Beast Read online

  Rising to my foot, I’m careful not to jostle Mom. She’s asking me to sit, to talk, to hear, to share, to do all these things I am not capable of right now, so I apologize and leave. There’s only one place in the house to go and that’s where I head, down the stairs to the basement, where I hop across the floor of hidden chunks of broken glass. Stabbing and piercing and I don’t stop until I get to the train set, where I collapse to the concrete and wedge myself in a corner laced with cobwebs.

  The village is stagnant. Nothing’s changed since I was last here.

  My dad built this.

  My dad was six foot, seven and three-quarter inches tall.

  I measured myself last week as a last hurrah and I was six foot, six and a half inches tall.

  I’ve almost caught up to him. Mom was so proud we’re almost the same height. I think it’s a punishment.

  Last night Jamie said she doesn’t care how big I get. She said she’s excited that she can wear whatever heels she wants and she’ll still be the short one. Thinking about it now makes me smile. And then not smile.

  I lean against the wall.

  Before I kissed her last night, I asked my dad for a sign. I didn’t get one. He never talks to me the way he talks to Mom. But maybe he knew what was coming and he backed out of the picture a long time ago. Maybe he saw what happened and he’s disappointed.

  “Dad,” I whisper in the shadows. “Please, please give me a sign if I did something I shouldn’t have. Please: now.”

  I wait and listen. I count to ten.

  I’m about to give up when a loud bang hits the kitchen floor above my head and my eyes fly up, heart racing, to stare at the spot.

  “Sorry!” Mom calls out from above. “Dropped a pot. You want some raviolis, sweetie?”

  “No,” I yell up. The spot above looks hollowed out and frozen from where the pot hit. It sends a shiver down my spine that doesn’t come from the cold basement wall. My dad is disappointed in me. That’s why he doesn’t talk to me. Maybe all along he was saying, Don’t do it.

  But we did.

  And now I’ve lost my dad.

  TWENTY-NINE

  My parents didn’t kill me!

  I told them I was with a friend, not a lie, and then we fell asleep. Also not a lie!

  I’m grounded for a week b/c I didn’t call and tell them I was staying over and I’m grounded for another week b/c it was a school night.

  How about you?

  Dylan? Was your phone taken away?

  You must be grounded way long.

  It’s been four days. I miss you so much.

  I’m telling myself you’re in the biggest trouble ever and have no means of communication.

  Not trying to be a needy gf, I swear!! It’s just been a week and I haven’t heard from you.

  I’m afraid to go to your house.

  Can I come over?

  I’m coming over.

  It’s been a little over a week since Jamie and I have spoken. She texts me at least ten times a day, but I don’t respond.

  When the doorbell rings, I’m not surprised. It takes a while for me to hear it from all the way down in the basement. I get up from the train set, pick up my crutches, and go to the storm window that gives the slightest view of the sidewalk. I think I see some bike tires sitting patiently in the early winter rain. December’s a miserable month. Always damp and cold. The doorbell rings again. A few minutes later my phone beeps. I check the message.

  Are you home? I’m outside. Can we please talk?

  Wiring for Hobbyists. It’s a good little book, very thorough. Can’t quite say it’s a page-turner, but it’s been helpful. The electrical system still won’t make the jump from one signal box to the other, and I can’t figure out why.

  As I read and Jamie waits on the front step, I tell myself a series of half-truths:

  1. Mrs. Swanpole never leaves her house and will tell my mom if I answer the door.

  2. I’m still grounded. (Mostly.)

  3. I didn’t hear her knocking until it was too late.

  My pliers are too small and these wires are missing their coating; I can’t tell which is which. Fingers are aching down here in the frigid basement. I still can’t believe my dad built all this and it pushes me to turn the page in the book and read about adapters. Maybe it’s the adapter.

  Putting the book down, I rub some heat back into my hands. I take a sip of black coffee from the mug I found buried way back in the cupboard that says WORLD’S GREATEST DAD and marvel at this tiny town. Wiring a train set shouldn’t be this hard, but it is.

  I get another text.

  My heart, it says. It’s breaking.

  I glance around the spotless basement. My home of late. Everything is clean, I made sure of it. The door to the boiler room has brand-new hinges; it’s perfectly hung. All the broken glass is swept off the floor, and the larger pieces from the cracked mirrors are neatly placed in piles waiting for their proper disposal.

  The wooden table the train set sits upon is repaired. Dad’s tiny town has all-new grass with little trees and flowers. It’s perpetual spring. The landscape is way more full than before because I added more hills. Bucolic and stuff. Underneath, I constructed the sheets of cardboard and glued them together like a cake before shaping them into a rolling meadow, just like my dad did.

  He’s watching.

  I can feel him these days. Hovering just beyond the borders.

  I’m doing everything I can to get Dad to send me a message. He helps Mom find me in the middle of a city filled with thousands of people; he sends her to the mall. He should be able to send me one stupid sign. A lost ball, a bird, a talking cat, whatever. I don’t care. I need help to understand.

  A line I never expected to see was crossed, and I need to know why.

  It’s not that I didn’t have a great experience. It’s that I don’t know what to do with it.

