Children of Monsters, page 18
“Does he really have another daughter?” Jasper asks.
“Micki.” I don’t intend for the name to escape my mouth, but it comes out in a growl.
“Did he abduct her, too?”
“No,” I say, voice thick with disdain. “She’s his little princess.”
Jasper, visibly uncomfortable with the anger in my voice, shifts in his spot. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to talk about it either when I came home.” He stands to leave, but I speak up when he reaches the door.
“Lou and Matthew,” I start. “Are they together?” Not knowing anything that’s happened since I’ve been gone, not having a clue about even the most basic aspects of Lou’s life when she’s told me every detail for years, only adds to the anger inside me. I’ve lost too much, and I hate it.
Jasper doesn’t answer for a moment, and I think he’s afraid to tell me.
“I don’t care,” I say shortly, “either way. I just want to know. I feel like I lost so much time. I don’t know what’s going on. Like I still don’t know where I am.”
Jasper nods. “I know the feeling.” Then, “no, they’re not together. I think they started talking a little after we disappeared. You know, both with a missing best friend.” He knocks his hand against the door frame. “I have to go. I’ll see you later.”
He leaves, and I hear the front door open and close shortly after. I’m searching through my closet for the most oversized sweater I can find when Lou’s footsteps sound down the hall, and she appears in the bedroom.
“Hey,” she says.
I pull a large grey hoodie from a tourist shop in Harley down off its hanger. The town’s name is embroidered in blue across the front. I find Lou standing in the doorway, leaning against the frame.
“You changed your hair.”
She smiles a little, though concern is still worn clear across her features. “Yeah. I didn’t want to find a new stylist, so I dyed it back the other day.”
“It looks good.” I remember when she first went blonde a few years ago. She was always insecure about her hair when we were younger, and she’d make envious remarks about mine, being fine and straight. Gradually, she let it curl like it wanted to and let her natural texture out, but she kept it blonde.
“I know you don’t want to talk about it all right now,” she starts, and I brace myself for the onslaught of questions anyway. They don’t come. “I missed you. What do you need from me?”
I look around, out the window, around the room. Anywhere but at Lou. After all this time, it's too much to see not only that I was missed, but that my absence hurt her.
“A towel,” I say. I don’t even know where they’re kept here. I finally look at Lou, still hovering in the doorway.
She nods and looks like she’s going to say something. She doesn’t. She just leads me down the hall.
She opens the closet at the end of the hall and frowns. Over her shoulder, I see a shelf of spare bed sheets and blankets. Another shelf holds a stack of hand towels and washcloths and an empty spot, presumably for bath towels.
“I just did laundry today,” she says, slipping around me and heading to the other end of the hall. I follow her through the kitchen to the basement stairs. “They’re still in the dryer.”
Lou flicks the light on and descends the steps. At the sight of the bare bulb hanging above the wooden stairs, I freeze.
The smell of dank concrete and old wood fills my nose. Hallam’s heavy steps echo in my ears, getting closer and closer. Cold cement floors dig into my palms and scrape my skin raw. A bolt cracks into place, and I’m trapped. My own screams bounce off the walls. Crack. Screams. Again. Again.
“Cal.”
I flinch away from the noise, the name pounding against my eardrums.
“Cal.” Lou’s voice. I don’t want to go back there. I hold onto the sound of her voice and don’t let go.
I blink. Breathe in. Breathe out.
I look around me at the kitchen of the Allans’ home. Not Hallam’s. Lou kneels in front of me where I’m seated in a dining room chair. She holds my hands firmly in hers.
“I’ll get it,” she’s saying in a soothing tone that sounds exactly like her mother. “It’s alright. I’ll get it.”
I can hear my blood rushing in my ears, crashing through my veins with my heart pounding double time.
“You’re home now,” Lou says. “You’re safe.”
