Hole in the Middle

by Kendra Fortmeyer

“No,” he says sheepishly. “I didn’t mean to—you were going faster than I realized. I’m sorry. It was dumb. I should have realized that would scare you.”

  “Yeah, you should have,” I say. “Shocker, it’s scary to have some rando follow you from a coffee shop and then jump in front of your moving vehicle.” I lean back in the chair and stare at the ceiling. “Do you have any idea what the last few weeks of my life have been like?”

  “Yeah,” he says, quietly. “Yeah. I do.”

  I glance up at him. Behind us, the nearly matched letters of our DNA march off the screen and into oblivion.

  “How long have you known?” I ask, more softly.

  “About you?”

  “About any of it.”

  “Dr. Morse has been prepping me for a while,” he says. “For this presentation, I mean, and proposal. For meeting you.” His fingers toy with the hem of his shirt. “I found pictures of you online last week. It seemed like a long shot, but . . .”

  He shrugs. I know that shrug. That shrug that means, But it’s only my entire life.

  I want to see some resemblance between us: a symmetrical mole, a shared skin tone or parting of the hair, but there’s nothing; his eyes brown to my green, his hair is a burnt caramel to my black. The only thing we have in common is the caved posture of frightened people: shoulders in, spines curved, to keep our torsos two inches back from the rest of the world.

  “You know this is crazy,” I say.

  “I know it’s a chance,” he says.

  “I don’t like the idea of somebody fucking around with my genes.”

  He lifts his head and meets my gaze, level. “I’d say they’re already pretty fucked, aren’t they?”

  The door opens, and the bright light of the corridor floods Howie’s face with light. The smile I thought I might have seen is washed out and away.

  “So Morgan,” Dr. Morse says. Her tone is the kind of casual that is full of teeth. “What are we thinking?”

  I look at Howie. His head is bent to the table, but his gaze jumps up to meet mine again. For a second, I think of speckled brown rabbits, leaping through tall grass.

  “I’m still thinking,” I say.

  Dr. Morse’s automaton smile snaps back across her face: the expression of someone who has been told too many times in her life to play nice. “Of course,” she says. And then, like she can’t help herself, “The sooner the better.”

  I almost, but don’t quite, miss the something that passes between her and Howie as I push past and into the hall.

  19

  I cross to the window through the bleached, chilly air. I just want to lean my forehead against the cool glass and think, but I catch sight of the crowd below and jolt backward as a smattering of camera flashes strike the window like popcorn. The crowd below has doubled. I feel like I can’t breathe.

  Taka finds me slumped in the height-and-weight station, poking at my height over and over. Five-foot-two. A small, unwavering fact.

  He cracks a delicate smile. “Hoping for a growth spurt?”

  “Only if tall people don’t have to put up with so much bullshit.”

  “Ah,” he says. He pushes his glasses up on his nose. “I wouldn’t know.”

  I realize for maybe the first time that Taka is almost exactly my height. I’m so often perched on a table when we interact, or lying down, or in a chair, giving blood. I can’t remember the last time we stood face-to-face. And though I am shaking and confused and furious, a part of me cannot help but think: my nose is on level with your nose. For some reason, it makes me a little scared.

  “How long did you know about this?” I ask.

  He puts his hands in his pockets and takes them out again. Like without a clipboard, he doesn’t know what to do.

  “The board sent me an article Dr. Morse wrote last January on the ICF-3 gene mutation,” he says at last. “We ran the tests.”

  “You knew this cure was out there for nine months,” I say, trying to keep my voice level. I fail. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  The reflected windows flinch in his glasses.

  “As you’re still a minor, I discussed it with your mother first,” he says. “She had her assistant look into it. My understanding was that she wanted to tell you herself.”

  The 1,900 unheard messages in my phone click into place.

  In my defense, if she weren’t such a drill sergeant to talk to . . . but no, really. I have no defense.

  “What do you think?” I ask him. He hesitates. “Honestly . . .”

