XL

by Scott Brown

  No, no, no, no, no. Very, very, very slowly, everything was ruled out.

  By the time all those tests were done, I’d grown another inch.

  Brian and I waited for the (partial) results of the (initial) tests in Dr. Helman’s office, where several generations of healthy, hardy Helmans were running around on her bookshelf in tasteful Pottery Barn frames, playing soccer or tennis, celebrating birthdays, graduating from things. There’s something really strange about doctors (especially ones who deliver a lot of bad news, and Dr. Helman delivered a lot of bad news) showing off their evolutionary fitness to sick people.

  “It’s okay.” Brian patted my leg. “This is all just—they just need to be sure, that’s all.”

  Brian was more worried than I was. I had my worries, sure. I wasn’t an idiot. Any kid who’s watched a parent die knows that life can’t be trusted to deliver a happy ending. But I wasn’t worried on a gut level. On a gut level, I felt damned good. Empty, as always; hungry as hell. But basically, fundamentally good.

  In came Dr. Helman, and Brian sat up like a German shepherd. I felt bad for him, being back here—all those feelings stirred up, all over again.

  Dr. Helman pushed her glasses up her short, upturned nose as she read my chart. She looked like a pig—and I mean a nice pig, a cute pig, a Muppet pig. But a pig. Her face was hard to read. Could be: Kid’s a goner. Could be: Do these glasses make me look like I want truffles?

  Your mind goes to dumb places when you’re waiting to hear if you’re dying.

  “Well, gentlemen,” she said finally, “I’ll be honest: I’m stumped.”

  Brian leaned in. “So his hormone levels—?”

  “Normal. Which, frankly, makes no sense. And the MRI’s clean. There’s no evidence of a pituitary tumor.” I watched my dad relax. “Now, respirometer’s off the charts. His body’s eating oxygen like a grease fire. Why? I’ve only got theories, and they’re not great.” Dr. Helman shook her wise porcine head again. “Thirty years here, I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  That was saying something, because HUGE, from what I’d witnessed just today, had seen a lot. A cruel person might even deploy the term freaks, perhaps in conjunction with the word circus. In the waiting room before the respirometer test, I’d met a twenty-six-year-old just three feet tall, with normal-size arms. A nine-year-old girl who was creeping up on 6′3″—gigantism. Hands the size of baseball mitts and heart problems that could kill her in her late twenties, if not before. It was a real Tolkienopedia in here, everything from hobbits to orcs. I was at the time the most “average” guy in the room.

  And I was thrilled. Not just because I didn’t have a pituitary tumor (although, not for nothin’, bonus), but because the normal hormone levels and otherwise healthy readings meant maybe, just maybe, they’d leave me alone.

  “Now, none of this is conclusive or dispositive,” said Dr. Helman. “We’ll need weeks to analyze the data. We’re still looking at the adrenals. All we can tell you today is that it isn’t a pituitary tumor. But there’s a lot of lab work we’re—”

  “That’s something, that’s wonderful,” Brian said, shaking Dr. Helman’s hand too hard. All he’d heard was not a tumor, and for right now, that was enough. I shook Dr. Helman’s hand, too. She held it a little longer than necessary, looking at me like I was a prizewinning steer.

  “Really, now: No joint pain? No restless legs? Sleepless nights?” No, no, and no. She scrunched her eyes, gave me the medical once-over. “How do you feel?”

  “I feel…well, actually, I feel amazing.”

  That seemed to worry her. She made a note.

  * * *

  —

  I swung into Rafty’s driveway, late for our hang; the hospital visit had taken most of the morning. We were supposed to go to the Portola Embarcadero, where Rafty promised me a “full reupholstering.” I was leery of that. But I desperately needed new clothes. Lately, I needed new clothes every couple of weeks. As I set the parking brake and hauled out legs I was rapidly running out of legroom for—time to move the seat back another notch—I heard a digital click right next to my face. Rafty had appeared at the driver’s-side door. Phone at the ready, he was documenting.

  “Let’s get a shot right here by the Yacht.”

