Beast(80)

“Dylan!” she shouts.

I raise my finger to my lips. “Shhhh…people are sleeping.”

“Oh my god.” Mom races to the front door and I hear her clambering up the staircase and opening my bedroom window as fast as her almost-forty-year-old self can go. “Dylan.” She squeezes out through the frame and onto the shingles. “Sweetheart?” I’m jealous of how easy it is for her. She slowly crawls toward me and crouches on her knees. “Please don’t jump, please, let’s figure it out, let’s talk about it. Just don’t jump, okay?”

“I’m not going to jump.” I kinda don’t want her to be up here with me, but I’m tired. It’s been a long night. I feel a little punch-drunk. She can sit if she wants to.

“Oh, thank heaven.” She exhales. “What are you doing? Where have you been? I’ve been up all night, worried sick, driving around looking for you. What happened?”

“I had to do some stuff. Then I came home,” I say. Everything is opaque, my eyes are so tired. “Have you ever had that walk-into-traffic, but just-kidding, but not-really feeling?”

“Dylan.” Mom grabs my arm. “You’re scaring me.”

“Don’t be scared. I’m not talking about for-real walking into traffic. Just like, I don’t know, that blink-and-you-miss-it wave of zen shit. Like a peace treaty inside yourself.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“But you’ve felt lost, right?”

She loosens her grip. “Of course.”

“You have that unbelievable failure, the kind that smells like burnt hair, and it’s awful. But then it’s over.”

“Have you been burning hair?” she asks with concern.

“No. I haven’t slept in twenty-five hours and I’m loopy as hell. Indulge me on my shitty metaphors.” I laugh. “But like, that place where there’s no fighting. There’s nothing to fight over. Everything is done.”

Mom frowns. “Then I suppose you’re lucky to have reached that point. I have not.”

“You haven’t? Ever?”

“No, everything is burnt hair for me,” she mumbles.

“Nuh-uh,” I say.

“I’m a thirty-nine-year-old college dropout and a single mom with a son who wants to wander into traffic. Obviously things are not okay.”

“You’ve got to trust. And not bug phones.”

“Oh.” She pats me on the knee. “So that’s what this is about. Well, I won’t apologize for that. I need to know you’re safe. And you better believe if I see that little blue dot of yours standing still in the middle of I-5 in the future, I’ll come running. That’s that.”

“Take it off my phone.”

“Who’s paying for your phone?”

“Trust the process of life, Mother.”

“It’s hard to be trusting when said child skips school, has grown-up sleepovers, and stays out all night. Trust is earned, Son.”

“Fair point,” I admit. “Let’s compromise.”

“I’m listening.”

“That thing comes off my phone and I start paying for the bills.”

“I don’t want you getting a job. School is too important.”

“Football will cost money,” I say. She flinches. “How about I call if I’ll be late.”

“How about you’re supposed to do that anyway?”

“What’s it going to take?”

She sighs. “Finish out sophomore year with good grades and no more of this funny business that’s been happening since fall, and then we’ll talk about removing it for junior year. I need to see progress.” Mom hugs me. “And let me in. Talk to me. I want to be in your life.”

“You are.”

“Dylan.”

I look up at the sunrise. Low and lazy with February’s tilt. “I love Jamie.” There. It’s said. “But she doesn’t love me and I have to accept that.”

“Oh, sweetheart.”

“I lost the greatest girl I’ve ever known because I wasn’t okay with myself,” I say. “And now I’m past the burnt hair, I aired out the room, it sucks I’m never going to see her again.”

“Maybe we can have her over for dinner some night.”

“She won’t come.”

“You need to put up a fight! Girls like effort. Go in there and make sure she knows that you’re—”

“Jamie knows what she wants and it’s not me, and I can’t say I blame her,” I say quickly. Mom looks all crestfallen. I put my arm around her. “Don’t be sad.”

“I want so badly for you to be happy, though.”

“It’s okay,” I say. “So that’s where I was all night. I needed to apologize to her.”

“I guess it didn’t work.”

“Does it look like it worked? I’m here all alone without a time machine.”

“If you could go back a couple months, what would you fix?”

“When I learned she was trans, I would say, ‘Cool.’ And then we would go get a pretzel.”

“And what am I up to in this do-over?”