The Monster’s Corner: Stories Through Inhuman Eyes

THE AWKWARD AGE by David Liss

PETE ALWAYS BELIEVED that he and Roberta had done everything they could do, but they’d been doing everything they could for so long that the urgency had long since slipped away, leaving nothing behind but familiarity. It was one of those situations that looked pretty much awful from the outside but was just everyday life to those inside.

So it was a surprise more confusing than pleasant when the phone rang one weekday night and Pete found himself talking to a woman with one of those congenial San Antonio accents that bespoke social fluidity and comfortable wealth. “Is this Neil’s dad? Hi. This is Mason’s mom.” Which is to say, my mother. I’m Mason. And I know you won’t be happy when you find out how exactly I knew so much about Pete’s life, his take on things, what went on in that fucked-up head of his. You are not going to like it, but I promise to tell you. Only not yet. For now, you are going to have to trust me, which is a lot to ask, I know. But people do trust me. I guess I have one of those faces.

Back to their phone conversation. Pete knew of no child named Mason, so the call caught him off guard. Mason’s mother, Cindy, whom Pete immediately recognized from her voice as a particular kind of San Antonio woman — a blond, ponytailed, lacquered — wanted to invite Neil to sleep over with Mason on Friday night. There were some calls across the house, some quick checking of schedules, and the thing was arranged. Just like that. Not until it was all over did Pete cajole Neil away from his computer long enough to answer some rudimentary questions about Mason, who was, by definition, remarkable simply for being Neil’s friend.

It was not Pete’s fault that he had no idea how to communicate with his son. Not really. On his best day, Neil was impossible to talk to, and this conversation turned out to be even more difficult than most. Neil had been a withdrawn kid when they’d lived in San Diego, and Pete had hoped their move to San Antonio two years ago would give him a chance to open up, to reinvent his life, but it hadn’t. He remained the same. Quiet without being moody. Withdrawn without being sullen. Alone without being lonely.

What little attention Neil had for his father evaporated the minute my name was mentioned, and he instantly retreated to the far reaches of his bed, tucked his receding chin into his too-large T-shirt, and mostly nodded yes or shook his head no or shrugged that he didn’t know. Pete — who was tall, broad in the shoulders, fit from a regular and moderately punishing gym routine — felt like a menacing ogre, and he couldn’t find it within himself to press on with the interrogation. He finally opted for a strategic retreat rather than continue to embarrass his son or do anything that might somehow endanger the sleepover.

Roberta, the lady of the house, made her own foray into Neil Land, but emerged with no more success. “I didn’t want him to feel so uncomfortable that he’d cancel,” she said later that night as they lay in bed. She was reading a mystery that she’d read a jillion times before. Roberta loved to reread books. Some of her favorites she’d read twenty times or more, which Pete would have considered less absurd if she were reading Proust or Joyce, but these were books by Janet Evanovich or John Grisham, books that hardly warranted a single skim, let alone dozens of attentive reads. Some years ago Pete had found this habit endearing, but now he thought it silly, even embarrassing.

“It’s weird,” Pete said. He was leafing through the New Yorker, not reading much of anything. “He’s getting kind of old for sleepovers, don’t you think? I’m worried there might be some kind of gay component to this. Or pre-gay.”

“You think this is a pre-gay sleepover?” asked Roberta.

Pete set down his magazine. “I’m saying it’s odd. I mean, I don’t care if he’s gay. I’d celebrate him being gay.”

“Like with a coming-out party?” Roberta asked. “Our neighbors would love that.”

“At least he would be enthusiastic about something. I just want him to be who he is instead of …” But Pete did not finish the sentence, because the only possible way to finish it was nothing, which was, to his own great shame, how he had come to think of Neil: as a walking depository of nothingness.

Neil always been that way; even as a baby he’d been detached, uninterested, unnaturally calm. Pete and Roberta had done all the right things, gone to all the right doctors, had all the right tests. The results were always the same. There was nothing wrong with Neil. He had no developmental issues; he was nowhere on the autism scale. He was intelligent and responsive, but he didn’t care for people. That was who he had always been.

“You should simply enjoy the fact that he has a friend,” Roberta told him.

A few minutes later, when she turned out her light, Pete vaguely considered rolling over toward Roberta, who remained very attractive for a woman of forty-seven — pretty, slim, the gray in her hair sexy in a Disney villainess kind of way — but he didn’t know if he exactly wanted to have sex. The last three or four — yes, it was exactly four — times he’d made advances, Roberta had rejected him, and he didn’t know if he was up for the emotional trauma of five in a row. He might be awake half the night, pondering this rejection, wondering what it meant for their eighteen-year-old marriage. Alternatively, she might be interested, and he wasn’t entirely sure that would be a good thing either. In theory sex seemed like an excellent idea, but even at its most rushed it was a time-consuming business, and it was already after midnight. He had work to finish in the morning. Did he want to have sex, or did he want to have had sex already so not having sex could be something he didn’t have to ponder? As he turned over these ideas, Roberta began to snore in a low, grumbling rhythm and the decision was made for him.

It turned out that Roberta could not take Neil over to my house on Friday night. She was the program director of an oldies radio station, and a crisis had exploded across station management with shocking urgency. The station’s popular morning DJ announced he’d received a lucrative offer from a station in Baltimore, and Roberta had to attend an emergency meeting about how to confront this offer. Pete, who telecom-muted as a software engineer for the database company he’d been with in San Diego, had the flexible schedule, and he was the one who picked up all the parenting slack. On the way to my house, Neil slouched in the front seat, playing with the satellite radio, settling on some kind of shrill dirge-like music that left Pete feeling both anxious and depressed.

“What’s this Mason like?” Pete attempted.

Neil shrugged and then attempted to retract his mass of curly brown hair into his chest cavity. “Okay, I guess.”

“Yeah? What do you two like to do together?”

“I don’t know. Nothing.”

At a stop sign, Pete took a moment to look at his slight, pale, gaunt specter of a son. “Is he also into computer games?”

“Who?” asked Neil with complete sincerity.

“Who do you think?” Pete sighed with frustration. “Mason.”

Neil didn’t respond, but his silence was not of the furtive or guilty kind, and Neil was already drifting off into the blank space he so much preferred to conversation. Pete decided to let the matter go.

