Last Night I Sang to the Monster Read Free Page B

feel lost. I liked our words, liked the sound of them as they floated out of their voices. As we got stoned out of our minds, we’d make up sentences using our words. The sentences sounded like entire stories to me. All week long I would write sentences in my head using our words.
    It was like having little pieces of my friends in my head.
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    At home, well, things were not great. My mom was depressed. I don’t mean that in the regular sense. Sometimes people say things like, “Man, I’m really depressed.” But my mom, she was depressed in the clinical sense.Not that you needed a psych doc to recognize her condition. I don’t know how it all started for her. Long before I was born, that’s for sure. I grew up taking her to different psych docs. She liked to change doctors. That really tore me up.
    I started driving when I was thirteen. Not that I knew what I was doing—but I got the hang of it. The thing of it was that my mom could never drive when she was having what my father called “episodes.” Driving without a license? That’s nothing.
    My mom, she was always on some kind of medication, and things would be okay for a while. She’d cook and clean the house and stuff like that—but then for some reason, she would stop taking her medications. I never really understood that. I’m not her.
    I could always tell when she got off her meds because she’d hug me and tell me that she was well now. “It’s all going to be lovely, Zach.” Lovely. I hate that word.
    I don’t remember a lot of things about growing up. I spent a lot of time playing in the backyard. I think I remember being in love with a tree. That’s weird, I know, but there are worse things than being in love with a tree. Trees are very cool. And they’re alive. More alive than some people.
    We used to have a dog. Her name was Lilly. She slept with me. When I was about five, I found her sleeping under the tree, the tree I was in love with. But she wouldn’t wake up. I was yelling and crying and just, you know, going mental.
    My dad came out. He saw Lilly. He smelled like the bourbon he’d been drinking. “Dogs die,” he said. And then he walked back into the house—to get himself another drink.
    I remember lying down next to Lilly. After a while I just got up and dug a grave. It took me a long time. But I couldn’t just leave Lilly lying there. It wasn’t right.
    I kept asking if I could have another dog but my mom said they were too much trouble. Like she knew. My mom, she didn’t know a thing about taking care of dogs. I mean she didn’t even know anything about taking care of boys. Boys, as in Zach. Not that it mattered. I managed. Look, I’m being mean to my mom. I hate that, when I’m mean. She had to deal witha lot of stuff. I know that. What Adam calls the internal-life stuff. I know it’s hell. Believe me, I know. Shit. I wish I didn’t. But there it is.
    My mom, mostly she stayed inside a dark room that was all hers. She had agoraphobia. That’s what my dad said. Just like her sister. I guess it ran in her family.
    Agoraphobia. That was another way of saying that she was allergic to the sky.
    When she was feeling okay, she’d leave her room and talk to me. I remember this one time she said: “Zach, you’re just like me. You know that, don’t you?” I looked at my mom and tried to smile. Look, smiling is hard for me. “You are,” she said. “You even have my smile.” Shit.
    And then she kissed me. “I miss you.” She said it like I had gone somewhere. I wanted to say, “I miss you too.” I mean, she had gone somewhere. And then she said, “I miss everyone.”
    I didn’t know what to say.
    “Your father doesn’t touch me anymore.”
    Wig me out. It was none of my business whether my parents touched each other or not.
    And then she looked at me and said, “Do you understand what I’m saying?” She squeezed my arm. “Zach, you can touch me if you want.”
    My heart was beating really fast and I felt as if