Beast

by Brie Spangler

  There are a few smiles. Little quick sympathy grins from the girls in class. I only notice because I’m trying to not stare at their assets as they walk by.

  I’m still mad.

  Mostly I sit and eat my lunch in the library and pretend I’m Gandhi. Which is bullshit because I can guarantee if Gandhi hadn’t been on a hunger strike, he would’ve had friends to eat with him. Plus, I want to pick up JP and throw him into the whirling, twirling engine of a jumbo jet, and I’m very sure that goes against everything Gandhi preached.

  Every time I see JP’s face, I think of Jamie. I wish you peace, I chant in my head. “I wish you peace,” I say now as he’s at my locker trying to “touch base.”

  “I really want to talk to you,” he says. “Please? Just for one minute? You can time it.”

  “I wish you peace.”

  “Stop fucking saying that.”

  I lean over him. “I will say that until I’m purple because if I don’t, you will be literally—not figuratively, not metaphorically—dead, and I have no desire to go to prison. Not my scene. I wish you peace.”

  While pushing off my locker, I “accidentally” knock him on his ass. Not super hard, but enough to end it for today because I can’t handle adding another ball to the juggling act I’m trying to pull off. No matter, he’s off to his new girlfriend’s house so he can go molest her in a quiet corner and she can coo and feel special that he chose her for the day. I’m alone again. But hey, this is great. I’m totally not feeling like ground-up slug on the bottom of someone’s shoe as I get into my mother’s car, which is waiting for me in the drop-off zone because she doesn’t trust me to get home by myself anymore.

  I slam the car door shut.

  “How was school today?” Mom asks, her attempt at sunshine falling short.

  “Awesome. I made a lot of new friends, and everyone picked me to represent our class in the school spelling bee.”

  The car pulls into traffic. “They still have spelling bees?”

  “Uh-huh. And Becky and Suzie made me friendship bracelets at recess too.”

  “Okay, enough.” She sighs, about to begin again. “You know, Dylan—”

  “Please don’t,” I say.

  “All I’m trying to say is—”

  “Mom, not today, okay? Please.” Because I’m having a shit time and if you’re going to say anything, say I Love You. That’s it. No advice. No wheedling about my attitude. No momsplaining to me why JP and I need to go back to Square One and be bestest buddies for life. No opinions on my friends or lack thereof or school or grades or my imminent future. Just I Love You. That’s all. Done.

  “We’re having some trouble, you and I. It’s obvious.”

  “Mmm.” Astronauts can get the gist of it from space, so yeah.

  “Maybe we need a break. Some time apart. Come back together in a stronger place.”

  My ears perk up.

  “I’ve decided to go to Pittsburgh,” she says, and I want to jump out and do the cha-cha.

  “Really?”

  “One of my coworkers ran into the same problem with her teenagers, and she said it was a breath of fresh air for everyone,” Mom says. “But there’s a but!”

  “There’s always a but.”

  “You have to follow the rules. You must answer your phone at all times. You must check in with the Swanpoles across the street when you get home from school and before you go to bed. You must do all your homework and you must go to school. You can hitch a ride with all the kids from junior high, I already called the lady who runs the buses. They’ll pick up on the corner of Going and 77th.” She draws in a breath. “You must not make me regret leaving.”

  “Got it.”

  “You and I need a reboot,” she says. “We both need to order some room service and watch a movie. Come home and everything will be back to normal.”

  “I think it’s a good idea.”

  A real good idea. A Nobel Prize–worthy idea. Some time when I can sit and eat as much food as I want without anyone reminding me how much it costs and play Madden until my hands are raw. She fills me in on some basic details, and after I wolf down a snack of three peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, I’m upstairs in my room to call Jamie and tell her all about it.

  She answers immediately. “Did you get your blood test? When do we find out Dylan the Giant has a posse?”

  “Blood sucked out Friday, but I have news.”

  “Tell me.”

  “My mom’s going on a business trip to Pittsburgh.”

  “This sounds promising.”

