XL

by Scott Brown

  “You don’t have answers, you are the answer. For me.”

  I watched a single tear well in Monica’s eye, break, and rill down her cheek.

  “I’m NOT. Okay? I’m not even my answer, how’m I supposed to be yours, Will? There are things about me, things you don’t know—”

  “Like those marks. On your back. Your dad told me…”

  Whoops.

  “What,” Monica said slowly, “did my dad say I did? The day I got those?”

  Say it.

  “He said you…hurt yourself. On purpose. That maybe you were trying to…send a message or…a cry for…something…or…”

  A cold front moved through the room, brittled my stammers into teensy icicles.

  “Surf?” said Monica, steel in her voice. “I was trying to surf? Actually? Surfing. It’s a thing that I do? To take me away from everything? Even people I love? Even myself? Especially myself? My friends know this. But you…”

  She laughed. It was a strange laugh, more like a cry. The first of many, it turned out.

  “…you talked to my dad. My utterly reliable dad. And you concluded…that I’m suicidal. Hooboy. Hoooooooboy.” She was pacing again now, fiddling with a chimp spear.

  “Monica, I’m not saying…that. Obviously.”

  “Oh, obviously.”

  What was I saying? Before I started saying it, I’d known, I could’ve sworn. “Look, I wasn’t there, but I do know…I know there was more to it….”

  “Oh!” said Monica. “And how do you ‘know’?”

  “Because I know YOU! Because I love YOU!” I reached for her, a hand on each shoulder, hoping a touch might do more than my gasping, gaping dead-fish mouth. “And because we are right! Right? For each other. You know it. You knew it a year ago, it’s why you dressed up. I was too stupid and small to see it. I had to grow up, but…I did!”

  I laughed. I hoped it didn’t sound unhinged.

  “Like, a lot! And now I know why! For this! Monica, Drew knows. And I think he gets it. On some level. Because, let’s face it, you two—you two didn’t work, okay?”

  Monica whipped away a tear like a samurai flicking blood off a sword.

  “How do you know?” she said. “You never asked if it was working!”

  Because I didn’t want to know.

  “Because I didn’t want it to get weird! Because I was sticking to the Plan!”

  “Well, that’s a fuckin’ relief.”

  Drew.

  A little early.

  There he was, in the door. Practice sweats. Looking exhausted. Like he’d spent the morning running drills, even though the season was over, even though he was technically suspended. Like he’d been running laps, just out of habit. That’s probably exactly what he’d been doing.

  I didn’t know how much he’d heard. It didn’t really matter.

  But in an ideal world? I’d really, really meant to be further along with the Monica portion of my argument by the time Drew showed up.

  “I’m so glad you stuck to the Plan, Will. Otherwise, something terrible could’ve happened to our friendship.”

  At the sound of Drew’s voice, the planet’s sweaty poles refroze.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” I said, for the save.

  “I’m not,” said Drew. He had an expression on his face I couldn’t quite classify. It might’ve been fratricide.

  I ignored that. “You guys, even before all that goddamn trolling started—which was all just bullshit, nothing happened—you have to admit that it wasn’t exactly clicking, right? You two? As a thing? You guys just…fell into each other. It was random.”

  “Random, okay,” said Drew. “Keep telling me about me and Monica, I find it fascinating. First, though, quick question. What happened? Between you two?”

  Monica face-palmed. There are people on this earth who enjoy being fought over. Monica was the opposite of those people. This was absolute torment.

  “I kissed her,” I said, and I really meant it to sound like a confession, I did, but it came out like an end zone spike, like a goddamned triumph, because too much had been dammed up for too long.

  I watched it hit Drew in the chest, I watched the ripples pass through him in a meat wave, and I’ll admit, shittily, it was a little satisfying.

  “Me. I did it. Because I’m in love with her, okay? Because I’ve been in love with her since we were ten.”

  “I knew it,” said Drew. “I knew it.”

  And then I felt this balled-up anger rise, like hot vomit.

