Read Monster in My Closet for Free Online

wonder you’re so mucked up. No, people do not normally feel what everyone else is feeling. You’re an empath. It’s part of you. And it’s a rare gift, not a fact of life. The rest of us only feel our own feelings.”
    I was certain this nice man was off his rocker. I gave him a blank stare that said everything and nothing. “But how can people communicate? If they don’t know what the person next to them is feeling, how do they know what to say? It would be like trying to drive at night with your headlights off.”
    He considered this. “From our point of view, it’s more like driving at night without infrared goggles. We never had them, so we don’t miss them.”
    I quieted while I chewed on the idea. My sense of other people’s emotions was mine alone. Nobody around me had any clue what I was feeling, what was happening in my head.
    No wonder communication broke down so often. How could people possibly understand each other? This explained a great deal about cruelty in the world. How easy would it be to dole out emotional damage if you didn’t get any backlash yourself? The more I considered the notion, the more it rang true.
    I shook my head. “This is crazy.”
    He smiled and gave me a cheerful bob of his head. “Yep. Crazy. Also true.”
    I wondered how I could have gone my entire life without realizing that nobody else was feeling everybody else. It was like I’d lived with a third arm and only realized now that everyone else had two. It was an embarrassing—and lonely—thought.
    All the times I’d stepped in when two people had a misunderstanding, I didn’t understand why they couldn’t see the problem as clearly as I did. I remembered the quizzical looks Sara gave me when I told her a bride felt like a breakdown was imminent.
    Sara must’ve thought I was nuts. But that’s what best friends did—they honored each other’s quirks as personality traits rather than flaws. For ten years, we’d talked about the people in our lives, from the nerdy R.A. running our dorm back in college to the dumbass who cut me off in traffic last week. I assumed we’d been using the same language to describe a new boyfriend, my father’s death or the divorce of Sara’s parents. She never once told me I was weird or that she didn’t understand.
    But apparently not everyone would label this insane deformity of mine as me simply being a lovable weirdo with an odd vocabulary. This guy had called me an empath. My brow creased in suspicion.
    “Andrew, how did you know I was in trouble out there?”
    “Zoey, there are lots of ways to be different. I heard the crash and went outside to see what had happened. You were standing there, brightly lit, with an aura the size of Wisconsin, and that guy was, well, he was bad. I could see how bad. His aura was the blackest, emptiest thing I’ve ever seen. And his aura was eating your aura. It scared me half to death.”
    “You see auras.” I reached down and rubbed Milo’s ear. His bushy tail thumped against my leg in rhythm with his panting breaths. “Like those weird photographs they take at psychic fairs?”
    “Something like that. I see them, and I can read them. And what I read in him had a badness level through the roof.”
    Auras. Empaths. Closet monsters. Okay. I was game. Enough weirdness had hit me in one day that discounting anything was pretty much an exercise in self-deception.
    “What was he?” I asked in a quiet voice.
    Andrew looked serious. “I have no idea. Nothing good. We need to work on making you less…tasty. This is going to take more tea.”
    He took my cup and moved to the counter where he kept hot water steaming in a coffeepot.
    Despite the circumstances, I felt safe in this tiny, odd-smelling place. Andrew felt safe. For once, here was someone who didn’t feel like any of his own problems. In fact, I felt nothing from him but a low echo of self-assurance. I wasn’t being either bombarded or drained.
    “Andrew?”
    He craned his neck over