Delicate Monsters (22 page)

He'd gone to sleep.

Sadie's gray cloud grew darker. By the time third period rolled around, she was in no mood to see Emerson Tate and his mopey grief and guilty glare. So instead of going to her Research Methods class, Sadie snuck up onto the school's roof to smoke. While she was there, she wrote to Roman for what would be the second-to-last time:

What did you do after?

She knew she didn't need to explain more than that.
After
meant after she'd hurt him. After the months she'd spent pushing him away and putting him down. After he'd kept coming back, no matter what she did or how horribly she treated him. After she decided to confront him, and finally ask what it was he saw in her, why he still wanted to be her friend.

“I don't like myself,” he told her. “And you don't like me, either. That has to mean something. I know it does.”

And wasn't that him giving her permission to hurt him? It felt as if he were handing over the reins of his own suicidal impulses. That was how Sadie understood it. Of course, it was how she wanted to understand it, because for her, toying with him and offering him hope every now and then that she might actually find value in him as a human being, before pulling it all out from under him, was pure pleasure. It was everything and more. So there'd been no reason
why
she'd done what she'd done.

There'd just been no reason not to.

So
after
meant after the dark January evening when she'd blindfolded Roman and driven him into the woods in the middle of a New York winter with only his Kentucky-weight jacket and left him alone with a map and a series of instructions. Instructions that would lead him to a secret party, she told him, part of an ancient Rothshire tradition. The lies had rolled off her tongue with grease-slicked ease. Only there was snow in the forecast that night, an icy blizzard, and the map she left led him far from any signs of life, ensuring that he ended up on the bank of a frozen river with the wind whipping, while the thermometer hovered close to the zero mark. He was out there all night until a helicopter spotted him the following morning. Disoriented and near death, he'd told the cops it had just been a prank. Never mind that Sadie wasn't even the one who'd gone looking for him or called the police; that had been the school when they realized he'd missed curfew. Still, Roman insisted, it was a joke between friends.

Nothing more.

After, Sadie had been brought up on criminal charges, but without his testimony against her, she got off with probation, expulsion from school, and an agreement for her mother to send her to the therapeutic wilderness camp. And after, Roman, who suffered serious medical complications as well as a severe mental breakdown, had gone home to his family and, as far as she knew, hadn't left his house to go outside in over eight months. Not once.

It took a while for him to reply. But he finally did.

That's the thing about after, Sadie. It's still happening, and there's no one answer to what you want to know. I'm living after. Every second. Every minute. Every day. But I'm living, and there's that. So here are a few of my immediate afters. Moments I'm not proud of:

After …

I wanted to die.

I wanted to kill myself.

I wanted to kill you.

Clearly, I didn't do any of those things, although I can see how for someone else, it would be easy to get stuck in one of those afters and not let go. But I moved on, because that's who I am. I realize this now, and I'm starting to be okay with it. For one, I'm a pacifist. I'm also afraid of death. But more than anything, what keeps me here on this earth and lets me live with my failures is the knowledge that I am a lamb among wolves.

I am not you.

Sadie clenched her jaw. She wrote back:

I did it to make you not want me. I did it to make you leave me the fuck alone.

He didn't respond. Sadie puffed harder on her cigarette and stared down into the narrow courtyard. Her heart stopped.

There, alone in the shadows beneath her, stood Dumpster Boy. She recognized his thin body and the way he hunched his back and his floppy blond hair that hung in his eyes and reached past the collar of his shirt. She couldn't believe he was actually here, but he was real, definitely real, and her instinct was to lean over and call to him with a lazy “hey, asshole” or something to let him know where she was, but in a way that didn't tell him how thrilled she was to see him. And she was, wasn't she?

Thrilled.

But Sadie stopped mid-lean. Miles had something gripped in his hands, an object long and dark. A gun, she realized with quick-rising horror. He's got a goddamn gun. Then something cold and awful wriggled through her, because when Sadie thought about the broken birds and the words he'd left in the abandoned cellar, and how close to her house he must have been hiding, all this time, it was clear he'd stolen one of her father's rifles. Right off the wall from his prized gun collection that he kept unlocked in his study. Of course Miles would know the guns were there. Of course Miles had seen them before.

riposte

thrust

touch
é

Miles the fencer, planning his attack.

All this time.

Of
course.

Sadie threw her cigarette on the ground and glanced at her phone.

Five minutes until the bell rang and the courtyard would be flooded. Her own Research Methods class would walk right into his line of fire.

“No,” she muttered. “No, no, no.”

*   *   *

Sadie ran as fast as she could, but she wasn't fast enough. The bell went off just as her foot slammed down on the first floor of the main building. Students crowded into the hall, but she shouted and pushed and shoved people out of the way, then kicked open the door that led into the courtyard.

Miles stood by the wall near a narrow strip of grass and an untended butterfly garden. His back was to her and somehow the saddest thing wasn't the way the oversized vintage rifle dwarfed his childlike hands or the cord of tension that streaked between his shoulder blades. It was the fact that he was wearing the same goddamn clothes he'd been wearing the last time she'd seen him. He'd sat in her car in that same dopey T-shirt with the picture of a fish on the back. It was also the day he'd told her he could see the future.

Was this what he'd seen?

Sadie bit back a cry. She didn't know. It didn't matter. The rifle was on his shoulder now. His finger on the trigger. He was scanning the crowd, looking for someone.

Who?

She sprinted hard. Launched at him from behind, knocking them both to the ground while she grabbed for the gun. He came back at her, swinging wildly. They grappled and rolled.

“Stop it,” she barked. “It's me, motherfucker! Me! I'm trying to help you. Like you asked me to! You can't do this. You
can't.
They'll kill you. Don't you get that?”

