Monster (Gone 7)

A Perfect Specimen

ARMO (A NAME formed by rearranging his true name, Aristotle Adamo) was a white male, seventeen, six foot five inches tall, muscular, blond, blue-eyed, with a jawline Michelangelo would have wished he could sculpt. By his own admission, Armo was not what you would call an academic sort (1.7 GPA). But neither was he a jock, despite being heavily recruited by his high school’s basketball team, football team, and even water polo team.

He was also not a gamer, a surfer, a geek, a nerd, or member of any other sort of group. Chess club? No. Math club? Hah! Armo’s math skills ended at long division and fractions. Cheese-tasting club? Definitely not.

Armo was not part of any clique because there was one, only one Armo at Malibu High School. MHS was neck-deep in the beautiful children of Hollywood, but still there was only one Armo. There was not a straight girl or gay boy at MHS who had not looked longingly after him. He was gorgeous, and worse than that, charismatic, and worst of all, he knew it, accepted it

as natural, and didn’t care. His self-confidence went deep, down to the bone.

“ODD,” the counselor read from the sheet of paper on his desk.

“Odd?” Armo asked.

“Oppositional Defiant Disorder. That’s what the shrink, the um, sorry, the psych eval said. You’re smart enough to manage at least a C-plus average without trying and a B if you worked at it. Maybe you won’t be going to Harvard, but you could go to a decent state school, make something of yourself.”

“I’m already something,” Armo said complacently.

The counselor, a sad, brown mouse of a man, could not, despite his best efforts, avoid feeling himself to be something out of DNA’s recycling bin by comparison with the young god lounging in the too-small chair. The counselor sighed and thought, You may be a pain in the ass, but at least you’ll never lack for female and/or male companionship.

“Why don’t you take Spanish? You know you need a language credit to graduate.”

“I don’t want to take Spanish, I want to take Danish. My family is Danish.”

“We do not offer Danish as a language option.”

Armo shrugged.

The counselor said, “You understand that everyone in Denmark speaks English, right? Usually better than most Americans?”

A faint smile twisted the corner of Armo’s lips. “This is why it’s important to keep Danish alive. It’s my heritage.”

“Oooookay.” The counselor laid his hands palms down on his desk in a gesture that signaled surrender. “Okay, Armo. But you won’t graduate. And if you don’t graduate, you won’t go to college.”

“Yeah.”

“And that will make it very difficult for you to get a decent job.”

“Like school counselor?”

Armo’s face was blank, but there was a spark in his blue eyes, and despite the implied insult, despite the brick-wall refusal to go along with, well, anything, the counselor found himself smiling.

That shut him up, Armo thought.

“Can I take off now?” Armo asked, and thirty seconds later he was back out on campus, striding to the parking lot as the churning mass of students rushing between classes parted before him like the Red Sea before Moses.

The parking lot was a sea of BMWs, Mercedes, and Teslas. There were also, at the other end of the spectrum, numerous Priuses and Leafs. But there was only one beat-up, orange and white, 2003 Dodge Viper. Many of the cars of the rich kids at Malibu High were fast, but only one did zero to sixty in 3.8 seconds, with a top speed of 189.5 miles per hour, and made the earth shake from the throaty rumble of the Viper’s enormous engine.

No one but an idiot gave a seventeen-year-old a car that fast, but fortunately for Armo, his father was a former stunt man who had managed to become an action movie star. His father figured if fast-and-furious was good for him, it would surely be good for his son as well.

The Viper’s cloth top was down, and Armo hopped smoothly over the door and dropped onto the cracked leather seat. This, this right here, this moment, when he was in his car, when he was done with school for the day, with the sun shining and the ocean sparkling, this was his favorite part of the day. He loved this moment. He looked forward all through the tedious day to this moment. The moment of escape.

Of freedom.

He keyed the accelerator and felt the 8.3-liter, 500- horsepower engine come to life, startling a pair of seagulls into dropping the French fry they’d been fighting over.

Armo roared down Morning View Drive, pulled onto the Pacific Coast Highway, and was hit so hard by a gasoline tanker truck that the Viper went airborne for fifty feet, spinning in midair as Armo thought, Uh-oh: that was a mistake.

The Viper landed on the far side of the PCH, bounced over the low metal railing that fronted the beach, and came to rest upside down on the sand, knocking a three-inch crack into Armo’s thick skull.