Broken Monsters Read Online Free Page A

snorts out a laugh, but the envy leaks through anyway.
    “You know I’d give you the shirt off my back, Ramón,” TK tries again, “but the shoes on my feet…”
    “Probably wouldn’t fit me anyhow.” He shuffles on the step. Which only emphasizes his soles flapping as they pull away from the bottoms of his black lace-ups.
    TK sighs. Sucker. “I never did like red shoes.” Which is not true, but hell, Ramón’s face brightens like a lightbulb turned on inside it. “Now get your ass inside already. You’re letting all the cold in,” he says, helping his friend wrangle the shopping cart up the porch stairs.

The Detective’s Daughter
    Layla is late for her Sunday rehearsal. Blame her mother, shaking her awake at four in the morning because she has to go out to a scene and “don’t forget the code to the gun safe, beanie, just-in-case.” When she had two parents working different shifts, there was always someone home, and she didn’t need a just-in-case, and there was always someone to drive her to where she needed to be, like rehearsals on a Sunday, because she has a scene of her own to get to, thanks Mom. Instead she has to wait for an hour at the bus stop, bundled up against the cold and doodling in her notebook, resisting the temptation to scribble on the bench like so many others before her. She plans to leave her mark on the world in other ways.
    Doing extracurriculars is supposed to help bring Layla out of her shell. Like she doesn’t know it’s cheap babysitting so her mom doesn’t have to feel guilty all the time. But she should feel guilty. It’s her fault they moved downtown after the divorce, her fault all Layla’s real friends live in Pleasant Ridge, which is only on the other side of Eight Mile, but might as well be a world away when you don’t have a car.
    She shoves through the double doors of the Masque Theater School and gallops up two flights of stairs to the main stage area. She’s relieved to hear from the chanting—all echoey and strange in the stairwell—that they’re still doing warm-up exercises. She dumps her bag by the door and looks for Cas—not hard in a room full of black kids. She slips in beside her, and falls in with the chorus of tongue-twisting vowel sounds that rise and fall. Mrs. Westcott raises her eyebrows, half-hello, half-friendly warning.
    Shawnia leads the circle, raising her fist in the air to indicate that they’re switching up the exercise. Black power, the speaking stick, all the rituals that count. They all stop dead and watch for their cue.
    Shawnia starts flopping her body around, like she’s having a seizure, and they all follow suit, trying to let go of their bones, making their limbs limp as tentacles. Layla flops her body forward so that her unruly curls brush the ground. (Which are not a weave, thank you for asking. She got them the old-fashioned way, from her mom, and yeah, that means she’s mixed race and no, you can’t fucking touch my hair, what do you think this is, a human petting zoo?)
    “Couldn’t get a ride?” Cassandra whispers. “Bet Dorian could have given you one.”
    Layla accidentally on purpose tries to smack her. But Cas ducks, making it look like part of her movement.
    “Oh no, too slow!” she whisper-mocks, both of them grinning.
    “Focus, please!” Mrs. Westcott yells. She says drama came straight out of human sacrifice rituals. Some ancient prehistoric tribes used to kill their chieftain every winter solstice as an offering to the gods to ensure that the spring would return, until they figured out that killing off their smartest and brightest maybe wasn’t the best way to run a society. They started reenacting the sacrifices, wearing masks to fool the gods, to allow the chieftain to return as a new man, or close to.
      
    You can inhabit a role, Layla thinks, you can reinvent yourself. She thought she could get away with it. Whole new school year, whole new school on the other side of the city, whole new