I release my own self and tug the spool of toilet paper, tearing some odd squares and mashing them into my eyes until all I smell is paper fiber and I have to sneeze. “It’s okay,” she says, after I mop up my slop.
“I’m afraid of myself,” I whisper. “I don’t want this. I keep growing and growing. I’m a tumor.”
“You’re not a tumor.”
“Then what am I?” My face rises up to meet hers. “Because I’m not a normal fifteen-year-old. I never got to be a kid. I never got to be free. I’ve always had to deal with being big.” I shake my head. “And I just keep getting bigger. I’m going to grow out of control, just like my dad. I’m a living, breathing tumor with a GPA. My body is going to eat me up from the inside out and kill me just like my dad’s killed him.”
“No, it’s not. I looked it up too. Gigantism can be controlled. You’ll be fine,” she says.
“I’m going to get cancer and be dead at twenty-six, just like my dad.”
“Well…I hope not.” She pauses, standing over me as I sit. “But no one knows, you know? We could walk outside, smell the effing roses, and get hit by a bus. That’s life.”
“That’s life.” I rest my head against her hip. She wraps an arm around my shoulder but can’t cover the whole of it and settles for the soft spot below my neck. I pick up her wrist and hold it against my cheek. In the quiet of my bathroom, where there’s no one in the world but us, I can feel her heartbeat on my skin. She’s here. Alive and kicking and I’m so happy she is. I don’t want to let her go.
But I do, kissing her scars before her wrist slips away. Sniffing the drips up my nose, I sit upright. She lays her palm against the side of my face, cradling my ear. “Do you think I’m a failure?” she asks in a small voice.
“Never,” I say. “Why would you even say that?”
“Because I don’t think I’m brave or any of that. I try and try. Do my homework, feed the dog, hug my mom and dad, join the clubs, do all the things, but I’ll run into one of those shitty alerts on Google News and it’s like, will I ever be enough?”
“You’re a good person. That has to be enough.”
“Most of the time I brush it off. Get all snappy and stuff, but the tank is only so full, you know? Sometimes I don’t feel like talking. Because talking always feels like defending and I’m tired of asking for permission to exist.” Jamie rubs behind her ear, scratching the back of her earring. “It gets hard because I like myself, I like my body, and then when someone shits all over it, it feels like I have to start all over. You don’t know what it’s like to have people actually come up to you and ask, ‘What are you?’ I mean, what am I supposed to say to that?”
“Don’t say anything. Punch them in the face.” Despite it all, that’s still my fantasy.
“Right, because that solves everything,” she says. “No offense, Dylan, but your only major hang-up is about being very big.”
“And ugly,” I remind her. “And being potentially riddled with lots and lots of malignant cancer that metastasizes to all my bones and organs.”
She cracks the smallest of grins. “Okay, fine. But you don’t have to field questions like ‘Did you get it cut off yet?’ And ‘You’re too young to be making such a big decision. What if you change your mind?’ I’d like to think I know myself a little better than some lady at Whole Foods.” Jamie tugs on her hair, twirling the same lock of hair the guy touched. “It’s why I was pissed at the store when you tried to chase off that creep. He was being gross, but he was honest. Then you charged in. I can’t go through life getting rescued.”
“I’m not going to apologize for chasing that guy away. I would’ve done that for any girl in the same situation.”
“Really?”
“Really. All we can do is be and hope someone else gets it.”
“Someone will love you,” she says quietly.
“Someone will love you too.”
“You think so?”
“I know so.”
Her eyes well up and she turns away from me. Jamie takes some things out of a small zippered bag inside her big bag on the counter and dabs where her mascara’s pooled into slick black rims. She catches me watching. “Touch-ups.”
I miss her hands. “Do me next,” I say.
“Are you serious?” She smiles. Then she pounces. Her fingertips caress my face, rubbing my skin flat, exploring. “What do you want? A smoky eye?”
I don’t care as long as she’s touching me. “Whatever you want.”
