Beast (13 page)

When I sit in the corner, my pocket doesn't yield. My phone. I get it out. No messages. There's only one person I was hoping to see there anyway. I start a text, but halfway through I stop and make the call. I have to.

“What's up?” Jamie says.

“I just wanted to talk to someone who understands,” I say.

“Then I have no idea why you're calling me.” She pauses. “Are you okay?”

I press my back into the concrete. “No.”

“What's wrong?”

Everything I want to say is caught in a snare, pulling and tugging against the rope. The trains lie crumpled on a model of a tiny town that looks like an earthquake and a tornado hit it on the same day. I rest my chin against the small world. Everything is chipped and plastic and smells like a musty cabin. “When you and your friends busted up, how bad was it? Like, did they turn the whole school against you? Is that why you transferred?”

“I…it was not good. It was partially them, but it was mostly me.”

“Why you?”

“I changed.”

“Um…” Beyond the obvious? Or am I allowed to say that? “In what way?”

“It's hard to say, because you can be like, oh, it's because I stopped doing her hair or she didn't want me to wear skirts because my legs are better than hers, but I guess because I found enough pieces of me that were real. And they weren't fans.”

“They sound shallow.”

“What can I say? Popularity does weird things to people.”

“I get that,” I say, but I can't tell her that aside from all the perks I get from hanging out with JP, I still want to be friends with him for some dumb reason. It's just something we're both really bad at. But if I tell Jamie I'm afraid the rest of the school will stone me without JP, she'll think I'm more shallow than people who care if someone wears a skirt. I don't care what people wear, I need them to acknowledge my existence. I hate that I need JP for that. “JP and I had a fight. A bad one.”

“That kid I met when I had my bike?”

“Yup.”

“He seemed really full of himself. Are you sure it's over?”

“Positive. I'm about to be a leper.”

“Whoa. That's pretty bad. What'd you do?”

Let you down, I want to say.

“Okay, let me ask you a different question,” she says. “What did he do?”

“Same thing he's always done. It's just the first time I noticed.”

“Do you want to know what I learned?”

I nod, but that's dumb. She can't see me. “Yeah.”

“That sometimes, friends disappear. They go away. That all the stuff you know about them to be true, they'll never see it. And the best part about it?”

“What?”

“They think equally terrible things about you, and that's why you shouldn't be friends anymore,” she says. “You can rehash a million little details, every conversation, every text, but at the end of the day, shit happens. And if you don't like the shit that happens when you're with them, time to mosey.”

“Easier said than done.”

“Yeah, except I've done it,” she says. “It sucks; it leaves holes in you.”

I already have this little Swiss cheese thing going in my gut. I hate knowing it's only going to get worse. We're quiet. I fiddle with a switch next to the tracks. Nothing happens when I flick it. “My mom thinks I'm being selfish. She's not on my side anymore.”

“Oh, do I know what that's like. My mom and I can't be in the same room alone for more than ten minutes before we're at each other. She thinks I'm going through a phase. I ask you, would anyone really go through this for a bucket of giggles? Yeah, don't think so.”

“My mom's mad at me.”

“She holds a good grudge?”

“The best,” I say. “But it's not like I didn't deserve it.”

“What'd you do?”

“I messed up a train set my dad built.”

“So help him rebuild it.”

“I can't. He's dead.”

“What? Oh my god!” she almost shouts. “I'm so sorry! You never told me.”

“You didn't notice the lack of a dad when you came over for dinner?”

“I dunno, no, but I didn't bring my dad either, so I figured we were square,” she says.

“It's fine. He's been dead for twelve years.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Thanks.”

“I mean it.”

“I know
you
mean it,” I say. “And thanks.” I mean it.

Leaning back against the chilled walls of the basement, I appreciate the empty chunks of missing mirrors. Although what would the mirrors show if they existed? Me smiling as I'm talking to Jamie. Yeah, I'd see a big old globby grin on my face because talking to her is like sunshine in February, and in Portland that is no small thing. All it takes is two minutes on the phone with her and I'm good.

I'm falling for a girl with boy parts. This is weird. Although technically I fell a long time ago. Over the phone, it's better than best. Like a tiny little rectangle rendering us as nothing more than voices. As simply us. She doesn't have to see me and my hideous, hairy-ass self, and I can talk to the person I need the most.

“Hmmm,” I hum.

“What?” she asks.

“Just doing better.”

“Good.” It's curt and short.

“Are you feeling better?” I ask her.

“About what?”

I put some padding back under a fake hill. A gentle swell returns to the meadow. “I don't know—what's bugging you right now?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“Of course I do.”

