Beast (22 page)

I sit up there, on my roof, and watch tiny sparks of gold tickle the trunks of the trees as the sun rises. Hazy pinks and yellows gradually waking up. My street is quiet. All the nosy neighbors still sleeping. I keep thinking it's my turn to sleep too, but I don't want to. My eyes are heavier than me and yet they refuse to shut. The sun compels them to stay open. Just a little while longer to watch a new day dawn.

When her car rounds the corner around 5:15 AM, I wave. The car speeds up, parks, door slams, and she sprints around to the side of the house below where I'm sitting enjoying the sunrise.

“Dylan!” she shouts.

I raise my finger to my lips. “Shhhh…people are sleeping.”

“Oh my god.” Mom races to the front door and I hear her clambering up the staircase and opening my bedroom window as fast as her almost-forty-year-old self can go. “Dylan.” She squeezes out through the frame and onto the shingles. “Sweetheart?” I'm jealous of how easy it is for her. She slowly crawls toward me and crouches on her knees. “Please don't jump, please, let's figure it out, let's talk about it. Just don't jump, okay?”

“I'm not going to jump.” I kinda don't want her to be up here with me, but I'm tired. It's been a long night. I feel a little punch-drunk. She can sit if she wants to.

“Oh, thank heaven.” She exhales. “What are you doing? Where have you been? I've been up all night, worried sick, driving around looking for you. What happened?”

“I had to do some stuff. Then I came home,” I say. Everything is opaque, my eyes are so tired. “Have you ever had that walk-into-traffic, but just-kidding, but not-really feeling?”

“Dylan.” Mom grabs my arm. “You're scaring me.”

“Don't be scared. I'm not talking about for-real walking into traffic. Just like, I don't know, that blink-and-you-miss-it wave of zen shit. Like a peace treaty inside yourself.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“But you've felt lost, right?”

She loosens her grip. “Of course.”

“You have that unbelievable failure, the kind that smells like burnt hair, and it's awful. But then it's over.”

“Have you been burning hair?” she asks with concern.

“No. I haven't slept in twenty-five hours and I'm loopy as hell. Indulge me on my shitty metaphors.” I laugh. “But like, that place where there's no fighting. There's nothing to fight over. Everything is done.”

Mom frowns. “Then I suppose you're lucky to have reached that point. I have not.”

“You haven't? Ever?”

“No, everything is burnt hair for me,” she mumbles.

“Nuh-uh,” I say.

“I'm a thirty-nine-year-old college dropout and a single mom with a son who wants to wander into traffic. Obviously things are not okay.”

“You've got to trust. And not bug phones.”

“Oh.” She pats me on the knee. “So that's what this is about. Well, I won't apologize for that. I need to know you're safe. And you better believe if I see that little blue dot of yours standing still in the middle of I-5 in the future, I'll come running. That's that.”

“Take it off my phone.”

“Who's paying for your phone?”

“Trust the process of life, Mother.”

“It's hard to be trusting when said child skips school, has grown-up sleepovers, and stays out all night. Trust is earned, Son.”

“Fair point,” I admit. “Let's compromise.”

“I'm listening.”

“That thing comes off my phone and I start paying for the bills.”

“I don't want you getting a job. School is too important.”

“Football will cost money,” I say. She flinches. “How about I call if I'll be late.”

“How about you're supposed to do that anyway?”

“What's it going to take?”

She sighs. “Finish out sophomore year with good grades and no more of this funny business that's been happening since fall, and then we'll talk about removing it for junior year. I need to see progress.” Mom hugs me. “And let me in. Talk to me. I want to be in your life.”

“You are.”

“Dylan.”

I look up at the sunrise. Low and lazy with February's tilt. “I love Jamie.” There. It's said. “But she doesn't love me and I have to accept that.”

“Oh, sweetheart.”

“I lost the greatest girl I've ever known because I wasn't okay with myself,” I say. “And now I'm past the burnt hair, I aired out the room, it sucks I'm never going to see her again.”

“Maybe we can have her over for dinner some night.”

“She won't come.”

“You need to put up a fight! Girls like effort. Go in there and make sure she knows that you're—”

“Jamie knows what she wants and it's not me, and I can't say I blame her,” I say quickly. Mom looks all crestfallen. I put my arm around her. “Don't be sad.”

“I want so badly for you to be happy, though.”

“It's okay,” I say. “So that's where I was all night. I needed to apologize to her.”

“I guess it didn't work.”

“Does it look like it worked? I'm here all alone without a time machine.”

“If you could go back a couple months, what would you fix?”

