The Monster Series

Shade was effortlessly charismatic, with a hint of something regal about her. But despite the charm and the cheekbones, Shade was not a popular kid at school. She was too bookish, too aware, too impatient, too ready to let people know she was smarter than they were. And beyond that, there was something about Shade that felt too old, too serious, too dark; maybe even something a bit dangerous.

Malik knew where that feeling of danger came from: Shade was obsessed. She was like some online game addict, but her obsession was with a very real event, with fear and death and guilt. And it was no game.

It was chilly out on the street, not real Chicago cold—that was coming—just chilly enough to turn exhalations to steam and make noses run. The little business section of Dempster—Starbucks, pizza restaurant, optometrist, seafood market, and the venerable Blind Faith Café—was just west of the corner with Hinman Avenue. Hinman—where Shade lived—was a street of well-tended Victorian homes behind deep, unfenced front lawns. Trees—mature elms and oaks—had already dropped many of their leaves, gold with green accents, on lawns, sidewalks, the street, and on parked cars, plastering windshields with nature’s art.

Shade and Malik walked together down to Hinman where the bus stop was. There were six kids already milling around.

“Well, I’ll see you, Shade,” Malik said. There was something off in the way he said it, a tension, a worry.

Shade heard that note and said, “Stop worrying about me, Malik. I can take care of myself.”

He laughed. He had an unusual laugh that sounded like the noise a hungry seal made. Shade had always liked that about him: the idiot laugh from such a smart person. Also the smile.

And also the feel of his arms and his chest and his lips and . . . But that was all past tense now. That was all over and done with, though the friendship remained.

“It probably won’t work,” Malik said.

“Are you rooting against me?” Shade asked archly.

“Never.” The smile. And a sort of salute, fist over heart, like something he’d probably seen on Game of Thrones. But it worked. Whatever Malik did it generally somehow worked.

“I’m going to do it, Malik. I have to.”

Malik sighed. “Yeah, Shade, I know. It’s called obsession.”

“I thought that was the name of a perfume,” she joked, not expecting a laugh and getting only a very serious look from Malik.

“You know you can always call me, right?”

Shade lifted her cup to tap his and they had a cardboard toast. “You should not be hitting on high school girls,” she said.

“What choice do I have? Northwestern girls aren’t dumb enough to buy my line of bullshit,” he said, and started to go, walking backward away from her toward the Northwestern campus just a few blocks north. “Anyway, you’ll be a college girl next year.”

He was six months older than her, always a year ahead.

“Also, wasn’t the Sandman basically a god . . .?” Shade called after him.

“I’m going to class now,” Malik said and covered his ears. “I can’t hear you. Lalalalala.”

But Shade’s focus had already shifted to the new kid at the bus stop. A Latino boy, she guessed. Tall, six-two, quite a good-looking kid.

Wait. Nope. Maybe not a boy exactly.

Interesting.

He or possibly she looked nervous, the new kid. His dark eyes were wary and alert. And made up, with just a little eyebrow pencil and a delicate touch of mascara.

The others at the stop were a pair of freshmen boys who looked like they should still be in middle school; a black kid named Charles or Chuck or something—she couldn’t recall—who had never yet been seen without earbuds; and two massive, muscular members of the football team, one white, one black, neither in possession of a definable neck.

“That is going to be trouble,” Shade muttered under her breath. Both of the Muscle Twins were eyeballing the new kid with a bored, predatory air.

No one spoke to Shade as she positioned herself a little apart, on the sidewalk, where she could watch. She sipped her coffee and waited, watching the football guys, noting the nudges and the winks. She could smell violence in the air, a whiff of testosterone, sweat, and pure animal aggression.

She noticed as well that the new kid was quite aware of potential trouble. His eyes darted to the football players, and when they moved behind him, Shade could practically see the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

Evanston had always been the very epitome of enlightened tolerance, but a perhaps gay, perhaps trans kid and bored football players with their systems pumped full of steroids did not always make for a good mix. And lately Evanston had begun to change, to fray somehow, to fade a little as if it were a movie being shown on a projector with a dimming bulb.

“Hey, answer a question for us,” the white player said to the new kid. Shade saw the newbie flinch, saw him withdraw fractionally, but then, with a will, recover his position and face up to the player who was an inch shorter, but heavier by probably a hundred pounds of muscle.

