Beast (10 page)

Safe at home, I stumble toward the basement, no crutches and no cane, hopping and lurching deeper down the stairs until I touch bottom. Walking on my cast is everything Dr. Jensen told me not to do, but screw it. If I could go deeper down forever, I would, but this is as low as my house gets, so I stop once I hit the trains.

I forgot about the trains.

Mom said they were for me, but I never wanted them.

I hate them—I've always hated them. Why was he building a train set when he could've been playing with me? Why would you waste what few years you have left on earth building a cheap plastic world? I turn away from the empty town. My reflection stares back at me and I hit one of the mirrors with my bare forehead. It's cold, but I'm so hot, it stings. I want to forget—
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
style. Either that, or find out that this is all a big joke and Jamie is a girl.

My girl.

But no girl is ever going to want me. I see that now. Jamie dumped me, and seriously, what the fuck? I got dumped. I knock my head against the mirror hard. I got dumped and we weren't even going out. Then harder. My hand balls up and I punch the mirror. The glass cracks and the reflection of my face is splintered—a crawling spiderweb of broken shards breaks it up into pieces. Jagged chunks of a jigsaw puzzle.

I blow. There's nothing I don't destroy. Glass smashes with each punch and my knuckles bleed, leaving smears of red pooling in the gaps. I kick an old steamer trunk with my good leg so it feels just as shitty as my broken one. So big and huge, huh? These arms that mock me in the fractured mirror, is this what people want to see? They want to see me smash and tear the place down? Fine. Watch me. I am reborn. I am the Beast.

The Beast pulls and yanks a train track off the table and another and another, but it's not enough. The wooden table, it's bolted to the wall. I dig deep and pull a standing leg off and push the wood in half until it snaps like a twig. Breathing heavy, I smash it into the little town. Trains and plastic trees fly. I take the wooden leg and throw it like a harpoon, knocking over a row of old bikes. The smallest Huffy lies there, all dumb and powder blue with red and white stripes. My old bike from when I was little. I pick it up and wing it into the stairs, where it falls into a dented ball, leaving a crater behind. Is this what you want, world? You motherfucking got it. I am that monster under the bridge. I will eat your children. The pain from my leg is amazing. I love it. I savor the agony from my back and my chin and my hands like it's money I'm saving up to buy something great. My leg burns as I tear off the door to the boiler room and I don't care. I don't care.

Metal chunks from the hinges rain down and I let them fall, pointy sides up, on the meat of my shoulders. An old oak desk sits in the corner. My muscles, these big giant things I've always hated and tried to hide, scream as they come to life. I squeeze my hands into fists and lunge for it. Lifting it over my head, I throw it to the concrete floor, where it cracks in half. My bloody knuckles burn and drip on the floor in a pattern. I swing my hand out and the drops dribble from my nails and splatter down in a lazy arc. A canvas. Oh look, I'm finger painting.

My phone beeps. Sucking air in through my nose and firing it through my mouth, I pause. Everything hurts. I don't want to have a phone right now. I'm afraid of what it says. I'm actually drooling. I sigh and wipe it with the back of my furry hand. My fingers look like they've been run through a garbage disposal. Great. Now there's blood and drool on my face.

I am finally what people see.

My future life streaks before me. I'll live alone in a trailer park, be even more hairy and huge than ever, and subsist on cases of beer, peanuts, and old porn. If I ever do have female companionship, it will be the kind I have to pay for. I just hope the future escort doesn't mind escorting herself to the lot my double-wide sits on.

Or maybe I'll just give up and become the hulking football player everyone thinks I should be, and I'll get a big fat NFL contract and bash everyone to death and get a bunch of groupies who'll only talk to me because of my millions of dollars, and they'll go back to my penthouse and fuck me on Sunday nights after the game. On the Lord's day.

Trailer park or penthouse, either way I'll find girls who'll like me for a price.

I slump at the thought and the mirrors mock me.

God knows what Jamie saw in me.

Jamie.

I feel her lips on mine and it feels like slivers of glass from the broken mirror crept into my chest and rolled around. It hurts. Everything hurts.

“Hello?” I hear from above.

Mom's footsteps overhead walk around in confused loops. To the living room and back to the kitchen. I look at the annihilated basement. I'm covered in blood. There's glass embedded in my forearm. I part the thick hair with my fat fingers and try to dig it out.

“You home, Dylan?”

This is not going to end well.

