Draw You Out

It's September when Molly finally thinks she sees me under her bed. 

She's five, little blonde pigtails done up with pink ribbons, and when she runs screaming to her parents, they shush her with placating words and share sighs over her head. 

“Look,” they say, when they come upstairs to her room, because they have to pretend to check. The good ones always do. “There's nothing there. See? All clear.”

Molly hides behind her dad's leg, clutching onto it like a lifeline, and stares at me in the corner with bright blue, terrified eyes. 

We're called friends long before we're ever called monsters. Last year, Molly and I played on the swings together, joking as we tried to see who could go the highest. We picked out movies and books and toys in her living room. When she was just a baby, she would laugh and reach for me with her chubby little hands, blowing spit bubbles in my direction. Imaginary friend, the ghost in your attic, the gentle spirit in your walls. We're all the same. 

But Molly is five now, and she goes to sleep in her parents’ room for the night, because she's finally old enough to learn that monsters exist. 

***

It’s five years later when Molly comes home from the neighbor’s house and asks her mom, “What would you do if someone told you a secret?”

They’re in the kitchen, music playing softly from the radio. Her mom is making spaghetti—Molly’s favorite—and outside the sky has turned dark, stars dotting the winter horizon. Molly hates when the sun goes down too early, the way it makes her feel like the day is over before it's begun.

“That depends,” her mom says. “What kind of secret is it?”

Molly sits on a stool across the counter, banging her knee against the wood. The scrape she got at soccer practice still hasn’t healed. If she notices me watching near the pantry, she doesn’t make it obvious.

She says, “A bad secret, I think.”

Her mom looks up at her. “In that case, I would tell an adult.”

“What if she—I mean, what if the person with the secret gets mad at me for telling?” she asks.

“Well,” her mom says, setting down her mixing spoon, and reaches across the space between them to squeeze Molly’s hand. “Sometimes we have to break promises to protect people. And we can only hope they’ll understand.”

Molly stares at her mom’s fingers for a long time, and the way her forehead creases in that familiar frown lets me figure it out a second before she says, “It’s about Marybeth.” 

Marybeth, who lives two houses down and has been nothing but kind to Molly since they met last year in their fourth-grade class. Of all the friends Molly has tried out, Marybeth is my favorite. She spends half the week over here, and there’s always light when she’s around, an indescribable kind of joy in Molly that I never see in her with anyone else. 

During one sleepover, when Molly shyly asked if Marybeth had ever believed in a monster under the bed, Marybeth’s face had gone oddly blank. I thought that was it, that she would be scared away, afraid of Molly the way Molly is afraid of me, but just like blinking, her expression went back to normal, and she told Molly she was sure she could help get rid of the monster. They stayed up all night saging the house with her mom’s incense, making fake holy water with made-up prayers, and chanting for any evil spirits to get out, leave this space, be gone. 

When they finally went to sleep, laughing until their cheeks hurt, Marybeth whispered, “Do you think we did it? Is the monster gone?”

I could feel Molly’s eyes on me where I’d gone to hide in the closet to humor them. She said, “Yeah. I think you scared him away.”

It’s clear to me now, even if it’s not to Molly, who makes her mom promise nothing bad will happen if she tells her the secret, that those nights with Marybeth are probably over. Still, Molly has to say it, so she does.

“Marybeth said her dad hits her.”

It goes just the way it should, after that. Molly’s mom is on the phone for a long time, her voice hushed and urgent, and then there are red and blue lights reflecting across the neighborhood, police cars parked in front of Marybeth’s house. When Molly comes barging home from school two days later, she finds her mom on the couch and says, “You promised nothing bad would happen!”

“Honey,” her mom starts, but Molly throws down her backpack.

“Marybeth has to move to Colorado with her grandma! She hates me!”

“I’m sorry, Molly,” her mom says gently. “But it wasn’t safe for her. Her mom decided it would be best if she wasn’t here while they waited for her dad’s trial.”

Molly stomps up the stairs, yelling, “I hate you!” as she goes, and I linger for a moment while her mom presses her hands over her eyes and takes a deep breath. I want to help, but I don’t belong to her, so I go upstairs and find Molly facedown on her bed.

