Chapter One ONE
So the difference between humans and demons is not as big as you might think. Sometimes you can’t really tell which is which just by looking. In fact, sometimes I even walk into a random store and wonder exactly what kind of person, like, the salesclerk is. Good or evil? I know this sounds crazy, but let me explain. The first time I realized I wasn’t sure who or what I was talking to, it was like I felt out of balance. “Discombobulated” was the word me and Lee Fang decided on. It was when him, me, Banker, and Davis were buying drugs at some dude’s house, which was in this normal neighborhood in Playa del Sol, about forty minutes from downtown Los Angeles. You know, nice lawn, with an olive tree out front like you see all over—those trees with complicated, twisting trunks. They’re really cool, the way they always look so old even when they’re small. I’m kinda obsessed with old stuff and history, because I legit was born in the wrong era.

Anyway, the neighborhood was so normal that it could’ve been a set in The Truman Show—which I never watched but I know the story. The movie’s about a guy who’s living in a reality show but doesn’t know it. There’s a big set that he lives in, and he thinks it’s the real world. One day Lee and I were high and talking about how even though Truman lived in a set, it was still his reality, right? Otherwise, you could make a case that just about everybody is living in a set. What I mean to say is, once you’ve met a demon, you realize just about nobody you know truly lives in reality—they have no idea of the really bad stuff that’s out there.

So, this house we were at looked hypernormal. As in, the kind of house a richer Truman might live in. White with a few stone steps and a big plant on either side of the door. I paused. It was January, drizzling a little, and I looked up and let the cool mist hit my face. A bunch of crows did that thing they do, when they all cry out at once, some landing on electric cables, some swirling around. The other guys were now a few steps ahead of me, so I sped up. I decided to make sure we were at the right place. “Banker, dude… you sure this is the right house?”

“Dude, it’s the address I have.”

“You’ve never been here before?” I asked.

“Nah.”

Lee and I looked at each other. Then Banker rang the bell, and a few seconds later a little girl answered the door. Lee and I looked at each other again.

The girl said, “Daddy’s peeing,” then giggled like she knew she wasn’t supposed to tell us that.

Then a man came out, a big guy with a big face and big hands. “Thanks, sweetie,” he said to the little girl. He looked at her with that expression I’d seen my parents give me: unconditional love. He was a total dad. Total. Which was weird since we were there to buy drugs from him. He led us into an office, indicated for us to sit down. The couch wasn’t that big, so I sat on an arm. He rummaged in a drawer, placed a baggie of pills—Banker had said they would be Percocets—on his desk, and looked at us. And I kid you not, when he looked at us, I thought I was gonna puke. It was like he’d just turned into something else, which I realized later was a demon.

“I didn’t expect you boys to be Asian,” he said. He was messing with something below the desk where we couldn’t see.

I thought he meant because we were the model minority or some stuff like that, so he was surprised we did drugs. Plus, I had my glasses on that day instead of contacts, so maybe I was looking studious. Then he stood up, and his, uh, thing was hanging out, and he said, “I never got head from an Asian kid before.”

I heard a kind of snort, I think from Davis. It was one of those moments, like right before you crash on your skateboard or bike, where you’re thinking Oh, shit, but there’s nothing you can do. Nobody moved, because I guess we all knew we should be cool—the last thing I wanted was to get this big guy alarmed. I mean, didn’t drug dealers have guns? Then I glanced at Banker; Lee and Davis were also looking at him. Because this was Banker’s deal.

Banker quickly said, “We have money.”

The guy looked genuinely surprised. “Oh, money!” he said pleasantly. He zipped up his pants. “That’s good too. I take money as well—sorry for the misunderstanding.”

And just like that, he seemed like a totally normal guy again. He seemed like a dad.

Do you ever ask yourself, Wait, what just happened? That’s what I was asking myself as I replayed the last two minutes in my head.

“All good,” Banker said calmly. He gave the guy two hundred dollars from the money we’d stolen earlier. The guy handed Banker the baggie and said, “This is guaranteed straight from the medical clinic.” We started to leave.

“By the way,” the man said, so we stopped. He took three long strides to where I was and laid his right middle finger on my forearm. “Study hard,” he said.

It was like I could feel heat coming out of his finger, not regular heat, but dry-ice kind of heat, if you’ve ever accidentally touched dry ice. Blank face for me, though; I kept myself totally blank inside and out. “Uh, yeah,” I said. “See ya.” Then as I moved through the doorway, I added, “Or not.” I made a mental note not to wear glasses next time I bought drugs, which you can say wasn’t an entirely rational mental note to make at that moment. But if you haven’t been there, all I can tell you is that you react the way you react.

