Sunday morning had that weird quiet where even the gulls sounded like they were whispering. Mom drove with both hands on the wheel, jaw set. I watched rowhouses and corner stores slide by and tried not to pick at the scab of last night.

  The skating center looked smaller in daylight. Less like a dare, more like a building with a mortgage and a manager who didn’t have time for nonsense. The back wall—the one I’d defaced—was a dull red again. Mostly. Rain had turned my yellow splats into a jaundiced smear.

  Inside, it smelled like cold air and stale popcorn. Mom found the front desk and asked for the manager using the voice reserved for utility companies. A woman, forties, shellacked ponytail, tired eyes, came through a door behind the counter carrying a clipboard.

  “I’m Ms. Perez,” she said. “You’re…?”

  I stepped forward before my courage shrank. “Diana. I tagged your wall last night. I’m—” I swallowed. “I’m here to apologize. It was stupid. I was trying to impress... it doesn’t matter. I’ll make it right. I can scrub it, repaint it. Whatever you want.”

  Ms. Perez watched me a beat longer than felt safe. Then she nodded, just once. “Thank you for coming in. Most kids don’t.” She slid the clipboard onto the counter. “Here’s what we’re going to do. Next Saturday, you’re here at eight. My maintenance lead, Gus, will meet you out back. You’ll scrape, sand, prime, and paint the whole wall. Not just your part. Gus will supervise and show you how not to make it worse.”

  “Okay.”

  “And since primer takes time to dry, you can help while you wait.” Her mouth tipped, not quite a smile. “Benches need a scrub. We have a Learn to Skate hour at ten; you’ll check in kids and hand out rental skates. If you’re still feeling industrious, bathrooms could always use attention. Bring clothes you don’t mind ruining.”

  “I can pay for the paint,” Mom said, already digging for her wallet.

  Ms. Perez shook her head. “We’ll handle supplies. Time is enough. I’ll sign whatever community service form the city hands you.”

  I exhaled. “Thank you.”

  Ms. Perez’s gaze softened a fraction. “Don’t do it again,” she said, then glanced at Mom. “We’ll see her at eight.”

  On the way home, the car felt lighter. Not free—there was still Monday’s office and hours and a lot of scrubbing in my future—but lighter.

  “Can I see Sketch today?” I asked as we pulled into our spot, the words sneaking out before I overthought them. “Here. My room. Homework.”

  Mom’s mouth went from neutral to something that looked suspiciously like a smile. “One hour,” she said. “Door open.”

  “Door open,” I echoed, trying not to sound too relieved.

  My room looked smaller with a boy in it, even one I’d known since we were five. It wasn’t fancy: a narrow bed with a thrifted iron headboard, a dresser with mismatched knobs, a corkboard above the desk studded with movie ticket stubs and a couple of dumb polaroids, a battered map of the U.S. I’d found at a yard sale and stuck up because I liked tracing the interstates with my finger. Mom’s mended quilt softened the bed; a string of cheap fairy lights looped around the window frame because I hated overhead lighting unless I had to do homework. My hair detangler army lined the top of the dresser like soldiers. The floor was mostly clear; Mom’s standards rubbed off whether I liked it or not.

  Sketch was cross-legged on the rug, sunglasses on my dresser, sketchbook open to a fresh page. He’d brought the good pencils; sharp tips at the ready to stitch my world back together.

  “Okay,” he said, flipping the pencil tin open with ritual care. “The frill monster. Start from the top.”

  I lay on my stomach across the bed, chin propped on my hands, and tried to pull the thing up without gagging. “Head like a sleek lizard, but wrong. The frill snaped up when it got mad—color bands, bright. Orange, electric blue, this neon yellow that felt poisonous. The skin…ate light. It wasn’t shiny. It was—”

  “Matte,” he supplied, laying in the silhouette with light strokes. “Scales? Skin? Smooth?”

  “Closer to skin. Sleek. And the frill wasn’t feathers. It was like thin cartilage with translucent webbing. When the frill shook, it made this…rain-stick sound.”

  He shivered and scribbled a note in the margin: sound = rain-stick. “Eyes?”

  “Black beads. Too many teeth. It hissed with hate for wasting its time.”

  “Diana, don’t make up motivations, just give facts.” He built the frill in segments, then started layering color. The orange went down first, then a line of toxic blue, then yellow. He kept it duller than a highlighter, so it looked real instead of cartoonish.

  “Show me where the kids were,” he said without looking up.

  I reached down and tapped the page. “Boy here, black blade. Girl here, green one. He was rougher, she was—” I searched for the right word. “Smoother. Like a dancer. Hair to her butt. The monster didn’t touch her once.”

  Stolen story; please report.

  “Blades looked like…?”

  “Stone,” I said immediately. “Not shiny. Dense. Dull black for his, dark green for hers.”

  “Jade?” He tilted his head.

  “Too matte. And jade would shatter, right?” I didn’t know. I wanted to sound like I did.

  He penciled in the swords as shapes without details. “Names help me,” he said, almost apologetic. “Do you want to call the creature something? Just for us.”

  “Nope,” I said too fast. “If I name it, it’s going to think it lives here.” I tapped my head.

  He nodded like that made perfect sense and wrote in the corner anyway, tiny: frilled alley thing—temp.

  He added a little scrawl near the tail: movement like a cat about to pounce. How did he manage to catch the bits I didn’t say?

