The Monster in Monster-Killer

There have always been monsters at Oaken Ash Academy.

They weren’t fae, nor did they come with rows of jagged teeth. They came in fleshy meat suits, wearing school uniforms with their heads held together by plaid ties.

It took one week of junior year for the monsters to reveal themselves. One moment I was eating lunch, the next, a hand gripped my hair.

“It’s kinda long for a guy, isn’t it?”

Then my face was shoved into my tray. I knew going from a public to a private high school would be jarring, but it was in that first month that I realized the main difference: the transition from an invisible entity floating through classes to the ‘girl-boy’ who had free lunches.

It took one month of junior year for the monster-killer to reveal himself. Bennett, the leader of the monsters, seemed to focus on me. I wasn’t his only target, but he said I interested him. It wasn’t the first time they tripped me while I walked away from the lunch line, but it was the first time I saw someone launch themselves from a table to let Bennett eat knuckles. The scene kept me on the floor—all punches and teeth and blood. I watched the attacker’s brown hair get splotched black. I wasn’t sure what the bounding in my chest was, but as I watched it take three teachers to drag him off of Bennett, I knew it was the opposite of fear.

The monster-killer was a senior named Sal. Students whispered his name in the halls during his two-month suspension. He filled the dark spaces of my mind, and during his expulsion all I could see were his swinging fists, face splattered with red, and teeth bared. I gathered as much information about him as I could, but he didn’t seem to have any friends. He was an enigma to the student body, known for his bruised knuckles and pierced bottom lip. That wasn’t enough for me.

When his suspension was up, I abandoned my classes to find him. I followed him between bells, slipping behind crowds. He didn’t talk to anyone, and at lunch he sat alone. Bennett’s ghouls didn’t harass me despite their escalations after Sal’s stunt. Today, they silently watched the brown-haired boy across the cafeteria.

After the bell went off, Sal sat still while others went back to class. When it was just us, he walked over to my table. He was smaller than I remembered.

“You’re following me.” His voice sounded like the calm before a storm.

“Yeah,” I admitted, “you saved me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Bennett tripped me.” A dread filled my chest. I didn’t realize Sal not recognizing me was a possibility. “You beat him afterwards. It’s why you were suspended.”

“Oh, right.”

Panic set in. I couldn’t let Sal just walk away, and the lack of conversation seemed to be an indicator that he was going to turn for class. I wasn’t afraid to beg him to stay, but my mouth wouldn’t work. There was a hole left in my chest that only he could fill, but I didn’t know why.

“Ever been in the woods?”

I froze. There was a forest that engulfed Oaken Ash. Students weren’t allowed in without staff permission, and that was usually denied. I shook my head.

“You wanna see it?”

The sun hung in the middle of the sky when we made our escape. I never skipped class before, but running after the monster-killer with autumn leaves and brown grass clinging to my feet felt like a rose blooming; natural. Sal ran over the expanse of overgrown land behind the school, and we stumbled past the forest edge together. The smell of earth and damp leaves permeated the air, and I could taste rain despite the clear skies.

“This is cool,” I said lamely. I didn’t know how to talk to someone who was so ingrained in my mind, and I still didn’t know anything about Sal.

He didn’t look back at me. “This isn’t it.”

I didn’t have to ask what he meant. A few more steps and the air turned sweet with rot. It wasn’t anything like crossing the line of trees that separated the school’s courtyard from the woods. The ground was wet like it had freshly rained, and the taste in the air was stronger from decaying wood. I saw a log split in half, white larva dragging their fleshy bodies through dead bark. It felt like home.

“Pretty,” I whispered.

Sal nodded. He stopped in a clearing of red-leaf bushes, the branches reaching for his legs like claws, “Isn’t it? The academy keeps the woods students see all cut and trimmed, but it’s wild not too far out.”

“Thank you.”

He looked back at me. I didn’t mean to say it, but something inside me burst with gratitude.

“You’re welcome…”

“Alec.”

“Alec.” Sal repeated. The wind was picking up. “You a girl or a guy, Alec?”

The world stopped. That question was never a kind one, and there was a certain horror to the possibility of Sal being a monster, just not from the pack.

“A guy.” My voice was a whisper in the blowing wind.

The forest fell silent. Only Sal’s breathing made it to my ears. “Cool,” He smirked. The curve of his lips would cause the trees to part if he asked them to.

There was something about the hour in those woods that changed the way my lungs took air in. I could feel them gradually shift within me, and oxygen had never been so clear. I felt like I breathed in the opposite of poison ivy; something that opened me up more than I ever had been before.

