XL

by Scott Brown

  I had no answer for him.

  So Mike made a move for the mangoes—

  Jollof was on him in a hot second.

  Biting, cuffing, and—whoomp! Magic Mike went tumbling, then ran screeching for the safety of the bamboo brakes.

  I started toward the door, but Jollof cut me off.

  I froze. He froze. His silver ruff was fluffed up, spiked, like a live current was running through it. He had, I noticed queasily, an enormous erection. Welp, I thought, this is when I get raped to death by an angry gorilla. What a week.

  But right within arm’s reach, Jollof just…sniffed. Gave me what primatologists call “the stink eye.” (Am I getting that right, primatologists?) He twitched his lips and huffed. Like he was trying to decide who I was, what I was. Sizing me up. Satisfying some scientific curiosity. Then he snorted. Hard enough to blow my hair back a bit. I don’t speak Gorillese, but I’m as simian as the next guy, and this snort said, pretty clearly, GTFO.

  So I GTFO’d. Fast.

  * * *

  —

  Back in the staging area, my heart still racing, I watched things return to normal.

  Jollof snapped at a couple of betas, ate his fill, kicked a few melons into the dirt to make his point, beat his chest thunderously, then mounted Blue. Just another Saturday.

  What the hell was that all about?

  Theories: Maybe Jollof could tell—or smell—that I’d had a few the night before. Maybe he was Southern Baptist, and judgmental. (This would actually explain a lot about Jollof.)

  Maybe he just didn’t like my new shoes.

  No one had seen what happened—Brian had been in the office, and I was so reliable that nobody watched me on the monitor anymore. I didn’t share. I picked up the Aggression Log, wrote attacked Magic Mike under Jollof’s name. I looked at the previous fourteen entries. They were all attacked Magic Mike.

  I sighed. That’s the story, I thought, of the rest of their lives, both of them. Biology is destiny. And in real life, destiny doesn’t have much of a plot. It’s just a pattern. Reruns. Then death.

  My hand hovered over “Additional Notes,” but I left it blank. Left out how he’d gotten between me and the door. Feeders who ran afoul of Jollof were immediately reassigned. This? This was a fluke, I convinced myself.

  I couldn’t lose the one job I was good at, not today.

  “Hey! Belated birthday boy!”

  I turned. Drew showed no trace of a hangover except a little squint and a careless choice of T-shirt—SeaWorld Seal-ebration! Something from the dirty laundry, I guessed.

  “So what’d I miss?”

  The laundry. That meant he’d been home. Where’d he slept? Had he slept?

  I didn’t want answers to these questions. Why was Asshole Brain asking them?

  “Uh, nothing, you missed nothing,” I told him. “Just…some…great apes. Some really great apes.”

  Asshole Brain was spitting out frantic junk code: Where’d he sleep didn’t see him at home but the shirt wait the shirt was in his gym bag had they did they did they?

  Pock pock pock. Drew drummed his fingers on the habitat’s glass. “How’s our little guy?”

  “Jollof? Model citizen. Even spell-checks his tweets now.”

  “You got some downtime?” Drew asked. In his voice, I heard it: the Conversation. He wanted to have the Conversation. Little did he know, I’d rehearsed the very same conversation: my version. With me playing the role of rebel lover. Drew…I know the three of us have been friends forever, but…Monica and I…we’re…something more….It was a Fire Speech, a Break Glass in Case of Emergency Address. There’d been a crisis, all right. Just not in my favor.

  I shook my head. “Y’know, I got in late, and I’m slammed. I was just gonna grab a turkey sub….”

  Drew wasn’t shakable. “Cool. I could eat. I’ll come with.”

  In my defense, I really did want a turkey sub. I’d wanted one all morning.

  Maybe more than one.

  Something about the combination of being threatened by an erect gorilla and anticipating the most awkward conversation of your life with the best friend who’s robbed you of your one true love just makes a guy want a foot-long Gibbity Gobbler from the Kibble Kiosk outside the Chinchilla Experience.