On the way to the car I gave Lee my best WTF look. But blank face from Lee. Davis was looking curiously at me for some reason. I felt anger rising up. “Banker, you coulda warned us.”

He glared at me, turned away. “It was a misunderstanding, okay? Stop acting like a kid.”

“Well, I am a kid,” I shot back.

Lee frowned at me. But he took a couple of long breaths, and I could see he was shook like I was.

Lee and I walked around the car to the passenger side. “I know, I’m discombobulated too,” he said quietly. “Because do you think the high-class dealers are two people in the same person?”

“That’s what I was thinking!” I said urgently to him. “He’s a dad AND a demon.”

Banker liked Lee to ride with him in front, so I sat in back with Davis, who was a quiet kid from a different school. All four of us were different ages: Banker oldest at eighteen, Lee next at seventeen, me sixteen, and Davis fifteen. I didn’t know how Davis knew Banker, but then, who cared?

As Banker hopped onto the freeway, I tried to wash that guy out of my thoughts. I searched my mind for something to make sense of our lives. All I could come up with was the words of another big man with big hands, a celebrity chef guy named Anthony Bourdain who I’d never heard of until he killed himself in a hotel room. To be honest, I didn’t even know what a “celebrity chef” was exactly. But anyway, in his last interview this chef guy said, “There are forces out there who are really fucking powerful and scary.” The interviewer herself said they’d talked about “the powerful forces of evil arrayed against decent people.” That interview, which I’d filed away in my brain, now made something click inside me. All of a sudden, I wondered what was up. Like, in the world.

I thought about that as we drove, and about whether it was possible to be two different people. Or more accurately, a person and an entity rolled into one body. I felt like that guy could put his little girl to bed with a kiss and could also put one of those hands on someone’s face and stop them from breathing. I felt, in short, that he was a force out there who was really fucking powerful and scary.

So that was my first experience with how weird and at the same time how normal some of these demons are. Which kind of makes them even more demonic. Some of them live in regular houses and all. So if the people who lived next door to that guy didn’t know he was a dealer and a perv, weren’t they kind of living in a set? Because they didn’t even know the reality going on right next door to them. It looked like a “nice” street, as my mom would say. “Good trees,” as my dad would say.

I leaned forward toward Lee in the front passenger seat, and what came out of my mouth was, “Do you ever wonder what we’re all doing here?”

“Shut the fuck up with that shit,” Banker snapped at me.

Lee turned all the way around to look at me. “Doing here right now, or here in general?”

“Both,” I said.

“I think guys used to fit in better with the world, and now we don’t. Maybe it’s technology that changed us,” Lee said. “More likely it’s the end of time.”

Lee was a doomer? That was news to me.

“It is what it is,” Banker said. He floored it for a few seconds, for no reason, and we all jerked forward when he slowed down again.

I glanced at Davis. He shrugged. “I guess… it is what it is.”

I’ve never understood what people mean by that. Of course it is what it is. It seems like what it really means is: “Don’t think, move on.” Which is sometimes maybe good advice. The problem was that Lee and I, we liked to think about stuff. That was literally our thing.

Then at a stoplight Banker handed each of us three Percocets. Which wasn’t entirely fair since it looked like he had about twenty in the baggie. But I popped one into my mouth and gulped water from my bottle. My mom was texting me that dinner was ready and everybody was waiting. I texted that I would be right there. When I pressed the send arrow, I looked up suddenly: I’d just had the thought, Well, here I am kind of being two people in the same person—one with these guys, and one with my family.

The guys dropped me off at my home in Rocosa Beach. It’s a town south of Los Angeles, but my family didn’t live on the beach. We’d stepped up a lot in the world, but not enough to live too near the water.

When I got inside, everybody was already at the dining room table, all staring at me as I walked over. Not in a bad way, but still, it felt awkward. I went to join my family with my two pills in my pocket. Still feeling discombobulated.

I smiled at everyone. Mom, Dad, Grandma, Grandpa, and Joshie, who was five, all lit up at my smile. Everybody loved me! My dog, Kiiro, had met me at the door and followed me to the dining room. My mom beamed, and as I sat down, she said, “Why don’t you say grace, Elijah?”

Which was freaky right there, because we hadn’t said grace since Thanksgiving, and I had said it then as well. It was like she somehow knew I needed to be purified or something. On the other hand, it coulda just been that I didn’t have a clue what was going on.