“Okay.” It was a distinctly feminine voice. Shade cocked her head and listened.

“What are you?”

There was a split second where the new kid thought about evading. There was even a quick glance to plan an escape route. But he didn’t back down.

“My name is Cruz,” the kid said. He wore his black hair long and loose, almost to his shoulders, swept to one side. Shade shook her head imperceptibly, watching, analyzing.

“Didn’t ask your name, asked what you are.” This from the black player. “See, I heard you’re crazy. I heard you think you’re a girl.”

Shade nodded. Ah, so that was it. Shade was gratified to have an answer. She had never really talked to a trans person before, maybe she should make an effort to meet this new kid—assuming he survived the next few minutes.

Mental check: he or she? Shade made a note to ask Cruz which worked best for him. Or her. And decided in the meantime to insert female pronouns into her own internal monologue. Not that her internal monologue—or her pronoun choices—would matter to the kid who, from all indications, was seconds away from serious trouble.

Cruz licked her lips, glanced up the street, and sighed in obvious relief: the school bus was wheezing and rattling its way up the street. Thirty seconds, Shade figured. Cruz thought she was safe, but Shade was not so sure.

“I don’t think I’m a girl, and I don’t think I’m a boy, I just am what I am,” Cruz said. There was some defiance there. Some courage. Cruz wasn’t small or weak, but she was both when compared to the football players.

“You either got a dick or you don’t got a dick.” The white one again. Obviously a philosopher. Shade had the vague sense that his name might be Gary. Gary? Greg? Something with a G.

“You seem way too interested in what I have in my pants,” Cruz said.

Shade winced. “Mmmm, and there we go,” she said under her breath.

The bus rolled up, wheels sheeting standing water from the gutter. It was the black one (who Shade believed was named Griffin . . . or was she confusing her G names?) who shoved Cruz into the side of the still-moving bus.

Cruz lost her footing, staggered forward, and threw up her hands too late to entirely soften the impact of her face on yellow-painted aluminum. There was a definite thump of flesh-padded bone against aluminum, and the rolling bus spun Cruz violently, twisted her legs out from under her and she fell to her knees in the gutter.

The bus stopped, the door opened, and the gnome of a driver, oblivious, said, “Let’s move it, people.”

Earbud boy and the two frightened freshmen, as well as the two lumbering thugs, all piled aboard.

“There’s a kid hurt out here,” Shade told the driver.

“Well, tell him to get on-board, he can see the nurse when we get to school.”

“I don’t think she can do that,” Shade said.

Cruz sat on the curb. Blood poured from her nose, and hot tears cut channels in the red, all in all a rather gruesome sight.

Don’t think about a face covered in blood. Don’t go back to that place.

Shade made a quick decision, an instinctive decision. “Go ahead, I’m taking a sick day,” she told the driver. The bus pulled away, trailing vapor and fumes.

“Hey,” Shade said. “Kid. You need me to call 911?”

Cruz shook her head. Her breath came in gasps that threatened to become sobs.

“Come with me, I’ll get you a Band-aid.”

Cruz stood and made it most of the way up before yelping in pain as she tried her left ankle. “Go ahead, I’ll be fine,” Cruz said. “Not my first beating.”

Shade made a soundless laugh. “Yeah, you look fine. Come on. Throw an arm over my shoulders, I’m stronger than I look.” For the first time the two of them made eye contact, Cruz’s tear-filled, furious, hurt, expressive brown eyes and Shade’s more curious look. “I live just down the block. You can’t walk and you’ve got blood all down your face. So either let me call 911, or come with me.”

It was all said in a friendly, easygoing tone of voice, but much of what Shade said tended to have a command in it, like she was talking to a child, or a dog. Lack of self-confidence had never been an issue for her.

They nearly tripped and fell a few times—Cruz had to lean heavily on Shade—but in the end they made their way down the sidewalk and turned left onto the walkway that led through a gate, beneath the tendrils of an overgrown and fading panicle hydrangea bush, to Shade’s back door.

They entered through a kitchen much like every other kitchen in this well-heeled neighborhood: granite counters, a restaurant-quality six-burner stove, and the inevitable doublewide Sub-Zero refrigerator. Shade fetched a baggie, filled it with ice and handed it to Cruz.

