XL

by Scott Brown

  I thought about playing it cool. Then I thought, Screw that. I jumped up, half expecting to stick in midair as credits started to roll underneath me.

  Drew grabbed me, lifting me higher. Kinda brotherly, kinda toddlery. But I didn’t mind, because: Five feet. Two inches. It’d snuck up on me somehow, during those dark unmeasurable eons. Had I been slouching? Consistently? For years?

  That made no sense. And made no difference. All that mattered to me was that it was here. It was happening. It was measurable. I was measurable.

  “Could be a spurt in the last year—heck, even the last six months,” babbled Brian, trying to strike a balance between thrilled and insultingly thrilled. “It’s not unheard of!”

  “I guess it explains why you’ve been so tired,” said Laura, sounding relieved.

  I didn’t need explanations. I knew what I needed to know:

  Today I was a new form of life. A growing one.

  As the kitchen calmed down, Drew smiled. “So…what do you want to do now?”

  I thought about that. So many possibilities, all of a sudden. But only one that made instant sense.

  “Let’s eat.”

  IF YOU’RE AVERAGE size, the difference between four foot eleven and five foot two probably doesn’t sound like much. So what? You went from being one kind of short dude to another kind of short dude. BFD!

  Let me tell you just how FB a D it was: the difference between four eleven and five two is the difference between being below human radar and being a blip on the screen.

  I’ll take the blip.

  At four eleven, you don’t register as anything, unless you’re surrounded by clowns and jugglers.

  At five two, you’re a short man making his way in the world, a short man in a long tradition. Prince. Carnegie. Manson. Men of just over five feet have redefined pop, built steel empires, and started highly successful murder cults.

  Me, I was happy just clicking my Fiat’s seat back a notch. Tiny little thing, but suddenly? My ride felt like a ride. Not a verdict.

  The morning of the doorframe, after we’d returned from a celebratory brunch (at which none of us, not even yours truly, bothered disguising our glee), I went to my room and clinked through the various tubes and bottles of herbal growth supplements I’d been squirreling away for years in a small gray footlocker I’d pushed to the back of my closet. I opened it up, smelled the plume of strange herbs that blossomed out of it. I sorted through the bottles, the many foreign words and characters, reviewing what I’d taken and when, in what order, in what combinations.

  Turns out I hadn’t been very scientific about it.

  My growth supplement habit/obsession/addiction lasted almost two years, and it wasn’t pretty. You could even see it, I guess, as a kind of mild self-mutilation. I’d find some new tincture or essence on the internet, gulp it down faithfully for a month or so, see no change, quit, swear, Never again. Then, three months later, I’d order more snake oil. But had one of them actually worked? If so, why now? What was the secret sauce?

  Was it just…wanting it bad enough?

  That was my least scientific theory. And, I’ve got to admit, my favorite.

  * * *

  —

  “It was the lifts, obviously,” Rafty said.

  We were hanging out on his elaborate front porch, which his mom and dad modeled after one they saw on a show called Epic Porches. (The apple, in Rafty’s case, did not fall far from the epic porch.)

  “Rafty, I told you, I wasn’t wearing them when I measured—”

  “No, man, they, like, spurred it. They challenged your body.”

  “I think my body was plenty challenged before you gave me those lifts, Rafty.”

  “Whatever, man. Perception is reality.”

  “Yeah, but not…really.”

  “What’s ‘really’?” He made a psychic flutter with his hand, which made me snort-laugh. “Speaking of those lifts, where are they? Dude! They’d take you up to, like, five three and a half now! I mean, I’d miss you down here, but…”

  Obviously, I couldn’t tell him that Monica and I threw them into the ocean. So I went with something almost true: “I’m actually good where I am.”

  Rafty smiled. “I see that. You’ve got that glow, man. The way, like, pregnant women get.”

  “Mmm. Thanks?”

  “Hang on, got an idea.” Rafty ran off.

  A few seconds later, I heard the eeek eeek eeek of something heavy rolling down the driveway on rusty casters.

