The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [132]
Thus generated his first scar. It was his fault, for he never even knew the woman who was his own mother.
The scar made him feel better, a little better.
Held in the opposite hand from his razor was a children’s book, a ten-page flip-book depicting a monster upon each page, a cartoon scribbling per page for every childhood nightmarish atrocity a kid could imagine, each one an allegory for a child to understand and overcome. There was a monster in the closet, a monster under the bed, and on another page, even a monster among the dustballs behind the couch. Andrew must’ve enjoyed this book.
Upon the opened page which Simon held within his lap and facing him was sketched simple beast, its contorted green body grimacing and awkward. The caption below its depiction read, plainly typed,
SCRATCH
...the monster from outside.
Suddenly Simon was distracted from this, from the blood, from the book, by Salvatia’s distant voice.
The voice summoned him to the school park beyond the house across the street, away and into the night.
And, reluctantly, he went.
36.
The Son of A.J. Erlandson
Throughout the accumulated years of the average fourteen-year-old, one can experience many changes. Andrew Erlandson was, overall, no exception to this, but for him there had always been a small handful of constants.
He had always lived within the same one-floor, three-bedroom Gilbert Street house, situated across the street from the Dr. Jonas E. Salk elementary school and the grass field posterior of Magnolia High.
He had never known his father, A.J. Erlandson, the Hollywood B-movie director who disappeared from the world without so much as a fleeting farewell mere months before Andrew was born.
Andrew’s mother was always there for him. She had raised him, bonded with him, took care of him, would’ve died for him. Andy’s mom shared with him the bewildered, empty grief of personal loss, the feelings of being only half a family...the lost other half nothing more than a perished void. That void was filled to a healing extent when his mother succumbed to a marriage proposal a handful of years ago making Dan Risselbërgen Andrew’s inevitable stepfather. And he was a good man. Andrew and his mother, however, chose to stick with their own last name.
Bari was always there for him, too. When someone has lived with a presence like Bari since the first day he began to observe the world around him, that presence simply settles into it all and takes its place within the varied mental categories of normalcy. When Andrew was very young, he took it for granted that everyone knew about Bari as well as he did. He soon learned the contrary, that no one else knew about Bari but himself and decidedly his relationship with Bari was best kept secret. In the eyes of those around him, Andrew oftentimes retreated into a reclusive fantasy world, a world where Bari solely existed, and oftentimes Andrew himself questioned his own sanity during the long periods when Bari chose to remain quiet and unseen even by him.
The remaining constant in Andrew’s life was, together with the absence of his father, the likewise mysterious absence of his brother. His brother had played an intimate role in the first two years of Andrew’s life, the only years Andrew could never truly remember at all. The sole remnants of his brother dwelt within his mother’s latent memories, a stagnant police report, and the lingering possibility that he may still be alive.
Then again, the same could be said about A.J. Andy’s mother had suffered for years with that possibility. Others, including her, attributed Andrew’s periodic reclusion into fantasy to the traumas of his lost father and brother. To them, Bari and those related fantasies were invented to replace the loss.
Andrew hadn’t the faintest idea what an Everborn was, nor that he was one,