Beast

by Brie Spangler

  “No,” I say.

  “Are you sure? Can I run out and get you a burger or something? An apple pie? You love apple pies.”

  “Mom!”

  “Okay, all right, fine.” She disappears.

  Dr. Jensen regards me once we’re alone. “Okay, now what’s the real problem?”

  His eyes are lasers. “It’s, uh…Well, ah, can you…” I shake my head, my pathetic head.

  “Can I what?” Dr. Jensen checks his watch.

  I sigh and try again. This might be my only shot. “Can you refer me to anyone who can change…me?”

  TWO

  I’m not complaining; it’s just unfair.

  And the worst is that if I ever bring it up with anyone, all I get is: suck it up. Unless it’s my mom, and then I get a “you’re so wonderful and amazing and I love you, hooray forever and ever” pile of Mom pom-poms (Mom-Poms™). Which is why I never talk to her about the stuff that really bothers me anymore. Besides, it’s not like she can stop me from getting hairier.

  The first time I wore a T-shirt to school in the seventh grade, Madison said it looked like I dipped myself in glue and rolled around on a dog groomer’s floor. After that, I didn’t wear short sleeves until the ninth grade, when we had a heat wave in late September and it got so hot I couldn’t stand it anymore.

  It’s no fluke that my nickname is the Beast. Or Furball or Sasquatch or Wolfman. It changes by the day. I laugh, but I hate them all. I’d rather not be a hairy slab of meat, or have a five o’clock shadow by noon. I’d rather not have knuckles so furry you can’t even tell if I’m wearing my dad’s ring or not. Rather not have chest hair squirt up the neck of my T-shirt. Front and back.

  I’ve heard girls whisper that it’s gross, that I’m nasty. I am aware.

  One of the worst days in my life was when I went to get my back waxed. The fact that Mom was willing to take me to her salon was mortifying enough, but I was desperate. Last summer my friends and I were going to Splish-Splash and I wanted everyone to see I was capable of de-cavemanning. Sue me, but I thought if certain young ladies could see that I’m loaded with enough solid muscle to throw a cow over each hairless, smooth shoulder, their perceptions might change. Unfortunately, I found out manscaping one’s back is impossible if you have the dexterity of a T. rex. I couldn’t reach it all myself and needed the help of trained professionals, so Mom brought me to her nail salon. Cue the laugh track.

  The lady brought me behind a curtain and I stood there, glued to the floor.

  She looked all the way up at me and took a step back. “What do you want?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You.” She flicked her hands like she was shooing a big fly. “Where do you want wax?”

  If she only knew how hard it was for me to walk behind this shabby white curtain, maybe she might not look so disgusted. I swallowed and thought of Splish-Splash. Of being a normal fifteen-year-old. “My back?” I said in a small voice. “My shoulders?”

  “Take your shirt off.”

  I did as I was told.

  She clicked her teeth and sighed. “Lie down.”

  I did that too. It took four hours. Four of the most painful hours ever, but when I was done, everything was smooth. The lady sat slumped in the chair and my mom gave her a big tip.

  We both knew it was gross if Mom said anything, so she didn’t, but when I got home, I hung my hair in my face and turned around and around in the mirror. It was all gone. I didn’t look like a throw rug. I looked like a person. It was amazing. I was ready for Splish-Splash. I was ready for Fern Chapman to jump up and sit on my shoulders so we’d win at chicken in the pool.

  Fern. What can I say about Fern? She’s gorgeous and smells like a flower. She’s the type of girl I want next to me so JP can nod, like I did good. She has big blue eyes and she’s small enough that I can definitely save her from a burning building or a car wreck or something. Pocket-sized, as JP would say. She’s perfect.

  Splish-Splash was not. I couldn’t go down the slides. Against the rules to go down with a hat. So I sat by the deck chairs because I didn’t want anyone to look at my face. I straight out lied. Said I didn’t want to go down the slides and then ha-ha-ha, everyone laughed and said, “Good—you might break them.” And to top it off, turns out waxing my entire body was worth a pile of shit tacos. No one said anything. Said anything nice, I mean. JP was like, “Where’s the floor-to-ceiling carpeting?” More laughter. Slaps on my sore, bare back because it’s so incredibly funny.