  Aphra Behn, the British writer who wrote the poem that broke up my English class, “The Disappointment,” would approve. Jamie had just as good a time as I did. I can see Aphra on her perch in the heavens, nodding proudly.

  That’s all fine, but it’s my dad up there in the stratosphere that worries me most. He’s up there turning his back on her and looking down with disappointment. It’s starting to eat me up. His approval, however empyreal, is important to me. I always figured my dad would be on my side, but I can’t break through to him.

  I know my dad is dead, but it feels like his silence speaks for him. Maybe the minute Jamie touched down on my thigh is when my dad officially gave up on me. I don’t know. That night has become very confusing.

  Mom wants to welcome any and all of my relationships. She’s seen the light and is prepared to proudly support me in any number of various sexual inclinations as I see fit—just hand her the right flag.

  There is no flag.

  It makes all the zesty conversations Mom’s dying to have remain unspoken. Which I’m sure frustrates her no end. Seems like all she wants to do these days is talk about her gay/bisexual/lesbian/pansexual/queer/intersex/intergender/asexual/binary/nonbinary/cis/trans/genderless/hypersexed/skoliosexual/third-gender/transitioning son…if only he would pick something.

  But I don’t have to pick anything. I am what I am—a straight guy. Same as always. Only difference is now a lot of items on the Firsts List have been checked off with Jamie.

  Mom’s relentless need for clarification pushes me deeper into the basement. It’s like she can’t accept me being straight and finding Jamie under the covers with me. She wants a reason she can cross-reference with her book that she walks around with all the time. The more Mom talks, the more I want to listen for the quiet voice of a dead man. I can brush off all the dumb shit at school (mostly) because those are people who don’t know the whole story. All they’ve got is I kissed a girl on her cheek who was assigned male at birth. Big deal. Scandal wears off after a month when nothing else happens.

  But more than that happened, and I need to know my
dad is still with me.

  And I wonder what might be next because honestly it scares me.

  I can’t stop beating that night to death. Over and over. Every time I think I’m overreacting and I should just pick up the phone and call Jamie, I get hit with another round of the same worry, the same fears. I mean, she was ready to do it and I wasn’t. Will I have to have sex with her just so I don’t have to do other things that I already know I won’t be okay with? Or should I just get on with it and act like this is normal? Makes me wonder if burying that night and never acknowledging its existence is the way to go, because it’s one or the other. Take it, or leave it. Can’t be both.

  So instead of facing her or my mom, I come downstairs and spend hours in a cold and dark room alone. I need my dad’s approval. As improbable as it sounds, I need his advice. Mom doesn’t understand that the only way he can talk to me is through the train set.

  Two feet wearing boots walk slowly down our front walk and hit the kickstand of a pink bike with a basket and tassels flying off the handlebars. I stay down here and wait. My ears and eyes are open. I’m listening.

  THIRTY

  I joined the football team.

  Two reasons. One: Who gives a shit? It’s okay that I publicly admit I like football. Just because the world sees me and instantly associates me with football doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to like it and play. Scholar-athlete. I can be both.

  And two: I joined the day after I overheard my mom talking to my grandma in hushed tones about how leaving her big meeting in Pittsburgh set her career back and she won’t be able to ask for a raise for a while and she doesn’t know what to do when college comes around. Then she asked Grandma for some money and I felt like garbage. So I went straight to Coach Fowler’s office the next morning and he jumped up and hugged me.

  Now I have somewhere distracting to be every day after school, and our weight room more than lives up to its name. It is a room and it is full of weights. Machines that you sit on and push and pull things that get progressively heavier the more reps you knock out. In addition to housing beat-to-hell pieces of equipment with chipped white paint and a faded banner that reads STATE CHAMPS 1994, the entire room smells like endless crusty-sock miasma. After a while I don’t notice the stench but I’m not sure yet if that’s a good or a bad thing.

  My leg’s still frozen in a cast, so I’m doing upper body. Three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Tuesdays and Thursdays I’m in Coach Fowler’s office watching film and getting tutored with the playbook. He gave me a list of names of guys who went to the NFL from the Ivies. He made it abundantly clear there are lots of great colleges out there, but I have tunnel vision and he honored it. I got nervous when he couldn’t promise I wouldn’t get a concussion, but he said he stresses no helmet-to-helmet contact and that as long as I lead with my shoulders and chest, I should be fine. Besides, my brains aren’t my only asset anymore. I’m very much looking forward to hitting someone. Like, a lot.

  Offensive line. That’s pretty much what I figured, and that’s where I’ll be for next year’s season. Maybe if I get good feet, I’ll move on to defense, and that’s where I’ll really get to murder people, but start slow. So all right, that’s what I’m doing. Dr. Jensen reinforced the bottom of my cast with a flat, textured grip, so I can start to put tiny amounts of weight on my leg. I’m supposed to still use crutches and go easy on it, but it doesn’t stop me from adding another twenty-five pounds on either side of the three-way row. Everything situated, I lean into the incline.

  At first I hated the idea of doing weights. I mean, seriously, why do I need to build mass? I come pretty close to having my own gravitational pull. But it’s really frigging hard. I’m always out of breath. Turns out, I am in terrible shape from sitting on my ass and doing nothing for years.

