Broken Monsters

  He examines it. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I’m going to need you to provide proof of your whereabouts on every single one of those occasions.’

  ‘10 Reasons You Should Always Bring A Lawyer With You.’

  ‘Wait. Am I a suspect?’

  ‘I don’t know. Are you? You moved to the city three weeks ago. You needed a clean slate, according to your blog. Did something happen in New York that made you leave in a hurry?’

  ‘I don’t blog about every single little detail of my life.’

  Especially not having his heart and guts wrenched out so that they drag along behind him wherever he goes. This isn’t working, he thinks. He’s going to have to change tack if he wants her onboard for the show. Although, hey, she’s not the only detective in the pig house. ‘Was that your daughter on the phone? Is everything all right?’

  She ignores him. ‘You’ll need to provide phone numbers of witnesses who can corroborate your whereabouts.’

  ‘I can see how you’d be worried as a mom, with what happened to that little boy last week. Abducted right out of school. Aren’t you working that case?’

  ‘Lead investigator. As you no doubt read in the Detroit Star this morning.’

  ‘Is this part of the same investigation?’

  ‘Murders happen every day in Detroit.’

  ‘But you’re saying the thing in the garden was definitely a body? I heard the boy was cut in half.’

  ‘I can’t comment on that.’

  ‘Can I quote your “no comment”?’ he asks, exasperated.

  ‘You can fill in that list.’

  ‘You know we’re on the same side, Detective Versado.’

  ‘No, you’re interested in getting a story and I want to get the bad guy.’

  ‘Isn’t that the story?’

  ‘It will be if you stay out of my way.’

  Teeth

  Layla’s hands are shaking. In her head, she had imagined confronting Travis in the middle of the gymnateria in front of everyone, a public humiliation. Exactly what he deserves. She hadn’t expected to find him out here on his own, sitting on a car in the parking lot, cutting class like she is, because she’s too upset to sit still.

  His knees are spread wide, as if he can’t quite find the right position for them. Too much leg, too much boy. Baby face on a man’s body.

  ‘I’ve been looking for you,’ she says.

  ‘Well, girl, you found me.’ He takes a drag on his cigarette, holding it between his knuckles, like something he saw in a movie.

  ‘Stand up,’ she says, kicking his sneaker with her shoe. She has been stewing about this all weekend, in church with her aunt and her cousins, listening to the choir dancing and singing, checking her phone obsessively for a message from Cas until her uncle threatened to confiscate it.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Because I have something to say to you and I don’t want to talk down to you.’

  ‘Aight,’ Travis says, getting to his feet. He drops the cigarette, his limbs all loose angles. ‘Is this about your friend? ’Cos we were drunk, just fooling around.’ He laughs uncomfortably. ‘I didn’t mean anything by it. Why you being so uptight? It was a joke.’

  ‘You sexually assaulted her! And you’ve been sharing that horrible video.’

  ‘So what? We didn’t make it.’

  ‘It’s disseminating child pornography, you moron.’

  ‘Disseminating shit! It’s on the Internet.’ He looks scared, though. And young. And dumb and full of come, her brain finishes the mantra. ‘Besides, they didn’t do nothing except take some pictures. It’s not like they raped her.’

  Layla loses it. ‘You stupid fucktard.’ She swings her schoolbag at the side of his head. He ducks, laughing as she swings her bag at him again.

  ‘Whoa! Come on now.’

  ‘You fucking asshole. You fucking shit. You fuck.’ She’s whomping him with her bag with every sentence, yelling through tears.

  Someone shouts ‘Fight!’ and the upstairs windows of the chemistry lab fill up with kids’ faces, shouting encouragement.

  ‘Get him!’

  ‘Hit her back! You gonna let a bitch wipe the floor with you?’

  ‘What are you doing to him?!’ CeeCee screams, bursting out the main doors. She gets between them, and shoves Layla to the ground. ‘Oh, baby. Are you okay?’

  ‘Ow, shit.’ Travis spits a bloody chip into his hand. ‘Fuck. You knocked my tooth out!’

