American Monsters

  “Then why can’t you distract him and I sneak in?”

  “Because it’s my plan.”

  “Still, though …”

  “Amber, you said you wanted to help. Is that true? Do you really want to?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Then distract the guard.”

  Amber sagged, and nodded. She walked over. The guy was looking at his phone. He didn’t even raise his eyes when she passed. She stopped and turned. He still didn’t look up.

  “Uh,” she said.

  His gaze didn’t move from his phone. “Can’t let you in.”

  “Oh,” said Amber.

  “VIP section,” he said.

  “I don’t want to go in,” Amber told him. “I’m just … Uh, do you have the time?”

  “Seven minutes past three.”

  “Ah.”

  She looked over at Kelly, who was glaring at her.

  Amber tried again. “Could I ask a question?”

  “I’m not gonna let you in,” said the guy.

  “I’m not asking to be let in,” she said. “I just want to ask a question. I was wondering about Montana. It’s my first time here and I was wondering what it’s like.”

  “You’re in it,” he said. “You can see what it’s like. It’s fine.”

  “Okay,” she said. “That’s good to know. Thanks for answering. Guess I’ll be going now. Oh, now that I have you here, do you know the way to the restroom?”

  “Back the way you came.”

  “That one smells bad. What about another one?”

  “Continue the way you’re going, all the way around, take three rights and you’re there.”

  Amber frowned. “Wouldn’t that take me back to the same restroom?”

  “I don’t know,” said the guy. “I’m not a restroom expert. Please move along now.”

  Amber hesitated, then started walking away. She glanced back, and her legs gave out from under her and she fell. The guy still didn’t look up, so she got back to her feet and made a helpless gesture to Kelly.

  Furious, Kelly strode over. “Hey,” she called out. The guy at the door looked up immediately. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? You think this is acceptable behaviour? Where the hell is your supervisor?”

  “I can’t allow you—” he started to say.

  “You can’t allow me?” Kelly raged. “You can’t allow me, you say? You listen to me, you little pipsqueak. I want to talk to your boss, do you hear me? To your boss!”

  The guy held up his hands in a placatory gesture, turning his back to Amber as he did so. The open door beckoned her in.

  “Miss, if you could tell me what this is about—”

  “If I could tell you?” Kelly screeched. “If I have to tell you, then you’ve failed at your job! You want me to do it for you, is that what you want? You want me to do your job for you?”

  Amber hurried inside.

  SHE GOT TO THE end of the corridor and pushed open the next set of doors. She passed a table with a box of lanyards, snagged one for herself and put it over her head. Around the next corner was an open area full of tables and chairs. There was a sign on the wall: NO PHOTOGRAPHS.

  Lots of people milling around, chatting. With her heart lurching and her eyes wide, she recognised most of them. Seth Dimitri chatting with Emmy-Lou Walters. At another table, Dominic Grey and Colin Phelps peering over Jessica Vaughan’s shoulder, laughing at whatever she was showing them on her phone. Marc Winter sitting by himself. It took every ounce of willpower Amber had not to just rush over and scream for selfies. She had to remind herself that she wasn’t here for that. She was here to protect the writer.

  And there she was, Annalith Symmes, sitting alone in the corner, away from the flesh-and-blood versions of the characters she’d created. Compared to their beauty, their studied cool, she was nothing. She was wallpaper. Occasionally, her eyes would flicker to them, as if hoping for an invite to join their effortless, carefree bantering. She received no such invitation. Amber wondered if they even knew who she was.

  A convention official stopped by Symmes’s table, spoke briefly to her and tapped his clipboard. She nodded, he gave her a smile and departed. Amber watched Symmes take a deep breath, then get up and follow the signs for the restroom. Amber went after her, moving away from the celebrities and the volunteers who were trying to act normal around them. Symmes disappeared into the ladies’ room and Amber hung about outside, making sure nobody went in after her. She tried to ignore the sound of puking.

  When Symmes emerged, she was pale and sweating slightly.

  “Hello,” Amber said brightly.