  And if I was the butt of everyone’s joke, why did they stay even farther away? Girls skirted around me, like they were afraid of me. At the snack hut, I offered to buy this girl from my Spanish class her french fries because she was fifteen cents short. Nothing weird or crazy about that. I was freaking gallant. I was the full-on “pull out the wallet, extract three dollars, and say, ‘Here, let me get that for you’ ” kind of guy. I stood over her and looked down nicely, smiling the whole time. The friendliest way I know how. And what did she do? She mumbled something I couldn’t hear, made the ohmygod face to her friend, and bolted. Left her fries on the counter. It’s like no matter what I do, I’m disgusting.

  So I put a shirt on and sat down on a plastic lounge chair under an umbrella and pretended to read really important texts. All that did was get me a front-row seat to JP giving Fern Chapman his towel when they came out of the pool together. She took it and smiled at him.

  Dr. Jensen clears his throat.

  A poke to my arm and the day at Splish-Splash fades. My leg. The white walls. Dr. Jensen checks his wristwatch. “You here?”

  “Yeah,” I mutter. “I’m here.” Still here in the hospital.

  “What do you mean by finding a doctor to change you? Can you elaborate on that?”

  “Elaborate?”

  “It means give further expla—”

  “I know what it means,” I snap. In probably not the best way, but I’m not stupid. Never have been, never will be. I just don’t want to elaborate beyond saying thank you for the referral.

  Dr. Jensen flips some papers on his clipboard and makes some notes. Bores a hole through my head with his precision dagger stare.

  My thumbs molest each other. “Like maybe plastic surgery or something,” I mumble. They work miracles. Surely they can snip away the ogre and tweak me into looking like a normal human person. I’ve seen the Discovery Channel.

  “So what does a plastic-surgery referral have to do with your broken leg?” he asks.

  “No, not like that….Like saying ‘plastic surgery’ sounds bad. But it’s just, you know, it’s something that I would, um…” Something I would get the nanosecond we won the lottery?

  “I need more words.”

  Heat rises up. My cheeks burn. “It’s just, this isn’t what fifteen is supposed to look like.”

  “Trust me, fifteen looks like many things, and there are far worse fates than being almost six foot four, two hundred and sixty pounds. Sounds like a football scholarship if you ask me,” he says, taking his pen from his pocket. I roll my eyes. See, this is why I hate football. It’s the only thing people think I am capable of doing. Big + Ugly = Football. Dr. Jensen flips a page up, scribbles something. “When did you first place a value on your looks?”

  “A value?”

  “When did the way you look become important?”

  “I guess the sixth grade.”

  “And when did you begin puberty?”

  “Ten or eleven,” I say. “Like, fourth grade.”

  “That must’ve been fun.” He jots it down.

  “Hmph.” No, it was not.

  “How’s your self-esteem?”

  If I’m honest, it’s in the toilet. If I’m doubly honest, I’ve been depressed for four years and counting. “Not the best.”

  “On a scale of one to ten, ten being the highest, how significant does the way you look factor into your daily life?” Dr. Jensen asks. “In regards to mood, extracurricular activities, social life,
and so on.”

  Eleven. I’d give anything to be a hundred pounds lighter and a foot shorter. To be normal. That’s all I want, to be normal. “I don’t know, maybe a seven,” I lie.

  “Uh-huh,” the doctor says with a sniff. “Ever had a girlfriend?”

  “No.”

  “Would you like to?”

  “Yes.”

  “And why do you think you’ve not had one yet?” he asks.

  Twist the knife already. “You know a face only a mother could love?” I point at my mug shot.

  “It’s not so bad,” he says. “If anything, you look rugged.”

  More like Cro-Magnon, but whatever.

  Dr. Jensen’s pen scratches across a new sheet of paper. “What’s school like?”

  “Fine.”

  “How’s home life?”

  “Fine.”

  “Mom? Dad? Siblings?”

  “Mom’s great. A bit pushy. No siblings. Dad died when I was three.”

