Beastly by Alex Flinn Page A

alone?”

    6
    I’ve changed my name.
    There was no Kyle anymore. There was nothing left of Kyle. Kyle Kingsbury was dead. I didn’t want his name anymore.
    I looked up the meaning of Kyle online, and that clinched it. Kyle means “handsome.” I wasn’t. I found a name that means “ugly,” Feo (who would name their kid that?), but finally settled on Adrian, which means “dark one.” That was me, the dark one. Everyone – by which I mean Magda and Will –
    called me Adrian now. I was darkness.
    I lived in darkness too. I started sleeping during the day, walking the streets and riding the subways at night when no one could really see me. I finished the hunchback book (everyone died), so I read The Phantom of the Opera. In the book – unlike the dorky Andrew Lloyd Webber musical version – the Phantom wasn’t some misunderstood romantic loser. He was a murderer who terrorized the opera house for years before kidnapping a young singer and trying to force her to be the love he was denied.
    I got it. I knew now what it was to be desperate. I knew what it was to skulk in darkness, looking for some little bit of hope and finding nothing. I knew what it was to be so lonely you could kill from it.
    I wished I had an opera house. I wished I had a cathedral. I wished I could climb to the top of the Empire State Building like King Kong. Instead, I had only books, books and the anonymous streets of New York with their millions of stupid, clueless people. I took to lurking in alleys behind bars where couples went to make out. I heard their grunts and sighs. When I saw a couple like that, I imagined I was the man, that the girl’s hands were on me, her hot breath in my ear, and more than once, I thought about how it would be to put my claws on the man’s neck, to kill him, and to take the girl back to my private lair and make her my love whether she wanted me or not. I wouldn’t have done it, but it scared me that I thought of it at all. I scared me.
    “Adrian, we need to talk.”
    I was still in bed when Will came in. I’d been looking through the window at the garden he’d planted, my eyes half closed.
    “Most of the roses are dead, Will.”
    “That’s what happens to flowers. It’s October. Soon they’ll be gone until spring.”
    “I help them, you know. When I see one that’s turned brown but it doesn’t fall off, I help it. The thorns don’t bother me too much. I heal up.”
    “So there are some advantages, then.”
    “Yes. I think it’s good to help them die. When you see something struggling like that, it shouldn’t have to suffer. Don’t you think?”
    “Adrian…”
    “Sometimes, I wish someone would help me like that.” I saw Will staring at me. “But there’s a few like that red rose, still clinging to the branch. It doesn’t fall. It’s freaking me out.”
    “Adrian, please.”
    “You don’t want to talk about the flowers? I thought you liked flowers, Will. You were the one who planted them.”
    “I like flowers, Adrian. But right now I wanted to talk about our tutoring relationship.”
    “What about it?”
    “We don’t have one. I was hired as a tutor, and lately all that means is that I receive an enormous amount of money to stay here and catch up on my reading.”
    “That doesn’t work for you?” Outside, the last red rose drifted on a sudden wind.
    “No, it doesn’t. Taking money and doing nothing in return is stealing.”
    “Think of it as redistribution of wealth. My dad’s a rich bastard who doesn’t deserve what he has.
    You’re poor and deserving. It’s sort of like that guy who robbed from the rich and gave to the poor. I think there’s a book about that.”
    I noticed Pilot, sitting by Will’s feet. I wiggled my fingers at him to try and get him to come over.
    “I’ve been studying anyway. I read The Hunchback, Phantom of the Opera, Frankenstein. Now I’m reading The Picture of Dorian Gray.”
    Will smiled. “I think I detect a theme here.”
    “The theme