XL

by Scott Brown

  “You know you’re always welcome here. You’re basically famil—”

  “Uh, don’t. Say that.” Monica got up, dropped her spoon into her yogurt cup with a thunk. She didn’t meet my eyes as she spoke, which was highly un-Monica of her. “I mean, it’s beautiful, I’m flattered, I…I don’t deserve it. But that…particular combination of words…it’s just not what I—”

  “I get it,” I said. “I get it.” But I didn’t, not entirely.

  The reaction Monica’d just had—I recognized that reaction. It was the reaction of the friend-zoned. The head-patted. The sexually decommissioned. Except, obviously, for a billion reasons, it wasn’t that. Obviously.

  Obviously.

  “You’ve got…enough blankets and stuff?” I always know the stupidest thing to say, and I always say it.

  “Yeah,” said Mon, “Laura keeps me in blankets, thanks.”

  We just stood there. The half-eaten Chobani between us. Staring up at us, lidless.

  We were about eight inches apart.

  I had this whole speech in my head: Calling her on the carpet about the Sawtooth. Telling her I knew where the scars came from. I was going to find out what it all meant: Had she wiped out? Or busted on purpose? To hurt herself? Or worse?

  Was she going to do it again?

  At the Sawtooth?

  I was going to tell her I couldn’t let her, and wouldn’t let her, and if that sounded overtestosterous, well, shit, maybe it was.

  Instead of all that, I was suddenly just kissing her.

  It didn’t even feel like a decision.

  Good thing, too, because if it had been? It would’ve been a terrible decision. Warning lights were flashing all over my brain console. It didn’t matter. More elemental forces were at work.

  Like gravity. Monica’s very specific gravity. Which I could feel now.

  [WARNING: DREW]

  And how about “trusting the water,” the way she’d always told me to?

  [WARNING: SIDNEY]

  Plus, we fit. I could feel that, too. Our bodies met perfectly now.

  How bad could it be? After all, she was kissing me back.

  [WARNING: MONICA]

  Until she wasn’t.

  She jumped back like I’d bitten her. Put her hand on her mouth. Choked. Not on Chobani. On the acid of complete and total disappointment in the human race.

  And my first awful thought was, Hey, as long as you’re equally disappointed in both of us, then we’re fine, we’re in this together, let’s keep going—

  Then her tears came, and exterminated all my awful thoughts, and all my nonawful thoughts, too. When tears came out of her, they didn’t come in little spring-rain spritzes, either—they came all at once, a rogue wave.

  “Mon…”

  She turned and walked into the computer room. Shut the door so quietly, it felt worse than a slam.

  I stood there, waiting for her to come back so we could talk. Waiting for me to come back, too. I needed to find out who I was now, and if I’d ever be okay again, after I’d done what I’d done.

  It was a long wait, and in the end, neither of us came back.

  At 12:58 p.m., I gave up and went to bed.

  Two hours later, I woke up starving, went to the kitchen, and ate half a chicken.

  For lack of a better idea, I dug the tape measure out of the drawer. Measured myself.

  Yep.

  It was next month already. I’d gotten there early.

  * * *

  —

  Two days later, I was at the Lowlands, and fruit was being served to a dyspeptic monarch. Jollof’d been under the weather. He was in a mood. He also had idiopathic diarrhea, which probably explained his mood. It was nothing but superficial colitis—not uncommon in a gorilla Jollof’s age, and very treatable, Brian said. He’d live. He’d be a little woozy on his meds, but he’d live. In the meantime, he’d make everyone around him want to die.

  Generally, Jollof was sweet with the female handler (5′3″) who now brought him his chow, but that day, from Keeper Access, I watched him snarl at her.

  “Not a good look on our boy,” she said as she came in.

  “Tell me about it.”

  Magic Mike just watched from a safe distance. Which made sense, given what Jollof’d done to him a few weeks before. (Back when Asshole had been in a good mood.)

  I was doing inventory: bamboo pallets, protein supplements. Riveting stuff. I was watching the gorillas make their usual rounds in the habitat, just out of the corner of my eye. And I noticed, after a while, that Mike wasn’t on his typical pig path.