  He rests the pen a moment. “Sorry to hear that.”

  “It’s okay,” I say. I know it should bother me more, but it doesn’t. He died when I was so young, all I knew of my father was that he was a very sick man. As far back as I can remember, everyone enforced the idea that for him to die was a good thing. I never knew it any other way.

  The pen goes back to work and more notes are made. “Would you say your new haircut was a contributing factor to your broken leg?” he asks with technical precision.

  “Um…”

  “Why the pause?”

  “How did you know I got a new haircut?”

  He smiles to himself. “Summer’s over, brand-new back-to-school haircut. Looks like you wore a hat too.”

  “Oh. Well, ah…” I try to laugh. “See, they made this new dress code at school and now we can’t have long hair and we can’t wear hats. They banned hats.”

  “When did they ban hats?”

  “Today.” Now the pen scribbles furiously. “But, I mean, it’s a coincidence.”

  “And today you fell off the roof and broke your leg at”—he flips the pages—“around three-thirty in the afternoon.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You have two spiral fractures and titanium rods and pins holding your leg together. That’s not exactly fine,” he says. “Do you have a history of self-harm?”

  “What? No! I don’t ‘self-harm.’ Are you serious?”

  “Dylan, you fell off the roof the day they banned hats.” He raises an eyebrow.

  “Because I’d rather be known as Guy on Crutches than a freak show!”

  “There it is.” Dr. Jensen’s eyes flick back to the clipboard and he almost writes a book on the last piece of paper. “I think there’s someone you should talk to. I’ll get in touch with her. Her name is Dr. Burns. She’s the codirector of psychology and she runs a wonderful outpatient group therapy program for troubled adolescents here at the hospital.”

  “Wait, I’m not—Dr. Jensen, I’m not troubled,” I say from my hospital bed.

  Patting my arm as he strolls out of the room, he smiles. “I’ll have a word with your mother.”

  “No, don’t—” He disappears and I’m alone in the room. “Shitshitshitshitshit.”

  I spend a minute looking for an escape route before Mom shoots through the door like a bullet. Dr. Jensen trails behind. “Oh, Dylan!” she cries, rushing over.

  “No, Mom, no. It’s not what you think! I’m fine.”

  “You did this on purpose?” Her hands flutter over me, smoothing and brushing all the loose bits.

  “Sort of,” I confess. “But not in the bad, crazy way. It was an accident.”

  “I knew you weren’t up there looking for a football!” She looms over me. I never felt dumber. “Well, whatever that therapist recommends we’ll do, because you’re not running up to the roof every time life gets tough. You could have landed on your neck and died!”

  She says it like that’s a bad thing. “I only meant to sprain my ankle.”

  “Is it your father?” Mom says, laying a hand three times smaller than mine on her chest. She’s the polar opposite of me. If I’m a Minotaur lurking in a labyrinth, my brown eyes burning red in the shadows, then Mom is a doe lightly munching dandelion greens in a field, blinking her big brown eyes so frigging much, the hunters become vegetarians. I don’t get it. I almost want a maternity test. “Do you miss him that much? Do you want to be with him in heaven?” She jumps straight to blaming my dead dad because that’s her go-to when things go wrong with me. “Is that what this is?”

  “Mom, no, it’s really not that big a deal.”

  “It kind of is,” Dr. Jensen chimes in. Smug bastard. “But Dr. Burns is great; she’ll help you learn some usable coping skills so the roof is less tempting in the future.”

  “Actually—”

  “He’ll be there,” Mom butts in. “With bells on.”

  “Good.” Dr. Jensen gives my mom a white card. “I’ll have her call you later today with the information.” He goes off to harass his next patient.

  Once we’re alone, Mom whirls around to face me and taps the card stiff in her palm.

  “Hey—” I try to cut her off.

  “Don’t even try to talk your way out of it, buddy,” she says. “You’re going to therapy.”

  THREE

  “The Beast is mobile!” JP hollers when he sees me wheel down the hall on my first day back. My right leg clears the way. “Everyone make a path—there’s a tank coming.”

