by Jon Skovron
“This human you live with,” she said.
“Gauge.”
“Does he know? What you are? About the rest of us?”
“No. But I think we’re going to have to tell him some of it at least. It’s not like you can just hang out with a scarf wrapped around your head forever.”
“Right…” she said, her eyes narrowing in a frown.
“Hey, don’t worry about it. We’ll figure something out.”
She nodded, but I could tell she wasn’t really convinced.
As we got off the train and walked to the apartment building, I tried to follow my own advice and not worry about how we were going to make this work. But as we walked the three flights up to my apartment, I got really nervous about telling Gauge. Everything was so concrete with him. So scientific. He wasn’t the kind of guy who believed that magic was possible. Or even desirable.
But as it turned out, it wasn’t something we had to deal with right away because Gauge wasn’t home.
“Oh, thank God I can take all this crap off!” said Liel. She threw the scarf, gloves, and coat in a heap on the floor. Then she fell back onto the couch and kicked her boots off into Gauge’s junk corner.
It was really weird having Liel in my apartment. But it was also really nice. I felt like I got back some part of me that had been missing.
“I’m not sure where Gauge is.” I sat down on the couch next to her.
“Hmmm.” She stretched out on the couch so that her legs were in my lap.
“He’s always home. About the only reason he ever leaves is to see a movie.”
“So we’ve got a few hours at least until we have to deal with him.” She stretched her arms up and burrowed her feet into the cushions so that her legs pressed down on my thighs. “You know, you keep telling me not to worry, but I think you’re way more worried than I am.”
I shrugged. She didn’t really understand everything we’d have to deal with. But maybe she didn’t need to know yet. It had been a stressful transition for me. I wanted to make it easier for her. So I didn’t say anything.
“Do you know what I like best about the city so far?” she asked.
“The subway tunnels?” I asked.
“Well, those are nice,” she admitted. “But no. My favorite is that part where you kissed me. Why don’t you do some more of that?”
“But what if Gauge comes—”
“Kiss!” She sat up so that our faces were close. “Now!”
“You trowe girls are so bossy.”
“You monster boys are just too shy.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
What could I do? The reputation of monster boys everywhere was at stake. So I had to kiss her. And because I didn’t want there to be any doubts, I did it a lot. At first, in the back of my mind I was still a little worried that Gauge would walk in on us. But this was the girl of my dreams and we were alone in my very own apartment. It had been a rough couple of months and as her body pressed against mine and her legs intertwined with mine, I thought maybe I had earned this.
So I let myself get lost in those glittering, diamond eyes. And for the first time in a while, I didn’t feel poor or alone anymore.
GAUGE DIDN’T WALK in on us. In fact, he didn’t come home that night at all. The next day I had to go to work, and I was worried about leaving Liel there in case Gauge showed up while I was gone. But I couldn’t take her with me, either.
“So leave a note,” said Liel. She was stretched out on the couch, flipping through TV channels.
“Right,” I said. “Somehow I don’t think a note that says, ‘Hey, Gauge, don’t worry about the random troll in your living room, I’ll explain when I get home’ will really do the trick.”
The apartment didn’t have a landline, so I tried calling his cell from an online VOIP service. But I got an automated message that said the number was disconnected. I popped online. I didn’t see surelee or s1zzl3 on, but there were a few other channels I knew that he used and eventually I found some people who knew him. But none of them had heard from him in the last twelve hours. For a lot of people, being offline that long might be normal. But for Gauge it was downright freakish.
“Okay, I’m officially worried about him now,” I told Liel.
“You said he was from California, right?” she asked. “Maybe he just went for a visit.”
“Maybe. But you’d think he would tell me something like that. And why would his phone be disconnected?”
She just shrugged and kept flipping through the channels.
“Well, I can’t be late for work,” I said. “Are you going to be cool here?”
“Sure,” she said. “I’ll just watch TV, I guess. And if he shows up…” She shrugged again.
“Yeah.” But there wasn’t anything to do.
So I left the restaurant number and headed to work. But I was stressing about it the whole day.
“You okay, man?” asked Ralphie while we worked the stoves.
“I guess,” I said.
“Is it that girl you saw last night when we were closing up?”
“Yeah, sort of.”
“Who is she?”
“She’s just…” I started to say “a friend,” but realized that wasn’t really true anymore. “I guess she’s my girlfriend.”
“All right, Frankie!” He slapped me on the back. “You go!”
I smiled as I went back to stirring my skillet. Liel was my girlfriend. I had this juvenile impulse to somehow get ahold of Shaun’s cell number just so I could call him up and tell him that in the end, Liel chose me. Sure, I lived in a shitty apartment, with a shitty job, and no money. But I had the hottest trowe girl in the world living with me. Worries about Gauge aside, it was pretty awesome. And I had to admit, not having Gauge there made things easier. Still, I’d have to deal with him eventually, right?
But when I got home, he still wasn’t there. And he didn’t come home the next day or the day after that. I started to think he’d done the same thing as his previous roommate and just taken off for California. Or maybe he’d gotten into an accident or been killed by a mugger. I had no idea. Nobody online had heard from him, and if he had any family, I’d never heard about them. There was no way for me to really take it further. So as the days turned into weeks, I just started to accept that he wasn’t coming back.
