Beast(66)

“I want to be with you.”

“Do you?” she asks. “Or do you want to set a course for college that ignores everything else? Because I’m excited about applying and all that stuff, but the path is littered with bodies and I don’t want to be one of them.”

“It is not that serious.”

“Maybe for you, but most people can’t sneeze and get an A.”

A+, I want to correct her. “But you’re smart too,” I say instead.

“Lots of very smart people get bad grades. It’s intimidating to think your entire life depends on a pop quiz in Spanish. I can’t keep up that pace,” she says. “So I pick petals from flowers, saying, ‘He loves me, he loves me not….’ I make wishes at 11:11 and when I twist the clasp of my necklace right side up. And when I see the first and only shooting star in my whole life, I wish that I’ll meet someone who just wants to be with me. I made the wish and then I met you the next day.” Jamie stares at me, her eyes lighting up all the shadows of mine. “Is it you?”

“Of course it’s me.”

“Then be here and stop thinking of England.”

“But I’m already lying down.”

She laughs. “I knew you’d go there.”

“That’s why we’re perfect.”

“You think so?”

“I know so,” I say. “That’s why we’ll work it out when we go away to England. Maybe we’ll travel and be vagabonds. Fill up passports like crazy. Jump from country to country where nobody knows anything about us and we’ll be free.”

“Shit.”

“What?”

“I should’ve known this was about me being trans,” she says.

“It’s not.” It kind of is.

“Are you afraid to walk down the street and hold my hand?”

I will walk down any street in England with her; I just don’t know about tomorrow here in Portland. “It’s just, I had a recent round of crap at school from…knowing you.”

She covers up the flicker of sadness with a big beaming smile, and I feel like the bottom of a garbage can. “Welcome, straight white boy, to the tiniest taste of the other side of the coin. Unfortunately, explaining that you are the expert on your own life to dumbass ignorant people is a thing. Like, oh hey, not that it’s any of your business, but no, just because a guy is dating a trans girl, it doesn’t mean he’s gay. It means he likes a girl. Is that some of what you got?”

I nod.

“Are you going to leave the coin heads up for all the world to see? Or are you going to flip it to heads down?”

“Heads up.” I forbid any more words from escaping because there’s a slight possibility the answer is What coin, where? Because I can barely handle being myself, I don’t know if I’m ready to be a poster boy for dating a trans girl. Only because of what happened under the sheets. It’s a little different and I’m not used to it yet. This is a whole other level of being with another person. We were flipping golden at talking and texting and laughing and hanging out. Then tonight happened. Not what I expected for a first time getting physical with another person. But all recent experiences are too raw to thoroughly examine, so off to the drawer they go.

Everything about her furrows. “Hmm.”

“Don’t hmm. What’s the hmm for?”

“What if this bed were front and center at the mall?”

“People would ask why there’s a bed at the mall.”

“Ugh,” she groans in exasperation. “I meant with us in it.”

“What? Why do we need to put on a show at the mall?”

“It’s not a show, it’s us.”

“I’m not getting naked at the mall.”

“Who’s asking you to get naked?”

“You are.”

“No, I’m not.”

Now I groan. “Why are we arguing?”

Jamie gives me a little hug. “Maybe that’s what boyfriends and girlfriends do,” she says. “Besides, I don’t want to waste a minute. I really want to be with you, so let’s leave it. We don’t have to worry about college anytime soon.”

“Oxford is another six years away, though; RISD is only two. Maybe we could talk to our parents about going abroad for the last two years of high school and—”

“Dylan,” she interrupts me. One leg straddles my body. Hello. “It’s three-thirty in the morning. Do you want to talk about college or do you want to make out again?”

I pull her down on top of me and answer this question as best I can.





TWENTY-EIGHT


I wake up covered in hair.

Not mine for once, Jamie’s. It’s everywhere. Strewn across my chest and my shoulders that have just been shoved and shoved hard.

“There had better be a damn good reason there’s beer bottles all over the kitchen and you’re in bed together,” I hear my mom say.

My heart stops. “Oh my god.” I snap wide-wide awake. “Jamie, wake up.” Elbowing her, I hope she keeps the sheet clamped down tight. There’s a whole lot of dermis under here.

“Mmm?” she murmurs, bleary and crusty-eyed. Then Jamie pops up, clutching the sheet to her chest, seeing my mom standing in the room. “Oh my god!”