Beast

by Brie Spangler

  What abt chix nuggets? she immediately texts back.

  Fine, I text, and find the money she gave me so I can get a candy bar and a bag of pretzels. Debate getting a soda too, but decide to pass. Screw fruit.

  ilu!!! she texts.

  I sigh. It’s not like I haven’t encouraged her to use actual English; I have, but she’s stuck in 2003.

  Love you too, I text back. I have to. If I don’t shut that down, an avalanche of emojis will destroy my data plan, and I need that to talk to my actual friends. Like when JP wants to humble-brag about how he didn’t tap whatever ass fell on him from the sky because “she deserves a guy who cares.” How magnanimous of him.

  Snacks in my lap, I make my way to the front of the hospital. I sit under the wide awning and wait. There’s not a great deal to look at. To my left, there’s an off-ramp from a highway. To my right, there’s a bus stop. Nothing special, just a boring clear and metal box with some posters and a bench and a schedule on a pole. One of the posters tugs at my eye. It looks like an advertisement for my favorite podcast about stuff you missed in history class. It’s literally called Stuff You Missed in History Class. I listen while I do homework because I like it when my brain bounces around, the colliding information zinging between hemispheres. Graphing the derivative of f while learning about an eighteenth-century vampire panic in New England must be what smoking a whole bong feels like.

  I wheel over to the bus stop. The poster turns out to be a regular old band poster. An upcoming show. One band is called Stuff (original) and the other is called Missed History. I clench my fist and shake at it, old-man style. Curse you, poster. Making me wheel over here under false pretenses—get off my lawn. I’m about to wheel back when I slam on the brakes.

  In the far corner under the giant plexiglass dome, huddled in a tiny little ball of boots and legs and skirt, kneels Jamie.

  SIX

  “Jamie?” I say, and she snaps up to her feet.

  “What are you doing here?”

  My gaze darts to the left before landing back on her. “I was looking at a poster. What are you doing here?”

  She looks at the camera cradled in her hands. “I was taking pictures.”

  “Of what?”

  Jamie shrugs lightning fast, a tightly coiled spring. “There’s some, um, rust, you know, in the corner over there,” she says. “It’s red. The pole is blue. Looks cool.”

  “Rust.” I back up my wheels, and her shoulders instantly soften and relax. My back teeth press together. We were just talking like twenty minutes ago. What happened to our five questions? She’s acting like I’m about to murder her or something. “Okay. I’ll let you get back to it.”

  I reverse in a three-point turn out of the bus stop when the back wheel skips off the sidewalk and into a small ditch of dirt next to some newly planted seasonal mums. My right leg stupidly sticks out, awash in signatures of mediocre intent, and I glare at it while trying to push off. Mom will be here any minute, and I’m not ready for her slaughter of questions. I pivot and push but go nowhere.

  Swiveling around in my seat, I look below. That one lump blocks me from going forward. I’m stuck. “Come on.” I give my wheels a shove forward, throwing my chest out for momentum.

  “I’ll help you.” Jamie comes up behind.

  “Don’t. I can do it.”

  She steps away from me, hands up, as I grunt my way back onto the sidewalk. “All good?” she asks.

  I don’t say anything. Maybe this is one of the rules of therapy; how should I know? Gripping the wheels, I turn them toward the hospital. Mom will freak if I’m not there.

  “Hey,” Jamie calls out.

  I pause.

  “Can I take a picture of you in your wheelchair?”

  “No.”

  She dashes in front of me. “No?”

  “No,” I say again, head down and staring at my lap. Those happy knees of hers are standing in front of my chair. I can’t go off-roading, that’s been proven. My only option is the sidewalk, and she’s starting to look like a very attractive speed bump.

  “I can’t take one shot? Just one?” she asks.

  “No way,” I say. “I don’t even let my mom take pictures of me.”

  “Really? Why?”

  I look up at her. “What the hell do you care?”

  Her mouth drops open. “You don’t have to be rude.”

  “Hold on. You’re the one acting like I was going to slit your throat in the bus stop, and now you’re all, sit still and pose for a picture?”

