Beast Read online

Jamie nods curtly and points to another lady. “And her?”

  “She needs to stand up straight; she’s too hunched over. It’s like she’d be pretty if she tried, but you can tell she’s not going to.”

  “What a shame.”

  “Well, kinda,” I say. “She looks like she’d be a nice girl if she smiled.”

  Jamie gets out her camera and takes pictures of the two passersby before they disappear from the plaza to parts unknown. “You know what I think? They’re phenomenal as is. Maybe you’ll figure that out someday.” She stands up, gathering her things. “I don’t think I want to know what you think about me. Later.” Jamie throws her empty cup in the trash and walks away.

  “Wait,” I call out after her.

  She spins around. “Of all the people the universe has ever barfed up, who are you to judge, Dylan?”

  I drop my coffee, brown liquid drenching the bricks as I roll after her. “Because I’m living it, okay? Every day. I am the one everyone sees and thinks, thank god, at least I don’t look like that.”

  The wind kicks up her scarf and she smooths it back down.

  She’s standing there with all her bones lining up in the most aesthetically pleasing way possible, and now I’m the one to roll my eyes. What a joke. She’s pretty and she knows it. Constantly seeking approval. Always looking around to see who’s staring back at her, and once they make eye contact, Jamie tosses her hair and gives a little smile to herself. Like it’s a check in the yes column.

  Jamie can be all, wow, you’re such a dick, look at you judging others—but she’s perfect. There’s nowhere she can go where she won’t be welcomed, because she is a very attractive person, and humans like looking at attractive people. It’s science.

  I twist it in. “Someone like you wouldn’t know anything about it.”

  Jamie takes her camera with two hands and looks into the viewfinder for a good long while before she looks up at me. “I’m happy with who I am.”

  “No doubt. You’re gorgeous.”

  She launches into a nervous waterfall of laughter. “Oh my god.” Jamie turns away, hiding her bright pink cheeks.

  “But who cares, right?” I say. “Because what we look like doesn’t matter, right? We’re all smiling beams of sunshine in the sky, on the ground, under the trees, and we’re all equal and extra-special flower petals, or whatever.” The words bubble up, pumping a deep spring in my gut. “If you believe that garbage, that we’re all beautiful little snowflakes, that’s great. I don’t. I haven’t believed it since the sixth grade, and I’m not going to start now.”

  Pity coats her face and I hate that it’s for me.

  I back my wheels up.

  My leg is killing me. Dr. Jensen gave me a prescription for Demerol, and I begged my mom to fill it, but she refused. Apparently all it takes is one Demerol and I’m going to end up in some abandoned warehouse giving head for meth. Instead, Mom loaded up a little plastic baggie with ibuprofen and stuck it in the zippered pocket of my book bag. I pull out the baggie now and dry-swallow. “I should call my mom.”

  “No, don’t do that,” she says with a softness that wasn’t there before. “Mothers should be avoided at all costs.”

  “Yeah, well, my mother’s probably filed a missing-person report by now.”

  “So what?” Jamie says. She takes her camera and snaps a few shots. “Don’t we deserve some time to ourselves?”

  “Oh, are we doing a ‘we’ now? Because I thought you were leaving.”

  “Maybe I changed my mind.”

  She eyeballs my chair and walks around the chrome frame and rubber treads in a slow circle, her finger itching to push the button. I concede. “You can take pictures of the wheels,” I tell her.

  “Thank you!” She bends to one knee and fires the camera to life. “Your leg too?” she asks, never letting the SLR leave her eye.

  “Okay, but that’s it.”

  She feasts. What she’s probably been hoping for ever since we met in group. The button clicks a million times. When Jamie comes up for air, she licks her lips. Sated.

  “You know, we’re not so different.” She fiddles with the lens cap but doesn’t put it on. The thing is still alive. “I have a confession to make, or maybe it’s more of a warning.” Jamie tucks a loose curl behind her ear. “Those thoughts you think? About how people look? I have them too and they don’t shut up. My last school was full of catty girls and I was one of them. You couldn’t walk two feet without one of us making a snarky comment like, oh my god, she is such a blubber nugget—those jeans are a million sizes too small. I made a lot of girls cry in my old life and I don’t want to do that anymore. I’m trying to be better. At least, I want to be better.” She beams. A frigging Girl Scout.

