The Game of Boys and Monsters (2 page)

“Hap Marsh,” said Evy that night as she painted little monsters of her own design on each one of my toes, “is a werewolf.”

“Okay, so which one do you like?” I asked, and Evy looked up from my toes with a smirk. “Evy . . .”

“Do I have to choose?”

I loved Evy, but when it came to boys, she could be mean.

Like, with Malcolm. I saw him after Evy dropped him flat, how he wandered around, stunned and put down, for weeks. I tried not to stare, to rub it in—he would know that I knew, since I was Evy's friend—but I ran into him once in the halls, walked right around a corner and into him so I couldn't get away fast enough.

He put his hands on my shoulders to steady me, and when I started to duck away, he tightened his grip and said, “Wait, Les, don't go.”

For a millisecond, the thought teased me that he was going to say, “You were the one, Les, not Evy. I got all mixed up. You were the one.”

But he just said, “What's wrong with her?”

“What do you mean?”

“Evy. Why is she like that? So cold?”

Evy wasn't cold—not my Evy, not to me. My tongue felt thick in my mouth, my lips dull. “I don't know what to tell you,” I'd said, twisting out of his grasp.

I took my toes back from Evy. “Watch out,” she said, “or you'll smudge my manticore.”

The monster on my left big toe looked more like the Blob to me, but I knew better than to complain.

“I would hate to see the Marsh boys end up like Malcolm,” I said, “or worse, end up fighting each other.”

“Wouldn't that be a howl,” Evy said, “no pun intended, if I got them to fight over me? Wait! That's the new game.”

“That's in stories,” I said. “Nobody really wants that. That's not a good thing to want.”

“Listen to you,” Evy said, “all protective. Which one do
you
like?”

To tell the truth, neither one of the Marsh boys really did it for me.

Or maybe that's a lie. . . . Maybe they did, both of them, but that only magnified my unease. There was something too dead-on about them. They were the opposite of good on paper. They were good in the flesh, right here and now, but something about them felt . . . off.

One night, Evy and I were supposed to meet up for movies and “margaritas”—Evy's mom mixed them special for us with “barely enough tequila to start a fire” (though Evy often spiked ours with more after her mom's full-strength fire-starters knocked her out for the night).

I showed up at Evy's, and the house was dark, no one home. Even the streetlamp on the corner of Evy's lot was out.

My feet—one poised on my bike pedal, the other on the pavement—weighed like anchors, incapable of movement, while the rest of me might float away. What if something had happened to Evy? To her mom and whoever her mom's guy of the month was? What if Evy's dad had come back in town and gone into “one of his fits,” as Evy's mom called them?

A fast heartbeat should heat a person up, right, but mine seemed to press all my blood into a tight ball of fear in my chest, leaving nothing to warm the rest of me. Cold nausea rolled through me.

Then I saw the shadows on the lawn. Their shapes, so different one from the other, gave them away: the Marsh boys, standing side by side. Jack slouched with his hand in his pocket, and Hap had his arms folded back behind his head like he was stretching.

They didn't move or speak, and I thought about pedaling—fast, all my weight—not back toward my own neighborhood, which would mean going up a mild hill, but down, past Evy's place, and on and on, too fast to catch.

That's when Jack said, “Hi, Les,” and the spell broke. I started to shake, which was actually an improvement, a release.

“Hi,” I said, swallowing my silly fear, trying to sound nonchalant.

“Nice bike,” Hap said, and I swung my leg over the bar and let the bike fall to the lawn like always. I stepped toward them, the damp grass tickling and chilling my ankles beneath my capri pants.

“What's with the lights?” I asked.

Hap shrugged. “There's a blown transformer or something.”

“Maybe a tree took down a line,” Jack said, but it sounded like the kind of thing a person is supposed to say when the power goes out, not a real thing he thought might have happened.

“Where's Evy?”

They both shrugged, and Hap said, “Beats me. We've been waiting half an hour or more.” He stubbed his toe into the lawn, kicking up a spray of dirt and grass, to show what he thought about that.