“When I learned she was trans, I would say, ‘Cool.' And then we would go get a pretzel.”

“And what am I up to in this do-over?”

“You're into it. The omnipresent worrying is at bay.”

“But you know why I worry, right? It's what moms do.”

“Most moms,” I say, feeling for JP.

“Maybe I'm not supposed to admit this, but in junior high when it appeared you were into girls, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Not because being gay is bad or anything, but because you don't want your kid's life to be any harder than it has to be. People can be so heinous,” she says. “When I was out in the car with Jamie's mom, Jessica, she was telling me how scared she is for her daughter. How much she loves Jamie and how every night she loses sleep worrying that bad things are always waiting around the corner. That she worries all the time about how hard Jamie's life might be. I…didn't want you to be involved in that. I wanted you to stay away to make things easier for you. It was wrong. Will you forgive me?”

“I guess so. It's awful, but I get it.”

“So I want in on this do-over too.”

“Then I guess you'd be like, how nice we get to have my son's girlfriend over for dinner. Let's make crab cakes with real crab.”

“Real crab, huh?” She laughs. “I'm very happy to hear we've won the lottery in this alternate reality.”

“Just sucks it's only that. This is a whole new world.”

A whole new world. Since I'm delirious, all I can picture is a boat made of souls, tearing through the surf and crashing onto a beach made of stars. They explode on impact, flying into space. Some stronger than others. Some disappear completely. “I think about Dad all the time.”

“Me too.”

“I've never needed him more than this past year.”

Mom holds me even tighter. “Oh, sweetheart.”

“What do you think he'd say about me and Jamie?”

“Well…” She rests a finger on her chin. “I think all parents want their kids to be happy. And I think good parents learn and adapt so that happiness grows. He would do the same.”

“Do you think Dad's out there?” I ask. “Not like in heaven or anywhere like that, but what made him a person, does that exist?”

“It has to. I need it to. He is still very much alive for me,” Mom says.

“Is that why you never remarried?”

She swallows with a thump. “Partly.”

“Why?”

“Because I can't imagine loving another person the way I loved your dad,” she says. “When we met in college, I fell madly, hopelessly in love with him. All my friends thought I was nuts because he was too big and too tall and too this and too that. You know what that's like; you're just like him.”

“I do.”

“But I didn't care. I knew we were meant to be. Then we had our little surprise, you, right before senior year. We decided he would stay in school and I'd get my degree later. By the time we bought this house, he already had cancer. We just didn't know it yet,” she says. “We had so many dreams for this place. We were going to plant a row of arborvitae right over there.” She points. “Change out that ugly fence for a new one.”

“Why don't we do those things, you and I?”

“Time. Money. It all slips away.” Mom sits there. I don't think I ever noticed how sad she was before. I always thought the sighing and the pining was her just being a mom.

“We need to sell the house,” I say.

“I'll never do such a thing.”

“We can sell it, move to an apartment. It'll be fine,” I say. “It'd be a lot less stress.”

“You're my number one priority.” She hugs me tight. “You come first.”

“Don't you think Dad would want both of us to be happy? I'm not a Labrador; I don't need a yard.”

She lets me go. Her gaze slides to the shitty chain-link fence.

“I think it's time we get happy,” I say.

“Perhaps you're onto something.”

Now I hug her. “We're going to be okay.”

She stops and holds my stubbly cheeks in her hands. “I'm very proud of you.”

“You are?”

“Of course I am! You're a dream kid,” she says. “Most of the time.”

“Ha-ha.”

My hair has grown since fall and she brushes some off my forehead. “I think we should have Jamie over for dinner,” she says.

“I already told you, that's out.”

“Well, maybe another girl sometime. Or boy.”

I look up to the sky. “I know that book you have gave you a million options to support in the most helpful Helpy McHelp-Help way, but here's the honest truth: I'm just a guy who likes a girl. So I'm whatever that's called and that's it.”

“Okay,” she says. “Sounds good to me.”

My face is crusty and my butt is cold. The sun is up and there's not much more to this day than an eventual trip to the hospital. I need sleep. My mom nuzzles me like a kitten or cub or something and I bust up laughing.

“What?” she cries out.

“Nothing. I love you.”

“Well, good, because I love you,” she says. “I'm freezing. Come inside with me and get ready for school.”

I get to my knees and start to inch across the roof. “I'm going to bed.”

“No way. If I have to go to work, you have to go to school.”

“I promise I'll be good tomorrow, but all I want to do is sleep until my doctor's appointment,” I say. “It was going to be a half day anyway.”