  “Would you have talked to me in your old school?”

  Her grin wilts. “Probably not.”

  “Ouch.”

  “It’s the truth,” she says. “I have…issues. When you surprised me at the bus stop, it brought me back to a bad place. I’m trying to get past it.”

  “So, what, hanging out with me is like karmic clean slate for you? Because you used to be mean to ugly people, you get soul credits for a cup of coffee?”

  “When you put it that way, it sounds pretty bad, doesn’t it?”

  It’s a blow.

  I sit back in my wheelchair and stare at the sky. No clouds. No birds. Just glaring gray haze. When I come back down to earth, Jamie sits in her chair next to mine like nothing ever happened. If I had two functioning legs, I’d take a big step away from her. But then…why? Because she’s a reformed mean girl? In a stupid way, I still am one. “Long story short, I guess we’re both horrible people,” I say.

  She laughs her great laugh. “If that means trying to be a little less shitty each day, then yeah, I hope we are very horrible people.”

  “Let’s go kick a pile of sleeping kittens.”

  “Pfft!” she scoffs. “You and what leg? Let’s go punch babies in the face.”

  “Topper.”

  “And how.” We smile at each other, but she breaks. “I would never punch a baby.”

  “So there’s still hope for kicking kittens?”

  “You’re terrible.”

  “You mean horrible.”

  Jamie holds up an invisible goblet. “To us, the most horrible people in the world.”

  “Cheers,” I say, as we clink our lost coffee cups together. We drink air.

  “But thank you,” she says. “For being cool. With me. That’s pretty awesome.”

  “Uh…why wouldn’t I be?”

  Her hands raise another toast before she scatters whatever remained of the faux cup to the winds of the square. “And that’s why you’re so cool.” She smiles.

  I die. I try not to, but I do anyway. I’d ask her to pinch me, but that’s technically touching and I might die some more. The best I can do is reach up and scrape the scruff on my cheek instead of smiling. “You’re welcome.”

  “Dylan!” My head whips around at my name.

  Oh my god. Mom.

  Beige coat flying, she tears toward me. “There you are! Sweetheart, you scared me half to death! What happened? Where were you? Who was that girl?”

  I go to make a flustered introduction, but Jamie’s off and sprinting down the steps. “Jamie!” I call after her. She doesn’t look back, speed walking across the bricks like she’s late for another bus. “She’s gone,” I say.

  “Why weren’t you at the hospital?”

  “She didn’t say goodbye.”

  “Dylan.” Mom claps a hand on my shoulder.

  “Sorry,” I say in a daze.

  “That’s all you have to say? Sorry?” Mom grabs the handles of my wheelchair and gives me a big shove. Our car is double-parked and blocking traffic. I’m maneuvered toward the backseat; my bag is removed and tossed in through the open door. Her hands grip under my armpits, as if she could lift me, and I come to.

  “I can do it,” I tell her, and get into the car by myself.<
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  “Wonderful,” she says, lightly dripping with sarcasm. “I wasn’t sure. I thought you might have brain damage or something terrible.”

  “You mean horrible.”

  “Fine, horrible. Why weren’t you waiting for me at the hospital?”

  The city whizzes by. Somewhere behind me, Jamie’s taking pictures. I want to be there with her as she listens for the cracks and dents to call her camera near.

  “Dylan!”

  “Sorry.” The inside of my head feels like whipped butter. I scoop out my story. “I thought I’d make it easier on you and take the bus home. It was the wrong bus. We ended up downtown.”

  “Who was the girl?”

  “Jamie. We met in group.”

  “If you two are in group together, then that’s where you two should be. Not flying all over the city together.”

  The car feels very small. More than usual, given that the shotgun seat is all the way down for my broken leg, and my toes can almost touch the glove box.

  “You should’ve called, Dylan. Or texted. I searched the hospital. I asked security; I asked every doctor and nurse in the hall. No one knew where you were. It was very upsetting. I’m very upset.”

