Delicate Monsters by Stephanie Kuehn

Author:Stephanie Kuehn
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466868854
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

chapter twenty-four

Guilt utilized its own kind of magic.

This was Emerson’s realization when he woke up Tuesday morning on the living-room couch to find his stomach sour with post-whisky resentment, and both Miles and his mother already gone. Guilt didn’t manifest itself in the expected ways. It was trickier than that, capable of all sorts of transpositions and sleights of hand.

He groaned and pulled himself up to sitting. Sleep hadn’t come easy for him last night. After the cops left, it took two more trips to the Mustang and the Johnnie Walker bottle before he was able to lie down and rest. Even then, when he finally shut his eyes, he hadn’t dreamed of May or Sadie or even his strange little brother who was apparently so danger prone he needed a guardian angel or one of those hermetically sealed plastic bubbles to help keep him alive.

No, Emerson had dreamed about the cat. The tabby one with the blue suede collar with the bell on it. He’d dreamed about that damn creature all night long, as if some phantom recording device inside his head were rewinding and replaying the memory of him hitting it, over and over, until it was etched into his soul. Until it was distorted into something far more meaningful than it should’ve been.

In some of the dreams, Emerson didn’t actually hit the cat. He was driving down the country lane with Trey and Giovanna in the car, but instead of staring at the crows, he saw the animal dozing in a patch of lazy sun, even before Trey yelled. In those dreams, he was able to honk and swerve at the last minute. The cat would scramble across the road, its wide belly dragging on the ground before vanishing into the bushes with a hot flash of its striped tail.

But in most of the dreams, the cat still died, and what haunted Emerson wasn’t seeing its broken neck or glassy eyes or the dot of blood dripping from its nose. It was the sensation of holding its dead body in his hands. The slack weight. The riffling of soft fur in the breeze.

The rush and the reverence that came with witnessing a life slip away into the ether for good.

* * *

“I heard about Miles,” Trey said when they met up in the hall before third period. “Fuck, man.”

“Yeah.” Emerson threw his books into his locker. His jacket, too. It was early still, but already everything in the building felt hot and stuffy. Like he was choking. Like he could barely breathe.

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know. He’s here. Somewhere. We don’t ride together.”

“You should.”

“I guess. He’s big on walking.”

“Who did it?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“He won’t say. Not even to the cops. I had to talk to them for a long time last night.”

Trey leaned forward, dropped his voice to a whisper. “Giovanna said they burned him. With a cigarette or something.”

Emerson winced. “Yeah.”

“That’s sick. Like, seriously sadistic. Look, we’re going to find out who did it, okay? And then we’re going to kick their asses.

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