The Game of Boys and Monsters Read Online Free PDF Page A

where Evy and I might have sat before.
    If I went up to him now, feeling the way I felt, he’d be mine.
    â€œGo for it,” Hap said. “You want to.”
    I looked to Evy. “Do you mind?” I asked.
    She picked up a piece of melon, sniffed at it, set it back down.
    â€œDo you mind”—I waited for her to look at me—“if I leave the table?” Leave you here with them? But I knew the answer. She was with them all the time now.
    Evy looked toward Ben, and her lips tipped up in a little smile. “I always thought you should go for him,” she said, and looked back at me, “but I was wrong about him being a werewolf.”
    Hap snorted into his hand.
    â€œYou think he’s a vampire?”
    Jack looked to the ceiling.
    â€œNo,” Evy said, “he’s just Ben.”
    I pushed my seat back, leaving my tray—let Jack clear it—and crossed the space between tables in a few long strides.
    The others at the table looked up at me in surprise, but Ben smiled. “Had enough of the Marsh boys?” he asked.
    â€œYou could say that,” I said, and I pulled out a chair and sat down.
    Ben offered me a ride home that day, and I took it. Normally I would ride with Evy, but Evy couldn’t drive anymore, not in the daytime anyway. I’d been biking because carpooling with the Marsh boys and Evy felt too weird.
    They were hers. She was theirs. I didn’t even think about whether she was seeing one of them anymore. It was more like they were family.
    And I was the embarrassing in-law Evy couldn’t quite shed.
    And yet, with Evy so . . . changed . . . I was the one they talked to, joked with. I was their daytime friend.
    It felt like a betrayal of Evy, in a way, that I wasn’t doing more, trying harder, to help her.
    Ben had an ancient car called Gracie—“She was my granddad’s,” he said. “He left her to me so my parents wouldn’t junk her.” She whinnied a little on hills, so Ben would pat her on the dashboard and say, “Come on, Gracie, you can do it. Don’t give up on me now.” But she got the job done.
    â€œI like her,” I said.
    â€œYou just passed the first test.” Ben turned to flash me a smile. He had a dimple in his chin, as if a sculptor had pressed a thumb there for a finishing touch. I wanted to see how my thumb fit.
    â€œI don’t want to go home yet,” I said, surprising myself.
    â€œOkay,” Ben said easily, “where do you want to go?”
    I wanted someplace where we’d be all alone, someplace that felt apart from every place else.
    â€œThe Thorn Bridge,” I said.
    He looked at me sideways, and I worried for a second that I’d thrown him. The Thorn Bridge had a reputation for being a place where people drank and hooked up, a place where you could get away with a party and no one for miles around could hear.
    It was too deep in the woods, in an unincorporated part of town, for the police to bother with it, and if they ever decided to patrol, it’d be easy to hear them coming a mile away.
    â€œDo you like that place?” he asked. A charged question.
    â€œI like how old it is. I’ve only been there once or twice, with Evy,” I said. “We took pictures. In the daytime.”
    He exhaled and smiled again. Oh God. For a second, Ben Grable thought I was too wild for him.
    â€œWhat’s going on with Evy?” he asked, and I stiffened. “Is she on drugs or something?”
    When I didn’t answer right away, he said, “God, that was rude, Les, I’m sorry. I don’t really think she’s on drugs, I . . .”
    â€œNo, I know that’s what people think.” It was the only real-world explanation that made sense. That the Marsh boys were dealers, or at least users, that they’d drawn Evy in. Some people said she was trading sex for drugs. Some people said I was a bad friend for