Of course, if he wasn’t coming back, that opened up a whole new set of problems. First, the lease was under his name, so technically the landlord could kick us out at any time. But the more immediate problem was who would pay the other half of the rent?
That’s when the checks started coming in the mail. They came from all over. Rebate checks, refund checks, weird sweepstakes prizes. They weren’t for a lot of money, just five bucks here, ten bucks there. But there were a lot of them. So many, in fact, that when you put them all together (and paid the ridiculous fee at those sketchy check-cashing places that don’t ID), the total net covered a little more than half the rent. Every once in a while, I’d wonder why we were getting all these checks. But things had been so hard for so long, and those first few weeks with Liel were so amazing that I just didn’t want to think about anything that might ruin it.
I’d get home from work and she’d have some crazy, elaborate meal prepared. After we ate, we’d go wandering through the neighborhood, exploring the alleys, the parks, under bridges, in the subway tunnels. After a while we started to explore past Sunnyside into other parts of Queens and Brooklyn. It was dark and we avoided areas with a lot of people, so it felt safe. As time went on, we got so bold that Liel started to walk around without anything covering her face. I loved to watch her wake up to the wider world and discover this place outside the theater. And because she had me to guide and support her, she never had to go through all the bullshit I did. She never had to go to bed hungry or beg for a job. For her, the city was just pure wonder.
One night we ran along the promenade in Brooklyn that overlooked the East River and Manhatta
n. Kind of a ballsy move, considering it went through some highly populated and posh neighborhoods like the Heights. But it was four in the morning, that perfect time when pretty much anyone who had been out late was finally home, and the early risers hadn’t quite gotten up yet. I can run really fast for a big guy, and I don’t get tired easily. So I thought I’d smoke her. But the way she ran? It was like a cheetah. Her white hair streamed out behind her and she had this tight, crazy grin on her face, her lower fangs poking out just a little. Her long dancer legs stretched out in front of her, like she was jumping from foot to foot, and her entire body stretched and contracted with each step. It didn’t take her long to pull ahead of me.
We were right alongside the Brooklyn Bridge, its stone towers stretching up over two hundred feet into the night sky. Liel’s diamond eyes widened when she saw it. She glanced back at me, and her smile got a little mischievous.
I frowned. “What are you—”
She turned and took a huge leap. Her clawed hands reached out and easily hooked into the rocky base of the bridge tower. Then she started climbing up.
“Shit,” I muttered and jumped after her before I had a chance to think about it.
I slammed into the cold rock and scrambled to hold on. I didn’t have claws, so there was a moment of hot panic in my gut when I thought I was going to slide right down the side into the churning waters of the East River more than fifty feet below. Then my fingers found a crevice and I squeezed the massive stone strut with everything I had. My face was pressed against its icy grit and I thought: This is crazy. I’m going to die. But then I heard her laughter carried down on the wind. I looked up and she was perched high above at the very top where the tension wires peak. She beckoned to me with one graceful hand.
Did I deserve this amazing girl? Was I enough for her? I wanted to be—so badly that I would do anything. I had to prove that I was enough for her. And I was the son of one of the most famous monsters ever. I could do this. I could do just about anything.
I felt this sudden surge of strength in me. Like when I beat the crap out of Shaun, but different. It wasn’t about hurting this time. It wasn’t anger. It was…I didn’t understand it, I just knew that it was something else. I reached up with one hand, found another crevice that I could get my fingers around, then the next, and before I knew it I was at the top, my arms aching, my breath pounding in my chest. We stood there and looked out over the city and river that stretched before us, sparkling with white and yellow lights, the muted roar of traffic like a low hum underneath.
“THIS!” she shouted over the shrieking wind. “THIS IS WHAT WE ARE MEANT FOR! NOT HIDING IN CAVES OR THEATERS! THIS!”
She looked so beautiful then, a fierce smile on her face, her eyes glittering in the moonlight. I pulled her to me and we kissed, hard and long, the curtain of Manhattan’s skyline behind us.
Then I knew what this new strength within me was. This new feeling. It was joy.
10
The Glamourous Life
BUT AFTER A few weeks, Liel got sick of sitting around inside all day.
I didn’t blame her, of course. Here she was, a Broadway dancer, cooped up in a tiny apartment with no hope in sight that it was going to get better. But I didn’t know what else to do. I tried to talk her into finding some kind of online job or something, but she was never really that comfortable with computers. Claws made it hard to type and she didn’t have my advantages of ways to bypass physical limitations. So she just did a lot of cooking and cleaning, like she was a housewife. She must have felt trapped, because, well, she kind of was. She started getting grumpy, taking it out on me. And even though I understood why she felt the way she did, I still wasn’t going to put up with her yelling at me. So we started fighting, mostly about stupid stuff like washing dishes and who left the toilet seat up. Finally, one night it got so out of control that I said:
“Okay, that’s it. I’m gonna find Laurellen.”
“What?” she said, a chair raised over her head.
