The Game of Boys and Monsters (6 page)

Read The Game of Boys and Monsters Online

Authors: Rachel M. Wilson

I take a deep breathâI
can
breatheâand hug my hands tight to my ribs. There's my chest moving up and down. An accidental touch is so easy. The words are my antidote:
Don't touch, please, please.

I thought I'd outgrown this game or at least squashed it down into something I could ignore, but the moment Dad left, it started again, and this time it feels deeper and harder to shake.

Mandy never knew about my “games”: See if you can hold your breath as we take the next curve or the car will fly out into nothing; try not to blink while you're looking at Mom or else she might get cancer and die. Touch another person's skin and Dad will never come home.

The danger
feels
even bigger than that. Touch another person's skin and Dad will
evaporate.
We'll never see him again. Mom will die of a broken heart. I'll have panic attacks, a complete and total breakdown, and get carted away to a hospital for crazy people. My brother will hate me forever and ever for failing him.

And I will be alone.

Every little thing in this world that has fallen apart will stay broken.

It's a lot, I know.

Dad would tell me to stop catastrophizing. Mom would tell me to drink some herbal tea.

There's a name for these imaginings: magical thinking. It almost sounds nice, but it isn't. The weirdest part is that I
know
my stupid games shouldn't have an effect on real life. But when I try to stop, the doubt creeps inâwhat if it
does
matter?

Dad left in June. I haven't touched a single person since.

“You okay?” Mandy asks.

“What? Yeah, I'm fine.” I force a smile.

Mandy squints at the freshmen. “Let's find someplace more private.”

Birmingham Arts Academy sits on the long ridge of Red Mountain, overlooking the city. Mandy leads me across the drive, past a row of flowering hydrangeas to the sloping woods. We're in the foothills of the Appalachians; I should be used to steep hills, but it makes me anxious to see the tops of trees angling downward so sharply.

Luckily, there are steps, a small amphitheater built into the side of the hill. If we sit on the bottom round of seats, we can't be seen from the courtyard.

The woods seem to close around us, a tangle of light-dappled leaves, mossy bark, and climbing vines. It reminds me of how Mandy and I used to build hideouts in the woods behind my house.

Mandy leaves space between us. My skin doesn't feel so
on edge
if I have room to maneuver, but the way Mandy keeps her distance makes me sad, too.

“I'm glad I got you,” I say.

Mandy nods without looking at me. “Sorry I was late. Boy drama.”

Always, with Mandy.

“What happened?”

She makes eye contact, so briefly, like she's checking if it's okay to share. Then, just as fast, she looks away, through the trees toward downtown.

“Nothing worth talking about.”

We used to tell each other everything.

Mandy lights a cigarette.

“Does your mom know you smoke?” I ask.

“Where do you think I got the cigarettes?” She absorbs my surprise with a flat smile and goes on, “She's convinced that it helps with my weight.” She blows out a long stream of smoke, and I turn my head.

The sound of a slamming car door makes me jump. Mandy holds the cigarette low between her legs in a practiced way and twists over her shoulder to check the tree line. Getting caught might make me the first person in the history of the academy to get expelled at orientation. I want to grab the cigarette, grind it out on the seat between us, and bury it under a mountain of leaves, but Mandy just waits. No one comes.

“I was sorry to hear about your dad,” Mandy says, picking up a shiny yellow leaf from the amphitheater's stage and twirling it by the stem. Her eyes stay on the leaf as if it holds more interest than my reaction, but I know better.

My mom must have told hers, and that makes it more real somehow, that other people know. I pretend I don't mind. I want Mandy to be my friend again. It's supposed to be okay for your friends to know what's going on with you.

“They're just trying it out,” I say. “It's not like they're getting divorced.”

Not yet.

I feel like I have to defend Dad. “One of his mentors from the University of Virginia wants his input on a study. It's a big honor. But, you know, it's temporary.”

Mandy nods, but she still looks pitying.

“Or we might all move there,” I say.

“Your mom would never leave Birmingham,” she says. “Her whole life is here.”

“She went away for college.”

