Beast

by Brie Spangler

  She sniffs, but this time it’s not pretend. “Do you want a blanket?” I say, and reach for a folded one untouched at the end of my bed.

  “Thanks.” Jamie unfurls it, wraps herself up like a woolen burrito, and sits on the far end of the bed. “I’m just not in the mood for ‘I knew you’d be one of those girls who stays out all night’ right now.”

  “Understandable.”

  “Just feel…” Her voice slips away. Jamie buries herself completely in the blanket. “I feel so alone.”

  I move to touch her, but my hand hovers. Waiting for a sign. I don’t know if I’m allowed to touch her in any way, but waiting for signs is a bullshit experience. Only sign I need is hers, and my hand comes down soft to rest on her shoulder.

  She doesn’t shake it off. She doesn’t tell me to move it.

  “I know that feeling,” I say.

  “So does JP,” she says. “It’s funny, when he found me I was practically bleeding from your silence. And all of a sudden it was like, who is this broken little rich boy?”

  “Who cares.”

  “He doesn’t know how to tell you how important you are to him. We were both kind of moping around over you, isn’t that stupid? Especially since he disgusts me right now. What kind of ally does that? He is a very good listener, though.”

  “That’s how he learns your soft spots.”

  “At least I got a show out of it.”

  “You did it on purpose?”

  “I’m no angel,” Jamie says. “Every time JP wanted me to talk to you and I said no, because I was pissed at you, which I still am, he kept upping the ante and I was like, hmm, how far will this kid go to get what he wants?”

  “JP will go the distance.”

  “He told me about his mom.”

  “Whoa. That’s major.”

  “He said you and your mom were the only people who knew.”

  “Well. That’s accurate.” I knew, but my mom did the listening and talking. Never me. But who knows, that could change. “So is that what you were thinking when you were out walking around for hours? How to bring me and JP back together?”

  “Yes. No.” Jamie flips her arms free from the blanket and pushes up her sleeves. “I just kept walking around, worrying about my Spanish test on Friday and all this other crap, but underneath it all, you kept bubbling up.”

  “In a good way?”

  “Not really. I hate that I think about you all the time. I wish I didn’t. I wish I could take a bath and wash everything away, instead of having it build and build. I hate that I torture myself with all these memories of us. I feel like I scared you away and I hate myself for that.”

  “You didn’t! Please don’t get that stuck in there. It was me. Maybe I wasn’t ready, maybe I was blaming my dad, maybe I was just an idiot. All of the above. Like, when you said you wanted to have sex, I was not expecting that. Made me nervous about future, um, endeavors.”

  “But I only said that to keep you.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not ready either. That’s what my friend Keely said to do. She said that’s what boys want.” Jamie wraps the thick blanket tighter. “Ugh, I feel so dumb. Like Keely knows what the hell she’s talking about. She can’t keep a boyfriend longer than a month.”

  “I wish you could’ve told me.”

  “Maybe we could…talk? About stuff like that? Instead of feel dumb?”

  “I’d love a chance to talk about anything with you.”

  The new silence isn’t cold. It’s as warm as my hand that’s still resting on her shoulder.

  “When we met, did you honestly not hear me in group?”

  “I was in a pity spiral, so no.”

  “Then why when you did learn the truth, why couldn’t you just say ‘Wow, I didn’t know you were trans, but I don’t care because I like you’ instead of spit on the sidewalk and make me feel like garbage, why? Even a polite ‘Thanks, but no thanks’ would’ve been better. Why did you have to be so awful? Why are you only okay with us in the dark?” Jamie finds her camera and starts twisting the lens cap with jittery fingers. “Why do I keep coming back to this?”

  The lens cap falls and she struggles to fit it onto the camera, gives up, and thumps it down in her lap with a thud. “Just feels like I’ve been trapped in this world where I don’t know what’s true anymore. When I’m with you, I only want the good and I’m too blind to see the bad. Even after everything that’s happened, I’m still in this soupy shit. I hate—no, despise—myself for wanting the fairy tale.”

  “But we all want that.”

  “Well, make it stop,” she says. “Tell me you’re an all-star asshole and that if I stay here one more second you’ll hurt me. Again.”

  “Jamie, I can’t stop thinking about you either.”

  “No. Wrong answer.” She shuts her eyes tight. “Were we ever real?”

  “Yes.”

  “All those things you said in the tree house, were they true?”

  “Every word.”

  “And my hand was honestly the best thing you’ve ever held?”

  Now I close my eyes, remembering. “Always.”

  I’ve hurt a lot of people in the past, but nothing is worse than this.

  Jamie hugs her knees. “Dylan, I think we…”

  I wait, my comforter taking the form of tenterhooks, when Mom yells up the stairs, “Sweetheart! It’s time to go.”

  “Where are you going?” Jamie asks.

  “My cast comes off today. Want to come?” We have so much more to talk about.

