second to listen? Probably because they are afraid of realizing how similar they are to the things they hate. How similar they are to the monsters they are so fucking afraid of.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for my mom and my dad. Your camera. I really thought he’d support us. I really thought he’d get it. I –”

  “It doesn’t matter. None of this matters. We’re leaving all of this behind, Pixie.”

  “Where are we going?”

  He smirks, his eyelashes leaking water. “Greatest city in the world.”

  “New York?”

  “Yeah.”

  I swallow, drinking in the summer rain, my heart banging in the chest. “Okay.”

  Abel traces my wet cheeks. “Are you scared of the big city?”

  “No.”

  He kisses my forehead sweetly. “You can’t lie for shit, Pixie. I’m gonna take care of you, you know that, right? I’ll always take care of you. You’re mine now, okay? Mine. My reason. My life. My purpose.”

  Purpose.

  Yeah, that’s the word. That’s what I feel for him. He’s my purpose. My purpose to live, to love, to cherish. To give.

  I nod. “You’re mine too.”

  “Besides, a fiancé is supposed to take care of his would-be bride, right?”

  “Fiancé?”

  He looks up at the sky, and then steps away from me. I watch him, confused, as he drops down on his knees, like he can’t bear to stand anymore. Like, he has to kneel.

  “Abel? What?”

  He’s squinting against the rain as he looks up at me. “I wanted to do this on your birthday. But I don’t wanna waste any more time. You always tell me that I haven’t asked you nicely.” He spreads his arms. “This is me. Being all nice and fucking polite. Will you finally say yes to marrying me?”

  I burst out laughing that changes into a sob. God, he’s crazy. And I’m crazy for him. I watch him on his knees, dirt sticking to his jeans, his face all bruised up, his arms wide open as if he’ll catch the sky if it falls on us and save me.

  That boy will be your downfall.

  They say history repeats itself more often than not. There’s poetry in nature. A symmetry. But I say that it won’t. History won’t repeat itself. Even though, we’re running away like his parents, David and Delilah, we won’t end up like my parents, Elizabeth and William, broken and toxic to each other.

  Falling on my own knees in front of him, I say, “Yes. It’s always been a yes, you big idiot.”

  I hug him and he fists my hair, pulls my neck back and stares down at me with ferocity. You’d think he’d devour my lips now, eat me up, drink me down. But no. His kiss is sweet and tender.

  Still watching me, he produces a ring from his pocket. It’s small with a white band and a tiny diamond atop it. It’s not flashy or expensive but it’s mine and I’ll wear it till the day I die.

  Abel puts the ring on my finger, kissing it. “You ready for an adventure, Pixie?”

  “Yes.” I kiss the ring, too. “We’ll be our own gods. You be mine and I’ll be yours.”

  “Fuck yeah.”

  As we see the town in the rear-view mirror of the truck, I hear my dad’s words again. I twist the ring on my finger and promise myself that I will never let his words become true.

  Abel Adams will never be my downfall.

  The next day, we reach New York just as the sun is setting over the Empire State Building.

  After leaving Prophetstown, we kept driving up I-80. Except for gas and some food, we didn’t stop anywhere. We were both paranoid, even though I knew Abel wanted to stop when he saw me falling asleep at an awkward angle.

  But the risk was too much. What if they found us? What if they took me away? So, we kept running, kept driving away from the people that almost ripped us apart.

  But now we’re here. In New York.

  It’s exactly as Abel described. Tall buildings jutting up to the sky, crowds eating up the earth. The steam is rising from the potholes. The horns are blaring. The cars and buses are crawling over each other. And people. Dear God, I don’t think I’ve ever seen this many people together in one place. Not even in church.

  As soon as we enter the city, I know I love it. It’s nothing like the town I left less than twenty-four hours before. It’s wild and untamed. It’s a little intimidating and it might take me a little bit to get used to the largeness of it, but I feel in my bones that this is where I’m supposed to be. I have a feeling that New York City has a place for everyone: the runaways, the misunderstood, the lovers, the strugglers, the drifters, the successful.

  In this city, our love will grow. This is our adventure now.

  This particular pocket is filled with colors and I like it immediately. Buildings are red, orange, cream. The symbols on the road signs are both in English and what I’m guessing is Chinese. The very air rings with those exotic symbols spoken aloud and the smell of peanuts.

  This is where Abel’s childhood friend Ethan lives. I’ve seen Ethan before in photographs on Abel’s phone. He has agreed to let us crash in his apartment for a few days, until we find something of our own.

/>   Abel’s truck sort of dies when he throws it in park, like it was waiting to deliver us to this city before taking its last breath. I think he might miss it since he’s been driving it around for ages. He hops out on a narrow but busy street. Without waiting for him to open my door, I jump out myself. But I stumble on my feet, already dreading the nasty fall I’ll be taking. But I should’ve known.

  I should’ve known that Abel will catch me.

  He grips my biceps, steadying me and bringing me flush to his body. And then, I’m standing in Abel’s city.

  “Hey, Pixie,” he rumbles, bringing his arms around my waist, the place he loves the most.

  I clutch his cross. “Hey.”

  “You okay?”

  “Yes. Remember how you saved me that day on the bus? When I was about to fall on you?”

  “Yeah.” He nods, smiling. “You were a victim of my charm, I know.”

  “It was the bus. It moved and threw off my balance.”

  He squints his eyes as if trying to look in the past, remember that day. “Nah, I’m pretty sure it was me.”

  I chuckle. “You’re crazy.”

  “Only for you.”

  He says it so seriously, with such gravity that all my anger comes out in the form of tears. How could they not see how much we love each other? How could they even think of tearing us apart? How could my dad do this to him?

  In the light of day, his injuries look worse. His face is a study of purple, yellow and blue splotches, and I run my fingers over the swollen hills. “Does it hurt?”

  “Not even a little bit.”

  “You’re such a liar.”

  He smiles and then presses a hard kiss on my mouth with his split lip. I move away from him, putting a hand on his bruised jaw. “Abel, not so rough. It’s going to hurt.”

  “Not as much as not kissing you, Pixie. That hurts me more.”

  So, he kisses me roughly, uncaring of his injuries, and I hold onto him, uncaring of the people around.

  “Abel fucking Adams.”

  We break apart at the call. For a second there, my heart stops beating. I’m thrown back into yesterday when the whole world was against us, and I tighten my hold on his t-shirt.