Beast Read online

  “Hey, let’s go crazy and play the What Does Jamie Want game because that’s fun too. Okay, ready?” Her hands flare. “I want to go roller-skating with you. I want to get pretzels and walk through pretty, lit-up neighborhoods at Christmas. I want us to hold hands and walk down the sidewalk on a sunny day with nowhere to go and no place to be. Just walk.”

  “Okay. Well. Maybe you can go to college in England the same time I’m there.”

  “And what if I don’t want to go to England?” she says. “What if I want something completely different, like to go to RISD like my idol, Francesca Woodman?”

  “What the hell is a riz dee, and who is Francesca Woodman?”

  “Rhode Island School of Design. She was a photography major and her work is flipping unbelievable and I love her, but my parents hate that I love her, because she killed herself and that’s become a bit of a touchy subject around the house.”

  “Since when do you have an idol?”

  “I’ve always had one; you never asked.”

  “Why can’t you be England’s version of alive nonsuicidal Francesca Woodman?”

  “Why England?” she asks.

  “Because that’s my dream. That’s my goal.”

  “To go write papers on the dangers of magical thinking in cancer cells.”

  “Do not make fun of me,” I warn her.

  “I’m not! I love magical thinking. Listen, do you remember when we met? Remember in group I said I made a wish on a shooting star?”

  “Yeah.” That I actually remember.

  Her hands play across the broadness of my chest. “I wished for someone who wanted to just be with me. That’s all. To just be.”

  “I want to be with you.”

  “Do you?” she asks. “Or do you want to set a course for college that ignores everything else? Because I’m excited about applying and all that stuff, but the path is littered with bodies and I don’t want to be one of them.”

  “It is not that serious.”

  “Maybe for you, but most people can’t sneeze and get an A.”

  A+, I want to correct her. “But you’re smart too,” I say instead.

  “Lots of very smart people get bad grades. It’s intimidating to think your entire life depends on a pop quiz in Spanish. I can’t keep up that pace,” she says. “So I pick petals from flowers, saying, ‘He loves me, he loves me not….’ I make wishes at 11:11 and when I twist the clasp of my necklace right side up. And when I see the first and only shooting star in my whole life, I wish that I’ll meet someone who just wants to be with me. I made the wish and then I met you the next day.” Jamie stares at me, her eyes lighting up all the shadows of mine. “Is it you?”

  “Of course it’s me.”

  “Then be here and stop thinking of England.”

  “But I’m already lying down.”

  She laughs. “I knew you’d go there.”

  “That’s why we’re perfect.”

  “You think so?”

  “I know so,” I say. “That’s why we’ll work it out when we go away to England. Maybe we’ll travel and be vagabonds. Fill up passports like crazy. Jump from country to country where nobody knows anything about us and we’ll be free.”

  “Shit.”

  “What?”

  “I should’ve known this was about me being trans,” she says.

  “It’s not.” It kind of is.

  “Are you afraid to walk down the street and hold my hand?”

  I will walk down any street in England with her; I just don’t know about tomorrow here in Portland. “It’s just, I had a recent round of crap at school from…knowing you.”

  She covers up the flicker of sadness with a big beaming smile, and I feel like the bottom of a garbage can. “Welcome, straight white boy, to the tiniest taste of the other side of the coin. Unfortunately, explaining that you are the expert on your own life to dumbass ignorant people is a thing. Like, oh hey, not that it’s any of your business, but no, just because a guy is dating a trans girl, it doesn’t mean he’s gay. It means he likes a girl. Is that some of what you got?”

  I nod.

  “Are you going to leave the coin heads up for all the world to see? Or are you going to flip it to heads down?”

  “Heads up.” I forbid any more words from escaping because there’s a slight possibility the answer is What coin, where? Because I can barely handle being myself, I don’t know if I’m ready to be a poster boy for dating a trans girl. Only because of what happened under the sheets. It’s a little different and I’m not used to it yet. This is a whole other level of being with another person. We were flipping golden at talking and texting and laughing and hanging out. Then tonight happened. Not what I expected for a first time getting physical with another person. But all recent experiences are too raw to thoroughly examine, so off to the drawer they go.

