Page 3 of A Mastery of Monsters

The correct dorm is Victoria Hall. It’s a massive gray six-story structure that’s not anywhere near as picturesque as the buildings along University Avenue.

There’s a boxiness to it, and from the front viewpoint, the left and right sides slant inward at a diagonal.

Since it’s summer, the place is deserted.

The only people still here are students like Jules who stay over the break.

I avoid the main entrance, instead going to the one at the side per Jules’s text instructions.

I wait, leaning against the wall under the overhang until the door is shoved open.

Jules scowls at me. “You’re drunk.”

“Surprise!” I say, throwing my hands in the air.

When my brother frowns, his already angular jaw becomes sharper, and the narrowing of his eyes has a strong effect with his thick brows.

He’s always had the look of a strict military leader.

But he’s as soft as the molten core of a chocolate lava cake and somehow sweeter in disposition.

In comparison, I’m more like a cake left too long in the oven, obviously a failure but kept on the counter for a while because it hurts to throw away something you’ve worked that hard on.

Every once in a while you take a taste, and the dry, rough texture reminds you not to try that again.

Jules ushers me inside, and we walk to the elevator, where he makes a point of crossing his arms and sighing. He’s doing that thing where he presses his lips together so hard that they ripple, like crumpled paper.

Mom has the same look when she gets mad. I only made her look at me like that once.

The last night I saw her.

On Jules, the expression doesn’t have any threat behind it.

He’s more putting on a show than anything, so I know he’s displeased.

He got the same things from our parents that I did: Dad’s obsession with academic performance, and Mom’s vague expectation that we be “better” in a way that wasn’t understandable but something you still wanted to achieve.

We never asked that of each other. It was an unspoken rule of our upbringing.

We didn’t need to be perfect when it was just us.

We could be whatever we wanted. We’d complain about the classes we hated that we took anyway because they were the “right” ones, or we’d skip Mom’s extracurricular training exercises and go waste time at the mall.

And the additional rule that Jules followed was that if I messed up, he covered for me.

I glance at him out of the corner of my eye and then away.

Throwing up twice made me feel better, but it hasn’t gotten rid of the spins, and now the taste of vomit clings to my mouth.

We get out of the elevator, and I follow Jules down a series of corridors until we reach a hallway that splits in two, one set of rooms in one hall, and another set in the second one.

Jules goes to the left. We pass a common room, where a few girls are sitting on a couch that looks like it was brought in from someone’s front lawn.

The atmosphere of the whole space is like being in an apartment building that hasn’t been renovated in years but has high rent because it’s in a nice area.

We stop at room 416, which Jules unlocks to let me inside.

“Bathroom?” I ask.

“Across the hall. Hold on.” He goes into the room and rummages in a drawer before handing over a new toothbrush and an unopened box of mini toothpaste. Overly responsible, as always. “Wait. Pajamas.” He digs around in his closet and tosses me one of his T-shirts and a pair of shorts.

I go to the bathroom and brush my teeth, wash off as much makeup as I can, and change.

I come into the room and kick off my Docs and dump my clothes by the door.

Jules’s bed is raised so he can store things underneath, so I have to basically climb onto it and scramble to the side closest to the wall, cocooning myself in the sheets.

Meanwhile, he stays standing, arms still crossed over his chest.

“You couldn’t have texted Bailey back?” he asks.

Here we go.

He doesn’t give me a chance to hop in. “She was worried. And I called her once you texted me, by the way. In case you cared.”

“She’s not my mom,” I mumble.

Mom is gone. And the thing is, when you’ve been missing for almost a year, people assume you’re dead.

I don’t want to be one of them. I refuse.

But I also can’t keep looking. Can’t keep pasting up posters and shouting on socials.

Begging people to share and repost. I want Mom to be a scar.

Something I carry with me and always remember, with the hopes of it healing well enough to barely notice it one day.

Instead, she’s a scab. And every time I try to find her and fail, I rip the dry crusted skin away, exposing the pink injured bits underneath, and have to wait again for it to start healing.