  Symmes gave her a panicked look. “I have to go onstage now? But … but the man said I had ten minutes. He said ten minutes and then—”

  “You’re still on in ten,” Amber assured her. “I’m not here about that. I just thought I would take this opportunity to say, to tell you, and I know that you probably hear this all the time, and I swear I’m not a weirdo, but I am a huge, huge fan of yours.”

  “Oh,” said Symmes, blinking quickly. “Thank you.”

  “And I was a fan long before the TV show,” Amber said quickly. “A family friend, practically my auntie, bought me the first three books and I just, I devoured them. I did. All because of Imelda. Then the show happened and everything exploded and I love the show, I do, but the books … the books are really, really good.”

  Symmes nodded awkwardly, made to walk past and Amber jumped in front of her.

  “Can I just say,” Amber said, “that the female characters in your books are just the best examples of, like … they’re the best representations of women that I’ve ever read, probably. You see all these polls and people saying that Little Women has the best characters, or Pride and Prejudice or whatever, but I think, in the modern world, In the Dark Places says more to people my age than any of the classics.” She even did the air-quotes thing, and she hated the air-quotes thing.

  “The classics still have a lot to say,” Symmes responded. Her voice was quiet.

  “Absolutely,” said Amber, “but I think you’re way up there with Jane Austen and her sister.”

  “I … I didn’t know her sister was a writer.”

  “Wasn’t she?”

  “You may be thinking of the Brontës.”

  “Maybe I am. Who wrote Little Women?”

  “Louisa May Alcott.”

  “I think I’m thinking of someone else.”

  “I think you are, yes. It was very nice to meet you.”

  Symmes went to move by her again, and once more Amber stepped into her path. “Before you go, actually, I was wondering if you had seen anyone, uh, suspicious, hanging around?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Suspicious,” Amber repeated. “Someone maybe … lurking? Have you seen anyone lurking?”

  Symmes took a step backwards. “Just you.”

  “Ha, yes,” said Amber, “but I promise you, I’m not the one who means you harm.”

  Incredibly, Symmes went even paler. “There’s someone who means me harm?”

  “No!” Amber said. “No, God, no! No … Well, yes. I have reason to believe your life is in danger. But don’t worry – I’m here to protect you.”

  “You?” said Symmes. “How old are you?”

  Amber tried to look taller. “Seventeen. I know I may not seem like it, but I really am your best chance of getting out of this alive.”

  “I … I think I’ll need to speak with your supervisor.”

  “Oh, I don’t have one,” said Amber. “I’m not even a real volunteer.”

  Symmes nodded. “Please,” she said, “please don’t kill me.”

  Amber tried to use laughter to make Symmes feel better, but it wasn’t working. She stopped laughing and said, very calmly, “I promise I’m not going to kill you.” That made Symmes even worse.

  Then Kelly came round the corner. “There you are,” she said.

  Amber held her hands up. “I didn??
?t do anything, I swear.”

  Kelly barely glanced at her. “Miss Symmes, I need a word, if you wouldn’t mind. I have reason to believe your life may be in danger.”

  Symmes was almost in tears. “That’s just what this girl was saying.”

  “Well, she was right,” said Kelly, and lunged at Symmes with a huge pair of scissors.

  SYMMES SHRIEKED AND FELL back, arms over her head, but, before Kelly could complete the stab, Amber wrapped her arms around her from behind and twisted, throwing her against the wall.

  “Go,” Amber said, picking Symmes up off the floor. “Run!”

  Symmes ran, and Amber held her hands out as Kelly turned to her.

  “Kelly, this isn’t you.”

  “Damn right it isn’t her,” said Aaliyah Brewer from behind Kelly’s snarling mouth. They circled each other. “I’m a real woman, something this stick insect would know nothing about.”

  “Well, okay,” said Amber, keeping an eye on the gleaming scissors, “at the risk of allowing this conversation to derail, she’s slim, sure, but I wouldn’t exactly call her a stick insect.”

