Beast(62)

When we met I had no sympathy for the girls in group who hacked themselves up. It made no sense. They were too pretty to have problems. “I never knew.”

“You and I didn’t go to therapy to swap recipes,” she tries to joke.

“I just always pictured you as above it, I guess.”

“Above what? Pain?”

“No, like you conquered it. All the things that bother people because you f*ck-it stomp it out. Like you’re fearless and strong and brave and all of that.”

“Don’t say that and not see me,” she says. “No one lives without fear.”

I’m not here, I’m not leaking in front of her. I’m not being some sob story in a bad song performed by untalented douchebags. I’m not falling into the hole I’ve been stepping over my whole life—I’m not. I don’t come up for air. I press it back inside my eyes and blink in my palms.

She finds one of my arms and holds it.

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.”