Delicate Monsters Read online

  A rush of cold air hit him. It smelled like spiders. He stood on the edge of the cement stairs that led down into the blackness, and a rare shudder of surety ran through him because he suddenly knew. He knew.

  Sometimes to end things, you had to go back to the beginning.

  Only it wasn’t his end he was facing.

  It didn’t have to be.

  With this revelation, both freeing and true, a puff of fear floated from his shoulders, like the tiniest spark of earthly magic. Miles stood tall as he took his first step into the dark cellar. Then the next. He kept going and going, descending deep into the earth.

  Wolves to the lamb, the wind whispered as it followed, swirling at his feet in its twisting, taunting way.

  But sometimes, he whispered back, “Lambs to the wolf.”

  chapter twenty-eight

  Where was Miles?

  It was a different day but Emerson and May were spending the dwindling hours of their afternoon together again, this time at his apartment as a result of her inviting herself over. Emerson thought he was okay with that, for the most part—his mother was working late—but he had no idea where his brother was.

  Which was both weird and totally normal.

  “Do you ever go to his grave?” May asked. She was standing by the desk in the room he shared with Miles, and her eyes were sad. He’d been telling her about his father. About how he’d died and how he missed him.

  “Nah. Not really. My mom doesn’t like to go. Last time I went I was thirteen. I went by myself after school one day, and I got really angry. Told him I hated him and everything. Stupid. It was stupid of me.” Emerson felt twitchy, which meant words were spilling from his mouth like air. He liked having her here, he really did, but he couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that his apartment was gross. And claustrophobic. And didn’t have air conditioning. And smelled like bad pizza, thanks to the restaurant next door. It was hard to relax with those kinds of thoughts spiraling through his head. She’ll see through me, he thought. She’ll read my mind.

  She’ll know.

  Only May didn’t seem to know. That was the thing. She had no idea. She just walked around and touched a few items that were on Miles’s side of the room, running her finger along a stack of books, including a worn copy of Watership Down and a tattered paperback titled Microbe Hunters. She paused to inspect an old charcoal drawing of dead birds, something Miles had done as a child and hung on the wall but had never taken down. It was creepy as hell, and Emerson asked him once what it was about.

  “I saw it,” Miles said dreamily. “I saw it in my head, and it came true.”

  Emerson turned his attention back to May, steeped in the way her presence pooled around the room like liquid. The way the fading sun lit her skin with a rosy glow. It was like she was from another century. Another world.

  “What was he like, your dad?” she asked.

  “He was a good guy. That’s why I was so mad, I guess. But I mean, he could be kind of a hardass, too, sometimes.”

  “Were you close?”

  “Sure. Sort of. I mean, my brother was really tight with him. I’m more of a mama’s boy. But my dad, he was outgoing, you know? That’s what I remember most. Always wanted to tell you everything when he was really into something. Like cars. Or horse racing. Or brewing beer. Once it was snowflakes.”

  “Snowflakes?”

  Emerson nodded, then sat down on his own bed. Wiped his hands on his jeans. “Miles had this book when we were kids, and our dad used to read it to us. Over and over. It was about this guy a long time ago who set out to photograph snowflakes. He wanted to prove that they were all different, you know? Unique. But I guess it’s not an easy thing to do, taking pictures of snow. Especially back then, with those old cameras: they got hot, melted all the flakes. But this guy was obsessed. He dedicated his whole life to the snowflakes, spent all his money on different equipment, just to get those images. Just to prove they existed.”

  “What happened to him?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t remember. I think he got pneumonia and died.”

  “That’s depressing, Emerson.”

  “Most things about my dad are. In hindsight, at least.”

  “My cousin killed herself,” May said. “Last year.”

  He looked up at her, at the shadows falling across her lovely face. “I’m sorry. That sucks.”