Mason’s family, which is to say my family, lived in one of those massive old Alamo Heights houses on one of those winding old streets near the dam. It was the kind of house, inhabited by the kind of people, that made Pete feel small and insignificant and destined to be an outsider in San Antonio. Here was land money, oil money, cattle money. Here were people who surrounded themselves with uniformed Mexicans and felt no discomfort in wielding their complete authority over them, comfortable giving out orders in their competent Spanish. They were the sort of people who, when they heard Pete was a software engineer, would say, “I think that’s great!” as if to announce that they were okay with Pete’s curious little career. They were accepting of his meaningless toil. They were willing to put a happy face on his inexplicable lack of riches. Mason’s family’s immodest weal made any interest in Neil even more inexplicable. Pete steadied his nerve as he pulled into our circular driveway, and Neil grabbed his bag and was out the door before Pete had unbuckled his seat belt.

Cindy was precisely what Pete expected — pretty and faded, slim, blond, ponytailed, tennis outfit as casual attire, too much makeup, certainly some minor plastic surgery, possibly something major. He felt like he needed a translator when talking to women like this.

“Those kids,” she said, looking toward the house, where the silhouettes of two figures were visible on the other side of the curtains. They stood there, still, bodies at odd angles, surely listening to the adults.

After Pete shook her hand and uttered a few awkward words of introduction, Cindy pressed on with her breathless and insincere enthusiasm. “I am just so glad Mason met Neil. I know he’s been a good friend, and Mason’s had such a hard time this year. Fourteen is such an awkward age, don’t you think?”

Pete agreed because he supposed, from talking to parents who had kids Neil’s age, that they had difficulties he and Roberta did not — drama and romance and hormones and emotions. Slammed doors and unfinished homework and asserting dominance. Pete had heard about these things. Also, agreeing seemed to be the best way to keep the conversation to a minimum, and more than anything else, Pete wanted to be in his car and driving away. After answering Cindy’s questions about what Neil liked to eat and how late was absolutely too late to stay up, Pete was soon free to retreat to his Accord and return home.

Later, Roberta was angry with Pete for not going inside the house, getting a sense of what the family was like — they didn’t even know if Cindy was married. Pete hadn’t noticed if she wore a ring. He hadn’t figured out a way to meet Mason, to lay eyes on the first friend Neil had made in years. Roberta’s irritation bordered on genuine anger.

Pete didn’t have the energy to defend himself. If he had, the discussion might have turned into a real argument, but as far as he could tell, he had done nothing wrong. He could hardly have forced his way into the house. He offered to call over there, but Roberta did not want to embarrass Neil in front of his only friend, so she managed to keep her curiosity under control. When Neil was safely returned home at the promised time the next morning, it was apparent there was nothing to worry about. That Neil would not describe his night as anything other than fine and okay in itself raised no red flags. That was Neil.

Roberta wanted to reciprocate as quickly a possible, both to show their appreciation and so they could have the chance to meet this elusive Mason, so the following Friday evening Cindy’s Escalade pulled into their driveway, and Pete watched from the window as my mother emerged, followed by a figure with long dark hair and dressed entirely in black. The first thing Pete noticed was that I had girlish hair — a long, straight tumble of darkness with two elevated purple pigtails. Then he noticed that I was wearing leggings and a skirt. It took a few seconds for Pete to put all the pieces together and realize that his fourteen-year-old son was having a sleepover with a girl. Or was it a cross-dresser? No, it was definitely a girl.

It was not Pete’s first encounter with Texas girls with ridiculous names, androgynous only because they were not first names at all. Nevertheless he’d assumed — of course he’d assumed — that someone named Mason would be a boy. Masonry was masculine work, after all. Now both Pete and Roberta were so paralyzed by surprise and awkwardness, they could not even begin to imagine how they ought to act. There was no precedent, no guidelines. They stood, mouths open, eyes wide, while an uninvited girl walked up their driveway followed by her blond, attractive mother, whose prettiness diminished in the wake of her daughter’s presence. Charisma radiated from Mason like radioactive waves. Pete saw at once that this was not just a girl. Mason was something special.

So, yes, he noticed me right away. Unlike small and androgynous Neil, I was neither scrawny nor underdeveloped. I was a full head taller than Neil, broad in the shoulder, and respectably stacked for a girl my age. I wore a long black skirt, black boots, and a gauzy blouse that showed off enough cleavage to make a point, but not so much as to venture into whore territory. Despite the dyed black hair and the excessive makeup, neither of which Pete was inclined to find particularly appealing, I had his full attention.

“I can’t thank you enough for having Mason over,” Cindy said, keys still in hand. She looked, as if with longing, at her Escalade. “Y’all are so nice.”

“It’s the least we could do. After you had our son sleep over with your daughter,” Roberta said, emphasizing the gendered nouns in case this aspect of the situation had somehow escaped Cindy’s notice.

“Y’all are so nice,” Cindy said again. “And I love your house!”

“Are there any …” Roberta waved her hand in the air and then, noticing what she was doing, stopped. “Are there any special rules you want us to enforce.”

I looked at Cindy and she looked away. “No,” said Cindy, who after a moment remembered her smile. “I trust y’all.”

With Cindy retreating to her car, Pete and Roberta hurried into a huddle as they attempted to formulate a strategy, but things quickly devolved into Roberta berating Pete for not having discovered last weekend that Mason was a girl. Roberta wanted to find some excuse for sending the girl home, but Pete wouldn’t allow it. It would be enough for her to sleep in the guest room. He did not want the girl to sleep in Neil’s bedroom, but he certainly didn’t want her to go. For Neil’s sake, he told himself, and at that point he wasn’t even lying.

Pete would not have thought of himself as the kind of man who would become fixated on a fourteen-year-old girl, but let’s look at the facts a little more closely. First of all, the girl in question did not look fourteen. That has to count for something. An uninterested party would think I was sixteen, maybe even eighteen. It’s not the most dignified thing in the world for a forty-five-year-old man to fall for an eighteen-year-old girl, but it is hardly pedophilia. I looked like a woman, not a girl, so while we are certainly entitled to think of Pete as a perv, we are not necessarily obligated to do so.

