“Well. That’s accurate.” I knew, but my mom did the listening and talking. Never me. But who knows, that could change. “So is that what you were thinking when you were out walking around for hours? How to bring me and JP back together?”
“Yes. No.” Jamie flips her arms free from the blanket and pushes up her sleeves. “I just kept walking around, worrying about my Spanish test on Friday and all this other crap, but underneath it all, you kept bubbling up.”
“In a good way?”
“Not really. I hate that I think about you all the time. I wish I didn’t. I wish I could take a bath and wash everything away, instead of having it build and build. I hate that I torture myself with all these memories of us. I feel like I scared you away and I hate myself for that.”
“You didn’t! Please don’t get that stuck in there. It was me. Maybe I wasn’t ready, maybe I was blaming my dad, maybe I was just an idiot. All of the above. Like, when you said you wanted to have sex, I was not expecting that. Made me nervous about future, um, endeavors.”
“But I only said that to keep you.”
“What?”
“I’m not ready either. That’s what my friend Keely said to do. She said that’s what boys want.” Jamie wraps the thick blanket tighter. “Ugh, I feel so dumb. Like Keely knows what the hell she’s talking about. She can’t keep a boyfriend longer than a month.”
“I wish you could’ve told me.”
“Maybe we could…talk? About stuff like that? Instead of feel dumb?”
“I’d love a chance to talk about anything with you.”
The new silence isn’t cold. It’s as warm as my hand that’s still resting on her shoulder.
“When we met, did you honestly not hear me in group?”
“I was in a pity spiral, so no.”
“Then why when you did learn the truth, why couldn’t you just say ‘Wow, I didn’t know you were trans, but I don’t care because I like you’ instead of spit on the sidewalk and make me feel like garbage, why? Even a polite ‘Thanks, but no thanks’ would’ve been better. Why did you have to be so awful? Why are you only okay with us in the dark?” Jamie finds her camera and starts twisting the lens cap with jittery fingers. “Why do I keep coming back to this?”
The lens cap falls and she struggles to fit it onto the camera, gives up, and thumps it down in her lap with a thud. “Just feels like I’ve been trapped in this world where I don’t know what’s true anymore. When I’m with you, I only want the good and I’m too blind to see the bad. Even after everything that’s happened, I’m still in this soupy shit. I hate—no, despise—myself for wanting the fairy tale.”
“But we all want that.”
“Well, make it stop,” she says. “Tell me you’re an all-star asshole and that if I stay here one more second you’ll hurt me. Again.”
“Jamie, I can’t stop thinking about you either.”
“No. Wrong answer.” She shuts her eyes tight. “Were we ever real?”
“Yes.”
“All those things you said in the tree house, were they true?”
“Every word.”
“And my hand was honestly the best thing you’ve ever held?”
Now I close my eyes, remembering. “Always.”
I’ve hurt a lot of people in the past, but nothing is worse than this.
Jamie hugs her knees. “Dylan, I think we…”
I wait, my comforter taking the form of tenterhooks, when Mom yells up the stairs, “Sweetheart! It’s time to go.”
“Where are you going?” Jamie asks.
“My cast comes off today. Want to come?” We have so much more to talk about.
The three of us pile into the car like it’s nothing. Oh, don’t mind us, we always travel in style with my mom driving the whip, my shotgun seat pushed back as far as it can go without breaking, and the girl of my literal dreams mashed in the backseat.
After a fairly awkward seventeen minutes of my mom peeking in her rearview mirror at me and Jamie, she finally pulls in to the parking lot and calls out, “We’re here!”
My crutches, the ones Jamie found, are all dinged up. Scratches cut the metal where I collided with a million trash cans, cars, shopping carts, and rocks. The handles are cracked and yellowed from months of my sweaty hands gripping the foam molded to my palms. Battle-hardened.
I walk into the hospital and lean them against the wall where my height is checked for the last time. I know the drill and I stand against the stadiometer as the nurse climbs up onto a chair. “I wonder if I’ll hit seven feet,” I say.
“I hope not. We’re running out of places to buy clothes,” Mom grumbles.
The nurse slides the bar down until it taps my head. “Six feet, seven inches,” she says, marking it on the paper inside a manila folder.
“I’m almost as tall as my dad.” This is so great, I could pop.