Pondering what to say, I peek in some of the remaining mirror to see just how bad it really is, and I realize I don't care anymore. I am the Beast. Mom will have to deal.

The basement door wheezes open. “Dylan, are you downstairs?”

“Yeah.”

Her feet pad down the top steps. “What are you doing?”

“Sitting on a pile of broken glass and bleeding.”

Now they run, bang, bang, bang, and boom—she's at the bottom, gasping. “Oh my god.” She races to me and kneels. “Did someone break in? What happened? Are you okay?”

“I did this.”

“What do you mean, you did this?” Her mouth bobs open and closed like she's a drunk goldfish. “Why?”

“It doesn't matter.”

“Excuse me?” She stands up. I shrug. An embedded chunk of glass bites the inside of my shoulder.

Mom's hands lightly sweep over the train set and everything still clinging to the walls. “Something happened,” she says. “You didn't just do this for fun.”

“Maybe I did.”

She picks up a large piece of fake grass and places it gently back on top of a rounded hill, patting it down. “I don't believe you're capable of this.”

“Here's proof.” I raise my knuckles.

Lunging to my side, Mom seizes my bloody hands. “You need to go to a hospital.”

“No,” I growl. “I'm never going to a hospital ever again.”

“But, Dylan—”

“Never.”

“These are deep. You need stitches.”

“I'll get a Band-Aid.”

“Please.” She cups my cheek. I shake off her hand. “Tell me what happened.”

“I need you to leave me alone.”

“I will not.”

“Yes,” I rumble. “You will.”

“What? Where is this coming from?”

Jamie's face. It sneaks inside my thoughts, and I feel her entire body balancing inside the palm of my hand. She stood in my hand and I held her against the sky. Thinking about it burns. Aches. “Can't I just have a shitty day for once in my frigging life?”

“No!” she yells so sharp, it snaps me backward. “You did not destroy the last thing your father ever made because things didn't go your way today!” She bends and screams in my face. “He was dying! He could barely move! Cancer was eating up all his organs, one by one, and he still dragged himself down here because he wanted to make this for you. He wanted to leave you one thing, just one thing for his little boy, and you've ruined it!”

“I was a baby. I barely knew what a train was.”

“That's not the point,” she says. “This little village was his legacy to you.”

“Bullshit!” I burst out. “I'm stuck in his legacy every single day!” I am my father's clone. Each picture of him might as well be a picture of me in bad clothes. I pitch forward and scramble to my foot. I'm all rickety, bumping around on one leg because my other one can't handle the weight. I pushed it too far. “If you think I'm thrilled about being a carbon copy of my dad, you're crazy.”

Mom slaps me across the face, a thousand bees stinging me. “If you become half the man he was, you're lucky.”

She rubs her hand and I struggle to see. “That's not what I meant.”

“Enough.” Mom pounds up the staircase. The door slams. I look at my broken reflections jumping between the shattered shards of glass and I sink back down. The floor is cold. Like sitting on an ice floe.

I welcome the drift.

Mom didn't help patch me up, and I didn't ask her. I washed out the cuts, glued them together all by myself with Super Glue, covered them up as best I could with Band-Aids, and went to bed. It's lunchtime, there's a tray of two meatball subs and a bottle of iced tea before me, but I'm hustling to finish my homework before all my afternoon classes.

Every time someone asks me what happened to my hands, I just glare at the person until they slink away. Never been happier to look like an axe murderer. I wish the bandages were invisible. I wish even more that I was.

I don't want to be here. Not when everything is red and infected.

My homework lies limp before me, and I don't want to touch it. Not that it's hard, because it's not, but I've never felt dumber in my entire life and I hate it. Who cares if I can whip out this physics homework in under ten minutes? Everything I thought I knew has been turned upside down. Am I so fucking desperate that I fell for a boy in a skirt?

Because I did. I fell ass over backward for a boy in a skirt. Hard.

I can't believe I zoned out that day in group. I can't believe I let this happen. If only I'd paid attention, I would've heard her…him…fine, Jamie is a her…say that bit about being trans and been like, whoa. Dodged a bullet. I wouldn't have gotten on the bus, wouldn't have let her buy me coffee. And there's no way I would have frigging kiss—

I can't even finish the sentence in the privacy of my own head.

