Just Like Home

by Sarah Gailey

This is the story of monsters and what they do to those who love them, those who fear them, and those who are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or, from a different perspective, those who are in the right place at the right time. Serendipity is just as cruel as it is kind. This book is dedicated to anyone who has ever loved a monster.

It was the right thing to do, giving up that little bit of hope. It was the only thing to do. Some things, Vera knew, were made to die.

The house swallowed the sound immediately, because it was a house that knew how to stay quiet.

She’d seen herself thousands of times in hundreds of different mirrors, had looked at her face under so many different kinds of light—she was accustomed to nothing so much as herself. But this mirror, and this light.

The noises are coming from under her bed and she is sure, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they are the result of Something Bad.

I like that something bad is capitalized, makes it feel important

The bugs are outside. The sounds are inside. They’re inside for sure.

That’s how these things work: they wait until a person is awake enough to be scared, they wait until a person is conscious enough to hope for mercy, and then they don’t give any mercy at all.

She can’t be alone in the room with the thing under her bed. Whatever it is, whatever it wants, whatever it’s planning—she can’t face it alone. She’s too small. She’s too scared. This is the first time she has ever felt ashamed of that.

Adults do that all the time, talking around big feelings and ideas as if no one will notice that they’re saying two things at the same time.

She falls asleep so quickly that she doesn’t register the faint sound that comes from beneath her bed. It is the sound of clumsy fingers, trying to learn how to snap four times fast.

That is so effective, but so gross feeling

The walls stayed as warm as skin.

She’d worked so hard to crush that kind of feeling out of herself for so long, because she needed to be the kind of person who could lure love out of someone.

Her mother has told her several times not to sneak, as if it’s Vera’s fault that nobody pays attention to the sounds of her life.

part of her that still hopes to discover something special and vibrant within herself.

violent wave of tenderness.

her father loves her. He would never betray their family. And if that’s not true, then nothing can be true ever again.

“Boys are just like girls, in almost every way. But men … men are demons, Vee.”

“Is one possible without the other? I think you have to know someone in order to truly love them, and you have to love someone in order to really hate them. There’s the thin hate we have for strangers.”

The first thing she knew was this: She knew that there was something under her bed. Something real. Real enough to sneak. Real enough to take. Real enough to lift the bed with her on it, so smoothly that she hadn’t woken up at the movement.

“Tell me what you did. Tell me, Vera, goddamn it, stop laughing, this isn’t a game!” But she couldn’t stop laughing, because here it was. Here was Duvall’s anger. Here was his violence. Here was the thing she’d been trying to avoid this whole time, the thing that she’d run away from last night, the thing that had made her weep in her bed with fear and hunger and urgent need.

“This is my home,” she said. “And you’re just passing through it.”

“He tried to build us strong and steady and whole. But he didn’t keep us safe. He didn’t know how to shelter us from all the hurt that was waiting, because he thought that hurt was the shape of love.”