XL

by Scott Brown

  Great job, buddy. Drag her down to your level.

  “Hey. Hey! I’m kidding,” I said. “I love it. I love it so much, I…I don’t even know what to say.”

  She squinted. Not buying it, not not-buying it. “You’re not a great present receiver, anybody ever tell you that?” she said finally.

  My dead mom did once, a long time ago, but that’s another story.

  “Guilty as charged.”

  “Okay, Ring-bearer, I guess let’s…get our asses to Jazzy’s Party Toilet, save Drew. His Toxic Masculinity Exposure Badge must be deep red by now.”

  And before I knew it, we were climbing.

  Up the cliffside, away from BoB, away from the amazing moment we’d had, which I’d ruined. Away from my one window, my one chance for everything to change.

  I couldn’t let it end like this, the moment I’d schemed and lied and microbetrayed into existence.

  Near the top, cell service returned, and my phone hiccuped.

  Drew. A barrage of old texts (quick stop at p toilet then to you!), and a new one:

  trying to find a lyft

  “Who’s that?” asked Monica. She’d already summited, and was getting her strange, sexy sandals back on. She wasn’t used to them, and it was a battle, one girl against wave after wave of tiny leather thongs.

  The blurp! of a fresh text from Drew:

  stay put @ bob monica headed your way me too will converge

  No. No, no, no. I needed more time.

  Project Semi-Judas could still work. On sheer instinct, I typed:

  no dont come we will meet u

  “Is that Drew?”

  Drew wrote back:

  would rather go with original will-centric plan

  “Yep.”

  no no no stay where u are all’s well

  “Says he needs an extract. We should come to him.”

  The lie came so easily, it was scary.

  k brother c u soon chez toilet!

  I turned off the phone. Added a white lie to my Ethical Breach Queue.

  Now came the hard part.

  “Hey! Wanna see something pathetic as hell?”

  Monica turned, raised an eyebrow. “Always?”

  I kicked off my Jordans. Picked the lifts out of them, like anchovies off a pizza. Showed them to her.

  For a second, she just stared.

  Then she cracked up. Guffaws. Belly laughs. Snorts. Monica never held back a good laugh.

  “Jesus,” she said. “Rafty?”

  We both laughed.

  She handed me IF YOU CAN READ THIS and hung on to WE HOOKED UP ALREADY, and then together—still laughing our asses off—we ran to the End, the cliff’s edge, where the guardrail guarded BoB, and we each pitched a lift into the water below.

  “What do I tell Rafty?”

  “Tell him,” Monica said, “tell him you hooked up with someone. And she stole them.”

  “What I like about this story,” I laughed, almost gasping now, “is the plausibilit—”

  At first I thought she’d slipped and bumped into me.

  Except Monica didn’t slip. Everything Monica did was magic, and everything Monica did was precisely what Monica meant to do in the moment she was living in. So when I felt it, I knew what it was, I knew what it meant.

  What she’d done was

  Have I mentioned

  she’d reached out

  how furiously

  and patted my head

  I hate pats on the head?

  like my mom.

  We just kind of looked at each other. Like neither of us could believe what had just happened. But it had. It couldn’t be taken back. Hobbit hair cannot be unruffled.

  That’s when the shadow took me.

  “Don’t. Do that.” Little fangs and claws sprouting. Ugly. Small.

  Monica took a step back. Appalled. At what she’d done? At how I’d reacted?

  And the moment—the moment I’d lied and betrayed for, the moment I’d committed so many small sins to engineer—was gone. It heaved, rolled, and took a terminal dive. In its place was just night. Dead night. Water. Rock. Nothing alive down there, nothing worth trying to sing to the surface.

  “Hey. Uh. It’s been a weird day.” I pretended to get a text. “Whoa, Drew must really be drowning in the Party Toilet.”

  Monica didn’t say anything. I saw a real darkness on her. A sticking, tarry darkness. And I’d put it there.

  I would’ve done any lame-ass imp dance to get that shadow off her. Instead, I put on my necklace, my One Ring, my gift and burden. And I said: “Whaddaya say? Off to Mordor?” Then: “It’s just…the head pat thing…”

  “No,” Monica said quickly, “I get it.”

