Man Made Boy (20 page)

“How?”

“I don’t know, but it’s got something to do with sound. Maybe she’s hitting some frequency that temporarily disorients them or something. That’s just a guess, though.”

We sat there for a moment, catching our break. Liel picked up a twig and stuck it deep into the soft dirt. The ground was thawing. Spring was here.

“The cops are looking for us, aren’t they?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“We probably won’t be able to catch a bus out of here now, will we?”

“It looks like we just blew up a building to escape, so they probably think we’re terrorists or something. They’re going to be watching just about everything for a little while.”

“So…” She looked up at me. “What are we going to do?”

“We’re in over our heads. We need to ask for help.”

“No! We can’t go back to The Show! If I go back, my mom will…” She shook her head. “You don’t know what trowe moms are like. And anyway, I made it this far. I’m not going back now.”

“Okay. Well, there’s one other person who might be able to help us. But first you’ll need to dose up on glamour so he doesn’t freak out.”

Two hours later, we were crossing the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in the back of a pickup truck, covered in random junk
and a blue tarp. Ralphie hadn’t even looked surprised when we showed up at his doorstep and I asked him to help us find a way out of the city unnoticed. He’d just looked at Liel in her human glamour, sighed, patted me on the shoulder, and said:

“Bonita y loca
, Frankie. ¿
Comprende?”

I CLIMBED INTO the Dumpster a little after midnight and sifted through the garbage for anything that looked like it wouldn’t kill me to eat it. As I picked up a half-eaten turkey sandwich and tried to decide if I could swallow it down before I gagged, I thought to myself,
It’s amazing what you can get used to
.

Once we’d reached New Jersey, Ralphie had just dropped us off on the side of the road. I’d asked him to. He had a family that depended on him, and the last thing I wanted was for him to get mixed up in all of this.

We’d tried to settle into one of the small suburban towns in New Jersey, staying in a sleazy little motel because everything else required a background check. It was a lot harder to get work there without some proof of citizenship. I finally found a job at a construction site, and it looked like things might work out. But then Liel ran out of glamour, and she was trapped again. One night, she stepped out of our cramped motel room for a few moments just to get some fresh air. Someone saw her and started yelling. Then someone started shooting, and we were on the run again.

That’s how, broke, starving, and exhausted, we ended up at a big rest stop, or “travel plaza,” on the New Jersey Turnpike.
It was crowded, but that wasn’t really a problem because most people weren’t really paying attention. They stumbled through the parking lot and into the building, just wanting to go to the bathroom, grab a coffee, maybe some food, and get back out on the road to continue on to wherever they were going. And with all those people, there was a lot of waste. Once we were able to get over the initial disgust of picking through other people’s trash, we realized that we weren’t going to starve. And it was warm enough now that we could sleep outside, hidden in bushes behind the building. And for a few months, things were, if not okay, at least stable.

But lately, I’d noticed that Liel was changing. She hardly ever talked anymore. Instead, she snuck onto the travel plaza roof and just sat up there at night, glaring down at the humans who came and went. Occasionally, she’d sneak up behind one of them in the parking lot and scare them so that they’d drop their food. Then she’d snatch what she could and run. It was risky, unnecessary, and, well, just kind of mean.

Tonight, as I looked around the parking lot for her, thinking I might share my half turkey sandwich and an unopened bag of chips, I saw her creeping up behind a blonde teenage girl who looked kind of like Liel did when she had glamour. Liel got up right behind her and snarled. The girl let out a shriek and spun around, dropping her fast-food bag. But this time, Liel didn’t snatch the food and run. She didn’t even seem to notice the food. Instead, she stared at the girl. The girl looked terrified, unable to move. No wonder. Liel didn’t look like a lean and graceful dancer anymore. She was hunched forward, with long spindly limbs that stuck out around her bloated belly. She looked really…trollish.

She took a step closer to the girl, her mouth open and a little drool starting to leak from one corner.

“Liel.” I stepped out from behind a car where she could see me.

She turned and hissed at me. Then she sprinted around the back of the building to the Dumpsters.

I turned to the girl. “Sorry,” I said.

And then the girl screamed. Like a Hollywood starlet in a bad horror flick. In a way, I felt like I’d been bracing for that scream since the first day I went out into the human world. But it still hurt like hell. Well, at least I’d proved Shaun wrong about that part. He’d said I wasn’t a real monster, just a robot. But only a real monster could produce that kind of scream in someone. Not that it gave me much comfort. The sound seemed to chase me as I ran away.

I found Liel back by the bushes where we usually slept. She sat cross-legged in the dirt, sharpening her claws with a rock.

“Why are you doing that?” I tried to sound casual.

“Bored.” Her tone was flat and harsh.

“Look. I think it’s time for us to move on. Somewhere else.”

“Where?” She didn’t look up from her rock.

