by Scott Brown
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2019 by Scott Brown
Cover art copyright © 2019 by Paul Blow
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Brown, Scott, author.
Title: XL / Scott Brown.
Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2019. | Summary: “Will has always been troubled by his short stature, but on his sixteenth birthday, he starts to grow—and grow, and grow.”—Provided by publisher
Identifiers: LCCN 2018017597 (print) | LCCN 2018023478 (ebook) | ISBN 978-1-5247-6624-5 (trade) | ISBN 978-1-5247-6625-2 (lib. bdg.) | ISBN 978-1-5247-6626-9 (ebook)
Subjects: | CYAC: Size—Fiction. | Growth—Fiction. | Stepbrothers—Fiction. | Dating (Social customs)—Fiction. | Self-esteem—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.B (ebook) | LCC PZ7.1.B (print) | DDC [Fic]—dc23
Ebook ISBN 9781524766269
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Part One: Hobbit
Chapter One: 4′11″
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Part Two: Man
Chapter Seven: 5′2″
Chapter Eight: 5′8″
Chapter Nine: 5′10″
Chapter Ten: 6′1″
Chapter Eleven: 6′4″
Chapter Twelve: 6′7″
Chapter Thirteen: 6′9″
Chapter Fourteen: 6′10″
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Part Three: Leviathan
Chapter Seventeen: 6′11″
Chapter Eighteen: 7′1″
Chapter Nineteen
Acknowledgments
About the Author
For Katie, Zoe, and Harry, the troop I’d follow anywhere
And for Pat McDonagh, who loved little things and made the world tremendous
“THE PROBLEM WITH monsters,” Monica (5′10″) liked to say, “is that monsters win.”
“And we fight ’em anyway,” I’d finish. “Unless you’ve got a better plan?”
“Nope,” she’d come back, with a smile and a shoulder punch. “We few?”
“We happy few.”
Our motto. Written in flame. Engraved in gold, or bone, or something even deeper. Stolen from all the books Monica’d ever read, which was a lot of books. We’d recite our motto, and toast us with any beverage in toasting distance. Us against the darkness.
Then a gorilla would throw its own shit at another gorilla, and I’d make a note of that in the Aggression Log. Those were our afternoons in the Lowlands, the zoo’s gorilla habitat, where I interned three days a week, shoveling, slopping, mopping floors, and updating the Aggression Log (which always needed updating). I kept the gorillas company, and Monica kept me company, and we talked about monsters because Monica had a library of monsters in her head and a smile as rare and bright as that sword-of-legend-drawn-only-at-the-crucial-moment. A smile that made the monsters worth fighting. That made you want to be a lover and a fighter. Two things I was pretty sure I’d never be.
See, in the thousand or so fantasy books Monica had read by the time she was seventeen, there were, I dunno, a thousand or so monsters. All defeated. By perseverance. By imagination. By faith. And by the big gun: love.
But there’s another kind of book. The book where none of that shit works, and the monster isn’t beaten. We just live with it. It hurts us, a little or a lot. We hurt it back. Things go on like that. And finally the monster wins. Or at least lasts.
“That’s where we live,” Monica would say, “in that book.” By seventeen, she was done with fantasy. She loved those stories. But she didn’t believe in them.
Monica believed in monsters. Because she’d met some. She believed you fight them, not because you’re a hero, not because it’s awesome—but because you have to. And odds are, the monster beats you anyway. To a pulp or to a draw. Those are your options. Somehow Monica made that sound epic instead of terrifying. Gorillas got us philosophical, I guess.
They don’t “talk” the way we do, but gorillas are just as sophisticated, and way more straightforward. Now, I say gorillas, and it conjures up all the brochure photos: gorillas grooming, gorillas playing, the stuff zoo-goers pay good money to see. But from Keeper Access? Where I worked? I didn’t see gorillas. I saw personalities. There was Blue, our resident manic pixie dream gorilla, doing spur-of-the-moment headstands and offering a bite of mango to anybody, ape or human, who looked hungry. There was Magic Mike, the scrawny beta male, the clown, the comedian—strutting, then tripping, maybe on purpose, maybe not. I loved those gorillas. I knew them.
And then there was Asshole.
Not his real name. I mean, jeez, who knew his real name? Something in Gorillese, something blunt and grunty you shouldn’t argue with. He was the alpha male, the biggest, the strongest. The silverback. The zoo called him Jollof. Why, I don’t know. In West Africa, jollof is a popular savory rice dish. In the Lowlands, it was the vastest asshole known to ape- or humankind.