  “Promise I won’t go Gollum again.”

  Then she smiled. The darkness lifted a little. “Better not,” she said. “Don’t make me throw you into Mount Doom.”

  I was back to being the half-decent half man she knew, instead of the whole and complete asshole I’d just toyed with becoming.

  And for nothing. Because I knew now that this person would never love me the way I loved her. She would love me in another way, one that would make it impossible for the kind of love I needed to exist.

  And I would be happy for that. Lucky.

  Breaking even: that was going to be my big victory tonight.

  And you know what? I was grateful.

  But the night wasn’t half over.

  THE PARTY TOILET was a porcelain-white trapezoid hung off a beach cliff in Pacific View, the choicest nabe in the school district. It looked like a box of supermarket wine trying to mount a commode. That’s kinda what it smelled like inside, too. The whole school was there. And the whole school was wasted.

  “When the Big Wave comes,” Monica screamed over the assembly of raving Harps, “this crock of shit will be the first thing to go.” Monica loved the Big Wave. It was her preferred apocalypse. It’s probably every surfer’s preferred apocalypse.

  Nothing makes the short man feel shorter quite like a crowded party. And packed in this tight—cologne and deodorant are pretty stifling at armpit level—it’s not a wholesome atmosphere, let me tell you.

  Even worse, I watched dudes’ heads swivel to Monica as we pushed through that mash of Harps. They were once-overing her, trying to figure out who she was, starting to put it together: it’s Monica Bailarín, Barrio Nacional’s own mystic surf bum in training, Cleaned Up Nice for a night. Hooboy. Last thing I needed was to watch shit-faced meatheads and meat-faced shitheads ogle Monica. I wanted to complete our mission—Operation Drew Extraction—and GTFO.

  “Where’s Drew, you think?” I asked.

  “Outside is my guess,” Monica yelled, leaning in. He certainly wasn’t in plain view—and he’d gotten much easier to find in a crowd over the last year or so.

  Monica bulldozed through the throbbing flesh that mobbed Jazzy’s massive mead hall of a living room. I followed in her wake, but in the end, there was too much throb and too little me. Elbows. The world’s a forest of elbows at four foot eleven. I ducked into the galley pantry for a breather, and when I looked up, Monica had completely disappeared. Two towering, tottering guys—basketball players, I think—passed a keg over my head as I took the side door out of the scrum. Felt good to breathe fresh-ish sea air again. But Monica was nowhere to be found.

  Outside, there was a lot of suspicious rustling in the bushes. Bedrooms upstairs were full, I guess, so memories that would last a lifetime and/or be obliterated by tomorrow had to be made out here, in nature. I had to step carefully to avoid becoming part of those memories.

  I heard the thwap of basketball on asphalt, moved in that direction.

  It wasn’t Drew. It was his future teammate Eric Forchette (6′4″), varsity power forward and
unironic rage machine. He was playing a game of horse for a gathering crowd.

  His opponent: one Roderick Raftsman Rhinehardt Royall.

  And—holy shit—Rafty was winning.

  As I walked up, he’d just sunk a through-the-legs bounce shot. Swish.

  Audible gasps. It was H-O-R-S in Rafty’s favor. Eric Forchette looked sweaty. (And, it should be noted, drunk. Which explained a lot.)

  A growing village of gawkers was gathering now, to watch the runty kid who suddenly couldn’t miss a series of crazy trick shots take on the towering jock who couldn’t disguise his frustration. Phones blazed.

  Everybody loves the exception, so they can go right back to the rule.

  “Willy boy!” Rafty yelled, motioning me over.

  Forchette barked, “Take your shot, Royall. Let’s get this over with.”

  “One sec, E-Money!” Rafty turned back to me. “My friend, I’m so glad you’re here. Top of the Toilet, Ma! We made it!”

  “What’s going on here, buddy?” I felt an obligation to apply the brakes, knowing Rafty never would.

  “I’m in the middle of a major rebrand is what’s going on. I, uh, I may have been…preparing? For this moment? A little?”

  “That’s great, Rafty,” I said. “Just watch out, okay? Forchette’s a psycho when he’s drunk.”

