More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
For the monsters in your head
No one would want a heart like his. But he’d still cut it out and given it away.
Being left aching and hollow was a familiar feeling. A comfortable pain.
This was what Andrew did—told stories. Ones with dark, bitter corners and magic curled into thorns. Ones about monsters with elegant, razor-like teeth. He wrote fairy tales, but cruel. Thomas loved them.
They’re just meant to hurt. Like a paper cut—a tiny sting that meant nothing more than I’m alive I’m alive I’m alive.
Thomas’s whole body tilted toward the sound, as if even amid the crush, his name from Andrew’s lips would always be heard.
Once upon a time, Andrew had cut out his heart and given it to this boy, and he was very sure Thomas had no idea that Andrew would do anything for him. Protect him. Lie for him. Kill for him.
There was something intoxicating about meaning that much to one person. Addictive.
Thomas was viciously talented. Andrew wrote cruelly beautiful fairy tales, and Thomas could illustrate them with a few slashes from a pen with such macabre beauty even his teachers overlooked his endless attitude problems.
If they stood any closer together, they could fit into each other’s skin.
Sometimes he’d lie awake at night and unpack all his feelings about this boy-shaped hurricane named Thomas Rye. He didn’t know if he wanted to be Thomas—reckless and uncontainable—or if he wanted to kiss him.
He was fine. It had been one mirror. One minute of lost control. Andrew, a string drawn taught— s n a p Blood all over Thomas’s shirt as he dragged Andrew away from the wreckage—
A boy with horns and roses grown from his eyes held a knife, and he was midway through carving the heart out of another boy with moth wings who knelt in the leaves, his face tilted upward in supplication. Vines blossomed around them, tangled and unruly.
He drew like this because Andrew wrote like this. They fed off each other relentlessly, their fever dreams bleeding through their eyes long after they woke.
Andrew hated the way his brain did this. Destroyed beautiful things. It was like he couldn’t just hold a flower; he had to crush the petals in his fist until his hand was stained with murdered color.
Their story had begun in the forest, a collision both violent and beautiful.
Once Andrew started watching him, he couldn’t look away.
“But I only draw monsters, so you probably couldn’t handle that.” He looked at Andrew as he said it, his mouth a serious line with a challenge tucked into one corner. “I can handle you,” Andrew said.
A smile broke across Thomas’s face, all sharp edges and cleverness. Andrew loved it.
An extraordinary amount of intimacy lay in exchanging art. Not for critique and not for class. Just to look. To feel. To understand each other.
“I’m scared of everything except the dark.”
“I think someday you’ll hate me.” Thomas’s voice stretched with a loneliness Andrew had never heard before. “You’ll cut me open and find a garden of rot where my heart should be.” Andrew let the silence sharpen between them, waited until Thomas’s breath caught in quiet anguish from being made to wait. “When I cut you open,” Andrew finally said, “all I’ll find is that we match.”
It was strange, Andrew thought, how when something moved in the dark, everyone’s first instinct was to go inside and hide under the covers. As if monsters couldn’t open doors and crawl into bed with you.
To write something nice, he’d need something nice to say. But his ribs were a cage for monsters and they cut their teeth on his bones.
The forest was immense and unmappable and monstrous—and it had always belonged to him.
Andrew couldn’t shake that feeling from the forest—the feeling of being watched by something not yet fed.
He had no wings. He’d fall and die and he’d do so in silence.
But no one who was innocent needed to be so violently defensive.
“The real question is, why are you hiding what really happened? You’re protecting someone. You hate your parents too much to cover for them, so you must be protecting—” “You.”
“Anyone could be a monster. In the right circumstances. Motivated by the right thing. To protect someone else or to … to protect yourself. Is it that wrong to fight for yourself if no one else will?”
His heart raced with pure panicked adrenaline. He was losing Thomas, watching him slip between his fingers and sink into the earth. Roots would grow over his face and dirt would fill his mouth and he’d be lost forever.
“I’m not afraid,” he said to the trees. “Nothing bad has ever happened in the forest.”
Andrew allowed himself to be dragged to his feet, but he didn’t let go of the hands holding him. He clutched Thomas like he was the only thing real in a world of nightmares.
He was so relieved that a manic smile tugged at his lips. Sure, monsters were real and wanted to rip out their throats, but at least he still had his best friend.
For a vicious moment, Andrew thought about slipping his fingers into Thomas’s cut. Taking hold of his rib and breaking it. Pulling the soft crumbling bone from his chest and sewing it into his own. They’d be forever together, rib against rib, fused in gore and bone and adoration.
He was infected by this night of woken nightmares and ebbing adrenaline—and the starved desperation of wanting Thomas, Thomas, only Thomas.
“We’ll stop this. Everything that starts has a way to end.”
All day he hovered around Andrew, stood too close to him, found every excuse to touch him with anxious fingers. It felt like he’d crawl inside Andrew’s shirt if he could, sew himself inside Andrew’s skin.
Andrew didn’t care, not while they still touched. He craved Thomas’s affection, with an intensity that left him dizzy. If he never had more, he had this.
“I’d take you.” Andrew swung his flashlight around the trees. “I’d pack you into my carry-on.” “Like, okay, I’m short, but not that short.” Andrew snorted. Thomas narrowed his eyes, but when Andrew smiled, the glower melted off Thomas’s face.
“I like how you are. There’s an entire world of ink and magic stuffed inside your head, and I think it’s beautiful. I just wish everything didn’t hurt you so much.”
Try to kill Thomas, and Andrew would lose his goddamn mind.
The monsters knew how weak these boys were and they found it delightful.
“You don’t know anything about me,” he said, low and venomous. “And you know less about Andrew if you think he’s some delicate wallflower that you need to ball up in cotton wool. He could cut me to bloody pieces if he wanted. I couldn’t stop him even if I tried. So can you stop pretending he needs saving from me? Back up and leave us alone.”
“All I care about right now is you and dealing with the”—Thomas’s voice dropped low—“monsters. Nothing else matters.”
He was liked by the boy who liked no one at all, and he wanted it to stay that way so much it hurt.
Everyone saw Andrew as shattered and fragile, and maybe he was to them. But when Thomas looked at Andrew’s sharp edges, he thought them dangerous and beautiful—not weak. He could cut me to bloody pieces if he wanted. Andrew hated the way he loved those words.
If the trees belonged to Thomas, midnight was in love with Andrew.
His absence felt like an electrical surge turned off, as if Andrew didn’t exist without Thomas in the room.
Having a crush on Thomas would be a little like putting a blade to your mouth and then being surprised when it cut you.
