My Monster

by Einat Segal

  The video goes viral and even makes it to the local news. Everyone’s disgusted. People call for Ashley’s head on a pike. The beautiful savage United States of America where they want to correct one crime with another. Why can’t we always fix online bullying with bullying the bully online? Nobody sees the irony here. Everyone thinks this is justice.

  I wasn’t after justice, though. I was after destroying her forever.

  Ashley, with her hair cropped short in a haircut that makes her look somewhat like a butch lesbian—again, the irony—gets called into the principal’s office. Our school has a zero-tolerance policy toward bullying. She isn’t kicked out because there’s a benefit of a doubt about her identity in the video.

  At first.

  We weren’t the only people to film Ashley that night. Encouraged by the success of our videos, more of those pop up. One of them even stars the back of my head for a moment, before Shawn turned off the light and made filming impossible. The week after, a few influential parents get to see the unedited versions, and those parents have a serious talk with the principal. By the end of the first week of November, Ashley Glick, the one who orchestrated the whole event, is expelled from our school, and all her friends are given a shitload of detention.

  When it all blows over, Esmeralda and I are back to usual.

  But there’s a small chasm that was never there before. We don’t talk about it, we don’t mention it, but it’s there.

  In the weeks that follow, we do our best to bridge over it. Which makes me realize something: I’ve changed. The mere fact that I’m capable of bridging over something like a scar in our friendship alludes to that.

  I’m not the same Sophie Green I was a couple months ago. I can’t pinpoint it exactly, and it isn’t a major transformation. It’s more like an acceptance toward something that happened to me emotionally.

  It’s exciting and unpleasant at the same time. My center of gravity is shifting; as if the earth has opened its maw, and now, I’m falling.

  I’m falling . . .

  But what’s at the bottom?

  8

  I Hate Nightmares

  I hear the sound of the front door opening and closing and my dad's heavy footfalls as he walks in.

  "Bah, it's freezing tonight," he complains loudly. The sound of rustling fabric tells me that he's wrestling out of his jacket. "I'm starved."

  I step out of the kitchen and narrow my eyes at him. At home he's on a strict diet, but I can't control his meals at work. He's as potbellied as always. "You don't look starved," I say.

  He ignores my comment and sniffs the air. "What're you making? It smells delicious."

  The corner of my mouth juts upward. "I made goulash."

  My dad is like an overgrown boy. Pure bliss engulfs his face. His baby-blue eyes shine, and he looks just like a toddler being offered chocolate cake. "Sophie, you're the best."

  I laugh. "You don't really mean that, Dad."

  "Why not? I stand behind my words. My daughter's the best."

  It's blindness due to parental love.

  We both hurry to the kitchen, and I ladle out two large bowls of steaming spicy goulash. It's got a rich reddish-brown color and smells like home and a warm embrace. It's pure comfort after a long day and a dark, cold December evening.

  My mom is a biologist who discovered two genes. She keeps going on conferences all around the world to talk about them. Dad and I are often like this, just the two of us. But we have a good vibe going.

  My dad makes these goofy jokes about New York in December while we eat, and they're not even funny, but I laugh anyway and almost snort goulash up my nose. Afterward, we load the dishwasher together. I know he's bone tired, but he helps me so he can continue talking to me. He never stops talking, his words coming out in an endless stream that borders on nonsense. After a while, all I hear is yammer, yammer, yammer.

  I don't mind.

  "You okay, Sophie?" he asks me out of the blue as we settle down in the living room to watch some TV.

  "Mmm?" My head was somewhere else, so I don't understand the context.

  "I haven't seen Shawn in a while. You two break up?"

  I shrug my shoulders. "We weren't really dating to begin with."

  My dad nods. See? That's what real life is like. Things can happen, and they seem oh, so dramatic, but eventually, it can so easily end with a convenient time to say the truth and a nod of the head.

  "School going all right?" Dad continues with his interrogation. He does it out of love, because he has that notion that as my dad, he should know what's going on with me.

