by Bryan Bliss
God hesitated. “Something stupid. Something he’s paid for a thousand times since then.”
Claire wanted to push him for more answers, she wanted to grab God by the shoulders and force him to answer the same question that had kept her up for hours last night—was he dangerous?
God shook his head and said, “Please just trust me? Just give him a chance and don’t do what everybody does.”
“And what’s that?”
Just then, a teacher’s aide Claire didn’t know—but who obviously had dealt with God before—came outside and told them to follow her to the office. And before she knew it, God’s face had transformed. He was smiling and talking to the aide, all while he directed Claire to the doors behind him, saving her from whatever would happen next.
Claire was still thinking about God and Dark and so she didn’t see Dr. Palmer until she was standing right above her desk.
“Are you deep in thought or completely ignoring my gracious offer of a free period full of nothing but enjoying classic works of literature.”
Dr. Palmer gestured dramatically as she spoke, unfazed by the way the entire class was now staring. Claire sunk down in her desk.
“I’ve already read it,” Claire managed. “Multiple times.”
“Multiple times. Really . . .”
Claire could tell Dr. Palmer was sizing her up, so she went against standard operating procedure and rattled off some trivia.
“Shelley wrote it when she was eighteen, almost on a dare. And a lot of people didn’t think she’d written it because, you know, she was a woman and obviously a woman couldn’t have written something so popular and insightful and revolutionary.”
“Revolutionary?” Dr. Palmer pulled an empty chair next to Claire’s desk and sat down. “That’s an interesting word choice.”
Claire was sitting up in her desk now, her voice beginning to rise with a passion for the book she hadn’t felt in years. If people were still watching, she didn’t care.
“I mean, look at the Monster. It switches to his point of view. Suddenly we’re in the Monster’s head. So, I don’t know, it feels pretty . . .”
“Revolutionary. I hear you. I hear you.”
Dr. Palmer leaned back in the chair, staring off into the distance. This was more than Claire had spoken in the entirety of the past school year. And now, in the wake of her sudden outburst, she wanted to disappear inside the neck of her T-shirt. She could feel every single set of eyes on her, their stares heavy and burdensome. But none more than Dr. Palmer, who was smiling like she discovered a secret.
“So, what do you think the Monster is feeling?”
The question surprised Claire, not because she didn’t know the answer. It was something she’d spent many nights thinking about and, during one eventful language arts class, it had caused her to verbally annihilate a kid who implied that the Monster was nothing more than a thoughtless beast.
But those were old words from an old world. And maybe she’d spent her allowance for the day, because she suddenly couldn’t talk. So she shrugged instead and sat there, hoping that Dr. Palmer would save her and just walk away. When she didn’t, Claire simply said, “I don’t know.”
“Well, I guess you’ve found your project, then.”
And then she stood up and returned to the front of the room.
God and Leg were waiting for Claire at the front door after school. As soon as they saw her, Leg said, “Right” and started walking down the staircase. She nearly fell trying to catch up with them, dodging students and teachers as they wove through the crowd, down the sidewalk, and away from the long line of yellow busses.
“I’m going to miss my bus,” Claire said.
“Good! School busses are instruments of institutional control!” Leg was looking back as he yelled, seemingly about one second from raising his fist in the air and exhorting his fellow students to rise up, rise up! And then he started laughing and dropped his skateboard to the ground, slowly rolling a few feet in front of Claire and God.
“He’s an idiot,” God said.
They were almost to the corner before Claire asked, “Um, where are we going?”
God didn’t say anything, just pointed across the street. A large truck was passing, momentarily blocking her view of the intersection. When it was clear, she saw Dark, head down and drawing in his notebook.
“What is he doing?”
“He can’t be on school property. That’s officially not school property.”
Dark looked up as Leg shot across the street on his board, nearly getting hit by an oncoming car. The driver hammered his horn, to which Leg gave a classy, almost royal, wave. When he got close to Dark, he faked a few punches. Dark didn’t respond at all, just stood there enduring it.
