XL

by Scott Brown

  More cement.

  “I need more girlfriends,” Monica finally said, to no one in particular.

  * * *

  —

  Atoll was “a sustainable dining experience.” It was also the only rotating rooftop restaurant in San Diego County. We just wanted something fancy. And to two sixteen-year-olds and a newly minted eighteen-year-old? Atoll seemed fancy.

  Well: three sixteen-year-olds, I should say.

  Because there, at the bar, sipping Diet Dr. Pepper, was Sidney Lim.

  Monica hadn’t wanted me to be the third wheel, and if that meant inviting Sidney—someone she barely knew and hadn’t really warmed up to—so be it.

  We were seated at what appeared to be an enormous lump of peach-colored coral. Outside, San Diego went by, very slowly, very repetitively. Inside, the lighting was half aquarium, half Star Wars cantina, and so was the mood: I didn’t know if we were just gonna glide along a lazy river of ambient restaurant synth…or if somebody was going to light up a saber and lop off an arm. The four people seated at that coral lump hadn’t been tested as a unit. We were about to test the sustainability of this sustainable dining experience.

  “So you, uh, you play volleyball?” Monica ventured.

  “Yeah,” said Sid. “It’s, y’know, it’s fun. Might be good for a scholarship somewhere.”

  “Right,” said Mon. “Scholarships are good.”

  “Monica’s getting a scholarship,” Drew offered, too quickly. “To Irvine.”

  The configuration of the coral lump made it impossible for Monica to kick Drew under the table. Otherwise, his shin would’ve been bloodied to riblets.

  “Yeah,” said Sid. “I hear you guys have kind of a plan to stick around this area for college. That’s cool.”

  Monica shot me a look.

  “Well, yeah, kinda,” began Drew.

  “It’s a pretty loose plan,” Monica said quickly, and then retreated into several mouthfuls of responsibly farmed prawns, prawns that had each been humanely suffocated, unlike the conversation at this table, which had just died screaming, in agony.

  “So, Drew,” Sid tried again, “looks like the Harps are on track to take regionals.”

  “Well, I mean, we’ve got a good squad this year….”

  “Listen to it, here it comes,” I said. “The SportsCenter voice. Humility über alles. Guy’s breaking local records left and right….”

  “Uh, what about world records?” Drew came back. “This guy’s got Guinness sniffing around….”

  Oof. I grimaced, and hopefully it wasn’t noticeable in the fancy-restaurant near dark. But how irritating: oh, Drew’s accomplishments of pure skill were absolutely comparable to my “achievements” of fluke biology.

  “Get a room, you two,” Monica deadpanned. Drew and I grinned. That almost saved the moment. Almost.

  And then everything got worse.

  Drew pulled out a box. A ring-size jewelry box.

  Wait. Had I misread everything? Had Monica?

  Were Sidney and I even supposed to be here?

  I could see: Monica was as flummoxed as I was.

  Drew grinned. “Happy birthday.”

  She gave a crooked smile. Took the box. Opened it.

  “Oh,” she said.

  Real surprise in her voice. Plus this mild aftertaste of…horror.

  Earrings. Very, very nice ones. Emerald clusters to match her eyes, with tiny diamonds nesting in these fairy curls of sterling silver. They must’ve cost Drew every ounce of allowance and summer job money he’d ever eked out, everything he’d ever earned running endless layup drills at basketball camp.

  “Ta-da!” said Drew, and between ta and da there opened this vast, dark, deep, full-fathom fubar, because everyone at the table who wasn’t Drew had just noticed something weird about Drew’s gift.

  Monica’s ears, you see, weren’t pierced.

  Missing the obvious is pretty par for the course, high-school-boy-wise. Consider, for example, what I did next.

  I mean, I’ve said a lot of stupid shit in my life.

  But this one’s up there, Hall of Fame:

  “Her ears aren’t pierced, dude.”