I licked my dry lips. “Um. Dear God, thank you for the—” I glanced at the table. Dinner was covered up, but I saw my mom’s special lasagna dish, and it smelled like lasagna. “Thank you for the lasagna.” Which I meant sincerely—she made awesome lasagna. And suddenly, I was really feeling it! “Dear God, thank you for the lasagna! I mean it! Sometimes I just look at dinner, and I feel like… like I just love this world, and I’m glad I’m here instead of somewhere else, because I know there are other places I could be that would be incredibly crappy and that there are a whole lotta people in those crappy places, and there’s not enough food there. I’m here, though. I’m here. And I haven’t really had hard times yet, thanks to you, and…” I looked up, and everybody was staring at me with their mouths open. I looked down and quickly mumbled, “Amen.”

“What a lovely prayer,” Grandma said. Now she beamed at me, really proudly, like I’d just given the Nobel Peace Prize speech or something. Which was nice, I guess.

“Help yourself,” Mom encouraged us.

And we did what we always did when my grandparents were over for dinner, which was that Grandma scooped out food onto Grandpa’s plate and then put food on her own plate and passed the food to her left, which was my mom. We’d been doing this for years in the same order. For reals, I never had a stronger feeling than I did that night that I was living in a set.

Meanwhile I grabbed some salad. As I reached out, I noticed the place on my arm where the dealer had touched me. He’d touched me for no reason. He’d just reached out with his big finger and laid it on my skin for about one second. Now it was like I could sense a mark on my skin, only I couldn’t actually see anything. But I knew the exact place. It still felt like touching dry ice in that little spot. That seemed strange, so I thought about getting up to scrub that spot with soap. But I didn’t. Later I thought I should have. Later I thought if I had washed off my arm, everything would’ve turned out different. Somehow.

Except for Grandpa, we all waited for everybody to be served before we started eating. But Grandpa plunged his fork into the lasagna as soon as it hit his plate. I think he would feel super bad if he ever noticed that the rest of us always waited until everybody had their food before we started eating. But he never noticed, because he was eighty. I mean, I guess when you’re eighty and you’re hungry, you’re just focusing on your plate and not even thinking about anything else. He was a really nice dude, though. An OG if ever there was one.

Watching his wrinkled, hairy hand raise the fork to his mouth, I suddenly felt kind of tired, not sleepy tired, but tired like I wasn’t sure how I was ever gonna be able to make all the effort it took to get to eighty. I used to think it’d be easy. But now I had a sense that it was going to be very, very hard. Only this morning it hadn’t felt that way.

I ate a couple of bites and asked, “Does anyone ever think about the past, like how you miss it?”

I was actually asking the grown-ups, but Joshie answered. “Bro! Just this morning I thought about that time we played Uno for an hour, and I won every game. I miss that.”

“Bro, that was only a few weeks ago,” I answered.

“Bro, I know!”

I had taught him to say “dude” and “bro” and “homie.” Mom had taught him kiddie Japanese words, like shi-shi and unko (pee and poop) and all the numbers up to a hundred—ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, and so on. And I’d taught him to say, “I got ya, homie.”

I tried to make him say it now, just for fun. “Joshie, you know you should eat some salad, right?”

“I got ya, homie,” he said in his squeaky voice, and reached for the salad bowl.

Then Mom said, “As far as missing the past, I think that happens more when you’re older.”

And Dad said, “There are things I look back on and think I would have done differently.”

“Yeah, that too,” I said. “I’m starting to feel that way.”

“Ohhh?” said my mom, leaning forward to study me more closely. She squinted right at my eyes.

I glanced at my plate and said, “Great lasagna, Mom.” Then, for good measure, I stuffed some in my mouth, chewed twice, and added, “Mmm, really great!”

She brightened up and started talking about how she’d found the recipe on a website that sometimes had good recipes with so-so reviews and sometimes had bad recipes with good reviews, and there was another time she found a recipe that had only four stars, but she’d tweaked it a bit and…

It was confusing sometimes how parents could be so easy to manipulate—all I had to do was say the word “lasagna” and Mom was onto some whole thing about recipes and websites and reviews. Do you ever wonder how your parents even got as far as they have? Because I think about that all the time. How did we even, like, own a house in Rocosa Beach? Was life just easier back when they were young, and all you had to do was go to school and get decent grades, get married, start a contracting business like my dad did, have kids, and then magically get the money to buy a house? And it all went pretty smooth-like?

I mean, I knew everybody had hard times, and there were probably demon-people all throughout history, but it seemed like life must have been pretty easy for parents, and they never ran into bad people, and even when they were kids, they must have never lied, or else why did they believe anything you said? That is, how did they survive if they were so gullible? Later I realized that they just wanted so bad to believe good things about you. And they would pretty much do anything in the world if they could make those good things be true.

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