“I don’t know. I was thinking maybe we could find a big forest somewhere. Live off the land, you know?”

“Real forests don’t exist anymore. There’s only this. More of this. Endless miles of this.”

“Come on, Liel. You don’t know that.”

“I know.”

“But—”

Then she got up and just walked away. She did that a lot lately. I used to follow her, until I figured out that just pissed her off more. So now I let her go sulk up on the roof.

I knew she was miserable. I was, too. I just didn’t know how to fix it.

ONCE I FINISHED dinner, I decided to wash up in the bathroom. I tried not to do that too often. The customers at the rest stop didn’t pay that much attention, but I was a memorable guy even with my hood up, and I was afraid that eventually the employees would start to catch on. But tonight I was feeling kind of low, and a splash of hot water on my face sounded like just the thing to make me feel better.

Now that I lived most of the time outdoors, the hard fluorescence inside made me wince. It was right around sunrise, so there weren’t a ton of people in there. Just a few early risers lined up for Starbucks or fast-food breakfast. I moved quickly to the bathroom.

I turned on the faucet and let the water get really hot before I washed my face, hair, and neck. It felt as good as when I was back home and I used to stand under the shower until Mom yelled at me for taking too long. I leaned my head over and watched water drip from my hair into the sink. I stared at the line of dirt on the white basin, and I thought,
God, I must stink
. I couldn’t decide which was worse. That I smelled, or that I was so far gone I couldn’t actually tell anymore.

I stared at myself in the mirror, dirty, ragged, my stitches frayed. No wonder that girl screamed. I would have screamed at me, too. I understood now just how ugly I was to humans, and even other monsters, since it was obvious Liel never really had any interest in me. I needed to get used to the idea of always being alone, unless I wanted to do what my dad did. God, that was really messed up now that I thought about it. My dad was
so ugly, nobody could stand to be around him, not even his creator. But misery loves company, I guess, because he forced Victor to make him a bride so the two of them could be ugly together. And then after a while, they decided the family wasn’t
quite
ugly enough, so they went ahead and made me.

And then for some reason I just started to cry. I tried to keep it quiet, swallowing the noise, but that hurt, which made me cry even more. I slumped down to the ground and covered my mouth with my arm to muffle the sound until I finally calmed down.

Eventually, I got it together, cleaned myself up all over again, and headed out into the hallway. I was halfway to the exit when I heard a human female voice.

“Hey, what’s you’re name?”

I assumed she was talking to someone else, so I kept going. But it came again.

“Hey, wait up!”

In my peripheral vision, I saw that someone had caught up with me. I still kept walking.

“I know you live here,” she said.

I stopped. I stared at the door. Close, but not quite close enough.

“I’m not going to tell on you or anything,” she said. “I just want to know who you are.”

I turned to her. She was older than me, maybe late twenties. She had olive skin, long chestnut-brown hair, and dark lipstick. She had thick eyelashes and warm brown eyes that seemed to melt when she smiled. And she was smiling.

“I’m Samantha.” She held out her hand. She had long nails painted pink.

“Uh, Frank.” I awkwardly shook her hand, so glad I’d just washed mine.

“So, are you like a teen runaway or something?”

I almost laughed at that. “Wow.”

“Sorry if that was too blunt.” She suddenly looked concerned. “I didn’t mean—”

“No, that’s okay. I’ve just…never really thought about it that way. It seems so cliché, you know? But I guess, technically, it’s true. I
am
a teen runaway.”

“Where are you from?”

“New York.”

“And you came out here? You know, most runaway teens go
to
the city, not away from it.”

“Right, well sure, if you want to just be like everyone else.”

She smiled at that. “So why’d you leave?”

“Oh, umm…” This was getting into territory I probably shouldn’t talk about. For all I knew, there was a warrant for my arrest in New York.

“Hey, you uncomfortable in here?” she asked suddenly.

“Yeah,” I admitted.

“You want to go sit on the bench out front? I have smoothies.” She held up a small, cardboard tray with two smoothies.

“Uh…”

“You don’t have to take it. I understand. Don’t take candy from strangers and things like that.”

“Trust me, I’m not worried you’re going to kidnap me.” She looked like she weighed about ninety pounds.

“So what then?”

“Well, just…why are you giving it to me?”

“What’s my angle, you mean?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Totally leveling with you? I’m studying to get my masters in social work.”

Before I even thought about it, I took a step back.

“God, why do people always get uncomfortable when I say that? First of all, I’m
not
a social worker yet. And I swear I’m not going to try to make you do anything like go to a foster home or something. I just…I don’t know, I was hoping we could talk. Maybe I could learn something.”

“Learn about today’s troubled youth?”

She smiled again. “Exactly.”

“Well, I’m not really a typical teen. But okay, if that’s all you want, I’ll take your smoothie bribe, Samantha.”