XL

by Scott Brown

  Coach was on the court. “That was some ugly ball.” It was unclear whom he was addressing. He saw me draw the charge, right? He saw my feet were planted? Coach looked from one of us to the other. Like he was deciding who’d inherit. He was enjoying this.

  Maybe not a great human being, Coach Gut.

  But look who’s talking: the guy who just made shaming his brother into performance art.

  “No basket.” Gut pointed at me. My ball.

  Drew turned away. I couldn’t see his face. I didn’t need to.

  Fweeeet!

  I faked. Drew lurched.

  I saw it: I could win.

  And I went the other way.

  Put up a skyhook. My dumbest, least reliable shot.

  GUH-DONG! Brick-a-lickin’…

  Drew rebounded, and I couldn’t flank him.

  Well. Put it this way: I didn’t flank him.

  Anyway, he stuffed it. And then…he pointed at me.

  Hoots. Boos. The peanut gallery had been on my side.

  Drew turned his back on the peanut gallery and walked off the court.

  Later, in the shower, I thought a lot about what had just happened.

  The way he’d pointed at me.

  Once upon a time, when I’d been safely in the stands, tiny and bendable and beta, pointing at me had meant, That was for you, blood brother.

  That day, on the court, it meant, That was at you, blood brother. Right at your head.

  Dominance display.

  Drew believed the rumor.

  Maybe not in his forebrain, with all his higher-function gear, but in his back brain, his subbrain, his lizard brain—and maybe even lower, in his heart, in his guts—he believed it.

  [jacksonpolyp]: nice job skooling ur bro. go team. should put that nasty cuck rumor to rest

  WillD: Anytime, buddy. Name a place, name a time.

  [jacksonpolyp]: naw u seem 2 busy. family is important!

  IT WAS DARK already, winter-dark, and I was coming out of the Lowlands, turkey sub under one arm, when she just sort of materialized, all in black.

  “Hey.”

  “Holy shit, Mon!” My sub shot up like a Trident missile, disintegrated in midair. Debris rained.

  Monica had her wet suit under one arm, the new, patchless one Drew’d gotten her after he’d returned the stupid earrings.

  “Sorry about your sandwich. I’ll buy you a new one.” She was fidgety, jittery. “I want to do something a little crazy,” she said. “But only a little crazy.”

  “Where’s Drew?”

  Monica sighed a long sigh. “I was blown off. Night practice.” She studied my face, which probably betrayed some fault lines. “What. Did something happen?”

  One-on-one. Drew pointing at my head, with murderous intent. Sure. Lots had happened.

  “Uh. No?”

  “Anyway,” said Monica. “You’re plan B.”

  There are men who’d have been insulted being plan B, even if the people who plan B’d them didn’t mean it as an insult.

  I was not one of those men. Was I a man at all? TBD.

  * * *

  —

  She wanted to go to Black’s Beach, surfer central, a popular destination. McDonald’s, Monica called it. Nice, steady corduroy waves, very predictable. Big, though. Very big, heavy, hollow waves. Ten-footers that night, according to the report. And, of course, it was night. But Monica—I think with her earring money—had acquired waterproof LEDs. And a plan.

  The sand was white under the moon. The sky was clear. We each got into our wet suits, on our separate sides of the car, the old Orthodox wedding. We hadn’t had to use that trick in years. Usually when we surfed, we were at BoB, where one person could duck into the cave for a quick change.

  I had my suit pulled on to the waist when I thought I heard the knock on the roof that meant Monica was ready to roll, chop-chop, get the lead out, time and tide wait for nobody, etc., etc.

  Instead, I walked around the car and found Monica half-naked.

  Her back was turned as she tugged the squeak-tight neoprene over her hips.

  Did I look?

  I looked. Okay: yes. It happened so fast. Boy eyes—they’re like cockroaches, fast little shits, skittering everywhere and hard to grab back once let loose. So yes, before I could unlook, I looked. But what I was looking at was…

  Jesus. What was I looking at?