Once Claire and God made it across the street, they all started walking down Lexington Avenue, a road that would eventually land them at Claire’s house. And for a moment, she thought maybe they were walking her home. That they expected to come over and sit around in her living room—an idea that made her breath catch.
But then they turned left on to Selby and made a right onto a street Claire didn’t know, and then another left, until suddenly Claire had no idea where they were. She tried to note every side street (breathing, breathing), hoping that she’d be able to string them together in case . . . what? She needed to escape? The word was an invocation, transforming her body into a jelly-filled panic. Every single muscle told her to run, even though she felt like she could barely walk.
“Hey . . .” God was staring at her. Leg and Dark were halfway inside the door of an apartment building. “This is Dark’s spot. We were going to go in and chill. Are you . . . good?”
Claire managed a thumbs-up, but when God turned to follow his friends into the apartment building, she didn’t move. Couldn’t, actually. Maybe God remembered the skating park. Or maybe Derrick had told them more than she knew, and God had been prepped for a classic Claire freak-out moment. Either way, he let the door close and stood there, waiting.
And that was the problem, wasn’t it? She didn’t know when a new nightmare would pounce out of the dark corners of her mind, gripping her entire body in a terror that might last thirty seconds or the rest of the week. She didn’t know why she couldn’t walk to Dark’s apartment, or why she simultaneously felt foolish and under attack.
God wasn’t fazed. “Do you want to call your brother?”
“Yes,” she said, pulling out her phone. “Where are we?”
God gave her the address and watched as she nodded and hit the button for Derrick, smiling as the phone rang (breathing, breathing) and she tried to quiet everything down.
“Hey, what’s up?”
“Hi. I went with God and those guys. To Dark’s apartment. We’re at”—she looked at God again for the address—“the corner of Milton and Portland. Next to a church that looks like it should be in a BBC miniseries about friars and nuns.”
The last part had just come out, making Derrick laugh. When Claire looked at God, he was trying to keep a straight face as he mouthed, “What are you talking about?”
And just as quickly as the panic had come, it began to drain out of her. Maybe it was talking to Derrick. Or God, trying so hard to honor her freak-out, but failing utterly. His entire body was shaking with laughter. Or maybe it was the realization that she wasn’t trapped—she was safe.
“Are you okay?” Derrick asked. “Do you want me to come get you?”
“I’m good,” Claire said. As she did, God smiled and turned around to push the button for Dark’s apartment. When the buzzer sounded, he held the door for her.
“Hey, Claire—” Derrick paused, taking a full beat before he finally said, “Have fun. Okay?”
Dark’s apartment was dimly lit and smelled like take-and-bake cookies, which were waiting for them on a paper plate in the center of a cheap coffee table. A lamp with a missing bulb stood in the corner, barely putting off enough light to see the room—which was smaller than Claire�
�s bedroom. Leg was fiddling with the back of the television, trying to connect an old video game console and swearing every few seconds.
“I wish she wouldn’t unhook this, man. It’s a real pain in the ass to strip the wires and get the connection to your old-ass TV.”
“Grandma thinks it’s going to start a fire,” Dark said, looking to the kitchen where an older woman leaned against the counter, smoking.
“I’m going to go on record and say that this Nintendo 64 is less of a fire hazard than, say, falling asleep on the couch with a lit cigarette,” Leg said, cussing again.
“She’s old,” Dark said, his voice flat and lacking emotion. He did look at Claire, as if he was embarrassed by—what? Leg? His apartment? The fact that his chimney-smoking grandmother wasn’t going to be a member of an IT team anytime soon?
“My brother is scared of lightning,” Claire offered, giving Dark a quick smile. A quick moment of solidarity. “Like, he won’t sit near windows during a storm because he thinks the lightning is going to come in through the window.”
Leg stopped messing with the television. “What.”
“That’s, like, physically impossible,” God said.