  Drew laughed.

  Then stopped laughing.

  Because he was looking at Monica’s ears. Really looking at them. At how very, very, very intact they were.

  “I, uh,” said Monica, “I’ve been meaning to get around to it.”

  She tried chuckling. She wasn’t a natural.

  And Atoll turned.

  The waiter came back and asked, “How are we doing?” and “Would we like anything else?”

  We weren’t doing well.

  We would like almost anything else.

  How about some poison? Do you have poison? Guaranteed to kill us all?

  * * *

  —

  I escaped to the Atoll bathroom. The celesta music was deafening in there, loud enough to drown out panic.

  Drew came in, went to the sinks, got a handful of water, and tried, unsuccessfully, to drown himself in it. Or maybe he was just washing his face.

  “So,” I said, “those earrings are really amazing.”

  “Yeah,” said Drew.

  “I didn’t mean to sound…When I said her ears weren’t…I think that all came out, uh…Anyway. They’re beautiful.”

  Drew tore a teal paper towel from the roll. “Thanks, man,” he said. “No worries. It was my stupid mistake. Not yours.”

  And he left. Just walked out. Not sure we even made eye contact.

  Not yours.

  Somehow he made that last bit sound less like Apology accepted and more like Back the hell off. How’d he do that?

  * * *

  —

  In the parking lot, we had our weird little goodbyes. Drew and Monica said they’d grab a Lyft. They were off to, I dunno, pierce? I didn’t ask.

  Sidney and I were getting into the Yacht when my phone shook with an incoming notification. I looked, instantly wished I hadn’t:

  hope ur havin a fun night. life is short. ull see

  ignore me at ur peril

  That little valentine capped a glorious day of human folly, the lesson of which, for me, was: Maybe never open your big mouth again? Because your big mouth is a factory that makes weird.

  * * *

  —

  “I shouldn’t have come,” Sidney said as we sat in the Fiat, outside her house. “I spoiled things.”

  “Oh, I think the three of us took care of that on our own.” I didn’t go into Martin Eddy. I was in hot enough water, telling Sid about the Plan…and then not telling Sid not to tell that I’d told.

  “Fine,” said Sid. “I didn’t ruin things, but I changed things.”

  “Well, sure. But…look, the three of us, we’re not delicate anemones, we’re big boys, and girls, or girl, singular. I mean, we’re old friends. And things were changing already. With or without you.”

  Sid let that hang a second.

  “So now you’re saying…I don’t matter?”

  “No, no! That’s not what I—!”

  But Sid was laughing.

  “No wonder trolls love you,” she said. “You’re so trollable.” She giggled, backlit by her house, which was lit up like a luxury ocean liner.

  “Your house is…blinding….”

  “I know,” sighed Sid. “Dad made one hell of a carbon footprint just so I can find my way across the lawn.”

  “He in there with a shotgun?”

  Sidney laughed. “How very…Scots-Irish of you to think so! No. Asian dads don’t use shotguns. They kill with sheer, focused disapproval. Also: he’s not in there at all. The lights are on a timer. They’re both in Singapore.”

  She looked at me. Raised an eyebrow. I
didn’t get it. At first.

  “Both in Singapore?”

  “Yeah. They’re in imports, remember?”

  The word imports sounded very exciting all of a sudden, coming out of Sidney Lim.

  “Right. Right! Imports.” I took a deep breath. I really needed one. “Both of them?”

  “Both.”

  “In Singapore.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the house is…”

  “Empty. Little brother’s at a sleepover. They’re watching Toy Story. Three.”

  “That’s a good one. Dark.”

  Sidney tilted her head: a question.

  Well. More of a suggestion.

  Truth is, I couldn’t quite believe what was being suggested. What was being suggested was…suggestive.

  “Singapore,” I said again, with my stupid boy mouth.

  “Uh-huh. Singapore.”