  “I could eat.” Always hated that phrase. It made me want to snap back: How nice for you! It’s so good to have options! But that was just Asshole Brain talking, and Asshole Brain was not happy with Andrew Tannenger.

  Will Daughtry just wanted a sandwich. So hungry.

  In line, I waited for Drew to tell me about Monica. I could tell he wasn’t eager to, for the same reasons I wouldn’t have been. He was noodling through some postparty gossip: how drunk Ethan Neville got, how Rafty Royall beat Eric Forchette at horse. How Eric gargled trash can–punch and got into a huge screamer with his girlfriend in the driveway. On and on. And the family of five in front of us was taking forever to order….

  I couldn’t take it anymore.

  “Hey, lemme just…before you go on…I think it’s only fair to say: I…I saw you guys.”

  Drew looked confused and mildly panicked. I put him out of his misery:

  “You and Monica. On the beach path at Jazzy’s.”

  Drew was quiet for a long, long time. He seemed to have trouble meeting my eyes. More than usual, I mean: This wasn’t a height-disparity issue. This was a shame issue. I didn’t blame him.

  No, wait. I did blame him.

  “Yeah,” he said finally. “I was gonna…I mean, shit.” The fact that they’d been seen, by me—that hadn’t been factored into Drew’s confession plan, or whatever it was he’d cooked up on the way over here. This new information threw him off. Made him a little mad, even.

  Which made me a little happy, maybe?

  Stop, I told Asshole Brain. Just. Stop.

  “You could’ve said something,” Drew said.

  Hooboy. Really, buddy?

  I stopped arguing with A. Brain and let it take the wheel. “Uh. Said something? Like what? Hey, could you two stop making out for a second, I wanna tell you something: I’m watching you two make out!”

  Drew ran his hand through his hair. Stung and humbled. Which A. Brain rewrote as hung and stumbled. Now my brain was just trolling me.

  But Drew was genuinely brushed back. “Dude…I’m sorry. I…this is…it’s kinda like telling someone you made out with your own sister, isn’t it?”

  “Is it? If it is, that is weird. For you.”

  I sucked on my teeth a minute. Waited to see if Drew had a reply. He didn’t. He just stood there.

  “No,” I said, “it’s worse than telling someone you made out with your sister. Because you’re not just telling someone. You’re telling your brother.”

  Drew looked appalled. I let it hang a second.

  Then I laughed. Punched him gently in the gut, the customary shoulder being out of my reach.

  “Kidding. Kidding! I’ve been thinking about it, and…I think…”

  And here it was. The fattest, fiercest lie I’d told in a week of lies.

  “…I think…that this…the two of you…that this is a good thing.”

  Drew…laughed.

  Explosively. A huge trapped bubble of pure relief escaping his thorax. You could almost see the cloud of relief spell out the word relief over his head. Which made me—

  Grrrrrrrrooowl.

  My stomach. Pacing its cage. Audibly. The littlest kid from the family of five ahead of us actually turned and looked: What was that? Did something escape?

  Drew either didn’t hear the growl or chose to ignore it. He was still laughing, still relieved. Couldn’t process anything else. “I’m so…so…glad to hear that, dude. You don’t know how much…last night…Well, we basically stayed up all night, talking about you.”r />
  “Me?”

  “You, and the Plan.”

  Of course. The Plan. Can’t endanger the Plan!

  “I don’t wanna pretend nothing’s different,” Drew was saying. “This is…Well, it kind of snuck up on us, and I want to make sure we, y’know, limit the, y’know…”

  Damage. I did know.

  “…effects. I mean. It’s so strange. Last night, man, I don’t know…it was just…different. She was different. She made me feel different. I mean, I dunno, coulda been the game, coulda been the beer.” He suddenly realized what he was saying. “I mean, it wasn’t. At all. It was…real. It is real.” He grinned.

  The phrase slap that grin off started to write itself on the bathroom wall of my bad, bad brain. I quickly erased it. But Drew was still grinning. “Probably a really, really bad idea, right?”

  Grrrrrrrrooowl.

  Drew heard me that time. “Was that you?”

  “Uh, yeah. I’m…uh…hangover hungry, I guess?”

