XL

by Scott Brown

  I probably should have said something, should have asked, but…what was I asking? Was I asking: Are you okay?

  Or Are you and Drew hooking up? As in, hooking up–hooking up?

  Nature frothed over the barrier jetty, kicked up sand, mixed the land with the sea. I didn’t know where I stood anymore, only that I stood more than a foot higher than I used to. I looked up and watched Monica disappearing over the cliff top, watched the moment slip away, like all those other moments. Tomorrow, I thought. I’ll find a way to ask tomorrow.

  Looking at that worse-for-wear sleeping bag, curled like a grub in the sacred cathedral of the BoB cave, I couldn’t put what I felt into words. But the fewer words I had to work with, the more I felt it in my hands: heat.

  I needed to put it somewhere, that heat, that wordless heat.

  I think that’s how I found my way into the middle of the Oklahoma.

  “FROM SHALINA BOULEVARD in Poca Resaca, Will Daughtry! Come on down!”

  I was in the ring. The ring was about eight feet across.

  And there was this guy in the ring with me. He was about eight feet across, too.

  This, apparently, was football.

  “And from Sutter Ave. in U City, Jaylen Teixiera!”

  We were all suited up, pads and helmets (mine borrowed from the department, a loose fit), and we were on wet grass, in this big black Hula-Hoop together, Jaylen Teixiera and I. The idea was: in forty seconds or so, one of us wouldn’t be.

  It’s like sumo wrestling, only with turf instead of sand, and more concussive helmet butting. And no tea after.

  Coach Whately called it the Oklahoma.

  This is what happens when Monica Bailarín tells you to be strong. One Ring hanging around my neck, inside a borrowed jersey, bouncing against my chest like a second heart, answering the one inside knock for knock—thump, thump, BANG, BANG— I’d decided to test-drive this new body.

  Turns out the football squad had suffered some injuries that season. Even mediocre football, it seems, leads to injuries. So the fall brought walk-on tryouts.

  I’d decided to try football first because I didn’t actually like football. I thought I’d be less disappointed if I washed out. I thought that would lower the stakes. What’s it matter if you fail at something you don’t even like?

  The other side of it was: I’d always been a little scared of football, and I wanted to do something about that. The universe had called my bluff, and presented me with Jaylen Teixiera, all two hundred pounds of him. I knew him a little, I guess. Well: I knew his shape. This was Rhombus, from the Ethan Neville affair, the night in Jazzy’s woods. And from countless roughings-up in remote hallways during middle school.

  I took comfort in the fact that the Keseberg High football team was (how to put this gently?) not very good. The Harps had a semi-storied basketball team, but we weren’t a football power. I assumed the bar would be lower.

  Maybe it was low. I had no comparison.

  Great plan, Daughtry. If Brian knew, he’d tranq-dart you and drag you home with his Ketch-All. Hell, if DREW knew…

  I tried a little levity. “Hi, Jaylen. Come here often?”

  Jaylen gave a mad-bull kind of snort that said, quite clearly, You will soon be not-alive, beta snowflake.

  “What do you think this is, Daughtry?” barked Coach Whately.

  This was obviously a trick question, but I was a guest here, so I tried to answer politely: “I was guessing…football?”

  “This is the Oklahoma!” Coach Whately crowed to his meat sticks, and they went all hooty. Hoot hoot hoot! Whatever was about to happen to me? Was apparently hilarious.

  Coach roared: “Bull in the ring, sudden death. Set!”

  I didn’t much like the sound of any of those words.

  If this’d been a movie, a distant eagle scream would’ve pierced the air, but all I heard was the shriek of the whistle—

  —and the CHOCK! of my helmet (and head) connecting with the helmet (and head) of Jaylen Teixiera.

  URF.

  Okay. Lesson. Learned.

  Bar. Not. Low. Enough.

  A blast wave passed through my new body, energy rippling through meat, bone, and better judgment as Jaylen Teixiera’s eyeless, mouthless face slot bulldozed into the curve of my left shoulder. My feet were briefly off the ground, both of them, and then came down, but they were slipping, trying to find traction in the wet grass. I dug in with my unfamiliar cleats, panicky little divots of turf flying like confetti.