Her mouth crunches up, but I can tell she's thinking about it.

“Play hooky with me—have a sick day. Make waffles and watch Netflix.”

Now she leers at me with a wink. “Now you're the bad influence.”

“Yay,” I cheer.

She goes in through my window and then I do. I shut it. She closes the lock. “You need to dust, Dylan. Good lord, look at this.” Mom shows me her filthy finger.

“Day off,” I remind her, and collapse into bed.

Pulling up my covers, she rubs my shoulder through the blankets. “I'll wake you up when it's time to go.”

The door shuts with a click and I'm out.

A heavy, deep hole opens up and I slide into it and close the lid. Warm and soft, I feel my dreams tiptoeing in after a while. Wild great things that make no sense and I'm along for the ride, until blackness hits me like a gong and I'm unconscious.

I dream of Jamie. That plane of hers is there and she's coming down the ladder. I'm waiting on the tarmac, wearing a suit.

Something stirs me.

“Dylan?”

I don't want to be awake. “Is it time to go?”

“Um, I don't know,” says Jamie.

My eyes fly open. Sitting up, I see her. She's red in the cheeks, her hair is a tangled mess, and she's pulling at her hands over and over. “Is this a dream?”

“I'm afraid not.” She looks to her wet boots. Then, carefully, up at me. “Hi.”

Mom stays stuck to the floor in my room, eyes whipping back and forth between me and Jamie. I didn't notice her before. “I'm going to the kitchen,” she says. “Does anyone need anything?”

We shake our heads no. I still can't believe Jamie is here in my house, not just in my house, but in my room and breathing and everything. It is a dream. I'm speechless.

“Okay then, um, so that's where I'll be and I'm going to leave the door open, okay?” Mom tilts her head and glares. “The door stays open.”

“Fine. Open,” I mumble.

Behind Jamie, Mom gives me two thumbs up before she jets away, and I laugh at her. “Am I bothering you?” Jamie asks.

“No, my mom's being a nut.”

“Oh.” Jamie paces the floor, leaving behind a spot of wet and dirty carpet from where she stood. I am so happy to see that mud, but she's oblivious. Every movement is stiff with cold, and she rubs her arms inside the sleeves of her coat. Her light is dim. “I didn't mean to come up here.”

“That's okay.” I sit up in bed and pull the blankets in.

“I left JP's house and walked. And walked and walked and walked. Fuck-it stomped all over town. Thinking. I thought about everything. Then around midnight, I saw your crutches lying in two different places a block away from each other. I was like, those are longer than mammoth tusks; they're definitely Dylan's,” she says. “I worried someone stole them or something. So I brought them here.”

“Someone did steal them.”

“Well, that's a shitty thing to do.”

“Sometimes people are shitty.” Like me.

“Hmm,” she murmurs in agreement. “I was going to leave them on the front steps, but your mom saw me. She asked me if I wanted to come in.”

“It's pretty cold out.”

“Yeah.” Jamie rubs feeling back into her ears. “So I thought okay, and then she asked me if I wanted to say hi because you were upstairs and I thought why not, so here I am. Hi.”

“Are you hungry?”

“Not really.” Jamie leans against my desk and takes in the shapes and sights of my room. “It looks a lot different in the sunlight.”

“I guess so.”

“I'll be honest with you, I'm stalling for time.” Jamie hides holding a tissue to her eye and disguises it as a runny nose before putting it back in her pocket. “I don't want to go home and hear ‘I told you so' from my mom.”

“She doesn't mean it like that.”

“The heck she doesn't. She ‘doesn't approve of my choices' these days,” Jamie says. “And I don't want more therapy. It took forever to get it down to two sessions a week. I'm tired of feeling like a project. I wish people would just believe me when I say I'm fine.”

She sniffs, but this time it's not pretend. “Do you want a blanket?” I say, and reach for a folded one untouched at the end of my bed.

“Thanks.” Jamie unfurls it, wraps herself up like a woolen burrito, and sits on the far end of the bed. “I'm just not in the mood for ‘I knew you'd be one of those girls who stays out all night' right now.”

“Understandable.”

“Just feel…” Her voice slips away. Jamie buries herself completely in the blanket. “I feel so alone.”

I move to touch her, but my hand hovers. Waiting for a sign. I don't know if I'm allowed to touch her in any way, but waiting for signs is a bullshit experience. Only sign I need is hers, and my hand comes down soft to rest on her shoulder.

She doesn't shake it off. She doesn't tell me to move it.

“I know that feeling,” I say.

