All These Monsters Page 2

  But I said nothing. I’d never been able to ask Laurence for anything. My brother and I barely spoke at all.

  “When?” Mom asked.

  “Next week,” Laurence said.

  Mom nodded. “Call your father and tell him.” She paused. “And let me speak to him.”

  My heart sank.

  * * *

  I retreated to my bedroom and didn’t listen to Laurence’s and Mom’s conversations with Dad. I didn’t need to. I’d heard it a dozen times. Mom always kicked Dad out, and she always asked him to come back.

  This was my fault, anyway. It was my fault for thinking this time would be different just because Dad put my head through a wall. If he’d put only a tiny bit more muscle behind it, he could have killed me. Mom had lost it, screaming at him to get out with such ferocity I was surprised she didn’t damage her vocal cords. The world was still tilted as I listened to her throw his clothes out the window, and Dad was gone before I’d fully regained consciousness. But the horror of that incident had faded, like it always did. It was naïve to think otherwise.

  And it was my fault for not being able to pass classes that, honestly, weren’t even that hard. My school was regularly ranked at the bottom of Dallas public high schools. Failing at my high school was a truly embarrassing feat.

  My phone dinged again, and I finally pulled it out. The top news alert was in all caps. GRAYSON ST. JOHN POSTS RECRUITMENT VIDEO.

  I clicked on it.

  Grayson sat in front of a white background. He was a blond man in his early twenties, and handsome in a way that was almost unappealing. He was so good-looking that he’d circled right back around to ugly.

  His blue eyes sparkled as he smiled at the camera. He was well lit. Grayson St. John was no stranger to the camera. I’d heard of the dude for the first time two days ago, and I’d already figured that one out.

  “Hello, friends,” he said. “I’m Grayson St. John. You’ve probably heard of my father, the former CEO of St. John Technologies, Gregor St. John. Our company provides weapons to soldiers fighting scrabs in the US.

  “I’ll get right to the point. I’m going to go kill some scrabs. My father died in Prague trying to fight these things, and I’m not going to let his death be in vain. He wanted Congress to act, to send any kind of help, but they’ve just voted—again—to stay out of the fight overseas. Parts of Europe and Asia are under constant siege, and I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of sitting here while people die. Our government has closed its borders, and our president has repeatedly said that America must come first. Well, I say screw that, and I know many of you agree with me.

  “We’re forming fight squads. Training and weapons will be provided. You don’t need a military or police background, just a desire to help, though if you’re one of the young people who received combat training in school, we’d love to have you. We have cutting-edge technology that helps us track scrabs, and we’ll be partnering with local law enforcement or military wherever we are. Most fighting will be hand-to-hand, so please have some skill in that area.

  “We’ll cover all your expenses, and you’ll get stipends that increase every week you spend with us. And because they said I have to set a minimum age, you have to be sixteen.

  “We do value your safety, so we’re holding tryouts to make sure you’re equipped to fight. If you live in America, tryouts will only be held in Los Angeles and Atlanta, but we’ve chartered buses from several major cities to help you get there. Everyone else, there’s a list of cities around the world where our trainers will be holding tryouts. If you pass, you will be assigned to a team, and we’ll pay for your transportation to Europe or Asia.

  “Call the number on our website, and we’ll get you sorted. We won’t be paying for any return airfare if you change your mind, so please be sure before you hop on that plane.”

  He leaned closer to the camera. “More information at the link. Please contact us even if you don’t have a passport. We’re working it out. I hope you’ll join me, friends. We can be better than our government.”

  The video ended, and I lowered my phone. I understood suddenly the kinds of people who were going to show up in Atlanta and Los Angeles—a few thrill seekers, sure, but mostly do-gooder types. Humanitarians and charity workers and the sort of people who went to foreign countries to build schools for orphans.

  Not me, basically. People probably didn’t join just because they were flunking out of high school and they were scared of their father. Those sorts of people simply ran away from home. I saw them living on streets, popping into the church a few blocks over for a free meal and a shower. Some of them looked like they were doing fine. Some of them didn’t.