Part of my soul was left in the trees that day, tugging me to the woods. The monsters would still get to me sometimes, but lunchtime with Sal meant their group sat quietly in the corner. I learned the reason for Sal’s short expulsion and the monster’s accepting a monster-killer’s existence was because both Sal and Bennett’s parents sponsored Oaken Ash. Their parents were both donors, and the school couldn’t afford choosing sides. That meant only glares from the monsters.

Sal would drag me to the woods often, beyond the invisible lines that separated what the forest looked like and what it really was. The ground was always wet, and the trees wore dark trunks. It was the perfect place for a monster-killer, and I told Sal as much. He smiled every time I mentioned monsters. I made an effort to bring the subject up often.

Every trip into the forest was the same. Something inside of me would change: a slight shifting of my ribs, an elongating of my fingers, a sharpening of my teeth. I would carry these changes long after I left the trees, a lingering mark of every visit. I started asking Sal if I looked different.

“You look good, so nothing new,” He’d say, and my heart would ring like a bell behind against my ribs.

It took three months to discover what the change truly was. Midterms had been particularly rough, and Sal didn’t do rough. He stayed at home more than half the week, only coming on exam days. This left the crusade of monsters to have me for lunch, and I didn’t have the threat of my parent’s money to protect me. I had gotten in with As and honors, but that wasn’t much of a shield to rich kids whose mouths watered for an easy target.

“Someone’s without their guard dog,” One of Bennett’s cronies cawed out words that might as well have been his, showing how disgustingly perfect he was at corralling his monsters. The lackey’s hand clapped flat on the table next to my tray.

I wanted to bristle, but the air felt thin. Direct confrontation from Bennett’s group was no longer as common as it once was, and my neutrality was out of practice. This one was stepping out of line. “Sal’s not a guard dog, he’s a monster-killer,” I muttered.

The monster gave one, hard laugh. “You really live in your head, don’t you? That’s why you’ll never really be a man.”

There was a sensation down my arm, like the dozens of legs from a centipede over my forearm. Whatever it was, it pushed my hand up over the table and my fingers found the other boy’s hand. It was only a brush of skin, the faintest of contact. He pulled his hand away and yelped like he had fallen in a thorny rosebush. His hand darted to his chest, but before he could cover it I caught a glimpse of a sickly olive color twisting on the skin between his thumb and forefinger.

“Ugh- don’t touch me! Who knows what I’ll get.” He attempted to wipe his hands on the vest of his school uniform, but I caught another flash of green on his skin. The monster hurried away, his mouth contorted. He looked in pain.

When the bell rang, I wasn’t in class. I closed the door to the family bathroom and let my books hit the sink’s counter. When I looked in the mirror, nothing stuck out. I looked the same as I did yesterday. But the closer I inspected, the more I realized I didn’t look like I had a month ago. The changes were subtle; limbs too long, uniform taut against places that were sagging at the start of the year. I closed my eyes and brought my hand up, letting my finger glide against the glass. My eyes shot open, and there were leaves the color of fire under my fingers. Browning, swampy vines crawled over the mirror, taking up the spot where my head used to be.

When Sal came to school again after Christmas break, I stayed quiet. I covered my hands with gloves and abandoned buttoning the cufflinks on my vest. The family bathroom was kept shut due to ‘vandalism’. Even so, everything went back to normal between Sal and me, but my eyes wandered to Bennett’s monsters every chance they could. Over the week after break, the boy I had touched started moving sluggishly, barely keeping up with the others. He wore a glove at first, then long sleeves, then scarves, even as spring blossomed. Two weeks after break, his face was no longer in the monsters’ crowd. On the third week, there came an announcement on the school speakers wishing their condolences for the family and friends of Martin Booker.

Sal didn’t react to the news, and a dark part of me felt that I shouldn’t either. He was a monster, belonging to a group of monsters. The guilt ate away at my stomach anyway. Every time I glanced in the direction of Bennett and his group, a little more of me felt missing. They stayed quiet now, and any activity the monsters had before came to a sudden stop.

“Something’s happened to me,” I said to Sal two months after Martin’s death. I had dragged him to the edge of the woods, but didn’t allow us to go in. “I’m changing.”

“I keep telling you, you look fine.” Sal’s eyes weren’t on me, focused on a bottle cap he was absently chewing on. My fingers twitched from his lack of focus.

“It’s not my looks this time,” I argued, my voice a squeak. “It’s inside me.”

“What’s inside of you?” Sal looked uninterested.

“I killed Martin.”

His head shot up at my words, eyes narrowed at me, and his jaw paused its incessant movement on the bottle cap.

All it took was his stare to make me regret my words. I didn’t know how he would react to that, not really. He’d been my friend for less than half a year, and what was half a year of friendship to a boy in the ground.

“I think it’s the forest.”