  “Oh, you did?” I couldn’t help myself. No attacks, I’d told myself. Defenses and explanations only. But diplomacy’s a fragile thing. “You knew? How I felt about her? That night? And you just thought, Ah, screw it, and grabbed her anyway—”

  “Seriously? Boys? The third-personing? Is starting to piss ‘her’ off,” said Monica, voice rising. “I did some grabbing, too, okay? I did some fucking up. Me.” Monica was the last person in the world you wanted to third-person.

  Drew was still standing in the door, but he suddenly seemed to be filling it.

  “Listen…,” I started—

  —and out of the corner of my eye, I saw something that half filled the observation window.

  Him.

  The others had cleared to the edges. He had his own skybox.

  My other blood brother from a distant mother. My fellow beta, the maybe murderer.

  He sat back on his hairy haunch, arms crossed. Watching the show.

  We gave him one.

  “Here’s what happened,” I said, summoning my science voice. (No anger, no fuss. Just facts. An evolutionary progression.) “You two blew us up, for something that didn’t even work. Okay? And look, I don’t blame you. I tried to do the same thing. And so did she.”

  Drew looked at Monica. Monica sat on the couch. Dropped her head into her hands like a bowling ball on a car hood.

  “Yep,” she said. “At BoB. That night, before we came to get you at Jazzy’s.”

  Drew sagged. “What?”

  “I…” Monica laughed. The strangest laugh, kind of indistinguishable from some night creature’s death rattle. “I made a pass!” She laughed again. “Guess that makes me the original piece of shit, huh, guys? Garden of Eden?”

  Drew hadn’t reached the ironic detachment portion of the discussion yet. He was scratching his scalp, hard and fast. Processing. “And?”

  “And…” Monica stopped laughing. “He didn’t get it.”

  Now I felt a little third-personed. But Monica was on a roll.

  “And I didn’t get that he didn’t get it.” Monica ground the heels of her hands into her eyes. “I don’t know why I…needed…I don’t know! Can I just be a moron? Is that okay? It seems to be okay for you two….”

  Drew was still thumbing through these new cards. “A moron because you wanted him…or because you wanted me?”

  Monica sighed a sigh of great weariness. “I just know…you’re both so special to me.” Which, let’s face it, wasn’t a great line, and wasn’t a very Monica thing to say, and maybe that’s why her voice kinked like a cheap garden hose when she said it.

  “Special,” said Drew. “Meaning: swappable?”

  “No,” snapped Monica. “Not meaning that.”

  Now Drew was looking me in the eye. But to do that, he had to look up. (And I’ll admit, part of me really loved that.) “I tried to fix this, I did. I tried to make a new Plan, and you two just laughed it off—”

  “Because,” I said, not nicely, “it was laughable.”

  Drew’s mouth pulled piano-wire tight. “Okay. Sorry for caring—”

  “Caring?” I said, looming. “Try controlling. Try trying to be everybody’s dad, just because your dad—”

  “Oh, buddy,” Drew said, and his voice had th
is dangerous teeter to it, “you better watch that.”

  “Watch what?”

  “Your fucking mouth.”

  I heard Magic Mike hooting, muted, on the other side of the glass. Drama. In wide-screen. He was loving this.

  The humans, on their side of the glass, less so.

  “No,” I said, “I don’t think I will, Drew. I think I’m going to say something I should’ve said a long time ago: you need to let go. Let go. Stop trying to be a cop or a dad or a team captain or whatever the hell it is you think you’re trying to be—”

  “Jesus,” said Drew. “You’re so goddamned selfish, it’s insane.” He took a step in my direction, and I felt the hair rise on my neck and arms.

  “Selfish? Me? I’m selfish? Says the guy who takes what he wants, no regard for consequences?”

  “Guys?” Monica said, rising. “I’m not a fan of this…whole thing we’re doing here. Nobody got ‘taken,’ okay?”