  “She was only twenty-two. She wanted to be a doctor, and she’d just gotten into med school. Harvard.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I know. She took a bunch of pills when she knew her parents weren’t going to be home. They live out in Illinois, near Chicago. Her mom was the one who found her. The thing is, her family got the coroner to say it was an accidental overdose on her death certificate. Because they were embarrassed, I guess. Or ashamed. But I know she did it on purpose.”

  Emerson shivered. Ashamed. He hated that word. To him, it brought up images of red-faced kids and scolding parents. Of his brother’s own whipped-dog cower. But was shame the reason Emerson had been lied to about his father’s suicide? Worse, was it the reason he’d never asked anyone about it, even after he’d found out the truth?

  “How do you know she did it on purpose?” he asked May.

  “I know because she’d tried before. She told me about it the last time we saw each other. She’d taken pills twice, and they didn’t work. She even told me why. But I didn’t tell anyone. And now … now I can’t tell.” She turned and met his gaze. “You’re the first person I’ve talked to about it, actually.”

  Emerson got up from the bed and walked over to her. Put his head on her shoulder. Held her close.

  She stroked his back.

  “Don’t hate your dad, Em,” she whispered. “He made a mistake doing what he did, and he can’t ever take that back. It’s a sad thing, the not being able to take it back. It’s the worst.”

  He kissed her.

  *

  Ten minutes later they were on his bed fooling around. Her skirt was up and his jeans were down, and Emerson wasn’t worried anymore about the heat or the pizza smell or how claustrophobic his room was. He thought maybe this was it, and she was his, and all the things he’d been worried about really weren’t that important in the grand scheme of things. Wrong was wrong, sure, but if no one knew about the wrong thing he’d done, what was the harm?

  But then May had to go and say, “So did Sadie send you those pictures?”

  And Emerson went from feeling turned on to feeling like the worst person in the world. The kind of guy who’d stopped caring when his little brother got sick or hurt, because he was sick and hurt all the time. The kind of guy who used the girl he liked in ways that demeaned her. The kind of guy who cut the legs off frogs and the heads off birds and—

  “She doesn’t have any damn pictures,” he muttered under his breath.

  “What was that?”

  “No,” he said. “Not yet.”

  “She’s funny, that girl. Her sense of humor is dry.”

  “I didn’t know Sadie had a sense of humor.”

  “Oh, she does. She makes me laugh. Did you know her dad makes documentaries? From all over the world. We watched one in history last year. It was about Huaorani teenagers.”

  “I don’t like her,” Emerson said plainly, and more than anything, he wanted to kiss May on the mouth again and have her kiss him back, but now the guilt was spilled between them, like an ocean. And he still couldn’t swim.

  “Em?” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Why me?”

  He stared at her. “What?”

  May lay on her back, arms stretched above her head as she stared at the ceiling, which was made of that terrible popcorn material, all gaudy and cheap, dotted with specks of fake gold. “I was wondering why you liked me. Other girls like you, you know. You play sports. You could have anyone. Some cute blond cheerleader, maybe.”

  “Forget blond cheerleaders. I like you. You’re prettier, anyway.”
<
br />   “Oh, come on. White guys don’t think like that.”

  Emerson’s heart beat faster. What did she mean? She was prettier. That was the truth. Cheerleaders were girls like Trish Reed, beauty marred by pettiness and snobbery. Besides, desire wasn’t about thinking. It was about wanting. What you couldn’t have. What you were driven to conquer. “Well, maybe those other guys, maybe they’re racist or something.”

  “Oh, hush.” May turned and pressed a finger to his lips. “Everyone’s racist. Me, you, everybody. That’s just how it is.”

  “You really believe that?”

  “I know that. It’s the world we live in. And knowing that’s the only way to change things. Pretending to be something you’re not’s the worst, don’t you think? If all the pretending does is trick you into believing you’re different than who you really are.”

  Emerson didn’t answer. Maybe it was the world they lived in—his own mom proved that fact—but he didn’t think it was up to him to change things. That was something other people did. People who cared. People who wanted to be remembered for their actions.