  Drew clapped me on the shoulder, too hard. “What’d you get into last night?”

  I only hated Drew a little at that moment. I was much too preoccupied with hating myself. How was any of this his fault? I’d never given the slightest signal I felt anything toward Monica but brotherly love. I hadn’t confided any of my innermost feelings to my closest friend in the world. Instead, I’d tried to hide those feelings, smuggle them past my blood brother, like a guilty little thing fleeing the light. Which, in retrospect: bad move! Oh, and I’d never suspected Drew of feeling anything other than brotherly love for Monica, either. Which, also in retrospect: stupid, galactically stupid!

  Why should I have expected him to see what I couldn’t?

  After we’d yammered awhile about alcohol, as if we were old drinking buddies, Drew said, “You never answered my question.”

  I was lost.

  “Is this…is this a really, really bad idea?”

  “It’s a little late to worry about that, isn’t it?”

  Drew’s eyes darkened a shade. “So you do think it’s a bad idea.”

  “I think…” What I think I thought was: I’m being an asshole. Think, schmink: I was being an asshole. I’d somehow stumbled thigh-deep into asshole swamps I’d hoped to avoid. But now that I was there…“I think it’s risky, sure.”

  “That’s it?” he said. “ ‘Risky’? You think it’s risky?”

  “Risky’s not the same as bad….”

  “I know! But you’re supposed to disagree.” He shook his head. “Because I think…Will…”

  Oh, Jesus, I thought. Here it comes.

  “I think I…I think she…maybe the two of us…maybe we’ve always…”

  I needed to stop whatever was being said here. I knew I didn’t want to hear it. So I slapped a big ol’ Band-Aid on this gusher of a burst aneurysm:

  “I don’t think you’d have done it if you thought it was wrong, deep down. You two are my closest friends in the world. This is…new. I just gotta, y’know, stress-test it. Kick the tires. That’s my job.”

  Drew smiled. Appeased. Grateful. We were at the front of the line. “Sub?” he offered. “I’m buying.”

  Because eventually the silverback lets the betas eat, right?

  “Sub me,” I said.

  Grrrrrrowl.

  “Whoa! Right in the nick of time. You better feed that thing!”

  * * *

  —

  Drew stared at me as I took the last two bites of my sub. His wasn’t even half-finished.

  He whistled. “Would not want to meet your hangover in a dark alley.”

  Two pounds of food in three minutes can’t be healthy, but Drew offered me his other half anyway, saying he was late for practice. Which left me alone with his sub. Two minutes later, I was just alone.

  I finished my shift at the zoo, carefully avoiding Brian. I stared in at Jollof for a while, trying to make sense of his episode. Maybe he’d sensed my mood? Animals can do that. Almost felt bad for ol’ Asshole, having to sense a mood like mine.

  I clocked the hell out.

  Back in the safe zone of my bedroom, I pried my sneaks off my bloated river-corpse feet and fell deeply, deeply asleep. It was two-thirty.

  And then I was at BoB.

  Except one of the two red cliffs was crushed to pebbles and Monica was there, talking about how the Big Wave had come and gone and had taken a few things with it, a few people with it, and not the ones you’d expect. All in all, though, she said, the Big Wave hadn’t been as big as she’d hoped. She’d surfed it anyway.

  I couldn’t tell where she was bleeding, only that she left red footprints.

  Behind her, on the water, something was…breaching. Bigger than a gray. Bigger than a blue. Like the ocean itself was splitting its skin, tearing itself apart from the inside, like a birth gone horror-movie bad. And this Thing, whatever it was, rose and rose out of the water, kept rising, volcano-high. Monica took zero notice, even as it threw a long shadow over her, over us. She just kept looking at me. Like she was waiting for an answer, but I hadn’t understood the question.

  I opened my mouth to warn her, and seawater came out.

  “Will?!”

  I opened my eyes. Darkness. Then light. Way too much light. Laura’d flipped on my bedroom dome. It was like dropping a safe on my face.

  Laura was in her plaid cotton pajamas. What time was it?

  “We couldn’t wake you up,” Laura said. Then she called down the hall: “He’s up, he’s fine, don’t call an ambulance.”