  Rafty’s Pro Slam basketball hoop, set at eight feet, for peewee dunking. Rafty’d had it since we were at basketball camp together.

  “Okay…”

  “Hang on,” said Rafty. “The pièce de résistance!” He ran off again, came back rolling a trampoline on its side. He let it fall onto its rubber hooves about four feet from the hoop, then just stood there, grinning like an idiot.

  “Do we dare, Treetops?”

  I grinned back. “We dare.”

  And we dunked off the trampoline, like a couple of trained monkeys, happy and stupid, for hours.

  * * *

  —

  “Let’s game this out,” Drew said. “New plan! Huddle up!”

  It was a blindingly beautiful day at BoB, and Drew was already ruining it.

  “I like the old plan,” said Monica. “The one where we just swim?”

  “Did you just say huddle up?” I asked. “Right here? In real life?”

  “Yes. I did. Sorry to go all team captain on you guys, but we’ve been avoiding this.”

  I had been, for sure. For just over ten days, since the Night of the Toilet, the night I’d heard that click of MoniDrew DNA coupling, I’d avoided facing the New Normal, because the New Normal hurt. Horribly. But I was still glorying in my newfound five-foot-two-ness, enjoying how the world felt different, even if some of it was probably imagined. (I hadn’t grown three inches overnight, obviously. Obviously.)

  (Right?)

  My bed felt like it fit me better, though—less vast, more snug—and my clothes did, too. Even the climb down the cliff face felt different; my feet landed in different spots, in different ways. Half the time, I felt like I was falling; half the time, it was more like flying. I was higher off the water, farther above the sand. I had—very literally—a new angle on life, and I had a lot of catching up to do. So I didn’t feel like dwelling on anything that got me down. But Spesh was in planner mode, shot-caller mode, and would not be denied.

  “We need something,” Drew said. “We need, like, rules. Or a referee.”

  “A parliamentarian,” Monica offered, but she was barely paying attention. Her eyes were where her eyes usually were, on the horizon—which, today, was a squiggle of churn. The Sawtooth was restless.

  “Yes!” said Drew. “A parliamentarian! Whatever that is!”

  “Can I play devil’s advocate for a sec?” I asked. “Why do we need new rules? Why do we need referees all of a sudden?”

  Drew paced. “Think,” he said, “about what happens if we, I dunno, disagree about something. Something more important than Burritos or burgers? Like, college, maybe. And then all of a sudden, it’s two on one.”

  I couldn’t resist:

  “Am I ‘one’?”

  Drew flushed. Caught. “Well, no. Course not. Not…necessarily, no. It could be any two of us against any one of us.”

  “But that was true before,” Monica put in, still turned away, still Tooth-watching.

  “Riiiight,” Drew improvised, with effort, “but, y’know…maybe we need some ground rules about what’s, y’know, in bounds….”

  “ ‘In bounds’?”

  Drew was looking for any way to talk about our new need for boundaries without mentioning who redrew those boundaries in the first place. And without mentioning that two
of the three of us spent a nonzero amount of time groping each other’s bodies, while the third ate turkey subs and cleaned ape habitats, and that was why we needed new boundaries. I knew this. Drew knew this. Monica knew it, too, which is why she stood fifteen feet apart and watched waves eat each other.

  “Okay!” Drew said, palms up in surrender. “You got me, you two! I am no! Good! With the ‘words’! I just wanna think strategically about this. I liked the old Plan. I liked where it was going. Where we were going. I don’t want that to change.”

  “I don’t want it to change, either,” I said, and I was mostly telling the truth. Though part of me thought: Where we’re going? We’re not going anywhere.

  That was the whole plan. To stay near each other, to stay put. Thus: UCSD, Irvine, etc.

  “I’m all for not overthinking this,” said Monica, but her voice was half swallowed by the crushing surf past the jetty.

  “Right,” said Drew. “So we all agree: no change.”

  “How about this,” said Monica, coming over. And just like that, she drew new lines in the sand, new rules for a New Plan, which was really just the old Plan in disguise, with thicker bumpers bolted on. The rules were:

  Don’t make it weird.

