Delicate Monsters (15 page)

“That's for you to find out,” she said. Then, “Actually, it doesn't taste that sweet to me. More salty.”

Emerson's jaw dropped. “You've tasted it?”

May blushed. “I mean, just myself, you know. I was curious.”

“I'm curious, too,” he said, which was true. He was very curious. But he was also relieved that he now had a way to give to May without taking. He still owed her, didn't he? After what he'd done. He owed her and he wanted them to be even, so he pushed her gently on her back, and he gave and gave and gave.

But the whole time, while he was busy doing all that guilty giving, Emerson couldn't help thinking,
Where's Miles? He should definitely be home by now.

Where the hell could he be?

 

part 3

The Hunter

“Sometimes I think evil is a tangible thing—with wave lengths, just as sound and light have.”

—Richard Connell,
The Most Dangerous Game

 

chapter twenty-nine

Sadie,

Here are thirteen facts about my relationship with Charlie Burns:

  1. Our fathers served together in the Marines.

  2. We were roommates fall semester of our freshman year. This was at Charlie's request. He didn't want to be friendless when he got to Rothshire.

  3. I have Tourette syndrome. Maybe you knew that. Maybe you didn't. I never told you. It's a lot better than it used to be and if people don't figure it out on their own, it's not something I like to bring up.

  4. Charlie knew.

  5. He called me a defect and a freak and a fucking retard for the entire five months we lived together.

  6. I took it, and I laughed at every single joke he made at my expense.

  7. Some of my tics I try only to do in private. They're embarrassing.

  8. Charlie knew that, too. He set up a camera in our room and filmed me and showed it to everyone at school.

  9. He got suspended.

10. I changed rooms.

11. He blamed me for the suspension and never let up. All year he harassed me in various ways, including, but not limited to, attacking me in the gym locker room, pulling my shorts down, and telling everyone I had a small dick.

12. I spent most of the summer between freshman and sophomore year being treated for anxiety and depression.

13. Sophomore year I met you.

—R

*   *   *

Dumpster Boy didn't show up in fencing class the next day. Or the day after that. He didn't show up anywhere, according to the talking heads on all the local news stations and the voicemail left by the school district superintendent.

Fifteen-year-old Miles Tate had vanished.

It happened on Wednesday, precisely two days after he was beat up on the street and left for dead by some unidentified boys, and precisely five days after he was hospitalized for a seizure of unknown origin. The last place he'd been seen was his math class, where he'd asked to use the restroom and never returned. The mystery surrounding his middle-of-the-day disappearance stirred a whirlwind of rumors, as did the fact that no one really knew him. Miles was described by everyone—classmates, teachers, neighbors, total strangers—as a quiet kid, a loner, a bullying victim, and, possibly, as the most salacious rumors went, an abused child. He'd run away, they said. He'd been kidnapped. He'd been murdered. He'd had a brain hemorrhage and died alone. He'd been taken by space aliens or hit by a train. Sadie didn't know him well enough to disagree with any of this, except the space alien thing because that was just fucking stupid, and seriously, why would they take
him
? But she hated the way they talked about Dumpster Boy on the news. It made her cheeks puff up and her head spin with thoughts of violence, because they talked about him like he was an object of pity, not a real person who was sad and screwed up, but also unique, the way a snowflake was: beautiful and strange and complex when you saw it up close, no matter how much you resented the fact that it was falling from the damn sky and ruining your whole day.

Miles was also Emerson Tate's little brother. Sadie knew that now, too. Clearly there was some weird shit floating around in the Tate gene pool. And while she couldn't conjure up any more of a memory of young Miles, just that brief flash of a waifish child, clinging to the legs of his mother like a parasite, all the connections between the three of them felt complicated in the same way that Roman's emails to Sadie felt complicated.

Sadie
hated
that. Complications. They were so useless, the way they made things seem important through mere coincidence or connection. Sadie didn't believe in finding meaning in things if the meaning wasn't obvious. The truth didn't get to be what you made of it. It just
was.
Anyone who believed otherwise reminded her of the hormonally challenged American girls at her Parisian boarding school, the ones with the blue eyes and the trust funds, who liked to look her up and down when they heard her last name and ask “but where are you
from
?” when Sadie said she was American, too. They were the ones who forever blathered on with pointless stories about how they
just missed getting into a car accident, by like,
a second
and
wasn't that
wild
?
and
didn't things like that, like, really make you
think
?

People like that didn't understand there was no
almost
when it came to fate.

People like that were ones Sadie knew she could lie to and get away with it.

Always.

*   *   *

When Sadie first met Emerson Tate, however, she didn't lie. She was nine and he was ten, and she had no reason to. If anything,
he
was the one who lied, even if he didn't know it. But she knew things about him even before his mother had shown up to tend to Sadie's maternal grandfather, who was dying of brain cancer in the bedroom right next door to Sadie's.
Her
mom had had to give up her duties at the winery she'd founded in order to care for him, because her deadbeat brothers couldn't be bothered to help. They were too busy tending to their polo games and budding alcoholism. Hiring a hospice nurse should've been a good thing, considering, but Sadie's dad had done it without asking first. That meant serious fallout in the Su household. The revelation that he was bringing in one with children had set off a ground war.

“He's my father,” her mother hissed. “My father hates children. All of them. And you know what? So do I.”

Sadie's father had been firm. “She's excellent. And she needs the work. She's Mark's widow, L. They need help. God knows we can afford to give it.”

“But why the boys?”

“They have nowhere else to go. But they'll be fine here. Plenty of room for kids to play and stay out of your way. I promise. Plus Sadie will help keep them busy, isn't that right?” He'd looked over to where she stood in the kitchen doorway, watching them closely.