  The three of us pile into the car like it’s nothing. Oh, don’t mind us, we always travel in style with my mom driving the whip, my shotgun seat pushed back as far as it can go without breaking, and the girl of my literal dreams mashed in the backseat.

  After a fairly awkward seventeen minutes of my mom peeking in her rearview mirror at me and Jamie, she finally pulls in to the parking lot and calls out, “We’re here!”

  My crutches, the ones Jamie found, are all dinged up. Scratches cut the metal where I collided with a million trash cans, cars, shopping carts, and rocks. The handles are cracked and yellowed from months of my sweaty hands gripping the foam molded to my palms. Battle-hardened.

  I walk into the hospital and lean them against the wall where my height is checked for the last time. I know the drill and I stand against the stadiometer as the nurse climbs up onto a chair. “I wonder if I’ll hit seven feet,” I say.

  “I hope not. We’re running out of places to buy clothes,” Mom grumbles.

  The nurse slides the bar down until it taps my head. “Six feet, seven inches,” she says, marking it on the paper inside a manila folder.

  “I’m almost as tall as my dad.” This is so great, I could pop.

  The crutches come with me to the X-ray room and I leave them by the bed for hopefully the last time. When we get to the exam room, I put them down for good. I don’t care what the doctor says; I won’t pick them up again. I am beyond done with this broken leg. Dr. Jensen comes in, clipboard in tow, just like always. “Hop up,” he commands, and I swing my leg high onto the crinkly paper bed. A nurse, not the same jerk who sized me up for pit fighting, aligns my entire right leg so it’s facing out and steady. “Let’s get right to it,” Dr. Jensen says. “I’ll turn on the saw.”

  Deep within my chest, my heart starts to throb. This is it. The oscillating saw looks like a motorized pizza cutter. It buzzes and Mom grips my shoulder. Jamie squeezes her hands to her stomach. “You’ll feel a light to moderate tickling sensation,” the nurse tells me as Dr. Jensen makes the first cut.

  It goes down, starting at my foot, smooth and firm. After each pass, he goes back and does it again. Sometimes two or three times. “The bottom of this cast has a lot more wear and tear than I’d like. But the X-rays look good, so I’ll let it slide.”

  After he’s done cutting two lines on opposite sides of the cast, he takes something that looks like a car jack and a pair of pliers had a baby, and stick
s its nose into the crack and pushes. The cast pops open in two pieces. I hold my breath as he lets air touch my leg. “Most plaster I’ve used in a long, long while, I guarantee you that,” he says, prying the top off and snipping the gauze with a pair of shears. He peels it all away and tosses it to the side, and just like that, my leg is free.

  And holy shit, it reeks.

  Mom pinches her nose shut. “I think I’m gonna barf.”

  “Nice,” I say, but looking at my leg, I think I’ll join her. Clots of flaky beige skin mingle with my dense leg hair, and it smells worse than a dead fish inside a dead cat rotting under the porch. I lift my leg from the tomb and push the old cast out from underneath it. It’s my foot. I wiggle it.

  Jamie sneaks her camera from her bag. “Whoa…This is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen. Can I?”

  “Take all the pictures you want.”

  She goes nuts.

  “Does it hurt?” Dr. Jensen asks.

  “A little.” I bend my ankle for the first time in months. It feels like it wants to pop. Turning my leg from left to right, I see the scars from the pins and screws buried in the bone. The nurse comes near with a flat metal tool to scrape days and weeks of nastiness off my leg. “I’ll do it,” I say, and rake the dull blade up my shriveled calf.

  Okay, this is gross.

  Dr. Jensen pats me on the back. “Rules for now: no sports for the next three months. Football should be fine by camp—when’s that, August? We’ll set up one last appointment to take a look, but as long as you go slow, I don’t anticipate any problems. Take it easy. Build up to running, let your leg get as strong as the rest of you. All right?”

  I nod.

  “But don’t worry,” he says. “Once a break heals, it becomes the strongest part of the bone.”

  “Like a scar,” I say.

  “Wear it proudly.” He shakes my hand and leaves. “See you in two weeks for the follow-up.”

  The door clicks shut. Mom helps me off the table, hands me the pair of jeans she brought in her bag, and I step behind a screen. By myself, I put them on. Buttoning the button and zipping up the fly. I smooth down the denim leg I’ve been missing all these months. Two legs in an actual pair of pants. It’s crazy how good a pair of jeans feels. I take the old pair, the one with only one leg, and ram it down into the shiny chrome trash can, crushing all the little paper cups underneath it down, down, down until my old pants, my old me, is gone. And I walk. It’s a cheesy little circle, but I walk and it’s amazing. Mom fusses and warns me not to go too fast, but this is heaven. No wheelchair, no crutches, just me.

  Jamie snaps three pictures and stops. Her eyes peek up from behind the camera.

  “Is it okay if we walk home?” I ask Mom.

