His memories of the story were hazy. Were the boy and the monster boy really friends? He remembered wariness between the two. Was the boy afraid of the monster boy’s capacity for violence? Maybe the monster was just faster and stronger and would hurt the boy while playing, without meaning to. Did the boy feel an obligation to be the monster’s friend, out of a painful sympathy? Maybe the boy, like the Tom himself as a boy, would have preferred to just stay home and dream of a friend he could feel closer to, a friend he could be comfortable with. Other kids his age seemed to have such friends. But other kids his age didn’t seem to love innocence the way he did. Other kids seemed more prone to being in trouble.
At some point in the book, the villagers find out about the monster families living in the mountains and attack their dwelling places, setting fire to them and driving the monsters out. He vividly remembered the monster boy running down the mountain, smoke rising into the sky from the burning dwellings behind him, screaming at the boy, “LOOK AT WHAT THEY ARE DOING!” and maybe also that it was the boy’s fault. Now the boy had fear and guilt over ruining someone else’s life, someone he feared and wanted to avoid, but who he felt a responsibility to be friends with. And maybe it was because he didn’t really feel friendship, and his efforts were well-meaning but not genuine, were inadequate, that he had unwittingly brought catastrophe down on the monster boy and his whole family.
The monster resembled a boy that he had known, named Steven. He had not liked Steven. Steven was his age, 8 at the time. Steven resembled him to a degree, and was pushy and annoying, with an odd, froggy face. He remembered some incident at little league, where he had gotten so mad at Steven that he had grabbed a handful of Steven’s shoulder and squeezed, an action of rage and deliberate malice. He has no memory of what Steven had done to incite him, just a general sense of having been antagonized. The coach broke them up and yelled at him. He felt terrible about upsetting the coach, who was a very nice man with three unruly sons and a very loud wife, but he had wished he could have kept going, that they could have had a definitive fight, maybe to the death. He had wanted vindication. He had felt burned by the familiar righteous fury that he felt toward so many of his peers.
After that abortive season of little league baseball, he didn’t see Steven again for years. On the first day of high school, a day of matriculation where the boys would be shown around the halls and introduced to the faculty, he saw Steven again. His friend Jeff confirmed that it was the same boy from Little League and they said hi to him. This brought Steven into their new circle of friends, as they all had similar tastes in music and style of dress, but no one liked Steven there either, because he was still pushy and annoying. Jeff led the others in blaming Tom for Steven’s noisome presence, establishing on the timeline that it was Tom who had said hello to Steven in the first place on that first day of high school.
Tom and Steven still resembled one another to some degree. Both were skinny, similarly complected, and dressed in similar styles, but Steven still had that odd, froggy face. It wasn’t enough to distinguish them from one another though, and he was often mistaken for Steven by other students who didn’t really know either of them. True to form, Steven was well-known and widely disliked at school very quickly because of his obnoxious nature, and became a stigma for their group of friends, who all wished him gone as he moved from one to the other for brief alliances.
By the time they entered their second year of school, Tom's own mind had slipped into a state of delusion and dysfunction, every day a torment as he tried to find his place in some kind of world of humanity. Meanwhile, Steven was pushed out adrift by the currents of hostility that he always seemed to wade in. Their friend Jack once told Tom that Steven had a terrible drug problem. Tom didn’t even know where to get drugs and did not even smoke cigarettes. If he had ever been shown actual drugs, he would have been terrified, would probably have vomited on the spot. But then there was an issue over a term paper that Tom could not type, for his family only had a semi-functional typewriter that he could barely use, and he could not actually type at all. Steven had a computer and a word processor and offered to type it for him. Tom was terribly grateful. Of course, Steven did not actually type the paper, and gave no reason. Tom had to turn in a shoddy handwritten manuscript for an appropriately low grade. He remembers yelling at Steven in the hallway and making dark remarks in the classroom. Grabbing the shoulder all over again, in a way.
Sometime after, Steven left the school, having been implicated in a possibly intimate incident with another boy who also had to leave, due to hostility from the other students. Tom and his whole friend group, and the student body in general, all breathed a sigh of relief. And as Jeff liked to remind Tom, all of this had been his own fault, they could have had a perfectly even first two years of high school if he had not naively said hello to Steven on that first day. Tom only saw Steven once more after that, later that year at the mall near the school. He almost didn’t recognize him. Steven was clean-cut and wearing a nice, modest grey suit with a black tie, and was accompanied by a well dressed young man and woman about their age. They greeted each other, outwardly smiling. Tom told Steven that he looked good, and they exchanged pleasantries and well-wishes. He was glad to see Steven doing well with a new community. He told his friends about it. They were uninterested.
A few years later, after high-school, while he was in the Navy, he came home on leave and saw a notice in the newspaper that Steven had died. There were few details. He told his friends. This time they feigned disinterest, but he didn’t believe it. They speculated that suicide or an overdose seemed likely. Ben said, “Good”.
There was actually one other time that Tom saw Steven, and it was decades later. This occurred in a series of recurring dreams that took place in his Grandma’s house (Nana). The house, in this series of dreams, is run down and stripped bare inside, and his Grandma still lives in there, and they still go there to take care of her. In this dream, it was a black winter night and the outside was cold like stone. Tom, in a black wool peacoat, had snuck into his Grandma’s front door and was laying on a couch on the porch, trying to sleep in the cold, wondering if he’d be found, and if so, by whom, and would he be welcomed or driven out. And then for a moment, Steven was there, also looking for a place to be. It was just for a moment, and then Steven moved along.
