Monsters Among Us

by Monica Rodden

  “Shut up!”

  “Catherine?”

  She spun around.

  Henry was standing before her with Molly, who was looking at her anxiously.

  “Sorry,” Catherine said. “You just…surprised me.”

  “Yeah, I got that.”

  Flustered, she took her earbuds out and pocketed them.

  “Wanted some fresh air,” she said at his silence. She didn’t have to meet his eyes to know he looked curious, even worried. “Forgot how cold it was. You should get her a coat.” She nodded at Molly.

  “We did, last winter. She hated it, though. Also, it’s too big now, since she got sick.”

  Catherine thought she might burst into tears at any moment, or scream, or hit something. It was like her brain was too big for her skull, everything under her skin about to burst through, and she’d splatter against the ground, black and putrid and festering, but at least she’d be free.

  “Hey, about Falls, it’s totally fine. I didn’t actually think you’d—”

  “You know what, Henry? I really don’t care what you think.”

  She brushed past him and within a few minutes was back at her house, stripping off her coat and sweater, kicking her boots into the closet that used to house a monster. She half ran upstairs to the shower, shutting out her mother’s call, her father’s frown. She felt bad about snapping at Henry, who she knew was only trying to help. But it didn’t matter. Nothing was going to help.

  She made the water so hot she swore she could hear it hissing. It burned against her closed eyelids and ran down her body, down her bruises, washing away her talk with Amber and her parents and her walk—all her early-morning good intentions.

  I can’t do it, she realized with a sort of awe. I actually can’t get through this.

  * * *

  —

  That night, just as Catherine was downing her sleeping pills and sitting up rigid in bed, one leg twitching in the darkness, Amy Porter was turning a valentine-red piece of construction paper over and over in her hands.

  She was in her bathroom, waiting until her parents were totally, absolutely asleep, and she didn’t think she’d have to wait much longer. She looked at herself in the mirror. Pretty, she thought, in an objective sort of way, because she was an objective sort of girl. Baking was a science, after all, and she tended to judge things in numbers, in careful increments. Pretty meant big eyes and straight teeth, smooth skin. Not like Nancy in her language arts class, who already had acne; Amy felt bad every time she looked at her. But still, studying her reflection, she thought she looked like a child, which she most certainly wasn’t. She felt a little sick and put a hand to her stomach: nervous, fluttery, lurching.

  Your bread is amazing

  Pumpkin-perfect

  I dream of your eyes

  Forgive the note

  Can I see you in person?

  She’d found it folded neatly in half and tied to the seat of her bike that very afternoon. Her friend Hannah Walsh had invited her over to see her new puppy, and since Amy’s parents were being super lame and lazy, they wouldn’t even drive her. “Hannah is three streets away, get some fresh air,” her mother said.

  So she took her bike, bundling up and cursing her parents; biking was only fun when she was delivering bread. She remembered a comedian she’d heard—a different one from Jim Gaffigan but she was blanking on the name—saying that anything you did outside in winter was just cold exercise. She snorted to herself as she turned the corner onto Hannah’s street.

  The puppy was small and impossibly white, like a T-shirt that had never been worn. Hannah was so excited she was practically crying, dragging Amy to see the puppy’s bed and toys and water bowl, and it was fun but kind of tiring. Plus, it started to make Amy sort of sad—she’d never had a pet, not even a stupid fish—and then that made her feel kind of bad for being sad. Eventually she told Hannah she had to get back.

  “My mom told me I had to be home in an hour,” she fibbed.

  Hannah groaned and clutched the puppy, which wiggled and yelped in her arms. “You always do everything your parents tell you to. Come on, staaaaay.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Zahara thinks it’s true.”

  Amy frowned at Hannah. Zahara wore shoes with thick heels that clacked when she walked and was always running out of pencils before tests. “What did she say?”

  “It was kind of mean….”