But no, Miles didn't get it, and no, he didn't stop. He fought Sadie like a treed cat, all fear and claws and fanged desperation. Soon people around them were screaming. About the gun. About her. About
him
. They realized who he was—the missing boy, the one they'd never cared about. But they cared now, because he was back from the dead.

Sadie reached for Miles again, but he shoved her with the butt of the rifle, slamming her head off the grass and snapping her jaw. Ears ringing, Sadie rolled to her right and scrambled forward into the butterfly garden. Wood chips scraped her hands, her knees, tangled in her hair, but her elbow bumped against something hard—a stake, a metal garden stake, the kind used to hold plants too weak to hold themselves. Sadie yanked it from the dirt. The stake was surprisingly heavy. She nearly dropped it. Held on. Had just gotten a good grip when Miles lunged for her. He grabbed her wrist. And twisted.

The pain was bright and shattering. Sadie writhed like a rattler, bucking this way and that. Finally wrenching free, she lashed out with the stake, thrusting as hard as she could until the sharpened tip made contact. It struck his cheek and sank deep.

Like a nightmare, blood exploded, spraying everywhere, onto the ground, on her. Miles cried out, the horrible anguish of a hurt boy, and grabbed for his face. There were tears in his eyes. The rifle tumbled to the ground.

Sadie picked it up and ran.

There was more screaming, more crowds, more people scattering in every direction. Sadie saw kids and teachers alike dropping to the ground, ducking for cover. And she heard voices shrieking at her to
stop
!

To
put it the hell down
!

To
give herself up before she got hurt!

Oh shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. They thought the gun was hers. They thought Miles had been trying to wrestle it away from her. That's what it looked like. There was blood all over her.
His
blood. Maybe they even thought she'd abducted him or something horrible, and now, like some God-given miracle, he was finally free.

Sadie ran faster. Fine. Good. Whatever. Let those fuckers think that. Let them believe in her badness and not in his. It was the truth, after all. She headed for her car on pure adrenaline instinct. Once there, she heaved the rifle onto the passenger's seat and slid behind the wheel. She started the engine. Threw the car in reverse. The tires squealed and left black marks. She gunned it out of there.

What the hell else was she going to do?

 

chapter forty-five

Was it possible to fall so far from greatness?

Was this, then, his destiny?

Emerson woke late Tuesday morning. He swung his feet to the floor and looked at the clock. It was ten thirty. That meant he was missing Research Methods, which was fine by him. He hadn't set his alarm on purpose, because he didn't plan on going to school today. In fact, the dreams Emerson had been having of late meant he didn't plan on doing anything anyone might expect from him.

What he did do, however, was take a long shower, his mind filling with steam as the hot spray peppered his body like sniper fire. After, he dressed in clean clothes taken from the laundry and kissed his still-sleeping mother on the cheek. Then he got into his dead father's '64 dynasty green Mustang and drove it out toward the highway.

He felt the sun on his face.

He felt the breeze in his hair.

He felt so very, very guilty.

Despite the guilt, or maybe because of it, Emerson kept driving, kept picking up speed. He absorbed the thrum of the engine and bump-press-roll of the pavement beneath his tires. A song came on the radio that made him feel sad, but in his sadness he also found a rich sense of satisfaction, one that ran both deep and profound.

This, he thought, this was the way a good-bye should be for someone like him.

Solitary.

Secretive.

Shameful.

Maybe a little bit liberating, too.

And it really was a good-bye. A cowardly one, sure, seeing as he was running with his tail between his legs, unwilling to answer for the things he'd done and the pain he'd caused. But the way Emerson saw it was like this: his family, his friends, they deserved better than him. Only better wasn't something he was willing or able to give. It never had been.

It never would be.

So he wouldn't be back. Not to Sonoma or the apartment. Not ever. He'd known that yesterday when he'd been with May. He'd known even before her eyes turned cold and hard, and she asked him to leave before she called the goddamn police and told them what he'd done.

But maybe he'd always known. Maybe the cool winds of fate and the flag-snap flutter of destiny had always been there, tickling his spine, whispering in his ear
it's gonna catch up with you boy one of these days the truth'll come back so you'd better go go go,
until finally, Emerson couldn't help but listen. There was only so much ruin the mind could rationalize. There was only so much badness that could be suppressed for so long. His guilt, on its own, was utterly meaningless—just a showy type of magic that changed nothing because changing nothing was the endgame all along. Words like
absolution
and
forgiveness
and
redemption
would never apply to someone like him. Those terms were just abstractions.

Names for what other people called the moments between darkness.

In the end it was simple: May was a good person. He was not. The way he'd fallen for her that day at the poolside party when she'd played badminton in the sun and he'd watched her breasts move and her brown skin glisten, that wasn't love. That was desperation, a sad last gasp at something he would never find.

Like Miles, Emerson could see the future, too.

Like Miles, it both awed and frightened him.

The Mustang raced out of town.

He never once looked back.

 

chapter forty-six

Oh, Miles, you dumb kid. You told me.

I should've known.

Sadie squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them again. Everything in her field of vision was shimmery and distant, the landscape whipping by in a hot blur. This moment was too surreal not to be real. City cops were riding right on her ass, a long train of them. The Doppler wail of their sirens filled her car and rattled her mind.

But she kept going. And going. She had no other choice. After peeling out of the school lot, she'd just about reached the main road when the first patrol car came up from behind, lights flashing, voice on the loudspeaker shouting at her to pull over. Should she have stopped then? Probably. Was it too late now? Definitely. Instead she'd hit the gas and run a red light, throwing her middle finger out the window with trademark defiance. Stupid. What a stupid thing to do. Now a whole fucking SWAT team was after her.