“THE PROBLEM WITH monsters,” Monica (5′10″) liked to say, “is that monsters win.”

“And we fight ’em anyway,” I’d finish. “Unless you’ve got a better plan?”

“Nope,” she’d come back, with a smile and a shoulder punch. “We few?”

“We happy few.”

Our motto. Written in flame. Engraved in gold, or bone, or something even deeper. Stolen from all the books Monica’d ever read, which was a lot of books. We’d recite our motto, and toast us with any beverage in toasting distance. Us against the darkness.

Then a gorilla would throw its own shit at another gorilla, and I’d make a note of that in the Aggression Log. Those were our afternoons in the Lowlands, the zoo’s gorilla habitat, where I interned three days a week, shoveling, slopping, mopping floors, and updating the Aggression Log (which always needed updating). I kept the gorillas company, and Monica kept me company, and we talked about monsters because Monica had a library of monsters in her head and a smile as rare and bright as that sword-of-legend-drawn-only-at-the-crucial-moment. A smile that made the monsters worth fighting. That made you want to be a lover and a fighter. Two things I was pretty sure I’d never be.

See, in the thousand or so fantasy books Monica had read by the time she was seventeen, there were, I dunno, a thousand or so monsters. All defeated. By perseverance. By imagination. By faith. And by the big gun: love.

But there’s another kind of book. The book where none of that shit works, and the monster isn’t beaten. We just live with it. It hurts us, a little or a lot. We hurt it back. Things go on like that. And finally the monster wins. Or at least lasts.

“That’s where we live,” Monica would say, “in that book.” By seventeen, she was done with fantasy. She loved those stories. But she didn’t believe in them.

Monica believed in monsters. Because she’d met some. She believed you fight them, not because you’re a hero, not because it’s awesome—but because you have to. And odds are, the monster beats you anyway. To a pulp or to a draw. Those are your options. Somehow Monica made that sound epic instead of terrifying. Gorillas got us philosophical, I guess.

They don’t “talk” the way we do, but gorillas are just as sophisticated, and way more straightforward. Now, I say gorillas, and it conjures up all the brochure photos: gorillas grooming, gorillas playing, the stuff zoo-goers pay good money to see. But from Keeper Access? Where I worked? I didn’t see gorillas. I saw personalities. There was Blue, our resident manic pixie dream gorilla, doing spur-of-the-moment headstands and offering a bite of mango to anybody, ape or human, who looked hungry. There was Magic Mike, the scrawny beta male, the clown, the comedian—strutting, then tripping, maybe on purpose, maybe not. I loved those gorillas. I knew them.

And then there was Asshole.

Not his real name. I mean, jeez, who knew his real name? Something in Gorillese, something blunt and grunty you shouldn’t argue with. He was the alpha male, the biggest, the strongest. The silverback. The zoo called him Jollof. Why, I don’t know. In West Africa, jollof is a popular savory rice dish. In the Lowlands, it was the vastest asshole known to ape- or humankind.

Jollof was definitely a monster by Monica’s definition—by any definition—and Jollof, with precious few exceptions, did indeed win. He’d hoard all the treats distributed to the troop, and when he’d finished stuffing himself, he’d crush or stomp or spoil most of what was left so no one else could have any. Classy. He’d randomly attack the other males, totally unprovoked—a bite out of nowhere, a casual swat (that probably felt like a full-tilt pile drive from the Chargers’ defensive line) just to remind them who was boss. Jollof would also mount any and every female at the drop of a banana. And he wasn’t much of a romantic, let’s leave it at that. But all that chest-beating alpha shit? (Literal shit—’cause throwing shit is a varsity sport among primates, and Jollof was a star quarterback.) It wasn’t a character flaw. It’s who he was. His job, his place. What evolution built. Nature made a monster, and it was my job to feed it.

And I was great at it. Better than anybody on staff. Because when I walked into the habitat, instead of fluffing up his fur, snarling, mock-charging—his usual routine—Jollof would bound up to me, all goofy-sweet, turn his back, and sit at my feet. Like a faithful dog, asking to be scratched behind the ears. Nice. Right?

Wrong. It was a dominance display. Like an emperor permitting a back rub from a concubine. (A word Monica taught me, of course.) It was a ritual to remind me of my place. Not that I needed reminding. My place was obvious.

I was almost sixteen years old. A nice guy, with a nice life, in every way but one.

I was four feet, eleven inches tall.

I was the 1 percent. The bottom 1 percent. Peel up the lowest height percentile: I was under it. I was the tile nobody bothered removing when they installed the lowest percentile.

And Jollof, from the bottom of his hairy scrotum, knew this. Knew my status. Which made it okay to accept the food I brought. I wasn’t giving it, after all. It wasn’t mine to give. It was Jollof’s to take. I was just serving it, like a good underape.

Still, I loved the Lowlands, Jollof and all. It was way better than the other ape house I inhabited: my high school. Jollof, at least, was honest. No loincloth of charm or irony or Lighten up, bro! draped over the basic, brutal biology of it all. “The loincloth we call Civilization,” Monica was fond of saying, “isn’t fooling anybody.”

It wasn’t fooling her, at least. Nothing fooled Monica, or so I thought. She was seventeen, so close and so out of reach, and I couldn’t begin to say how I felt about her, couldn’t put words to that music even after six sad years of trying. What if the words were wrong? Would she just disappear? Or ascend, like the heroes in those fantasy stories she’d outgrown? I was terrified of finding out. Terrified of losing all at once the girl I was already losing a little at a time. I desperately needed everything to change, and I desperately needed nothing to change. I’d almost run out the clock. Monica was approximately seventy weeks from freedom, from putting all the little tyrannies of high school behind her, and she didn’t believe in any civilization bigger than “we happy few.”

She believed in monsters.

Anyway.

This is the story of how I became a monster.