  “Sorry I’m late….”

  “Will. You. Are. A celebrity. You’re supposed to be late.”

  I yanked my backpack out of the passenger seat, tossed it into the back, marveling, for the fortieth time, at how easy that had become, how weightless the bag seemed now.

  Rafty rattled on. “So I checked Guinness, and this is on track to be the huge-largest growth spurt ever.”

  “Is huge-largest English or metric? I forget.”

  “Dude. People are gonna notice. People are already noticing.” He pulled up some randomly sourced fact sheet on his phone. “Dwight Howard: thirteen inches in a year. Impressive! But slower than you. Adam Rainer: guy from old-timey times, went from four feet tall at eighteen to over seven feet in his thirties. Bonkers. But! It took him almost fifteen years. Adam Rainer can’t touch Will Daughtry! And so, for the sake of our children’s children’s grandchildren, you gotta let me document your excellence. Now stand next to the Yacht. We’re doing this every day from now on.”

  I rolled my eyes. “No, man, I don’t wanna be one of those—”

  “You have to. For posterior generations.”

  “For posterity.”

  “Them too!”

  I sighed. “How long do I have to do this?”

  “Until you stop being amazing or the internet dies! Until forever!”

  So I stood by the Yacht, and Rafty clicked away.

  “Um. How many of these are you gonna—”

  “Perfection is not an accident, Highlander,” said Rafty, changing angles. “This is Photo Mark I, gotta set a precedent here. Chill with your huge self.”

  Click. Click. Click click click.

  * * *

  —

  Rafty was a clown, but he was right about one thing. People were noticing.

  More to the point: girl people were noticing.

  Or maybe girl people were just the ones I noticed noticing.

  I wasn’t getting ogled or eye-groped or anything. It was just…acknowledgment. Maybe a little curiosity thrown in.

  On a more practical, less sexy level: Rafty and I walked through the Portola Galleria now without zigzagging or fighting the current. Humanity parted for me, like I was actually there. Was this what walking was like for the average-size human?

  Passing Mister Vape, we saw Jazzy, huddled with two of his frowsier co-bongoliers. Jazzy wouldn’t meet my eyes. Funny, because it was easier now than it’d ever been, altitudinally. But when I nodded at him, I saw something new on his face, something I’d seen on many an ape face: uncertainty. About where he stood.

  That made me so happy, it was almost embarrassing.

  “So…,” Rafty said, “I have to ask again. In fact, I’ll never stop asking. What’d you do? To make this happen? It’s ’roids, right? If it’s ’roids, you can tell me. I’m a vault. Feds’ll never crack me. This is just between us Smalls.”

  “I didn’t ‘do’ anything.”

  “C’mon. You can tell ol’ Rafts.”

  “Ol’ Rafts, if I knew? I’d be tall and rich.”

  * * *

  —

  There was no scientific answer to Rafty’s unscientific question.

  But after failing to declare it to a series of UCSD doctors, I knew I had to show Brian my contraband. The box.

  Even in the face of cancer, I couldn’t bring myself to tell the white coats about it. I could barely admit it to myself. It was so shameful. Desperate. And potentially important to the path report, so it was time to tell someone. So Brian and I sat on my bed with the open box. He examined each bott
le and vial, sniffing, rubbing some of the dried herbs between thumb and forefinger. Trying to figure out what to say. He settled on:

  “This stuff—it’s completely unregulated, Will.”

  “I know, I—”

  “Incredibly dangerous, messing around with this kind of—”

  “Dad. I know.”

  He sighed. Put the bottles back in the box, gently closed the top, and left his palm on the lid, heavy and flat, like he was swearing on a Bible or trapping a small, snarling animal. “I wasn’t there for you. Was I?”

  “Dad…”

  “I had…no idea. And I should have. I feel…terrible.”

  “Don’t. Look. I wasn’t…telling anyone.” It was weird having a conversation like this with my dad—a real soul barer, about my body—under any circumstances. It was especially weird having a conversation like this because I was rapidly acquiring a different body, becoming a different person—and yeah, I mean proportionally, relative to Brian. A few months before, Brian had to tilt his head down to look me in the eye, even if we were sitting. Now I was gaining on him, fast. Fathers and sons usually have years to adjust to that kind of leveling.

