Monster (Gone 7)

Cruz had never met anyone like Shade. Not even a little like Shade. It was as if there were two people living in that pretty, scarred body: a high school science nerd and a shark. Sometimes Cruz played a little game with herself, seeing Shade’s unblemished left side as representing an interesting but essentially normal high school girl; and the right side, the side with the scar, as the shark. The girl Shade Darby was funny and relaxed and even moderately empathetic; the predatory fish? Well, as the famous movie line went, the shark had “lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eyes.”

Yes, there were times when Shade frightened Cruz a little. But that frisson, that sense that she was dealing with a person far larger than could possibly fit within this girl, just added to Cruz’s growing infatuation. Writers—even unpublished ones—loved characters, and Shade Darby was definitely a character.

Was it the shark that kept Cruz from asking Shade why she was doing this? Was it the invisible but very real barrier that Shade erected around that question and around her past?

At the very least, Cruz wanted to ask about the scar. It was not subtle, it was like something out of an old Frankenstein movie, a good six inches long and cross-hatched. Shade could have worn her hair in such a way as to hide it, but she didn’t. She could have worn turtlenecks, but she didn’t. She wore the scar proudly, it seemed to Cruz. Or was the right word “defiantly”? It had the odd effect of accentuating her prettiness, but at the same time it gave her an aura of to

ughness and mystery.

I don’t want to push her. I don’t want to lose her.

Cruz had thus far in her writing life stuck to short stories and the occasional bit of not-great poetry. But she had enough of the instincts of a writer to recognize that here was a story. Maybe a cautionary tale of obsession. Maybe a weepy rise-above-it tale in which Shade coped with the death of one parent and the emotional absence of the other. But that was certainly not how Shade saw herself, and when Cruz was with Shade she could not help being swept up in Shade’s determination. Shade was like an ebb tide sweeping Cruz out to sea, out to danger, and yet . . .

And yet, you are willing to be swept, Cruz. Aimless and friendless, you are just so much flotsam on the river of life.

One thing had become clear: there was no more harassment from anyone at school, and somehow this was Shade’s doing, though Cruz had no notion of how her friend managed it. The student body simply seemed to have figured out that Cruz was under Shade’s protection, and that was all it took. Cruz did not become popular overnight. In fact, if anything she felt people avoiding her, but they did not hassle her, and for now that was enough.

Cruz sometimes wondered what Shade was like before losing her mother. Had she always had this split personality? Had she always had a gift for ruthlessness and the iron will to go with it? Had she ever just been a normal high school girl? Did whatever it was that took her mother’s life harden her? And was it the kind of hard that was only on the outside, or did it go all the way down?

Cruz had covered pages of her purple Moleskine with notes about her new friend. Her only friend. She had started by thinking Shade’s plan to steal the rock was fantasy, the kind of desperate nonsense a girl with delusions of grandeur or a simple hunger for adventure might come up with. That mistaken belief lasted only a very short while, for it was clear, absolutely, unmistakably clear, that Shade Darby meant to steal the rock.

That she meant to experiment with the rock.

And though Shade never quite said it, Cruz knew it was all connected to the absent, never-mentioned but always somehow present Dr. Heather Darby, PhD.

Then, too suddenly, the date came. ASO-3 was on its long glide path to Earth, orbiting once before it would begin its tumble into the atmosphere. And by then whatever doubts Cruz had became irrelevant.

Because the line was before them—and both girls knew they were going to cross it.

Shade drove a dull but sensible Subaru, a few years old, clean inside and out, in a color that could best be described as Forgettable Beige. It was so at odds with Shade’s personality that Cruz guessed it had been Shade’s mother’s car.

Cruz herself did not drive. She could have, she could easily pass the test, but she was not yet ready to face the trauma of something that was simple for everyone else: answering the question “Male or female?”

Yes or no, up or down, in or out, male or female, and no, there could be nothing that did not fit into a binary. Either/or, not some of this and some of that.

“Where’s my phone?” Cruz asked in sudden consternation, patting various areas of her body before vaguely remembering she’d left it in Shade’s room.

“I took it,” Shade said. “Look in that bag by your feet. There are two burner phones in there.”

Cruz looked as Shade pulled out of the driveway and turned in the direction of the freeway.

“These are crap. These aren’t even smartphones.”

“Cell phones—especially smartphones—are tracking devices,” Shade said, distracted by traffic. “They leave a record of your movements. First thing Sixty-Six will do when they see they’ve been robbed is look for cell phone signatures at the crash site. It wouldn’t be hard to connect my cell phone to my father, and burners are not exactly iPhones. We did discuss this, Cruz.”

“I just . . .” A heavy sigh. “I just didn’t think you meant it. We’re practically cave people now. I’m going to go into withdrawal.” Cruz pulled out her Moleskine and a pen.

“What are you writing?”

“I’m writing that a monster has kidnapped me and plunged me back into the twentieth century.”

“I thought writers enjoyed the chance to write, free of distractions.” A car sliced too close to their front bumper and Shade leaned on the horn. “Hey, asshole!”

Cruz did her silent laugh and for a while was lost to conversation, bent over her notebook, pen held in her left hand in an awkward-looking position.

“You stick your tongue out when you write,” Shade observed.

“I do not!”