Sal nodded slowly, like those didn’t sound like the words of someone a few twigs short of a tree. He spat the bottle cap into his palm. “What do you mean?”

“I touched him,” I explained slowly now. Sal’s face fell to show he didn’t find it funny, but I continued anyway. I told him about the swirl of green, about the vines in the bathroom. His face changed into something I couldn’t read, but I kept talking. I retold the last three weeks; how the monster I touched whittled away until he didn’t come back.

“You killed a monster,” Sal eventually said, his voice low.

“Huh?”

“That’s what you call Bennett’s guys,” His back straightened, hands on his own thighs. “They’re monsters. That’s what you say all the time. You believe they’re monsters, right?”

My throat felt full of leaves. I nodded instead.

“Then why do you sound so sad about it?”

Sal must’ve seen my eyes widen, because he didn’t give me a chance to talk. “Hold on, Alec. You remember your first interaction with these people, right? How fast you became a target? You always talk about hunting these monsters.”

“But you’re my monster-killer,” I didn’t mean for the words to sound so possessive, “I’m too weak to fight monsters.”

“You were too weak.”

Sal pointed down. I hadn’t noticed the pale afternoon grass greening around where I sat. Petals the color of murky water pressed at the palms of my hands; flowers I did not recognize. I writhed on the ground and struggled to stand, tripping over myself. Sal’s hands moved to my shoulders, keeping me seated and taking my breath away.

“Calm down.” His voice was firm, and I could do nothing but listen. “You’re fine.”

“I feel like you’re not freaking out enough.” I sounded less winded than I felt.

“Well, you’re not dying, are you?”

Sal’s hands slowly left my shoulders, and I missed the weight. With a shake of my head, I tried to settle down. The grass was still under me, no changes being made once I became conscious of the shift.

“You don’t think this is…” Sal stared at me as I trailed off, but I shook my head and restarted, “I think the forest made me into a freak.”

Sal shook his head. “No. It made you a monster-killer.”

We spent rest of the school year with frequent visits to the forest. Sal wanted to see what I could do, which wasn’t much. I learned to summon moss, skullcaps, and vines—mostly by accident.

“I don’t think I’ll survive school without you,” I said while we were sitting side-by-side in the branches of a tree. Finals were a month out, and it wasn’t a question of if Sal’s graduation would break me, but how fast.

“Why?” Sal’s fingers were following the bark of the branch.

There were a million ways I could answer that question. My mind shouted to tell him the truth, that he was the water that kept my petals from withering. I decided for a half-truth. “Bennett and his monsters will kill me.”

Sal looked up and his eyes looked like rich soil. “Then kill them first.”

At the time, I hadn’t answered, but the thought took root. The guilt I felt for Martin had vanished with Sal’s words. He was a monster—I’d known it all along and yet I had felt sorry. Not anymore.

Finals took place online that year. The school had to shut down after an incident in the band room. According to Oaken Ash’s newsletter, seven students were locked inside when a tree fell through the roof, crushing all seven of the boys in the process, including the school sponsor’s beloved son, Bennett Roffe. The newsletter didn’t explain the flowers growing through their spines or the way their hands bloomed with bark.

The graduation ceremony was held in the park, students still determined to walk. What were seven lives to their twelve years of hard work? I stayed in the bleachers, looking for only one face. Sal didn’t look up when he got on stage, but I watched his brown hair bob with his steps. No one else noticed the vine trailing under his gown but me. I never saw him again.

Summer was slow. Nothing mattered without Sal: not the forest, not the new stillness in classes and lunch, and not this power that I had given up trying to control. It was wild and free, and the only thing left that reminded me of Sal. Even without any more plants growing in the halls, or parts of the school being closed from botanical incidents, I could never give that up. Not for anything.

It was a month after senior year started when it happened. There had been people who replaced Bennett, of course. New horrors all on their own, but they never bothered me. They stalked halls and threw students against lockers, and I silently watched.

“Hey, give those back!” There was something different about this call for help that made me pause. Across the cafeteria, I saw a young boy holding a pair of glasses over a girl’s head. She had dark skin, freckles, and a tooth gap that stood out from her white teeth.

I didn’t realize I stood until I was crossing the room, and before I knew it, I had a pair of glasses in my hand and a boy at my feet.

“Thank you—thank you…” She sounded winded as she took the glasses from my hands.

I could see teachers scrambling for me, but they were too slow. I spoke as fast as I could, the first thing that came to my mind.

“Ever been in the woods?”

And we went, again and again and again. I watched her change, slowly at first. It only felt natural to keep quiet about it, let her discover everything on her own. She needed to be able to protect herself.

After all, there have always been monsters at Oaken Ash Academy.