“I want to go to the bathroom in peace.”

“Huh?”

“There was a huge beef at school today. They arranged a unisex bathroom for me and I could totally tell when the three teachers who were against it gave me the side eye. It's like walking past a very thin laser. Zing.”

“They won't let you use the girls' bathroom?”

“Bingo. I have to walk way the hell back to the designated bathroom, because heaven forbid I make the world's fastest pit stop in any of the fifty girls' bathrooms. That would be SO BAD. And everyone would DIE.” She sighs. “It's only temporary. I believe people will change. In time this will be in a history book.”

“I never thought about it that way.” I try to imagine it and it sucks. You have classes all over the building and can only use one bathroom. I would just stop drinking water. But then you're denying yourself water. Screwed up. “I'm sorry you have to deal with that.”

“Thanks.” Her voice sounds like she's peering out a window and seeing a very sad face in the glass.

“You know what I hate more than anything?” I ask her. “Going number two at school. I hate getting the pass and then you have to sign in to the bathroom and when you sign out and the monitor is like, ha-ha, well look at you, ten pounds lighter. Hate it. Poseidon's kiss right before English is the absolute worst.”

“I'm afraid to ask.”

“Backsplash.”

“Okay, I just threw up.” She laughs. “This is why I never, never poop at school. Never, ever, ever.”

“How is that possible?”

“Ever heard the phrase ‘scared shitless'?” She laughs, but sounds like she's repeating a bad joke to a tin can. “I didn't for years. I never wanted to go in the boys' bathroom. I held it all the way through junior high.”

“Every day?”

“Unless it was a total emergency, then yeah. I did.”

“Whoa.”

“The whole bathroom thing is dumb. I don't want special treatment and I don't want to go around educating everyone—because it's seriously not my job. I just want to pee.” Jamie laughs. “I can't believe I'm talking to you about this. It's so embarrassing.”

“To be fair, I'm the one who brought up poop.”

“True. You're a terrible influence.”

“Horrible.”

“So horrible.”

I just want to scream, YES! Be horrible with me! Instead I hang up.

I drop the phone on the train set and clench my fists above. “Gah, why this now!” But I know why. The fluttering is here and using my stomach as a bouncy house. “Fuck off, butterflies,” I say as I call her back.

She answers. “What happened?”

Nerves. “Um. Dropped the phone. Or something.”

“Oh…”

“I want us to be friends,” I blurt out.

“Yeah, isn't that why I ate a crab cake the other night?”

“You didn't eat the whole thing.”

She laughs. “Don't get nitpicky.”

“It wasn't good?”

“Moving on. Friends. We've established that. Do you want to get it notarized or something? Because that'll cost us three whole dollars.”

“I don't know. I don't want to offend anyone.”

“If by ‘anyone' you mean me, go back to the days when I was just another girl on the street. No big deal.”

That's what I'm afraid of. I stick a wobbly tree back up into the grass, and it falls over again. This is why I love school: I don't have to question anything; I just have to conquer it. “Be patient with me,” I ask her.

“I'm trying,” she says softly.

“I don't like not knowing what's going to happen. Things used to be real clear. Now I'm not so sure.”

“But isn't that on everyone's bumper sticker? We're all growing a little bit more every day and all that?”

I jump. “Can we not talk about growing?”

“Um. Okay. Well, since we're friends and all that, if you want to ever talk about great unknowns or screaming into the void or whatever, you know where to find me,” she says. “But I gotta go. Have homework.”

“We should do homework sometime.”

“NO! I mean, no thanks,” she says, scrambling. “I'm real bad at math. I don't want you to see how dumb I am. I'm practically redoing Algebra 1. It's pathetic.”

“You are not dumb. Like, at all. Maybe I could help you?”

She thinks on it. “Maybe you could. But not tonight. Bye, Dylan.”

“Good night, Jamie.”

We hang up and I feel empty.

I don't know why. I should be feeling like my battery is in the green. Every time Jamie and I talk, it's like sitting inside the eye of the hurricane. An absolutely good place to be. Where whatever is swirling around on the outside, like trees and flying cows or whatever, everything on the inside is still. A place to be whole. I don't want to think about it, so I do what I do best.

Bury it. Bury all the feelings.

Problem solved.

I shake with a shiver, throwing an entire day's worth of crap off my back.

My broken leg is still attached to me like a stiff slab of concrete, and with cramps in all my other muscles, hefting myself off the floor is no picnic. The litany of all things wrong with me skips through my mind. Thankfully my blood test is in two weeks. My bigness will have its proper medical diagnosis of acromegaly and I'll be fixed. I can't wait. Shifting upright, I put only the slightest weight on my leg. It's still sore from the last time I was knocking around the basement, and I don't want to mess it up any further than it already is. This cast is my plaster symbiote: it needs me and I need it.

