The Boy Who Drew Monsters: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

making sure it was shipshape for the winter, and I thought I heard the wind come in, so I go checking all the windows. In one of the rooms there’s a real peculiar smell. A stink, really—”
    With his glass at his mouth, Jack Peter snorted into his milk.
    “So I look under the bed, and what do you know, the kid had left a wet bathing suit under the bed. Been sitting since the end of summer, but that’s not all. Inside the pockets, what do you think? Hermit crabs. Four of them crammed in there. But here’s the weird part. I’m getting ready to leave and I hear this scribble-scrabble sound coming from where I laid them out upon the desk, and you guessed it. Those crabs come back from the dead, trying to escape the house and walk back to the ocean.”
    “Ghost crabs,” Jack Peter said.
    “That’s right,” Mr. Keenan said. “Figure they were hibernating or something. Nearly scared me half to death.”
    Mrs. Keenan rolled her eyes and pressed her hand against her painful-looking bruise. Mashing a potato with the tines of her fork, she addressed the table. “Nick, we’re looking forward to having you stay over after Christmas.”
    He reddened, remembering how his parents had foisted him off so that they could get away on a cruise between Christmas and New Year’s. Just the two of them, a second honeymoon, they said, although he wasn’t sure what was wrong with the first. The trip, he sensed, was intended as remedy for what had been broken over the years, but their attempts at rekindling left him out in the cold. They had given him the choice between a week with the Keenans or five days down in Florida with Nana and Pap. The spare bedroom at their condo in the retirement village was always hot no matter the temperature outside. Even Christmas was blazing. No snow, no friends. The endless afternoons. Dinner at five o’clock, in bed by eight. The nightly news, a game show with the television blasting full volume. Maybe you would like to do a puzzle? He loved his grandparents, but he’d rather be dead.
    “Thanks again for having me. I’m happy to stay with you guys. And with Jack Peter.”
    Across the table, his friend betrayed no emotion.
    An idea jumped from Mr. Keenan’s brain to his mouth. “We could even get the old gang together during winter break. What were those boys’ names? Jip, you haven’t seen some of those guys since, what, second grade?”
    Yes, second grade. Jack Peter had been an inside boy for over three years. Hadn’t been to school, rarely left the house. One by one, his few old friends had nearly forgotten about him, and they always gave Nick grief for continuing his strange friendship. Perhaps it would be better in Boca Raton.
    “You boys will have the run of the place,” said Mr. Keenan.
    A pair of eyes stared out at him from over Jack Peter’s shoulders. Mismatched askew eyes, the left larger than the right, pupils dark as holes, glowered at him. He nearly dropped his spoon. The giant face came into focus, a child’s pencil drawing taped to the refrigerator door. The portrait filled the entire page from side to side: a young boy with dark tangled hair atop a high bare forehead, a rudimentary nose, a slash of a mouth. He was primitive but intense, hatched and worked over, shadows radiating from the wild eyes. Nick could not resist the temptation to look more closely, so he rose from his chair and walked right up to the paper.
    The drawing had a furious energy to it. There were no erasures, no signs of uncertainty, but rather the stray lines and swirls had been incorporated into its overall execution. A smudge ran the length of the jaw from the left ear to the chin, as though its maker was trying to soften the line and blur the edge. Though the picture looked similar to many children’s drawings, the boy on the page was animated by a different spirit, an air of unreality, that hypnotized Nick. As if the image had some power over him, life imitating art. He could not reconcile its