  “Honestly, I’m just excited to have the house to myself,” I say. “She’s only gone for two days, one night, and I might as well wear an ankle monitoring bracelet, but it’s thirty-six hours without Mom. I’m psyched.”

  “I’m so jealous.”

  “Don’t be. It’s going to be me and about thirty of my closest pizza-shaped friends.”

  “And maybe a little something else.”

  My eyebrows raise. “Go on.”

  “Let me ask you something, how fast can you grow a beard?”

  “A full beard, or some scruff? I can do scruff in a day.”

  “Good to know. How long for a full beard?”

  “Like three days. Why?”

  “When’s your mom going out of town?”

  “Next Thursday.”

  Jamie’s grin fires across the phone lines. “Start growing that beard on Monday.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  It’s Friday, and a sweeping breath of calm fills me as I pick good, clean clothes to wear to the hospital. White cotton button-down shirt. Clean jeans with the leg cut out for my cast. A navy blue sweater. I comb my hair, not that it does more than tickle a scalp full of stubby follicles. This is a baptism. Dear Dad, I start to dictate in my head. It’s time to learn the truth. We have the thing. That spark, that flare, that tumor that makes us (made, in your case, sorry) grow way too big. This is the day I take my first deliberate steps to getting to the bottom of whatever the hell is wrong with me. I’m on the road to my diagnosis and I can’t wait.

  It’s an ungodly early appointment, but I don’t care. Mom’s saying things and they float around me, creating a bolstering cloud of security, because this is it. I’ve googled the snot out of acromegaly. I’m ready to join the parade. The blood test today will look for an overactive hormone and I’ve already checked nearly everything off the list. Enlarged hands and feet? Yup. Everything is enlarged, it all counts. Coarsened facial features? You bet. A deepened, husky voice? You’ve been listening in, haven’t you, you sly devil? There’s other stuff that doesn’t line up with the list from the Mayo Clinic, but there’s enough right there to say oh hell yeah, it’s gigantism. I’ve already signed up for the acromegaly mailing list. I’m ready to be the state of Oregon’s chapter president.

  Someday, when I’m being interviewed for Nova or 60 Minutes because I’ll have cured cancer by then, they’ll ask me about my formative years and I’ll say what a shitstorm my life was until I got my diagnosis. And once I was a legit medical giant I was no longer ashamed to tower through the halls. I had a genetic ailment that no one could take away from me. My pituitary gland produced too much growth hormone; it’s not my fault. Perhaps there’s surgery on the horizon for some benign tumors causing trouble, but once they’re gone I am in the clear. I stop growing.

  I fasted overnight. I haven’t had any breakfast. Let’s do this.

  Mom and I get in the car. Back on the road again and we’re off to the hospital. It’s a different room in a wing on the right I’ve never been to. Everything is fresh and new. Even the magazines have better pictures of bikini-clad ladies over here. Doesn’t matter they’re illustrating some weight-loss bullshit; still counts. The lab tech calls me in for the blood draw.

  “Why you smiling, baby?” she asks.

  “Nothing.” Everything. “How much blood are you taking today?”

  “Eight pints.”

  “Really?”

&nb
sp; “No, you’d be dead.” She laughs. Gotta love phlebotomist humor. “Couple vials, baby, and you’re on your way.”

  The needle goes into my vein. Vials are filled. She releases the purple elastic around my bicep, presses a cotton ball against my arm, slaps some paper tape over it, and I’m free.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The shelves in bodegas and corner mom-and-pop shops always make me smile. It’s a hodgepodge of stuff they ordered once but didn’t sell, so they let it sit on the shelf with all the other items to turn yellow and fade under the fluorescent lights. I straighten my sports coat and chuckle at one package of generic diapers, next to a pile of wrenches, next to some old travel bottles of shampoo, next to some faded boxes of birthday candles, and a box of off-off-off-off-brand teeth whitening strips left to die next to two bags of Acme kitty litter.