I hop upstairs, one step at a time, and shut the light off on the little village once I get to the kitchen.
Sleep well, Dad.

The idea is nice, wishing him a good night's sleep and all, but his body is rotting in a box in the ground. If there's anything left, that is. Mom went for an all-natural burial. But who knows, maybe the chemicals from years of chemo turned his veins into plastic, and someone dug him up and posed him like a heroic warrior in one of those traveling body shows.

How would I want to see Dad posed? Definitely not with his torso and legs all carved open like he's a chest of drawers, jeezus. I saw that poor guy when the show came to the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. Don't think getting turned into something out of an Ikea catalog was what that guy had in mind when he donated his cadaver, but as for my dad? I'd love to see him on a horse. Sitting victorious atop a horse with his abdomen and chest hollow. Clean of cancer.

I try the pose. Like I'm a general, triumphant over all the shit that's trying to kill me from the inside out. Arm outstretched with sword, other hand tucked inside coat. I hold very still. Practicing like I'm dead too.

Past the kitchen, Mom sits, very much alive but in a different kind of stasis, in the living room. I lean on the door frame and stare at the TV over her shoulder. Nonsensical death and mangled bodies and strangely intuitive detectives who instantly know everything.

No one knows everything.

Mom looks over to me. Our standoff thaws. “Hi,” I say.

We're the ones left behind; all we have is each other. “You're welcome to come sit, if you want to,” Mom says.

I do. I shuffle and hop over to where she's sitting and seat myself next to her. Mom reaches for me and I lean against her. If I'm crushing her, she doesn't show it. She lets me and holds me nearly the same way she has since I was little. There's nothing to say about this stupid show; she and I know I won't be staying long—my homework sings its siren song and I need to go soon—but for now, it's just the two of us with no one knowing anything beyond the moment of now.

Mom drops me off at school with a hug, and I don't stop her. The car door hangs open and it takes me a hundred years to get out, but she's patient. I asked to come early and Mom obliged.

“Group today?”

“No frigging way; I'm fine. It was all a big misunderstanding.”

She nods a touch. “Guess it's all for the best. Now you don't have to see that Jamie girl.”

Dad? Throw me a sign, please? Anything? Flicker a light if I should tell Mom I talk to Jamie every day now? That we text each other in between classes to say nothing but hi?
I scan the length of our well-lit school. Nothing.

“Sure.” Jamie said she stopped going to group too, but Mom doesn't need to know that. Apparently Mom doesn't need to know anything.
Right, Dad? But seriously, Dad, feel free to jump in.

“Have a good day,” she says.

I look for good-luck pennies and see none. “You too,” I mumble, and she drives off.

The halls are slick and bare, and the rubber tips of my crutches make a squish-punch against the linoleum. I wanted to be here early so I wouldn't have to see anyone, and last night I got a late start on my homework because neither me or my mom wanted to get off the couch. So we didn't, and now I'm behind the eight ball on trig, but I don't mind. Someday, during my interview with the Rhodes committee, I'll tell them that when I was in high school I used to pretend an asteroid was about to crash into the planet and kill everyone, but I solved the impossible calculations to avoid disaster and saved the entire human race in the nick of time.

Thinking about cracking open my textbook and setting the doomsday-countdown clock on my phone sends a little thrill to my heart as I open the door to the library. The place is empty. I've got my pick of places to sit, and I go for the quiet corner. I throw my bag down, but I'm not alone. There's sniffling behind me.

I turn around and there's Bailey. At least, I think it's her, she's all hunched over in a ball, head down and sounding like she's cleaning out a fish tank with her face. “Bailey?” I ask.

Her head pops up. Red, wet face, smudged eyes, and runny nose. Both sleeves of the white dress shirt of her uniform are soaked through. I see skin. “Oh,” she says, wiping everything up with her cuffs.

She gets her things together, but I stop her. “Are you okay?”

Bailey's face crinkles up and she starts to cry again. “No,” she says in a whisper. “Please don't tell him.”

I get her a tissue from a pocket pack Mom stashed in my bag on the first day of school. She takes it and blows her nose. “Tell who?”

“JP,” she says, all irritated.

“I won't. But honestly, who cares what he thinks.”

She breaks down in a fresh round of tears.

“I know you guys broke up, but it's gonna be okay.” I pat her on the shoulder, but just once so it doesn't come across as creepy.

“I don't know what I did wrong.”

“You didn't do anything wrong, trust me.”