  Then.

  He let me go.

  Huh. That’s weir—

  ORF.

  Fresh impact. Harder this time. Didn’t seem possible. But. Yes. Harder.

  And now I was off balance.

  My knees folded like lawn chairs. Muscles in my back and arms, muscles I didn’t even know I had, started screaming bloody murder at me—Why are you doing this?!—and for a second, I was knocked right out of this shiny new body and back into my old one—

  I’m four feet, eleven inches, ninety-six pounds, and a monster’s crushing me to death—

  And then a voice:

  William. Be strong.

  And then I was back.

  Back in the moment. Back in the flesh. My flesh.

  We were just two guys, Will and Jaylen, head to head on a football field, and this was just a drill. A test. Nothing serious. That’s all I came out here to do, right?

  So I tested.

  An inch from the edge of the ring, I got low. It was pure instinct, the getting low. I dug in. And I pushed back, with everything I wasn’t sure I had.

  When I did…I felt that unstoppable Rhombus…stop. And reverse. Just a tiny little bit, just enough. I felt Jaylen Teixiera give.

  I’d never felt anything like that before. Feeling someone else give…under my strength?

  Feeling that changed, well, everything. Muscles that’d been flashing ALL DONE! three seconds before now felt irrigated with jet fuel. Strength from God knows where surged through them, and Jaylen Teixiera—who’d maybe gotten a little cocky when I was three inches from oblivion—now found himself with the higher center of gravity and a surprisingly strong force at work underneath it, tipping him toward the opposite side of the circle. He jujitsued out of my clutches just in time but couldn’t quite reclaim his momentum, and we were stalemated for so long, Coach finally called it.

  For a second there, I was that guy in the movie who says, I could do this all day.

  “Not bad, Daughtry,” said Coach, not meeting my eyes, but smiling as he flipped the sheet on his clipboard. “Beginner’s luck. Awright, next! From North Laurenzi Ave….”

  For reasons I can’t explain—something having to do with adrenaline and maybe something deeper than adrenaline, something I’ve felt only one other time in my life and never want to feel again—I said to Coach Whately:

  “Lemme go again.”

  Coach raised an eyebrow. But before he could say no, another face slot stepped out of the scrum. Not quite as wide as Jaylen, but taller. Like Jaylen, he wore the full-face-eraser sun visor. Unlike Jaylen, he had a cocky posture that asked, Who’s your silverback? And there was…something else. Something…familiar.

  “I’ll go.” Player Y cocked his head. “Hi, Will.”

  Before I had time to place that voice, Coach said, “Awright, ladies’ choice. Set!”

  The whistle screamed and Player Y came in fast, a human scimitar, looking for a quick decapitation. I absorbed the hit into my padded shoulder, and for a second, I thought I’d capsize like some torpedoed ocean liner—he hit so hard and fast, one of my legs lifted off the ground, and a dam broke inside me, cold panic flooded—

  But then I came down.

  And as soon as I got traction—

  —my muscles seemed to figure out what was really going
on: it was a bluff.

  This guy didn’t have the bulk of Jaylen, or the power of Jaylen, or the stability of Jaylen. He’d come in hard and high, trying to take off my head. I realized I’d seen this before: this matchup, these stances, this exact species of push-and-pull. And I knew just what to do.

  I hooked.

  I scooped.

  I got under him, lifted.

  And suddenly Player Y was on his back. On the ground. Outside the ring, wriggling like a stag beetle.

  Which is where I got the idea.

  (Don’t mess with Biology Boy.)

  Player Y spent what seemed like a slo-mo eternity on the ground. Then he ripped off his helmet, came at me, skunk-stripe highlights flashing in the sun. The other players restrained him.

  Of course it was Spencer. Sidney’s old Spencer. Spencer from the woods at Jazzy’s party.

  “Fuck was that?” he screamed, and Coach blew the whistle.

