Broken Monsters

by Lauren Beukes

  ‘Why, are you into him?’ Cas asks.

  ‘Not unless he’s an arty skater boy way out of my league,’ Layla says breezily. ‘Why, are you?’

  ‘Boys. Gross.’

  ‘Girls?’ Layla prods.

  ‘Hey, chicken, I love you, but not like that. I’m just flying solo.’ Cas pulls a ridiculous sexy pout at the gold mirrored walls. ‘Besides, I am also out of your league. Ow! Don’t hit me.’

  The old elevator rattles them up to the fourteenth floor and Layla thinks how it’s weird that Cas isn’t into anyone. Maybe she’s asexual or trans like Eric Redding (formerly Erica). Going to a super-liberal charter school means that kids are open about who they are, but also that everyone is up in everyone else’s business. Even before she started the semester, she knew about the girl nicknamed Chlamydia (for obvious reasons) from the online gossip about her. Shakespeare would have it wrong these days. It’s not the world that’s the stage – it’s social media, where you’re trying to put on a show. The rest of your life is rehearsals, prepping in the wings to be fabulous online.

  There’s a red roller suitcase by the front door, which means that Cas’s mother, Helen, is either coming or going. She wears smart suits and high heels and twice a week she flies to flat parts of the country with wheat fields and silos, doing labor resolution for a grain company. Layla doesn’t think she’s ever seen Gabriella in heels. Maybe in the wedding photos – which have been relegated to the basement along with the other souvenirs of the life they used to have.

  Cas’s mother is thin and beautiful. Her makeup is always flawless and her blonde hair looks like she just stepped out of a shampoo commercial.

  ‘It’s formaldehyde,’ Cas told her once. ‘This special hair treatment which is like seriously poisonous. And she’s only skinny because of ballerina syndrome.’ She sighed in exasperation at having to explain. ‘You know. Bulimia and anorexia sitting in a tree, P-U-K-I-N-G. Don’t worry, there’s an app for that now.’

  ‘For anorexia?’ Layla was shocked.

  ‘Probably. But I meant for counting calories. And off-setting them against the ones you burn on the treadmill. My mom spends like an hour in the gym every single day. And she does like this power walk thing through the airport. I swear she’d use weights if they’d let her take them in her hand luggage.’

  ‘Cassandra, is that you?’ Her mom looks up from her laptop in the living room.

  ‘Hey, Mom. We were just talking about the doorman.’

  ‘Is he new?’ her mother says, going through the motions, but her attention drifts back to her screen as if its tied to a sinker.

  ‘Same one as always. We were just talking about how cute he is.’ Layla realizes Cas is baiting her mother.

  ‘Mmm-hmm,’ Mrs. Holt says vaguely, but Layla notices her shoulders tighten.

  Her father is cooking in the kitchen. Layla thinks of him as hipster sitcom dad – sweet and funny, but somehow tragic. He’s shaved his head to hide that it’s balding. ‘Is that Lay with you? You pulling in for eats?’

  ‘Thanks, Mr. Holt. Only if it’s no trouble.’

  ‘Are you kidding? You’re our favorite dinner guest. And it’s Andy, please. Shrimp pasta with chili good for you?’

  ‘Sounds amazing,’ Layla says.

  That’s what Layla envies. The almost normal. And sure, stats will tell you that divorce is normal, but she wants this. A home with two kids and two parents and something good on the stove, the smell expanding to fill the whole house.

  Her parents always planned to have more kids, but they were busy and a friend of theirs got shot and they got freaked out, and in the end they just never got round to it.

  ‘Is Ben home?’ Cas says, peering around for her kid brother. He goes to a different school, for reasons Layla hasn’t been able to ascertain. Special needs or something, although there doesn’t seem to be anything obviously wrong with him. Cas has assured her it’s because she hasn’t spent enough time with him, but for all her bitching, she’s insanely protective of him.

  ‘He’s at practice. Be back by half past.’ Her dad is a techpreneur. Name a major company in Silicon Valley and he’s ‘pulled a stint’ there – his words. It’s why they moved from Oakland, California. Detroit is friendlier to start-ups: lower overheads, tax incentives, hungry talent, cheap office space in TechTown. He’s bought into the city’s revitalization ‘with bells on’. Layla loves hearing him talk. It’s another language, where any word can be verbed. She and Cas have a secret drinking game they play during dinner, taking a sip of juice every time he uses techno jargon like ‘angel-investor’.