“Okay, well, she was supposed to hang out with me tonight.”

“Us too,” Hap said.

Jack smiled in his cool way. “She said you wouldn't mind.”

“I don't mind,” I said. “No, that's great.” But I didn't believe my own voice, so why should they?

“Let's wait on the roof,” Jack said. “She'll love that.”

“On the roof?” My words were slow, dumb, because part of me didn't want to catch up.

“Yeah, we hang out up there sometimes,” Jack said.

“Just the three of us,” said Hap.

I wanted to ask, When? Why, without me? Say, that's impossible, because Evy and I were together almost every night, so what, had they been showing up after I left, keeping Evy up and having fun without me?

She'd looked wan over the past few weeks. She'd lost something, a little weight maybe, so that her skin hugged the bones of her face with a translucent sheen, and some of her Evy, her spark, was gone. I'd thought her mom might be keeping her up nights, and that she didn't want to talk about it because . . . I imagined all sorts of reasons why.

The door creaked open behind the boys. Evy stood in the foyer, backlit by a single lamp. Her pale nightgown picked up the light and let it through, so we could see the shape of her. She seemed to glow.

“Evy?” I heard myself say because I couldn't be sure for a second who or what she was. Stupid, but that's what was there.

“What are you all doing having fun without me?” she said.

Evy flicked on the area lights. I blinked against their harshness, but everything looked more itself in the light. The sky overhead was cloudy, ready to drop, so of course it blocked out the stars. The dead streetlamp was just dead.

“You okay?” Hap said, taking my arm. I actually leaned on him a little as we walked up the front steps. He burned hot, like a furnace, and that felt nice against the shivers that had taken over me. I let his hand at my back push me up and inside. Hap followed me through the door and held it open for Jack, who slipped through and closed it behind him.

“Why aren't you dressed?” I whispered to Evy as I pulled away from Hap's sphere to stand beside her.

She looked down at her nightgown. “I thought it might work as a dress,” she said, and when I didn't laugh or smile, she got irritated. “Kidding.” Her voice sounded hoarse, and the flesh under her eyes looked almost bruised. She covered a yawn. “I was sleepy,” she said, “so I took a nap. Is that allowed?”

“The house was so dark, I thought something was wrong.”

“Mom went out with some girlfriends she met at the club. She forgot to turn the lights on, or she left before the sun went down? I don't know.”

“How long were you asleep?”

“Worrywart,” she said, and leaned over to kiss me on the cheek, but she didn't answer me.

That night, Evy never changed out of her nightgown. She lounged, held court while the Marsh boys passed an enormous bottle of Jim Beam back and forth between them—Hap had pulled it out of his backpack like that was a normal thing to carry around. Evy and I took what she called “lady sips” from a pair of tiny juice glasses. “Drinking straight from the bottle's a recipe for date rape,” she deadpanned, and Hap laughed so hard he choked.

We were all such good friends, we could joke about rape?

Jack pursed his lips as if he at least found Evy's joke distasteful—maybe because it'd force him to think twice about trying to make something happen between them that night.

Nothing happened, I don't think.

I slept over, sharing Evy's bed, and the Marsh boys crashed on the sofa and chair in the little sitting room that made up what Evy called her “basement suite.”

Once during the night, I woke up cold. The bed was empty, covers kicked to the floor, and the high window beside Evy's bed was open, letting chilly air wash in.

“Evy?” I whispered toward the dark opening that led to the sitting room, wanting to get up and check if she was there, but wanting more not to walk in on Evy and one of the Marsh boys in a private moment.

Maybe she had taken one of them outside, but then why bother with the window? Evy's mom probably hadn't even come home, and she wouldn't hear Evy walking out the front door anyway—probably wouldn't even hear if Evy set off the alarm.

I was about to climb out of bed, to shut the window, to search for her—I wasn't sure—when Evy appeared in the archway that led to the sitting room.

“What?” she said, a reproach.

“I woke up and you weren't here.”

“Can't a person use the bathroom?” Evy said, sounding irritated again. Evy never got irritated with me. She shambled over to the window, stood on the chair that I only then noticed had been pushed up below it, and used all her weight to tug the window shut.