  Fair comparison since I feel like a bulldozer. I can barely walk on two legs without knocking over anywhere from one to a dozen things, but a wheelchair? Forget it. Wheels are definitely not my friend. Too round. Since my mom dropped me off at the front door, I’ve managed to bang into the trophy case, one fire extinguisher, and a bucket of dirty water left behind by the art kids painting a mural over the principal’s office. At the end of the day, this poor wheelchair is going to cry itself to sleep.

  But I’m slowly discovering I love being in it. In the chair, I’m normal-sized. The Beast is contained. I don’t have to duck under doorways and I can make eye contact with the girls instead of towering over them.

  “Hey, hey, make way,” JP says, and the group of guys loitering in a semicircle around him step aside for me. “How are you? Does it hurt? Did you get the pizza I sent? I wasn’t sure if the hospital accepted pizza.”

  “They did! It was awesome, one large pepperoni and—”

  “Mushrooms,” he finishes for me, and we both nod because that’s our favorite. “Cool, because I was like, shoot, I can’t go visit but I know what’s good.”

  JP can’t just get rides on a whim. His parents aren’t good with that sort of thing. We might not be able to drive yet, but pizza makes everything better. “Nailed it,” I tell him.

  This kid Whatshisface hangs on the outside of our gathering group, angling his way in because him and JP were on the same baseball team last summer. JP doesn’t acknowledge Whatshisface so I don’t either. This kid sends out ping after ping to JP’s radar. Like, What gives, JP? We were teammates—we talked about girls and shared a laugh. Why are you ignoring me now? Just want to tell him, Sorry, man. If JP says you’re not in, you’re not in.

  “You’re finally the shortest one,” JP says.

  “Yeah.” For the first time, I don’t have to stoop over and hunch down to hear what they’re saying.

  “What’s up, man? How do you feel?” Bryce asks.

  “Beats rotting in the hospital. Can’t believe I was there for a whole frigging week.” I peer up at my friends and blink.

  “How long are you in the chair?” Bryce asks.

  “For the next few weeks, until I can get the side pins out,” I say, looking him in the eye as I answer his question. This is so bizarre. “Then I move on to crutches.” Truth be told, I don’t want to get rid of the chair anytime soon. So many times, people just throw words up at me. I wonder if since I’m smaller, maybe they’ll actually listen to what I
have to say.

  “You guys, Dylan is a total badass,” JP says, thumping my shoulder. Everyone in a twelve-block radius nods in agreement with him, and I eat it up. Can’t help it. I’m filled with toasty warm kittens right now.

  “Yeah, well, it was me against the roof, and the roof won.”

  “Liking the dome,” JP says, cupping his hand over my shorn skull. I hate this stupid buzz cut, but it feels like he’s anointing me in front of the whole school, and it feels good. Here is my first mate, my best man. Here is the one I choose to stand beside me. Or in this case, sit.

  The bell rings and I wheel off to my locker.

  JP walks with me. With me in the chair, I can’t bump his heels like I used to and he can’t back-kick me in the ass. But we’ll figure something out. “Don’t forget to use that thing for all it’s worth. It’s a pity magnet,” he says.

  A scenario and device that spark sympathy from the female population? Golly, what desperate loser would stoop that low? Answer: Me. And how. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Lucky bastard. Your house good after school?”

  Ordinarily, yes. We play video games almost every day at my house until our eyes bleed, but today I can’t. Stupid therapy awaits. “Can’t,” I say. “Doctor’s appointment.”

  His shoulders slump. “Cold shit on toast, Beast, because I just got this new controller. Maybe you heard about it? Like, only the most amazing one ever?”

  “No way, nuh-uh, the Wormhole? You got a Wormhole?”

  “Oh yes. Oh so very yes.”

  “Are you serious?” That thing costs four hundred dollars and has a five-month wait because it has to get shipped over from Korea on a bed of angel-driven clouds. It is insane. It’s pulse sensitive and auto-responds in time with your heartbeat, so if you get all amped up and your heart beats fast, it will adjust precision time. I would fall off another roof to have one.

  “And…I might’ve gotten you one too.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “It’s yours. But hey, you know Adam Michaels?”