  ‘How’s Crater going?’ Layla asks him, trying to remember the name of his big start-up project.

  ‘Curatr,’ he corrects her automatically, rolling the trrrr.

  ‘Please don’t get him started,’ Cas complains.

  ‘I still don’t know if I get it. So, it pulls in all your social media to one place?’

  ‘Yes, it’s an aggregator. It pulls all your feeds to one platform.’

  ‘Aren’t there social networks that do that already?’

  ‘Right you are, missy!’ he says in some kind of cheesy British accent, and she’s almost relieved she’s not the only one with dorky parents. ‘But the difference is that Curatr is an anti-social social network. It’s a private diary, only for you and the people who are really close to you. It’s about giving you kids back some privacy, a space that’s yours alone, and totally safe. It’s tied in with our other offering, Walled Garden reputation management, using a subscription model to better customize SEO.’

  ‘I don’t really know what that means,’ Layla says, although she thinks that was an upcoming module in Future Promise. Search Engine Optimization: Hitting Your Target Audience.

  ‘It means we partner with the major search engines to promote results you approve and push down ones that might be damaging.’

  ‘Like doing a duck face when you were twelve.’ Or being nicknamed Chlamydia, she thinks.

  ‘Yes.’ He shifts uncomfortably. Maybe he doesn’t know what a duck face is and assumes it’s something worse. ‘Think of it as having your own publicist. We can’t get rid of anything forever, but we can push it four pages back on the search results. Maybe as much as ten.’

  Cas yawns dramatically. ‘Dad, can we eat in my room? We have homework.’

  Her father is stung, but he covers it up. ‘No problemo. Two times desk dine-ins coming up.’

  ‘Three please,’ Helen shouts from the living room.

  ‘Oh no. Someone has to eat with me!’

  ‘Your son will be home soon.’

  And on cue, Ben comes in the door, frowning intensely at his phone from under the flop of his sandy hair, and jabbing at the screen. Cas bounds up to him and snatches it out of his hands.

  ‘Whatcha looking at?’ she demands. ‘Message from a girl?’

  He flushes and tries to grab it back from her. ‘Hey c’mon! Phones are private!’

  ‘Big sister privileges.’

  ‘Give it back! Iza!’

  Cas examines the screen, then tosses it back to him, satisfied. ‘Shut up, dumb-ass. I was just teasing. Here’s your stupid phone with your stupid game.’

  ‘Aw man, you messed up my high score. Thanks a lot!’

  ‘I’m just making it more challenging for you. I’m like an extra difficulty setting. You should be grateful.’

  ‘Whatever.’ He brushes his hair away from his face, and she spots the bruise under his eye. She grabs his face, yanking up his chin to get a better look. ‘What the hell happened to your face? Because if someone did this to you, I will fucking kill them.’

  ‘Chill. It’s hockey. I caught Jimmy’s elbow at practice. You gonna go ballistic when someone body-slams me on the ice? ’Cos then you can’t come to the game.’ He’s genuinely alarmed. ‘Dad! Tell her she can’t come if she’s going to be such a freak.’

  ‘Like I care about your game anyway.’

  ‘Does that mean you’re
not coming?’

  ‘Of course I’m coming. Layla too. We’ve made cheerleader outfits and signs to hold up and everything. “Ben, Ben, he’s our guy, watch him go: super-fly!”’

  ‘Mo-ooom!’

  Their mother does not look up from her laptop. ‘Would you two please stop winding each other up?’

  ‘You going to sit and eat with me, Benjamin?’ their dad says.

  ‘Do I have to?’

  ‘Nope. We can all eat in different places round the house, all plugged in to our devices and not talking to each other.’

  ‘Isn’t that the whole point of your business?’ Cas says.

  ‘No,’ her father sighs in exasperation. ‘It’s creating new tools that facilitate new ways of expressing ourselves in appropriate ways.’

  ‘We are expressing ourselves. Just not with the people in this room. Can we go now? Because homework?’

  ‘Yes, all right,’ he deflates. ‘But only because you have a guest. Tomorrow night we’re sitting at the table like a real family.’