“Let’s do swarthy pirate,” she declares.
She’s up close, her face near mine, and I write a last-ditch letter.
Dad—Let me know this is okay. Give me a sign, because I can’t take it anymore. It’s one thing for me and Jamie to talk until we’re blue, but I don’t want to talk anymore and this girl is centimeters away and soft. I can smell her. Vanilla and honey. I could tilt my head and brush her chest with my mouth. Please tell me this is okay, because I want to. Tell me I’m normal and this is something that can happen and you’ll still be my dad.
My eyes get gently contorted like clay, but I don’t care. Her fingers are warm. I follow all the commands—Blink. Look up. All the way up. Blink. Look down. Look left. Look right—and I want her. I want to grip her hips and pull her down onto me, tear off her shirt and find my mouth on her skin, but I wait. I need my sign. I lick my lips. She licks hers.
“Okay, look,” she says.
I swivel my head and burst out laughing. “Oh man…” I laugh more. There’s black lining my eyes, and mascara, and my eyebrows are all combed and pressed into place. I smolder. My cheeks are dewy and I’ve even got lip gloss on. It’s pineapple.
“You like?” she asks.
I nod. “It’s something else.”
Jamie takes a step back. “I mean, woof, Dylan. This is a surprise. You are no longer that hulking beast in a wheelchair, no sir.”
There is no sign, there may never be one, but I can’t wait anymore. I stand up and hold my nose to hers. She holds a hand on my chest. “What are you doing?”
I slide a hand up her spine. “Is this okay?”
“Yes. It is. A lot.” Jamie bites her lip. “I didn’t want to get my hopes up.”
“I kind of always liked you.”
“I kind of never stopped.” Her hands creep across my bare skin. They settle on the small of my back and lock like magnets. All the atoms fly from the drawer and sink deep inside my chest where they belong as I stare into her eyes.
We kiss.
We kiss and stop, our noses a paper’s width apart. Barely a touch, but I want more and I dive into her neck. She gasps, fighting my lips up toward hers. This is the only sign I need. We crash like waves.
There’s everything else and then there’s Jamie.
TWENTY-SIX
A race. That’s the best way I can put it, we’re both in a crazed race and I have no idea what the finish line looks like. My hands are all over her, hers are up and down my front and my back and when she skims the sides of my ribs, it tickles and I laugh.
“Sorry,” she whispers, a grin inside her kiss.
“Don’t be.” I kiss her back. And again and again and one more time before I wrap my arms around her and lift her high. We’re still in my crappy bathroom. We can’t jet off to Tahiti or Paris, but I can whisk her up to my room. She weighs nothing. Either that, or I can’t tell what she weighs because I’m so light-headed.
We launch into my blankets. Jamie kicks and giggles as I pile on top of her. My shirt’s long gone and now hers is too. The lights are off and the only way we can see each other is with the dim glow from the streetlamp flickering through my threadbare curtains. I look down. Jamie’s skin looks like colors of the fading day. She reaches up and touches my cheek, her palm warming me to my bones.
She is beautiful.
I don’t want to stop kissing her, so I won’t. This is how we’ll be forever, tangled up in lips with long kisses and short kisses. Chaste ones you’d do in front of a librarian. Deep, p
unishing ones you save for when he’s off restocking the shelves. Like now.
We’re alone. The night is ours. There’s no stopping us.
All this amazing skin we have, brushing and colliding together, hot fingertips and sweaty tips of our toes, it’s like unlocking a hidden door you never knew existed and finding a path littered with bread crumbs. Once you taste one, there is no way back. You can’t forget this. We’re never coming home.
In the midst of making out and gripping our shoulders, arms, backs, we go further. Like, further south. Jamie’s thumb peeks below the waistband of my boxers. Her painted nails dip inside. She finds me and with one touch, it’s like being hooked up to a car battery. I explode.
I’m mortified that it took so little, but Jamie kisses me. Her teeth tweak my bottom lip with a wink. “That was hot,” she murmurs.