Secondly, I went after him. Maybe. That is what happened, isn’t it? At times he was so sure, but other times — well, it was complicated, wasn’t it? As the more mature of the two of us, he ought to have found it within himself to be wise and dignified and refuse to enter into some kind of fucked-up relationship because the girl wanted to or seemed to want to or whatever it was that was going on. All of that is surely true, and yet I went after him, almost certainly, and he enjoyed it too much to find the will to resist.

Pete certainly had no way of preparing himself for what was coming. It began as nothing more than an awkward social situation that would someday turn into the kind of funny story you tell after a little too much to drink. I disappeared with Neil into his bedroom, where we did whatever it was we did — Pete certainly had no idea what was going on in there, and he didn’t want to humiliate his son by having a peek — until dinner, when we emerged looking neither entirely guilty or innocent. We sat at the table, where we were presented with Roberta’s chicken enchiladas, and Pete tried not to avoid looking at me, because that would be rude, but to avoid looking at me too much, because that would be rude, too. Mainly he kept sneaking glances, trying to remember if I was quite as striking, quite as interesting and pretty and magnetic as he recalled me being when he was looking elsewhere. And I was. You’d better believe it.

Over dinner Pete kept staring longingly at a distant wine rack, but he and Roberta — mostly Roberta — had decided not to model drinking in front of the children. Behind the decision was an unspoken need to set clear, strict, puritanical boundaries. Uncorking a wine might just be the first step to an untamed, drunken bacchanal. Mason’s mere presence in their home that night was an assault upon the fortress of propriety, so cracks in the walls could not be tolerated. Consequently, Pete made do. Roberta, meanwhile, made a valiant and highly laudable effort to make conversation about normal things — which classes Neil and I shared, what subjects I liked best, what kind of after-school activities I enjoyed. I grant her points for her careful navigation away from questions that might have embarrassed Neil, such as which friends we had in common, what it was we liked to do together, or what, precisely, my interest might have been in a boy whose parents had come — really through no fault of their own — to regard him as something of a ghost.

Questions directed at Neil lost momentum and died. There was no inquiry that could not be satisfied with a shrug or nod or shake of the head. Both parents tried, and both failed. When I talked, I found ways to include him that did not involve any actual response from him, and I knew he would be grateful.

Roberta gave up on directing questions at Neil and focused on me. “So tell us, Mason, what kinds of after-school activities do you do?”

I did not give her the kind of withering glance that any self-respecting goth girl would launch at a parent floundering this badly. Instead, I smiled broadly, waving my fork around for emphasis as I told her about my hours logged on the school literary journal. “I,” I assured her, “am a poetess.”

Pete liked the way I talked. He liked the youthful exuberance and brazen self-confidence, all laced with the most subtle hint of self-effacing irony. As dinner went on, Pete regarded me less as a child and more as a person, less as a curious invader and more as an interesting, even welcome, intervention into his musty routine. That was what led Pete to ask more interesting questions, because he believed I could handle it, because he believed the answers would be illuminating. He wasn’t a parent passing judgment on the peculiarities of the younger generation. He wanted to know. “I’m interested in your, I guess, style, Mason.”

“Pete!” Roberta objected.

“I don’t think I’m being rude,” said Pete. “Mason knows that she dresses in a particular way, and she knows it is going to attract attention. It’s not offensive to ask you about it, is it?”

“Of course not.” I smiled at both of them. “If you dress in a way that makes people stare, you should be prepared to discuss it.”

“Is it some sort of a music thing?” Pete asked. “Are you dressing like a singer? Like, I don’t know, Marilyn Manson?”

“Who?” I asked. “Oh, yeah. My mom used to listen to him, I think. I don’t mean that in a bad way. I like oldies, but my look isn’t about music.”

“Is it about Twilight?” asked Pete. “Are you into vampires?”

“I’m not a vampire, Pete,” I said.

“I’d never suggest you were,” he said, feeling a little chastised, and feeling it was deserved. He realized he had veered into the condescending, and wished to correct course. “Of course not.”

“Some people are,” I told him as I picked at a piece of chicken. “Some people like to pretend they are, and some people actually are. But I’m not.”

“We know you’re not, honey,” said Roberta.

“I’m a ghoul,” I said.

This kind of pronouncement can bring a conversation to a halt, but I had confidence I could get things moving again. Neil chewed on obliviously. Roberta looked at Pete, as though begging for some kind of lifeline. Pete grabbed for the goblet of wine he wished were by his placemat.

“Oh,” said Roberta at last. “That’s so interesting.”

Pete sucked in his breath, came to terms with the lack of wine, and chose to valiantly march into the battle. “Is there a difference?” He met my gaze for the first time, holding on to it, and he smiled. I smiled in return, and he knew he was having fun now. He wasn’t teasing me. He wasn’t interested in humiliating me or showing me up. He told himself he was treating me like any guest. In fact, he was flirting with me. “Isn’t ghoul just a kind of generic term, and maybe vampire is, I don’t know, a subset of ghoul? All vampires are ghouls but only some ghouls are vampires. Like squares and rectangles.”

“It’s a common mistake,” I told him, careful to sound amused as well. I was also flirting. “Really, there’s no reason to be embarrassed. But no vampires are ghouls. Different things. Vampires suck the blood of the living. Ghouls survive off the flesh of the dead. And, to a lesser extent, disillusionment.”

“Is this appropriate dinner conversation?” Roberta asked.

“Don’t we all eat the flesh of the dead?’ asked Pete, holding up a piece of chicken on his fork.

Across the table, Neil sawed a piece of enchilada in half with his knife and fork.

I met Pete’s gaze, firm and steady, and showed him my best, full-toothed, red-lipped smile. “Indeed we do. But,” I added, “a ghoul prefers to eat uncooked human flesh.”

“I really don’t think we should be talking about this,” said Roberta, “but what a wonderful imagination you have.”

They made up the guest room for me. “We’re not comfortable with the two of you sharing a room together,” Roberta said. “You understand, don’t you, Neil?”

He shrugged. “I guess. Whatever.”