  I cover my mouth as I yawn. "The usual," I say.

  Again, he nods. This isn't as awkward as it sounds. I lie back into the couch with my eyes half closed and let my dad flick through the channels.

  "Are you dating someone else now?" he asks.

  "Dad," I say in the classic “you're embarrassing me” tone.

  "You talk to your mom about these things, but you can't talk to me?"

  He kind of has a point. I move my head to my shoulder. "I'm dating this guy called Landon."

  "Landon what?"

  "Pearce. What does it matter?"

  Dad frowns. "Just humor your old man, Sophie. I just want to know these things. It's my right to worry about you."

  Okay, when he puts it like that . . . "Fine," I say.

  "What do his parents do?"

  I shake my head. "They died last year."

  He opens his mouth, surprised. "Both of them? How?"

  "He doesn't talk about it," I say.

  Dad shakes his head. He's taking this news hard. "Damn. Poor kid. Does he have any other family?"

  "He has an uncle who's his guardian now."

  "What does the uncle do?"

  I raise my eyebrows. "Why do you care about people's professions so much?"

  Dad shrugs his pudgy shoulders. "I've got no idea what else to ask."

  Fair enough. "You know Ambrose Sutherland? The guy who everyone calls the Dragon of Manhattan?"

  "Yeah, sure. What about him?"

  "That's Landon's uncle."

  My dad's eyes widen. He scrunches up his mouth. "Wow. Damn. You met this kid in school? I knew it was a good school."

  I snort.

  My dad laughs as he shakes his head. "Dating Sutherland's nephew," he muses aloud. "I'm glad I asked."

  * * *

  I lean back in my chair and look at the sparkly silver bowling shoes on my feet. We suck at bowling, both of us. Landon keeps throwing it too hard, and I just keep throwing at random. I did get two strikes, but that was complete luck. I sip the hot chocolate and cringe. It's too sweet.

  "Don't make that face. It'll stick that way," Landon says.

  "What kind of place doesn't serve tea?" I complain.

  "The good kind of place. Tea is evil."

  The reason we came here to begin with is not because either one of us wanted to. We would have been perfectly fine staying in like we always do, especially on this cold mid-December afternoon. But the heating in Landon's place is broken, again.

  This bowling place is right across the street, and it's completely deserted. I find bowling alleys remarkable. There's something about them that feels like they're their own universe. And don't get me started on the place where the pins disappear to. It must be a portal to Middle Earth.

  "What will you do tonight?" I ask.

  "Freeze."

  "Do you want to come sleep at my house?"

  He perks up at my suggestion, his lips parting with a wistful sort of eagerness. I see it all on his face before he looks away in an attempt to hide that he's flustered. "Wouldn't . . . wouldn't your parents object?"

  "My mom's still in the Netherlands, and I just told my dad about you." I suddenly notice that I'm smiling a little. I've never seen him behave like this. He's always so confident that it's almost a relief to know that he has this side to him as well.

  "I see," he says, light-brown eyes sparkling.

>   I tilt my head to the side. "I mean, if you don't want to . . ."

  He jumps to his feet. "You already invited me. It's non-refundable. You can't take it back."

  "You sound as if you want to meet my parents," I say, watching him closely for signs of lunacy.

  "Why not?" he says, and nothing about his face indicates that this is a joke. "I like parents."

  At his words, my heart does an unexpected thing; it kicks me in the chest. I have parents. I'm pretty glad I do. But he doesn't have them. I feel . . . I feel sorry for him.

  This is my first time feeling this way.

  "That's settled, then," he says cheerfully. "Let's go."

  "Right now?"

  He grins like a superstar. "I also want to get to know your room, particularly your bed."

  * * *

  My dad isn't home and won't be home before 11:00 p.m., but my bed is right where I left it this morning.

  The sheets, the blanket, and the pillows are a mess, though. Landon and I have gotten so good at doing this, at having sex. We know what we like, how we like it. A part of me can't believe that this has been going on for so long.