  “Inskip! Language! You wanna sit out a game or three?”

  Spencer shook off his restrainers, turned, mumbled under his breath, “Like you’d bench your star quarterback.”

  Coach was suddenly in close orbit of Spencer’s face. “If I had one,” he said, “no, I wouldn’t bench him.”

  More hoots, and a few daaayums. Spencer reddened. “Coach,” he said, in a voice dangerously close to a whine. “What that little freak pulled—that wasn’t football!”

  “Nope,” I said—and unless you’re Monica Bailarín, there are very few moments when life hands you the perfect line at the perfect time, and this happened to be one of those moments. “That was the Oklahoma.”

  It wasn’t the kind of thing a nice guy would say. But then, nice guys don’t usually get the chance to settle old middle school scores wearing new grown-up bodies.

  The hoots bloomed again. Coach shut everybody up with a whistle, and I walked off the field for the first and last time, gloriously backlit by victory, quitting while I was ahead.

  Yep, that was my football career, from beginning to end.

  I really don’t like football.

  (I’ll always have a soft spot for the Oklahoma, though.)

  * * *

  —

  I was toweling off when a familiar shadow fell over me.

  “What the hell?” asked Drew. “What the hell?”

  He was in practice sweats. Trying to look casual, like he’d just happened to run across me here, in a locker room I never, ever visited.

  “Football?”

  “Tryout for walk-ons, big deal.”

  “Yeah, big deal. I heard you almost got the shit kicked out of you.”

  Now that got me a little riled, I’ll admit. Because there’s no version of what happened on that football field in which the shit was almost kicked out of me. “Who told you that?”

  Drew had on his most annoying face: Dad Face. I braced for it: the Sonning.

  (I’ll fill in his sons for you. They’re silent—even Drew couldn’t hear them, I don’t think—but they’re most definitely there.)

  “Spencer Inskip is an effin’ sociopath, son. And, son, football is not your game. Okay? The team is bad news, son. The harder those guys lose, son, the shittier they treat people, and those guys lose hard. You’ve got nothing to prove to them, my sonny son son.”

  Ah, but he was wrong, son. I did have something to prove.

  Not to them, maybe.

  “Okay,” I said, not bothering to disguise my irritation. “So what you’re saying is, Don’t get too big for your britches?”

  When we used to argue, I’d always been a foot away from Drew’s face, no matter how close I’d been standing.

  Now, even sitting down, I was a lot closer to his airspace.

  We weren’t fighting, though.

  Were we?

  Drew was quiet for an almost-too-long time. Then he said:

  “I would…never…say britches.”

  And we both laughed. Fighting? Who, us? Nah!

  “What I’m saying,” said Drew after we’d laughed, “is maybe slow down.”

  And because he’d just been so funny, I tried really hard not to hold that buzzer-beater Sonning against him.

  * * *

  —

  I had a deep think on the way home. Drew. Monica. All the helpful advice my new body was attracting. Seemed to be this thing’s single function lately: advice stimulator.

  Slow down, Drew said.

  Be strong, Monica said.

  Don’t make it weird, the Plan said.

  But! But Monica’s sleeping bag was in BoB! With Drew’s lucky duffel! That was already weird, right? That needed addressing! My central processor was melting down, barfing out feedback: Slowdownbestrongdon’tmakeitweird…slowdownbestrongdon’tmakeitweird…

  Rafty had a different perspective. He shared it with me one afternoon as we dunked in his driveway. The Pro Slam had been set back to regulation, for my benefit. The trampoline had been pushed to the side. Rafty sat on it and philosophized.

  “My friend,” he said. “With great power comes great responsibility.”

  “Feel like I’ve heard that before,” I said. “What does it mean? In this case?”

  “It means you have a responsibility to your body.”

  “Okay.”

  “You have a responsibility to use your body…for sex.”

  “Hmm.”

  “You need to have sex with that body, Will. If I had that body? I would have sex with it.”

  “Hmm.”