  “Ambulance?”

  “We were really worried.”

  There was a ridge between her eyebrows I’d only seen at Drew’s games, when the Harps were losing. Brian came in. Bit of a ridge between his brows, too. What was going on?

  “Will, do you know what time it is?”

  I shook my head.

  “Seven.”

  I clocked fresh sunlight peeking through the blinds. “A.M.?”

  “Sunday morning. You fell asleep…when?”

  I looked around my room, as if my Visible Human Body mock-up or my scale-model gibbon skeleton would provide some sort of answer. “Yesterday?”

  “Afternoon. That’s not normal,” Laura said to Brian, like I wasn’t even there.

  “Will, how do you feel?”

  Grrrrrrowl.

  “Hungry,” I said, getting up. “And fine. I feel fine. Seriously.”

  I did, too. I felt…great. Actually. Hungry. And great.

  In the fridge, I found an unopened pack of hickory-smoked turkey, ripped the pull tab, crammed a cold handful of wet deli slices in my mouth. They slid down my throat too easily. Drew was in the kitchen, eating almonds and reading A Coach’s Life. He was looking me over again, the way he’d looked me over at the Lowlands. Are you okay? Is there anything I can do? Is this my fault?

  It just made me angry.

  Grrrrowl.

  Which just made me hungry. Hungrier.

  “I think we should take him to the doctor,” Laura was telling my dad. Laura was always up for going to the doctor. Laura, by herself, was probably one of the top five reasons health-care costs are out of control.

  “Now hang on,” Brian said. “I think overeating and sleeping in are pretty normal for any gr—”

  Brian choked on the word. Then corrected:

  “For a teenage boy.”

  I stopped eating.

  He’d started to say growing. And stopped himself.

  I swallowed the meat in my mouth.

  “You can say growing, Dad. It’s just an expression.” Here’s the great thing about Getting Angry: it takes on its own momentum. That’s why I added: “It’s just a fucking expression.”

  “Will!”

  “Believe me, nobody in this hous
e,” I yelled, plummeting into the abyss, “takes the expression growing boy literally! Or seriously!”

  “Will, I never meant to—”

  “Stop being so careful with me, okay?! Stop pretending!”

  I was heading for the pantry. I barely knew why. Instinct, man. Sometimes you don’t wanna get between instinct and a basket of mangoes, am I right? Rage has its own rules. I jerked out the second drawer down, the junk drawer, plunged a hand under a layer of greasy, forgotten soy sauce packets. My fingers closed on it:

  The tape measure.

  When I turned back, they were all watching me. Embarrassed. For me? For themselves? My answer was the same either way: Good. Let them feel as embarrassed as I did every minute of every day.

  I grabbed a Sharpie off the counter, stood at the doorframe, my back to it, flat against it. Slashed a nice fat black line right at my crown, right at Peak Me. Then I took the tape measure, stomped on the tab, yanked it up for all to see: the awful truth. Data. Brutal. Irrefutable.

  “There,” I said. “That’s what’s real. Let’s just face it.”

  I faced it.

  “Dude,” I heard Drew say before I actually read the measurement. Drew was staring at the doorframe with an expression of utter surprise, which was not an expression I associated with the Special.

  I stared, too. And what I saw—it didn’t make sense.

  The slash I’d made was above my last line. Three inches above my last line, from years back. Which could mean only one thing.

  I was five feet, two inches tall.

  We all stared at it for a while. This new New Normal. What was the proper response here? Part of me wanted to pull a Rafty: pump a fist, take a doorframe selfie, post the evidence to everything postable. Part of me wanted to cry. Because it was so little. And so much.

  I settled for “Huh.”

  “Well,” said Brian, with a grin he clearly couldn’t control. “Look. At. That!”

  I remeasured. Laura remeasured. Brian and Drew remeasured. I made sure we scientific-methoded the crap out of this, scrubbed all bias. In moments like these—fluky, outlier-y, percentile-jumping—it pays to be skeptical.

  But the results were pretty hard to argue with. There are only so many ways a tape measure can malfunction.