That's how Mom and Dad met. But Mandy knows my mom almost as well as I do, and I'm pretty sure she's right. When my parents moved here, Mom bought two rocking chairs for the back porch. When things were good, they would sit out there to watch the sun set behind the woods, have a drink, and chat. Mom always said she hoped that was how they'd spend their “twilight years”âin those chairs, side by side.

I don't want to leave Birmingham either, especially now that I'm at the academy. I want us all to stay happy in our same house, for Mom to get her “twilight years” wish. It seems like such a simple, small thing to ask.

Mandy goes back to twirling her leaf.

“Is your dad so pissed you're going here?” she asks.

I shrug.

My parents fought about the academyâa lot. They fought about other things, but there was that one night in March .Â .Â . Mom had let me audition for the academy in secret, and when Dad found outâbrutal.

Months later, when Dad said he had to go, Mom told him, “If you're leaving, you don't get to argue with me about Caddie's school,” and I guess he agreed. I still worry he'll hold it against meâthat even if he does come back, things will never be the same.

But I can't say that to Mandy.

“Do you still take dance?” I say. Friends ask each other things.

She purses her lips like she swallowed something nasty. “On weekends. Mom's got me taking voice lessons too. I'm supposed to be a triple threat.”

“What's that?”

She smiles at my ignorance, not in a mean way, but it's a reminder of how much more time she's had in this world. “It means you act, sing, and dance. You have to be a triple threat to be on Broadway or do regional theater even and have a career. It's all musicals. .Â .Â . Here, watch me do a smoke ring.”

The smoke comes out a shapeless mess and Mandy laughs at herself. “God, Caddie, I don't even like musicals.” She inhales, then talks through her exhale. “They say movies are all waiting around, but I still think it'd be cool.” Her eyes go misty.

“So go be in a movie. Tell your mom she can be her own triple threat.”

Mandy laughs. I made Mandy laugh.

“I'm scared I don't have the look for it.”

I've never known Mandy to be scared of anything, but I like her for saying it. “You're the best-looking person I know.”

She laughs again. “No,” she says. “I mean, even if I look all right hereâand I think I look all rightâthis is Birmingham. We're tiny.”

I follow her eyes to downtown, just visible through the tree cover. Our tallest buildings hardly scrape the sky, but they form a decent-sized grid stretching north and south of the train tracks. Most cities form around water, a lake or a river, an ocean port, but Birmingham's river was a railroad.

On the edges of the city are the smokestacks and furnaces. Now, a lot of these have been shut down. Graffiti artists have outdone themselves, tagging the highest pipes in jewel tones that complement the rust.

Most of what people call Birmingham is miles and miles of villages with names that play on nature words: “ridge” and “valley,” “crest” and “dale,” plenty of “red” for the iron. Toss in “Cahaba” and “Cherokee,” the occasional “English” or “Avon,” and you've got it covered.

Up here in Redmont Park over Avondale, the cicadas sing louder than the downtown traffic.

Mandy's been still for a long time, but it doesn't feel wrong being quiet with her. Then she looks to me. “Caddie, why did we stop being friends?”

She doesn't seem worried by what I might say. It's a fact that we're no longer friends, and she says it like that, no emotion attached.

“I stopped taking dance; we went to different schools .Â .Â .”

We both know there's more to it than that, but Mandy doesn't contradict me.

I think
I
might have wrecked it with Mandy. I was jealous when she got the academy and
I
got panic attacks, afraid of her seeing how jealous I was and how strange I'd become.

Mandy's stopped twirling the leaf, and she studies me like she's making a decision.

“You're going to like the theater people,” she tells me, and I feel like I've passed a test.

She holds her leaf out to me, but if I take it, our fingers will touch. I wave it away like she's handing me a milkshake and I'm watching my weight. I'm worried I failed that one, but she says, “Let's go,” and the leaf falls down between us as we stand.

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About the Author

PHOTO BY EVAN HANOVER

RACHEL M. WILSON
received her MFA in writing for children and young adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Originally from Alabama, she now lives in Chicago, Illinois. You can visit her online at www.rachelmwilsonbooks.com.

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Copyright

THE GAME OF BOYS AND MONSTERS
. Copyright Â© 2014 by Rachel M. Wilson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition Â© August 2014 ISBN 9780062330581

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