  “You mentioned that.”

  “And you don’t seem to care!”

  “I care,” I mutter. Jamie didn’t say goodbye.

  “You need to call me before you pull a stunt like that,” she grumbles before launching a giant sigh. “Okay. Compromise. You can ride the bus with your friend, but you have to call me first.”

  “I can’t have some time to myself?”

  “I am not having this argument with you right now, Dylan.”

  “It’s not an argument!”

  “Don’t raise your voice at me.”

  I glare at her in the rearview mirror. Fighting with my mom is a lose-lose situation, so I drop it. Her version of brass knuckles is guilt. No matter what I do, Mom snuffs it out with her trump cards: Widow, Single Mother, and We Don’t Have a Lot of Money. Whatever I’m going through, it pales in comparison to her struggles. Because I have no idea how hard life is….I usually run to my room with my books, but I’m stuck in the car with her this time, and I don’t even think studying would make me feel better right now. “How did you find me?”

  She looks to heaven. “I asked your father for a sign. He told me where I needed to go.”

  My eyes bug.

  Mom pats her heart and drives on. We aim for home. I say nothing and look at the sky with jealousy. Over the years, I’ve asked my dad a million times to help me with a million different things. I’m still waiting for an answer.

  EIGHT

  One day later and it’s like my escape to the city never happened. Mom and I are tucked snug into our tiny two-bedroom bungalow with one extra plate at the table tonight. But we don’t mind. JP has a stacked, infinity-bedroom, infinity-bathroom palace far away in Irvington, and yet he lives in a tree house his dad had built for him instead. It’s a nice tree house, don’t get me wrong, all hooked up with electricity and stuff, but it’s a little cold and crappy in the wintertime, so Mom and I just say hi when he comes here. A place to be, a house on the ground, where he can sit and eat and feel normal. When we were kids, I always wanted to go to his house—his toys were way better—until I realized there’s a stark difference in parenting techniques between his mom and mine.

  We never talk about it. Ever. But it’s there, like shadows attached to the bottom of your shoes, following you in silence. Because I mean, shit, if I were JP, I’d never go home either. And I’d be sitting on my best friend’s living-room floor and playing video games too, which is exactly what we’re doing.

  “Get the fuck out of here, you piece of shit.” JP’s fingers fly with his new controller.

  I run over his corpse as it evaporates and switch guns. “Kiss my ass,” I say.

  “You mean, kiss my Sasquatch ass.” JP wastes a life and respawns at the start of the level way the hell over by the crumpled-up Empire State Building. “In which case, that’ll never happen,” he says, and runs to catch up. “I don’t want furballs.”

  “Whatever,” I say. “Come over here again. I’ll still kill you.” Angling my guy to jump off a pile of crushed taxis, I stall. I hate this part. I always screw up here. Something about jumping doesn’t sit well with me anymore.

  Crap. I die and regenerate over by the Empire State Building.

  “And the Beast chokes again,” JP says.

  Sometimes I want to choke him. He’s always just…I don’t know. Lucky. He’s lucky. I have no idea how he does it, but whatever tricks he has up his sleeves, girls practically wait for their turn with him. If only they knew his skater bro shit was a farce. He might look like one of the original Z-Boys of Dogtown, but in reality he gets off the bus two stops early to fake like he skated the whole way to school.

  JP curses me out after I kill him: “Blow me, you hairy asshole.”

  “Blow yourself.”

  “Nah, I’ll get Katie to do it later.”

  I grumble to myself because here’s the thing: I have no idea if that’s true or not. JP is north on the compass, no doubt about that, but there’s no way of knowing if anything he says is the truth or just him exaggerating. He’s been caught doing both, so I let it go.

  JP claims he’s done it, but he says it was with a girl he met while he was at baseball camp. Wait, there’s girls at baseball camp? Oh, no worries, she was at the softball camp. Same fields, different buildings. Sure. Why not? And she was from California, where they have no email or phones, so there’s no need to keep in touch. Sounds good.