  “I’m not a fan, either!” I barked, and I heard my voice bouncing off the glass, louder than I’d intended, and I’d intended it to be pretty loud. Blue actually took a step back. “You think I want to be here? Saying this shit out loud? I haven’t been a fan of anything that’s happened to us, the three of us, as a unit, ever since the night you two decided You Two were more important than…Us!”

  “Why’s that, Will?” asked Drew, taking another step toward me. “Because suddenly it wasn’t about you anymore? From that point on? That’s it, isn’t it? Oh, but you fixed that: freakish growth spurt!”

  “Wait wait wait wait: go back to the part, Spesh, where everything’s about me?” I said, closing the distance. “In what possible universe was anything ever about me—”

  “Are you kidding? Are you fucking kidding?” Drew’s voice broke like a fifth grader’s. “It’s always about you! Since forever! Look, here’s a brand-new car for Will, ’cause we feel sorry for him! No car money in the budget for Drew, though, oh no. Drew’s gotta ride with Will! In Will’s new car! Which Will…resents! ’Cause it makes him feel small! Well…maybe that’s cause he IS!”

  The bombs were falling thick and fast. And Drew wasn’t finished.

  “We all walk on eggshells around you! First ’cause of your mom! Then ’cause you stopped growing! And now? Because we’re all afraid you’re gonna fucking DIE!”

  Monica said, “Okay, that’s enough.”

  But it wasn’t enough for Drew. “Remember, Will, when you were worried you weren’t in the right body? Well, guess what, buddy? You’re not. Can’t fool me. I know you. And to me, you’re still a needy little shit in a big, baggy T-shirt, and you can’t handl—”

  The decision to hit Drew wasn’t really a decision, any more than you decide to chew a tough steak you’ve already shoveled into your mouth.

  It’s not exactly like breathing.

  It’s not exactly like deciding, either.

  Anyway, my fist was halfway there, halfway to the bridge of Drew’s nose.

  Magic Mike was hooting again.

  And around three-quarters of the way there, three-quarters of the way to the point where Monstrosity hit Humanity, because they SO deserve each other, was when Monica got there…

  …got between us.

  I didn’t hit her, exactly.

  Not exactly.

  She hooked my swinging arm with her arm, at the elbow. The force lifted her off the floor, and threw my equilibrium off-kilter…and we fell…together….

  I landed

  more or less on her

  and her head

  hit the concrete

  with this terrible wet and heavy sound

  I’ll never stop hearing, as long as I live.

  Then Drew was grabbing me. Rolling me off her. And there was blood on the floor.

  And Magic Mike was hooting.

  And everything was untakebackable.

  And nothing mattered.

  Whatever old scores I’d tried to settle.

  Whatever gleaming future Drew had been planning for.

  Whatever perfect moment Monica had been trying to live in.

  All gone.

  Untakebackable.

  WE SAT IN blue plastic chairs in the waiting room of the ER, Drew and I. Man and monster. Waiting. To see what was left of the world.

  They worried she’d been concussed, the first responders at the zoo. They worried about the blood.

  Some of it was on me. Some of it was on Drew.

  The EMTs had just stared at me as they loaded her into the ambulance.

  I’d told them I’d fallen.

  True.

  Drew and I didn’t talk on the ride to the hospital. Now we huddled under a chunky old tube TV hanging perilously from the drop ceiling. On the screen, one of those awful daytime court shows gibbered and snarled. It was still morning, and the place was deadish. But there was one kid, about ten, with a phone, sitting across from us, couple of rows away. He kept stealing looks. Grow-liath, in the wild. I’d been sighted. Great.

  Finally I just came out and said what I assumed Drew was thinking, too.

  “I wish it had been cancer.”

  Drew didn’t answer.

  On TV: Applause. Hoots.

  “Should I…expand on that?”

  “Well,” said Drew finally. “If you want to compete in the Wish I Were Dead Olympics, sure, let’s go.”

  “Okay,” I said, preparing a case for my immediate elimination from the human gene pool. “So you were right: I am…wildly…insanely…selfish. And I thought…you two owed me something. I thought the world owed me something. Because I’d been…nice. But I hadn’t been nice. Not really. I was just…hiding?”