  “Hannah—”

  “She thinks you’re no fun anymore and that your bread business thing is just to make other people look bad because you’re always trying to be the best at everything,” Hannah said in a rush.

  “What?”

  Hannah nodded. “I told her she was wrong, but she kept calling you Perfect Amy Porter….” Hannah clutched the puppy to her harder and talked into its fur. “What do you think, you cute little puppy-wuppy…? Is Zahara mean or—”

  Hannah babbled at the dog like it was a baby and Amy left the house grumpy, only smiling when Hannah’s older brother, Matt, ruffled her hair and told her that her bread was awesome.

  She’d gone outside, breathing in the chill and thinking about what Hannah had said. Perfect Amy Porter. The idea left a bad taste in her mouth, like cheap vanilla extract. She did have fun, whatever Zahara said. And the bread business wasn’t about making people feel bad, what a stupid thing to say. She was so busy imagining ways to spill confectioners’ sugar all over Zahara’s stupid head without getting into trouble that it took her a few moments to notice something was tied to the seat of her bike: a note.

  She’d read it slowly, heat coming to her face with every word, like she’d just opened an oven. She looked up at Hannah’s house and then back at the note.

  No signature, and the handwriting wasn’t familiar, but the writer had closed the note with a place to meet that very night:

  Lookout Point. Bring the note, poem’s not done yet

  And below that, a time.

  She knew Lookout Point, the clifftop where you could see for miles, always lit up at night for couples and tourists or people just passing through. That was during summer, though. People almost never went in winter because of the cold, and if they did go at all, they didn’t stay long. But it was probably the most romantic spot in West Falls. It wasn’t hard to guess what was going to happen.

  If her parents caught her, they’d ground her forever.

  But—

  Perfect Amy Porter. It repeated in her head like a beeping oven timer. She was a pretty good kid. Good grades. Nice. Teachers liked her. Her parents were proud of her bread business, bragged about her to relatives over Christmas. Maybe she’d earned a little fun. She was probably the only girl in her grade who hadn’t even kissed a boy. She’d be thirteen soon. It was getting ridiculous. Her friend Claire had made out with a boy named Jason Esposito at a horse camp last summer and came back covered in bug bites and swooning. She’d die when Amy told her about this. Amy could almost feel Claire hitting her on the shoulder. You did not! He did not! Tell me everything. Then she wouldn’t be Perfect Amy Porter anymore.

  Now Amy checked the clock, did the math. The clifftop was a ten-minute walk, and she’d have to walk because her bike was in the garage and opening that door would definitely wake her parents. She told herself if it was raining hard, she wouldn’t go—she wasn’t totally reckless—but thankfully the night was almost clear, with just a faint drizzle falling. She zipped up her coat to her chin, shoved the note into her pocket, and took a full thirty seconds to close the front door with white-mittened hands. It was freezing outside, so she walked fast, her stomach rising up to her throat. She swallowed. Nerves. Relax. At least you won’t get bug bites. Rain dotted her hat, caught on her eyelashes. She blinked to clear them, and they fell onto her cheeks, like tears.

  She came up the narrow ro
ad lined with trees, feeling almost warm by the time she reached the end. An opening in the trees revealed a wide clearing a hundred or so yards across, shaped like a half circle, the cliff’s edge the circumference. It was completely deserted. A single lamppost illuminated the guardrail that curved like a smile at the edge. She walked across the clearing toward it, blinking at the yellow glow for a moment before looking past it, to the long drop.

  “Amy.”

  She spun around, facing the clearing again, and the road leading to the clifftop. Someone was approaching out of the darkness.

  “Hey,” she said as he came toward her. She tried to make her voice calm, but it shook slightly. “I got your note?” She said it like a question, but then he nodded at her and asked if she had brought it, and when she handed the note to him, her logical brain started to whirl, adjusting to this new development.