  It's not just about the sex anymore. It's about me and Landon, and about Landon and me. There's an "us" and a "we" here. We talk a lot. We don't tell each other stories about who we were before we met. We talk about the present, because that's the only time that actually exists.

  Sometimes we don't talk with words, even. Sometimes we converse with our eyes, sometimes with our bodies.

  And sometimes there's a whole dialogue happening by just lying side by side in warm silence.

  We lie in the dark later that night. I think about the parts of him that are hidden. I might not enjoy this as much if I knew who he was. Landon strokes my shoulder, his hand traveling down my arm. Up and down, up and down.

  "What happened to your parents?" I ask.

  I hear him breathing. I can vaguely see the reflection of the strip of light that shines from under my bedroom door in his opened eyes. I don’t think he’ll answer me.

  "They were murdered . . . slaughtered," he says in a hollow voice, "by a lunatic named Revenna."

  My arms tighten around him. I wish I never asked. He rolls over, turning his back to me.

  And then he whispers something, but it doesn't make sense.

  It sounds like he says, "Every time.”

  * * *

  I don't want to give my dad another heart attack, so in the morning, we use Shawn's trick. I sneak Landon out the back door, and he rings the bell twenty minutes later, claiming that he came to pick me up for school. My dad looks him up and down, and then he does the godawful deed of winking at me.

  Ever since Halloween, school has become a strange place.

  Everyone calls me Jessica, and people greet me in the corridors like I'm some sort of hero. Even my spider hole has been claimed during lunchtime by a group of freshman boys who stare at me like I'm a huge walking candy cane. I've begun spending my lunches with the rest of the student body in the cafeteria.

  It's horrible.

  I use Landon as a type of shield between myself and any social situations. If anyone wants to talk in my vicinity, they can talk to Landon. He's not a big talker, though, and has an uncanny ability to dry up conversations in less than five minutes. Shawn's wrong about him, of course. He just doesn't get that Landon is simply as asocial as I am.

  Shawn and I, it seems, have successfully reverted to the days of old. We don't interact in school, and at the last Henderson dinner, it almost felt like our usual banter.

  If I think about it, the only thing that’s different is that Shawn's list still has no new additions. But this is exactly where I successfully employ my "whatever" tactic.

  That evening, I sit reading for Italian class on Landon's bed with a pillow propped behind my back. The heating is fixed again, but I still have the blankets wrapped around my lap on principle. I remember how cold it was.

  Landon pads into the room, moving silently on socked feet, and lightly leaps onto the bed, landing with his legs crossed and a goofy grin on his face.

  I put down my homework to give him a long look, trying to guess what he's up to.

  "You don't need that reading assignment until next week," he says.

  I shrug. "I've got nothing better to do."

  "Let's go somewhere. Let's do something."

  "Look at me." I gesture at myself, my hand going in a circle to include my whole situation. "What do you see?"

  Landon quirks his eyebrows as he inspects me. He leans close, examining my face. He even lifts the blankets to look at my legs. "Messy hair, jersey, sweatpants, socks, pillows, and blankets." He rubs his chin thoughtfully. "Looks like a classic case of cuddle-curl-cliosis."

  I manage to keep a straight face. "Right, that's exactly it. There's no cure. It's chronic."

  "What? No treatment? You're going to be like this forever?"

  "You obviously aren't up to date on the latest literature," I say studiously. "Some cases of cuddle-curl-cliosis ease up on the symptoms come spring. It's been noted that people with introvert professions like writers, editors, academics, and graphic artists suffer from an acute version of the virus all year round."

  "I see. In that case"—his grin turns cocky—"should I break my heating on purpose this time?"

  I gasp. "Don't you dare!"

  He offers me his hand. "Then come with me."

  "I will," I say, reaching over for my Italian homework. "But not right now."

  "How long do you need?"

  "Let's go out . . ."—I think it over—“in three months."