  ‘You psycho bitch!’ CeeCee snarls, and Layla, still down, raises her arm to fend off a blow that doesn’t come. Above, kids are leaning out the windows, filming on their phones. People are streaming out of the building, forming a half-circle around them, but no-one does anything, waiting for the drama to play out. Spectators until the principal, Mr. Clarkwell, wades through, snapping at the kids to get inside, right now.

  Travis spits a rope of bloody saliva.

  ‘He was asking for it,’ Layla says, gingerly getting to her feet. She’s not sorry. She’s not. She stoops to pick up her bag and the stuff that’s fallen out of it, including a cracked ashtray. Curved glass like a seashell, rainbow colors running together. When she comes back up, Travis has a strange expression on his face. His tongue works against his cheek, and then he spits out another tooth.

  ‘Oh my God,’ CeeCee says, not without glee. ‘Bitch, you are in such fucking trouble.’

  ‘What in the wide world is happening here?’ Mr. Clarkwell says, pulling Layla back, as if she was still trying to get at Travis.

  ‘I didn’t even hit him that hard.’ She clutches her bag to her chest.

  ‘Guh,’ Travis says and three more teeth tumble into his hand. His eyes are wild.

  ‘Travis?’

  He retches. Vomit and blood and more teeth, yellowy-white, clatter onto the cement.

  And all Layla can think is that they don’t look like they do in the toothpaste commercials.

  Mistakes that End Bloodily

  The dream needs more disciples. Ramón is so eager, he makes everything possible. It is able to bend the world a little, enough, through his faith. It is not as rich and complex a malleability as the true dreaming, but it’s a taste of what is to come.

  They have already started moving.

  ‘All of it?’ Ramón looks appalled. But it is like the advertisements on TV. Everything must go!

  They shuttle back and forth all through the night between the house and the place of conception, until Ramón is exhausted. The dream drops him off at the shelter, where his lady stays, anxious about letting him out of its sight, afraid she might try to wrest him back.

  But it means it is alone with Clayton, moving its dreams-locked-in-form from the backyard to the truck, when it hears the car pull up outside, in a street where no-one lives, and no-one should come.

  It creeps round the alley and all its human fears come swarming back when it sees the man in his blue uniform climbing out of the car with his gun, all black jagged angles of impatient potential, the violence within trying to break out. The Police.

  It hangs back while the Police rings the doorbell. It feels the man’s panic like something caged in Clayton’s chest, the heart thudding.

  As the Police turns to his car, raising his phone to his ear, Clayton’s body rises up behind him and rams the nail gun against the Police’s head with its neat plaited cornrows, and jerks the trigger.

  The Police falls, a limp nothing, the phone tumbling onto the grass. The dream seizes him under the arms and drags him to his vehicle. It clambers in and drives the car into the garage, sitting trembling behind the wheel, trying to assemble the pieces of what it should do next, Clayton’s thoughts gone slippery from fear.

  It’s a station wagon, not a police car, Clayton notes, and the dream realizes that the species is important – that it won’t have a tracking device. But it must get rid of the phone. It must smash it into a hundred thousand pieces, because they can follow the lines of communication, like threads through a maze, back to
the house, and everything will come unraveled.

  Unless.

  Unless the Police is a gift. A centerpiece to hinge everything else on.

  Principles

  The principal keeps Gabi waiting, which is a classic interrogation trick, and frankly very tedious, especially when she has a wad of messages piling up at the station that she has to deal with. The heating is turned up too high. The big green radiator clatters to itself and drifts of heat nag at the ends of the blinds. She wonders if there is a state-issued color guide for public buildings that schools and hospitals have to conform to.

  Mr. Clarkwell, the engraved brass paperweight declares. She has only spoken to him once before this, during Layla’s entrance interview. He seemed friendly, she remembers, and, as Layla pointed out afterwards, he had a pointy head. Bald and pointy. They laughed about it in the car. She cannot summon up anything else. Except that she had made a vague promise to come in and give a talk about her job to the eighth graders during careers week. Boy, she wishes she had done that talk now.