  Brian and I had weeks.

  “Look,” I told him, “I don’t think any of this is, y’know, significant.”

  “You can’t know that—”

  “Because I’d stopped. Taking any of it.”

  “When?”

  “I dunno. A year ago?”

  “And you stopped because…”

  “I gave up.”

  Brian was giving me the sad eyes, the sea turtle eyes that make you think, Damn, my parents are old and also Did I do that to them?

  “Anyway,” I said. “I don’t think powdered monkey testicles are…timed-release or anything.”

  “Oh, please,” laughed Brian. “You think that’s really powdered monkey testicles?” He picked up the box. “We’ll have the lab run it all anyway. There’s enough here to keep UCSD busy for quite a while.”

  I watched the box leave the room for the last time.

  And, not for the last time, I prayed they wouldn’t find anything. I didn’t want the box to have anything to do with what was happening to me, good or bad.

  I wanted the only reason for what was happening to me to be Me.

  Looking back, I’m pretty sure I got my wish.

  SUMMER WENT ON while I waited on the toxicology analysis—the pituitary tumor had been ruled out, but more “exotic” possibilities hadn’t. I was still, potentially, a cancer grenade, pin pulled, waiting to blow. I wasn’t really celebrating.

  But I was still growing.

  I knew this because it had started to hurt a little. Not much, not excruciating, but it was there: this kind of pleasant ache, like I’d just run a mile. At night, though? My shin splints were exclamation points.

  And I kept tripping over things. Things that weren’t the right distance away anymore. Stairs. Rock outcroppings at BoB. Kitchen chairs. I was a figure drawn to a slightly different scale every day, it seemed. The world was doing a terrible job of adjusting to me.

  Dr. Helman had suggested, of all things, a weight lifting routine.

  “Gentle,” she said. “Easy. Nothing NFL. The important thing isn’t the weight you’re lifting; it’s the routine. Living in your body every day. Building out what they call your proprioception, your body awareness. Like an invisible scaffold.”

  I took Dr. Helman’s proprioception prescription and handed it to my physical therapist, Dr. Andrew Tannenger, B.o.B. And he gave me a weight lifting regimen.

  We lifted together, actually. Well: not together. Drew was lifting a lot more, and for different reasons. He was getting ready for varsity, staying in shape, playing in the La Jolla Summerhoop League. I was getting ready for…well, I didn’t really know what. I just wanted to stop tripping over my own feet. To stop being quite so surprised every time I passed a mirror.

  So I lifted. And I watched. I watched Drew burn through the Summerhoop League, where his team was a thinly veiled test run of the Harpoons’ varsity lineup. They were even called the Poca Resaca Mobys. (Not super subtle.) The Mobys had been unstoppable out of the gate, but in the last three games, Drew’d averaged fewer than eighteen points, which was considered shocking. Fans were chattering about “hype,” the way fans do. I didn’t think it had gotten to Drew.

  I was wrong.

  One night, against the Portola Warthogs, Drew was off from the jump, turning over the ball five times in the first half and shooting three for fifteen, crazy low for him.

  “What’s going on?” I asked Monica. Laura was covering her eyes. (Laura didn’t like suspense.)

  “No clue,” said Monica. Her typical game face, which I’d call Focused Detachment, had been replaced by Obvious Worry. Monica, in the previous incarnation of our trio, liked to affect not caring about the game of basketball overmuch. Basketball had been our thing, Drew’s and mine. I surfed with Monica, played hoops with Drew. Now Monica had to be a basketball superfan? Was that the New Plan? Or was that just…weird?

  “He’s psyching himself out,” muttered Brian. “Trying to solve problems he doesn’t have.”

  Grotesque and inelegant ball sprawled before us for the better part of forty minutes. Finally, mercifully, it was halftime.

  “Will?”

  And there was Sidney. Holding two giant sodas.