  “I mean…I don’t mean…you know what I mean! And I mean: Soon. Imminently. Tonight, maybe. There are takers, dude. So many. The girls in the hall, you walk in, and it’s like…it’s like they’re at Red Lobster, and the waiter says, ‘Ladies, pick your lobster.’ And there’s this one really big lobster, and you know they all want it. That’s a bad metaphor—I lost my grip.”

  “You did. And now I’ll never eat lobster again.”

  “My point is, you’re all in your head about this. When you should be…all in your bed…about this….”

  “Now, that rhymes.”

  “In bed with someone. Less thinking. More sexing.”

  “Says the virgin.”

  “As a virgin, I have clarity on this.”

  “Well, as a fellow virgin, I’m vomiting. On the inside. Because of words like sexing.”

  “Sure, go on, be a nozzle about this, but you know I’m right.” Rafty stood up on his trampoline, looking very friends, Romans, countrymen. He bounced a little as he speechified. “You’re off surfing and doing whatever it is you do at the zoo,” he pointed out, “when you should be turning the back of your car into a frickin’ sex museum.”

  “There is very little back of my car,” I said. “So that…would be one tiny sex museum….”

  “Will. Be serious. Focus.”

  “The exhibits would have to be, like, modest—”

  “Now you listen to me, you giant ass prolapse!” Rafty was hopping up and down on his trampoline. Every third or fourth word he delivered to me eye to eye. “You are living a life most of us can only imagine. Sitting on a freakin’ jackpot, doing jack shit about it. That is…a betrayal. You are a celebrity. You have responsibilities. And as your manager—”

  “Raf, this ‘manager’ thing, we gotta talk about it—”

  “—as your manager, my managerial advice is: strike while the lobster is hot. You’re gonna be a Guinness entry in, like, a matter of weeks. You need to do something with this. You need a goal. Preferably a sex goal.”

  Rafty didn’t know my secret: I had a goal in mind. It wasn’t a sex goal.

  It was: six feet, seven inches. That was my goal.

  Not very scientific, I know, banking on a conclusion before the experiment’s over.

  For
some reason, though, six foot seven had become my Goldilocks height: tall enough to be taller than just about everyone (99.7th percentile, if you’re interested—the ceiling tile of percentiles), yet not so tall that people would think freak or How sad! or grasp for the names of glands they only dimly remembered from AP biology. I had no evidence to support six seven as my probable resting height, my summit. I just really, really wanted it to be true.

  I was a real primordial soup, you see: Drew telling me to slow down, think of the future. Monica telling me to lean in, be in the moment. Rafty ordering me to screw or be screwed. (When I hadn’t even kissed anyone yet. Not really. Not a real kiss. Not a first kiss.)

  And into this soup crashed a comet named Sidney.

  * * *

  —

  Sidney found me a place in the exciting world of mixed-gender intramural volleyball.

  “Because you’re gonna wanna spike” was Sidney’s rationale.

  Sidney played varsity volleyball, so she knew some things about the game, and she taught me a few of them. Enough for intramurals, at least. I had some new advantages, of course. For instance, the net? Wasn’t as much of a problem for me these days. One hop and I was an arm’s length above the tape. And that gave me the spike, which had eluded me the first sixteen years of my life, for obvious reasons. Now I owned it. And thus, I owned mixed-gender intramural volleyball, sport of kings. (And queens.)

  “Intramural volleyball?!” Rafty shook his head. “You put Spencer Inskip on his ass, and you’re playing…intramural volleyball?!”

  “I thought you’d approve of the ‘mixed-gender’ part.”

  “Will, buddy, where’s the fire in the belly?”

  “Whenever I feel fire in my belly,” I said, “I eat. And then it goes away.”

  Attendance at intramural volleyball games went up, for the sheer curiosity factor. (Some nights, it was Ethan Neville, clicking away for the yearbook, plus up to fifteen other people—a tenfold increase.) With me in the rotation, every side-out looked like a gearshift toggling from D to R to N and back. But nobody laughed when a setter gave me a high one and I came flying forward to rain spike after spike on the unfortunate mixed genders across the net.