  Layla’s bag is sitting on the desk, the contents spread out like evidence. Her books are arranged in a neat stack. An algebra textbook. Three spiral-bound notebooks she bought her at the beginning of the year, purple print with a reclining leopard on the front. She remembers what a pain in the ass it was going store to store until Layla found ones with a cover she liked.

  A heavy glass ashtray, cracked down the middle. Hers, from the basement.

  She flips through one of the notebooks. Her daughter’s handwriting is loose but neat, the letters all separated out, given individual weight and merit, beautifully formed. Not the handwriting of someone who would club a fellow student in the head until all his teeth fell out. And yet there are bloodstains. And witnesses and videos. And the cracked ashtray. Prop turned evidence.

  She remembers when her own world was regulated and finite. Before Layla came along. It was an emergency C-section, the doctor pulled her out from behind the screen like a magic trick, full of howling outrage at being ripped from the certainty of everything she had known and into the bright lights of the hospital delivery room. Gabi had felt the same way. As if the universe had abruptly expanded, like opening up a map, in a way she wouldn’t have believed was possible. Love. The real thing. Huge and hungry and savage. She has never felt the animal inside humanity so clearly as on that day, with the shock of the naked creature on her chest, rooting for her nipple. She would rip out someone’s throat with her teeth if they even thought of hurting her, this tiny stranger with the bloody cord still joining them together. The raw violence of it was shocking. Love has claws.

  Maybe it would have been different if they’d had another child. Maybe the intensity would have been diluted. You could dish out the love between two kids, like creamed potatoes at dinner. Maybe.

  Gabi stands up as the principal ushers her daughter into the office.

  Layla is trembling with shock, her hands clamped on her elbows as if to prevent them flying away. No, not shock. Indignation. The same righteousness with which she’d marched downstairs at midnight to confront her parents during one of their fights. She was holding her arms the identical way. She stood at the bottom of the stairs, shaking, until they were forced to shut up.

  William asked her if she was all right and she demanded, over-enunciating her words to cover the way her voice was trembling, that they ‘stop acting like fucking toddler beauty queens throwing a shit fit’. She must have been thinking about the insult all the way down the stairs, crafting it in her head. Gabi had laughed. She couldn’t help it. Her clever thirteen-year-old daughter with her HBO vocabulary, and a child’s unshakeable belief in justice and the importance of people being nice to each other.

  She wants to open her arms for Layla to fly into them, the way she used to when she was little and she bumped her head, or that night on the stairs, when they pulled her into a hug, laughing at her, even as she protested, outraged, that it wasn’t funny. It wasn’t the last time they had a group hug, but it was the last time it felt uncontaminated.

  ‘Mom! I didn’t do it,’ Layla bursts out. ‘Not like they’re saying. I forgot it was in there.’

  ‘I think it’s more appropriate to talk about why you did it, Layla,’ the principal says. Gabi’s intention is to steer the conversation away from talking about it at all until she has had a chance to grill Layla on her own.

  ‘Thank you for coming in so quickly, Mrs. Versado.’ This is not the time to point out that her title is Detective. ‘I hope you weren’t in the middle of something.’

  ‘How is the other teenager?’ She is careful not to use the word ‘child’.

  ‘We don’t know yet. He’s been taken to Wayne County hospital. I was hoping you would be able to talk to his parents, but they’ve gone with him.’

  ‘Was he conscious? Talking? Making sense?’ She has seen enough head injuries to be able to guess at the severity of the diagnosis.

  ‘He was awake and in shock. I’m sure we’ll get a full medical report soon. You need to know, Mrs. Versado, that if the parents want to press charges, they’ll have our full support. We take bullying very seriously at this school.’

  Only this isn’t bullying. It’s assault.

  ‘Does the family have insurance?’ She’d rather try to calculate the costs of dental reconstructive surgery than the possible criminal charges.

  ‘I’m really not sure.’

  ‘Can we set up a meeting with the other parents? I’d like to resolve this as soon as we can.’ She avoids the word ‘settle’.

  ‘I’m sure they’ll agree, once Travis is stable and there’s been a police report. In the meantime, I have to suspend Layla.’

  ‘Until when?’ Layla is furious.