  Oddly enough, now I’ve got the same problem. I want to tell him about Jamie, but there’s no proof. No number, no email address, no glass slipper, no nothing. Jamie’s real, but she sounds too good to be true. A girl—no, wait—an interesting girl, who even JP would think is hot, bought me (yes, me) a cup of coffee and we talked. For a couple of hours on a perfect fall day, we were a We. I never knew what that was like before (it was awesome) and I might never know what it’s like again, which is depressing.

  “Hey, uh, Adam Michaels? Talk to him yet?”

  “Shit.” I totally forgot. And/or slightly hoped Adam Michaels had paid up by now. He’s kinda older and not as big as me but big enough to leave a mark. I like it better when they can’t fight back. “Will do.”

  “Thanks, man.” JP jerks to launch another round of flame bullets at the little baddies protecting the big baddie in the corner. “How’s the Wormhole?”

  “Amazing,” I say, because it is. Then I chuff to myself because it’s funny, the stupid things we do for each other, JP and I. But fine, I’ll go talk to Adam Michaels.

  Mom leans in from the kitchen, bringing the smell of simmering spaghetti sauce with her. “You guys ready for dinner?”

  “Yeah,” JP answers for both of us.

  JP puts the game on pause, hops up and out of the beanbag chair, and trots into the kitchen like a dungaree-wearing farm boy whose mama done rung the dinner bell. Left for dead, I lug my corpse up from the deepest depths, mentally scream in agony because my leg freaking hurts like hell whenever I move, and hop stupidly to my place at the table. Even if I’m not supposed to be up and about just yet, I have no choice. My wheels are folded up and left by the door like an umbrella because our house is too small for me to actually use it indoors. I have to use a cane to hobble around the house instead. I try to gently bumble, but when was that possible back when I had two working legs?

  The wooden chair groans under my weight. I lift my cast for elevation and wait for the pain to stop. It doesn’t and I wish I could rub the bones straight. Mom ladles organic, grass-fed meatballs onto the plates heaped with pasta and sauce. Two for her, five for JP, and twelve for me. Fair is fair. “Ready?” Mom asks.

  Both her and JP bow their heads. Mom thanks the Universe. JP thanks God because unlike me, he’s an actual Catholic and not going to St. Lawrence because it’s the best education in town. While th
ey say their own version of grace, I pretend to. Although I never know where to send prayers, so I just think: Hi, Dad.

  Their heads pop up and we begin to eat. “Go easy on the cheese,” Mom says to me.

  I lift the Parmesan from the grater. “Why?”

  “Because that’s the last of it for the month.”

  Money. As in, as soon as I finish dinner, I’m off to go study so I can get a full ride to Stanford or Yale or Harvard or MIT with all the bells and whistles. One day this mutt will have a pedigree.

  But as I shovel food in my mouth (from the ever-rising food bill we never ask JP to help pay because apparently lost boys eat for free), I wonder…would I change places with my best friend? The answer is yes. In a heartbeat.

  I imagine waking up in his body. One smile from my perfect teeth that align one perfect row on top of the other, and I’m wrapping up girls in my new lean arms. My brains in his body with all his money? Unstoppable. The world won’t know what hit it. I’d never give his body back. He’d be stuck inside my old one and man, would he be miserable. But I bet, dollars to donuts, he’d take my body and do something real stupid with it. He wouldn’t turn to a book to keep it in check. He’d go whole hog and end up in prison. No doubt.

  My hand squeezes into a fist underneath the table. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if my fuse really lit. I haven’t punched anyone since last year. Some junior. JP had asked me to do it, like he’d done a thousand times, but this time I enjoyed it. Way too much. It’s not my size that scares me. It’s what I’m carrying inside. My secret Hulk is always crouching under the surface, needling me. But I know the tricks to keep it locked up.

  JP doesn’t have control. He’s all id: I want, I want, I want.

  He’d want to beat the shit out of someone and he wouldn’t know when to stop.

  I drop the fantasy. He’ll always be him, and I’ll always be me. He’ll have his face, his genes. All he has to do is hold on a few more years and he’s gone. His dad will pay for college without breaking a sweat. JP can dick around for four years and earn some bullshit degree, smile with his pretty teeth, and he’ll get by forever. Not me.

  But whatever. It’s science. It’s fine.