I don't think my mom realized that a new person moved in with us that day, but it's been with us ever since. My monster was out for good now, and I couldn't put it away. I tried to— every day I tried to—but it doesn't work that way. If it were that easy to get rid of, it wouldn't be a monster.
Once the demon was dead, I tried to rebuild the wall and put my rules back in place, but my own darker nature fought back at every turn. I told myself I wasn't allowed to think about hurting people anymore, but in every unguarded moment, my thoughts turned automatically toward violence. It was like my brain had a screen saver full of blood and screaming, and if I ever left it idle for too long, those thoughts would pop up and take over. I started acquiring hobbies that kept my mind busy—reading, cooking, logic puzzles—anything to stop that mental screen saver from coming back on. It worked for a while, but sooner or later, I'd have to put the hobbies down and go to bed, and then I'd lie there alone in the dark and wrestle with my thoughts, until I bit my tongue and pounded my mattress and begged for mercy.
When I finally gave up on trying to change my thoughts, I decided that actions were the next best thing. I made myself start complimenting people again, and forced myself to stay far away from other people's yards—I practically gave myself a pathological fear of windows, just from forcing myself not to look in them. The dark thoughts were still there, underneath, but my actions stayed clean. In other words, I was really good at pretending to be normal. If you met me on the street, you'd never guess how much I wanted to kill you.
There was one rule that I never reinstated; the monster and I both chose to ignore it for different reasons. Barely a week had gone by before Mom forced me to confront it. We were eating dinner and watching The Simpsons again—times like that were virtually the only times we talked.
"How's Brooke?" Mom asked, muting the TV. I kept my eyes focused on the screen.
She's great, I thought. She has a birthday coming up, and I found the complete guest list for her slumber party crumpled up in her family's garbage can. She likes horses, manga, and eighties music, and she s always just late enough for the school bus that she has to run to catch up.I know her class schedule, her GPA, her social-security number, and the password to her Cmail account.
"I don't know," I said. "She's fine, I guess. I don't see her all that often." I knew I shouldn't be following her, but. . . well, I wanted to. I didn't want to give her up.
"You should ask her out," said Mom.
"Ask her out?"
"You're fifteen," said Mom, "almost sixteen. It's normal.
She doesn't have cooties."
Yeah, but I probably do. "Did you forget the whole sociopath thing?" I asked. Mom frowned at me. "I have no empathy—how am I supposed to form a relationship with anybody?"
It was the great paradox of my rule system: if I forced myself not to think about the people I most tended to think about, I'd avoid any bad relationships, but I'd avoid any good ones just as strongly.
"Who said anything about a relationship?" said Mom. "You can wait 'til you're thirty to have a relationship if you want— it would be a lot easier on me. I'm just saying that you're a teenager, and you should be out having fun."
I looked up at the wall. "I'm not good with people, Mom,"
I said. "You of all people should know that."
Mom was silent for a moment, and I tried to imagine what she was doing—frowning, sighing, closing her eyes, thinking about the night I threatened her with a knife.
"You've been so much better," she said at last, "It's been a rough year, and you haven't been yourself."
I'd been more myself in the past few months than I'd ever been in my life, actually, but I wasn't about to tell her that.
"The thing you need to remember, John," said Mom, "is that everything comes with practice. You say you're not very good with people—well, the only way to get good is to go out and do it. Talk. Interact. You won't develop any social skills sitting here with me."
I thought about Brooke, and about the thoughts of her that filled so much of my mind—some good, some very dangerous.
I didn't want to give her up, but I didn't trust myself around her either. It was safer this way.
Mom did have a point, though. I glanced at her quickly—the tired face, the worn clothes—and thought about how much she looked like Lauren. How much she looked like me. She understood what I was going through, not from experience, but from pure, uncluttered empathy. She was my mom, and she knew me, but I barely knew her at all.
"Why don't we start with something easier," I said, picking at my pizza. "I'll, you know, get to know you, and then move up from there." I looked at her again, expecting some kind of derisive comment about how talking to other people was "moving up" from her, but instead I saw surprise. Her eyes were wide, her mouth was tight, and there was something in the corner of her eye. I watched as it developed into a tear.
She wasn't sad. I knew my mom's moods well enough to tell that. This kind of tear was something I'd never seen before.
Shock? Pain?
Joy?