  May moved her finger down from his lips, running it along his jaw, his neck, his chest. “But there are white guys out there who make a fetish out of being with girls like me, you know? The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice. I don’t like that. I don’t want you to want me that way.”

  “I don’t want you that way. I mean, maybe I am racist or something. Hell, I don’t know. I’ve definitely done things in my past that I’m not proud of. But what you said, about a fetish, that’s not how I feel.”

  “Good,” she said, smiling.

  “The sweeter the juice?” he asked.

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “Is it true?”

  “That’s for you to find out,” she said. Then, “Actually, it doesn’t taste that sweet to me. More salty.”

  Emerson’s jaw dropped. “You’ve tasted it?”

  May blushed. “I mean, just myself, you know. I was curious.”

  “I’m curious, too,” he said, which was true. He was very curious. But he was also relieved that he now had a way to give to May without taking. He still owed her, didn’t he? After what he’d done. He owed her and he wanted them to be even, so he pushed her gently on her back, and he gave and gave and gave.

  But the whole time, while he was busy doing all that guilty giving, Emerson couldn’t help thinking, Where’s Miles? He should definitely be home by now.

  Where the hell could he be?

  part 3

  The Hunter

  “Sometimes I think evil is a tangible thing—with wave lengths, just as sound and light have.”

  —Richard Connell, The Most Dangerous Game

  chapter twenty-nine

  *

  Sadie,

  Here are thirteen facts about my relationship with Charlie Burns:

  1. Our fathers served together in the Marines.

  2. We were roommates fall semester of our freshman year. This was at Charlie’s request. He didn’t want to be friendless when he got to Rothshire.

  3. I have Tourette syndrome. Maybe you knew that. Maybe you didn’t. I never told you. It’s a lot better than it used to be and if people don’t figure it out on their own, it’s not something I like to bring up.

  4. Charlie knew.

  5. He called me a defect and a freak and a fucking retard for the entire five months we lived together.

  6. I took it, and I laughed at every single joke he made at my expense.

  7. Some of my tics I try only to do in private. They’re embarrassing.

  8. Charlie knew that, too. He set up a camera in our room and filmed me and showed it to everyone at school.

  9. He got suspended.

  10. I changed rooms.

  11. He blamed me for the suspension and never let up. All year he harassed me in various ways, including, but not limited to, attacking me in the gym locker room, pulling my shorts down, and telling everyone I had a small dick.

  12. I spent most of the summer between freshman and sophomore year being treated for anxiety and depression.

  13. Sophomore year I met you.

  —R

  *

  *

  Dumpster Boy didn’t show up in fencing class the next day. Or the day after that. He didn’t show up anywhere, according to the talking heads on all the local news stations and the voicemail left by the school district superintendent.

  Fifteen-year-old Miles Tate had vanished.

  It happened on Wednesday, precisely two days after he was beat up on the street and left for dead by some unidentified boys, and precisely five days after he was hospitalized for a seizure of unknown origin. The last place he’d been seen was his math class, where he’d asked to use the restroom and never returned. The mystery surrounding his middle-of-the-day disappearance stirred a whirlwind of rumors, as did the fact that no one really knew him. Miles was described by everyone—classmates, teachers, neighbors, total strangers—as a quiet kid, a loner, a bullying victim, and, possibly, as the most salacious rumors went, an abused child. He’d run away, they said. He’d been kidnapped. He’d been murdered. He’d had a brain hemorrhage and died alone. He’d been taken by space aliens or hit by a train. Sadie didn’t know him well enough to disagree with any of this, except the space alien thing because that was just fucking stupid, and seriously, why would they take him? But she hated the way they talked about Dumpster Boy on the news. It made her cheeks puff up and her head spin with thoughts of violence, because they talked about him like he was an object of pity, not a real person who was sad and screwed up, but also unique, the way a snowflake was: beautiful and strange and complex when you saw it up close, no matter how much you resented the fact that it was falling from the damn sky and ruining your whole day.