Sadie gave a quick shrug, small shoulders grazing her pigtails. “Maybe Grandpa will die soon so they'll go away faster.”

Her mom had fled the room then, crying, and her father crouched down on his knees and beckoned her over.

Sadie went to him, dancing into his arms. That champagne thrill of victory bubbled inside of her.

“That wasn't nice,” he told her sternly. His hands smelled of cigar smoke and fresh rosemary from the garden.

“I wasn't trying to be nice,” she shot back.

“I understand that. But you know, a famous priest once said, ‘The things that we love tell us what we are.'”

“So?”

“You love cruelty, Sadie. That's not a good thing.”

She'd twisted in his grasp. Pinched at his neck and left a mark.

“I mean it,” he said. “You can't live this way, hurting people the way you do. I won't let you.”

“Who's Mark?” she asked. “What happened to him?”

Her father's eyes grew soft, sad. “Mark Tate. He used to work on my car. He was the nicest guy. Had his troubles, but he was a real family man. He died last fall.”

“How?”

“Do you know what suicide is? Do you know what that word means?”

“Yes. It's what Iris Chang did. She shot herself in her car. Pop pop pop.”

He tightened his jaw. “How do you know about that?”

“I heard you talking about it on the telephone. You wanted to make a film about her. So that's what this Mark did? He shot himself?”

“Not exactly. But he died in his car. And his kids … I don't think they're taking it very well. One of them, especially. He's sort of in denial about it all. His mother's worried, and she's already got enough to be worried about. So be kind to the boys, Sadie. How you treat them will tell me what you are.”

*   *   *

The next day, the widowed nurse and her two boys had showed up at the house, right on time. The nurse, whose name was Gracie Tate, spent the afternoon doing things like ordering medical supplies, administering pain medication to Sadie's grandfather, and changing his catheter. For all her tears and endless complaining, this allowed Sadie's mother to lie down and drink wine, although not necessarily in that order.

Sadie crept around the house that first day, shadowing the nurse. She mostly did this to see the catheter thing happen. Sadie longed to know what a penis looked like in real life, and she also longed to touch one. But when she caught a glimpse of her grandfather's, it reminded her of a horrible slug or a turd that had been left out in the sun, and she quickly decided she'd look elsewhere for that opportunity.

It didn't take long for Sadie to figure out which of the boys was the screwed-up one. This boy was surly and mean, and had the pretty lips and blond curls of an angel. Sadie watched as he stole one of her grandfather's watches, sprinkled weed killer on a patch of new-growth Riesling vines, and put laxatives in the cat's food bowl so that it shit all over the living room carpet and tracked it around the house, including Sadie's room. He also managed to push his brother down a flight of stairs when he thought no one was looking, and insisted on using racial slurs whenever he addressed any of the vineyard workers. She found this both ironic and cowardly, seeing as his own mother was hired help and the boy never dared say anything about Sadie's immigrant father. Not once.

After school one day, she trailed the boy around the property and out to the boggy creek. She crawled up a tree and lay on her belly in the branches while he picked up rocks and looked beneath them. After a few tries, he captured a small green frog, cupping it in his hands before pinning it to the ground and cutting its legs off with a switchblade.

The frog lay dying, and Sadie watched as the boy shoved both hands down the front of his shorts. He was doing something strange and urgent in there when she called out to him. And she didn't lie. She told him the honest truth about himself.

“Bad,” she told him brightly. “You're a bad person.”

 

chapter thirty

When Emerson had been in the eighth grade, his computer programming teacher had stood before the class one day and announced that he had a foolproof method to get people to stop smoking.

“It's simple, and it's guaranteed to work,” he told them, as he leaned against the plywood lectern positioned at the front of the room. “Every time a smoker has a craving for a cigarette, all that person needs to do is tell themselves that they can have one, in exactly one hour.”

Of course everyone in the room had raised their hands and opened their mouths and asked how anybody could quit smoking if they never stopped. But Emerson understood right away. The point was that if you followed the teacher's instructions to a T, you'd never light up again. You could become a nonsmoker without ever committing to stopping. Behavior was what mattered.

The mind would follow.

That's how it was with Miles's disappearance. To Emerson, it felt as if he'd traveled someplace frightening and foreign without even realizing he was in motion. It started when Miles didn't come home for dinner Wednesday evening. That wasn't so strange, considering, and besides, it was also the afternoon May had come over and taught Emerson that the greatest gift a girl's body had to give was indeed more saline than sweet. Dazed and spent and helplessly lost in the promise of her goodness, he hadn't noticed the hours passing until it was almost ten and still, there was no sign of Miles. He wasn't answering his phone, but he kept the damn thing switched off half the time or let it run out of juice. And why not? It wasn't like he was waiting for anyone to call.

So Emerson had gone to sleep, only to wake the next morning and realize Miles still wasn't there. Or maybe he'd come and left early, the way Miles often did. Emerson didn't want to freak out his mother or cause a whole episode, so he went to school like normal and asked for the desk lady at the front office to page Miles.

But he didn't show up. Not to the office. Not to any of his classes.

Not anywhere.

Even then, there was no defining moment or flashbulb of awareness, just a gradual accumulation of absence. More hours and more doubt and more questions added up until over a whole day had passed and still, nobody knew where his brother was. Emerson braced himself and called his mom, and together they went down to the police station to report what was already so very, very obvious.

Miles was gone.

*   *   *

The cops stopped by their apartment again and again as the hours ticked by. They asked the same questions each time they came, along with the occasional new ones. Had they heard from him? Had they heard anything? Did they ever see him with anybody? Did he do drugs? Did he sell drugs? Did anyone in the house do drugs? He really didn't have
any
friends?