  ‘Until we’ve settled this.’ He has no problems using the word, she notices.

  ‘What about the play?’

  ‘Layla!’

  ‘You should have thought about that before you knocked all the teeth out of a boy’s skull.’ The principal peers at her, baffled. ‘You know, you’ve always been a good kid, Layla. I just can’t understand why you would do this.’

  The echo of the words ‘good kid’, heard so recently about a dead boy, is like a needle in Gabi’s kidneys. But she can’t let Layla answer. Not here, not on the record. She summons all her cop-smarts. ‘Obviously whatever course of action we take has the potential to seriously affect the lives of two minors going forward. And there’s the school’s reputation to consider, Mr. Clarkwell.’

  ‘That goes without saying. But we still need to do this right. The school has procedures. We need to do an investigation into how this happened.’

  ‘Why don’t you ask Travis?’ Layla interrupts. ‘Ask him what he did to Cas!’

  ‘Yes, Cassandra’s history is very sensitive. And confidential.’ Sweat is gathering on Mr. Clarkwell’s forehead. ‘You’d have to discuss it with her parents. This is a very difficult situation all round.’

  Layla opens her mouth to speak, but Gabi interrupts her.

  ‘I’ll talk to them. Layla, could you wait outside, please.’

  Her daughter snaps her trap shut and makes her exit, glaring at the floor, burning holes in it. Gabi’s phone rings.

  ‘Do you need to get that?’ the principal offers.

  ‘No.’ She hits ‘reject call’ on Sparkles. Whatever it is can wait.

  Gabi turns it on for Mr. Clarkwell. She is authoritative, objective, soothing. The voice of cool reason. ‘It seems like there are a lot of sensitivities here. You should know that Layla had a terrible shock on Saturday night. I’m not saying it explains her behavior, but it’s certainly a mitigating factor. I should have sent her for counseling. She shouldn’t even have been in school today.’

  He tries to reply, but she cuts him off. ‘Let me speak to the boy’s parents. I know we’ll resolve everything in the way that’s least damaging to these kids’ futures and the school. Thank you for your time, Mr. Clarkwell. And for taking care of Layla.’
r />   She stands up and puts out her hand to shake and he responds automatically. This is something you learn as a cop – that we’re programmed by social conventions.

  ‘We’ll sort this out, Mr. Clarkwell,’ Gabi says, looking him in the eye as she scoops Layla’s stuff back into her schoolbag, including the cracked ashtray. She, of all people, knows how easily evidence can get lost.

  Exile

  In the car, her mom is as quiet as the moment before the tornado hits.

  ‘I’m sorry. I forgot it was there!’ Layla protests. ‘I put the ashtray in my schoolbag on Friday and forgot about it.’ The details seem far away. Like a dream. ‘I didn’t mean for it to happen like that.’ Didn’t she? She remembers being full of rage so clear and hot, it was like the light blowing out on an old film camera and she was just a shape moving through the white. ‘Anyway, he deserved it, and I’m not sorry.’

  Her mom hits the brakes. So hard, the car behind them erupts into hooting as it screeches around them, the driver yelling unheard. Her mother is gripping the steering wheel as if she is strangling it.

  ‘Don’t you ever say that, Layla. Ever. Not to me, not to anyone.’

  ‘But what he did to Cas!’ She means Isabella. It’s all getting mixed up in her head. The video and the party and the secret identity of the girl she thought she knew. Like a game on her phone, when the blocks are coming faster and faster and you can’t slot them into the right places in time.

  ‘Layla, you need to understand that you’re in serious trouble. This could ruin your life.’

  ‘We could move to another city, change our names.’ Lie to our best friends.

  ‘Listen to me. It’s very likely that as soon as that kid’s parents come to their senses around that hospital bed, they are going to press charges. There will be an investigation – a criminal one, not just at the school. And there may be a court case.’

  ‘Am I going to go to jail?’

  ‘I’m going to do everything I can to make sure that doesn’t happen. But you need to help me. And saying stupid shit like you just said is going to mean the difference between a suspended sentence and juvenile detention. Do you hear me?’