  “Hey, Sid!” Yikes. It came out a little Disney World!

  “I got two,” she explained, regarding the twin sodas, “but Ethan’s off sugar, something about his Adderall. You want this?”

  “Sure!” This wasn’t bullshit. I craved sugar water all the time. “Please, hand me some sweet, sweet diabetes.”

  Sid grinned, passed me a missile silo’s worth of high-fructose corn syrup, and sat down. Her hip touched mine, and to my surprise, the place it touched heated up to about nine thousand degrees Celsius.

  “C’mon, Mobys, c’mon!” Brian said, standing, clapping. He was the only one standing and clapping, because it was halftime. Brian was melting down a little.

  “Your dad’s had a long day,” Laura explained. “The chimpanzees started making spears.”

  “What?” Monica raised an eyebrow.

  “Yeah, apparently it’s a big deal.”

  “It is a big deal,” Brian editorialized. “It’s never happened in captivity before. Not just tool use, weapon use, in a zoo environment. C’MON, MOBYS!”

  “Brian? It’s halftime.”

  “I think I need popcorn,” said Brian. “Popcorn? I’m going for popcorn.”

  He sidled out of the bleachers. Laura sighed. “I’m off to talk your father down from his tree.”

  “Don’t give him a spear,” said Monica.

  Laura turned to Sidney. “I’m Laura Tannenger, Will’s stepmom.”

  They shook hands, as if something had just been transacted, and a small eruption of butterflies, for some reason, blew through my stomach. Laura scootched down the bleachers, caught up with my dad. Whispered something to him. I saw him turn, take in Sidney. Eek. My face, I imagined, cycled through six shades of red. I hoped nobody’d noticed.

  Monica was looking at Sidney, too. Just…looking.

  Sidney said, “Monica? Right?”

  “Monica,” said Monica. “Right.” She said it in her flat assassin voice. Monica regarded all rich, popular kids with suspicion, but I was a little surprised at this. Open hostility (except in special cases of self- or friend defense) was not Monica’s jam.

  “You tutored me in algebra? Seventh grade?” Sid attempted.

  “Mmm,” said Monica. “Yes. Algebra. The killing fields. One sec, gotta drain the dragon.” Monica stood, began sidling out of our row.

  Sid flipped back to me. “Crazy, huh?”

  “What?”

  “The
game.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Ugly ball.”

  “Refs are kinda obviously anti-Drew.”

  “Well,” I said, “to be fair, Drew is a little anti-Drew tonight.”

  Monica, in the aisle now, shot me a look as she headed for the bathroom: Uh. Traitor? She had a point. Why had I said something even vaguely Drew-critical? To an “outsider”?

  Maybe because Sid wasn’t quite an outsider these days. We’d been hanging out that summer, even without frogs to dissect.

  I wasn’t really sure what it meant, this new attention from Sid. Was it height-related? Better question: was it only height-related?

  “So if you’re serious about that anti-cruelty petition to ban dissections,” I said, flapping my lips on instinct, “we’d better file it now. Or else another generation’ll be subjected to Sulak’s mindless butchery. I mean…think of the fetal pigs….”

  I rattled on about pigs and petitions, and Sid just looked at me like she was looking at me, but just looking, not really listening. Because, Jesus? Who would? I was talking about pig parts! Why was I talking about pig parts?

  Sid stopped my hogalogue with: “What are you doing this weekend?”

  Honest answer: Riding the bench of life. Waiting for test results. Dunking on Rafty’s low goal. Maybe some BoB time with two people who’d probably rather be having se—

  “Uh, I dunno,” I yammered, “still in the planning stages…”

  “ ’Cause there’s this thing at Jazzy’s. The volleyball squad’s going to scrimmage at sunset. On the beach.”

  On the beach. This meant beach volleyball. This meant a lightly clothed event.

  “Will loves volleyball!”

  My father’s voice. My blood ran cold. Brian was back, with popcorn. Leaning over us. Some kernels spilled from the paper sleeve and fell on Sid’s blouse. I wanted to die. What the hell had Laura said to him?