Then she rolled back in beside me and pulled the comforter up over both of us. “Don't fret, Les. All is well.”

The way she said it suggested I knew what to fret about, that I knew what might not be “all well,” but I couldn't bring myself to ask her.

As soon as Evy was back in the bed, I didn't want the comforter. She brought so much body heat of her own I actually started sweating, but when her foot brushed against my leg, one of those awkward touches you're not supposed to mention when you're sharing a bed with a friend, her skin was ice-cold, and I shivered again. Was I getting sick?

I wanted to look in the room past the arch, to see if the Marsh boys were still there. One, or both of them?

Way off in the woods, far below Evy's house, something howled.

Another time, several weeks later, the Marsh boys showed up at my house.

It was a Saturday, stormy and leaden, the occasional shudder of thunder and lightning the only thing bringing life to the gray day. Evy had said we could hang out later but she had to run errands with her mom in the afternoon. I wasn't expecting company.

I was reading, a paranormal romance, the kind Evy and I both loved but had issues with too. Why were the girls always so eager to give up all their power to the guys? Why were the sexiest parts the ones where the guys didn't listen to what the girls said they wanted, where they took control?

I'd been having dreams, dreams that Evy said were about sex. “If you do it,” she said, “you won't be so scared of it. Everything will calm down.”

But the dreams didn't seem to be about sex to me. They seemed to be about death.

“Same thing,” Evy said. “Haven't you ever heard of
le petit mort
? It's an orgasm, in French: ‘little death.'”

But there wasn't anything orgasmic in my dreams about snakes and wolves.

In one, I found my lawn covered in writhing snakes—too many to step around, as if the blades of grass themselves had turned into serpents, each one eager to wrap around my ankle and poison me.

In another, a pack of wolves chased me to a clearing in a thick wood. They were starving, saliva dripping from their mouths. In waking life, I loved wolves—but these saw me as food.

I'd wake up kicking at my sheets when they lunged.

On that gray afternoon, I'd reached a scary part in my book, a part where the heroine was about to enter the lair of the vampire who might have a secret reason to want her dead, or in bed—in these books the two did seem to go together—when the hand slammed against the window behind my head.

I dropped the book and shrieked, actually shrieked, but what followed was laughter: Hap's crowing and musical, Jack's sharp and gasping.

My little Norwich terrier, Grizzbee, came running and barking, his hair raised.

I hid my book under a pillow, hoping they hadn't been reading over my shoulder at the window, and tried to calm Grizzbee down.

They were waving and walking over to the door of the den like they took it for granted that I would move to let them in, like it was the most normal thing for them to be visiting. Could it be possible we'd made plans and I'd forgotten? No, of course not. Making plans with the Marsh boys—I'd remember that.

When I opened the door, Grizzbee growled and skittered from side to side. “I'm sorry, I— He's usually friendly.”

Hap reached for Grizzbee, who snapped at his hand.

“Grizzbee! No!” I said, and told them to hang on. I collected his spasmodic little body, dumped him in the laundry room, and shut the door, but he didn't stop barking.

“Sorry,” I said, feeling self-conscious and irritated.

They were both drenched, dripping on the mat on the back porch.

Hap said, “What a cutie,” pointing toward Grizzbee's quieter but no less insistent grumbles, and stepped inside. I had to back up to make way.

“Hap,” Jack said, “mind your manners,” but he said it like it was a joke between them, Jack being the civilized side of their comic duo. “May we come in?” he said to me apologetically.

“Of course. Come on in.”

Jack bowed his head toward me as he crossed the threshold, and I said, “Let me get you a couple of towels. What did you do, walk here?”

“We did actually,” Hap said. “We were just over at Evy's.”

I'd gone back into the laundry room to grab a couple of clean towels and felt lucky they couldn't see my face when I said, “I thought she was out with her mom,” as casually as I could manage. Hap laughed.

As I handed him his towel, Jack, kinder but no more apologetic, shrugged. “You know Evy, always changing her plans.”