Pete stared at his son in undisguised disappointment. A charming, sexy, unconventional girl was sleeping over at his house. Surely this was the time to rouse himself from his torpor. Surely this was something worth fighting for, but Neil glanced at his cuticles and jabbed at the carpet with the tip of his sneaker.

They let us stay up playing video games until eleven, and then it was lights out. The guest room had its own bathroom, so I disappeared inside but did not get undressed. I turned out my light, and by midnight the rest of the house was dark. I waited, not certain what Pete would do, but I knew a thing or two about desire and longing, and I’d placed my bets. A little after one in the morning, I saw a light go on in the kitchen. I heard the shuffle of feet, the low murmur of the TV, and the distinctive popping of a cork. Pete decided he would have that wine after all. I waited until I thought he’d have had time for a glass and then went out, still fully dressed, still fully made up, looking fresh, rested, impossibly unrumpled. He was sitting at the kitchen table, wearing a white T-shirt and cotton shorts, watching a black-and-white movie on the TV, with a bottle of wine and a glass in front of him. And he was glad to see me. Maybe even relieved. He didn’t know himself.

“Where do you keep the wineglasses?” I asked.

He paused for a moment, and somewhere in his reptile brain a thousand possibilities played out, a thousand choices presented themselves, but there were really only two, and he chose between them without taking a moment to seriously consider the alternative. He looked at my lips, red as blood and glistening from a fresh application of lipstick, and gestured toward one of the cabinets. I took a glass, sat down across from him, and poured. I swirled my glass, took a sip, and then looked at the label.

“So, what?” he asked. “You’re some kind of bad girl?”

“I like wine,” I said. “I prefer old-world reds. You know, big Italian wines, especially anything from Piedmont, but this is pretty good for a California cab.” I took another sip and met his gaze, enjoying astonishment and pleasure, enjoying the distant thrum of gears turning in his mind. “Define ‘bad girl.’ ”

“Come on,” he said. “What are you doing with Neil? You are a beautiful young girl and Neil is … You know.”

I leaned forward, letting my top sag just enough to improve his view. “Tell me.”

“There’s nothing wrong with him,” Pete said, staring into my face because he dared not look down my top. “He’s just a loner. He doesn’t have a lot of friends. You must know that. Before you, he didn’t seem to have any friends, and he didn’t seem to mind. As near as I can tell, the other kids don’t pick on him. They hardly even notice him. When we have conferences at school, his teachers need a minute to go through his file, as if they’re trying to remember who he is. Christ, sometimes I come home and see him and remember that I have a son.”

“And you’re telling this to his only friend?”

“It’s crazy,” admitted Pete. “I guess I wonder if maybe you know him, really know him, in some way that Roberta and I don’t. Maybe you can tell me something.” He finished off his glass and poured himself another one. After a moment’s thought, he refilled mine. “I’m sorry. You must be uncomfortable.”

“No,” I said. “I appreciate that you talk to me like I’m a peer. You don’t talk down to me. You expect me to get things. And I do. I get a lot of things.”

“You seem very mature. For a ghoul.”

“Gotta respect the ghoul,” I said.

“Human flesh,” he said.

I smiled. “And disillusionment.”

“Tasty,” he said.

“You’d be surprised.” I met his gaze and held it until he looked away. Then I said, “So, we can be friends, right? We can hang out?”

“Come on.” He leaned away from the table, creating more space between us, not because that’s what he wanted to do, but because it was what he thought he ought to do. He liked the idea of being my friend. He liked the idea of hanging out with me. He hated that he liked the idea, but he liked it all the same.

“No,” I said. “You come on.”

“How exactly is that going to work? You’re in middle school, and you think we can just hang out? I’m forty-five years old,” he said, wanting, more than anything else, to hear that it didn’t matter.

“Forty-five,” I said. “Now that is an awkward age.”

I let the better part of a week go by, but on Thursday I called him on his cell phone, right after school, a good couple of hours before Roberta would be home. “Engineer any good software today?”

“How did you get this number?” he asked.

“I found it in Neil’s phone,” I told him. “I was snooping. I’m very curious.”

“Right,” he said. “I was about to run some errands. You’re lucky to catch me.”

“I am lucky to catch you,” I agreed.

“So, Mason,” he said. “Can I do something for you?”

“What do you have in mind?”

There was a pause. “I mean, are you calling for a reason?”

“Do I need a big reason? I thought we were going to be friends.”

“Mason, this is weird,” he said.

“I know. Right?”

Another pause. “I just don’t think this is a good idea.”

“Are you going to give me a lot of crap about age difference? Are you really that shallow? Because I don’t think you are. I enjoy your company and you enjoy mine, and there is no reason why we can’t be friends other than the fact that, on some abstract level, you think it can be interpreted as weird. And maybe that’s true. Maybe, in general, it is weird for a person as old and feeble and decayed as you to be friends with a bright young fountain of potential like me, but the question is, do you think it is always weird? Do you think it is weird in this particular instance?”

“Wow,” he said. “Have you been practicing that?”

“It just came out, but it sounded awesome, right? I know! I was totally on a roll!”

He laughed. “You make a convincing case.”

“Good, so I’m at home, my mom is not. Why don’t you come over. I’m about to watch this old movie, Showgirls? Have you ever seen it? It’s about strippers or something, and it’s supposed to be so terrible that it’s awesome.” I gave him a few seconds to consider all this. “Join me?”

He took a few seconds himself. “I can’t. I have, uh, errands.”

Is there a way to interpret an invitation to watch a semipornographic film in an empty house as anything other than a come-on? Pete worked hard to find another explanation, because the most obvious one seemed so improbable — and so very much what he wanted — that he found it impossible to accept. Mason did not understand what she was doing. Mason was naive. Mason was so incredibly not interested in Pete that she viewed him as essentially sexless, which meant there was no erotic component in watching a dirty movie with him. One of those things had to be true because the alternative, that sexy young Mason was into him, meant he would have to develop some kind of response. Of course he could not make a move. Any kind of sexual relationship with her was unthinkable — and a crime. If they were caught, it would mean scandal, prison, the destruction of his family. It was also adultery, and despite the chronological fatigue currently buckling the walls of his marriage, Pete loved Roberta, had never cheated on her, and didn’t relish the idea of doing so.