  ‘God, they kill me,’ Cas says, flinging the door shut and flopping backwards onto her bed. She reaches over her head to dock her phone in the speakers, and some sickly sweet shoegaze spills out. ‘You’re so lucky that your mom’s so uninvolved.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s terrific,’ Layla deadpans. ‘You white people. My parents would never let me get away with this kind of shit.’

  ‘Do you miss your old man?’

  ‘I don’t know. Sometimes.’ All the time. The weird trivia, the geeky projects, being able to hang out together and do nothing. She never realized what a luxury that was. She’s had just the one stilted conversation with him since Saturday’s disaster call. ‘Come on, shove over,’ she says, climbing onto the bed.

  Cas’s room is chaos and beauty, wallpapered with pictures ripped out of magazines or printed out. A goth girl in an elaborate lace dress with even more elaborate hand-carved prosthetic legs, a lightning storm over a volcano, abandoned theme parks, misty cliffs. She has a chandelier made out of origami cranes and fairy lights. It’s like her whole room is a Tumblr of things that make her happy.

  ‘You know you could just put this up online. It would be a lot easier to manage,’ Layla says, glancing over the wall to see if there are any new pictures since she last visited a few weeks ago. A photograph of horses’ silhouettes in streaks of sunlight, an illustration of a plump lionfish mermaid with poisonous quills, a girl with her hair dyed in a cascading rainbow.

  ‘Online’s not real,’ Cas says, bored. ‘Besides, I have to share the PC in the living room with Ben.’

  ‘But you don’t have a Facebook page or anything,’ Layla persists.

  ‘Too much effort. It’s designed to make you insecure about the amazing better life everyone else is having. You’re just feeding the machine.’

  ‘It’s an anxiety engine.’

  ‘What I’m saying. You of all people should quit. You’re anxious enough as it is.’

  ‘Am not.’

  ‘You worry if the shrimp my dad got are frozen? Maybe they’re crawling with salmonella.’

  ‘They would be killed during the cooking process.’

  ‘Are you sure? Aren’t bacteria more invincible than Superman and cockroaches put together?’ Cas prods her.

  ‘Super-roach!’ Layla says, trying to distract Cas because she’s succeeding in freaking her out. ‘I bet someone has dressed up a roach in a superhero outfit. We could check online!’

  ‘Like I said, computer’s in the living room.’

  ‘What’s your wifi password? I’ll look it up on my phone.’

  ‘My dad’s got spyware. Did I mention he’s super-paranoid?’

  Cas’s dad nudges open the door with the toe of his sneaker, balancing the tray. The food smells amazing, like a restaurant.

  ‘Come on, Cassandra,’ he berates her. ‘You know how I feel about closed doors.’

  ‘Sorry, we didn’t want the music to disturb you.’

  ‘I’ll just turn the TV up,’ he says, glum. ‘It’s not like we’re having a family conversation.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr. Holt.’

  ‘Mmmm, thanks Dad,’ Cas says, hustling him out of the room. He leaves the door ajar. ‘This is why we do this shit at your house.’

  ‘Why are your parents such control freaks?’

  ‘It’s because I once tried to off myself.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Or they’re worried they’re going to bust me touching myself. Or making like my mom.’ She holds up two fingers for emphasis and then pretends to stick them down her throat. ‘Blaaargh.’

  When she was a kid, Layla entertained all those pop-star princess fantasies. That there had been a terrible mix-up. She was a changeling, and one day her true parents, who were either New York socialites or Hollywood movie stars, would come to reclaim her. Or her owl would fly through the window with her scroll from Hogwarts.

  She thinks about how Ben calls Cas ‘Iza’, how little they talk about her old school and her life in Oakland.

  ‘Can I ask you something serious?’ Layla picks around the shrimp.

  ‘Serious like Dorian? Or serious like climate change? Because I’m sad for the polar bears and shit, but I don’t see how we’re supposed to make a difference on an individual level. Although I think using public transport helps.’

  ‘Cas.’

  ‘Yeah, fine. Ask whatever you want.’ She’s gone as still and tense as her mother did earlier. It’s in her shoulders, even though she’s stirring her noodles with her chopsticks, head down, intently digging for one last shrimp. Funny how body language can be genetic.

  ‘Are you in witness protection?’