  He had a scarf tied around the lower half of his face to block the cold, but she could see his eyes, a half inch of hair fringed under his hat. He wasn’t who she’d been expecting—or was he? The glow of the lamppost shot his eyes white, lit his hair to amber, and it was hard to tell what colors he was made of. She blinked, squinted, trying to place him, faces shifting in her memory, one after another. “You know everyone in this town,” her mother had told her once. “You’ve fed everyone in this town.”

  The scarf and the light were throwing her off. She could tell he was older, and the more she looked at him, the more familiar he seemed. Like she had sold him bread from behind a folding table. Or handed one to him on a front porch.

  “You tell anyone you were coming?” he asked.

  She shook her head. Her breath steamed in front of her in quick bursts. I’m a dragon, she suddenly wanted to say. See?

  He stepped toward her. She took a step back. He chuckled, a low soothing sound that she’d heard before. That she recognized. Unlike his voice, his laugh was almost exactly the same through the scarf.

  She knew who he was.

  As he moved forward, she stayed where she was and watched him, tilting her head upward a little, because he was taller than her. There was a bad taste in the back of her throat and she felt her fingers sticking together inside her mittens. Half his face was wrapped in thick wool and his eyes gleamed down at her and she suddenly felt as though she’d walked out into a busy street and there wasn’t time to step back; a car was coming too fast, almost like it had to hit her. But why? Everyone else she knew had kissed someone. It wasn’t a big deal, so why—

  Because I don’t want to. I thought I did, but I don’t. This isn’t what I thought it would be like and I changed my mind. Can I do that? Here in the cold and you walked in the rain and so did I but can I say no? Even now?

  He was a foot from her. He pulled the scarf down to his neck and, with his other hand, reached out to brush her hair from her face.

  No.

  She started to say it, actually. Sucked in a breath to tell him so, but then she felt his hand on her skin, the back of her neck, and every tiny hair there shot up, rigid, erasing the words inside her like a cloth on a whiteboard. She was still, silent, pliant and pleading, and nothing had even happened yet but she knew it would. Something shifted inside her. Everything was different. Her blood was rushing from her hands to her heart and her stomach was fighting to crawl out her throat and she wanted to scream—but that was stupid. Nothing was wrong. He was just going to kiss her and leave, but behind her was a clifftop and she was a statue in the night, waiting for him to smash her to pieces and throw her off the edge, into blackness and infinity.

  Catherine awoke on the twenty-seventh to the sound of shouting. She sat bolt upright in bed, a slick layer of sweat on her skin and her comforter tangled around her ankles. She yanked it high to her chest just as someone flung her bedroom door wide and, by the sound of it, nail-scratched at the wall until the light flicked on.

  Amy’s mother was standing there, her eyes wet and terrified. Catherine’s mother stood right behind her, saying something soft that Catherine couldn’t make out. She felt a sudden chill dry the sweat on her skin.

  “No,” Catherine said finally, in a strange, calm voice, the question coming at her like a gun she’d finally gotten into focus. “I haven’t seen Amy since before Christmas Eve.”

  Amy’s mother was talking again, shrieking, and Catherine’s mother—and now her father, appearing bleary-eyed and worried in the doorway—tried to calm her, and all the while, a realization came to Catherine, like a slow swallow of poison her body had tasted before.

  The clock on her nightstand read 7:06 in the morning.

  * * *

  —

  He did not throw her over the cliff. Whoever killed Amy Porter left her several feet from the edge in the glow of the lamplight, as though wanting her to be found. Her hat was askew, but her mittens were still on; he’d put back the one that had come off in the struggle. The rest of her clothes were on except her coat, which had been taken off and then thrown over her like a blanket, a bloodred splash across her body.

  A man walking his dog found her at 8:19 that morning. The dog was a golden retriever named Shiloh, who, unlike the unfortunate Molly, was young and in good health. His owner, however, clutched his chest at the sight. Not a heart attack, but one of panic that brought him to his knees all the same. Shiloh, torn, hovered between owner and Amy, keening with anxiety, his paws scratching at the rain-soaked grass.