  “You caught me off guard.”

  “It’s a public space.”

  “Well, maybe I get nervous in public spaces.”

  “Well, maybe you’re crazy.”

  She smooths her skirt. “Maybe you don’t know what it’s like to be a girl.”

  A giant red stop sign shoots up inside my head. Cease and desist. JP always says when girls start whining about how hard it is to be a girl, smile and nod and move on as soon as possible. “You make a fair point.”

  “Thank you. So can I take your picture?”

  “No!”

  “Dylan…”

  “What?”

  “Look.” Jamie comes near, stoops down, and shows me the screen of her camera. “I really am a photographer. See?” She flips from one frame to the next. Shadows behind a door, a pencil with a broken tip, an empty syringe surrounded by needles, someone’s bare back, a twist of yarn, uneaten food, empty prescription bottles, a half-pulled-back curtain, a close-up of her eye, and then finally the rust.

  “You have no idea what you’re doing,” I say.

  “What!” she explodes.

  “I mean, not like you don’t know how to use a camera, but what are you taking pictures of?”

  “Life, you asshole,” she snaps. “Because we’re human beings who should care about being alive, not about the glory of sitting next to some jamoke at a lunch table.”

  “Wait, hold up. Don’t throw one of my ‘five good things’ back at me. That’s not fair,” I say. “I had to say something in that stupid room, and yeah, maybe having a prime seat next to the most popular guy in school is a bonus for someone like me.”

  “Someone like you.”

  “You know what I mean.” I angle my head back down and hide behind the hat.

  Jamie slides the lens cap over her camera and slips it into her bag. “Yeah, I know. Stupid me for thinking there was more to it. Now, if you’re going to continue to be a cryptic a-hole, my bus is coming.”

  “I’m not being cryptic,” I say, wheeling after her. She doesn’t slow down. It only makes me louder. “I’m not!”

  Jamie steps onto the bus and pays her fare. The driver sees me and hits the hydraulics to lower the bus down to the curb with a wheezing hiss. A metal flap unfolds and the driver waits for me to roll on, so I do. If I see a white car drive by, right now, this second, then it’s a sign from the afterlife that I’m supposed to get on the bus.

  A red car flies by, followed by a silver truck. Then a white car.

  Close enough, Dad.

  The bus gobbles me up, seals the door tight, and eats my money. My nostrils flare. I’m inside. I’m on the bus. I look with wide eyes at the parking lot. If my mother’s there, I don’t see her. And then I realize I don’t care.

  I’m on a bus and I’m going far, far away to another place, and this is amazing. A smile breaks out across my cheeks so hard, it feels like a sunburn. I give my armrests a squeeze and gaze headily at the trees whizzing by. “You okay?” Jamie asks.

  “I am so okay right now.”

  “You look high.”

  “I am not that kind of high,” I mumble. “But I wouldn’t know, that’s your arena.”

  Her head bobbles. “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you properly because it sounded like you just called me a drug addict.”

  “The syringes.” I lean in and whisper. “On your camera. I saw them, but don’t worry, I won’t tell.”

  The farther Jamie’s neck s
kews backward, the more her eyes stay locked on me. “Did you ever think those needles and syringes might be for medicine that keeps me alive?”

  “Like for diabetes?”

  “Something like that.”

  “So…,” I drag out. “You’re a diabetic?”

  Her lips purse like she’s sucking a lemon. “Yes,” she finally says.

  I look at her wrists, but they’re covered with long sleeves. “Where’s your medical bracelet?”

  “My what?”

  I point to her right and left hands. “For the EMTs. In case your insulin gets too low and you pass out walking in traffic.”

  She whips her hands up under her armpits. “I don’t wear one. They’re ugly, so stop looking.”

  I scratch my chin. “I’m guessing you’ve got type 1 juvenile-onset diabetes, so I’m not sure what the pill bottles are for. Maybe high doses of—”

  “Okay, enough, Dr. McKnowitall. I get it: you’re smart,” she interrupts me. “But this is not Jamie’s Medical History 101, so let’s talk about the weather.”