“Come on.” They headed upstairs, Cruz holding the carved wood railing and hopping, with Shade behind her ready to catch her if she fell backward.

Shade’s room was on the second floor, walls a cheerful yellow, a gray marble bathroom visible through a narrow door. There was a queen-size bed topped by a white comforter. A desk was against one wall. A dormer window framed a padded window seat.

And there were books. Books in neat shelves on both sides of the desk, between the dormer and the southwest corner, piled around the window seat, piled on an easy chair, piled on Shade’s bedside table.

Shade swept a pile of books from the easy chair and Cruz sat. Shade stepped into her bathroom and came back with a bottle of rubbing alcohol, tissues, a yellow tube of Neosporin, a box of bandages and a glass of water.

“Put your leg up on the corner of the bed,” Shade instructed. Cruz complied and Shade laid the ice bag over the twisted ankle. “Take these. Ibuprofen, it will hold the swelling down and dull the pain.”

“You’re being too nice,” Cruz said. “You don’t even know me.”

“Mmmm, yes, that’s what everyone says about me,” Shade said with a droll, self-aware smile. “That I’m just too darn nice.”

Cruz carefully wiped blood away, using her phone as a mirror. Then, suddenly remembering, she pulled a small purple Moleskine notebook from her back pocket. It was swollen from curb water in one corner, but otherwise unharmed. Cruz stuck it in a dry jacket pocket with a sigh of relief as Shade fetched a trashcan for the bloody Kleenex.

“Shade Darby, by the way. That’s my name.”

“Cool name.”

“It’s something to do with the moment of my conception. I gather there were trees. Not the kind of thing I ask too many questions about, if you know what I mean. And you’re Cruz.”

Cruz nodded. “In case you’re wondering, I have a dick.”

That earned a sudden, single bark of laughter from Shade, which in turn raised a disturbing red and white smile from Cruz.

“Is that a permanent condition?” Shade asked.

Cruz shrugged. “I don’t have a short answer.”

“Give me the long one. I’ll tell you if I get bored.” She flopped on her bed.

“OK. Well . . . You know it’s all on a spectrum, right? I mean, there are people—most people—born either M or F and are perfectly fine with that. And some people are born with one body but a completely different mind, you know? They know from, like, toddler age that they are in the wrong body. Me, I’m . . . more kind of neither. Or both. Or something.”

“You’re e), all of the above. You’re multiple choice, but on a True/False test.”

That earned another blood-smeared grin from Cruz. “Can I use that line?”

“I understand spectra, and I even get that sexuality and gender are different things,” Shade said, sitting up. “This is not Alabama, after all. Or it didn’t used to be. Our sex ed does not end with Adam and Eve.”

“You’re . . . unusual,” Cruz said.

“Mmmm,” Shade said.

“I like boys, mostly,” Cruz said with a shrug. “If that clears anything up.”

“Me too,” Shade said. Then with a small skeptical sound added, “In theory. Not always in reality.”

Cruz gave her a sidelong glance. “I saw you with that boy, the tall, dark and crazy-good-looking one?”

“Malik?” Shade was momentarily thrown off stride. She was not used to people as observant as herself.

“He likes you.”

“Liked, past tense. We’re just friends now.”

Cruz shook her head slowly, side to side. “He looked back at you, like, three times.”

“So, you’re a straight girl trapped in the body of a gay boy? Walk me through it.” Shade deliberately shifted the conversation back to Cruz, and she was amused and gratified to see that Cruz knew exactly what she was doing.

Smart, Shade thought. Too smart? Just smart enough?

“I am e), all of the above, trapped in a True/False quiz,” Cruz said. “You can quote me on that.”

“Pronouns?”

Cruz shrugged. “More she than he. I don’t get bitchy about it, but, you know, if you can . . .” Now it was Cruz’s turn to shift the topic. “You read a lot.”

“Yes, but I only do it to made myself popular.” The line was delivered flat and Shade could see that Cruz was momentarily at a loss, not sure if this was the truth, before realizing it was just a wry joke.

It took Cruz maybe a second, a second and a half, to process, Shade noted. Slower than Shade would have been, slower than Malik, but not stupid slow, not at all. Just not genius quick.

“I’ll call us in sick,” Shade said, and pressed her thumb to her phone.

“I don’t think you can do that.”