“Are you sure?”
“Oh yes.”
We shift in the bed. Now she’s on top, her hair spilling down across my chest as she kisses my neck. It’s something I never knew I needed. It’s especially incredible now that my entire system overloaded, burst into flames, and is being rebuilt one caress at a time.
As Jamie starts to rub against me, everything of mine is still raw nerves. Her skirt shifts up. I see our matching equipment and I jerk back. Jamie panics a little, tugging down her skirt. “I’m sorry, I was afraid this was a bad idea, it’s just, I don’t want you to think—”
“Don’t apologize,” I tell her. “For anything. Come here.” And I bring her back so her hair dances across my chest again.
There’s only one thing I want right now, and that’s to do for her what she did for me, make her feel like the length of her skin is dancing inside a star.
Her eyes spiral up to the blue ceiling I painted for my dad and blink as she shudders. “That was amazing. Like riding a horse without a saddle,” she says.
I laugh. Of everything I never expected to hear, that has to be at the top of the list.
“What? I always loved horses; lots of girls love horses.”
“I know. I read an article once about how girls transfer their childhood love of horses, because they’re big and filled with muscle, onto boys once they get older.” I flex my chest and shoulders. “So I guess you’ve come to the right place.”
She groans with a smile, diving face-first into my sternum. “You would bring up some random factoid right now, wouldn’t you?”
“At your service. My brain never stops working.”
“Hmmm.” Jamie leans up and nuzzles my ear. “But it did for a moment.”
“An embarrassingly very brief moment, yes.” I kiss her. First a kiss that would make your friends gag from too much PDA in the halls. Then I follow it up with one that would be acceptable before saying goodbye at a train station. I am getting good at this.
“What would you do if I made you pancakes?” I ask.
“Eat them.”
“Let’s go.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
She sleeps. I don’t.
Up high in my room, under the covers of my bed and beneath my silent blue ceiling, trying to force my eyes to close. It’s not working. When they do close, the last nine hours go on instant replay and I pop back awake. Sleeping is not an option right now.
I’m still figuring out all the drifting puzzle pieces. Fragments scattered on the floor in the shape of our clothes. Lying here in the dark and trying to sort it all out is harder than actually messing around. In the moment, all I wanted was her. And I got it. Long after we’re exhausted and filled with pancakes, I can’t help but dissect the night as I would a frog. Slicing it open with precision and gently peeling back the layers until the guts are exposed.
What I keep going over and over is the one question she asked.
We were deep in the middle of round two. Post-pancakes and back in my bed. Kissing. It was dark and hot under the sheet and she’s having fun with me and I’m having fun with her and she goes, “Want to?”
“Want to what?”
She stroked my cheek as she smiled. “Do it?”
Everything ground to a halt. Pebbles and rocks went over the ledge in a cloud of dust. She lay underneath me and peered up, her hair on my pillow in a wave. I can’t count how many times I’ve dreamed of this moment. A girl in bed wanting to do it with me. Instead, a weight sank my stomach. The truth is the truth.
“I’m not ready,” I whispered.
“Okay.”
“Do you think I’m a loser?”
“No.” She shook her head.
“Are you sure?”
“Completely.” Her fingers dragged down my back. “Kiss me.”
I stopped. “Am I hurting you?”
“Dylan, if I’m ever having a bad day or whatever, just come over and lie on top of me,” she said. “You don’t even have to get naked. I just want the weight of all things real pressing into my bones. It’s intoxicating.”
“You’re intoxicating.”
Jamie arched her back, pushing into me. “When you say that it sounds like thunder.”
So I kissed her. More and more. After we watched a movie and went back to bed way after midnight, Jamie drifted off to sleep and I tried to join her.
Since I can’t sleep, I watch her and beg the sun to stay away. Give me more time to watch her breathe, to be here where nothing else matters.