  Taka picks his words carefully. “Your physical deformities match Howard’s, and your genes express a similar mutation, but it guarantees virtually nothing,” he says. “I haven’t seen research specifically disproving Dr. Morse’s methods, but that doesn’t mean that they work. She’s”—he hesitates—“ambitious.”

  “You still should have said something, Taka.”

  I sound like a little kid. I want him to reach out to me. I want him to take my hand. But he is not wearing gloves now, and we do not know how to touch each other without them.

  He meets my eyes.

  He says, “I didn’t want to get your hopes up.”

  Mother holds the crowd at bay while Caro steers me to her car. I keep one hand over my face and the other on my stomach, questions pelting off of my exposed skin. I keep my head down as I feel us accelerate onto the street, curl my fingers into the nest of my lap. Beside me, at the wheel, Caro is brimming with energy.

  “Oh my God,” she finally explodes. “Lump Boy? Morgs! Multiple exclamation points!”

  I say nothing. Her enthusiasm hovers a moment in the silent interior of the car, then slowly dissipates, the smile fading from her face. I stare at the skin forming on the top of the cold cup of coffee between us. It shivers when we slow for a red light.

  “Taka doesn’t think it’ll work,” I say at last.

  She nods carefully, keeping her eyes on the traffic, feeling me out. Mother must have filled her in in the waiting room. She didn’t like that Caro knew my secret when we were children, but she must be grateful now to have someone to talk to, even if it’s her teenaged daughter’s best friend. I imagine the two of them waiting among the benches and magazines, their heads bent together, clashing smells nestling in their collarbones: Dollar Store lemon shampoo and Mother’s latest tester, Dusk or Gibbous or Provoke, hundreds of dollars and mere centimeters apart. Somehow this makes everything scarier.

  “What do you think?” Caro asks.

  “Do I think it’ll work, or do I think I want to do it?”

  “Both. Either.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Caro glances up at the rearview mirror. I instinctively mimic her. If we are being followed by the press, I can’t tell. Every car looks like an ordinary car, an anonymity that felt safe until this moment. Now I want to hide from everything.

  Caro catches my eye, reaches out and squeezes my hand. “It’ll be fine, Morgs,” she says, and I want to ask, What will? But I don’t want to know the answer, either.

  She turns up the radio to cover our silence, and I relax back in the comfortable sleeve of noise. I try to imagine my life without the Hole: all those giant sweaters tossed in the trash, along with my insecurities. All of those belly shirts stripped of their magic, baring an ordinary belly. Whole, I would be stronger, bolder. I would laugh with my mouth wide open. I would take lovers, five hundred lovers. I would wake early and paint masterpieces until dawn, until the five hundred lovers rose from bed to stroke my bare shoulder with their one thousand hands, and feed me one thousand grapes. “I knew all along that the only thing holding me back was the Hole in my middle,” I would throatily tell the editors of Esquire. I would take their hands. “No,” I would say. “It’s okay. I’m touched by your concern, but don’t worry about me. I am all better now. Now I am cured.”

 
The world outside comes to a stop, and I blink up at the mossy mortar of our apartment building. The five hundred lovers come crashing down into the chalk-crumbling brick. I want to laugh at myself, but don’t. The movement of my chest might shudder into crying.

  “Do you need me to call in sick?” Caro asks. “My shift manager’s been a total dick lately, anyway. We can skip town, maybe head to the beach. Or stay in. Anything you want. We could eat ice cream in the dark and watch Steven Universe. You know, whatever.”

  “Your boss already hates you,” I say.

  Caro shrugs. “It’s just sublimated self-loathing,” she says. “She’ll be extra passive-aggressive for a few weeks, no big deal.”

  I lean back in the seat, feeling the weight of the whole world beneath me.

  “That’s okay,” I say.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Really.”

  Caro tilts her head back and forth.

  “All right,” she says at last.

  She opens the door. I don’t move, cradling myself in the seat.

  “You know I’ll need to kick you out of the car in five minutes if I’m going to work,” she says.