“Please.” Shade dialed, waited, said, “Hello, this is Shade Darby, senior. I’m feeling a little off today, and I’m also calling in sick for—” She covered the phone and asked, “What’s your legal name?”

“Hugo Cruz Martinez Rojas.”

“Hugo Rojas. Yeah, she’s hurt. A couple of our star football players roughed her up. Yes. No. Uh-huh.” Shade hung up. “See? No problem. The school is already dealing with the swastika incident. They don’t want any more bad publicity.”

“Swastika incident?”

“Spray paint on the side of the temporary building, the one they use for music. A swastika and the usual hate stuff, half of it misspelled. It’s two ‘g’s’ not one. One ‘g’ and it’s a country in Africa. Sad times when someone does that, sadder still when they can’t even spell it.”

Cruz had removed most of the blood from her face and neck, but Shade went to her, took a tissue and leaned in to wipe a fugitive blood smear from the corner of Cruz’s mouth.

The gesture embarrassed Cruz, who turned her attention again to the bookshelf beside her. “Veronica Rossi. Andrew Smith. Lindsay Cummings. Dashner. Marie Lu. Daniel Kraus.” Reading the authors’ names from the spines. “And Dostoyevsky? Faulkner? Gertrude Stein? David Foster Wallace? Virginia Woolf?”

“I have eclectic tastes,” Shade said. She waited to see what Cruz made of the rest of her collection.

“The Science of the Perdido Beach Anomaly.” Cruz frowned. “Powers and Possibilities: The Meaning of the Perdido Beach Anomaly. That sounds dramatic. The Physics of the Perdido Beach Anomaly. Way too math-y for me. Our Story: Surviving the FAYZ. I read that one myself—I guess everyone did. I didn’t like the movie though—they obviously toned it way down.”

“Mmmm.”

“You’re very into the Perdido Beach thing.”

Shade nodded. “Some would say obsessed.”

Some. Like Malik.

“And you like science.”

“My father is a professor at Northwestern, head of astrophysics. It runs in the family.”

“And your mom?”

“She’s dead.” Shade cursed herself silently. Four years of saying those words and she still couldn’t get them out without a catch in her voice.

“I’m sorry,” Cruz said, her brow wrinkling in a frown.

“Thank you,” Shade said levelly. She had the ability to place a big, giant “full stop” on the end of subjects she did not want to pursue, and Cruz got the hint.

“My father is a plumbing contractor,” Cruz said. “We used to live in Skokie, but, well, I had problems at the school. It was a Catholic school and I guess they like their students to be either male or female, but not all-of-the-above, or neither, or, you know, multiple-choice. I started out wearing the boys’ uniform and they didn’t like it when I switched to a skirt.”

“No?”

“It was a bit short,” Cruz admitted slyly, “but they don’t make a lot of plaid skirts in my size.”

“What do you do when you’re not provoking violence at bus stops?”

Cruz had a silent laugh, an internal one that expressed itself in quiet snorts, wheezes and wide grins, sort of the diametric opposite of Malik. “Are you asking what I want to be when I grow up? That’s my other secret. I’ve gotten to the point where I can mostly deal with the gender stuff, but writing . . . I mean, you tell people you want to write and they roll their eyes.”

“I’ll be sure to look away when I roll my eyes,” Shade promised.

“Yes, I want to be Veronica Roth when I grow up. You know she’s from here, right? She went to Northwestern.”

“What do you write about?”

Cruz shrugged uncomfortably. “I don’t know. It’s probably just therapy, you know? Working out my own issues, but using fictional characters.”

“Isn’t that what all fiction writers do?”

Cruz did a short version of her internalized laugh.

Shade nodded, head at a tilt, eyeing Cruz closely. “You . . . are interesting.” Something in the way she said it made it a benediction, a pronouncement, and a small, gratified smile momentarily appeared on Cruz’s lips.

After that they chatted about books, ate chips and salsa, and drank orange juice; they watched a little TV, with Shade leaving the choice of shows to Cruz because, of course, Shade was testing her, or at least studying her.

Cruz actually is interesting. And . . . useful?

The day wore on, the swelling in Cruz’s ankle worsened until it was twice its normal size, but then began slowly to deflate like a balloon with a slow leak. The pain receded as well, beaten back by ibuprofen, ice, and the recuperative powers of youth.