  If things are made weird, ask yourself: Would things be weirder if the third person were here? Or would things be less weird if that person were here?

  If the answer to either of those is yes, don’t make it weird.

  “But,” I noted, “we are weird. We’ve always been weird.”

  “True,” mulled Monica, “so…remember your Ben Franklin.”

  Drew was lost. “ ‘I put a key on a kite, so now there’s electricity somehow’?”

  “No, dude,” I corrected. “She means the famous Ben Franklin saying: ‘I love freedom and hate syphilis, but I also love French prostitutes, so sue me.’ ”

  “He didn’t really have syphilis,” said Monica.

  “WHAT?! I was lied to! There goes my childhood!”

  “Actually,” Monica rolled on, “I was thinking of ‘Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.’ ”

  “Yikes,” said Drew.

  “Except for us, I’d paraphrase it: Three can be weird, if two are weird and the third is willing.”

  We stared at her like broken slot machines, matching sets of lemons.

  Monica tried again: “We can be weird. As long as things don’t…get weird. Huh? Whatcha think?”

  I rolled that one around. “Well…it’s definitely…weird.”

  “Yeah,” said Drew. “I’m pretty sure none of that made any sense.”

  “Well then, how about we just do what we already do,” said Monica. “Stay out of each other’s way. While simultaneously always being there for each other. Right?”

  Was that what we always did? Yeah. It kind of was. I’d never thought of it in terms so clear. But then, clarity was a Monica specialty. You just had to let her get there.

  I concurred. “That sounds good to me. Drew? You turn your key on that?”

  Drew’s phone started screaming an alarm. Practice beckoned.

  “I turn my key,” said Drew, heading for the cliff. “Grabbin’ a Lyft. You two okay?”

  “We’re fine,” Monica said. She gave him a quick peck. I made a small opera of not noticing, of catching sight of something off the coast. Oh, look! Gray whale!

  Drew climbed the cliff trail. Monica stayed.

  “Come surfing with me,” she said. “Got both boards, and your extra suit’s in BoB.”

  I hesitated.

  She saw me hesitate.

  Five minutes into the New Old Plan, and shit was already getting weird.

  “Can’t,” I lied, thinking, Maybe I need to make some rules of my own, just for me. “Got a thing with Rafty. Promised.”

  “Okay.” She hugged me. Solid and platonic, friend hug of death. Not hard enough to feel the One Ring under my T-shirt, luckily. I didn’t want her to know I was still wearing it. I didn’t even know why I was still wearing it. “I swear to God,” she said, “you’re…”

  She didn’t say taller. She just let it hang.

  It’s funny: Monica never mentioned my height. Ever. Until that moment.

  We hadn’t really talked about it, the Heightening. I wasn’t telling people. Telling people you’re now five two is like telling people you’re no longer obese, just overweight.

  But I knew Drew had told Mon about the tape measure. Was that weird? Pre-MoniDrew, it wouldn’t have been. It just would’ve been How Information Travels Between Friends.

  Monica smiled, shrugged. “Anyway: whales and waves wait for no woman.”

  “Pick you up later?”

  “Nah. I’ll take the bus.”

  “You sure?”

  “I like reading on the bus.”

  “Hipster affectation.”

  “For you, maybe, Daughtry. I’m actually poor.”

  And with that, Monica Bailarín dove into the surf.

  Athena Departing an Awkward Conversation.

  * * *

  —

  Later, I was gathering behavioral data from questionable sources—building a histogram from creepy old-school internet personals, the really gross kind—on female interest in men who were five foot two (a small but noticeable uptick!) when I noticed my fingernails clicking against the keyboard. They needed trimming.

  Again. But I’d trimmed them just the day before. That seemed notable.

  I went to the bathroom and trimmed. That’s when I noticed my scruff—my sparse and slow-growing scruff, which needed attention only every three weeks or so, and then only on my upper lip and a few patches hither and yon—was scruffier than usual.

  That seemed notable, too.

  It’d been eleven days since the Doorframe Revelation.