  At 8:21, the man—a retired postal service worker with bad knees and an affinity for gardening in the warmer months—managed to dial the police, who arrived within nine minutes. Thirty-six minutes after that, the lead detective on the case knocked on the door of Amy Porter’s house. They’d gotten the report of a missing child an hour before, and it was a small town, West Falls, Washington; everyone knew the girl with the red coat, the bread, and brown, brown eyes.

  * * *

  —

  Catherine and her mother stood with their arms wrapped around their middles, shoulders hunched against the cold on the front porch. They could just see the commotion outside the Porters’ house. One police car turning to two, then three. Officers marching: suits and uniforms and vests.

  “It might be nothing,” her mother said, shivering a little and wrapping her shawl more securely around her shoulders. “They’ll find her. She’s, what, twelve now? You snuck out more than once at twelve.”

  “Amy didn’t sneak out.”

  Her mother eyed her curiously. “How do you know?”

  It was Catherine’s turn to shiver. Just past nine in the morning, and already the day was edged in ice. It wasn’t raining yet, but that mist was back, drifting like a fog, everything seen through a damp haze of gray that chilled the air. It blurred the scene at Amy’s house, tinged it dark and faded like a days-old bruise.

  “Amy hated the cold. This.” Catherine jerked her head at the sky. “She wouldn’t have just gone out. Not unless someone made her.”

  “Catherine,” her mother began gently. “We don’t know anything yet. Hold off. At least until we hear from your father.”

  Catherine said nothing to that. Her father had led Amy’s mother back home earlier that morning, keeping a slight distance between them like she was a feral cat. He was still at the Porters’ now. Close friends with Amy’s father, Catherine’s dad had him speak to his senior classes at least once a year. “So many of my AP students want to become lawyers,” Catherine’s father told her once. “Evan’s very knowledgeable with his practice, and they like getting a feel for the profession.”

  But Catherine imagined that most of her dad’s students probably wanted to be criminal lawyers, like on Law & Order, badgering serial killers stupid enough to take the stand and getting insanely rich doing it; they were more than likely bored to death by Mr. Porter’s lectures on finance law. Amy herself had complained about it enough: “I swear to God, if he tries to teach me about indem
nity one more time, I’m going to die.”

  Catherine felt herself shake again and tightened her arms around herself.

  “We don’t know,” Catherine’s mother said again. “We don’t—”

  But then Catherine saw someone leave the house: a familiar figure, moving slowly.

  “Dad,” she said.

  Finally, he reached them. He didn’t have to speak at all; his face told her everything she needed to know. Everything she had already known since that morning.

  Distantly, Catherine could hear the screaming. The walls of Amy’s house were muffling the noise, absorbing it, but she could make it out all the same. In Catherine’s mind the pain of that sound overflowed. Ran down the walls like paint.

  They stood in the cold, all three of them staring down the street, and then her mother seemed to gather herself—gather them—and ushered them all inside. She put on coffee and boiled water for tea and took out orange juice as Catherine sank into a chair at the kitchen table and her father stood rigid against the cupboards. No one said anything, even as Catherine’s mother bustled around, setting out too many glasses, every coffee creamer they had in the fridge.

  “Mom,” Catherine said finally. Her teeth were chattering, though the kitchen was warm.

  Her mother’s face was red, her neck blotchy, her hands twitching. She was taking out the sugar.

  “Mom,” she said again.

  A burst of sound from outside: a yell, then more shouting. Catherine spun around and, through the window, saw a flurry of confused movement outside: a blur of shapes, something streaking low to the ground, trailing…a rope?

  Then her mother dropped the sugar canister: large, with painted flowers, it shattered on the hardwood with the force of a small and concentrated bomb. Catherine leapt off her chair as the porcelain exploded across the small kitchen. Pink pieces shot into the air and fell, skidding across the hardwood. One hit Catherine’s leg and bounced off her sweats; another flew past her left eye and she felt a pain at her cheekbone like a thin line of fire.