“You don’t believe me, do you,” said Ava.
I shook my head.
“Or you do believe me, and you don’t want to show it.”
I’d kept still. There was no wriggling out of Ava’s grasp once she started in on you. She preempted every escape, called you on every strategy. She was astonishingly good at reading people, which is part of what made her so terrifying: Ava always knew what you were thinking.
“You should try to find him someday,” Ava had said. “I would if I were you. I’d get my friends together and go to his house and beat the shit out of him.”
I swallowed hard. I’d never thrown a real punch, let alone beat anyone up.
“You should probably get tested,” Ava continued. “Who knows what kind of diseases he had?”
Monster, my brain was still thinking. Monster.
“Are you crying?” Ava said.
I focused my eyes on the Satan poster on Ava’s wall. Satan had a black goatee and piercing yellow eyes. He was ripped, too. Arnold Schwarzenegger in Hades. “No,” I’d said.
Ava took my chin in her hands and looked straight into my eyes. Her irises were purple from contact lenses. It was like staring into the eyes of a sea snake.
“You’re lucky,” Ava said. “It takes some people a lifetime to figure out how fucked up the world is, and you got to find out at thirteen.”
From the kitchen, Mom had called us. “A-va, Anna-beth, time for ca-ake.”
Ava let go of my face. My chin hurt where her fingers had held it. “Don’t tell them I told you,” she said. “Promise.”
“I promise,” I said.
Just then, Nan opened the door. She peered into the room in her Nannish way, her pants dusted with icing sugar. The scent of cake wafted in the open door, along with the sounds of the adults in the living room.
“Ava, Annabeth, we are ready for you to come out.”
“Okay, Nanna,” said Ava with an angelic smile. She hopped off the bed, suddenly bouncy.
I went to the bathroom and stared into the mirror, wondering how I’d managed to go thirteen years without noticing.
6
MOM AND NAN HADN’T TOLD ME for another week.
At my friend Hailey’s pool party, I’d sat on the edge in a sweater and jeans and wouldn’t swim. If I got into the water, people would see my monster-body and they would know.
At lunch, I couldn’t eat. If I ate, the monster would be eating, too, and if it grew any bigger it would crowd out the only part of me that was still good.
Shopping with Mom, all I could feel was the shame and horror throbbing out from me in a tortured halo. Up until that point, I’d had no filter. Now, for the first time, I grew watchful. I pulled my hands up into the sleeves of my sweatshirt and strained to hear double meanings in everything Mom said.
“What’s up, Annabean?” Mom asked. “You’re never this quiet.”
“Just daydreaming,” I said and twitched my mouth into a smile.
Finally, the night arrived. Nan came over and they cooked my favorite dinner, and instead of playing Scrabble like we normally did, they sat me down on the couch to talk, as if I were a cancer patient about to go in for a frightening surgery.
“Annabeth,” said Mom, “your grandma and I need to talk to you about something that you might find pretty upsetting.”
I sat very still. If I made a sound too early, they would know that I knew. So I killed the howl that was struggling to escape me, wrung its neck like a rabbit, and dropped it as far down as it would go.
“What is it?” I’d said.
My father was a boy Mom had known from some of her classes. He was friendly and a flirt, which had made things harder after the canoe trip. People take your side when it’s a stranger with a knife, less so when it’s a handsome boy playing “Blister in the Sun” at a campfire sing-along.
Mom said she’d always known she wanted to have a kid, and even though it happened in a terrible way, she knew she was going to love me just as much as any other baby. The way Mom told it, the story was smooth and hopeful. She didn’t mention the part about not speaking for eight months, or how she’d almost given me up for adoption. Maybe she was saving that conversation for when I was an adult.
“Did he go to jail?” I’d asked.
Ava had already told me that he hadn’t, but I had to ask things or they’d figure out that I already knew.
“The laws aren’t very smart,” said Nan. “At the time, some other women in your mom’s situation were running into problems with custody. We didn’t want there to be any chance that he could come along someday and say, I want my kid.”
I nodded. In my head, I was imagining a hairy stranger breaking through our front door and dragging me away. Maybe it would have been better if I had been adopted. At least then Mom could have finished college and started her life over, instead of ending up back in her hometown, working at No Frills, while people she’d known all her life treated her like trash.
Mom and Nan were back to talking about how special I was and how proud of me they were.
“We’ll go for a hike tomorrow,” said Mom, “and we can talk about it as much as you want.”
I wondered if Mom was sick of our dusty little forest, and the dusty little life to which I had consigned her. On the trail, the next day, I was too conscious of my arms and legs, my eyes and hands and hair.
“Are you angry, Annabeth?” Mom had asked. “I didn’t want to tell you when you were too little to understand. But I didn’t want to wait too long either, because you’re growing up fast, and if, God forbid, you ever find yourself in a situation, I want you to have a better chance than I did.”
I’d never seen her so uncertain. Mom had always seemed invincible to me. She could walk the farthest and carry the heaviest pack. And as horrible as it was to find out that the delinquent-but-redeemable father I’d imagined was actually a demon, to glimpse a crack in Mom’s invincibility was almost as shattering.
“Why would I be mad at you?” I’d said. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
I imagined Mom getting back into her canoe the morning after it happened. Why hadn’t she told anyone? Why hadn’t she clawed his face off?
Monster, monster, monster, said the pumping of my heart.
Monster, monster, monster, until it was as normal as the sound of my own breath.
My first day at E. O. James, I got lost in the hallways and almost had a panic attack when a senior boy named Louis Vallero startled me in the out-of-the-way stairwell where I was hiding with a book.
At the barbecue, someone handed me a hot dog and I didn’t know what to do with it. I couldn’t see anywhere to throw it out, and I was about to wrap it in a napkin and hide it when a girl I didn’t recognize wrinkled her nose at me.
“Gross, right?” she’d said. “Welcome to high school, have some murdered pig parts.”
“I know,” I said, even though I wasn’t even vegetarian at that point, just unhappy and overwhelmed.
“I’m Noe. What’s your name?”
I’d hesitated. “Annabeth.”
Since the summer, it had hurt me to say my own name. I wanted to go live in the forest, with sticks in my hair, like a medieval leper. At least that would be honest; at least that way, I wouldn’t have to pretend to be happy and normal. Nobody expects a medieval leper to make friends.
Noe didn’t seem to notice my leperhood. “Will you come to the bathroom with me?” she said. “It’s kind of an emergency.”
We started walking. “What happened?” I’d said.
“The Senior Leaders made me eat Skittles,” Noe said. “You know they’re made out of boiled horse hooves, right? I told them I was vegetarian, and they didn’t care.”