  Rafty grinned. “ ‘Be cautious and bold.’ Barnum.”

  “Okay, but: ‘Hulk smash.’ Hulk.”

  “Last chance, asshole!” shouted Eric.

  “William?” Rafty snapped his fingers. “Camera, por favor. I would like the following archived for future generations.”

  And Roderick Raftsman Rhinehardt Royall squared up and—I’ll be damned—drained another no-look, over-the-head bucket, twenty yards out, from behind the azaleas.

  Forchette dropped a muddy, slurry series of f-bombs, then released his shot…

  …which toilet-bowled into the neighbor’s yard.

  The crowd went wild. Forchette sulked off, grabbing a bottle of Cuervo from the first beta male he saw, mumbling, “Goddamn circus act.”

  That it was, Eric Forchette. That it was.

  I saw my friend and fellow halfling, my war buddy and co–shelf elf, hoisted onto the shoulders of near strangers. Rafty pointed down at me. “Are you not entertained?! Post the long version! I’ll edit it down to a twelve-second spot tomorrow! Tomorrooooooow!”

  With that, Rafty was carried off in the direction of the keg. After we found Drew, I figured, we’d do a Rafty sweep, try to pull him out of here before Forchette got drunk enough to seek revenge.

  That’s when I heard two sounds that, together, bothered me.

  Vomiting. And laughter. Male laughter. Low and throaty, from multiple sources. The kind of laughter that comes in packs.

  There are various theories about how animals sense danger. Stories of worms boiling out of the ground before an earthquake, elephants fleeing from the coast five minutes before the tsunami crashes through. It’s what serious science would call interesting but anecdotal. Hard to run that experiment, y’know?

  But I felt it. I felt, in the soles of my feet, what those elephants must’ve felt. The unmistakable vibration of Trouble. And the undeniable urge to run.

  Hehehehehehe…

  It came from back in the pines, a wooded lot that was Toilet-adjacent. I looked around. As far as I could tell, everyone who’d been watching the Rafty show had gone back to the house. Biology told me I should do the same. Civilization agreed with biology. Back to the light! Back to the cookfires and piddling rules of society, shitty though they may be! It’s better than whatever’s out there!

  More laughter now. And more vomiting.

  On instinct, I pulled out my phone. Only one bar of battery, and flickering. Power drained by BoB, from reaching for a signal that wasn’t there. I flicked it to Airplane Mode to save whatever juice was left.

  So there I was: one of those behind-enemy-lines-without-a-radio moments. Go find reinforcements? And risk letting the bad thing that was clearly in progress happen? Or go in, half-cocked? A half-cocked half man?

  What would Drew do? What would Monica—

  Vomiting. Laughter.

  Without a plan, I walked into the pines.

  There was a fallen tree and a shaft of streetlight, enough to see a bunch of guy shapes, faceless in the shadows, standing in the ancient ritual semicircle of Guy Evil. I braced for what I’d see in the middle of that semicircle: some poor girl, blotto, in God knows what state of—

  But no. It was the shutterbug.

  Now his name came swimming back to me: Neville Ethan. No! Ethan Neville.

  And there was his steampunk Leica, his pathetic hipster accessory, the world’s last film camera, on the ground. In pieces. Ethan wasn’t in pieces quite yet, but it looked like he was headed that way. They had him draped over a pine like a duffel bag. His shirt was off, and his fish-belly-white torso glowed in the moonlight. He was heaving in weird ways, like he wasn’t quite conscious. Even from a ways off, I could smell him. Had science found a way to distill Jolly Ranchers into liquor?

  “The Human CamelBak,” someone funnied, unfunnily. “Coming to a theater near you.”

  “Not too near, man. He’s gonna—”

  Ethan upchucked some noxious, unreal color, the kind of atomic green found only in low-budget science fiction and high-toxicity cleaning products. They’d pumped him full of one of those candy liquors. Probably convinced him he could be one of the pack or something.

  “It spilled,” another voice observed. “Refill!”

  And now I recognized the voices.

  It was the football team.

  Unhappy, perhaps, with their lack of yearbook coverage?