  That pig path was a rangy one, giving the main troop a wide berth. But today he was closer in, closer to town center. Testing the troop, maybe. Testing Jollof.

  Every time I looked up, he was closer.

  And then he was just…gone. Vanished.

  I got up, went to the glass, tried every possible angle. No Mike. Maybe, I figured, he was at the waterfall, in one of those little nooks that can only be seen from the concourse. I was about to go upstairs to check when—

  A roar. Like a giant tree being pulled apart. The kind of sound that stops a conversation, or maybe a civilization.

  Jollof.

  Bellowing. Furious. Actually beating his chest. It wasn’t the superficial colitis.

  It was Magic Mike. And what he’d done wasn’t superficial.

  Magic Mike was sitting on Jollof’s rock. He was in the throne room.

  Eating a mango. Casually. Like this was something he did on the reg.

  And he was up there with Blue.

  Suicide by silverback was my first thought. He’s finally snapped. No, Mike, no.

  Jollof seemed to grow three sizes. It was mostly hair, but damn, was it effective. It looked like he’d been inflated. He tore up the path to the rock, scaled the boulder face in a matter of seconds. Blue’d already run screaming. Mike retreated, and my heart stopped.

  Because Mike had moved farther into Jollof’s lair, which was a blind alley, a stone wall. The worst move he could’ve possibly made. Now there was no way out. No backing down. No way to show deference and restore the status quo.

  This is how wars start, and how they end. This is the vanishingly rare situation in which you might actually lose a captive gorilla.

  Silverbacks don’t usually kill. It’s incredibly uncommon. Even assholes like Jollof—they’re just not killers by nature. But when there’s an imbalance in the leadership, a change in troop social structure—yes, very occasionally, bad things can happen. It’s the exception, though, not the rule.

  Magic Mike had backed himself into the perfect exception.

  Jollof charged into the throne room, bellowing, pounding his chest, reaching for Mike’s head to crush it like an overripe melon. And Mike backed up, backed up, kept backing up—backing up when he should’ve been backing down. I couldn’t see what he was doing anymore; he’d retreated past the lip of the rock, where my sight line stopped. What the hell was he—

  SCREECH! SCREECH! SCREECH!

  Now I saw them: Mike had catapulted himself at Jollof. Bounced off the back wall and gone right at him, at a dead run, screaming. This scrawny, neurotic little gorilla—I say little, he still weighed almost three hundred pounds—gambled it all on a kamikaze dive, and this completely unexpected, out-of-character move so freaked out Jollof—hell, it freaked me out—that he reacted with a traditional gorilla defensive tactic: he broke left.

  Except there was no left.

  There was just air. A drop. A long one.

  Which Jollof, in his surprise and colitis and medication, had apparently forgotten.

  And so down he came,

  this monster, this victim,

  falling backward from throne room to forest floor—

  SHUK
!

  A very bad sound when he hit the ridge of rock at the base of the throne.

  Jollof didn’t move much after that.

  There were twitches. Awful twitches. Meat, short-circuiting. Strange whistling noises that were not what the general public would think of as gorillaesque.

  Whimpers.

  Up above, on the throne, Magic Mike looked down at Jollof, his tormentor and king, shaking in the dirt, the life leaving him.

  I hit the alarm.

  In came the cavalry.

  Out went Jollof, in traction, on a gurney.

  Broken backs aren’t easy to treat in higher primates, even in state-of-the-art veterinary facilities. Jollof was gone by dinnertime. Just like that. Almost twenty years in charge, almost twenty-nine on earth. An endangered species, a little more endangered than it had been that morning.

  One wrong turn. Broke left when he shoulda broke right.

  And then: just broke.

  All of us hominids, gorilla and human, we just sort of stood around for a while. Stunned. At sea. Wondering what came next.

  I didn’t know.

  Magic Mike, though, he sat on his throne, sat on it like a champ, and didn’t fidget. He sat there like he knew something. Like he was waiting for someone to come ask. Eventually, someone did. It was Blue.