“This isn’t us. It’s just because you’re stuck in this apartment all day every day. I’m going to contact Laurellen and ask him to give us some glamour so you can get out of the house and do something.”
“Are you stupid?” she yelled, still all fired up. “What if he tells on us?”
“I’m going to risk it. I mean, do you want to keep this up? You’re just about to chuck a chair at me.”
“Uh…” She frowned and looked up at the chair in her hands like she was surprised it was there. Then she put it down. “Yeah, okay. I see your point.”
“I don’t think he’s going to tell on us. Laurellen is cool. I’ve always felt like I could trust him and Mozart.”
She flopped onto the couch. “I hope you’re right. Because at this point, going home would be a really bad idea. My mom would totally kick my ass. And that’s not a figure of speech.”
I didn’t want to think about how my own mom would react. I really didn’t want to think about her at all. Mostly because if there was one thing I missed from The Show, now that Liel was here, it was her. I don’t know why. She never said much and you never knew how she felt about anything, or if she felt anything at all. She was almost like a walking mannequin that happened to be really good at fixing stuff. But I was really starting to miss her stiff, blank-faced presence. I also felt a little guilty. Like I’d abandoned her to that place that treated us so badly. I don’t know why I felt that way. She was an adult, free to make her own choices. Nothing was keeping her there. Except maybe Dad. But that was her choice, too.
“So how are you going to contact him?” Liel asked. “Email or something?”
“I’m pretty sure he’s one of those guys who checks his email like once or twice a year. And prints it out to read it.”
“So what then?”
“Well, I remember hearing him talk about Monday nights when The Show is dark. He goes out to some club in the Village. Stone…something. Stonebridge, Stonegate, Stone…”
“Stonewall,” she said.
“Yeah, that was it. How’d you know?”
“Call it dancer’s intuition.”
It turns out Stonewall was some really famous gay club. I’d never been to a gay club before—or, really, any club at all—so I was a little nervous. But Liel said to just be super polite to everyone and I would be fine.
The next Monday night, I got somebody to cover my shift at work and took the train to Christopher Street. I walked past the tattoo parlors and sex shops until I came to a club with a big rainbow flag hanging over the door. Two guys were out front. One of them was really muscular for a human, even through his wool coat. The other guy was all decked out in a really nice coat with a matching scarf and gloves, his hair perfectly styled in a short, spiky cut.
The big guy took one look at me and said, “You gotta be kiddin’ me, kid. You know this is a club.”
“Sure,” I said.
“A club that serves alcohol. And don’t even try to pretend like you’re old enough.”
“I don’t want to drink,” I said. “I just need to talk to a friend of mine in there.”
“So call him and tell him to come out here so you can talk to him.”
“I don’t have a cell,” I said. “And I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have one, either.”
“Right, doesn’t have a cell…” He turned to the well-dressed guy next to him. “Can you believe this? Kid’s a fuckin’ comedian.” He turned back to me. “Beat it, kid. Come back in, what…like, five years?”
“Three and a half,” I said. This guy wasn’t making it easy to be polite. “Look, could you just do me a favor? Maybe you or your friend here could give him a message for me.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” he said. “You want me to leave my post, wander through the club looking for some dirty old queen who likes high school football players, and give him a message for you?” He shook his head, looking at the other guy again. Then he looked back at me. “Look, kid. It’s a big club, there’s a
lot of people in there. It ain’t gonna happen.”
“Maybe you know him,” I said. “He’s a regular here.”
“Oh, yeah, sure. ’Cause I know every guy who comes in here on a semi-regular basis.”
“Come on, Jeffrey,” said the fancy guy. “Don’t be an asshole.”
Jeffrey sighed. “Okay, I’ll bite. What’s his name?”
“Laurellen,” I said.
His eye went wide.
“Uh…” he said.
The fancy guy said, “You know Laurellen?”
“He’s a friend of mine,” I said.
Jeffrey shook his head. “No way. There’s no way you know Laurellen.”
“Ask him,” I said. “Just tell him Runaway Boy needs to talk to him.”
They looked at each other for a moment.
“I had no idea that’s how he rolled,” said Jeffrey.
The fancy guy shrugged. “It’s Laurellen. You’d better find out, just to be safe. I’ll watch the door.”
Jeffrey nodded, suddenly looking a little nervous, and went inside.
The fancy guy and I stood there in silence for a moment. Then he said, “I’m Vinnie.”
“Most people call me Frank,” I said, holding out my hand.
He shook it gracefully, with small, leather-gloved hands. Everything about him seemed classy.
“Sorry about Jeffrey,” said Vinnie. “He’s usually not that much of a bully. I think your size intimidates him.”
“My size? He’s huge!”
“And he’s not used to some healthy competition,” said Vinnie, and smirked in a knowing kind of way that suddenly made me think they were probably dating. “So, how do you know Laurellen?”
“We used to work together.”
“You were in The Show?”
“Backstage stuff,” I said quickly.
“I love The Show. I mean love it. I think I’ve probably seen it about twenty times.”
“Oh, yeah? What’s your favorite act?”
“I absolutely adore the underwater mermaid pool number.”