“So does JP,” she says. “It's funny, when he found me I was practically bleeding from your silence. And all of a sudden it was like, who is this broken little rich boy?”

“Who cares.”

“He doesn't know how to tell you how important you are to him. We were both kind of moping around over you, isn't that stupid? Especially since he disgusts me right now. What kind of ally does that? He is a very good listener, though.”

“That's how he learns your soft spots.”

“At least I got a show out of it.”

“You did it on purpose?”

“I'm no angel,” Jamie says. “Every time JP wanted me to talk to you and I said no, because I was pissed at you, which I still am, he kept upping the ante and I was like, hmm, how far will this kid go to get what he wants?”

“JP will go the distance.”

“He told me about his mom.”

“Whoa. That's major.”

“He said you and your mom were the only people who knew.”

“Well. That's accurate.” I knew, but my mom did the listening and talking. Never me. But who knows, that could change. “So is that what you were thinking when you were out walking around for hours? How to bring me and JP back together?”

“Yes. No.” Jamie flips her arms free from the blanket and pushes up her sleeves. “I just kept walking around, worrying about my Spanish test on Friday and all this other crap, but underneath it all, you kept bubbling up.”

“In a good way?”

“Not really. I hate that I think about you all the time. I wish I didn't. I wish I could take a bath and wash everything away, instead of having it build and build. I hate that I torture myself with all these memories of us. I feel like I scared you away and I hate myself for that.”

“You didn't! Please don't get that stuck in there. It was me. Maybe I wasn't ready, maybe I was blaming my dad, maybe I was just an idiot. All of the above. Like, when you said you wanted to have sex, I was not expecting that. Made me nervous about future, um, endeavors.”

“But I only said that to keep you.”

“What?”

“I'm not ready either. That's what my friend Keely said to do. She said that's what boys want.” Jamie wraps the thick blanket tighter. “Ugh, I feel so dumb. Like Keely knows what the hell she's talking about. She can't keep a boyfriend longer than a month.”

“I wish you could've told me.”

“Maybe we could…talk? About stuff like that? Instead of feel dumb?”

“I'd love a chance to talk about anything with you.”

The new silence isn't cold. It's as warm as my hand that's still resting on her shoulder.

“When we met, did you honestly not hear me in group?”

“I was in a pity spiral, so no.”

“Then why when you did learn the truth, why couldn't you just say ‘Wow, I didn't know you were trans, but I don't care because I like you' instead of spit on the sidewalk and make me feel like garbage, why? Even a polite ‘Thanks, but no thanks' would've been better. Why did you have to be so awful? Why are you only okay with us in the dark?” Jamie finds her camera and starts twisting the lens cap with jittery fingers. “Why do I keep coming back to this?”

The lens cap falls and she struggles to fit it onto the camera, gives up, and thumps it down in her lap with a thud. “Just feels like I've been trapped in this world where I don't know what's true anymore. When I'm with you, I only want the good and I'm too blind to see the bad. Even after everything that's happened, I'm still in this soupy shit. I hate—no,
despise
—myself for wanting the fairy tale.”

“But we all want that.”

“Well, make it stop,” she says. “Tell me you're an all-star asshole and that if I stay here one more second you'll hurt me. Again.”

“Jamie, I can't stop thinking about you either.”

“No. Wrong answer.” She shuts her eyes tight. “Were we ever real?”

“Yes.”

“All those things you said in the tree house, were they true?”

“Every word.”

“And my hand was honestly the best thing you've ever held?”

Now I close my eyes, remembering. “Always.”

I've hurt a lot of people in the past, but nothing is worse than this.

Jamie hugs her knees. “Dylan, I think we…”

I wait, my comforter taking the form of tenterhooks, when Mom yells up the stairs, “Sweetheart! It's time to go.”

“Where are you going?” Jamie asks.

“My cast comes off today. Want to come?” We have so much more to talk about.

The three of us pile into the car like it's nothing. Oh, don't mind us, we always travel in style with my mom driving the whip, my shotgun seat pushed back as far as it can go without breaking, and the girl of my literal dreams mashed in the backseat.

After a fairly awkward seventeen minutes of my mom peeking in her rearview mirror at me and Jamie, she finally pulls in to the parking lot and calls out, “We're here!”

My crutches, the ones Jamie found, are all dinged up. Scratches cut the metal where I collided with a million trash cans, cars, shopping carts, and rocks. The handles are cracked and yellowed from months of my sweaty hands gripping the foam molded to my palms. Battle-hardened.

I walk into the hospital and lean them against the wall where my height is checked for the last time. I know the drill and I stand against the stadiometer as the nurse climbs up onto a chair. “I wonder if I'll hit seven feet,” I say.

