Beast Read online

  JP stuffs his arms into his coat. Of course it looks good on him. “No worries,” he says. “I was just leaving.”

  My mom rises to stop him. “Wait, what’s going on with you two?”

  JP silences her with a look.

  “Sorry,” she says.

  “Don’t apologize to him,” I say, ready to drop-kick him outside.

  JP speeds fast out of the kitchen into the darkness of the hallway, protecting his neck the whole time. “I’m going, I’m going.”

  “Get out.” I slam the door in his face.

  “Dylan!” Mom charges toward me. “How dare you chase him away like that!”

  “News flash, Mom—JP is a piece of human garbage.”

  “He was scared of you. Didn’t you see how he was cowering? He thought you were going to hurt him. What’s wrong with you?” She hugs herself instead of me. “I know you two are having a rough patch. And that’s normal. All friendships encounter some rocky times here and there. As long as you guys have open communication, you’ll be fine.”

  I want to scream, but I don’t. My pillow’s all the way upstairs. “Mom, he’s using you just like he uses everyone else.”

  “He is not. I swear, Dylan, you are so selfish, it’s infuriating. He comes here for a little piece of comfort and security—he’s a very sensitive young man.”

  “He’s a manipulative asshole!”

  “His mother is a full-blown alcoholic. Where is your compassion?”

  “Mom…”

  “I’m serious, Dylan, what is up with you these days? Turning your back on your lifelong friend? You two never even play video games anymore.” She pauses. “You know, I blame Jamie.”

  “What?”

  “I do! Ever since you met her, you’re destructive, you’re moody, you insult your father’s memory, I don’t know what to do with you anymore.” She walks back into the kitchen and flings dirty dishes into the dishwasher. “And I know it’s Jamie because her poor mother told me the same thing. She’s bending over backward for her son, and then once he declares he’s a she, her new ‘daughter’ treats her worse than dirt. Jamie’s a bad influence on you.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? I don’t treat you bad.”

  Mom wraps her fingers together. “We used to be so close, Dylan.”

  “We still are.”

  “Do you even want me around anymore?”

  “Of course I do. Is this why you can’t get enough of JP? Because he’s a needy prick and I’m not?”

  “Enough! That’s Jamie talking; I can hear it.”

  I take a breath and hold it, letting it out slower than slug trails. “Mom. I need you in my life. I love you. Everything between you and me has nothing to do with Jamie or JP or anyone else.”

  “But we’ve always looked after JP. You two used to call yourselves brothers.”

  “Leave him alone!” I slam my hands on the counter.

  Looming over her, I can almost see steam flying from my nostrils. Mom looks up at me with wide eyes. “I see.” She picks up her book, steps into her house shoes, and leaves me.

  “Mom,” I say, hoping to coax her back. Now is the time, I want to say. Shake the Mom-Poms™ and tell me how everything is going to be okay.

  “Sleep off your anger, Dylan. Calm yourself. We’ll talk about it again in the morning,” she says with a dull voice from the living room. The TV clicks on so she can double down on ignoring me with her trashy novel and blaring a hideous crime drama with raped-up little kids and murderers, murderers everywhere.

  I catch my reflection in the window. My head hangs low. I touch the top of my scalp. My hair’s growing back. Just like the rest of me. Growing, growing, always growing.

  I disappear to the basement.

  Down in the cool clamminess of the cement walls filled with clumps of pebbles and rocks, I hop across the lost chunks of broken glass still hiding in thin cracks on the floor and make my way over to the trains.

  Tiny broken trees and tracks. If Dad was as big as me, it’s strange to think he sank so much time into making something so small. I kneel down and come face to face with the tiny town. Flaps of grass and uneven terrain. Splayed wiring tangled in between bumps of fake moss. I nudge a few tracks into place with my fat finger. I smooth a raggedy row of shingles flat.

  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.

  NINETEEN

  “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 pha
se. 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.

  TWENTY

  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.”