“Meteorologically impossible, even,” Dark mumbled, which made everyone laugh. God slapped him on the shoulder and Leg went back to the work of connecting the N64, which after a few more seconds, lit up the dark room in one brilliant flash of light.
Leg and God played a game called Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, which Leg proclaimed “the best damn game of all time” before he cut himself off and immediately started swearing.
“My controller is broken. These things are old, and my controller is broken.”
“The controllers work fine,” God said. “And stop complaining. We have company.”
Dark sat on the floor, his back against the couch. Every few seconds Claire would peek at what he was drawing—the same heavy black lines. The same chaos.
“Can I use your bathroom?” Claire said. Dark nodded and jumped up, rushing in front of her to close doors on the way down the hallway. It was the fastest she’d ever seen him move.
“It’s right here,” he said. “Sorry. The whole place is kind of gross.”
“Stop apologizing,” his grandmother said, stepping out of what must’ve been her bedroom at the end of the hallway. Claire hadn’t even seen her leave the kitchen. Before she could stammer out an apology, the woman snapped, “Nobody walks into a place like this and expects Buckingham Palace.”
Dark cringed as his grandmother trudged past them, lighting another cigarette on her way back to the living room.
“You should’ve seen our trailer in North Carolina,” Claire said. “The bathroom was a total pit.”
“Yeah?” Dark said, looking at her through his dark hair. “Well, tell me how it compares. Wait. Is that weird?”
“I mean, it wasn’t.”
Claire smiled and Dark smiled, shifting his weight to his other foot before saying, “Okay, well. Good. I mean, let me know if you need anything.”
He cringed again.
“I should be fine,” Claire said, pointing at the bathroom. “Over a decade of experience.”
Dark laughed uneasily before walking back down the hallway, checking the doors a final time before he disappeared into the living room.
The bathroom was small and, in striking contrast to the dim living room, was lit by a bright and obviously new bulb. Claire had to squint as she washed her hands, looking at herself in the mirror when she was finished.
She was thinner, maybe by ten pounds. Her eyes seemed darker, too. As if something inside of her had changed and was only now pushing itself out. She fixed her hair and smiled at her reflection, wondering if that, too, had changed.
She could hear the boys playing their game as she stepped out into the hallway. As her eyes adjusted, she almost tripped and fell over a large, fat cat that had decided to sit right in front of the bathroom door. He looked up at her lazily, as if to say, “Step over me. Or wait there, I don’t care.”
Choosing to step over the yawning cat, Claire noticed a door was now open in the hallway. The cat must’ve been in there and pushed his way out. She wasn’t planning on looking, let alone opening the door. But a faint red light caught her attention first. And then it was the eyes, bone white and piercing. Spotlights in the otherwise shadowy room.
The Monster.
Its head seemed to push through the back wall of Dark’s room, expertly drawn around the twin windows that looked down into the street. And from the corner of the room, two arms reached forward, trying to catch her before she could run away. Its face, unlike the ones in the notebook, was plaintive—almost pained. Like it could be crying or screaming, depending on what happened next.
She knew that look.
They’d only been in Minnesota a few days, back when she still believed they could run away. Derrick had the television on—they always had the television on back then—and in a moment of either confusion or misplaced excitement, he’d said her name.
It was Eleanor, her friend. Her teammate since second grade. But she looked different, as if she’d been changed in some fundamental way. She was screaming, crying, right outside the front doors of their high school. Of course, everybody would end up focusing on the FUCK GUNS that she’d scrawled across her T-shirt. The pure fury that seemed to shake the otherwise still picture.
But for Claire, it was Eleanor’s face. Something universal, traveling across the thousands of miles between Minnesota and North Carolina to perfectly capture the pain and the fear and the grief that all of them felt. That Claire still felt every single moment.
“Hey . . .”
Claire would’ve run God over fullback style if he hadn’t caught her by the shoulders. She couldn’t stop herself from shaking in his hands.
“I’m fine,” she said automatically.