  It reminds me of my head. A pile of random shit crammed together. I almost want to buy the teeth whitening kit just to bring it home and give it a proper burial. Maybe I’ll add it to my list, which is pretty brief. The only thing on it is Beer.

  Two six-packs and a pack of gum from every corner store we go to.

  Because I am a bit of a math nerd, I actually looked into how many ounces of beer it would take for someone my size to get drunk, and the answer is a lot. Since we don’t want to be caught, we figured that if we buy two six-packs and some random gum at each store, no flags are raised. If we hit up enough stores, we slide under the radar, secure plenty of suds, and have a lovely long constitutional whilst getting said brews.

  Jamie has to wait outside as I browse in my man drag, select beer, and buy it. We already know it works because we stashed a brown paper bag from the last store under a row of scrub bushes, but I’m still sweating like a pig. No one seems to notice. Why would they? We scoured all the closets at both our houses and found usable man things. Thankfully her dad is real tall and doesn’t seem to be missing his scratchy brown-plaid sports coat. Jamie and I worked up my everything real good before we left. Gave the coat some Professor Huffinblad patches on the elbows that her mom had been meaning to add forever but never got around to, and with my wire frame glasses to boot, it’s all complete. Jamie swiped them from her grandpa, and as long as I sink them down the bridge of my nose and look over the top, my eyes don’t kill too much. She said that was a perfect touch because it makes me look like I need bifocals and I’m too stubborn to get them. Good for the age range we were going for.

  In addition to the khaki pants and the respectable socks and loafers, she sliced a rigid line through my hair with a fine-tooth comb and parted it to the side. Flecked with scattered gray hairs at the temples that she individually painted. Put together, but not too much. Casual. I look like a banker approving a loan for a pot farm.

  The pièce de résistance is the beard.

  It’s thicker than it should be after three days and covers everything. Neck, high up the cheeks, and almost under my ears. I hate it. It’s itchy and looks stupid. Jamie laughed her ass off while she painted about seventy-five hairs on my chin gray. So of course her laughing at me made it better. Just kidding, that sucked.

  The girl behind the cash register is older than I am, but not by much.

  “Excuse me, sir,” I hear behind me.

  I spin around on my crutches and glare at Jamie. “You’re supposed to be outside.”

  She holds up a box of Only Dudes hair dye. “I was wondering if you could help me?” She tries so hard not to laugh. “See, my dad is the same age as you, old as hell, and he’s turning gray and sagging into his shoes too. Do you have a preference when selecting cheap hair dye for old men—and by ‘old,’ I mean actually-pay-attention-to-boner-pill-commercials old—to pretend they’re still in the game?”

  Jamie shimmies with glee. This whole beer excursion came from one long exploded dare with one another. “I’ll do it if you do it” became “Let’s do it.” Turns out we both always entertained the thought of getting blitzed but never had the opportunity. And now we do. Thanks, Mom!

  “Young lady, you are quite a hoot.”

  “Thank you, sir. I like to think so too.”

  I check the clerk behind the counter. She’s not watching us, and I give Jamie’s shoulder a little bump. “Dork,” I whisper under my breath. I was excited about getting all this beer, but it turned out it’s just us doing what we do best, and that’s my favorite part.

  “You look great!” she whispers back.

  She gives me a shove. I give her a shove. She bumps me with her hip. I turn around and knock her with my butt. Jamie bounces into the teeth whitener. We glue our mouths shut because whoever laughs first loses, so we snort up a storm.

  “You’re horrible,” she says.

  “No, you’re horrible.”

  “We’re both so incredibly horrible,” she says, and I’m like, oh hell yes, we are. Forever and always.

  Jamie walks away and I tap her lifting heel with my crutch, making her trip. “Don’t blow your cover,” she shoots back with a huge grin.

  “You started it,” I rumble back.

  She situates herself by the sodas and I scan the store for people. We’re waiting for someone to check out and I’ll stand behind them, so it looks like I’m just another man buying beer and gum before going home to the wife and kids.