  A claw mark.

  Three deep scars, thick and ropy, white with time and imperfect healing. Slashed in parallel on Monica’s back. The scars began near her left shoulder blade and arced over her spine, reached all the way to her starboard rib cage.

  From an animal?

  From a human animal?

  She felt my eyes on her then. Turned.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Your…back,” I said. “Monica, what…”

  “Old news,” she said, shrugging the suit over her left shoulder, zipping herself. It took some doing, some stretching. “Seriously, it’s nothing.”

  “Doesn’t look like nothing.” I tried to make this sound lighthearted.

  She wasn’t buying it. She came closer, an ember of warning in her eyes. “William? If it’s on my body, and I say it’s nothing? It’s nothing.”

  She grabbed her board and started toward the beach. I just stood there with my weather vane spinning. Then she added over her shoulder, “Dude, zip up. You’re not decent. And we only have all night.”

  We hit the goat path down to the water. Out past the silver strand, the ocean was muttering, grinding its molars.

  Why didn’t Drew tell me? He had to have seen those scars.

  I hated thinking about how he’d seen them, in what context, but the scientist in me had to admit: he’d seen them. And he’d said nothing.

  Because that would’ve made it weird?

  I wondered what the New Plan had to say about night-surfing Black’s? Just the two of us? Dressing in a parking lot? And no Drew in sight for miles?

  “Why are we doing this?” I called over the breakers, which were getting louder.

  “It’s a thing,” she assured me. “People do it. I’ve got a light.”

  “But…why?”

  “There’s no shore breeze at night.”

  Like this was a perfectly sufficient answer.

  She started heading down. I followed.

  “It sounds kinda rough for winter.”

  “It is,” said Monica. “Crazy out of season. Climate change: the surfer’s friend!”

  They were coming into focus: waves at high tide, under the moon.

  “Chaos, right? But no: it’s a particular kind of chaos. The kind I need to practice on.”

  I stopped. Planted my feet. “I can’t surf that.”

  “Oh, I know.” She kept heading into the water, pancaked onto her board, began paddling.

  “So what did you need me for?” I yelled.

  “Witnesses!” she screamed over the breakers. “Gotta have witnesses!”

  * * *

  —

  She cut the cleanest lines out there, on the far spit, bright blue whorls in a red tide. The big breakers weren’t all that distant cyclone had washed up on our shores: bioluminescent dinoflagellates were cookin’ tonight, and every little disturbance in the water spawned Dopplers of unearthly light, like an oil fire. She almost didn’t need the LEDs she’d studded her board with.

  Watching Monica surf always made me feel like life wasn’t just a mindless killing machine I’d been studying from a safe distance since I was eight.

  Which isn’t the same as saying it made me feel safe.

  Watching her do things I couldn’t do and didn’t quite understand made me want to fit into the universe the way she did when she surfed. Monica ha
d a niche. It was a moving niche, and hard to pin down. But it was there. To watch her surf was to see how a person, however tiny, could fit into those great, grinding gears, if only for a few perfect moments. It made me want to find my own fold. And a few good friends to share it with.

  Monica wasn’t so content. Not that night.

  I saw her pick a victim. A big one.

  She waited a beat.

  Paddled five strokes fast. Crested, rose on the board.

  And then down she went, and in.

  Pitted. In the tube.

  It was beautiful.

  What I saw of it.

  Watching her, I let my guard down in the dark, and a dinky little four-footer broke over me. I went crashing over backward, 225 pounds of chaos. It didn’t hurt a bit.

  Monica’s next few rides were uglier.

  At first I thought the waves were getting nastier. Then I realized that it wasn’t the waves, it was the rider.

  She’d delay and delay, then launch a deep takeoff way too late—even a dragger like me could see it—and go straight into the barrel, choosing too high a line…and getting sucked over the falls and pounded into a shallow sandbar.

  The shit-eating wipeout that resulted looked so bad, I started paddling out.