But it never finishes. Because the instant a bit of it forms, it’s torn away again.

“No, she’s not Mom, she’s our aunt, and you live with her, and she cares about you.”

“We hadn’t spent more than a weekend together until this summer.

” Me and Jules were born in Kingston, but our family left when I was four and he was five to accommodate Mom’s job in consulting.

I never understood what the work was, just that it required us to change apartments frequently enough that we didn’t often see anyone else in the family. Including Dad’s little sister.

“I’m not trying to guilt you,” Jules adds. “I’m just saying.”

And I know he is. Unlike our parents, Jules has never decided who I should be and then shoved that image onto me.

He’s the only person who’s ever pushed me to do what I want.

Be who I am. Not only when it’s just us.

All the time, with everyone. And I never listened to him.

Because I wanted to do everything our parents wanted.

My friends wanted. And in the end, it didn’t even matter.

Everyone ended up disappointed, so why bother?

If anything, speeding up the process would have saved us a lot of time.

Bailey will figure that out eventually. And then she’ll leave too.

Jules leans against his desk. “Do you really want to spend every weekend coming to the city to blow your paycheck clubbing? Not to mention that you’re only seventeen. You’re two years too early for that.”

“Hardly.”

I have a late birthday, just like him despite my summer month name. I’m basically eighteen.

I close my eyes and pretend to sleep, facing the painted brick wall.

I didn’t ask Dad to drag me from Toronto and dump me on Bailey.

Jules was lucky since he escaped to campus.

And of course, Dad is too busy working at the college.

I don’t know what he thought ditching me was going to do.

Everyone is doing their own thing, so I’m doing mine.

Jules says, “Can you at least not wander around at two in the morning? It’s not exactly safe behavior.”

“Sorry I tried to exist as a girl and didn’t have someone around to protect me because I’m so weak and vulnerable.”

I don’t open my eyes to see Jules’s expression, but I can picture it. His mouth opening and closing, the furrow of the brow, maybe even an eye roll. “It would be unsafe for anyone who was alone! What if something happened to you?”

“It didn’t.” Nothing I couldn’t handle, anyway.

“I get not wanting to just do what Mom and Dad want. I’m legit happy you’re finding your own way. But does that have to mean throwing away everything that you worked hard for? I know they pushed it, but I genuinely thought you wanted to go to Queen’s.”

I shrug.

“Is any of this making you happy?”

I open my eyes, and turn to face him, grinning. “Don’t I look happy?”

He shakes his head. “Be serious.”

I spent my whole life trying to live up to what they wanted.

I studied hard for things I didn’t care about.

I kept up an active social life with “friends” who didn’t know me.

I recorded and tracked everything I put in my mouth and ate things I didn’t like so I would look the way people wanted me to look.

I hadn’t enjoyed any of it. I hadn’t been happy.

But I didn’t want to ruin the delicate ecosystem of our lives.

And none of it mattered in the end.

Because the one time I tried to do something for me, Mom had given me that look . Like she didn’t know me. And then she left and never came back. A lifetime of being perfect undone because of one disappointment.

There’s no point to it. To any of it.

I don’t know why Jules doesn’t realize that.

He’s kept it all up and what does he have to show for it?

He’s got the job of looking after first years in the dorm while the second years like him become legal and party even harder than they did last year.

“Why didn’t you move off campus with your friends?

” I ask, turning the spotlight on him. “Don’t all the second years do that? ”

“I wanted to stay on campus.”

It’s then that I notice my brother’s room, which I haven’t seen since I last visited a couple of weeks ago. He’s usually so neat, but now there’s all this random shit shoved under his desk, and papers sticking out of his drawers, and a laundry heap exploding from underneath the bed. “Why?”

“Stop trying to deflect. We’re talking about your life. I’m trying to help. Just like Bailey, and like Dad, whose calls and texts I know you’ve been actively ignoring.”

“What’s he going to do? Kick me out of the house?” I pause and pretend to be shocked. “Oh right, he basically already did that.”

Jules rubs at his face. “I know he isn’t perfect—”

“Understatement.”