  “Look at her,” Brewer said, lifting her top. “When was the last time she had a burger, huh? When was the last time she defiled her body temple with a slice of pizza? This, all this? This is all for them.”

  Amber took her eyes away from Kelly’s abs long enough to frown. “For who?”

  “Men,” said Brewer. “She’s starved herself to conform to the male perception of what makes a woman beautiful. I didn’t need to do that. I was comfortable in myself and that’s what made me beautiful. I didn’t need male approval.”

  “Uh, neither does Kelly. She’s a lesbian.”

  Brewer kept on glaring, but didn’t respond.

  “Anyway,” said Amber, “now that we’re talking, I wonder if I could persuade you to leave Kelly’s body and stop killing people. Could I do that?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Brewer.

  “What doesn’t?”

  “Her sexual orientation. It has nothing to do with anything. She’s still a woman in a man’s world, because, in this culture of ours, it’s the stick insects who get the magazine covers. That’s all we see, 24/7. Image after image after unrealistic image.”

  “Okay, I really have to stop you there and ask what this has to do with anything,” said Amber.

  Brewer shrugged. “It’s just something that bugs me.”

  “I think it might be because you live on the internet and you’ve probably seen some pretty unhealthy things.”

  Brewer shook her head. “This has been bugging me long before that. Why are you taking her side? You’re like me. You should be proud of your body.”

  “I’m taking her side because she’s not trying to murder anyone.”

  “You’re ashamed,” said Brewer.

  “You realise we’re having two completely different conversations here, right?”

  “Admit it,” Brewer said. “You hate how you look.”

  “If I admit it, will you leave her body?”

  “Gladly.”

  Amber took a moment. “Then yeah, I do. I don’t like being fat.”

  “Fat according to who?”

  “I think it’s whom. And I don’t know. Other people, I guess.”

  “They called me fat, too,” said Brewer. “Fat and ugly. The boys in my school. And the girls hardly rushed to my defence. They were too busy looking pretty and trying to fit in. Well, I didn’t care about fitting in.”

  “I did,” said Amber. “Care, I mean. I did my best to be like everyone else, but it was never going to happen. There was a girl I grew up with, she was way bigger than me. Then, after one summer, she came back to school and she’d lost all this weight. It took a few months to lose her old nicknames as well, but she did, and I watched it all and I knew that even if I did everything that she’d done, it wouldn’t make one bit of difference. I still wouldn’t fit in. Some of us are just different, Aaliyah.”

  Brewer shook her head. “If I looked like them, they’d have loved me. If I’d been a stick insect like this one, I’d have been the most popular girl in school.”

  Amber took a small step forward. “What about you? All I’ve heard from you is a rant about how much thin people suck. But what if they don’t? What if they’re just like you?”

  “The difference,” said Brewer, “is that I’d never bully anyone because of how they looked.”

  “Then how about you stop calling people stick insects, and leave her body like you promised?”

  “I’ll leave when I’m ready to leave,” said Brewer.

  Amber didn’t know where the hell Symmes had run off to, but wherever it was it looked like there weren’t any security guards there. This was up to Amber.

  “Why are you doing this, Aaliyah?” she asked. “Is it really because of the fan fiction?”

  “Gideon and Uriah are polar opposites.”

  “Aaliyah, come on … You’re killing people because you object to the pairing. You’ve got to be able to hear how nuts that sounds.”

  “These characters are my friends!” Brewer yelled. “I grew up with them! I know them better than I know my own family!”

  “They’re not real.”

  “To me, they are! To me, they are everything. We own them. The fans, the true fans, we own those characters, and Symmes thinks she can come in and ruin all that? She thinks she can plant those seeds and – and – and absolve herself of all responsibility?”

  “It’s fan fiction, Aaliyah. What does it matter?”

  “Fan fiction, the good fan fiction, is as relevant as the books. Maybe even more so, because the writers aren’t motivated by greed or publishing contracts. We are pure.”

  “Just not the writers you disagree with.”