Molly rarely looks at me these days. A few months ago, after a bad day at school, she’d cracked under her stress and asked her dad if he could make sure there was no monster under her bed. Her dad, halfway beneath the sink at the time, fixing the leaky faucet, had said, “Sweetheart, you’re a little old to still believe in monsters. I promise you there’s nothing down there.” She’d taken to stuffing blankets and spare pillows under the bed anyway, like it would make me go away.

“I’m never telling anyone anything ever again,” she says into her pillow.

Carefully, I say, “Molly…” but she slams her hands over her ears.

“Go away,” she begs. “Go away. Please, just go away.”

“Okay,” I say softly, but I can’t go away, not now, not ever, so I hide in the closet like I did that night, giving her what I can.

I know it’s not enough.

***

The Brittanys arrive in the spring after Molly’s eleventh birthday. They are two girls from her soccer team, both named Brittany A, so they go by Blonde Brittany and Redhead Brittany to those at school who whisper their names in the hallway. To Molly, one is Brittany, and the other Brit, which always makes them roll their eyes and call her “Mol” in return.

When they come over after practice for the first time, they give her house a long look, and they refuse to take their shoes off “because of germs.” Molly doesn’t seem bothered by this and takes them to the kitchen, saying, “If you guys want a snack, I think we have some chips or cheese crackers or something.”

Blonde Brittany raises an eyebrow. “Cheese crackers?” she says. “Oh my god, I haven’t had cheese crackers since I was, like, three.”

Molly blinks, taken off guard, and then laughs a little too, sounding uncomfortable. “Right? My mom buys the weirdest stuff.”

In her room some weeks after that, after the Brittanys convince her to skip soccer practice—“Quit being such a goody-two-shoes. No one cares if we miss one little practice”—Redhead Brittany plops down on her bed, still wearing her shoes, and crosses her legs beneath her.

“Did you guys see that new girl in the hall today?” she asks. “Her eyebrows were like two caterpillars. Someone needs to give her some serious tips.” 

“More like one caterpillar,” Blonde Brittany mutters, and picks up one of Molly’s dolls from the drawer she’s rifling through. “Do you actually still play with toys?”

Molly, who has been hovering near her desk, watching them both, says, “What?” and then snatches the doll from Blonde Brittany. She moves like she wants to cradle it in her arms and then catches me standing in the doorway, just one second, and looks away. “As if. My mom won’t let me get rid of them. Says they’re like antiques or something.”

Blonde Brittany just shrugs and goes to sit on the bed too.

That night, Molly pulls all her dolls and stuffed animals from their resting spots and stuffs them under the bed so they can’t be seen. I mark it as the end of something, even if I can’t be sure exactly what. 

It's not that Molly suddenly changes. She doesn’t. She has been changing since she was five, since the day she decided I was a monster. She starts cleaning her own room, under the excuse of being more responsible, which her parents admire and I see right through. It gives her the freedom to keep those toys hidden away over the years, long after the Brittanys disappear and there’s no one to hide them from. And then, when she turns fourteen, it gives her a place to stash the cigarettes she’s swiped from the corner store before her mom opens her door.

She doesn’t look at me when she tosses them under there. She doesn’t look at me when she smokes them either. More and more, though, I know she can feel me watching.

“So you weren’t gonna tell me you got benched on the soccer team?” her mom demands.

Molly sighs. “It’s not a big deal, okay?”

“Actually, it’s a huge deal,” her mom counters, looking around at the new boy band posters on her walls that she hung without asking. “Your coach told me you’ve missed almost every practice this season.”

“Maybe I just don’t like soccer anymore,” Molly says, which is probably true. Molly doesn’t seem to like much of anything anymore, except the curly-haired boy I’ve seen waiting for her outside the house. Jeremy. He seems nice, a little awkward in the way all fourteen-year-olds are. He’s better for her than the Brittanys ever were, even if he’s the one who got her into smoking after he’d found her crying on the bleachers at school and told her it would help calm her down. 

“Then you be responsible and tell your coach you want to quit,” her mom says. “You don’t ditch practice and leave your team when they’re depending on you.”