All the while Shade considered. She liked this odd person, this e) in a True/False world, this person who tried to wear a skirt to Catholic school, this smart but not too smart, funny, self-deprecating, seemingly aimless creature who wanted to be a writer.

Person, Shade chided herself. Not creature, person. She was aware that she had a tendency to analyze people with the intensity and the emotional distance of a scientist counting bacteria on a slide.

Blame DNA.

Shade needed help, back-up, support, she knew that, and her only currently available choice was Malik, who would resist and delay and generally try to get in her way. Malik was a chronic rescuer, one of those boys—young man, actually, in Malik’s case—who thought it was their duty in life to get between every bully and their victim and every fool and their fate. Had he been at the bus stop he would have launched himself in between the two football players and gotten a beat-down, and it would be his blood she was wiping away, and him she was making ice packs for, and him here in her bedroom . . .

And that is not a helpful place to go, Shade.

They had been drawn to each other from the start, four years ago when Shade had returned to live with her father after the life-changing disaster at Perdido Beach. At first they’d been friends. He had visited her in the hospital after her second surgery, the one to repair the nerves on the right side of her face—she had not been able to feel her cheek. In later years they had become a great deal more, each the other’s first.

The break-up had been Shade’s decision, not Malik’s. He had wanted more of her, more commitment, more openness. But Shade liked her secrets. She liked her privacy, her control over her life.

Her obsession.

Now Shade reached a conclusion: time to pull the pin on the hand grenade, or light the fuse, or some such simile.

Fortune favors the bold, and all that.

“My father is actually doing some work for the government,” Shade said.

“Like for NASA?”

“Mmmm, well, not exactly. How are you at keeping secrets, Cruz?”

Cruz waved a languid hand down her body. “I’m a gender fluid kid who had been passing as muy macho until, like, six months ago. I can keep a secret.”

“Yeah.” Shade nodded, tilted her head, considered, careful to keep a gently amused expression on her face to conceal the cold appraisal in her eyes.

She owes me. I rescued her. She has no friends.

She’ll do it.

“My dad’s, um, tracking the path of what they’re calling an ASO—Anomalous Space Object. Several, actually. Seven to be precise, ASO-Two through ASO-Eight.”

Cruz lifted a plucked eyebrow. “What happened to ASO-One?”

“Oh, ASO-One already landed on Earth years ago. They think all eight ASOs are pieces from the same source, an asteroid or planetoid that blew up, sending some interstellar shrapnel our way. One of the pieces—ASO-One—managed to catch a ride on Jupiter’s gravity well and got here ahead of the rest. Just about nineteen years ahead. The other fragments took a longer route. But ASO-Two through Eight are scheduled to intercept Earth over the next few weeks.”

Shade saw that Cruz had not made the connection, not figured it out, and that was a little disappointing. But then a flicker and a frown, and Cruz made direct eye contact and asked, “Nineteen years ago? Wasn’t that . . .”

Shade nodded slowly. “Mmmm. Nineteen years ago ASO-One entered Earth orbit and slammed into a nuclear power plant just north of the town of Perdido Beach, California.”

That froze Cruz solid for a long minute. Her eyes searched Shade’s face, trying to see whether Shade was just kidding. Because this wasn’t some little secret like ‘I’ve got a crush on . . .’ This was a secret two high school kids who barely knew each other should not possess.

Cruz swallowed a lump. “You’re talking about the alien rock?”

“The rock that changed the world,” Shade confirmed. “The rock that rewrote the laws of physics. The rock that turned random teen sociopaths into superpowered killers. That rock.”

“And you’re . . . you’re saying there’s more coming?”

“According to my father’s calculations, and he is very good at his job. He’s tracking the rocks. One lands today off the coast of Scotland. That’s ASO-Two. Another, ASO-Three, hits in just a few days.”

Cruz shifted uncomfortably, obviously realizing that Shade was no longer making idle chitchat. A message was being delivered. A question hung in the air.

“It’s supposed to land in Iowa. Or it was,” Shade said. “Now, with some updated numbers, they think it will land in Nebraska. There’ll be a whole government task force there to grab it: HSTF-Sixty-Six—Homeland Security Task Force 66. Yes, they’ll be there with helicopters and police escort and various scientists. In Nebraska.”