  We locked eyes at one point, Magic Mike and I. And my blood went cold.

  Because he gave me a nod.

  More than likely, it was just a twitch, a fleabite. But to my biased and unscientific eyes, he gave me a nod, and what—if you’re inclined to anthropomorphize gorillas, which I would never do, oh no, not I, because that way madness lies—you might even call a smile.

  Who’d have thought? said the smile. Couple of nice guys like us. Look at us now, brother man. Look at us now.

  [jackofclubs]: this could get worse u know

  WillD: [YOU HAVE BEEN BLOCKED]

  [clubofjacks]: want 2 know how?

  WillD: [YOU HAVE BEEN BLOCKED]

  [bjscuckloaf]: okay maybe ill just show u

  GAME DAY. FEBRUARY 27.

  A day that shall live in infamy. A day that should’ve died in infancy.

  So many portents and omens ignored: Martin Eddy’s visit. Jollof’s dethroning and death. The awful Unkiss in the kitchen. All leading up to this Very Much Not Good Day.

  The night before, I’d had a dream.

  It was just a cell, at first.

  One cell became two. Then four. Eight. And so forth, until there was a clump, which bloated into a bumpy sphere. A blastula: the gloppy primordial basketball of life.

  A dent formed in the basketball. Rotten crater opening on a ripe peach, just a pimple at first, then a sucking wound, and the first feature to form was the blastopore. Which was and is a mystery. Was it a mouth?

  Or was it an asshole?

  Biologists disagree on which came first, asshole or mouth, evolution-wise. On my happier days, I tilt mouthward. Not sure that really makes me an optimist, though.

  Mouths are far worse than assholes. Mouths bite. Mouths devour. Mouths are ambitious. Assholes are…humble. They’re just doing their jobs. Anyway, let’s call the thing in my dream a mouth. (Because I feel gross enough already.) A mouth forms, the ball deflates, folds in on itself: a blind gut. That’s what they call it. Congratulations, Life-Form, on your blind gut! You’re now a sac.

  I tumbled up, ass over blastopore, up through evolution, hitting every rung on my way…coming to a stop, mercifully, at the Age of Fish.

  A great age, the Age of Fish.

  Long before the big, farting, dumbass dinosaurs and all their bumbling, stompy bullshit, the oceans were high and twitching with chilled-out ectotherms of great size and variety and (I like to think) total self-control. They looked manga-sleek, and they moved like music through rippling forests of green. These creatures—they bled no heat, they risked no flameouts. They lived and loved and ate and eventually died, and it was all very relaxed, very casual. Even predation, murder—no one took it personally. Carnivorousness was just bodies sliding easily over other bodies, enveloping them. Not some big screamy deal.

  They had only one problem, these fish. They never stopped growing. But even that wasn’t really a problem. They didn’t measure. They didn’t categorize; they gave not a single fish shit about taxonomies. They just grew and grew and grew, totally unselfconscious, until something ate them. That was all there was to it. Simple.

  I woke up feeling just like them, one with the current at a nice room temperature. Took just a minute or two before I ran aground and remembered what I was. Remembered my desperate mouse metabolism scurrying furiously on its doomed treadmill in every groping, gasping cell of my giant and now-unbeautiful body, a body that had already betrayed one best friend and fallen in a big creepy heap on the other, hungry blastopore gaping, trying to swallow her up into its blind gut.

  * * *

  —

  It’s not like I hadn’t tried to talk to Monica. I had. Since the Unkiss.

  There’d been many flavors of evasion. She’d ducked me at breakfast. She hadn’t been at BoB. She’d ridden the bus in. Drew didn’t know where she was, either. Not that Drew was really talking to me much. Our ride to school was pure NPR, Drew’s nose in his phone, watching game tape.

  I’d finally found Monica at the library, after lunch. “Should we talk about it?”

  Monica didn’t take her eyes off Leviathan. She just said: “No.”

  “I want to make this right,” I said.

  “I think you should stop wanting that,” said Monica. Then she’d closed her book and walked away.

