For Julie, it was the cryptid out in the woods behind our old elementary school. Wings, red eyes. Yes, Julie came back knowing exactly when everyone she loved was going to die, but it was worth it, she told us.
The six of us—well, five after Sophie left—were friends because we all understood why she kept going back, again and again.
It was different for each of us, though. For Chrissy, it was the faceless monster that took her under the risers in the choir room during fifth period, when the windowless room was dark and empty. As long as she kept her eyes shut, it was excruciatingly good, she said. He had the voice of an Angel and sang to her while it happened.
For Liv, it was a dead guy who lived in her bedroom mirror. Maybe a demon. It was a bit unclear. But it wasn’t just the sex, Liv told us shyly. He made her laugh. He turned death into a joke for her. He also put her abusive youth pastor in a psychiatric hospital on a permanent basis, which we all agreed was pretty funny.
Mia joined us a little later junior year with claw marks on her shoulders. Her she-wolf had transformed in the middle of things. But Mia hadn’t wanted to stop, so they didn’t. Afterward, she checked herself for ticks and cleaned the wounds with peroxide. “She’s just so loyal,” Mia had whispered. “I feel so safe with her.”
Liv had shrugged. “It’s not as weird as Julie’s bug guy, I guess.”
Mine was … I don’t know. Not a man. Not a woman. It lived out in the marsh. I’d thought it was a tree at first until it reached out.
“It’s a flower?” Chrissy asked. “Or, like, a tree? Mud monster?”
“All of the above?” I had said uncertainly. What I was certain about was the thrill. I wasn’t sure if it was sex in the human or botanical sense, but it sure as shit had me rooted. Worth the mild skin reaction.
Lest any of this sound too romantic, I should be clear on this point: we were confessing sins to each other, and make no mistake, we were sinners.
Our monsters killed people sometimes.
But this wasn’t the kind of world where that was automatically a bad thing. Like the day Dustin Richards stormed into Chorus II with his uncle’s legally purchased AR-15. Kids started screaming and ducking for cover before he even fired off a shot. In the chaos, apparently no one saw the shrieking Angel emerge and fly at Dustin. Dustin did fire his weapon, but no one got hit.
“Tore his face off,” Chrissy said matter-of-factly. “Like it was a veil or something.”
Monsters, yes. But at least ours were loyal.
There were the expected candlelight vigils. Some kids went to the state capital. Nothing happened, which was its own brand of add-on trauma. We all just notched it on our belts and kept going, because what other options were there?
We didn’t talk much outside of our unofficial support group sessions. Sure, we ran into each other from time to time, had the same classes. Most of us showed up for the walkout when the school board made the library pull a bunch of books. Mia didn’t, but we understood. Her dad was really scary, and she would have been in the kind of trouble you don’t just walk away from. We all privately hoped she’d gain the nerve to sic her wolf on him someday.
Then there was the time Julie came back from the woods with red-rimmed eyes and told us all we had to get out of town that weekend. We made up stories about spending the night at each other’s houses and rented a cabin out in the state national park. An EF5 tornado churned through town while we were gone in a freak January thunderstorm. Fifteen casualties in all. Of course, they may not all have been tornado victims. Several of the bodies were found in the high school, and we suspected the Angel may have been involved.
On our drive back to town, we listened to news about the storm, and the damage done, not only to property but to the Clarksdale Wetlands State Park, where ancient cypresses and tupelos that pre-dated the Declaration of Independence had been felled.
After we got back and I dealt with my tearful parents, I ran out to the swamp. My monster was hurt and angry, but still there. My monster wanted revenge for its lost trees.
But I was just a junior in high school, and there wasn’t much I could do to help beyond witnessing.
I guess I could have warned the development company that tried to put in a car wash next to my monster’s swamp in the months that followed, but no one would have believed me, and anyway, they all would have died just the same.
We wondered why we were like this, of course. Sometimes we tried to be less weird and do normal kid things, but it felt forced and uncomfortable. At least we understood each other, even if no one else in the world ever could.
Or could they? Was this another fucked-up part of growing up that no one bothered to warn you about? Did everyone have a monster and just hid it better than we could?
Still, we knew it was unhealthy. The rashes, the soreness, the guilt. None of us thought it was a good idea for any of us to keep returning over and over again to our creatures’ arms.
“It must be dopamine,” Mia whispered gruffly. Her throat was sore from howling at the moon all night, and we all politely ignored the fresh claw marks across her shoulder. We’d wondered if Mia might turn or something after all this. She was with her wolf just about every night and it only seemed like a matter of time before she’d be able to bite back with her own set of murderous canines. “Like with nicotine. It gives your brain a hit of something it needs, so it makes you go back for more.”
Liv, who’d kept her own tryst last night and smelled a bit like rotten eggs and mold as a result, shrugged. “Maybe. But, like, that’s any relationship, right? You lose your mind when you’re in love, with, like, a human.”
There were a lot of layers to that sentence that none of us wanted to disturb. Did we love our monsters? Would we or could we ever be in love with human beings? Was love even real or just a chemical state that we’d somehow managed to work ourselves into through a fairly salacious back door?
They say when you fall in love, that you know. Well, I didn’t know, so it couldn’t be love, could it?
“It’s not a relationship,” Julie snapped reflexively.
It was a guiding principle of the group that we didn’t confuse our monsters with actual dating. However, there was also the case of Sophie, our lost sister. Sophie, the only girl to ever leave our group after her vampire Nicolaus had gotten too clingy.