  Coach Fowler says if anything, football is going to help me be the right weight, so okay, I can deal with that. If I have to be the Beast, I might as well do it correctly. It makes me focus on getting through these sessions. I do it for me, I do it for my mom, and I do it for my dad. Maybe he can look down and help us win some games or something. Maybe after I make a tackle, he’ll materialize in the stands and poke the guy next to him and say “That’s my boy” right before he vaporizes back into nothingness.

  I’m done with a set of ten and I take a break. There’s a bunch of noise outside and my stomach tightens. People approaching. When there’s other guys in here, I can feel them watching me bench out of the corner of their eye. It’s weird. One senior said he would kill to be as big as me.

  That was weird but I nodded and said, “Thanks.”

  The din gets closer and the baseball team comes in as one. They’re getting ready for spring. I grab my towel and move because I don’t want to see JP for anything. Been working overtime to avoid him for weeks, but I’m not fast enough. “Hey, man,” JP says, coming over. “What are you doing here?”

  “I joined the football team.”

  “But I thought you hated football?” he asks.

  “I have a latent predilection for violence.”

  I move over to the chest press and add more to the puny amount already stacked. Two hundred and fifty pounds. I give JP a look. There’s no way in hell he can do that if he tries. I sit down and do two sets of five. “I have more reps to do. Later.”

  “So…”

  What the hell, he’s not leaving?

  “How’s things?” he asks.

  As if he cares.

  “Got any new games?”

  Of course he would ask that; he has no concept of living on a budget. Yeah, no, dipshit. No new games.

  JP leans in way too close for comfort. “Can I talk to you?”

  “What do you want, JP?” I say, low as I can. “You want to use me? Feed me a load of shit so I do something dumb for you because some poor kid didn’t pay you back? Well, guess what: those days are over. Whatever you have to say is pretty fucking pointless these days.”

  “Whatever, dude.” JP slips away and I’m alone again.

  Fine. He’s got nothing. He wants to talk? That’s nice, since he’s nothing but talk. There’s no way he has anything relevant to say, it’s him being full of shit as per usual. I keep my head down and steady my hands on the machine. I start to go through the motions and count one…two…three…four…, but the background noise deep inside my head wonders what he wants.

  THIRTY-ONE

  The holidays at my house are always lonely.

  In a lot of ways, I blame said house. Mom didn’t want to leave it when Dad died, and twelve years later the mortgage is still sucking her dry. It’s more important to her to keep the house she picked out with Dad when he was an upstart young engineer than it is to move somewhere else more affordable. So we stay permanently house poor. Some days it seems like a tent on the side of a highway would be most prudent. We don’t travel. We don’t get on planes and visit relatives back East often, if ever. It’s me and Mom and the ghost of a dead man that only talks to her.

  She loses it, reliably, either Christmas Eve or Christmas morning, which is the worst because it means the rest of the day gets a shroud draped over everything until at least dinner.

  Unfortunately, this year it’s Christmas morning.

  I knock on her door when she’s not up yet, a cup of coffee for her in my hand. After a feeble go-ahead, I enter.

  The blinds are drawn and she sits on the bed, sinking into the middle like a bowling ball. “Merry Christmas,” she says in a dull voice. Yup, this is Christmas.

  “You okay?”

  “Yup.”

  She is not okay.

  “I brought you coffee,” I say.

  “Thank you, sweetheart.”

  I sit down next to her and we stare at the wall. I’ve learned it’s best not to say anything. In time, Mom sips the coffee. She doesn’t need to bother blowing on it; it’s plenty lukewarm by now. She does the same thing she always does: turns her head, smiles at me with all the joy of an old shoe left
in a puddle, and says, “Just miss him, you know?”

  “I know.”

  “We’ve been chatting, he and I.”

  “What’s he saying?” Because I don’t know. Because it feels like I will never know.

  “Afraid that’s between me and your dad,” she says.

  “Does he say anything else?” That no matter what happens, I’ll be okay?

  “You know you can always ask him anything, sweetie.”

  Merry Christmas. Here’s a punch to the gut because goddammit, I’ve been asking him things for over a decade and looking for signs in every dead crow and lost penny I see and always coming up with nothing on top of nothing.

  She gets up, I follow, and we go into the living room to open presents.

  I got my mom a garlic press for Christmas and some new slippers. She got me a gift certificate to our local bookstore, a new pair of shoes, some extra wiring for the train set, and this amazing salmon jerky from a place we like to visit in Astoria. It’s seriously fish candy, but it’s pricey as hell, so I know what a treat it is. Someday when I’m rich, from football or being brilliant or both, I’m taking my mom to the smoked-fish shop and we’re buying the whole store.

  It’s a good goal.

  I have a lot of them now. They are short and don’t involve much more than do this, get a small reward. Like a scientific experiment. If you floss today, you get ten extra minutes with this book. If you look ahead and do five problems from tomorrow’s homework, you get five more sets of push-ups. Stupid stuff like that. Doesn’t matter what it is—it serves a purpose: don’t think about Jamie.