Jollof was definitely a monster by Monica’s definition—by any definition—and Jollof, with precious few exceptions, did indeed win. He’d hoard all the treats distributed to the troop, and when he’d finished stuffing himself, he’d crush or stomp or spoil most of what was left so no one else could have any. Classy. He’d randomly attack the other males, totally unprovoked—a bite out of nowhere, a casual swat (that probably felt like a full-tilt pile drive from the Chargers’ defensive line) just to remind them who was boss. Jollof would also mount any and every female at the drop of a banana. And he wasn’t much of a romantic, let’s leave it at that. But all that chest-beating alpha shit? (Literal shit—’cause throwing shit is a varsity sport among primates, and Jollof was a star quarterback.) It wasn’t a character flaw. It’s who he was. His job, his place. What evolution built. Nature made a monster, and it was my job to feed it.
And I was great at it. Better than anybody on staff. Because when I walked into the habitat, instead of fluffing up his fur, snarling, mock-charging—his usual routine—Jollof would bound up to me, all goofy-sweet, turn his back, and sit at my feet. Like a faithful dog, asking to be scratched behind the ears. Nice. Right?
Wrong. It was a dominance display. Like an emperor permitting a back rub from a concubine. (A word Monica taught me, of course.) It was a ritual to remind me of my place. Not that I needed reminding. My place was obvious.
I was a
lmost sixteen years old. A nice guy, with a nice life, in every way but one.
I was four feet, eleven inches tall.
I was the 1 percent. The bottom 1 percent. Peel up the lowest height percentile: I was under it. I was the tile nobody bothered removing when they installed the lowest percentile.
And Jollof, from the bottom of his hairy scrotum, knew this. Knew my status. Which made it okay to accept the food I brought. I wasn’t giving it, after all. It wasn’t mine to give. It was Jollof’s to take. I was just serving it, like a good underape.
Still, I loved the Lowlands, Jollof and all. It was way better than the other ape house I inhabited: my high school. Jollof, at least, was honest. No loincloth of charm or irony or Lighten up, bro! draped over the basic, brutal biology of it all. “The loincloth we call Civilization,” Monica was fond of saying, “isn’t fooling anybody.”
It wasn’t fooling her, at least. Nothing fooled Monica, or so I thought. She was seventeen, so close and so out of reach, and I couldn’t begin to say how I felt about her, couldn’t put words to that music even after six sad years of trying. What if the words were wrong? Would she just disappear? Or ascend, like the heroes in those fantasy stories she’d outgrown? I was terrified of finding out. Terrified of losing all at once the girl I was already losing a little at a time. I desperately needed everything to change, and I desperately needed nothing to change. I’d almost run out the clock. Monica was approximately seventy weeks from freedom, from putting all the little tyrannies of high school behind her, and she didn’t believe in any civilization bigger than “we happy few.”
She believed in monsters.
Anyway.
This is the story of how I became a monster.
I WOKE UP to the smell of fear.
You know what fear smells like? When you’re not quite five feet tall? And turning sixteen?
Cake.
Maybe that’s just me.
For normal people, birthdays—the cake, the singing, another candle every year—signify impending adulthood, which is so exciting, you actually appreciate the lame-assery that comes attached. But for us Smalls, birthdays never lose that paper-hat vibe…because that’s all there is to them. Seeing your name in baby-blue frosting, year after year, from the same exact altitude—well, it has a way of shaming your testicles right back to where they descended from. In my crazier moments, I used to think the parties themselves were keeping me small. Which is why I’d come to dread the sound of two little words:
“Will! Breakfast!”
My dad is such an awful actor, it’s almost charming. He’s just too straightforward by nature. His inability to fake anything—it makes him a great dad. Makes him a natural with zoo animals, too—zoo animals like a straight talker—so that works out well for him professionally, as a zookeeper. But it makes him just awful at surprise parties. “Will! Breakfast!” was something my father said precisely once a year. On my birthday. My big day. My big, smoking crater of a day. I woke up, smelled cake, and thought, Oh, God, no.
Which is kind of a shitty thing to think when a cake’s been baked for you.
But consider this: a birthday’s a promise. Something changes today! By birthday the sixteenth, I’d discovered otherwise. Every promise had been broken, five promises running, because biology, God bless, can be a real dick sometimes.
So I stalled in bed. Faked a sleep-in for a precious half hour. Any longer, and masturbation would be suspected. This birthday, like all the rest, just needed to happen as quickly as possible, then vanish again. So I could vanish again.
That was my top-ranked fantasy on the morning of my sixteenth birthday. Invisibility. To be a shadow. He who slips past, unseen. With one (very notable) exception, that was as wild as my dreams got. Slipping Past Unseen was how I planned to get through high school, in the hopes that college would be better. And if it wasn’t? I’d slip past that, too.
There was just one thing I wanted to take with me. Just one person I wanted to be seen by. That Notable Exception.
She’s why I wanted to slip through this day with as little trouble as possible and get to what would happen next, the thing I didn’t even dare name, even though I’d spent the last fortyish nights imagining it.
But first: cake. Should I just rip off the Band-Aid? Or attempt evasive action?
I considered the sycamore outside my window. I could shinny down the trunk in twenty-five seconds, if I had to. Which might’ve been impressive in a dude of normal proportions. When I did it, I looked like a performing lemur. Something you’d reward for the effort with a slice of mango and a pat on the head.