When I nod, Lou stands and disappears downstairs. She returns quickly with a couple of bath towels, and she tails me back up the hall to the bathroom. Before I can shut the door, Lou snares me in another tight hug, her arms thrown around my neck and the bundle of my sweater and the towels trapped between us.
“Don’t you ever disappear on me again,” she whispers.
Anger burns hotter and flashes brighter.
Because Hallam didn’t just hurt me. He hurt Lou. I don’t know what he said to her yet when he contacted her. Even aside from that, Lou was hurt by my disappearance. She was worried, and afraid, and it was all Hallam’s fault.
“I won’t,” I tell her.
When she lets me go, and I shut the bathroom door behind her, I turn on the shower to let the water heat up. Stripping back out of my fleece PJs and taking off the damp tank top from the woods – from the day I ran off to Charlesborough, though I had a sweater that I lost between then and now – I catch sight of myself in the mirror.
I look like hell. I understand why Jasper thought he should take me to the hospital when I see the near-blue colour of my skin, what colour I had stripped away by the cold and, probably, how little I’ve eaten. The scars on my shoulder stand out as pinker than the skin surrounding them, a pale memory of the jaws that tore through my flesh years ago.
I look grubby. I feel grubby. My hair’s greasy, and my scalp starts to itch as my hair dries, leaving behind a layer of dirt and grime. Underneath my nails are caked with dirt and dried blood. The rain and the snow and the snowmelt afterward did a decent job of rinsing mud from my skin, but it’s still there in the creases of my palms, and it left me coated in a layer enough to feel gross even where it’s not visible.
I look away as steam starts to fog up the mirror, eating away the reflection into a blur.
The water runs brown as soon as I step under the shower stream. I’m squeezing water out of my hair, trying to get the mud out, when the nausea hits. I try and fail to bite it back, swallow it down, pleading in vain with myself to just let me get the woods off of me.
I leave the shower running and step out from under the stream to crouch, still dripping, in front of the toilet. I watch the still-brown water pool on the tile beneath me as my mouth begins to water and acid burns in my throat. I try to breathe through the sickness, but I can’t keep it down anymore and retch.
I almost gag again at what comes up. I spit, but can’t get the sour, metallic, gamy taste out of my mouth. I don’t want to think about what I’ve been living on since Hallam kicked me out of the house.
I close the lid, flush the toilet, and nearly slip on the wet tile on the way back into the shower. I give in, grudgingly, to the weakness setting heavy on my bones, and sit down under the stream. I hold my knees up to my chest and watch the water run, ever so slowly, from rust to brown, then clear.
I grab the closest shampoo bottle I can see from the corner shelf in the shower and scrub it aggressively through my hair, top to bottom. The steam has gotten to me by the second shampoo, and my vision starts to falter, splotches of black obscuring the white shower walls. I stop forcing shampoo into my hair and dirt out of it when my sight goes completely black. I sit still and wait for the fuzz in my head to go away, and the bathroom falls gradually back into place around me. Jasper was probably right about a hot shower being a bad idea.
I’ve scrubbed my scalp raw, and the hot water burns as I rinse out the last of the shampoo, but I don’t adjust the temperature. It finally feels clean, the layer of grime washed down the drain.
Picking at and scrubbing away the dirt from under my nails and the creases around them takes ages, and the hot water has run low, just lukewarm by the time I’m done and rinsing the very last bit of muck from my body.
It takes the last bit of effort I have to towel off. I try to cover the bulk of the water on the floor with the bath mat, and when I’m done towel drying my hair, I throw that towel down on the floor as well.
I slip into the warm clothes I brought in with me and grab my hairbrush from the drawer under the sink. I pull it through my hair once, tangled and made worse by the aggressive scrubbing and towelling, and give up, arm aching from the effort of one pull alone. I twist my tangled but wonderfully clean hair up into a bun and leave it to deal with later. After a moment of consideration, I lay the second bath towel down on the floor, covering up the last of the tile. It’s still wet, but not slippery enough to be dangerous.