“I told my mom I was going out with the most popular guy in school and she was just, I don't know…She was so proud of me because I was actually leaving the house and doing normal high school things.”

“You don't need JP to get out and go do stuff.”

Bailey's tissue is a wet rag, so I get her a new one. “He dumped me in my own driveway,” she says, dabbing everything at once. “He came over and goes, ‘I think we make better friends, don't you?' and then next thing I know we're sitting under my basketball hoop and making out. I asked him if we were still together, and he just shook his head no. Then he left. But we made out. I'm so confused.”

“That's his way of doing it, I guess.”

“He was my first kiss. He said I was like no other girl he'd ever met.”

“Look at his track record,” I say. I don't want to shrug, but I do. “This is his deal.”

Bailey glares at me. “Maybe you don't get it, because you're on a whole different side of the train tracks and all, but in a regular normal boy-girl relationship, we mean what we say.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“I know what's going on with you and your Jamie person. He told me.” Bailey mops up her cheek. “JP said you're into her because she's the best you can get, so maybe you just don't know what it's like in a normal relationship.”

I look over my shoulder. No one's around, no one heard, and I'm thankful. It's still too damn early. “Look, Bailey. Whatever JP told you, about anything, pick a topic, is a flaming pile of dog shit.”

“So you're not going out with a tranny?”

“Don't ever call Jamie that. I'm serious: that word is not okay.”

“But she is, I mean, she's not a real girl,” she says.

“Jamie worries about school and friends and all that stuff. She's as real a girl as you are.”

“No offense, but she's not. Because she has, you know, boy parts, right? She didn't get them chopped off yet?”

I lean in and whisper back, “Do you dwell on everyone's junk when you meet them? Like, all you do all day long is think about dicks and janes? Is that your thing, Bailey? You can't stop thinking about what's in everyone's pants?”

“No.” She throws herself back in horror. “Ew. I do not.”

“Then why are you doing it to Jamie?”

“Fine.” Her face is dry. She sniffs once more to seal it up. “You did kiss her on the cheek, though. I saw you.”

“I did.”

“So there you go.”

“You of all people should understand that relationships are a bit more complicated than that. But okay, yes. I kissed her on the cheek. Happy?”

“Are you going to bring her to a dance or something?”

“I…don't think so.”

“Why not?”

Because before I knew, I absolutely would have, but now I wouldn't, and I feel downright shitty about that fact. “Because I hate dances.”

“What's her real name?”

“Jamie.” I get my books and put them on her desk. “Did you do trig last night?”

“Of course I did.”

“Spot me?”

“How very unlike you, Dylan.”

“Hmmph.” We plow through it, and I thank the crashing asteroid gods our teacher assigned only ten questions yesterday. Cakewalk. We close our books at the same time.

“Please don't tell anyone,” I say. “About Jamie.” If I need to bury it inside, then I need to bury it everywhere.

“I won't. I promise.” I hate that I'm relieved when she says that.

“See you in class?”

“Yeah,” she says, but she has no intention of moving. I can almost see Bailey going over every minute she ever spent with JP, dissecting it like the scientist she is and trying to piece it all together. She wanted the fantasy, and JP got out before she saw the reality. He always does. She doesn't know how little she meant to him. I do, and that's an awful thing.

I wonder if all JP's ex-girlfriends feel the same way? Whispering to each other in solidarity and trying to warn girls before it's too late. I hope so. A groundswell might get him to quit doing this shit. I hand her a few more tissues and leave her in the library.

Spread the word, Bailey.

The weirdness people send my way is like a wall of spiderwebs. It's like I'm wading through invisible phantoms. I go to my locker and toss things where they need to go. When I close it, JP's there. “Jeezus,” I curse under my breath.

“I need to talk to you.”

I hold my hand up. “I wish you peace,” I say, getting all my stuff ready for homeroom.

“Whatever,” he says. JP shuts my locker door. “Come with me.”

“I really don't want to.”

“It's about Jamie.”

We go.

We weave through the hall, him high-fiving various wannabe bros and me following. Whatever attention I get from trailing JP is tenuous, and I drink it in while I can. I admit, it's nice being popular by association. I lock eyes with everyone I pass. Remember me. I'm decent. I'm okay.

JP ducks into a narrow hall next to the auditorium. This better be quick; the bell for homeroom is going to ring any minute. “What is it?” I ask.

“Ethan and Bryce found Jamie online and they didn't come to school today.”

“So? You yourself said they were idiots and weren't going to do anything.”

“They changed their minds.”

Yellow light barely bounces off the bricks around us, but all I see is one nightmare scenario after another. What they do to her, what I do to them. “Where are they?”

