Today (Noon)

“Hey, Teddy,” Abel said, and Theo blinked in confusion. “You with me?”

“Sorry, I was thinking about the last time we ate pho.”

Abel hummed as though the memory were a particularly fond one. Theo tapped his chopsticks to adjust his grip on them and scooped up a mouthful of noodles. As he tipped his head to the side to eat them, he caught sight of a familiar figure. The chopsticks slipped from his hands. They fell to the table in a clatter, and one rolled to the floor. Theo flinched as the noodles plopped back into the broth and splashed his face, but he kept his head down as he watched the man walk by.

“Woah,” Abel watched the chopstick on the ground roll to a stop. " Is everything alright over there?”

“I thought I saw…” He trailed off, shaking his head and forcing his spine to straighten. “I’m just being crazy. Sorry.”

Abel did not comment on whether he was crazy or not. He never did, even when Theo could tell by other people’s reactions that he was acting it. Everything that Theo said or did was of grave importance to Abel, although he probably took most of what came out of his mouth with a grain of salt. It was refreshing for someone to actually listen to him instead of dismissing him immediately.

Whether he thought Theo was having one of his breaks with reality or not, he asked, “What did you think you saw?”

“Somebody that I knew once.”

“From when you were a kid?” Abel asked. This was the town where Theo grew up, after all. He shook his head, and Abel’s expression darkened from confusion into concern. “From when you were with Ken?”

Theo nodded, his voice stuck in his throat.

“What did he look like?” Abel was already scooting out from his side of the table. Theo’s heart leapt right up beside his voice to lodge itself in his trachea. He did not want Abel to meet any of the demons. They would charm him and rip him to shreds in front of Theo, either by turning him into one of them or by splattering his blood at Theo’s feet. He’d seen it happen before and they’d threatened already to do it to Abel.

“I…I don’t,” he stammered when Abel looked down at him expectantly. Then Abel crouched beside him and put his big hand over where Theo’s were clasped together in his lap. He gave him a reassuring smile.

“It’s alright,” he said as confidently as he might declare that the sun would rise again in the East tomorrow. “You said you thought you imagined it anyway. I’m just going to go check. What did he look like?”

“He’s white with a shaved head and has a tattoo of a rose on his skull,” Theo said. The words were drawn out of him by some charm in Abel’s eyes. Whenever he looked at Theo like that – completely open, honest, and patient – it simultaneously made him want to bare himself completely and hide away forever. It was a look that cut through all the shadows and the cobwebs in his mind and made him feel warm and safe.

Abel nodded and stood to go look outside the entrance to the restaurant. He would not find anything. Even if Theo had not imagined the figure, they were masters at deception and hiding themselves. Perhaps they were just trying to remind Theo that they were only a step away despite his little road trip. It had been in this town where he met his first demon, after all, the one who found him again all those years later. It would find him again in the future, no doubt, and perhaps already had.

Thirteen years ago

Theo had friends when he was very little. His mom took him on playdates with neighborhood kids, and he had a best friend in pre-school, although they moved away. But by the time he was in third or fourth grade, he spent recess alone. The other kids would whoop and holler as they swung around on the playground or played life-sized tick-tack-toe on the tennis courts. The teachers would sit on the benches under the shade of a big magnolia tree, whose leaves rattled whenever there was a breeze.

And Theo would wander around by himself. He never liked to sit in one place for too long because he would be able to feel the eyes on him like that. Instead, he paced in large, lazy circles around the playgrounds, kicking the rubber mulch and picking up acorns to inspect them. He stopped in front of the big plastic board with the sign language alphabet on it and practiced with his chubby little fingers sometimes. But mostly, he wandered around and talked to himself under his breath.

Because nobody else would talk to him. And he did not really want to talk to them. He made up scenarios in his mind and had both sides of the conversation so that it would go exactly as he imagined it. He paced and muttered to himself and kept his eyes on his shoes. Then, he wouldn’t have to look at the pinched eyebrows of his teachers or see the way his classmate’s eyes followed him.

Yesterday he had wet himself in the middle of class. This was embarrassing for two reasons. One, he was much too old to be doing that. And two, he had just come back from a bathroom trip. The hall pass had barely stilled on its hook by the time he was sitting in a puddle of his own making in his seat.

The teacher asked him what had happened. He had just gotten back from the bathroom, so why? All the other students skittered away from him and muttered amongst themselves. And he wanted to disappear.

He had never made it to the bathroom, crushed by some invisible weight in the big empty hall halfway between the classroom and the bathroom. His heart hammered in his chest, and his feet stuck to the floor. As he imagined the echoey bathroom with its shadowy corners and vacant stalls that hid behind half-closed doors, he leaned against the wall and could go no further. Across the way was a time capsule project that the graduating fifth graders had done. He stared at it for a very long time before tiptoeing back to the classroom with a bladder about to burst.