It scared us when she dumped him. “You can’t just break up with these things,” we warned her.
But Sophie did just that, and now she was a well-adjusted National Merit scholar, and her cheeks were so pink you’d never guess she’d had a severe iron deficiency for months.
“You should consider getting out,” she’d told us the last time she’d hung out with us, right before we asked her to leave us alone. “Seriously, I’m so much happier.”
And sure, Sophie did seem happier. But I couldn’t imagine swearing off the ecstasy of the mud. Every time I met my monster, I never knew if I was coming back from the encounter or not. It always started with mud that I sank into, never knowing if I’d be caught or if the one who caught me would let me go.
Every time, an overwhelming panic, the beginnings of suffocation, the smell of rot but also of iris. And the overwhelming sensation of the green pulse of the swamp itself, pale shoots rising, the confused, chaotic dreams of minnows, the inarguable feelings of being part of something in a world where I spent so much of my time feeling like there was a plastic divider between me and reality.
Can you imagine how terrified, how full, and how transcendent a flower must feel when it blooms?
I’d take it over happiness any day.
Then one day Mia didn’t come to school. She didn’t answer our texts.
And then it finally made the news. A missing person case.
“She must have just gone wolf,” Liv said nervously. And we all wanted that to be true, wanted to imagine Mia and her wolf loping through the trees together.
But what if Mia wasn’t a wolf at all, but just meat?
Chrissy was nervous. Her Angel was pretty possessive, and he’d started showing up in places she didn’t expect. Liv’s ghoul had worked out how to find her through other mirrors besides the one in her bedroom, and she was scared he’d soon be able to enter her world without her permission.
Our town had been badly shaken by Dustin’s attempted mass shooting, and now there was a full-blown panic about the town’s youth. They were right to panic, of course, but the degree to which they missed the point staggered us. Dress codes, screen time limits, frantic attempts to shape our limited spheres of control and no effort to fix the bigger world at large.
They found Mia eventually. Or what was left of her.
Like I said, our monsters were actual monsters.
“I mean, that’s what happens when you date a carnivore,” Julie said, and we all understood that she wasn’t trying to be unkind, she was just trying to find a reason why it wouldn’t happen to any of us. A lot was riding on our ability to see ourselves as not completely interchangeable.
We even talked to Sophie, who was very gracious despite our earlier cruelty. She told us how she managed to get out. “Clear is kind,” she said patiently. Her paramour had been humanoid, though, and so Julie and I weren’t sure her advice was particularly applicable for us and our elemental entanglements. But Chrissy and Liv both thought about it, a lot.
Chrissy broke up with the Angel and dropped choir. It got rough at the end, she’d said, and for a minute she’d thought he was going to kill her, but ultimately, with a horrendous cry of sadness in his magnificent heldentenor voice, he let her go.
Liv tried, too, we think. We don’t know what happened to her, and no one ever found any evidence. We were pretty sure she’d gone through the mirror for good.
We hoped she’d at least wanted to go.
So then our group was down to just me and Julie.
“So what do we do?” Julie asked.
I sighed. “I don’t want to die.”
“Me either.”
“You think it’d kill you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Me either.”
“But it’s different for us, right? We can just stop going out to see them. And we’ll be fine. There’s no reason for us to ever have to go to the woods or the swamp.”
Julie sighed. She looked like she’d been crying. “Yeah. I guess I’m gonna stop.”
“Yeah, me too.”
We looked at each other, the last two standing in our unspeakable little club.
“What, are we gonna, like, join botany club or something?” Julie broke the tension.
I guffawed.
Then we hugged and that was that.
I did my best. I really did. And it turned out I wasn’t so bad at normal life. High school kids are more tolerant than they get credit for, and once it was clear I was done being a Weird Kid, I found some ins into the social landscape. I did actually join the student conservation and ecology alliance, even ran for office in the spring semester. I made a few friends, started accompanying other kids to the coffee shop and Target, got better at using TikTok. I even did a better job of humoring my parents.
But.
That divider between me and everything else was still there. The world was still in a slow-motion train wreck with evidence of doom mounting every day, and I thought about my monster every time I threw out plastic tags from disposable new clothing, dental floss, fast food wrappers, ketchup bottles, Jesus Christ, was everything made of ecosystem-choking plastic in this world?
Something was going on with Julie, too, even though she’d had similar social and academic success. I could feel her struggling against an impossible reality, even if we weren’t talking much anymore.
On the anniversary of Dustin’s attack in the choir room, there was another walkout. Chrissy stayed home that day, just in case the whole thing stirred up the Angel. We walked out to the nearby park gazebo where unofficial chaperones were waiting to be sure we behaved. Julie and I landed next to each other.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey,” she answered. Then she rolled her eyes. “Like this is going to do anything.” For a minute, I missed her more than I missed my monster. I started to ask her if she wanted to get together sometime, but I couldn’t get the words out.
Instead, I texted Nick Strayde that night, asked if he wanted to hang out or something. We made out a little bit. It was gross and awkward and the sheer humanness of him revolted me. I felt bad, he was a sweet kid and good-looking, and if I had been anyone else, anyone normal, I would have been thrilled to kiss him.
But it didn’t scratch my very specific itch.
I texted Julie.
<<I really want to>>
Three dots, then nothing. She must have given up trying to respond.
I’m pretty sure she wanted to, too, but neither one of us wanted to push the other over the edge.
So I put on my coat and my waders and I headed out to the swamp. Because what else could I do? I didn’t want to die. But I also wanted to live.