  But up she popped, gave me a game-show smile and the All’s well. I stood down.

  The next wave she shanked exactly the same way. And the one after that.

  Finally I realized: She’s practicing wipeouts.

  She’s making chaos that isn’t here.

  That’s when I realized what she was practicing wipeouts for.

  * * *

  —

  The parking lot was basically empty by the time we got back. The usual ghost car, somebody sleeping one off, maybe, and beyond that, a world empty of everything but us and the chew we’d just walked out of.

  “You’re gonna hit the Sawtooth. Aren’t you?”

  Monica stopped. Studied me. “You gonna stop me?”

  I hadn’t gotten that far in my thinking. So I went with: “If I have to.” The words came from a place in my testicles so deep and strange, I couldn’t even draw you a map. Not that you’d want a map of my testicles.

  Monica…smiled. Like she’d seen the map of my testicles, and had found it amusing. “And how do you plan to do that?”

  “Seriously? Are you really going to make me call someone?”

  “ ‘Call someone’? Who are you going to call, Will?”

  “I don’t know. Someone you’ll actually listen to? Drew? Your dad? A suicide hotline?”

  “Oh, God. Are we really having this talk?”

  “Monica, promise me you aren’t going to do anything stupid.”

  “Sure. Easy. I promise.”

  “Promise me you aren’t going to try the Sawtooth.”

  “William,” she said, coming closer until she was just five inches away. So close I could smell the salt on her. “Here’s what I’ll promise you. I promise that if I do it, when I do it, it’s because I know what I’m doing. It’s because I’ve figured it out.”

  “Monica—”

  “No, listen, I’m serious: I’ve spent years picturing it, and you want to know something about that picture?” She paused and looked away from me. “You’re always in it. You are the person who’s there when I do it, because you are the only person in my life who’ll understand.” She peered into me. “I’m right about that. Right?”

  Then she went and sat in the car.

  I stood there for a while. Listening to the ocean mutter.

  No. Not muttering now. Laughing.

  “CAN WE HIT those brakes a little harder?”

  Dr. Helman’s nose was in my lab results. I sat across from her, slumped in a chair that used to engulf me but now felt comically undersized, like we were in a clown act.

  “It doesn’t really work that way,” Dr. Helman said absently as she read over my endocrines. On the chart, I clocked: TACE inhibition. GHBP imbalance. Epiphyseal hypertrophy. Jargon that sounded eerily familiar.

  “It doesn’t work at all, as far as I can tell,” I said, in a hopefully not too obnoxious way. “I’m still going strong here.”

  Dr. Helman looked up. Fixed me with her sweet, infuriating cartoon-pig eyes. “Will, two things. One, this isn’t a bar. You can’t just order another shot of hormones.”

  “I was under the impression that’s exactly what people can do these days.”

  “No. It isn’t. Certainly not for this, which is…well, we still don’t know. And two, you’re a minor. Remember? We’ve bent the rules a little, let your friend pick you up from these appointments, because they’ve been so frequent. We know that’s hard.”

  “It’s not hard. I feel fine. You keep telling me everything’s normal, except for, y’know, the obvious. So it’s not hard—”

  “Psychologically,” said Dr. Helman.

  “Isn’t that a little outside your job description?”

  “I’d like your father here,” said Dr. Helman, “for your next appointment.”

  “See, now, that’s hard,” I said. “On him. This stuff stresses him out. And you know my dad’s whole…history with this place—”

  “I know,” said Dr. Helman. “And that’s why I’d like him here for these checkups. Especially if we’re looking at getting more aggressive with hormone therapy. Will?” She leaned across her desk and was suddenly a very serious cartoon pig. “You’ve got to let me do my job—Are you all right?”

  I wasn’t. I was sweating. Breathing felt thick. The air was suddenly sticky, syrupy—how does anyone get this stuff into and out of their lungs?

  I was hot. So hot.

  I’m in the wrong body. Running hot. Melting down.