But there were those little nagging questions. Would cheating really be that big a deal? What was cheating — what was it really? Just body parts touching, when you thought about it. Like shaking hands. In the end, what did it really mean? And what if it turned out that he fell in love with Mason? Then shouldn’t he be with her? Statutory rape, as a law, made sense in most cases, but Mason was clearly no ordinary fourteen-year-old. She was a woman, and there was nothing perverted in desiring her since he desired her as a woman, not a child.

He desired her. Yes.

These thoughts ping-ponged through Pete’s mind as he ran his errands, through dinner, through after-dinner television. In the middle of a show he and Roberta always liked to watch together — though they watched it only because she had a crush on one of the actors — Pete got up and went to Neil’s room, knocking once, and then entering when Neil grunted his approval for entry.

Inside the room, Neil sat at his desk, using his mouse and keyboard to lead a knight on a horse across a hilly landscape.

“You have a minute?” Pete asked.

“Okay,” Neil said, not looking up. “I’m supposed to meet someone from my guild in like ten minutes.”

“Sure,” Pete said. He sat on Neil’s bed, which had been made with almost military precision. There was no junk on the floor. His books were put on their shelves in alphabetical order. There were no posters on the walls. It had never occurred to Neil that he might want to personalize his space.

“Are you still friends with Mason?” Pete asked.

“I guess,” Neil said, continuing to ride his horse across the landscape. “I mean, maybe. I don’t know.”

“Do you like her? I mean, like for a girlfriend?”

“Nah.”

Pete needed a moment here. There was no awkwardness in this. No embarrassment. Pete had the distinct feeling that Neil had never considered Mason as an object of desire — that now that the topic had been raised, he still didn’t.

“Does she still want to hang out?” he managed.

“Not really.”

“Since when?”

“Sleepover, I guess.”

“And how do you feel about that?”

Neil shrugged. “I don’t feel anything about it.”

Pete stood up. “You don’t feel anything about it? You don’t have any friends, Neil. Don’t you care that you don’t have friends? Don’t you care that this beautiful girl wants to spend time with you, that she’s been — I don’t know — chasing you? Haven’t you noticed? Are you just going to let her get away from you without even noticing that she’s there?”

Neil stared at his father with a surprise that bordered on a kind of confused alarm. “She’s okay, but you know.”

“Okay,” Pete said. He walked toward the door, now afraid he’d raised his voice, that Roberta had heard him. He put his hand on the doorknob, turned back to Neil, and said, “Okay,” again. And that was it. Neil was already back at his keyboard, piloting his horse toward another figure on a horse. He tried not to think about the impossible, nonsensical, fantastical possibility that Mason had used his son to get to him. Why would she do that? Who was Pete that a fourteen-year-old girl would give a crap? Maybe Mason liked Neil for his own sake. Maybe she saw something in him that his own father simply could not, and while Pete found that thought as comforting as he did shameful, he could not make himself believe it. Even if it was the most logical explanation, it did not feel true.

Pete walked back to the TV room and sat next to Roberta, who hadn’t noticed he’d been gone, let alone heard him raise his voice. Roberta watched her show, and Pete thought about what might have happened if he had watched Showgirls with Mason.

Wasting no time, I texted Pete just before noon the next day.

ME: what r you up2

HIM: Hi Mason. I’m working. Shouldn’t you be furthering your education?

ME: take me 2 lunch

HIM: Wouldn’t you have to miss school?

ME: So not ur problem 12:15 at gas station, 1 block north of school

HIM: I don’t know.

ME: Yes u do I’ll b there

He came. Of course he came. How could he not? I’d made it so easy to say yes, so hard to say no. He picked me up in his Accord and smiled politely and did not touch me or leer at me, despite my wearing a very tight black T-shirt and short skirt in which I looked entirely like a woman and nothing like a child. I had my hair back in a ponytail, and he liked the way it looked. He liked being able to see my white neck. He liked my profile. He liked it all.

Pete had decided he would do everything he could to act as though meeting me for lunch, helping me to skip school, were the most natural thing in the world. He wore khakis and a button-down shirt, and he felt certain he looked handsome and competent, and he felt muscular and trim and ten years younger than he was, and he kept trying to forget what he was doing, how crazy and strange and dangerous it was. He wanted to enjoy the sensation of being near me, of being so close to my youth and vitality and freshness, and my near total absence of world-weariness. He didn’t want to think about what any of it meant or where it would lead or how insanely and foolishly self-destructive this single act was, how it could ruin his marriage and his life and everything. He wanted to inhabit the experience, and he could not remember the last time his life offered up a moment sweet enough to deserve that kind of attention.

“Where do you want to go?” he asked.

“Someplace I can get a beer,” I said.

He paused for a moment, and then decided not to be shocked or surprised or concerned. He decided to go with it. In some sense, he decided I was in charge, and he knew he was deciding that, and it was possible he even liked it. Pete was not accustomed to drinking beer in the afternoon. He might do so at a weekend party, but on a weekday, when he ought to be working — that was something that had quite literally never happened before. When you are self-employed, working entirely without supervision, it is healthiest to view midday drinking as strictly for drunks and losers, the pathetically unproductive. He knew that, and yet now that I had suggested it, Pete could not help but find the idea appealing. More than appealing. Seductive. It was a doorway to an entirely different life, and he was surprised how easy it was to decide to step through it. “What time do you have to be back?” he asked.

I pressed myself into the seat. “I don’t. I don’t ever have to be anywhere.”

He took me to a Korean place off Walzem where we ordered barbecue and drank Japanese beer while we snatched up spicy pickles and potatoes and little tiny fish with our chopsticks. Pete hadn’t known what to expect when I ordered the first round of beer, but the waiter had only nodded, not so much concealing his reaction as never having one. Maybe he was used to parents ordering drinks for their underaged children. Maybe he never doubted that I was of age. Maybe I simply had that effect on people. Certainly, Pete reflected, he’d already done things with me and for me that he never would have imagined doing, so he simply assumed the waiter was no different.

The beer turned out to be just what he needed. It didn’t make the situation any less strange, but it helped him to settle in, to work up the nerve to say what needed to be said. “What exactly is up with you and Neil?”