  Of course it was the football team: Spencer Inskip and his lineup of beefy mediocrities, my most fearsome middle school foes. Worse than Jazzy, even. Jazzy enjoyed humiliating people, but Spencer and Co.? Those dudes hit.

  Aside from Spencer, I’d blocked out their names, but I remembered their shapes: rhombus, rectangle, doucheahedron—shapes I often saw coming at me in my nightmares. Jesus, how much Pucker had they funneled down Ethan’s gullet to get him to take his shirt off?

  Leaves crunched underfoot, announcing me.

  Six pairs of drunk-but-not-nearly-drunk-enough eyes swiveled to me: together, the assembled shapes were a giant mutant spider in the dark. Well. Here we were. Half Man vs. Acromantula! Me and Shelob down by the schoolyard! I spoke the following in my testosteroniest voice:

  “Hey, uh, what’s happenin’, guys?”

  Triangle shrugged. “All’s well, little man. Just having fun.” This voice was silkier. It belonged, I knew, to Spencer.

  “You okay?” I asked the kid, whose name, in the midst of staving off a full-scale panic attack, I had forgotten again. Ah, there it was: “Ethan? You having fun?”

  “Private party,” Rhombus growled, in defiance of the dangerous lack of self-awareness it takes to actually growl the words “private party.”

  I felt the nearly dead phone in my hand and, on pure reflex, lifted it. And hit Flashlight. Bathed the woods in a clean white Gandalfian glow.

  “Shit,” said one baller, and started edging off, back toward the party. Another followed him. Wow. Instant reaction. I would have felt downright powerful if I hadn’t been so busy shitting myself. How long would the light last? Not long.

  Rhombus came forward on his knuckles, or seemed to. “Give me the goddamn phone, shit twist.”

  I stepped back. “Sure,” I said, “but I’m live-streaming, and it looks to me like Ethan might need a ride home. So—”

  “Oh my God! What did you assholes do?” The voice came from behind me: familiar, but my adrenalized brain couldn’t run the plate until I saw my lab partner, Sidney Lim.

  Oh, thank God.

&n
bsp; Sidney ran to Ethan’s side. By that time, he was out cold.

  “The hell’s wrong with you?” Sidney muttered to the remaining meat stacks.

  Sidney and Ethan Neville are friends was my initial, idiotic thought. That’s weird. Brains get strange when they think they’re about to die.

  “Jesus. I’m calling an ambulance.”

  “Sid,” came Spencer’s silky, triangular voice again, “don’t be dumb.”

  “Dumb?! Dumb was when you dick warts poisoned him. You know how he is.”

  “How is he, Sid?” Spencer’s voice was a creepy, even hum. “You two close, or is this just another one of your rescue puppies?”

  They locked eyes. Spencer. Sidney. Another idiotic thought drifted through my head: Spencer and Sidney. They used to date. Huh.

  “You’re torturing my friends now?”

  “This derp’s not your friend,” said Spencer. “You collect these betas, Sid.” And here he gestured vaguely in my direction. “They worship you. It’s sad.”

  “Get medicated, psycho,” Sid spat. “Ethan? Can you hear me?”

  “I dunno,” and his voice was the low hum of a white noise machine. “I seem like the calm one here, Sid. You’re the one— What are you doing?”

  Sidney held up her phone, showed him the 911 she’d already dialed. “And I hope the EMTs call the cops on every last one of you Pop Warner date rapists.”

  “Hey, bit—” growled Rhombus, but Spencer held up a restraining hand. With a nod from him, the shapes began to disperse. Best to be gone when the ambulance pulled up.

  Sid was already hoisting Ethan, staggering low to get his right arm around her neck. “Can you help?” Rectangle, the most soul-enabled of the ballers, started swooping in, but Sidney shook her head. “Not you. Will? A little help here?”

  A little help. I almost made the joke so I could be the punch line. Plain old derision felt much safer than this. But instead, I got under Ethan’s left side—

  Oof. Never in my life, before or since, have I felt anything heavier than Ethan Neville felt that night. I don’t even know how I did it.

  “Hey, Will,” called Spencer, in his most pointed, most triangular voice. “Let’s talk later.”