  I did want to make things right, though. I needed to re-Jekyll and de-Hyde. I wanted to get clean. I wanted to be good again, nice again. Because I was nice. Right?

  So I did the right thing. The nice thing.

  I broke up with Sidney after school.

  There are many ways to have a bad meal at Carl’s Jr., but this one’s up there. Top five, I’d say.

  I called Sid and told her we needed to talk.

  “Well,” Sidney said, after the words need to talk came out of my mouth, “see you at fucking Carl’s Jr., then.” She wanted a handcrafted biscuit that wasn’t actually handcrafted and maybe wasn’t even a biscuit. She loved Carl’s Jr. Normally she’d never take Carl’s Jr.’s name in vain. But she had good reason.

  “I’m about to be dumped, right?” she said as we sat down at one of Carl’s Jr.’s plastic tables. “That’s the great thing about We need to talk. You already know what you’re gonna talk about. So I figure let’s just skip to where I medicate with junk food.”

  Her handcrafted biscuit was bleeding grease, squirting cheese out the sides, and she ate it while I explained what had happened, why I was doing what I was doing, without precisely saying, I need to feel like less of a monster, so I’m dumping you.

  I had no food in front of me as I did this. I couldn’t eat a biscuit, no matter how alluring, no matter how industrially handcrafted, in front of someone I was dumping. I wasn’t that much of a monster.

  But I was getting there.

  I did, however, want her biscuit. I coveted it. It looked amazing. My stomach generated horrifying wild Serengeti sound effects while I was breaking up with Sidney, this amazing person I’d never deserved in the first place.

  Life is chaos, y’know? Hungry, lip-smacking, earth-eating chaos.

  Here’s the thing: I didn’t really want to break up with Sid. I liked Sid. A lot. I may have even loved her, under different circumstances. I’d have been lucky to have loved her, if events and brain chemistry had taken me in another direction, if life had broken right instead of left. As I may have mentioned, Sid was someone I didn’t deserve, and as I also may have mentioned, Sid was beautiful. Out of my league at any height.

  And we
had to end. Right away.

  I was the guy having sex with someone I’d never said I love you to, while ambush-kissing someone else, someone I’d loved from the moment I’d seen her, and also betrayed and repelled, maybe permanently.

  I couldn’t be sure of anything anymore, so I confessed everything.

  Sid listened, then offered the following:

  “Well, Daughtry, obviously you can burn in hell. I like you a lot. You’re fun. You’re my favorite kind of fun: a sweet dork in a body I wanna swallow. But I’m going to hate you for a while, I’m going to keep talking instead of crying, do you mind?”

  I said I didn’t, and tried to absorb the barrage of utterly incompatible feelings all of this sent through me, but Sid didn’t slow down, Sid plowed right on: “Even sweet dorks screw up, though, and you screwed up real bad, not knowing how you felt, and I screwed up, not listening to what everybody was saying—”

  “The rumor was bullshit—”

  “And then it came true. Right?”

  I clammed up. Sid just nodded.

  “Course it did. Warning signs were there all along. I saw them, and I didn’t do shit about it, because we were having so much fun. So I’m mad, yeah, mad at you, mad at me, too, and I might cry about this later, but not until I’m by myself, because, frankly, you don’t get to see that.”

  She took a big bite of her biscuit.

  “A little advice. You, Will Daughtry, need to get over yourself.”

  Now, that didn’t seem fair.

  Sure, I’d made mistakes. I’d been selfish, maybe. But I was a good guy. A nice guy. Who suddenly, through no fault of his own, had a lot of self to get over. Whole mounds of self I never asked for. Way more self than most people had to deal with.

  Her biscuit looked so good.

  I think she saw me eyeing it. She put it down. Like her intestinal fortitude had deserted her. Or maybe just because I wasn’t talking and responding like a human.

  “I’m gonna go now,” she told me, rising. “We’ll be friends later, maybe. Maybe. You’re not one hundred percent a bad guy, I don’t think.” She picked up her purse and turned to go. Then turned back. “But also: who gives a shit?”