  Miles was also Emerson Tate’s little brother. Sadie knew that now, too. Clearly there was some weird shit floating around in the Tate gene pool. And while she couldn’t conjure up any more of a memory of young Miles, just that brief flash of a waifish child, clinging to the legs of his mother like a parasite, all the connections between the three of them felt complicated in the same way that Roman’s emails to Sadie felt complicated.

  Sadie hated that. Complications. They were so useless, the way they made things seem important through mere coincidence or connection. Sadie didn’t believe in finding meaning in things if the meaning wasn’t obvious. The truth didn’t get to be what you made of it. It just was. Anyone who believed otherwise reminded her of the hormonally challenged American girls at her Parisian boarding school, the ones with the blue eyes and the trust funds, who liked to look her up and down when they heard her last name and ask “but where are you from?” when Sadie said she was American, too. They were the ones who forever blathered on with pointless stories about how they just missed getting into a car accident, by like, a second and wasn’t that wild? and didn’t things like that, like, really make you think?

  People like that didn’t understand there was no almost when it came to fate.

  People like that were ones Sadie knew she could lie to and get away with it.

  Always.

  *

  When Sadie first met Emerson Tate, however, she didn’t lie. She was nine and he was ten, and she had no reason to. If anything, he was the one who lied, even if he didn’t know it. But she knew things about him even before his mother had shown up to tend to Sadie’s maternal grandfather, who was dying of brain cancer in the bedroom right next door to Sadie’s. Her mom had had to give up her duties at the winery she’d founded in order to care for him, because her deadbeat brothers couldn’t be bothered to help. They were too busy tending to their polo games and budding alcoholism. Hiring a hospice nurse should’ve been a good thing, considering, but Sadie’s dad had done it without asking first. That meant serious fallout in the Su household. The revelation that he was bringing in one with children had set off a ground war.

  “He’s my father,” her mother hissed. “My fa
ther hates children. All of them. And you know what? So do I.”

  Sadie’s father had been firm. “She’s excellent. And she needs the work. She’s Mark’s widow, L. They need help. God knows we can afford to give it.”

  “But why the boys?”

  “They have nowhere else to go. But they’ll be fine here. Plenty of room for kids to play and stay out of your way. I promise. Plus Sadie will help keep them busy, isn’t that right?” He’d looked over to where she stood in the kitchen doorway, watching them closely.

  Sadie gave a quick shrug, small shoulders grazing her pigtails. “Maybe Grandpa will die soon so they’ll go away faster.”

  Her mom had fled the room then, crying, and her father crouched down on his knees and beckoned her over.

  Sadie went to him, dancing into his arms. That champagne thrill of victory bubbled inside of her.

  “That wasn’t nice,” he told her sternly. His hands smelled of cigar smoke and fresh rosemary from the garden.

  “I wasn’t trying to be nice,” she shot back.

  “I understand that. But you know, a famous priest once said, ‘The things that we love tell us what we are.’”

  “So?”

  “You love cruelty, Sadie. That’s not a good thing.”

  She’d twisted in his grasp. Pinched at his neck and left a mark.

  “I mean it,” he said. “You can’t live this way, hurting people the way you do. I won’t let you.”

  “Who’s Mark?” she asked. “What happened to him?”

  Her father’s eyes grew soft, sad. “Mark Tate. He used to work on my car. He was the nicest guy. Had his troubles, but he was a real family man. He died last fall.”

  “How?”

  “Do you know what suicide is? Do you know what that word means?”

  “Yes. It’s what Iris Chang did. She shot herself in her car. Pop pop pop.”

  He tightened his jaw. “How do you know about that?”

  “I heard you talking about it on the telephone. You wanted to make a film about her. So that’s what this Mark did? He shot himself?”