  I knew my place. It was here, trying to make ends meet with my mom, or it was with the street kids, or it was in one of the group homes a few of my grade school friends were always cycling through. It wasn’t in Europe, fighting monsters because I had a burning urge to save people. The only person I wanted to save was myself.

  Not to mention, just setting foot in Europe was a terrifying prospect, much less going there specifically to fight scrabs. You couldn’t even tell when they were approaching, because they dug elaborate tunnels underneath the ground for travel. They’d spring up in heavily populated areas, like they were hoping to inflict as much damage as possible. And they did.

  Scientists were still unsure about their intelligence levels, but they were pretty sure that all scrabs had the same goal: destroy. Human, animal, plant, building—it didn’t matter to a scrab. If it was in their way, they demolished (or ate) it. It was like they were trying to clear the Earth of every obstacle until they were the only thing left.

  And I didn’t want to spend every waking second worrying about the ground beneath my feet.

  A knock sounded on my door, and Mom pushed it open. I knew what she was going to say before she opened her mouth. Her face was determined, but a little abashed.

  “I spoke to your father,” she said.

  My stomach dropped to my feet. “OK.”

  “He’s really sorry.”

  “OK.”

  Mom pressed her lips together like she did when she was trying not to cry. “Clara, please don’t be like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “It’s been hard around here without your father. I can’t . . .” She gulped. “And now you’re flunking out of high school and Laurence is leaving. I can’t do this by myself.”

  She couldn’t. Mom wasn’t able support us, not on a cafeteria worker’s salary. And she’d never been good at being alone. It was the mortgage, or a busted pipe, or a broken-down car, or just loneliness, but it always ended the same—asking Dad to come back.

  “Please, try to act happy that he’s home,” Mom said.

  I plastered a huge fake smile on my face. “How’s this?”

  “Please try, Clara. He’s sorry.”

  He was always sorry. There were holes all over the house that he’d been sorry about later. Sorry I kicked a hole in the cabinet while we were fighting. Sorry I threw the doorstop through the window after I had a bad day at work. Sorry I put Clara’s head through the wall.

  Mom was looking at me like she was expecting an answer. Like I was still a ten-year-old girl who would tearfully agree with her—Dad was sorry, and things would get better.

  “Sure, Mom,” I said dryly.

  “He’ll apologize to you. He promised.”

  “I can’t wait. I’ll treasure every moment.”

  Mom didn’t know how to deal with sarcasm, so she just pretended she hadn’t heard it. “There will be plenty of cake,” she said, and left.

  3

  Dad would be home at six.

  I trudged out of my bedroom at 5:58. It would be worse if I ignored him.

  The painting of Texas had been set straight. I hated it, and I wasn’t sure if it was because it covered the hole made by my head or simply because it was Texas. I despised this state, even though I’d never visited the forty-nine others. T
he only place I’d ever been was Guanajuato, Mexico, to visit Mom’s family. Tía Julia paid for plane tickets for just Mom and me two years ago, and then tried to convince Mom to stay once we arrived. I’d been in favor of it. I loved the city, with its brightly colored buildings and streets so narrow you couldn’t drive cars most places. I could step out of the house and get lost in the winding roads.

  No one walked in Dallas. I could walk to the bus, which would take me through miles of suburbs and into the city, and I still wouldn’t have seen most of the Dallas–Fort Worth area. It was too big. All of Texas was too big. It made it too hard to escape.

  Mom was in the kitchen again, stir-frying like her life depended on it. Laurence brushed past me and raised his eyebrows as he looked at the meat and vegetables over Mom’s shoulder.

  “Is Dad going to like that?” he asked.

  “I’m using the sweet sauce he likes.” Still, worry crossed her face. It was risky, trying a new recipe. Dad enjoyed barbeque and burgers and fried Americanized Chinese food.