  Drew nodded. Then he said:

  “You want to talk about hiding? I’ve been hiding for a year, Will. I came out and showed myself when I punched that kid in the face. Oh, and you want to know where I was hiding? I think you know already. The Plan.”

  I snorted. “Well, there was room in there for all of us to hide, I think.”

  “I don’t even know,” Drew said, “if I remember exactly what the Plan was supposed to do. Except keep everything the same. Keep us the same. You’re heading for Scripps! She’s going to Irvine! We’ll always be together! But, man, in case this wasn’t obvious? I don’t know the rules, I never did. I just hoped other people would follow along. Because…because I’m scared shitless I’m going to lose. And lose and lose and lose.” He put the heels of his hands on his temples, rubbed hard. “I’ve been on a crusade up my own ass for so long, I’ve forgotten what I was trying to do up there.”

  “Well, you seemed busy up there. And I was busy up mine.”

  “Look at us. Couple of…what’s the word? For, like, cave explorers?”

  “Spelunkers.”

  “Spelunkers.” Drew nodded. Like that solved everything. “I guess I haven’t been the best fake brother to you.”

  “I haven’t been the best fake brother to you.”

  “I just felt…I felt like I always worked, you know. Like, really hard,” said Drew. “I practiced and practiced, even if I didn’t totally know what I was practicing for or why. And while I was practicing, while I was working and working and working…you…just…happened. You didn’t even try. You just, like, arrived. And everybody went bananas. And that made me…that made me really, really mad.”

  Okay. The unmistakable odor of rubber meeting road.

  “I wanted you to lose,” I said.

  Drew was quiet. Waiting for the rest. I gave it to him.

  “Over and over—and this is before you and Monica—I just…I wanted you to lose. Games. Life. Just a little. I wanted you to come back to me. To where I was. So I sat in the stands and I…prayed for you to lose. So we could be closer again. I mean: how crazy is that?”

  There was a m
oment of silence. The waiting room took a breath of alcohol-smelling air and held it.

  “Well, I wanted you to stop fucking growing,” Drew said. “You had to keep going, you little asshole.”

  “You know, I never really thought of us this way,” I said, “but we are a couple of only children. And they’re the worst.”

  He laughed. I laughed.

  “But we weren’t the ones who got hurt.”

  Drew stopped laughing. “No. We weren’t.”

  We stared at the blue galley doors to the ER. They didn’t so much as flutter. They kept their secrets.

  Back there, behind those doors, our best friend was getting sewn back together, all because she’d come between a couple of monkeys, a couple of monsters, all because she’d tried to hold together a civilization she didn’t even believe in, a civilization that hadn’t been particularly good to her in the first place.

  Applause. On TV, somebody was guilty.

  * * *

  —

  My stomach was making science-fiction noises, so I went foraging among the vending machines in the vestibule off the lobby.

  I thumbed in my quarters and made a play for that Grandma’s cookie. Still just hanging there, tormenting the miserable denizens of the waiting room, as it had for millennia. The corkscrew turned, the bag started to fall—and then got stuck again. Of course.

  You’re never going to eat that cookie, my dead mom told me. You get that, right?

  I gave the machine a light bang with my caveman forearm, and it turned out to be not so light a bang. A nurse at the desk turned toward the sound, saw me looming there, over my kill. Looked away.

  And the bag fell.

  I got what I needed: that soft cookie was mine. Then I noticed, spidering the plexiglass of the machine: a tiny crack. Hairline.

  This was my new world. A world that broke when I touched it.

  I looked at the cookie in my hand. It was very small.

  I thought about what Dr. Helman had said. About how there was no telling. How I could go on like this. And on. And on.

  I held that soft, soft cookie in my huge, huge hands.

  Then I left it on the waiting room table, on top of a dirty old National Geographic. For the first time in months, I didn’t feel the least bit hungry.