  I nod against the headrest, staring straight ahead. Caro lingers a moment longer, clearly about to say something, but then thinks better of it. She walks up to our building in a flash of sun. I linger in the car a few precious minutes more, wondering about the Lump, and the Hole, and all the places the cooling tires beneath my feet could take me if only I knew which direction to point the car.

  20

  I sleep uneasily that night, bobbing in and out of the silty air of dreaming. The Lump boy makes an uncomfortable shape in my subconscious. I can’t stop thinking about his hope, struggling against the shy bent of his head.

  My alarm jolts me awake at 7 a.m., my cotton nightshirt a second sweaty skin. Caro sticks her head out her door as I stumble toward the bathroom. She looks worried.

  “Um, Morgs?” she says. “You should probably see this.”

  I follow her into her room, squinting against the sun creeping cheerily through her windows. I lean over her shoulder to peer at her computer screen and moan.

  “No way,” I mutter into her clavicle. It shifts, apologetically, yes.

  We’re on the news.

  This is no small local story. I’m on Buzzfeed, the Daily Beast, the AOL homepage. I open the tabs quickly, scattering them across Caro’s screen like a little kid dumping Halloween candy on the bedroom floor. Match Made in Heaven—or Science? the first headline chirps cheerfully. Subtitle: Pair United for Genetic Study.

  I feel the floor fall out from under me. My body is certainly no longer in the room. It is out there, on the Internet, replicated something-point-four million times. Caro right-clicks on headlines, scattering a spray of new tabs across the screen: The Missing Piece of Her and A Perfect Fit! and Two Halves Make a Whole—Or Cure a Hole? There are no photos of Howie and me together, of course, but the resourceful media has made do, favoring a mash-up: on one side, Howie standing bare-chested and emotionless against a clinical white background. On the other, a Public Scrutiny photo of my faceless silhouette, punctured irrevocably by the Hole.

  Caro opens Puzzle Piece Pair Together At Last:

  Science or fiction? This is the question on the lips of medical professionals around the country after the discovery of a young couple whose compatibility stretches way beyond chemistry—and straight into biology.

  “They share a complementary genetic mutation,” said researcher Dr. Parker Morse in an interview on Sunday. “Compounded with their mirrored physiology, it’s really quite remarkable.”

  Howard Garrison, 18, and Morgan Stone, 17, daughter of fitness trainer Alanna Stone, are marked by matching deformities that make them literal human puzzle pieces: a four-inch-long lump of flesh on his lower abdomen matches a hole that punctures Stone’s torso.

  These deformities baffled doctors for years.

  “Morgan’s in particular is really quite eye-catching,” said Morse. “It’s my understanding she uses it as a gimmick on the local club scene. On the other hand, Howie is very shy about his body, which is . . . why it took them so long to get together.”

  “That she-devil,” Caro gasps.

  “I am going to kill her,” I announce matter-of-factly.

  We keep reading. The piece guides the reader through an infographic about the ICF-3 gene, teases us with sidebar links to Public Scrutiny and to a list of “Fifteen Famous Freaks To Make You Say WHOA!” Halfway down the page we encounter a photo of Howie. His eyes are lifted to the camera and bright.

  “I would say I’m cautiously excited about [Stone],” Garrison commented. “I mean, it’s wild to think about, but what if this is it? What if I was put on this earth to meet this person?”

  The medical field is divided.

  “Fifty percent of human DNA is shared with a banana,” said geneticist Dr. Amy Olvides of the Brooks Institute. “There’s almost no chance that this is more than an accident of physiology.”

  But outside the scientific community, people see the sweeter side.

  “I think it’s beautiful,” said Jennifer Carson, 24, who waited outside the doctor’s office in Raleigh on Sunday to see the pair united. “It’s kind of like solid proof that there’s one person out there for you . . . I’m really happy that they found each other.”

  This happiness is echoed by Morse, Garrison’s personal doctor.

  “It’s been a long, hard road for Howie,” she revealed. “We have a great deal of hope for the possibilities of this union.”