  Mom took me to a ramen restaurant once, for lunch, just the two of us. Let’s not tell your father, she’d whispered in my ear as we left, because Dad was the sort of man to get angry about noodles.

  The television was on, the news blaring, and Laurence walked into the living room and flopped onto the couch. My eyes drifted to the screen.

  “We have reports that three thousand people have already signed up to join Grayson St. John’s team,” the male anchor said.

  He had two guests on the program with him, and the blond woman shook her head.

  “Who are these people?” she asked the anchor.

  “From what we’ve heard, they’re mostly young people, and they’re from all over the world.”

  “It’s been suggested that some of them were rejected from the military in their countries,” the blond woman said.

  “That’s just speculation at this point,” the anchor said. “And some are too young to even join the military, since the minimum age for these teams is only sixteen. But St. John has made it clear that the training will be rigorous, and they won’t accept people who aren’t fit to fight.”

  I swallowed. One in five. Was that fit to fight?

  I looked away from the television and caught Laurence staring at me. The thing about quiet people was, they were always watching. And listening. And noticing things I’d rather they didn’t notice.

  “Those idiots are going to get themselves killed,” Mom grumbled.

  “I think it’s brave,” Laurence said quietly, still watching me.

  Outside, a car door shut.

  Mom frantically wagged her hand. “Turn that off, turn that off.”

  Laurence grabbed the remote, and the television screen went black. I pressed both arms to my chest, my left hand tightly clasping my opposite wrist. It was all I could ever think to do to protect myself.

  There wouldn’t be any danger immediately—Dad was always on good behavior at first—but my body didn’t know that. It had been trained to tense up at the mere mention of Dad.

  The door opened, and he stepped into the house. Dad was well over six feet tall, with shoulders so wide he sometimes had to turn sideways to go through doors. He’d been good-looking in his youth. Now he always looked like someone had just spat in his tea.

  Dad’s eyes skipped over me, standing in the middle of the living room, to Laurence, perched awkwardly on the edge of the couch. I wondered what it was like to live in Dad’s world, where everyone shifted things to your liking. At work, did he walk into rooms and wonder why it wasn’t quiet, neat, and full of nervous energy?

  Mom’s face lit up as she stepped out of the kitchen to kiss Dad on the cheek.

  Why anyone would get excited to see Dad was beyond me, but I guessed Mom had found something to like about him. They were opposites in appearance (Dad: white, blond, built like a linebacker; Mom: Latina, olive skin, brown hair, short and thin) but alike in other ways (love of football, hatred of crowds, an impressive ability to completely ignore reality).

  I, thankfully, took after Mom, except taller and with more curves. I had serious curves, the kind everyone liked to comment on. Those are birthing hips, mija, Tía Julia said. That is an ASS, a random guy at 7-Eleven said. That shirt makes you look like a whore, Dad said.

  My boobs looked great in that shirt. I wore it several more times, until it mysteriously vanished one day.

  “Laurence,” Dad said, clapping him on the shoulder. Laurence clearly wanted to disappear. “You think about what I said?”

  Laurence nodded.

  “And? Dallas is a lot bigger than Tulsa. You can’t find a job here?”

  Laurence shook his head.

  “What’s there to do in Oklahoma anyway?”

  Laurence shrugged.

  “It’s just a construction job,” Dad said. “It’ll be over in a few months. What are you going to do then?”

  It took my brother a moment to answer, and when he did, it was with a sigh, like being forced to actually say something was tiresome. “I guess I’ll find a different job. Or move somewhere else.”

  A look crossed Dad’s face, like he was both surprised and dismayed. “I don’t know where you think you’ll go,” he muttered.

  I realized suddenly why Dad was trying to convince Laurence to stay. He wasn’t going to miss him; Laurence could barely muster up the energy to be marginally polite to Dad. There was no love lost there.