  Everything about her furrows. “Hmm.”

  “Don’t hmm. What’s the hmm for?”

  “What if this bed were front and center at the mall?”

  “People would ask why there’s a bed at the mall.”

  “Ugh,” she groans in exasperation. “I meant with us in it.”

  “What? Why do we need to put on a show at the mall?”

  “It’s not a show, it’s us.”

  “I’m not getting naked at the mall.”

  “Who’s asking you to get naked?”

  “You are.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  Now I groan. “Why are we arguing?”

  Jamie gives me a little hug. “Maybe that’s what boyfriends and girlfriends do,” she says. “Besides, I don’t want to waste a minute. I really want to be with you, so let’s leave it. We don’t have to worry about college anytime soon.”

  “Oxford is another six years away, though; RISD is only two. Maybe we could talk to our parents about going abroad for the last two years of high school and—”

  “Dylan,” she interrupts me. One leg straddles my body. Hello. “It’s three-thirty in the morning. Do you want to talk about college or do you want to make out again?”

  I pull her down on top of me and answer this question as best I can.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  I wake up covered in hair.

  Not mine for once, Jamie’s. It’s everywhere. Strewn across my chest and my shoulders that have just been shoved and shoved hard.

  “There had better be a damn good reason there’s beer bottles all over the kitchen and you’re in bed together,” I hear my mom say.

  My heart stops. “Oh my god.” I snap wide-wide awake. “Jamie, wake up.” Elbowing her, I hope she keeps the sheet clamped down tight. There’s a whole lot of dermis under here.

  “Mmm?” she murmurs, bleary and crusty-eyed. Then Jamie pops up, clutching the sheet to her chest, seeing my mom standing in the room. “Oh my god!”

  I yank a portion back to cover me. “Even he cannot help us now,” I whisper.

  “You need to get dressed and go home, Jamie,” Mom says in a low voice. Her feet slam out of my bedroom, and she yanks the door shut with a bang. Oh shit.

  “Are you grounded now?” Jamie sits up and fumbles for her bra.

  “No, I am dead now.”

  Jamie flies out of bed—the bra that took me twelve tries to remove clipped in place with her one practiced snap—and scans the floor for her shirt and skirt. Lucky her, her underwear’s on. Mine is hiding and I creep upright, gathering the sheet around me like half a toga, to get a new pair. I’ve been as naked as I can possibly be with Jamie, and yet I don’t want her to see me in broad daylight. I’d like to think everyone has this reaction the morning after, but I don’t know.

  All dressed, Jamie throws her head down to her knees and shakes her hair out, combing it with her fingers. She stands and it tumbles down her back. Ready to go, she waits for me. “I’m scared,” she whispers.

  “Me too.”

  “My parents are going to kill me.”

  “Maybe we can go to each other’s funer
als.”

  “Here’s hoping,” she says, and reaches up to kiss me goodbye.

  I kiss her back. “See you soon?”

  “That would be awesome, but I’ll probably be on lockdown for the rest of forever.”

  “Send me a pigeon.”

  “I will. You too.” She heads downstairs and turns into the bathroom. Her things gathered and back on, Jamie pauses in the foyer long enough to take one last picture of me before my execution.

  “Very funny,” I say.

  She winks, opens the front door, and escapes.

  “Dylan! Downstairs!” Mom immediately yells.

  My knuckle jumps into my mouth and I bite it. Fuck. I’d rather have a roomful of cracked-out monkeys rip each and every hair out of my entire body, one by one, than go downstairs and face my mom. There’s no postponing this. Only thing I can do is go downstairs, get yelled at, get grounded, and wait for it to be over. And maybe sneak out to see Jamie a couple hundred times so I don’t go crazy missing her.

  By the time I land in the kitchen, Mom has paced an oval in the floor. Stuck in her very own racetrack.

  I sit in a chair. “I thought you were coming home tonight.”

  “As if that excuses what you’ve done.” She sniffs and grabs a crumpled tissue from a pile on the counter. It doesn’t go to her nose or her eyes; instead she squeezes the life out of it. “You didn’t return my texts and I knew something was up. I just knew it. I came home early.”

  “What about your big meeting?”