  * * *

  —

  Sid’s shirt was off by the time we were halfway up the stairs. There were a lot of stairs.

  Stairs take a while when you’re making out on every step, losing articles of clothing along the way.

  Sid had my shirt unbuttoned down to my navel, and her warm, small hand was inside, a finger tracing the place where my stomach and pelvis came together, that area on Superman nobody knew exactly how to draw or costume. That area, on my old body, was just an area: wouldn’t even bother dignifying it with a temporary tattoo. On my new body, though, it looked like a suspension bridge, a ropy Y of strung muscle that was apparently prized by fans of the male physique.

  “I guess we could’ve done this in the Yacht a long time ago,” said Sid, in a voice so chill I had trouble matching it with the person in front of me: a shirtless teenage girl, in some kind of lacy bra that said Summer Plunge on the inner seam. I read those words over and over: SUMMER PLUNGE. “It’s just…your car’s kind of small, no offense.”

  “No, no, uh, none taken, it’s…it’s small! Crazy small! That car is sure…not a sex museum! Like, at all!”

  Ladies and gentlemen, I present: more dumb things that come out of my mouth.

  Sidney blinked. “Sex museum?”

  “Never mi—”

  And she was kissing me again. We were so close to the top of the stairs. I wasn’t sure we were going to make it.

  Well: I wasn’t sure I was going to make it.

  Sid came up for air. She had something in her hand.

  Oh, Jesus.

  The old suspension bridge sagged a bit.

  What she had in her hand was the One Ring.

  “What’s this?”

  “Well, that,” I said, “is the One Ring.”

  In all previous makeouts, you see, I’d slipped off the One Ring. It had never felt right to have it on, to have it banging against Sidney while we were pawing at each other in a cozy Italian bucket seat.

  But I’d worn it that night. Because it’d been Monica’s eighteenth. Seemed like a million years ago. Everything before this staircase felt ancient, Paleozoic.

  “From…Lord of the Rings?”

  Sidney looked like she had more questions. Then…she didn’t. She just pushed the One Ring to one side and kissed me again while grabbing a handful of pectoral. Sex is a deep magick, I realized. Sex shows mere talismans for what they are: Toys. Trinkets.

  Out of nowhere, Sidney stopped. “Am I going too fast?” She stroked my chest. “It wants what it wants, right?”

  I gulped. I think the gulp was even audible, like in old cartoons.

  “Um. What…wants…?”

  “The heart. You’ve really never heard that? Wants what it…Wait, what’d you think I meant?” Then she realized what I’d thought she meant. And laughed. “Oh. Well. That, too, I guess. Wants. Stuff. I guess. So: what’s yours want? Heart, that is. The other’s not such a huge mystery. Oh, God! Did I actually say that?!”

  She’d cracked herself up again.

  And while she was laughing at her own dirtyish joke, buying me time, I grabbed for the ring, on instinct, as if it’d answer something.

  But it wasn’t where it usually was. It’d been pushed to the side.

  What an excellent, excellent question she’d asked—

  What did my heart want? A question I hadn’t asked my heart in months, because maybe I was afraid of the answer. There were a lot of questions I hadn’t been asking, I suddenly realized, because I was afraid of the answers.

  But the questions also seemed less urgent these days. Events were overtaking them, like they said on the news. Life was overtaking all my questions. Life, for the first time, had even overtaken my heart, had left it behind.

  I thought suddenly and painfully of Monica. Off getting pierced, probably. The thought of which slapped me back big-time into the present, set me right back on those stairs, where everything was happening.

  “What does my heart want? Well: I’d say…this, what’s happening here, on these stairs? Ranks up there pretty high. On the list of…heart-wanted…things.”

  Sid smiled. “You know one of the things I like about you?”

  “This…part of my stomach? That you keep touching?”