  Mouse metabolism. Elephant body.

  I was gonna burst into flame.

  I remember Dr. Helman saying, Lie down, just roll. There we go. Now. Feet up. Don’t worry about the wall, scuff it up, it’s fine.

  A few minutes later, I was on my back, my massive legs pointed straight up the wall. Dr. Helman and a nurse were standing over me.

  “ ’S okay, I’m fine.” I started to get up. Dr. Helman knelt, put a hand on my chest.

  “Not yet. Stay still a little longer.”

  I laughed. “I’m gonna die, right?” I felt rivers of hot salt passing my temples. The ceiling was coming down, acoustic tile by acoustic tile. “I’m gonna die, let’s just say it. I’m gonna die of the same thing that killed my mom.”

  “No,” said Dr. Helman. But I saw a bulb flicker behind her eyes.

  “Something about it, though, reminds you of her thing. Right?”

  Dr. Helman took a deep breath. “You don’t have cancer. This isn’t…that. You have…you had, I think, an insensitivity to growth hormone before this…spurt.”

  “Can we…not call it that?”

  “Before this phenomenon. Near as we can tell—and, Will, we’re working with specialists from all over—near as anyone can tell, your body…compensated for your innate insensitivity to growth hormone. And then all of a sudden, those factors blocking the hormone? The binding proteins that stopped you from growing? Just fell away. For reasons we don’t really understand. So you got both barrels from your pituitary gland. And…here we are.”

  “And you’re saying this has nothing to do with my mom’s cancer? They’ve got nothing in common? Nothing at all? Not the GHBP? That’s growth hormone–binding protein, right? I see it on my labs, just like I saw it on hers. Not the TACE inhibition, either? C’mon, Doctor.”

  Dr. Helman sighed. “You pose an interesting question, Dr. Daughtry.”

  Don’t mess with Biology Boy.

  Dr. Helman spoke slowly, chose her words carefully. “Your mother’s cancer,” she said, “involved a very rare interplay of hormonal and enz
ymatic factors regulating cell growth generally, and musculoskeletal growth and regeneration, chondrogenesis, and ossification in particular. And yes, some of those same factors are in play here, too. But we’re talking about the most basic mechanisms of growth, on a biomolecular level. So saying they’re related is like saying basketball is related to rock-paper-scissors. The answer is Sure! and also Not at all! The fact is, it’s still early days, and these therapies—it isn’t like stomping the brakes on a sports car. It’s pumping the brakes…on an aircraft carrier. You have to give it some room, Will.”

  I thought about that, the room I’d given “it,” given myself. I thought about that all the way home in the car with Monica. I thought about how all games were feeling more and more like games of chance, not tests of strength or skill. Which made me feel all seasick and loopy again. I didn’t want to feel that way. I wanted to feel more like I felt when I spiked over the net, or when I moved Jaylen Teixiera off his stance, or when I broke Rafty’s backboard, even.

  (Better scary than scared, right?)

  So I just decided to feel that way. Just like that. And I felt better.

  Maybe, I figured, I can just hold that thought.

  * * *

  —

  I can’t even remember what we were having for dinner, the night it happened. My memory has it down as Sad Bowl of Corn and Tragic Lump of Mashed Potatoes, though that seems unlikely, given where Laura was with carbs.

  This much is crystal: the Daughtry-Tannengers were engaged in what I’d classify as the Bitter Family Dinner, a classic of the genre. Kids’ eyes trained on their plates, parents’ eyes cutting to each other, signaling furiously, concerned. Brows furrowed, frowny faces over food that looked like plastic props in a local commercial, perfectly fine food made depressing and doomed by the grumpy people eating it. Dinners like that make the basic act of eating seem disgusting: you hear the chewing because there’s nothing to drown it out, and the business of placing organic matter in a mouth hole and dissolving it with enzymes in order to stay alive becomes hard to avoid, harder to dress up as anything other than what it is.

  I still ate a lot. I mean: it was still food.