  “But you’re in therapy.”

  “So are you.”

  I shake my head. “Not really. I only went to one session to make my mom happy.”

  “Your mom sent you to therapy?”

  There are so, so many ways I could answer that question. “Uh, no. Not quite. My orthopedic surgeon did.”

  “An orthopedic surgeon sent you to therapy? Holy shit, Dylan, did you break your own leg?”

  “What? No!”

  Now Jamie is the one who leans in tight. I try not to get heady from the closeness. “We’re in therapy for self-harmers.” She gestures to my leg. “So if you did this to yourself, you need way more than one session.”

  I turn toward the window. “Where are we going?”

  “We?” she chokes out. “I’m sorry, were you under the impression we were going somewhere? Because you got on by yourself. I don’t tend to go on bus rides with people who insult my work and assume I shoot up black tar.”

  She gets up from her seat and sits across the aisle, arms crossed and legs folded.

  Suddenly the bus is cold. “I don’t know anything about photography,” I say.

  “That’s obvious.”

  “Why do you like it?”

  “Why should I tell you?”

  “Because I want to learn.”

  Jamie’s eyes return to mine. She reaches for her bag and takes the camera out, pinching the sides of the lens cap and smuggling it away inside a pocket. Her finger nudges a tab and the shutter twitches to life with a click. She looks through the viewfinder and snaps a picture of the empty rear of the bus. “It sees more than I can. Captures those tiny moments in time. Things you think are soft but they’re really solid. Like light,” she says, but I can hardly hear her above the engine. “Unexpected things. Vulnerabilities.”

  The camera lands on me and I hide in my sleeve. “Don’t.”

  It sinks down, revealing her face.

  Hers is such an interesting face.

  “Take a self-portrait,” I say.

  “I have,” she says. “Thousands.”

  “Thousands?”

  Jamie hugs the camera to her cheek. “You think it’s egotistical?”

  “No.” But I might be a little jealous.

  She tugs her skirt down and rests the camera on her leg. I swear it nestles in like a pet cat. “I could take a nice picture of you in your uniform, if you want.”

  “What uniform?”

  “Your football uniform.”

  “I’m no more a football player than you are a heroin addict.”

  “You’re not?” I hate that she’s surprised. “I figured, football season, your leg, you can’t play. Benched. Depression, self-destruction, all that jazz.”

  “Time to change your tune.”

  I can’t bring myself to look at her face after that.

  The world will never see me as the smart guy, the guy who likes to sop up equations like crusts of bread dipped in warm soup. Everyone but my mom thinks the rows of A’s on my report cards are a quarterly mistake. Why am I killing myself over grades when I could just be running into other meatheads, bringing glory to our town?

  If I were a withered, hundred-pound string bean who could barely hoist a backpack, no one would think twice. It’d be, Oh hey! Look at Dylan dominating the honor roll again. Of course he did; isn’t that jolly. Indeed. Pip-pip, cheerio, send him off to Oxford on his Rhodes Scholarship, where he can squirrel away in a turret and ruin his eyesight by reading all those tasty history books.

  And there it is. My dream.

  I’ve never told a single person alive that I want the Rhodes. That I want to wake up in an eight-hundred-year-old dorm room in England and dash to class in a building that looks like something out of a Harry Potter novel. That I want to drink a tall pint and talk about All the Things at The Bird and Baby, the tavern where J. R. R. Tolkien hashed it out with C. S. Lewis every Tuesday at lunch.

  I want to understand cancer, and not just the cellular kind. All cancer, because that shit is everywhere in all forms. There’s very little difference to me between a malignant tumor and the Salem witch trials of 1692. Faced with his entire world going to hell, a seventy-year-old farmer named Giles Corey refused to plead guilty to practicing witchcraft, so they pressed him to death. And what did he do? He looked them all in the eye and said, “More weight.” That’s amazing to me. I like to think my dad was similar in his final days. Dead at twenty-six. I’d like to think he threw up the double birds and said, “More weight,” because fuck you, cancer.