I let the bottle of beer dangle between my thumb and index finger, swinging like a pendulum. “What do you mean?”

“Give me a break, Mason,” he said, loving the feel of my name in his mouth. “You know what I mean.”

“Nothing is up with me and your son,” I said. “He is my friend. I like Neil. I’m not dating him. We are not having any kind of sexual relations, if that’s what you want to know. Anyhow, I have a boyfriend.”

“You do?” Disappointment, followed by chastising himself for that disappointment. What possible concern of his could it be if I had a boyfriend or not? I had a boyfriend and had no interest in Pete in that way, just as he had supposed, just as he had always known. He felt utterly deflated and utterly relieved. He felt like the world was righting itself and, in the process, he was sliding off the surface and into the void.

“You don’t think I could have a boyfriend? You think ghouls don’t deserve love?”

“That’s not what I’m saying,” he said. “Of course it isn’t. I’m just making conversation, I guess. Acknowledging that I heard you.”

“He’s older than I am,” I said. “I like older guys.”

This got his attention. “How much older?”

“Tenth grade.”

I could see the emotions swirl across his face like the time-lapse image of a hurricane. Never had Pete felt quite so many of his forty-five years all at once, all so bitterly. He ordered us another round of beer.

“His name is Ryan,” I said. “And he is so hot. God, I love him. He plays JV football, but he’s not the jock type. He’s really cool. You would love him. I can’t wait for you guys to meet.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t know how feasible that is,” he said.

“And he is so good in bed. Fuck. I know I shouldn’t say things like that. I know. I’m sorry. Cindy always says I need to censor myself better, and I swear I’m working on it.”

So now Pete knew. I wasn’t hitting on him, he concluded. He was an absurd, self-deluding, middle-aged clown. That much was now clear, wasn’t it? But then how to explain the flagrant flirting, the inviting him over to watch Showgirls? Could he have been so wrong about all that? How could he have misunderstood so many signals? He couldn’t have, but then how could he make sense of this new development?

It would have been so easy for him to escape. He could have done it right then, and to do it he only would have had to say precisely what was on his mind. He could have asked me what I thought I was doing with him. He could have asked me why I was flirting with him and then talking about my hot boyfriend. He could have said that he found this situation very confusing and strange, and maybe the strange part he could live with, maybe he liked the strangeness. He could have said how much he enjoyed me and being near me and talking with me and drinking three or four or five beers with me in the afternoon and blowing off that work he swore he would get done that afternoon because being with me was so much better than any of that, but he could not deal with how confusing it was. He could have said that he didn’t know if it was because of my youth or the generation gap or just the peculiarities of my personality or the fact that maybe I ought to be on meds, but clearly I did not understand the mixed signals I was sending, and he needed me to explain. That’s all it would have taken. Web snapped, snare broken. It would have been so simple, but simple doesn’t mean easy, and for Pete the hardest thing would have been to say the words that banished the illusion that a beautiful, impossible, unobtainable girl desired him. So he said something else. He said, “You know what? You should feel free to be entirely yourself around me.” “I will,” I lied as I took a piece of kim chi.

There were more texts. I sent him a message every day. Then two or three and then four or five times a day. I would sometimes wait an hour or two before responding to his. He always responded right away. There were more lunches with more drinks. We would sneak away, he from his home office and me from school, and we would eat and linger around the table at some obscure Asian eatery with stained linoleum floors and peeling wallpaper and delicious food — restaurants in forgotten corners of the city where no one he knew would ever go. We would get pleasantly, and never excessively, drunk. I put my hand on his arm while we talked. I hugged him hard both hello and goodbye. I pressed myself against him, and let him catch me breathing in the scent of him as though these hugs could sustain me. Those moments, he was sure, were the happiest of his life, so true and so hopeful and so full of sweetness.

Sometimes he would think that if he considered Mason, really considered her, who she was and what she said and did, then he knew he didn’t really want her. Even in some fantasy world in which they could be together, the relationship could never last, and it wasn’t because of the age difference either. It was because the things that made Mason so tantalizingly desirable were not the things on which real love was built. He knew it, and knowing it did not matter.

Roberta noticed nothing. That was the crazy thing. He kept waiting for her to say something, to discover the e-mails or the texts or smell the beer on his breath or my scent on his clothes, but she never did. He sat across from her at the dinner table, still half buzzed from lunch with his secret fourteen-year-old friend, and waited for the other shoe to drop. He cooked up explanations and excuses and narratives that would attempt to make sense of his relationship with me. But Roberta never asked or noticed, which only left Pete feeling emboldened.

And work. That was the crazy thing. Pete felt like he was in some kind of moralistic novel from the fifties, one in which his halfhearted efforts to escape from his life of quiet desperation would lead to his loud and chaotic destruction. His productivity fell off. He was sure of it, but no one at the company noticed. His superiors still sent him enthusiastic e-mails about his work. If he missed a deadline by an hour or two, no one seemed to mind, and it occurred to him that for years he’d been making himself crazy to hit deadlines no one but he cared about. Pete was crashing and burning, but no one troubled to take note. His work, his attention, his daytime sobriety weren’t missed.

Pete wrote his code during the day, and then in the evening he would sit through his quiet dinners with Roberta and Neil, and then Neil would slink off to his room and he and Roberta would watch some television in which neither of them was particularly invested. They would go to the bedroom and read for a little while, and now and again they’d have satisfactory if familiar sex. That was it. That was his life. That was the sum of his existence without me, and I outweighed all of it. He would have let it all go for me if he could.

He couldn’t, of course, and so he would spend long hours, awake in his bed at night, thinking that he would just need to wait until I was eighteen. Three years and seven months. That was all he would have to wait, and then Neil could go be Neil on his own. Roberta didn’t want Pete around anyhow. Not really. They were just a comfortable habit now. In three years and seven months he would run away with Mason. He promised himself it would happen, and he refused to think about all the reasons why it was impossible because he knew that if he did not have me to give his life meaning, the emptiness in my wake would be unbearable. It was the one thing about me of which he was absolutely certain.