  “It’s kind of far. I don’t want you to tax your leg on the first—”

  I give her a look.

  Mom stands up straight. “Oh. Sure thing,” she says. “But call me if it gets to be too much, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  She pats me on the back and squeezes Jamie’s shoulder. “Have a nice walk, you two. Go slow.”

  In the empty exam room, Jamie and I are still. She takes a breath and doesn’t budge. Her nose lifts to the ceiling and she talks to the invisible sky above. “I don’t know what we have. If anything. I don’t know where to start.”

  My one new leg is tender. I shake it out as I think. Mom’s voice rings in my ears. Trust is earned. “Me either, but when we go get that pretzel, I want to eat the whole entire thing in front of the universe.”

  A tiny grin sneaks across her lips.

  I gaze down at her and it finally comes out. “I love you, Jamie.”

  “You don’t.”

  “I do. And I want to show you every day.”

  She covers her eyes with one hand and searches for my chest with the other. It lands and I clamp it down over my heart. Her fingertips linger. Jamie peeks through her knuckles to see me smiling because I can’t do anything but smile when I’m around her.

  This is the girl that sees beauty in rust, that flies with or without my hand under her feet. Who meets me in a garden full of sleeping flowers. The girl who I hope will be there with me when they bloom again in the spring. The girl who changed my life. I hope she drives me crazy by taking a billion and more pictures of me and everything else in the world forever. This is the girl.

  We leave.

  We leave the osteo office, we leave the wing, we leave the hospital, we even leave the bus stop, and stroll into the sunlight. On the sidewalk, the steps I take are light. Nervous. I test my leg and give it more. I bend my knee and we hear my ankle pop.

  People stare at us as we walk by and I’m like, yup. That’s me, that’s her.

  That’s us.

  “I don’t want us to be horrible anymore,” she says.

  It’s like a little dagger that came out of nowhere. “You don’t?”

  “No,” she says. Jamie’s hand sneaks toward mine. Her fingertips brush against the back of my hand, and I weave my fingers through hers. “I want us to be good.”

  “Let’s be good,” I say.

  Our shadow below shows us walking as one, stretched out and long. Jamie takes a picture. I lean my head back and take in the light. Rain again tomorrow, but I don’t care about anything but her hand in mine. It’s all I need.

  I give it a squeeze. “Want to see how fast I can eat like ten pretzels?”

  She sends me one back and laughs. “Yes, immediately.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I tried to kick off thanking so many wonderful people with something witty, but it quickly devolved into why type O blood saved a significant amount of people from bubonic plague in medieval Europe and then that somehow morphed into a line about boob sweat and I was like, you know what? Forget all that. I need to salute the real MVPs because that’s far more important and coherent.

  Two people—straight up, no chaser—come first because without them, oh man…I don’t even want to think about it. This book would be nowhere without my amazing agent, Mackenzie Brady-Watson. Tenaciously whip-smart and clever, she saw the story I first delivered and knew the bones could bear more weight. I can’t thank her enough for loving Dylan and Jamie and always wanting more from both them and me. And it’s almost unfair to merely say thank you to my extraordinary editor, Erin Clarke, whose thoughts and notes crackle with fire, because there’s so much I need to pack into those two words. Thank you for believing in these characters and knowing just when to administer CPR. And thank you for giving this book life.

  So to these two brilliant women, my eternal gratitude for all the very many big and little things. You know them all, and I thank you, thank you, thank you.

  My cover. Oh my god, it’s gorgeous. I was filling up my car when I first saw it and immediately started getting all weepy at the gas station. Leo Nickolls, you’re the best. And when I’m done gushing about your work, I’ll let you know, but I fear it will be never.

  To everyone at Random House, thank you for being so very excellent. Big shout-out to the copy editors because—holy cow!—I repeat myself so much. It’s a tic, repeating myself (have I mentioned I tend to repeat myself?), and they endured a whole manuscript. True professionals, I’m telling you.

  I am one lucky duck because, along the way, I’ve gotten to know some truly great people. Major recognition and thanks to Billie Bloebaum, Kiersi Burkhart, Cara Hallowell, and Cynthia McGean. Martha Brockenbrough is a gem. Meredith Russo is a badass. To a very special person, Sara Gundell Larson: the book world is a better place for having you as its champion. Thank you for being a dear friend and good heart. With love, I thank you for absolutely everything.

  And to Whitney Gardner: You knew every iteration of this book, from beginning to end and all my flailings in between. One time when I was filled with doubts about this book and everything inside it, you wrote in the margin, “If you don’t finish this, I will cry and cry and cry and cry.” It’s tiki time. (tiki emoji)

  Lov
e is love is love. I wish all couples joy and happiness and the freedom to fight over stupid things like who gets the remote and why do you always leave your socks on the floor when the hamper is right there, why?

  If you’re thinking about harming yourself, please go to twloha.com.

  We love you. I love you. Be well.

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