  Landon blinks, grabs my wrist, and wrestles my reading assignment out of my hand. I maintain eye contact with him, daring him to try something more.

  He gives me an epic smirk before pouncing on me. I squeal as he pulls me from my nest of blankets and stands up on the bed, lifting me with him. For a moment, my feet are kicking the air, my elbows pinned to my sides.

  Then, as if I'm weightless, he hoists me over his shoulders and hops off the bed.

  "Landon," I howl, unsure whether I'm screaming or laughing. "Put me down . . . put me down . . . put me down . . ." I have to yell it three times before I figure out that he won't put me down. He's remarkably strong. I've noticed this before. He's thin, and while pretty much every inch of his body is hardened muscle, he's not the buff sort of muscled guy who eats hours of gym for breakfast.

  He pats my butt as he marches out of the bedroom. "Let's go see the world!" he cries.

  * * *

  I shiver, sitting on the hood of the Porsche and pulling my scarf to cover my nose. My toes are freezing in my boots. Landon rubs one of my gloved hands between both of his.

  Out of all the places we could have gone, Landon took me to “the hill.” It overlooks a good portion of town, and the view is spectacular. The lights of the houses twinkle gloriously at our feet. It's supposed to be one of the romantic spots in town, but not when it's freezing cold and windy.

  Regardless of that, I never thought I'd be here. Just like any other high-school girl, watching the view with a boy I hope will kiss me soon.

  I never thought I'd be feeling the way I do.

  Ah, how low could I stoop?

  "Look at how peaceful it seems," I say dreamily. "From up here, I can almost overlook how fucked up everyone is."

  "Sophie? Why do you hate so many things?"

  I shrug. "Hating things gives me energy and makes me feel superior," I say flatly.

  He snorts. “Is that all?”

  “You know how kids always imitate one another and it just gets worse the bigger you get? Well, I don’t want to be like that.”

  “You could rule your school if you put your mind to it.”

  “And what would that make me? Another Ashely Glick.”

  He nods his head. He gets it.

  "Landon, can I ask you something?"

  He turns to look at me with a worried frown. "I don't know. Try?"

&n
bsp; "Why did you choose me?"

  He digs his fingers into my hair. "I have a thing for redheads."

  I can tell that's a lie. I don't say anything. He's touching my hair, and it feels nice. Not exactly like how Shawn does it, but still good. I lean in toward him. He presses my head to his shoulder.

  “When I transferred here, I had no intention of making friends just for one year," he starts explaining. "When I started talking to you, all I wanted was to hook up. I actually didn't expect you to be so addictive. I like you, Sophie. I like you a lot more than I deserve to like you."

  It sounds more honest when he puts it like that. But still, something’s off. He grows silent, and I suddenly feel like he's waiting for something. I lift my head and lock eyes with him.

  Suddenly, there's a wonderful ache in my chest. The wind makes my eyes tear up, and I can feel the quick tattoo of my heartbeat in my temples. I swallow around an unusual lump lodged in my throat. "I . . ." I begin, but have to pause for breath. "I don't hate you, Landon."

  This is enough for him, though. He slants his lips to mine and kisses me with a hunger that makes my core burn with longing. Through the thick layers of his winter clothes, I try to feel the shape of his body. I find what I'm looking for, and knowing that he's this turned on already is enough to make me lose my mind completely.

  "Sophie, wait." He pulls away from me. We're both out of breath, white steam rising as we exhale.

  I can't wait. I need him right now. I give him my most outraged look.

  "I . . . I . . ." He tries to speak but then closes his mouth. He looks at the scenery. "I need to tell you something. I just don't know how. I've never had to . . ."

  His voice trails away. I stare. I'm alert now, and I don't like where this is going. If Landon has secrets, maybe I shouldn't know about them. "You don't have to tell me.”

  "I'd rather tell you than have you find out . . ."

  "Did you murder someone? Is your uncle really a crime lord? Landon, I don’t care about—”