Everything I knew about myself is effed. All those Lego pieces I thought were clicking together to create my supposed self might as well be moldy avocado pits stacked in a slippery pile. I don't recognize who I am anymore. I liked her so much, felt so good with her. Felt like home. To know I was completely into a boy in a skirt throws everything out the window. Who am I? Am I gay now—is this what it all means? I'm so frigging confused. And worst of all? JP knows.

He knew before I did.

The seat next to me is empty, ready for him. I already chased off Bryce from sitting there, he knows better, and even though I don't really want to be here while JP holds court, I see him coming and brush crumbs off his waiting seat because here comes the king.

He acknowledges tables as he passes, gives a cheap wave here or there to his future girlfriends, before plunking down in his seat next to me. “Hey, man,” JP says above the din in the cafeteria. It's so loud in here, you'd think this was the monkey house at the zoo. And I've been there; our cafeteria is way noisier than that. Especially sitting at this table with all these guys fighting to be heard.

“Hey,” I mutter.

“Just so you know, I got you.”

There is a small flare inside me that he'll let this slide. That he's my friend. We can do this weird thing where I'll vent and he'll listen and then we'll both pledge to never speak about it again. That instead of JP going down his relationship memory lane and listing every girlfriend he's ever had and what was wrong with them, he sits there and commiserates with me that my first attempt at an actual relationship was a cock-up of epic proportions. I mean, shit, between the two of us, I would've been the one to have an actual legit underline/bold/italics relationship. Jamie would've never been just another checkmark in a column, not to me. Then I could've been the one giving him advice. Doesn't that count for something?

It's not like I can tell any of this to Mom. So I'm anxious to hear what he has to say.

“I didn't know that you were…you know.”

“That I what?” I ask.

“That you had a type.”

“I do have a type. It's girls.”

“But she is a girl, right? Isn't that the whole point?”

Dear Dad…
I start a letter.
Now that you're done laughing your ass off at me and what an idiot I am, please help me not cause significant frontal lobe damage to JP. It is most tempting.

“You've been totally avoiding me,” JP says. “I texted you like a hundred times last night, tried to get you at your locker before almost every class. Look, all I'm trying to do is check in. What's up?”

“Nothing.”

“She seems nice?” he tries.

Only eleven more minutes until the bell rings.

“Dylan, did you not know she was tra—”

“Could you just shut up?” I jump at him.

“Oh shit, you didn't. Hey, look, it's really no big deal. My cousin started dating this girl, but then we all found out her girlfriend lived as a dude for the first twenty years of her life. It was like a holy-shit-no-way thing, but you know what? It was fine. She's a really nice person. I met her last Thanksgiving in Kentucky. She likes green olives, hates lumpy gravy, and says ‘cool beans' like all the time. They're still together. Lesbians and everything, four boobs, it's all good. At the end of the day, more people will be happy for you guys than not, so who cares?”

“I care.” Because I'm a moron who will be alone forever. So yeah, I kind of frigging care.

“If you guys are cool, I don't see what the—”

“I said shut up.”

“I'm just trying to be decent here.”

Decent? Bullshit. Pouring salt in a wound. All I want to hear is: That sucks, followed by Tough shit, and then Let's move on.

“Dylan, talk to me, man.”

The lunchroom rustles to finish up and all around me, kids dump their uneaten food in the trash. So un-Portland of them. They should compost. Not like I compost at school either, but at least everyone's probably done their homework. Mine still sits in front of me, undone and miserable. “I have four minutes to finish physics.”

JP laughs. “Not gonna happen. Even you aren't that smart.”

“Why are you on my case so hard, JP? Seriously, don't you have a girlfriend to dump or something?”

“Because this is major! And you haven't said shit to me about it, I'm dying here.”

“I'm not a sideshow.”

His perfect hair tosses off his perfect face. “Aren't you?”

“Then why don't you go run home and tell your mommy all about it? Oh no, wait—you can't because she's drunk.”

For once he's fucking quiet.

I hunker down over my homework and try to squeeze off one problem. Just one. So it looks like I've done at least one frigging thing right today.

A slow clapping starts. It grows bolder and louder and I look up and there's JP, standing on top of a chair in the middle of the cafeteria doing this weird rally clap. Everyone joins in. The entire lunchroom claps along with him, like it's primary season and he's running for president. Some morons in the middle cheer, because they'll do whatever it takes to get in JP's good graces. The kids at the far perimeter, the losers of St. Lawrence, kind of hold back, not quite sure what's going on. I feel like one of them right now.