I find Lou waiting in the living room. I also find Derek and Liam. I stop in the doorway. Derek’s in his uniform and his boots sound heavily across the floor as he approaches me. I don’t know if he got done his shift or if Lou called him home early while I was in the shower.
I prepare myself to be berated, ready for a continuation of the fight we were having when I left. But I can’t even remember what it was, or why it mattered, and Derek doesn’t say a word. I’m pulled into another hug, officially surpassing the number of times I allowed anyone to hug me even after my mum died.
“I’m glad you’re okay,” he says finally. With my head this close to his chest, I can feel the vibrations as his voice forms the words.
“I meant to come home,” I hear myself say.
“I know.”
“I shouldn’t have taken off.” None of this would have happened if I hadn’t run off and wandered the city alone.
“I know.”
The morning after I left Hallam in the woods – though it was, really, well into the afternoon when I woke up – I woke in a strange bed, in an unfamiliar room. Disconcertingly, the strange bed was my own.
I’m at home.
That was hours ago. Now, Derek is still home, and he’s getting dinner ready. He’s making lasagna, and he didn’t mention it, but I have a feeling it’s lasagna and not takeout because he knows I like it, and he feels bad.
Being the subject of everyone else’s pity got old when I was little. I noticed the sympathetic looks regarding the utter tragedy that I was being raised by a young single mother. Oh, how hard that must have been for me. But I didn’t feel bad, and pity does nothing.
“I want to talk to Becka,” I say from my perch on the kitchen counter. I’ve got a half-empty bottle of pink sports drink clutched between my knees, the latest thing Derek has handed to me with the expectation that I consume it. He knows I’m severely malnourished and dehydrated – it’s obvious, really.
“So you’ve said.” He looks around, flustered, for something he’s misplaced in the middle of grating cheese but does not ask me for help.
I have said it. I said it to the cops who came by earlier today to see for themselves that I was no longer a missing person, no thanks to them, and to fill them in on everything they didn’t know already, which was a fair amount. They said that Becka wouldn’t give a statement or testimony, and it was unlikely she’d want to talk to me.
I said it once already to Derek, who said it was unwise to go anywhere near the family while Hallam is still a threat.
Derek sighs when I don’t concede. “Why do you want to talk to Becka?”
“She lied for him.” I could have been out of there long before I was, could have forgone the time in the woods, but Rebecca Sinn decided to cover for her husband instead. He doesn’t even treat her that well.
What I don’t say to Derek, because I don’t want to be told that I need to keep my anger issues in check, is that I want to make her see what she let Hallam get away with. I want to know how she would feel if Micki was victimized and abused the same way I was. I want to know if she would still let him away with it, or if it’s only me that deserved it.
“I think you should relax,” he says.
I’m about to tell him not to tell me to relax, don’t tell me to calm down after everything, but he keeps talking. Meanwhile, Lou stomps down the hall from our room, where she’s been fighting her way through homework.
“You’ve had a rough few weeks,” Derek says, “just take it easy.”
I ask, finally, what the date is anyway. It didn’t matter much when I was fresh out of the woods, but not knowing the date is as disorienting as having lost time.
Derek pulls his phone out of his pocket and squints at the screen, holding it at arm’s length.
“November sixteenth,” Lou cuts in before he can read it.
Oh. Yesterday was my birthday.
I look over to where she’s standing at the edge of the dining room. The look on her face, and her hands hidden behind her back, tell me that she has not been doing homework. Liam slides into the room to stand beside her, a more obvious gift bag hanging in his hands behind him. Liam gives a knowing smirk, and I know what’s about to happen.
I groan loudly, but they’re singing “Happy Birthday” before I can stop them. At the look on Lou’s face, as if she’s so damn delighted just to be singing at me even if it’s a day late, I let it happen. Amidst the mundanity of it – of another birthday, though belated, celebrated by the Allans to the best of their ability – I almost forget the hurt, the cold, the rage.