God followed Claire’s eyes into Dark’s room and, after a second, closed the door. He looked like he wanted to say something, but instead he let go of Claire’s shoulders and looked back to the other room.
“We’re going to run over to Grand Ave.,” he said. “Get something to eat.”
And then he left her in the hallway to calm herself. To push back the storm. To breathe.
Chapter Seven
CLAIRE IGNORED HER BURRITO BOWL, WAITING FOR Derrick to come pick her up, trying to dismiss every red flag rising inside her. Calling every fear a liar.
It didn’t help that God had watched her the entire walk to Chipotle—a look she knew all too well. She’d used that same microscope to dissect every movement and intention of every person she met, these boys included. She expected him to turn one of the lamps on her and begin the interrogation any minute.
Instead, the three of them ordered food, found seats, and generally acted the same as usual—loud and unabashedly idiotic. Still, every so often she caught God staring at her. He never let his gaze linger, always smiling at something Leg or Dark said and turning away as soon as she caught him. At first she thought it was actually in her head—a fiction her anxiety was knitting together.
“I mean, they do make you pay for guac, which is total bullshit. But otherwise?” Leg lifted his burrito, as if to consecrate it before the food gods, and let loose a too-loud ommmmm. “Best restaurant in the entire world, fight me.”
A couple shot him a rude look, but he didn’t notice. He stared reverently at his burrito for a moment before taking a huge bite.
“I prefer Taco Bell,” Dark said, looking up from the table only to catch Leg’s incredulous face.
They were still arguing when Derrick walked in and started bumping fists and swiping rogue pieces of steak from their bowls.
“What up, degenerates?” he said, dropping into the seat next to Claire.
“No context,” Leg said. “Chipotle or Taco Bell?”
Derrick said, “Wow, I mean—how does one gauge his response? Affordability? Freshness? The ability not to spend the rest of one’s life on
the toilet after consuming?”
“See?” Leg said, slamming his hands down on the metal table. “You don’t ever get the shits after eating at Chipotle. It’s, like, in their business plan. This matter is settled.”
Derrick was laughing with the boys when he turned and saw Claire, halfway out of her seat and obviously waiting for him to be done. She didn’t need to say anything. He stood up and said good-bye for both of them, but just as he was about to walk away, he snapped his fingers and pointed at the three boys.
“I almost forgot—Mark-O had somebody cancel at the product demo tomorrow. So, me and Claire are going to hit up the Lair tomorrow night. If you guys are down, I’m skating. Plus, if you don’t make a big deal about it, after I’m finished I’ll let you walk off with some of the promo gear.”
Leg was nodding before Derrick had even finished his first sentence, and now he looked like he was on the verge of choking himself with enthusiasm and a mouthful of burrito.
“Hell yes,” he managed. “We’ll be there.”
God was staring at Claire again, and she forced a smile. Forced cheer into her voice, hoping it would be enough to end this conversation and get them out the door.
“You guys should totally come,” she said, her voice all wrong.
Derrick looked from Claire to the boys, before finally saying. “Okay, well. It starts at seven o’clock. Maybe we’ll see you guys.”
As they were walking outside into the cold night air, it started snowing once again. Big, fat flakes that fell from the sky and disappeared as soon as they hit the ground—a singular thing returning to the masses.
When they got to the car, Derrick put his hands on the roof and looked over at her.
“So, what was that about?”
The lights inside the restaurant made it seem warm for a second. Leg was gone from the table, getting another soda. And God was talking to Dark intently, neither of them looking toward the window or Claire.
She had no idea what they were talking about or how she should feel.
“Nothing. I’m just ready to go home.”
At school the next day, Claire was too distracted to focus on her project. And when Dr. Palmer once again stopped by her desk, she didn’t need another conversation. So, she wrote “The Monster” at the top of her page, which was enough to appease Palmer, who moved on to bother the kid in the back who was obviously flummoxed by Leaves of Grass and had taken to just staring at the unopened book, as if waiting for inspiration.