  Ms. Stone could not be reached for comment.

  Caro pushes back from the computer. “Just for the record, I do not like this woman.”

  I sink slowly onto Caro’s bed, remembering Dr. Morse’s tense smile, the undercurrent of anger lacing her voice when I told her I needed time to think. Taka’s word: ambitious.

  “She’s mad,” I say, slowly.

  “Why?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe because I didn’t fall at her feet and proclaim her my savior.” I flop over, pull Caro’s stuffed unicorn to my chest. “But that’s crazy, right? I mean, this is a totally bananas medical procedure. I’d be insane not to think it over.”

  Caro snorts. “No wonder she let you get out without talking to the press yesterday. She was probably afraid you’d go off of her message.”

  “Damn right I would’ve,” I say.

  Caro bats her eyes at me. “Who, you?” she asks, and despite myself, I laugh. “Todd’s giving me a ride to school today,” she says, closing the laptop. “Want a lift? We’re going to stop by Bojangles and get, like, a million biscuits.”

  “What about the press?” I ask automatically. “You aren’t worried they’ll jump the car?”

  “Screw the press,” she says. “Just go get your shoes. And brush your teeth. You smell like eight different dead things.”

  I blow into her face. “This is the breath of fame,” I say. “Get used to it.”

  But my head feels light and disconnected as I wander into the hall, the enormity of my altered life following me from Caro’s bedroom into the bathroom. I focus on concrete, mundane things. Hello, same sink. Hello, same towel. I brush, spit and rinse. The toothpaste spit of fame looks no different from the toothpaste spit of yester-me. For some reason I find this hilarious. I start laughing and can’t stop. I laugh until my gut seizes and I dry heave over the toilet, tears stinging my eyes, sides still convulsing. Ha, ha! My life is in shambles!

  “Hey, Morgs,” Caro calls, clattering by with her backpack. “Your ancient phone wants something.”

  I dry my eyes, scoop my phone off the bed. There are thirty-four new missed calls. Thirty-three are from numbers I don’t recognize. The other one is from Mother.

  It takes her a long time to pick up. When she does, she sound
s rushed.

  “I want you to come over right away,” she says.

  For the first time in recent memory, I don’t want to argue with my mother. I am really, really ready for some responsible adult to pick me up out of the mess my life has become.

  I’m texting Mother’s assistant to call in an excused absence for me when my phone buzzes again.

  “Morgan?” my mother says. “Wear something nice.”

  The outside world seems bright and strange once Caro leaves, aggressively three-dimensional. I find myself peeking at people in passing cars, studying them at traffic lights. Have you read the news? Have you?

  Mother lives in the far north part of town, where the sounds of downtown Raleigh drop away and the earth unfurls into a hushed green expanse in which dazzling white estates are set like pearls. The street lamps are hand-lit by a man in a taupe uniform at dusk, extinguished at dawn. I know Mother wishes I would spend more time here, but the house and all it stands for rub me like a poorly tailored shirt. I chafe. At this moment, though, her mini-estate with its gates and codes and impermeable walls of wealth and class promises refuge. I know we live in a democracy. I know this isn’t supposed to be the way it works. But the truth is, with a certain amount of money, nobody can touch you.

  Maybe this is why I can’t stomach my mother’s lifestyle. Maybe I’m dying to be touched.

  I punch in the gate code and pull up the long circular driveway. There’s an unfamiliar Lexus parked in front of the house, and the air tightens in my chest. Who has she got in there? A reporter? Ira Glass? Oprah? For a long moment, I sit in the ticking car, ruing my decision not to just crash on the way over and die a quick and easy death. My phone rattles in the cup holder. A text from Caro:

  are you coming to school today? y/n?

  I glance up at the house, type back, I dunno. depends on what Mother’s got in store for me.

  A pause, and then she responds. okay.

  The blinking ellipsis appears below her words, indicating that she’s typing something else. I watch it, waiting, but it disappears again. Nothing.