Almost.
II
Matthew
Three nights ago, I went with Jasper to rescue his sister from their father.
This morning, I’m back in the school guidance counsellor’s office.
Mr. Vankev sips at a steaming paper cup of black coffee and peers at me over his desk while bringing up my file on his computer. He glances over the numbers and gives a forced sigh for theatrics. I already know why I’m here.
“What’s going on, Matthew?” he asks.
I shrug and pick the strings from a tear in my jeans.
He doesn’t ask again; he just waits and lets the silence press for an answer.
“I’ve just been distracted; I’ll fix my grades.”
“If you’re distracted, you need to cut the extra activities and focus on your classes.”
“No,” I argue. “I just-” But I don’t have a solution. I’ve been falling too far behind, and I don’t know where to start on the piles of assignments I haven’t handed in. “You’re taking me off the team, aren’t you?” I ask miserably.
He laces his fingers together, rests his elbows on the desk, and gives me a long stare. I’m starting to think he’s reconsidering when he says, “I’m obligated to, for now. I’m sorry.”
I push my chair back and stand up to leave.
“Matthew, sit down,” Vankev says to my back. “We’re not done here.”
I grumble to myself but do as he says, dropping back down onto the chair.
He gives me a stern look, but it melts into something more sympathetic. He considers, and then turns his computer screen to face me. I see my grade average at the top of the screen, just barely keeping above fifty percent. Underneath is a list of math and English assignments, more of them highlighted in red than not.
“I know that this is overwhelming,” Vankev says. “It really is. But I’m here to help you get your grades up, not punish you when they fall. So, what do you need help with?”
I look at all the missing assignments in red, each marked at zero percent. “I don’t know where to start.”
Vankev nods and puts his computer monitor back where it belongs. “That I can work with. Are you able to cut back on your other obligations? It would benefit you to focus more time on school.”
“I’m not quitting my job, too,” I say.
“Fair enough,” Vankev says. “Look, I see how dedicated you are to your athletics, and you’ve done great on the basketball team over the last few years. I really don’t want to take that away from you.”
“But you’re going to.”
Vankev chuckles. “So, I’m going to make you a deal. You’re going to miss practice and this week’s game, and unfortunately, nothing can be done about that. But if you can afford me some of your time during lunch and after school every day this week, I can help you start working away at all of this,” he says, gesturing at the screen. “We can work out a starting point, and from there, I can keep you on track until these assignments are made up. I know you’re perfectly capable of doing the work, Matthew.”
“And if I get all the work done?” I ask, wondering what the other end of the deal is.
Vankev smirks. “If you show up and let me keep you on track, and it pays off – which I’m sure it will – you may be on track to go back to practice next week or the week after.” He knocks the knuckle of his pinky against the desk twice, punctuating his sentence. “Sound good?”
“I guess.”
“I appreciate the enthusiasm.” He leans back in his chair and folds his hands in his lap. I realize, after a moment, that he’s mirroring my own lazy posture. “I’d like to see you here at the beginning of the lunch break so we can work out a game plan. Then I’ll let you get back to your day, and I’ll see you after class to work on your missing homework. Can you give me an hour after school? Will that work?”
Now that I don’t have practice, my afternoon is freed right up. I nod, and Vankev grins.
“Okay,” he says and gestures to the door. “Don’t be late for class.” I get up once more and leave the office. “I’ll see you later,” Vankev calls after me.
Josh sidles up to me in the hall and matches my pace as I walk. “So?” he asks. He knows I got called into the office, and he knows why.
“I can’t play this week,” I mutter. I stop at my locker and pull it open, letting the door swing loudly into the one next to it.
“Are you kidding?” Josh exclaims. “He actually kicked you off the team?”
“For now.”
“This is such bullshit,” he says, rolling his eyes. “We need you.”
I shrug.