  I wondered.

  I went downstairs, marched into the kitchen on a mission, became briefly distracted by a large Tupperware full of spaghetti Bolognese, quietly, guiltily washed the empty tub when I was finished, and then approached the doorframe. Carefully. Respectfully. As if it might bite. I put my back to the pine, slashed a new mark. Measured: five foot two…and three-quarters.

  Eleven days. Almost an inch.

  An obvious operator error, any reasonable biologist would conclude.

  So I checked it five times. I almost went to find Laura, to get her to check.

  But I didn’t. I knew it would worry her.

  By then, even I was a little worried.

  IT’S WEIRD, AND not particularly fun, spending summer vacation getting examined (and examined, and examined) in the same hospital where your mom died.

  I don’t recommend it.

  It was also weird hearing my physician, Dr. Danielle Helman (5′9″), inform Brian and Laura (in the quiet, controlled tones I knew from experience to be the Voice of Very Bad News) that it was “probably pathological.”

  Since my birthday, I’d grown six inches. In about three months.

  I knew what that meant.

  That meant cancer.

  Pituitary, more than likely. Maybe adrenal. Gigantism.

  Maybe late-breaking Marfan syndrome, if I was lucky.

  I wasn’t feeling so lucky, all of a sudden.

  Before my smallness became statistically bizarro (she didn’t live to see my nonstarter of an adolescence), my mom liked to tell me about her father and grandfather, both under five six and decorated war heroes. They learned (in Mom’s telling, at least) that being not-the-biggest man teaches you how to be the bigger man. That “modest stature” wasn’t the worst thing in the world.

  Then, later—also via Mom—I learned what the worst thing in the world actually was.

  Now the same genes I’d complained about making me a midget were sen
ding me skyward at a growth rate far beyond the norm. Now my weird genes were probably going to kill me, same as they’d killed Mom.

  UCSD had a topflight Human Growth and Endocrinology Unit (or HGEU, which my brain always respelled as HUGE). That was the good news. The bad news was that UCSD was where Mom spent her last nine weeks. So I was very, very familiar with UCSD, in the worst way.

  I noticed immediately that they hadn’t updated the vending machines. The Grandma’s cookie that clung to its ring by one desperate, mangled corner of wrapper, ready to fall any second—had it been hanging like that for the better part of a decade? I remembered trying to shake it loose one long, bad night when Mom was starting her terminal dive. Was it the same cookie? It couldn’t be, right? What was the life span of a Grandma’s cookie anyway, preservatives notwithstanding?

  So many memories in this wing. HUGE was adjacent to Oncology. Which seemed ghoulish. Yet correct.

  I was fed into the same MRI tunnel she was. Got my blood drawn on the same chair, arm tied off by the same nurse (well, I think it was the same nurse—similar scowl, similar vampiric pallor), all while wrapped in the same kind of soothing-floral-print hospital gown my mom was wearing when she slipped softly out of this world like laundry down a chute.

  I talked to my mom a lot in that MRI tunnel. There wasn’t much else to do. What did we talk about? Topics ranged. Mom, don’t let me be sick. Mom, don’t let me die. Natural enough thoughts. But the big one, strangely, was:

  Mom…on the off chance I’m not dying…

  …please don’t let them stop me.

  Because this had already been discussed: responding to the Heightening with a Stoppening. Braking my growth, gently, with hormones. Hormones fighting hormones. I was not in favor of this option. It seemed…contrary. Not to mention dangerous. Cock-blocking a miracle—isn’t that a special kind of crime? Unless it wasn’t a miracle. Just a disease. You’d think somebody could tell the difference.

  But no. The doctors asked a thousand questions, exploring the possibility of an environmental trigger. Endocrine disrupters, that sort of thing. What was a typical meal in our house? (Answer: organic everything, light on meat, free of pesticides, herbicides, hormones, antibiotics.) Was I on any medications? Had I shown evidence of any strange new allergies? Had anything new, anything nonstandard been introduced into the household in the last year? Was I huffing Roundup? Did I meditate?