  “You’re more important than a meeting. The promotion can wait.”

  My shoulders sink with guilt.

  “I tried to give you space, tried to take a step back, and I come home to my son in bed with a transvestite, no, wait, she’s…” Mom looks tired. Her eyes flick high as she thinks. “Transgender. I’m sorry, I get confused. Bottom line, you’re grounded.”

  “So it’s worse because she’s trans?”

  “I would ground you no matter who was in your room last night, because you lied to me,” she says, simmering. “You said you were going to order pizza and watch TV by yourself, and clearly that didn’t happen.”

  “Fine.” I rearrange my face to look more conciliatory. I’m already embarrassed as shit and feel bad she missed her big moment. Just chew me out already.

  “Go ahead, be flippant. You are not equipped to deal with this.”

  “What the heck does that mean?”

  “She’s a very confused young person with a complicated history—”

  “You keep saying that,” I interrupt, risking more jail time. “If Jamie were your definition of a girl, would you still say she’s confused? Would you keep saying she’s complicated? I don’t get it. We’re no different than any other fifteen-year-olds.”

  “You have no idea what the world is like.” Her fingertips fly to her temples and press so hard, her nails turn white. “And Jamie looks like a tall, skinny boy made out of spindles and wearing a skirt,” she attempts to mutter.

  “No, she doesn’t. She’s amazing.”

  “I’m sorry. You’re right, it shouldn’t matter. I’m just worried you two will never fit in. It’s hard enough for you, Dylan.”

  “So what? I already know plenty what it’s like to fit in nowhere. To make people run away, to have everyone think you’re dumb because you can hang a hat on your teeth, to grow up without a dad.”

  “Don’t you dare bring your father into this,” Mom shoots at me. “God only knows what your dad is thinking about this up there.”

  “What would he think?” I ask, barely scraping the air. He had a front-row seat from my blue ceiling.

  All she does is shake her head, shake her head.

  “Mom?”

  “He would not be pleased—that’s putting it lightly.”

  Feels like a knife through the chest. My broken bones throb along with my heartbeat, ricocheting up my spine. “Okay” is all I say.

  “It’s not okay! Dylan, please, what is going on?” she erupts. “I know you don’t have any condoms in your room, so we’ll—”

  “Waitaminnit, you’ve been in my room?”

  “What can I do?” She throws her arms up. “You’re not talking to me; you gave me no choice. I have to look out for you.”

  “What the hell, Mom?”

  “Well, you’ve officially shed your cocoon, unfurled your wings, and had one helluva time,” she says. “There’s beer in my kitchen, enough hair all over the bathroom to make a yak a wig, and you just had sex with a girl who has a penis. What else am I to think?”

  Dear god, make me a bird, so I can fly far. Far, far away.

  “We never drank the beer.” It’s the best I can do. Jamie and I didn’t drink one drop.

  “You and I are going to be proactive.” Mom clasps her hands. “This isn’t how I pictured it, but I guess we’ll pick up a carton of condoms now. Maybe they have cases at Costco.”

  “We didn’t have sex,” I say.

  “You didn’t?”

  “No.”

  “Oh thank goodness.” She heaves. “I don’t mean that in a bad way, I mean it in a you’re-still-fifteen-years-old way.”

  What we did was different. Nothing worse than a hundred million stories I’ve ever had to listen to at lunch. And I wasn’t a hundred percent thinking about it while we were doing it last night, but in the glaring light of day and underneath my mom’s microscope, it’s starting to shift. Maybe it was wrong. Through my memory, I see Jamie’s face in the darkness. In the sunlight, it begins to fade.

  My dad. The blue ceiling above us the whole time.

  She starts pacing again. “Sweetheart, I love you. Talk to me.”

  I…can’t make words.

  “I stopped communicating with JP; I’m doing my best to respect your wishes.” Leaning against the counter, she looks down at me. It’s a strange rarity. “I wish you’d do me a favor and confide in me.”

  But I don’t know what to say. I’m already guilty, I’m only here for sentencing, but Mom is dragging this out and it’s making my skin crawl.

  “Well.” Mom inhales and exhales way slow. “Jamie is really good at doing makeup, you look great the morning after. That’s how you know someone has skills.”