JP settles down the clapping like a conductor. “I know the bell's about to ring, but I want to make an announcement,” he booms. “My best friend, right here—you might know him as the Beast—anyway, this giant hairy son of a bitch has a new girlfriend, and I think we should all, like, give him a round of applause because I never thought we'd see the day.”

Oh my god.

The lemmings cheer and my heart stops.

“Not only that, not only that”—JP throws his hands out like a puppeteer, and everybody zips it—“I have to give him credit. His girlfriend is real pretty, and it's cool they see something in each other.” (The room fucking goes, “Awww!”) “And he's finally met his match, because I think it's safe to say he's the only guy here whose girlfriend is trans. So give it up to the most open-minded guy we know, Dylan Walter Ingvarsson!”

My shit is spread out all over the table and I get books and papers sopping wet trying to scramble it into my bag, grab my crutches, and get the hell out of here. All around me is laughter, the evil uncomfortable kind, and for the briefest of moments the only thing I think is, no one deserves this.

Until JP hops down in front of me, and then all I think is, I'm going to kill him.

“Is it true?” Bryce asks me.

“Uh…”

JP nods. “True. Met her yesterday. Dylan is ahead of his time.”

“I didn't know you were such a fag, Dylan,” Ethan says.

“I'm not gay!”

“Not buying it. You have to be gay, because this whole trans thing is bullshit,” Bryce says. “I don't care how much surgery or how many hormones a guy does to look like a girl; you're still a guy. You can't change DNA.”

“I think I'm gonna throw up,” Ethan says. “Like, for real? You're actually going out with a chick with a dick? Do you guys just blow each other all day? How does that work?”

“Look at him. A tranny makes sense. He would smother a real girl,” Bryce says.

“Hey, don't ever call Jamie that,” JP counsels. “And you didn't say shit when Jason came out, so be nice.”

“Yeah, but that's different. We all knew Jason was gay since kindergarten. The Beast humping a dude in a dress is gonna give me nightmares.” Ethan makes a gagging noise.

“We're not a thing. I like girls; she's just a person I know,” I blurt out.

“What's its name again?” Bryce asks.

“Jamie,” JP pops off. “And she's got curly brown hair and wears skirts and rides a pink bike and everything. The whole nine yards.”

I give him the look of death.

His arms fold triumphantly. He might as well spray-paint
Top that, bitch!
on the ceiling.

Whatever bubble used to protect me and make me popular by proxy has been obliterated. I can feel it. If JP is magma at the center of the earth, I am now the moon. Even if nobody ever takes me on in an abandoned hallway or whatever, I know it's over.

“Where does it go to school?” Bryce asks.

Ethan laughs. “We should go fuck it up. Make it put some pants on.”

“Hold up, you fucking Neanderthals,” JP says. “Leave her alone.”

“If a girl has a penis, it's not a girl. That's like Biology 101 and shit,” Bryce says just as the bell rings, scattering everyone to class.

“Bryce, Ethan! Wait!” I call out to them. Twenty minutes ago, they would've stopped.

JP's about to bolt, and I grab him by the neck. “If anyone hurts her, believe me, you'll get it ten times worse.”

He works to not fidget in my grip, and we both stare at each other. I can feel my eyes burning his. I've never hated anyone more.

“They're…not gonna do…anything…,” he coughs out, and I loosen my hand. “They're all talk. They couldn't even remember an empty box for the can drive, remember?”

“Dylan Ingvarsson!” Mr. Copeland calls out from left field. “You release him right now, this second. No choking people. That's a detention.”

Oh, so some shitstain standing up on a chair and putting me on blast in front of the entire cafeteria is Catholic-school kosher, but one tiny squeeze of a chicken neck and I get detention? This is garbage.

“Mr. Copeland…” I try to plead my case and JP sprints off. Fucking coward.

The slip gets written up, and I stuff it into my pocket next to my phone.

I don't want to go to class. I don't want to be here. I don't want to know these people.

Somewhere in this city, Jamie is sitting in her school and most likely not wanting to be there either. An image of Bryce and Ethan flashes in my mind. I feel sick because I know if they really want to, they'll find her. People talk. I'm all worried they're going to harass her as she's just trying to ride her bike or something. Whatever happened with me and Jamie is one thing, but that doesn't mean people have the right to give her a hard time. She didn't do anything wrong.

Things creak and crawl into place, and before long I have a plan.

I get my phone out and text:
Can we talk?