Moonlight threads its way in through the blinds and dresses her shoulders in silver. She stirs. I shift back to give her space, and Jamie awakes with a start. “Oh!” She rubs her eye. “I forgot where I was. I was dreaming.”
“What were you dreaming about?”
“I have this one dream. It’s always the same but different,” she says, gradually coming round. “I’m on a plane, but sometimes there’s no plane, and I land in a place where I’m supposed to take pictures. Like, dreaming about my dream job, you know? And then I get off the plane. Sometimes I don’t know where to go. Sometimes I do. But tonight was different.”
“How?”
“You were there when I got off the plane. Then I woke up.”
I kiss her on the forehead. “Sounds like a good dream.”
“What about you?”
“I haven’t been to sleep yet.”
“What? Why?”
“I don’t want this night to end.”
“Aw…” She snuggles into my chest. And this is why.
We’re quiet. Doing nothing but listening to our heartbeats bounce.
“What are you thinking about?” I ask her.
She lifts her head up and the moonlight coats her face in thin light. “Us.”
“Is there an us?”
“I think so,” she says in a hush. Jamie turns toward the window to check the night, and I see the vestiges of her XY chromosomes sneaking through but only because I’m making myself look for them. I see it in her bones. I never saw before the day she told me, and I don’t really care. Not here with just the two of us in my room, anyway.
If we went away where no one knew us, we’d be free. We could hold hands wherever we wanted and not care what people think, because we’re just like any other couple, which we are, but we wouldn’t have to answer any questions. We’d get married and adopt some babies. She can go and take pictures, and I can stay at home with the kids while I study and teach classes as an adjunct professor in England. “Come with me to England.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“My dream, my waking alive real dream, is to get the Rhodes Scholarship,” I say. “And I’m going to Oxford to get my master’s and study, maybe doctorate too.”
She laughs with the corner of her mouth. “In what?”
“I have this crazy idea that the spread of cancer has similar wavelengths to historical outbreaks of evil. Like hysteria. And I wonder if it can be tracked down and pinpointed to one gene or one cell. Was it Tituba, the possessed teenage girls, or the people who believed them that began the Salem witch trials? Can you nail down Hitler before he invades Poland? That kind of stuff
.”
“So you want to give human thoughts to cancer cells?” she says.
“No, I think they already have them. Which is why you watch people do terrible things in history. The creep of being bad starts slow and builds. Like one idea that people latch onto and let it get this almost magical thinking mentality that they use to excuse what they’re doing, you know? And then only after the fact, people are like, oh yeah, that whole Nazi thing was really bad. But the Nazis didn’t think so while they were in it. The teenage girls in Salem thought what they experienced was real, but if you break it down, the women who got hanged were mostly widows. The minority,” I say. Jamie watches me intently. “Just makes me think that must be what cancer is like. The spread. You start with some cells and end up taking over whole organs and bones. There has to be a connection.”
“Whoa.” She lies back on the pillow. “That’s quite the thing you’ve thoughted up.”
“Thanks. And I love books, so I might do something with English, but nothing serious because all I want is an excuse to read.”
“Naturally.”
“We can get an apartment, or a flat, whatever they call them, and you can fly to Europe and take pictures whenever you want,” I say. “It’ll be amazing—come with me. We’ll go over and live together. We’ll get a cat—”
“We need a cat?”
“I’ve always imagined studying at Oxford with a cat. Dogs need to be walked; won’t have time for that.”
“If you don’t have time to walk a dog, how will you have time for me?”
“Who said I won’t? And besides, you’ll be right next to the rest of Europe; you can zip over through the Chunnel and go to Paris whenever you want. Go to London, hit up the National Gallery. It’ll be perfect.”
“So I get to be a tourist for four years.” Jamie’s forehead wrinkles down. “What about our parents?”
“You can’t stand your mom. It’ll be fine.”
“I never said that,” she says, all defensive. “All I want is for her to stop worrying about everything. Maybe we can come home after you finish up at Oxford.”
“No, we need to stay in England.”
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