It was scary to go alone, but he was too old to need someone to take him to the bathroom. He was too old to think that a monster hid in the stalls or that the shadows beneath the urinals would creep out and curl around his ankles to drag him down the drains. He could not admit his fear to the teacher because then she would tell his parents, and they would make him talk about it with the counselor again.

So, when she asked, why? He kept his mouth shut. And he had not spoken a word since. This was why, today, he wandered around the playground, talking to himself and nobody else, ignoring the concerned eye his teacher watched him with and the other students’ whispers that crowded his ears. 

It did not matter how much he avoided everything. Two days later, he sat not in front of the counselor but in front of a lady with her own office in a building filled with businesses on the other side of town from the school. She had thin glasses that flashed with the reflection of the light streaming in through her blinds every time she looked down at her notes.

“Your parents tell me you are afraid to go anywhere by yourself,” she informed him. “Is there anywhere that you feel safe by yourself?”

Theo thought about wandering around the playground by himself, always accompanied by sets of eyes prickling the back of his neck. He was not truly alone there, nor in class when he sat quietly at his desk while the others talked around him, nor at home when he sat at the dinner table or did chores. He was alone in his bedroom at night, but he certainly did not feel safe.

There was always a nightlight on in his bedroom, the hallway, and the bathroom. He slept with his bed wedged into the corner, where he could lay on his side with his back to the wall and face both his bedroom door and the closet.

“No,” he said.

“Not even at home?”

“No,” he repeated under his breath.

“Okay.” She made a note. “Do you ever spend time in your room alone?”

“No.” He always had chores. And he liked to sit out in the living room and watch movies. At night, he was alone, he supposed, but she had already moved on before he could say anything about that.

“Can you tell me why you don’t feel safe?”

Theo eyed the corners of her room. There was a particularly dark space behind an armchair shoved into one corner that kept drawing his eyes. It leered at him. It sank its claws into his chest and made his heart stutter and his lungs hurt. He eyed it with apprehension while he tried to think of what to say. When he told the school counselor about the monsters watching him from the shadows, she told him there was no such thing. But his mom said this lady was a professional, so she might know what to do about monsters.

“There are things in the shadows,” he said quietly. “They stare at me, and I’m afraid that if I am alone, they will grab me.”

“Oh?” Her glasses remained clear as she watched him, eyes steady and pen still against the notebook in her lap. There was no pinch between her eyebrows like the teachers got. Maybe she understood. “What kinds of things?”

“Monsters,” he whispered, shooting a quick glance at the shadow in the corner.

“And have they ever grabbed you before?” she asked seriously.

Theo hesitated. There was something on the tip of his tongue, shadows looming in the closet and creeping up from beneath his bed to grab his arms and legs. But that was just a nightmare. He used to wake up from it panting and sweating and shaking, then run to his mom’s side of the bed to crawl in against her side. Until she told him that he was too old for that. There were no monsters in the closet.

Right now, even his heart thudded against his eardrums, and his chest trembled. He admitted, “No, they haven’t.” At least, he thought not.

“That’s because there is nothing there to grab you, right?” She told him. “I’ve noticed you keep looking in the corner. Would you like me to show you that there is nothing there?”

She pulled out a flashlight and together they shone it under the chair. Then she knelt on the cushion while he stood beside her and peered over the back into the little triangle of empty space behind it. Like she said, there was nothing. Well, except for a spider and a lot of dust.

“I need to clean,” she chuckled as they sat back down. “But you see, there is nothing in the shadows. You just need to prove that to yourself.”

“Here is what we are going to do,” she told him. “You are going to practice standing in your bedroom alone. Just go into your room alone and count to ten. Then you can go back out with your parents. Practice this a couple of times a day. Then do it counting to thirty. Then, for a whole minute. By the time I see you next week, I think you will have been able to get to a whole minute. What do you think?”

He wanted to say no. But then she would try to convince him, so he shrugged.

“Take a flashlight with you if you think it will help,” she suggested. “But stay alone in your room long enough so that you can realize that nothing is going to grab you.”

She told his parents, and they made sure he did the exercise, which involved him going down the hallway, stepping through the door of his room, pressing his back to the wall, and trying not to throw up his heart while he counted to ten. His mother waited for him at the end of the hallway, counting along. And inside his room, the closet door hung open, and the shadows draped themselves in the corners, all silently mocking his fear.

He made it to a minute, then two, and never went back to that lady’s office again. Although, he did go to others who made notes on different kinds of paper and handed them to his parents. These were something called prescriptions, and they would help him feel better. Like magic potions to protect him from the monsters, his mom told him.