So he sent me more messages and longer messages and asked to meet with me more often. To counter this boldness, I talked incessantly about Ryan, about how much I loved him, how much I missed him when he was not around, how we had amazing sex, how I gave him a blow job for scoring a touchdown. This stuff killed him, and I could tell it did, but he would not tell me to stop, he would not ask me what I wanted with him, he would not ask why I wanted to spend time with him. Someday he would be with me, but that was an impossibly distant future. For now, it was enough that nothing change. If I were to come on to him and kiss him and that led to sex, maybe it would be hot and exciting and amazing, but next would come guilt and drama and perhaps jail, and he didn’t want any of that. He didn’t want to cheat on his wife and he didn’t want to be the sort of person who would sleep with a fourteen-year-old girl. What he wanted was for things to be exactly the way they were, and maybe hearing about Ryan was the price he had to pay for that to happen. Maybe as long as I was in love with Ryan, and having sex with Ryan and talking about Ryan, Pete would be safe inside his insane and happy bubble.

One day, after three beers and over the remains of pad thai, I began the next phase. “How come you never invite me over to dinner anymore?” I asked.

He looked at me, and then away, and then at his food. Then he looked at me again. I was wearing a black summer dress with spaghetti straps, and it was less like clothing than a wrapping to conceal my nudity. Pete tried not to let it distract him and to focus on the task at hand. He had become used to regarding everything I said as a puzzle or a test, and he considered the best way to tackle this one. “I thought you and Neil weren’t friends anymore.”

“But you and I are,” I said.

“So, you want to have dinner at my house? With my family?”

“Are you ashamed of me?”

It occurred to Pete that they’d never discussed what they did as secret. They never talked about it as sneaking around. Did Mason not see it that way? Did she have no idea that adults were not supposed to do things like this? While his heart hammered with the thrill of the illicit and the daring, did she regard this as just another lunch with just another friend? He did not know. He did not fucking know, and he could not stand not knowing.

“I just don’t know how comfortable Roberta is around ghouls,” he said.

He was trying to keep it light, and I knew it, but I chose not to take it that way. I slammed down my beer. “Why do you want to make my life into a joke?”

“Why do you want your life to be a joke? You are a bright, beautiful girl, so why do you need to pretend you are some kind of monster?”

“I was honest with you from the beginning,” I said. “This is what I am. I never pretended otherwise. I am this way because of my own actions, but I don’t have a choice. You are either my friend and accept me or you aren’t and don’t. There’s no other way to see it.”

“Mason, I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“Too late,” I said, finishing my beer. “I think of my friends as people who would do anything for me.”

“I would do anything for you,” he said.

I snorted.

“No, really,” he said, and he was pleading now, desperate that I believe him. “I would do anything for you.”

“Would you kill someone for me?”

“If necessary, yes,” he said.

“And if it weren’t necessary?” I asked.

“This is silly,” he answered.

“You’re right, it is silly,” I agreed. “Take me home, please.”

We talked about it over a series of e-mails and texts. I apologized to him, told him I’d been tired and moody and on the rag, that he had done nothing wrong, but that was the moment things changed. I slowed it all down. I didn’t respond to all his messages, and when I did respond, I waited longer than usual. I would make dates for lunch and then cancel. I left him hanging.

For Pete, these were not easy days. Things with me were not what they had been. There was no comfort to take in Roberta, who grew older and cold and remote. Neil was isolated and broken — a complete failure as a child and a monument to Pete’s complete failure as a parent. All the miseries of his life began to come back into focus, now more vivid than ever for having been briefly occulted.

The more I withdrew, the more he thought about me, until he reached the point where he realized that he was thinking about me every moment of his day that he was not specifically thinking about something that required his attention. I was his default mode, his anger, his resentment, his confusion, his rage toward himself for his own inaction and hesitation and refusal to walk away from something so impossible and destructive. He would vacillate between confusion, hope, and despair, unable to make sense of anything I had ever done, anything I had ever said. Nothing in his life had given him the tools to sort out the mystery of Mason. His internal compass was like that of a plane lost in the Bermuda Triangle, the needle spinning endlessly, north every direction and none at all.

In was in this period when Pete, moping and hollow, ran into Cindy at the grocery store. Maybe he might have avoided her in the past, but now he was desperate. He would take any contact with me he could manufacture, even if it was secondhand and through my mother. She was at the deli counter as he pushed his way past, and she looked away, hoping to avoid him. Normally he would have pretended not to see her pretend not to see him and wheeled his cart right on past, but not now, now when he stood to possibly learn something about me, so he put on his best smile and pushed his cart over to her.

“Cindy, hi. It’s Pete. Neil’s father.”

She met his false smile with one of her own. “Of course. How are you? How’s Neil?”

“Oh, we’re good.” Pete was already tiring of the small talk, feeling it gum up his brain. “How’s Mason?”

Cindy stared at him. “Oh, you know.”

“No, I don’t. How is she?”

“You know how it is with kids their age. It’s a challenge. Especially Mason. She just hasn’t been the same since her father.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know anything about this. Her father — died?”

Cindy nodded, and her eyes were moist. Pete wanted to get the hell out of there. He hated making this woman cry, but he also felt certain he was on the verge of something important. “That’s when it all started, you know, with her look and everything. They were never close, but I was out of town when it happened. I wished she’d called the police right away or called me or something. But she didn’t. That’s what happened to her, you know.”

“What happened to her?” Pete demanded. He didn’t raise his voice, but he could feel himself getting intense.

“She was alone with the body too long and she tried — ” Cindy turned away.

“She tried what?”

Cindy shook her head. “It was hard. That’s all I meant. Don’t tell her I told you about her father, but if it comes up, please don’t let her think I told you more.” She pushed her cart away.

Pete stared after her, resisting the urge to chase her, to make her tell him what she did not want to say because Pete thought he knew. He was certain he knew what I had tried to do with my father’s body. What I had done with it. Pete thought he knew, and he was right.

After leaving him in this state for almost a month, I called him. “Hey, Pete.”

“Hi, Mason.” He tried to sound neutral, not bitter and delighted and angry and hopeful. It was just after noon on a weekday, and I heard the slur in his voice. He’d been drinking. On his own. Every day he waited for me to call or text or e-mail, and some of those days he drank.

“It’s so good to hear your voice,” I said. “I’ve missed you so much!”