“I hope not. We're running out of places to buy clothes,” Mom grumbles.

The nurse slides the bar down until it taps my head. “Six feet, seven inches,” she says, marking it on the paper inside a manila folder.

“I'm almost as tall as my dad.” This is so great, I could pop.

The crutches come with me to the X-ray room and I leave them by the bed for hopefully the last time. When we get to the exam room, I put them down for good. I don't care what the doctor says; I won't pick them up again. I am beyond done with this broken leg. Dr. Jensen comes in, clipboard in tow, just like always. “Hop up,” he commands, and I swing my leg high onto the crinkly paper bed. A nurse, not the same jerk who sized me up for pit fighting, aligns my entire right leg so it's facing out and steady. “Let's get right to it,” Dr. Jensen says. “I'll turn on the saw.”

Deep within my chest, my heart starts to throb. This is it. The oscillating saw looks like a motorized pizza cutter. It buzzes and Mom grips my shoulder. Jamie squeezes her hands to her stomach. “You'll feel a light to moderate tickling sensation,” the nurse tells me as Dr. Jensen makes the first cut.

It goes down, starting at my foot, smooth and firm. After each pass, he goes back and does it again. Sometimes two or three times. “The bottom of this cast has a lot more wear and tear than I'd like. But the X-rays look good, so I'll let it slide.”

After he's done cutting two lines on opposite sides of the cast, he takes something that looks like a car jack and a pair of pliers had a baby, and sticks its nose into the crack and pushes. The cast pops open in two pieces. I hold my breath as he lets air touch my leg. “Most plaster I've used in a long, long while, I guarantee you that,” he says, prying the top off and snipping the gauze with a pair of shears. He peels it all away and tosses it to the side, and just like that, my leg is free.

And holy shit, it reeks.

Mom pinches her nose shut. “I think I'm gonna barf.”

“Nice,” I say, but looking at my leg, I think I'll join her. Clots of flaky beige skin mingle with my dense leg hair, and it smells worse than a dead fish inside a dead cat rotting under the porch. I lift my leg from the tomb and push the old cast out from underneath it. It's my foot. I wiggle it.

Jamie sneaks her camera from her bag. “Whoa…This is the most disgusting thing I've ever seen. Can I?”

“Take all the pictures you want.”

She goes nuts.

“Does it hurt?” Dr. Jensen asks.

“A little.” I bend my ankle for the first time in months. It feels like it wants to pop. Turning my leg from left to right, I see the scars from the pins and screws buried in the bone. The nurse comes near with a flat metal tool to scrape days and weeks of nastiness off my leg. “I'll do it,” I say, and rake the dull blade up my shriveled calf.

Okay, this is gross.

Dr. Jensen pats me on the back. “Rules for now: no sports for the next three months. Football should be fine by camp—when's that, August? We'll set up one last appointment to take a look, but as long as you go slow, I don't anticipate any problems. Take it easy. Build up to running, let your leg get as strong as the rest of you. All right?”

I nod.

“But don't worry,” he says. “Once a break heals, it becomes the strongest part of the bone.”

“Like a scar,” I say.

“Wear it proudly.” He shakes my hand and leaves. “See you in two weeks for the follow-up.”

The door clicks shut. Mom helps me off the table, hands me the pair of jeans she brought in her bag, and I step behind a screen. By myself, I put them on. Buttoning the button and zipping up the fly. I smooth down the denim leg I've been missing all these months. Two legs in an actual pair of pants. It's crazy how good a pair of jeans feels. I take the old pair, the one with only one leg, and ram it down into the shiny chrome trash can, crushing all the little paper cups underneath it down, down, down until my old pants, my old me, is gone. And I walk. It's a cheesy little circle, but I walk and it's amazing. Mom fusses and warns me not to go too fast, but this is heaven. No wheelchair, no crutches, just me.

Jamie snaps three pictures and stops. Her eyes peek up from behind the camera.

“Is it okay if we walk home?” I ask Mom.

“It's kind of far. I don't want you to tax your leg on the first—”

I give her a look.

Mom stands up straight. “Oh. Sure thing,” she says. “But call me if it gets to be too much, okay?”

“Okay.”

She pats me on the back and squeezes Jamie's shoulder. “Have a nice walk, you two. Go slow.”

In the empty exam room, Jamie and I are still. She takes a breath and doesn't budge. Her nose lifts to the ceiling and she talks to the invisible sky above. “I don't know what we have. If anything. I don't know where to start.”