Have I mentioned how deeply, how furiously I hate pats on the head?
Anyway, I got dressed, like a good lemur. A grateful lemur, desirous of cake.
I took a deep breath and padded downstairs, right into the teeth of it: my birthday ambush.
“Birthday ambush!” my dad barked, in a voice usually reserved for lemurs that hopped the fence. He came toastering up from behind the love seat—an impressive, slightly scary, always embarrassing maneuver for a middle-aged man, especially one of above-average height.
My father, Brian Daughtry (6′1″), the zoo’s chief primate keeper, was the right size for a keeper. He had presence, like a force field that didn’t feel forced. It was just this funny assumption of control—nothing bullying or desperate about it—that calmed nervous animals and also nervous people who were afraid nervous animals might eat them. He oversaw the primate staff, gave presentations to all the bigwigs and VIPs who toured the zoo, and spoke gently and evenly to reporters when the rare animal died on the zoo’s watch. He also had great hair. My stepmother called it That Irish Mane. I called it Humble Hero Hair.
Brian Daughtry presided over things: bad things, good things, anything.
You preside over things, y’know. Not under them. Is my point.
Anyway, as Brian presided, Laura (5′8″) glided into the living room with a blazing cake and a half-sung “Happy birthday, Will!” and her perfect yogurt-commercial brunette ponytail swinging. Laura advised food shippers on safety and best practices. She believed passionately in safety and best practices, and she had the greatest handle on stepmomming I’ve ever seen in a stepmom. She didn’t try to mom me, for starters, and she didn’t try to friend me, either, or freeze me out. Laura was simply and plausibly Cool, without attempting to be Cool. She was what they call “at home in her skin.”
I appreciate that quality in people. Always been a little low on it myself.
“Happy birthday!” Brian sang horribly. “Happy birthday, baby, oh, I love you so! Six. Teen. Candles!” No oldies, no matter how golden, were safe from Brian Daughtry.
A little behavioral biology for you: when Large Things advance on a Small Thing, singing screamy falsetto and brandishing flaming baked goods, the Small Thing’s natural, paleomammalian reaction is to back up. Which I did—
—and collided with something as solid as a basketball goal.
Something that was, in a sense, a basketball goal.
“Whudup, Willennium. Ready to become a man?”
And there was Drew (5′11¾″). Number 38. “The Special.” Lewis Keseberg High School junior varsity basketball’s pride and joy. Keseberg varsity basketball’s future. And my almost brother. My near brother, my blood brother.
“What happened to practice?” I asked. Drew, as a rule, did not miss practice. He was grateful for every nanosecond of practice he got, because every nanosecond brought him closer to fulfilling the Plan.
It hadn’t started without a hitch, the Plan. But Drew kept at it.
At five foot nine last fall, as a sophomore, Drew hadn’t made the varsity squad, got kicked to JV with the peewees. That didn’t sit right with him. By February, Drew was scraping six feet and schooling the league, averaging twenty-six points a game. People (randos, not just parents) actuall
y showed up to JV playoffs that season, just to watch “Spesh” dunk on what Monica called “lumpen Lilliputians.” Drew was, that very night, widely expected to put away St. Augustine, the Keseberg Junior Harpoons’ nearest competitor, closing out an undefeated season. For him, it would be just another game. He’d already enrolled in a postseason league to keep himself sharp for next fall. He wasn’t just aiming for varsity, he wasn’t just aiming to start. He’d started. The Plan was under way.
The Plan was multipronged, and we were all part of it: Drew, Monica, and I.
Drew had his eye on the University of California, San Diego, which had been teetering on the brink of Division I status for years. The Special’s plan was to be there when it tipped in, to shine on a Cinderella team, to burn through March Madness and maybe, I dunno, humiliate Duke or something. A boy can dream.
Some can even reach what they dream without a step stool.
UCSD was just one aspect of the Plan. The Plan was bigger than all of us, even Drew. But Drew was definitely the keeper of the Plan, and Drew’s basketball career was a key part of it (his test scores sure weren’t), and that meant Spesh had practice all the time. Afternoons, mornings, weekends. Nothing got in the way.
Nothing, apparently, but this one little thing. My birthday.
“Will Daughtry’s turning sixteen,” he said. “Screw practice.”
“ ‘Screw’ practice?” Laura said to Drew, arching an eyebrow. She could mom Drew, just like Brian could dad me. Either parent could parent, of course—we weren’t anarchists!—but momming and dadding? Those were dedicated lanes. And the first rule of any blended family is Stay in your lane.
Now, the fact that Drew was skipping practice to be part of my birthday? My feelings can only be described as deprazing, which is Monican for “simultaneously amazing and depressing.” Amazing because this was game day, the Finals, a very big deal for Drew, for the whole damned school, and he was 100 percent giving up something precious to celebrate little old me.