“I don't know.”

I land against the wall. “Oh my god.”

“Dylan,” JP says. “I'm on your side. I'm being legit—I don't think you and Jamie are weird or anything. Quit being so embarrassed. Let me get Bryce and Ethan to come back to school, I'll talk to them. No one will bother either of you ever again.”

“Then do it. If you're such a good guy, what are you waiting for?”

JP draws a huge breath. “Adam Michaels. I need you back. He never paid up.”

“No.”

“But this is what we do, Dylan. I make the deals, you get the money. This is our thing.”

“Not anymore. How about you call Bryce and Ethan and get them to leave her alone right now because that is what sane normal people do.”

“I know and I will, as soon as you visit Adam Michaels.”

“My days of beating people up for you are over. I did it to make you happy. Don't you get how screwed up that is? I'm done. Like, over and out forever, done.”

“Bryce and Ethan are out there.”

His face blurs and we're two feet shorter. He's covered in freckles and I'm not covered in hair. We're in the fourth grade and he's got this amazing new Hot Wheels to trade if I only go stand outside on a ninety-five-degree day and save him a tire swing until he can get to the park. He doesn't show up when he says he's gonna, and I get a sunburn.

We're slightly taller, shaggier, starting seventh grade, and fitting all these new teeth of ours into retainers and braces. He's telling everyone at camp how cool I am and I feel so good, I never notice that I'm the one pushing aside little kids because he asked me to get him the last granola bars on the table.

We're taller. But really, I'm taller. We're only freshmen and I'm taller than everyone else, including all the sophomores, juniors, and seniors. I can't fit at the tables, the desks; nothing fits. Except when I'm around JP. I know what to do, where to go, how to be. He jumped right into the high school flow without a single hiccup, turned around, and said, “Follow me.” So I did. I did everything he ever asked as long as there was a place where I fit.

“JP…” I look at him. Maybe for the first time. “Have you ever been my friend?”

“Dylan, we've been friends since we were practically babies.”

Except I'm not talking about how long we've known each other.

JP brings out his phone. “One text and these two idiots are back at school and no one from St. Lawrence ever bothers Jamie for the rest of forever. Do we have a deal or not?”

“What is wrong with you?” I lunge for the phone, desperate to do it myself. “She's a person, not some pawn in your stupid game.”

“I have no choice!” He slides the phone down inside his front pocket, where I'm definitely not going. “Adam Michaels has missed every deadline to pay me back. He's up to three hundred and fifty dollars.”

“So what? Why do you need this so bad?”

“It's all I have! This is what I do; this is my thing.”

“This is how assholes are born.”

“Shut up. I run this school. I'm the guy in charge, not you. This is what I control.”

“I'm not doing it.”

“I can't let everyone see I let Adam Michaels slide. This is not some Robin Hood situation here. There are at least two other kids who owe me that much or more. If they see I can't collect, then I'm out like over a thousand dollars,” he says.

“How can you say you're all supportive of me and Jamie with a straight face and then blackmail me into beating someone up?”

“I'm a businessman.”

“You're a back-alley loan shark.”

“Take the deal.”

I scowl at the wall just behind his head. Notches and dings line up inside these faded rusty bricks, and I'm listening so hard for their stories of how they got there because I can't believe what I'm hearing in real life.

“Dylan, take the deal,” he says. “My dad…I haven't seen him in almost two months. He's gone.”

That sucks, but I knew that. His dad still wires him money whenever JP asks him. “Sorry about your dad.”

“So you'll do it?”

“How about you help keep a fellow human being safe.”

He shakes his head and sucks in air like I'm asking him to dig another Panama Canal. “I can't. I just can't. Adam Michaels needs to pay up.”

“You'd rather throw Jamie to the wolves?”

“I…I need Adam Michaels. And if Ethan and Bryce aren't the ones who find Jamie, it'll really suck when someone else does.”

“Are you saying what I think you're saying?”

He stares at the closed door down the hall instead of me. “She's a real nice girl too.”

“You frigging piece of shit. You win.” I leave the hallway on my crutches. He goes one way, I go another. The bell hasn't rung yet; Adam Michaels and I can go outside and be back in class in like five minutes.

I round the corner of the senior wing and there he is, collecting his books like a good little student. I button up my school jacket because blood on a white shirt is always a pain to get out. “You,” I say.

“Back again?” He drops his bag on the floor. “Not so much a cripple this time.”

“Never was.”

He looks at my leg and crutches. “Whatever. Let's go.”

We find the busted emergency door that everyone props open with soda cans and go outside onto a barren, cold patch of earth and glare at each other like two dogs.