Last Night I Sang to the Monster Read Online Free PDF Page A

anxious. School, it was like an addiction. I had to go. I had to. And when I couldn’t get there, I would just get all anxious.
    When I went back to school, Mr. Garcia noticed the bruises. He started asking questions. You know, Mr. Garcia, he was too sincere for his own good. And really, his questions made me even more anxious.
    “It looks like it hurts.”
    “Not much,” I said.
    “Who did that? Who did that to you, Zach?” He sounded a little mad.
    “Some guy at a party,” I said. “I like to party.”
    “Really? A party, huh?”
    “Yup.”
    “Maybe you should stop going to those parties, Zach.”
    “Maybe I should.”
    I don’t think Mr. Garcia was buying my story. He asked me to come by after school.
    When the last bell rang, I really didn’t want to go see Mr. Garcia, but my feet took me there anyway. When I got to his room, his door was open and he had an open book of poems in his hand.
    “Sit,” he said. He put down the book of poems on his desk and I saw the title: Words Like Fate and Pain. I watched him as he took out his trumpetand played something real soft and smooth. Maybe he was trying to make me cry. Why was he trying to make me cry? When he finished playing, he looked at me. “Everything okay at home?”
    “Yeah,” I said.
    “Mom’s okay?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Dad’s okay?”
    “Yeah, everything’s okay.”
    “What if I told you that I knew your mom suffers from depression?”
    I don’t know how he knew that. And I hated that he’d let me know that he knew. “It’s not so bad,” I said.
    “What if I told you that I know your dad drinks?”
    “It isn’t that bad.”
    “Maybe it is bad. Who hit you, Zach?”
    I got up from where I was sitting. “What if I told you that it’s none of your fucking business?” That’s what I said. “You’re just a teacher. Your job is here—in this fucking classroom.” I knew I was yelling.
    Mr. Garcia, he sort of gave me one of his smiles. God, his smile really tore me up. “No cussing in my classroom,” he said.
    “Okay,” I said.
    “Okay,” he said. “Look, Zach, I didn’t mean to upset you.”
    “I’m not upset.”
    “Okay,” he said. He wrote down his cell number and gave it to me. “Look, if you ever need anything, you just call.”
    I nodded. I took it. Another piece of paper.
-3-
    Mr. Garcia had it wrong. I mean, it wasn’t as bad as all that. We had a decent house. And my dad liked having a nice lawn. I had it in my head that the nice lawn was my father’s way of telling the world that a real family lived there. A man, even a man who drinks too much, has to have some pride. Pride. Maybe God wrote that word on my dad’s heart.
    But the thing was that he spent more time with the grass than he did with me. That messed me up when I thought about it. That’s the thing about remembering. If remembering messed me up, then why do it?
    When I turned seventeen, my dad remembered that it was my birthday. I don’t know how that happened because he’d really been hitting the bottle especially hard. I mean, even for him, things seemed really bad. But he remembered. He remembered. Me. Zach.
    My mom was having an episode so I didn’t expect her to remember. And Santiago, I mean the guy didn’t even remember his own birthday. But my dad, hell, he remembered. He really remembered. Wow.
    He asked me what I wanted to do. I didn’t know. I just made something up. I told him I wanted to go hiking. I don’t know why I said that.
    And, you know, that’s what we did. We went hiking out in the desert. And it was beautiful and brilliant and amazing. And my dad only drank water and I didn’t smoke and, my dad, he knew the names of all the different kinds of cacti and bushes. I didn’t know he knew stuff like that. And he even smiled that day and it had been a long time since I’d seen him like that. And that really tore me up.
    I asked him how he knew about all the plants and their names.
    “My dad,” he said. “My dad taught