Free Monkey Beach by Eden Robinson

said, “I think you have something to say to my son.”
    I knew I was supposed to say sorry. But if Frank wasn’t going to say it, neither was I. “You taste like poo.”
    “You are a monster,” she said to me. “You are an evil little monster.”
    “Takes one to know one!” Mick shouted, looking up from his potential date.
    She scowled at him. “Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it?” She hustled Frank out of there.
    Mick came up and knelt beside me. “You okay?”
    “I’m not a monster,” I said.
    He grinned at me. “You’re nowhere near as bad as your mom was. Now, she was a holy terror.”
    “Nobody likes me,” I said.
    “Kiddo,” Mick said, kissing my forehead, “you are my favourite monster in the whole wide world.”
    Three days later, I answered the front door and Mick’s friend Josh stared down at me. He said, in a loud, tipsy stage whisper, that he had taken care of his nephew Frankie for me. “You want me to bring him over to say sorry, I can do that, too.”
    I shook my head.
    Josh leaned over. I turned my face away and held my breath because it smelled like something had died in his mouth.
    “He’s spoiled, that’s what he is. He just needed a good kick in the pants. He’ll learn, God love him.”
    Later that evening, Mom and Dad offered to fix up the basement for Mick, but he decided he was going to live with Josh until he got back on his feet.
    “I don’t know,” Mom said. “Your mother said he isn’t right and I think she’s on to something.”
    “He’s okay.” Mick said.
    “He is kind of haywire,” Dad said.
    “He’s a bit fucked up, but, hey, who isn’t?”
    “But—”
    “It’s my own mess, Albert Hill. You don’t have to clean up after me any more. I’m a big boy.” When Dad still looked doubtful, Mick noogied his head. “Stop worrying, will you?”
    Mick took me Christmas-tree hunting that winter. We drove along the highway between Terrace and Kitimat and stopped when Mick thought we’d reached a good spot. As we drove, Mick played Elvis and homemade tapes that his friends had sent him, with songs like “FBI Lies,” “Fuck the Oppressors” and, my favourite, “I Shot Custer.” Despite my pleading that they really were socially conscious, Abba was absolutely forbidden in Mick’s cassette deck.
    “She’s got to know about these things,” Mick would say to Dad, who was disturbed by a note from one of my teachers. She had forced us to read a book that said that the Indians on the northwest coast of British Columbia had killed and eaten people as religious sacrifices. My teacher had made us each read a paragraph out loud. When my turn came, I sat there shaking, absolutely furious.
    “Lisa?” she’d said. “Did you hear me? Please read the next paragraph.”
    “But it’s all lies,” I’d said.
    The teacher stared at me as if I were mutating into a hideous thing from outer space. The class, sensing tension, began to titter and whisper. She slowly turned red, and said I didn’t know what I was talking about.
    “Ma-ma-oo told me it was just pretend, the eating people, like drinking Christ’s blood at Communion.”
    In a clipped, tight voice, she told me to sit down.
    Since I was going to get into trouble anyway, I started singing “Fuck the Oppressors.” The class cheered, more because of the swearing than anything else, and I was promptly dragged, still singing, to the principal’s office.
    Mick went out and had the teacher’s note laminated and framed. He hammered a nail into his wall and hung the note in the centre of the living room. He put his arm around me, swallowed hard a few times and looked misty. “My little warrior.”
    Dad was not impressed with Mick’s influence on me. He gave his older brother a hard slap to the side of his head. Mick got him in a headlock, then wrestled him to the ground. Once he got Dad pinned, he held him there until Dad called him the most handsome, bravest and smartest warrior in the world. He