He didn’t want to say it. “I miss you, too.” He said it anyhow.

“How have you been?”

“Okay,” he said. “You?”

“So busy, but listen, I need some help. Do you think you could help me? I need you to give me a ride tonight.”

Hope. Yes, there was anger and hesitation and fear and confusion, but more than anything else, hope, and he was full of willingness to forgive me for everything — for teasing him and misleading him and telling him about my sex life with my sixteen-year-old boyfriend — if only I would be his friend again and let him do me a favor. “A ride where?”

“I’ll tell you when I see you. Can you pick me at my house at about eleven? I’ll be waiting outside.”

“Listen, Mason, I don’t think I can do that. It’s, I don’t know, crazy.”

“Why?”

“Because it is, that’s why. What would I tell Roberta?”

“Tell her you are doing me a favor,” I said. “She has met me.”

This was precisely the sort of thing that left him so utterly rudderless, and he needed a moment to formulate a reply. “What about your mother?” he asked. “Can’t she take you?”

“My mother. Please,” I said, which both ended that line of inquiry and provided absolutely no information.

There was a prolonged silence and then, finally, “I’ll be there.”

Where I wanted to go was the cemetery, the Jewish cemetery, because Jews did not embalm their bodies. I told him where and I told him why, and he drove me. He tried to make conversation, to keep things light, to ask what I was up to, but I was not in the mood for talking. He even asked me about Ryan in the hopes of rousing me out of my stupor, but it was of no use. “Mason, what is going on?” he asked at last.

“I’m hungry,” I said.

“Then let’s go out to eat,” he said, excited. There would be food and drink and we would have a little too much and I would touch his arm when I talked and he would feel light and giddy and young and full of potential and he would forget how unhappy he was.

“Not that kind of hungry. I need to eat real food. There was a funeral today. There’ll be something fresh.”

“Mason,” he began.

“I told you,” I said. “I told you the first time we met what I was. I know you didn’t want to listen, you didn’t want to believe, but it is part of who I am, and I have to eat. If I don’t, I will die. Is that what you want?”

“Let me take you home,” he said, putting a hand on my arm, daring to initiate touching for the first time, to thrill at the feel of my skin, of my warm flesh, of the roundness of my arm. He loved me. He really did. “You need some sleep, and you’ll be fine.”

I jerked away from his grip. “Are you my friend or aren’t you?”

“You know I am,” he said.

“Then come with me. Help me, and if you want, you can join me.”

“Join you?”

“Take my hand. You can be like I am.”

He stared at me. “Are you quoting Blue Oyster Cult?”

“I’m alluding to Blue Oyster Cult,” I said. “It’s not the same thing. But I am also offering us a way to be together.”

“Why me?” he said. “Why did you choose me?”

We all have our blind spots and our weaknesses, and this was mine. This was the question to which I’d never formulated a response, and I should have known it was coming. I should have seen it as inevitable, but I slipped up, and now I had to think on my feet. I could not hesitate. I could not appear to be fabricating something, and so I told him the truth. “I saw you at school, picking up Neil, and you were what I wanted. I knew you were. You were like a perfectly ripe piece of fruit ready for picking. And so I picked you. Now you are mine, if you want to be.”

He stared at me, daring to hope that what I said was true, that I could somehow make him something else, that he could walk away from his life and have a reason, a necessity, to become something else. Even if it meant becoming a monster, was it worth it? Was becoming something unspeakable too high a price to pay for becoming something new? Pete had already had a taste of what it would be like to live outside the realm of the acceptable, he had desired the forbidden, he had flirted with becoming an outcast, and all of those things had seemed wonderful and welcoming and sweet, and that was why he followed me into the graveyard.

I stared at him hard, daring him to turn away from me. “You said you’d do anything for me. You said that. Did you mean it?”

He nodded.

“Then it’s time to show me.”

Of all the things he did that night, following me inside was the hardest. To enter a graveyard at night was a thing so strange, so against every instinct, that it made the rest that much easier. We trudged across the vast expanse of markers and monuments. The air was warm and pleasant, and the half-moon provided us with just enough light. Somewhere in the far distance, the cemetery’s lone security guard sat in his little room, watching his little television, oblivious to our trespass.

I’d scouted ahead, so I knew where to find the fresh grave with its loose soil and the shovel sticking out like a toothpick in a plate of hors d’oeuvres.

“Dig,” I told him.

He stared at me. “You want me to dig up a grave? Why?”

I smiled. “Because you want to know what’s at the bottom. You’ve always wanted to know, haven’t you? What do I want with you? What am I after? There’s only one way to find out.”

He looked at me, unable to believe he was here, in this graveyard, truly considering something so insane as digging up a dead body. “You could simply tell me,” he said.

I shook my head, sympathetically, not at all unkindly. “No,” I said. “That’s not how it works. There’s only one way to find out. You can dig, or you can never know.”

That was why he picked up the shovel and thrust the blade into the loose soil. That was why he worked with calm, steady, untiring effort while I sat on a nearby gravestone and painted my fingernails black.

When the grave was dug and the coffin was open, it was his turn to watch, and he did watch. He looked on while I ate. I did not need to remove my clothes, but I did that for him, to give him something to consider, to ponder, to enjoy while I engaged in an activity that he must at first find revolting, and later find something else entirely. And when I’d had my fill, I took the shovel and removed the top of the corpse’s skull and handed him a beautiful cut of the freshly dead and yeasty-smelling brain. I stood before him naked, my breasts streaked with dirt and blood, holding the flesh out to him like a supplicant making an offering to her god, and he took it and bit into it and his knees became weak.

“Wow,” he said, dropping down onto the grass as he chewed thoughtfully. “It’s amazing. I can — I know what she was feeling, I know what she thought, how she made sense of things. I know what it was to be her.”

I stood there and looked at him and smiled. “I know,” I said, “that’s how it works. You just know.”

I watched. I watched him know what it was like to be that deep inside someone’s head, to understand a stranger’s life with intimate certainty. I looked at him and smiled, and wiped my mouth with the back of my naked arm. Pete had been amusing, and he’d been useful, but I could see it might get tiring soon enough. And when it did, well, something might happen to Pete, and then it would be time for me to find out what he’d been thinking all this time …