  I don’t know if there’s such a thing as a historical oncologist or an oncological historian, but I don’t see why I can’t be the first. It’s a solid step up from some bullshit major like underwater basket weaving. Oxford is the perfect place for a Dr. Dylan Ingvarsson, MD, PhD, to do quite a bit of both.

  Only my dad knows my top secret dream. Being dead makes him magic because he’s officially become a part of history, however small. But if I told a living, breathing person my biggest wish, of somehow blending obscure history into the cure for cancer, they’d be like, that’s nice—here’s a football.

  Try not to chew it too hard.

  My gut falls into its very own tar pit and right now, all I want is to go home and sink into bed. I take my phone out and hit the screen. Twenty-two messages. All from Mom. I should get off this bus and call her. Tell her I thought I’d make it easy on her and take the bus home.

  A bus that ended up going in the wrong direction.

  “Hey,” Jamie says. She stands. “Come with me.”

  “And do what?”

  The bus skids into a blank patch reserved on the pavement. The door opens. She looks over her shoulder. “Now or never.”

  Her boots tap-tap-tap down the aisle. My phone starts to vibrate. I don’t think about how fast I’m shoving it back into my pocket; I’m too busy giving my wheels a giant push. The driver sees me and the bus starts to kneel. Now or never.

  SEVEN

  Downtown Portland looks like what a five-year-old would doodle up if you gave them a piece of paper and some crayons and said, now draw a city. There are rectangular buildings with glass windows standing tall in various heights on square blocks. Very basic. You’d win at Pictionary. But with any city, it’s not always the surroundings that make it worth visiting; it’s the people—and this town is the ultimate grab bag. Fixie-bike drag racers, eco-warriors, steampunk foodies, zoobombers, caffeine snobs. You need to fulfill a lifelong search for someone with a fork tattooed on their neck? We got you covered. Couple years here in the rain and everyone wears the same thin coat of moss. It keeps us huddled together and loving weird things like bewitched donuts and refusing to use umbrellas when it’s pouring out.

  It’s the people that make a city great, and today that’s us. Jamie and I, we are great.

  In the middle of this block-tower paradise, there’s a splat of bricks called Pioneer Courthouse Square, and th
at’s where we sit near the steps, me in my wheels and her in a folding chair, holding hot cups of coffee. My first. Jamie bought one for me. “You think it’ll work?” I ask.

  “It’s why I started drinking it. Five foot nine is tall enough—I have no desire to be a giraffe. So please, coffee”—she cradles it lovingly in her hands—“stunt my growth.”

  Jamie smirks as she sips.

  “I don’t blame you. I think girls should be short too,” I say, and take a sip myself.

  “Hold up—don’t put words in my mouth,” she says. “I’m talking about me. My dad’s a former Trail Blazer, my mom’s Swedish, and I’m trying to stay under six feet tall so I can comfortably fit my knees in an airline seat, thank you very much.”

  “Your dad’s a Blazer?”

  She stares at me like I have nine heads. “Did you hear anything I said?”

  “Well…yeah, but you have to admit, that’s an interesting factoid.”

  “A factoid. Sure. He played two seasons before he tore both his ACLs and retired. Rip City, do or die. Now he sells boating equipment.” Jamie checks her phone for the time.

  “I can sympathize,” I say quickly. I don’t want her to leave. “About the airplane. Those seats are so small, it’s unbearable.”

  “What exactly did you mean, though, that girls should be short?”

  I shrug. “It’s what I’ve heard.”

  “From who?”

  “My best friend, JP. He’s got standards. Girls should be short, not talk while you’re playing video games, and have long hair.”

  “He sounds like a real prince.”

  I scowl and look down at my coffee. It’s too hot. So far it tastes terrible. “I’m just saying.”

  She motions to a lady walking across the plaza. “Her. That woman in the glasses—what do you think about her?”

  “Like, in general?” I give her a once-over. “She’s got to be almost forty, too old to be wearing a hoodie and jeans. And they have holes in them. She looks like a hobo.”