  “No,” said Sid. “I mean, yes. That’s why I keep touching it. But I also like…your friends. And how you are with them. And how they are with you. They’re more like family. I mean, I guess one of them is family. But…well, you know what I mean. You have no idea how lucky you are, Will Daughtry. Can I ask you something?” Sidney was chewing her lip a little. “There’s no right or wrong answer here.”

  “Uh, sure.” I think it came out zure. My jaw was having a seizure, for some reason.

  “You still got your V card?” She drew a V with her finger, on my chest. “The big V.” The fulcrum of that big V was my belt buckle, which was apparently hooked up to an electrical transformer, because a thousand joules went through me when she did that. I was so shocked, I had nothing left but brutal honesty.

  “Yes. That’s correct. No sex. For me. Thus far. I’m so sorry if that’s…lame?”

  Sid was so patient. “No! Not lame at all.”

  And for some reason, words, honest words, just came Pezzing out of me: “In fact, before last summer…I was pretty ready…never to? ‘Lose it’? I…guess?”

  This is where Sid could’ve blown a sweet symphony of bullshit, all about how she knew lots of girls who’d thought I was cute and nice “before.” At which point, I’d have to make the distinction for her, between adorbs and doable.

  But she didn’t say anything. She just kept tracing the V.

  For the first time, I realized she had a square wet wipe packet in her left hand.

  And then I realized it wasn’t a wet wipe packet.

  “That’s okay,” she said. “As long as one person knows what she’s doing? We should be fine.”

  * * *

  —

  You know what? We were. Just fine. More than fine.

  * * *

  —

  The only problem

  and I mean the only problem

  was that I was thinking of Monica.

  Right up to the moment I wasn’t.

  So yeah, maybe it all did feel just a little like a lie.

  But only a little. A lot of it felt true.

  Was this how everything felt? Past a certain point in life? Like you were always doing a certain amount of damage, just by being in the world and moving through it? Biology Brain flickered on briefly: is it a function of size, how much damage you do?

  some people think of baseball

  Like the great sauropods, who walked away from their nests

  I guess I think of sauropods

  so they wouldn’t step on their eggs, on their young?

  oh my God this is happening

  The worst part was a
lso the best part: I felt insanely great

  and scared

  and stupid

  and the king of all possible worlds

  and also a little like some awful moral mutant

  and I thought—to the extent that I was “thinking,” at that point—that maybe feeling all those things is what it feels like to be grown-up. What it means to have “arrived.”

  Because if I knew one thing beyond a doubt, it’s that I’d absolutely

  definitely

  most certainly

  arrived.

  OR NOT.

  Yep. That’s right.

  I kept growing. Right past my Goldilocks height.

  So much for six seven. Bye-bye, Goldilocks, hello, terra incognita.

  * * *

  —

  San Locutus International Baccalaureate had Drew’s number. They could double- or even triple-team him, and they’d risk whole possessions just to mess with his head. They were fiendish deployers of infuriating feather fouls that threw off his balance, rerouted his cuts. He couldn’t get a rhythm.

  What that boiled down to: Drew’d racked up only twenty-two points by the fourth quarter, and the Harps were up only by four.

  “Not good,” said Monica as the center from San Lo—the freakin’ center—somehow nailed a three, and their side of the gym went absolutely bananas.

  “How goes the Irvine application?” I asked Monica.

  “Don’t you start,” she said, and then, “Hey! What the hell, ref?”

  The ref had just called a crap foul on Drew. Reaching in. Monica delivered a counternarrative the official didn’t quite hear and wouldn’t have appreciated.

  “See, this is the problem with being a basketball widow,” Monica muttered in my ear. “You start to care about this stuff, in spite of yoursel— OH, COME THE HELL ON, REF!”

  Something in her voice sounded…brittle. Un-Monica. “Basketball widow”? But I’d recently learned a lot about my big mouth and its consequences, so I stayed quiet.

  San Lo had drawn a foul from Eric Forchette, his third, that dumb hothead. Their forward sank the free throw and tied things up.