  Some guy comes in and I’m relieved. He’s gotta be like eighteen or something, but I bet he’ll buy an energy drink and I’ll look crazy old by comparison. Then I lean against the beef jerky because I don’t like looking like this.

  Having this thing on my face feels exactly like that time I got trapped under my grandma’s thick wool blanket when I was four: I can’t breathe. I can’t get out.

  Stop. Focus. I breathe. It’s just a beard, not a death sentence.

  I need something else to do in the store and decide on examining shoelaces. My choices are brown, black, and white in either twelve- or twenty-inch lengths. Twelve seems too short, but the twenty looks too long. One of the laces isn’t wrapped properly at the end, and the end is fraying. The store should offer it at a discount. A ruckus hits my ears.

  The guy has Jamie pinned in a corner.

  He’s in her space, her back against the wall, and picks up a lock of her hair. She smiles, a fake one, and twists her hair away as he laughs. I’m there before her hair hits her shoulder. “Leave her alone,” my voice booms above him.

  The dude turns around and faces me. “What’s it to you?”

  “Get what you need and go,” I say, stepping in between him and Jamie.

  “What if I’m in the middle of getting her number, huh?”

  I look at Jamie. Her head shimmies no, just enough for me to see. “Is he bothering you, miss?” I ask her.

  She clamps her lips down. “I’m fine; you can go.”

  “You heard her,” I tell the punk.

  “No, you,” she says.

  “What?”

  Anger slips across the way from her to me. It’s so strong, I almost want to hold on to the shelves. “I’ll be fine. You don’t have to be here,” she says, as if she just found out I drowned all her new puppies in a sack. Then warmth comes over her and she smiles at this fuckfaced jerk. “Hey,” she says to the guy. “Thanks, but no thanks. And you, sir,” she says to me, suddenly cold again. “I’m good. Okay?”

  “You heard the girl, bro,” the guy says to me. “Step off.”

  “She told you the same thing. Take a hike.”

  The guy shoves me with his pointy little fingertips. “You got something to say on this hike of yours, tell me outside. I always wanted to take on the Man.”

  Hold on, I’m the Man?

  I have been a bully. I don’t think I want to be the Man.

  My reflection in the dim light of the window is everything I don’t want to be, because that’s not me. That’s what I might be. I’m not some old man in a sports coat; I’m a kid. I should catch a glimpse of some thin-shouldered twerp in a ratty old T-shirt and beat-down hoodie with acne all over his face.


  Jamie called me sir, but not in the fun jokey way. Feels like I’m the bad guy now. She stands firm and I have no idea what to do. My only talent is growing bigger, so I wish she’d just let me chest-bump this dude all the way to Idaho.

  The punk looks me up and down and all over, hands flexing in and out of fists because he can’t figure out what’s next. He wants to take me on—I can smell it, hear the blood rush in both our ears. I step back, I want no part of this. He gets tighter in my space. Daring me. Jamie watches us from the side, her hand sneaking out to grab the neck of a glass bottle, just in case.

  Out of the corner of my eye, Jamie creeps back many steps. Safe.

  “She’s not interested,” I say in a low whisper.

  “Let her be the judge.”

  “You guys…,” Jamie says.

  “She already said no thanks. You got a hearing problem?” I say. “In case you do, I’ll talk real clear. She’s underage. She’s off-limits. A real judge would throw the book at you for trying to get with a minor.”

  The jerk’s got nothing after that. He slinks out of the store and finds his bike, riding off into the night. I turn to Jamie just as she puts the glass bottle down. “Are you okay, miss?”

  She nods but doesn’t say anything.

  Please look at me, I ask her without words.

  She does. Why’d you have to do that? I was fine. Everything was fine.

  How could I not?

  I’m so pissed at you.

  Why?

  You’re not my fucking bodyguard, okay? she says back as she stares at the ceiling.

  Oh. “Let’s go,” I whisper, turning to leave.

  She pinches the fabric of my sleeve. “Get the beer first.” I need to get shitfaced. I was kinda joking before, but I’m for real now.