Christopher Golden: The Monster’s Corner: Stories Through Inhuman Eyes

“What’s this Mason like?” Pete attempted.

Neil shrugged and then attempted to retract his mass of curly brown hair into his chest cavity. “Okay, I guess.”

“Yeah? What do you two like to do together?”

“I don’t know. Nothing.”

At a stop sign, Pete took a moment to look at his slight, pale, gaunt specter of a son. “Is he also into computer games?”

“Who?” asked Neil with complete sincerity.

“Who do you think?” Pete sighed with frustration. “Mason.”

Neil didn’t respond, but his silence was not of the furtive or guilty kind, and Neil was already drifting off into the blank space he so much preferred to conversation. Pete decided to let the matter go.

Mason’s family, which is to say my family, lived in one of those massive old Alamo Heights houses on one of those winding old streets near the dam. It was the kind of house, inhabited by the kind of people, that made Pete feel small and insignificant and destined to be an outsider in San Antonio. Here was land money, oil money, cattle money. Here were people who surrounded themselves with uniformed Mexicans and felt no discomfort in wielding their complete authority over them, comfortable giving out orders in their competent Spanish. They were the sort of people who, when they heard Pete was a software engineer, would say, “I think that’s great!” as if to announce that they were okay with Pete’s curious little career. They were accepting of his meaningless toil. They were willing to put a happy face on his inexplicable lack of riches. Mason’s family’s immodest weal made any interest in Neil even more inexplicable. Pete steadied his nerve as he pulled into our circular driveway, and Neil grabbed his bag and was out the door before Pete had unbuckled his seat belt.

Cindy was precisely what Pete expected — pretty and faded, slim, blond, ponytailed, tennis outfit as casual attire, too much makeup, certainly some minor plastic surgery, possibly something major. He felt like he needed a translator when talking to women like this.

“Those kids,” she said, looking toward the house, where the silhouettes of two figures were visible on the other side of the curtains. They stood there, still, bodies at odd angles, surely listening to the adults.

After Pete shook her hand and uttered a few awkward words of introduction, Cindy pressed on with her breathless and insincere enthusiasm. “I am just so glad Mason met Neil. I know he’s been a good friend, and Mason’s had such a hard time this year. Fourteen is such an awkward age, don’t you think?”

Pete agreed because he supposed, from talking to parents who had kids Neil’s age, that they had difficulties he and Roberta did not — drama and romance and hormones and emotions. Slammed doors and unfinished homework and asserting dominance. Pete had heard about these things. Also, agreeing seemed to be the best way to keep the conversation to a minimum, and more than anything else, Pete wanted to be in his car and driving away. After answering Cindy’s questions about what Neil liked to eat and how late was absolutely too late to stay up, Pete was soon free to retreat to his Accord and return home.

Later, Roberta was angry with Pete for not going inside the house, getting a sense of what the family was like — they didn’t even know if Cindy was married. Pete hadn’t noticed if she wore a ring. He hadn’t figured out a way to meet Mason, to lay eyes on the first friend Neil had made in years. Roberta’s irritation bordered on genuine anger.

Pete didn’t have the energy to defend himself. If he had, the discussion might have turned into a real argument, but as far as he could tell, he had done nothing wrong. He could hardly have forced his way into the house. He offered to call over there, but Roberta did not want to embarrass Neil in front of his only friend, so she managed to keep her curiosity under control. When Neil was safely returned home at the promised time the next morning, it was apparent there was nothing to worry about. That Neil would not describe his night as anything other than fine and okay in itself raised no red flags. That was Neil.

Roberta wanted to reciprocate as quickly a possible, both to show their appreciation and so they could have the chance to meet this elusive Mason, so the following Friday evening Cindy’s Escalade pulled into their driveway, and Pete watched from the window as my mother emerged, followed by a figure with long dark hair and dressed entirely in black. The first thing Pete noticed was that I had girlish hair — a long, straight tumble of darkness with two elevated purple pigtails. Then he noticed that I was wearing leggings and a skirt. It took a few seconds for Pete to put all the pieces together and realize that his fourteen-year-old son was having a sleepover with a girl. Or was it a cross-dresser? No, it was definitely a girl.

It was not Pete’s first encounter with Texas girls with ridiculous names, androgynous only because they were not first names at all. Nevertheless he’d assumed — of course he’d assumed — that someone named Mason would be a boy. Masonry was masculine work, after all. Now both Pete and Roberta were so paralyzed by surprise and awkwardness, they could not even begin to imagine how they ought to act. There was no precedent, no guidelines. They stood, mouths open, eyes wide, while an uninvited girl walked up their driveway followed by her blond, attractive mother, whose prettiness diminished in the wake of her daughter’s presence. Charisma radiated from Mason like radioactive waves. Pete saw at once that this was not just a girl. Mason was something special.

So, yes, he noticed me right away. Unlike small and androgynous Neil, I was neither scrawny nor underdeveloped. I was a full head taller than Neil, broad in the shoulder, and respectably stacked for a girl my age. I wore a long black skirt, black boots, and a gauzy blouse that showed off enough cleavage to make a point, but not so much as to venture into whore territory. Despite the dyed black hair and the excessive makeup, neither of which Pete was inclined to find particularly appealing, I had his full attention.

“I can’t thank you enough for having Mason over,” Cindy said, keys still in hand. She looked, as if with longing, at her Escalade. “Y’all are so nice.”

“It’s the least we could do. After you had our son sleep over with your daughter,” Roberta said, emphasizing the gendered nouns in case this aspect of the situation had somehow escaped Cindy’s notice.

“Y’all are so nice,” Cindy said again. “And I love your house!”

“Are there any …” Roberta waved her hand in the air and then, noticing what she was doing, stopped. “Are there any special rules you want us to enforce.”

I looked at Cindy and she looked away. “No,” said Cindy, who after a moment remembered her smile. “I trust y’all.”

With Cindy retreating to her car, Pete and Roberta hurried into a huddle as they attempted to formulate a strategy, but things quickly devolved into Roberta berating Pete for not having discovered last weekend that Mason was a girl. Roberta wanted to find some excuse for sending the girl home, but Pete wouldn’t allow it. It would be enough for her to sleep in the guest room. He did not want the girl to sleep in Neil’s bedroom, but he certainly didn’t want her to go. For Neil’s sake, he told himself, and at that point he wasn’t even lying.

Pete would not have thought of himself as the kind of man who would become fixated on a fourteen-year-old girl, but let’s look at the facts a little more closely. First of all, the girl in question did not look fourteen. That has to count for something. An uninterested party would think I was sixteen, maybe even eighteen. It’s not the most dignified thing in the world for a forty-five-year-old man to fall for an eighteen-year-old girl, but it is hardly pedophilia. I looked like a woman, not a girl, so while we are certainly entitled to think of Pete as a perv, we are not necessarily obligated to do so.