  “What do you think it means?” I asked. “The kids. The swords. The…cleanup.” I told him about going back, the empty alley, the bristle marks, the lemon and bleach where there shouldn’t have been any.

  He rested the pencil on the page and leaned back against my bed. “If you want the boring answer, it means there’s an organized something. People who know what they’re doing. Protocols. Cleaning to hide the evidence.” He flicked a glance up at me. “The fun answer is vigilante monster-hunters.”

  “Like an anime. Or Buffy.”

  He made a face. “Less quippy. More OSHA.”

  I snorted. “Why now, though? Why can I see them, and Officer Morales can’t? Why could those kids?”

  “Brain chemistry?” He grimaced. “Carbon dioxide poisoning? You said bleach. Maybe you huffed something by accident.”

  I smacked his head with a pillow. “No huffing.”

  “I know.” He shrugged. “I don’t think it’s a tumor,” Sketch said, immediately making a face. “I hate that joke.”

  I smacked him with a pillow again. “Bad. Besides it doesn’t explain the kids. They saw it, unless I hallucinated the entire thing.”

  “Okay, serious theories.” He tapped the page with a pencil tip. “Those kids didn’t look surprised. They looked trained. The cleanup? Protocol. So…fencing team with a very weird extracurricular? Secret club? LARP with better props and a sanitation obsession?”

  “LARPers don’t bring bleach,” I said.

  “That’s where the sanitation obsession comes in.” When we finished laughing, he added, “The swords weren’t metal. That’s really weird. I mean, they were strong enough to cut the thing, right?”

  “The swords weren’t shiny,” I repeated. “No metal glint. Just…dense.”

  He said, “Fiberglass? Resin? Some cosplayers make crazy stuff. But you said these looked…dense. Not brittle. Like—Plastic? Pro?grade cosplay?”

  “Maybe. Or ceramic? Like those kitchen knives. Super sharp, kind of matte.”

  He nodded, scribbling: blades = matte, dense (ceramic? fiberglass/resin?). “Ceramic comes in colors, right?”

  “Yeah. I’ve seen white and black. Maybe custom green exists?”

  “Could be. Only downside—ceramic’s probably brittle.”

  “Then maybe layered stuff—fiberglass, carbon, something.”

  “Either way,” he said, “they knew how to use them.”

  I nodded. “The girl was all precision. The boy, more…shove and hack.” I rolled onto my back and stared at the cheap fairy lights. “Why can I see them, and the cops can’t?”

  Sketch chewed his lip. “It keeps coming back to that, doesn’t it?”

  We were silent a while before he said, “You know those Magic Eye posters? Stare long enough and then—boom—dolphin. And after you get it once, it’s easier to see again. Maybe your brain flipped a switch. Maybe most people never do. Or it’s like color blindness but for…monster wavelengths.”

  “So helpful,” I muttered, but I couldn’t help smiling.

  He flipped the page and did a quick block-in of the alley layout from my memory: dumpster, jutting pipe, roofline. “If you see them again, try to notice patterns. Time of day. Smell first or sight first. What sets them off?” He glanced up. “And text me. I’ll bring the book.”

  “Yeah, you keep it,” I said quickly. “If anyone sees it at my place—”

  “Sure.” He slid the sketchbook back a bit, like it was hot. “I’ll keep it safe.”

  We fell quiet for a minute. The apartment sounds did their usual thing—pipes ticking, the upstairs neighbor’s TV bleeding through the ceiling, Mom moving in the kitchen. I stared at the sketch he’d just finished. The frill, the teeth, the matte skin. On paper, it wasn’t less scary. But it was…contained. Like a pin in a map.

  “You still don’t think I’m crazy?” I asked before I could stop myself.

  He met my eyes. One brown, one blue, both steady. “Nope. I think you’re telling me what you saw.” A beat. “And I think we’re going to keep track until we can prove it to someone or we can’t.”

  We, again.

  A knock on my doorframe made us both jump. Mom leaned in, a smile ghosting her mouth like she was trying it on. “Hour’s up, kids.”

  I glanced at my clock; it had been almost two.

  “Thanks, Mrs. Sinclair,” Sketch said, already packing his pencils like a surgeon capping scalpels.

  “Door open,” she reminded, then looked at the sketchbook. “Homework?”

  “Biology,” I said smoothly. “Diagrams.”

  She gave me a look that said she didn’t entirely buy it but was choosing peace. “Walk him down when you’re done.”

  Sketch slid the sketchbook into his bag, stood, and slipped on his sunglasses. “Text me if your community service is something hilarious.”

  “Knowing my life, I’ll end up scrubbing toilets.” I hesitated. “Thanks. For believing me. Again.”

  “Always.” He paused in the doorway. “And hey—frilled alley thing is a terrible name. We need a working title better than ‘temp.’”

  “Don’t you dare name it,” I said, and he grinned and left.

  I walked him to the door, watched him jog across the street, then went back to my room and flopped on the bed. The drawing hovered in my head—the colors, the teeth, the way he’d caught the posture like it was about to move again. My phone buzzed.

  Sketch: Door-ajar policy survived. Victory.

  Me: Barely. Also, “frilled alley thing” stands. No naming.

  Sketch: Fine. FAT for short.

  Me: Absolutely not.

  I set my phone on the nightstand and stared at the ceiling. The world had slipped sideways—so why was there a little heat in my chest?