Beast(84)

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 sticks 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.”