  Dad was scared that his son would be better than him. Dad had never been anywhere. He grew up a few blocks from where we lived now. He visited Austin once with Mom and declared it “terrible.” He was a plumber, a job that only required travel within the Dallas–Fort Worth area.

  Mom had him beat; she was born in Mexico and immigrated here with her parents when she was six years old. She’d traveled around the southwest states and Mexico a lot in her early twenties, before she met Dad. Maybe I even had him beat, with my one trip to Guanajuato.

  Dad shifted his attention to me. He laid a hand on my shoulder. I tightened my fingers around my wrist. “Clara.” His voice shook with emotion. “I’m so sorry about losing my temper.”

  I’d never understood the phrase losing my temper. It was never lost. Dad kept his temper with him always. He managed to hide it from everyone—from his coworkers, his friends, from the cops I’d called once, only to have Mom tell them I was a liar. He could keep a grasp on his temper in all those situations, so that meant he chose to free it at home. He hadn’t lost anything.

  “I hope you can forgive me,” he said.

  His face was open and sincere. He thought he meant the apology. He didn’t. He always did it again, and you can’t be truly sorry for something if you turn around and do the exact same thing, repeatedly.

  He stared at me anxiously. I was expected to be a bottomless pit of forgiveness. No matter what he said, what he did, I had to forgive or I was a horrible person. Everyone forgave Dad. Those were the rules.

  I broke the rules last time. No forgiveness. He flew into a rage within two hours of returning home, because he said I was being rude to him.

  There was no reason to believe that this time would be any different. Mom was widening her eyes at me, silently asking me to play nice. The smart thing to do here was to force a smile and say I understood. Yes, Dad. It’s fine that you called me a moron and bashed my head into the wall. It’s OK, even though I know you’ll do it again.

  I said nothing. I was not a bottomless pit of forgiveness; I was a screaming ball of resentment. There were two options here—silence or hysteria. I chose the former, always.

  Dad’s contrite look faded. His jaw twitched. His apology only applied if I accepted it. I didn’t think apologies were supposed to work like that.

  He turned on his heel and grabbed his bags. “There’s something wrong with that girl,” he muttered to my mom. I’d heard him say it before. Do you think she has feelings at all? he whispered once to Mom, with an actual edge of concern in his voice. r />
  I had feelings. He just didn’t like any of the ones I had for him.

  Dad deposited his bags in the bedroom and returned to join Mom in the kitchen. He wrapped his arms around her waist from behind, and she smiled as she leaned into him.

  She loved him. It defied all common sense and logic, but she really did. And it made me feel like a crazy person that I didn’t. Was I overreacting? Did I expect too much? Was this how fathers were, it was just that no one talked about it?

  I had loved him once, as a kid. I remembered the feeling of relief when he was happy, the certainty that this time would be different. I was sure that if I was good enough, everything would be fine.

  But there was no such thing as good enough. It was embarrassing how hard I’d tried, looking back now. I never wanted to be that dumb again.

  “Clara.” My name was disappointment on Dad’s lips. He stepped away from Mom, his hand lingering on hers a moment. I watched the way their fingers clung to each other for a few extra seconds before splitting apart.

  “We need to talk about your grades,” he said.

  Mom’s demeanor completely changed. Her shoulders tensed, her eyes going a little wide. She was still trying to be good enough.

  “She got an A in history and combat class!” she blurted out. “I should have mentioned that before.”

  “That’s great about history, Clara.” Dad smiled at me. I didn’t return it.

  I’d liked history this semester. We studied recent history, up to the first scrab attack in Scotland. That’s how they got their name—the first sighting was in Scrabster, Scotland.

  I’d never even known how they got the name until Ms. Watson took us through their history and the various conspiracy theories about their origin and how they ended up in the US. She’d made a strong argument that someone must have smuggled a few into the country and lost control of them. Scrabs could reproduce, so she reasoned that all our scrabs could have come from just one male and one female brought over from Europe or Asia.

  “What do you think went wrong in English and physics?” Dad asked.