Beast(47)

“Thanks.” Her voice sounds like she’s peering out a window and seeing a very sad face in the glass.

“You know what I hate more than anything?” I ask her. “Going number two at school. I hate getting the pass and then you have to sign in to the bathroom and when you sign out and the monitor is like, ha-ha, well look at you, ten pounds lighter. Hate it. Poseidon’s kiss right before English is the absolute worst.”

“I’m afraid to ask.”

“Backsplash.”

“Okay, I just threw up.” She laughs. “This is why I never, never poop at school. Never, ever, ever.”

“How is that possible?”

“Ever heard the phrase ‘scared shitless’?” She laughs, but sounds like she’s repeating a bad joke to a tin can. “I didn’t for years. I never wanted to go in the boys’ bathroom. I held it all the way through junior high.”

“Every day?”

“Unless it was a total emergency, then yeah. I did.”

“Whoa.”

“The whole bathroom thing is dumb. I don’t want special treatment and I don’t want to go around educating everyone—because it’s seriously not my job. I just want to pee.” Jamie laughs. “I can’t believe I’m talking to you about this. It’s so embarrassing.”

“To be fair, I’m the one who brought up poop.”

“True. You’re a terrible influence.”

“Horrible.”

“So horrible.”

I just want to scream, YES! Be horrible with me! Instead I hang up.

I drop the phone on the train set and clench my fists above. “Gah, why this now!” But I know why. The fluttering is here and using my stomach as a bouncy house. “Fuck off, butterflies,” I say as I call her back.

She answers. “What happened?”

Nerves. “Um. Dropped the phone. Or something.”

“Oh…”

“I want us to be friends,” I blurt out.

“Yeah, isn’t that why I ate a crab cake the other night?”

“You didn’t eat the whole thing.”

She laughs. “Don’t get nitpicky.”

“It wasn’t good?”

“Moving on. Friends. We’ve established that. Do you want to get it notarized or something? Because that’ll cost us three whole dollars.”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to offend anyone.”

“If by ‘anyone’ you mean me, go back to the days when I was just another girl on the street. No big deal.”

That’s what I’m afraid of. I stick a wobbly tree back up into the grass, and it falls over again. This is why I love school: I don’t have to question anything; I just have to conquer it. “Be patient with me,” I ask her.

“I’m trying,” she says softly.

“I don’t like not knowing what’s going to happen. Things used to be real clear. Now I’m not so sure.”

“But isn’t that on everyone’s bumper sticker? We’re all growing a little bit more every day and all that?”

I jump. “Can we not talk about growing?”

“Um. Okay. Well, since we’re friends and all that, if you want to ever talk about great unknowns or screaming into the void or whatever, you know where to find me,” she says. “But I gotta go. Have homework.”

“We should do homework sometime.”

“NO! I mean, no thanks,” she says, scrambling. “I’m real bad at math. I don’t want you to see how dumb I am. I’m practically redoing Algebra 1. It’s pathetic.”

“You are not dumb. Like, at all. Maybe I could help you?”

She thinks on it. “Maybe you could. But not tonight. Bye, Dylan.”

“Good night, Jamie.”

We hang up and I feel empty.

I don’t know why. I should be feeling like my battery is in the green. Every time Jamie and I talk, it’s like sitting inside the eye of the hurricane. An absolutely good place to be. Where whatever is swirling around on the outside, like trees and flying cows or whatever, everything on the inside is still. A place to be whole. I don’t want to think about it, so I do what I do best.

Bury it. Bury all the feelings.

Problem solved.

I shake with a shiver, throwing an entire day’s worth of crap off my back.

My broken leg is still attached to me like a stiff slab of concrete, and with cramps in all my other muscles, hefting myself off the floor is no picnic. The litany of all things wrong with me skips through my mind. Thankfully my blood test is in two weeks. My bigness will have its proper medical diagnosis of acromegaly and I’ll be fixed. I can’t wait. Shifting upright, I put only the slightest weight on my leg. It’s still sore from the last time I was knocking around the basement, and I don’t want to mess it up any further than it already is. This cast is my plaster symbiote: it needs me and I need it.

I hop upstairs, one step at a time, and shut the light off on the little village once I get to the kitchen. Sleep well, Dad.

The idea is nice, wishing him a good night’s sleep and all, but his body is rotting in a box in the ground. If there’s anything left, that is. Mom went for an all-natural burial. But who knows, maybe the chemicals from years of chemo turned his veins into plastic, and someone dug him up and posed him like a heroic warrior in one of those traveling body shows.