  Cas laughs and her whole body unclenches. ‘Yeah. Exactly. You got us. Don’t tell anyone. Pass the soya sauce.’

  ‘I mean it, Cas.’

  ‘Like my dad was a whistleblower on insider trading software and we’ve been on the run ever since? And my mom’s really CIA, which is why she flies around so much?’

  ‘Fine, okay, it sounds really dumb when you put it like that.’ A terrible thought occurs to her. ‘Wait. Did you try to off yourself?’

  Cas puts down her noodles and gives her a look full of contempt and pity. ‘Hasn’t everyone?’

  THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 13

  Open Wide

  ‘What is it with graffiti in Detroit?’ Jonno says into the microphone, standing under a beautifully detailed black-and-white paste-up of a wild boar, three stories high. ‘Like Coney Island dogs, stray dogs and hipster facial hair, it’s freaking everywhere.’

  He strolls toward the camera, Jen matching his pace, walking backwards. He passes a little old lady carrying a bright pink purse.

  ‘Tags, tags everywhere, but there’s also some serious work to rival big international names like Banksy and Blek Le Rat, or Faith47. And what do we have to thank for the explosion of street art in the city?’

  He pauses for dramatic effect. ‘The high crime rate.’

  There’s a pause, then a man in a ski mask runs up to the old lady behind him, and snatches her purse. She shrieks in dismay.

  ‘Cut!’ Jen yells. ‘Simon, you have to come in earlier.’

  Simon slinks into shot, his ski mask pushed up on his head, looking sulky, and hands the old woman her purse back.

  ‘This is stupid,’ Jonno complains. He hates being here at all; he’s decided there’s a vibe between Simon and Jen, the residual energy of people who have slept together.

  ‘I think so too,’ the mugging victim chimes in. ‘I would never give up my bag that easy. I should struggle, maybe I could hit him with it a few times before he gets away.’

  ‘Relax, Jonno, it’s cute,’ Jen says. ‘We can always cut it if it doesn’t work. And sure, Ivy, if you want to ad-lib, go wild.’

  ‘Great. Now the old lady gets more of a say than I do,’ Simon bitches. Everybody wants to be a director.

  ‘We want it to be funny.’

  ‘It’s not funny, it’
s tragic,’ says Jonno.

  ‘That’s even funnier.’

  ‘Fine. I’ll pick up and maybe Simon can hit his fucking cue this time?’ He still hates this, even if, it turns out, he’s pretty good at it when he warms up. It reminds him of his mother, who was a nurse in an obstetrics ward. She hated inserting catheters, so she did it as quickly and efficiently as she could, which meant she got called to do all the catheters.

  And he’s kind of flattered that Jen is so serious about it. She’s been designing a two-second intro sequence for his channel with an animator friend (male, of course), and they’ve worked out a schedule of what they’re going to film, focusing on the art scene: this new street art, the Dream House party on Saturday, a pop-up dinner with the cool glitterati in a secret location next week. This might even work, Jonno thinks.

  The Dream House prep video they did got 788 hits in the first twenty-four hours. They watched it spread, and it was amazing how each new view was a little shot of validation. This piece they’re filming now isn’t just about art, it’s about the weirdness Detroit has in spades, which is what people are hungry for. They might even reach a few thousand views. It’s about building your audience.

  They repeat the scene. This time Simon hits his mark, the little old lady they lured over from her porch to be part of the scene for fifty dollars screams hysterically, and Jonno walks forward, improvising on the script they wrote this morning. ‘Detroit’s police department has bigger problems to deal with than street art. So you get major artists, sick of being arrested in California, moving to Detroit. Their loss, our gain. Here, no-one hassles you.’

  He ignores the tussle that has broken out behind him and Simon’s yelps of ‘Ow, shit! What is wrong with you? Get her off me!’

  ‘There are household names on the scene. Revok. Nekst, Pose, Elya. The Smooth Wizards League, Loaf.’ According to Jen at any rate, he’s never heard of any of these fuckers, and that’s not including the oh-so-edgy art students or the white-trash weed dealers who like to think they’re being creative, throwing up tags. ‘But some prefer to stay mysterious, like whoever is behind the wooden Delray Angels, a heavenly host of painted plywood that some believe watch over one of the D’s most forlorn neighborhoods.’