“Jeez, all right,” Molly complains. “I’ll quit then. Happy?”

Molly’s mom has the same look she did when Marybeth had to move away. “No,” she says, on her way out the door. “No, I’m not happy.”

“And you?” Molly snaps once she’s gone, turning to me. Her eyes have gone teary and red. “Are you happy?” 

But she doesn’t wait for an answer before she leaves too. It isn’t a real question anyway. 

She doesn’t want my help. I do the only thing I can and honor that wish.

***

Molly has good friends at sixteen. Charlie, the dimpled boy who doesn’t talk much. Annie, who’s both overly anxious and overly outgoing. Max, the genius who skateboards. And my favorite, Shara, the sweet math nerd who loves to bake.

They’re all patient with Molly when Molly isn’t patient with herself. They spend evenings camped out in the living room, doing homework and watching reality TV and eating Shara’s newest cookie experiments. Annie stays over at least once a month, and Shara comes over a few times a week, and Molly never goes back to soccer, but she teaches her friends how to play sometimes at the rec center.

She’s gone back to pretending she can’t see me. It’s how it always happens when they grow older. Pretend long enough that you convince yourself it’s true. Just a shadow, just a trick of the light when you’re tired. We never go away, the imaginary friends, the monsters under the bed. Molly must forget this, because after a day out with her friends, she comes home smiling and sees me in her room and her whole face changes.

“No,” she says. “No. Why are you still there? Why are you always still there?”

“Because I can’t leave you,” I tell her. “You know that.”

“No,” she says again, and storms away.

She’s agitated all through dinner, watching me from the edge of her vision as Annie chats nonstop with Molly’s parents about climate change and prom and NASA. The subtle glances from Annie are enough to prove she knows something is wrong, and to my relief, all of Molly’s friends show up again in the morning to take her out for breakfast. 

They say, “Try this weird crepe with me!” and, “God, is anyone else nervous about Mr. Harrington’s math test?” and Molly smiles and drums her fingers and does her best not to look at me until her friends finally distract her and allow her to forget, for a while.

But Molly never forgets for long. The next thing she hides under her bed is a bottle of vodka she steals from the cabinet. At night, she takes a few chugs of it until she’s had enough to decide I don’t matter anymore, and when her parents question her about the missing drink, she says she doesn’t know anything about it. Charlie gives her a lot of worried looks. Max tries to find a way to kindly ask if she needs someone to talk to.

“Cause, you know, I can ask my dad for recommendations,” he says. “He works with a lot of doctors.”

“Doctors?” Molly asks.

“Uh, therapists,” Max says, scratching at his neck, and I want to tell Molly to take it, to reach for the hand offering her guidance while it’s still there, but she just laughs.

“I’m fine,” she says. “I always have someone to talk to.”

Max doesn’t look convinced. I like him even more for it, though I know it won’t help anything now. 

“You’re sure?”

I start to say Molly’s name but stop myself. She ignores me.

“I’m sure,” she says.

The night before her seventeenth birthday, she stumbles through the front door, reeking of alcohol. Both her parents are out, and so it’s only the two of us in the house, no one to see when she corners me in her bedroom and jams a finger in my direction.

“This is all your fault,” she says, tipping sideways a little before righting herself. “All of it. Everything. It’s all your fault.” 

“I’m sorry,” I say, because there’s nothing else for it. 

Tears slide down her cheeks. She swipes angrily at her eyes, taking a step back from me. “You’ve ruined my life,” she says. “My whole entire life. What the hell do you want from me?”

For once, I wish I could lie. I wish I could tell her what she needs to hear, the magic words that will make everything okay. But I can’t, so I say, “Molly, I don’t want anything from you.”

“I hate you,” she whispers. “I hate you. I hate you.”

“I’m sorry,” I say again, to her back this time, watching her leave and knowing, somewhere, that this will be another moment I mark in time. Another ending.

We’re called friends long before we’re ever called monsters. I’ve never been underneath Molly’s bed, but I go there now, with the vodka, the cigarettes, the toys—just another thing to hide away.

I am not a monster, I want to say, to plead, to make her understand. But in the end, it won't matter. 

I am what she's made me.