Monsters
Our nerves were still on fire from being under the boardwalk, and from Matey biting that guy, and the night, for the first time I could remember, it was alive.
On the way home I kept smiling on accident and then rubbing it in with the side of my arm.
This year at school was going to be different, I knew. It didn’t matter what was going on at my house, or houses. I was going to be a different person. I was leaving all the stupid stuff behind me.
At my new granddad’s I sat at the table and watched game shows and ate some cold tater tots with warm brown ketchup — my grandmother had no idea that ketchup went in the fridge, not the cabinet — then went up to my room to cry with the door closed, and hit the mattress because I was being stupid but then tell myself to just get it all out now anyway, because I wasn’t going to let this happen again, ever.
I went to sleep on top of the covers in my beach clothes, and the last thing I remember thinking was Sid Wilkerson, driving across all of America to get back to Matey, so that, when I started hearing him bark, I thought it was just in my head.
But then it wasn’t.
I rose, parted the blinds of my room, and there on the beach, staked on a chain, was Matey, long strings of saliva arcing out from his mouth.
“I don’t think he likes me,” a voice said behind me.
I turned around slow.
It was the guy in the leather pants.
He was just standing there.
“You— you shouldn’t— ” I started to say, building up to a scream, but then he was close, his hand clamped over the lower part of my face, my back pressed into the wall, his eyes hot at mine.
His breath smelled like Matey’s.
“Wanna be number five?” he said, smiling.
I tried kicking him but it was like kicking a brick wall. My tears were collecting on the top of his hand. He lifted his hand, licked them off, his other hand already keeping me quiet.
“Your little girlfriend,” he said then. “She’s not here, is she?”
If my heart had been pounding before, it stopped now.
“Yeah,” the guy said, leaning back to study Matey.
“Don’t,” I told him. “She’s— you can’t…”
“You’d be surprised at what I can do, maybe,” he said back. “Want a little test drive?”
It took me a bit to hear what he was saying. I shook my head no and he smiled with his eyes.
“Then you know what to do,” he said.
I shook my head no, I didn’t — I didn’t I didn’t I didn’t — but he was already stuffing me deep enough into the closet that by the time I got out, he was gone.
And then I realized it was quiet for the first time since I’d woke.
I felt my way to the window.
Matey was gone.
I didn’t even stop to put my shoes on or care if my new granddad heard me. I went out the window, through the bushes, and crossed lawn after lawn, to get to Elaine first.
By the time I got to her street I could taste blood in my throat, feel it on the soles of my feet, but none of that mattered.
I jumped the rail to get to her front door, stabbed the doorbell button until Elaine’s dad answered, a golf club held low by his thigh.
I was crying and trying to talk and, finally, Elaine’s mom had to call my mom to get my new granddad’s phone number.
Nobody was mad, but nobody understood, either.
The whole time Elaine sat at the top of their carpeted stairs, studying me. Because she was in her nightgown, her dad wouldn’t let her come down.
“Sid Wilkerson gets home tomorrow,” I said, like my last hope.
Elaine’s mom patted me on the shoulder.
They thought — I don’t know what they thought. That I was lovesick, I guess. That I was twelve years old and had fallen for their daughter and now was making up things to keep them there.
Soon enough my grandmother was at the door in her robe, and was apologizing to Elaine’s parents, guiding me away, to the car with my new granddad sitting in the front seat.
“No problem, sport,” he said, reaching back to clap me on the leg like I was part of the club now. Like he understood, and would cover for me if needed.
I looked away, my breath too hitched up to answer any of my grandmother’s questions. After we’d making the wide turn home my new granddad didn’t accelerate like a normal human, but crept along at senior citizen speed. I just sat in the back seat, watching all the dark houses skid by into my past, thinking to myself that this was it, then, it was over, maybe Matey really was back in his pen at the Wilkersons’, and maybe I deserved the parents I had, maybe I deserved everything that had happened, even Elaine, the way she’d looked at me from the top of the stairs, her toes digging into the carpet. It was like, being a grade ahead, she understood too. Like she wanted to come down, let me explain it all to her.
And I would have listened, too, that’s the thing. All night.