  “Gideon and Uriah don’t belong together,” Brewer said defiantly. “Gideon and Balthazar belong together.”

  “How did you die, Aaliyah? Aaliyah? How did you die?”

  “An accident,” said Brewer. She chewed her top lip.

  “What happened?”

  “It was an accident. They said, they said afterwards that I did it myself, that it was suicide, but it wasn’t. It was an accident.”

  “I believe you.”

  “I didn’t kill myself. They said I was confused and angry and …”

  “It’s okay,” said Amber. “I believe you.”

  Brewer nodded.

  “Aaliyah, I don’t want to fight you. I’ve been fighting way too many people lately and I really don’t want to fight you. Can we not fight? Can we not do that?”

  “If you stand in my way, I’ll kill you.”

  “Stand in your way of what? Killing Annalith Symmes? What do you think that will achieve? The TV show will go on, you know it will. It’ll probably get a huge ratings boost.”

  “The show isn’t why I’m doing this.”

  “Then have you thought about what happens with the books?”

  “Yes. They stop, before they get a chance to slide into mediocrity.”

  “But if you kill her then we’ll get tens of thousands of new readers, each one of them claiming to have been fans from the very start. Forums will be swamped by noobs. In the Dark Places will become even more mainstream than it already is.”

  Brewer glowered. “I hate noobs.”

  “I do, too. We all do.”

  “But she has to die.”

  “No, she doesn’t,” said Amber. “Neither did those people you killed.”

  “You don’t understand,” Brewer said, tears springing to her eyes. “They were changing my friends. They were making them do things they would never do. They were butchering them.”

  “They’re allowed to do that. We’re talking about stories here, Aaliyah. And the characters, they’ve already been changed. Balthazar in the TV show is not the Balthazar in the books – he’s wittier.”

  “His eyes are the wrong colour, too.”

  “Well, yeah, I mean …”

  “
And he should be taller.”

  “I guess you’re right,” Amber said. “But he’s even different from how he was in the early books, isn’t he? Remember how he used to say that he’d never been in love, and then in Tempest’s Anguish he talked all about the women he’s loved over the centuries? Some people call that inconsistent, but I call it—”

  “Evolution,” said Brewer. “He’s evolved. They all have.”

  “And fan fiction is just another stage of that,” said Amber. “Maybe not an official stage, maybe not a canon stage, but it’s still a stage of the characters’ development. You’ve just got to … you’ve got to accept this, Aaliyah. And stop killing people over it. Aaliyah? You okay?”

  Brewer frowned. “There’s a voice in my head. A girl.”

  “Kelly.”

  “Kelly, yeah. She says … she says hi.”

  “Tell her hi back.”

  “She can hear you,” Brewer said absently.

  “I don’t want to fight you,” Amber said, her voice gentle. “I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want to hurt her. Don’t make me. Please.”

  “She’s talking to me,” said Brewer. “It’s hard to … it’s hard to focus.”

  “Listen to her.”

  Brewer shook her head. “You’re trying to get me to stop. I don’t want to stop. I don’t want to …”

  “Do you like hurting people?” Amber asked.

  “No!” Brewer said, so vehemently that Amber thought she’d blown it. But then Brewer calmed. “No. I don’t. But they’re … they’re hurting my friends.”

  “Balthazar and Gideon are my friends, too,” Amber said. “They’re Kelly’s friends. Everyone in those halls? Their friends, too. We share them. We love them.”

  Brewer screwed her eyes shut and wobbled a little. She dropped the scissors. “I’m all alone,” she said.

  “I know what that’s like,” Amber said, stepping forward slowly.

  “I’m scared.”

  “I know you are. But you can’t stay in Kelly’s body. I’m sorry.”

  Brewer looked at her, tears rolling down her cheeks. “What will happen to me?”

  “I don’t know, Aaliyah.”

  “Do you think I’ll be lonely, where I’m going?”

  Amber hesitated. “I think you’re going to a place where you’ll be surrounded by friends and loved ones. They’re waiting for you. All you have to do is go to them.”