  Oh my god, the makeup. I grab a fistful of napkins and rake them across my eyes.

  Mom gets a dishcloth, runs it under the tap, and drips a few drops of soap from the dispenser on the sink. Buffing it together until little bubbles rise, she hands it to me. “Here. You need real soap and water to take off that stuff. Just shut your eyes tight so it doesn’t sting.”

  I don’t want to take the dishcloth down. I rub and rub and when I do pull it away, I stare at the black tar ground into the cotton. My eyes burn and I blink. Wiping with the dry side, I don’t want to look up. Mom reaches for her bag on the floor and pulls out a book filled with colored stickies and flags. I read the title and want to run, no, fucking swim to the bottom of the ocean and drown.

  In bright neon orange letters on a slick electric blue background the title screams, Be Their Greatest Ally: Navigating Your Child’s Sexual Identity. “So I have this new book that was recommended to me after I found you two at the mall,” she starts.

  “I’m leaving,” I say, and get up from the chair.

  “Dylan, wait!” she commands, and stops me from charging out of the kitchen on one leg. “All I want to do is help you.”

  “You read that on the plane?” What if someone I know saw her reading that?

  “I read it everywhere. It’s how I knew what ‘cisgender’ meant, I feel so with it now.”

  “Oh jeezus.”

  “Talk to me. Please. I love you for who you are. Always have, always will,” she says. “What are we working with here? Are you genderqueer? Bisexual? Is this situational sexual behavior? Are you feeling”—she flips to a giant yellow sticky and the book flops open—“ ‘the pressures and constraints from heteronormative gender roles’?”

  “I…yes? I don’t know
? I’m a fucking big huge man and no one lets me forget it, so maybe?”

  “First of all, language. Second of all, you are not a man. Not yet.”

  “Tell that to the world.”

  “Okay. Let’s try this angle: has possessing these physical attributes made you turn to trans girls?” Mom grips this stupid book like the Bible and won’t let me leave.

  “That doesn’t even make sense.” Why can’t I just like Jamie? “How long am I grounded?”

  “We’ll get to that.”

  “How long am I grounded!” I yell.

  “Sweetheart,” she says softly.

  “Mom. Please.” I don’t want to talk about this. Definitely not now and after last night, probably not ever.

  The metal clang of the mail slot yanks our heads toward the hallway. It’s something we’re both anxious about, and the rubber nubs of my crutches squeal in a race to get there first. An assortment of envelopes huddles in the box and I snatch them all. Bill, bill, junk mail, letter from the hospital addressed to me. “It’s here,” I say.

  “Open it!”

  My results. The answer to all my problems. All this mindless psychobabble from Mom’s book can rot in hell; all I want to know is when’s the date of my MRI and subsequent surgery. I want to put being the fucking Beast behind me forever.

  I read it. I read it again.

  Mom tugs at my arm. “What’s it say?”

  “There are no elevated levels of GH and IGF-1. We can therefore conclude there is no biomedical confirmation of acromegaly.” I can’t believe it.

  “What does that mean?”

  The letter slips from my hand and trickles to the floor. “I don’t have it,” I say. Dull weight pulls me down. “I’m not a giant. I’m just…big.”

  She throws herself on me and squeezes. “Oh, thank god!”

  “I need to sit down.”

  We get to the stairs, and my head sinks as far as it can go in between my knees. Mom tells me to breathe, but all I can hear is a loud high-pitched ringing. She blankets me in a hug and it’s too much. I’d move, but I don’t want to take the chance of accidentally hurting her again. Mom says things. Disjointed, unfortunate things that make no sense.

  There’s no surgery. There’s no benign tumor. There’s nothing to blame. I wanted acromegaly. Even if Jamie or my mom tells me I’m fine the way I am, I still wanted a culprit to point to. I wanted a Most Wanted poster with the word CAPTURED scrawled across my pituitary in bright red ink. I didn’t get my wish. It’s just been me all along and I will only get bigger until the day I magically stop. When I broke my leg, Dr. Jensen said I still had a bit more growing to do because my epiphyseal bone plates had yet to ossify. To which I said, well shit.