Page 21 of You Weren’t Meant to Be Human

Fifteen

Crane can’t stomach going back to the apartment. Levi hasn’t texted him, hasn’t called Tammy demanding his whereabouts, hasn’t beat his fist on the door to drag him back. So Crane stays the night like he’s seventeen again.

Hannah and Jess sleep in the guest bed that used to be his, curled up facing each other. When Crane wanders past to brush his teeth, because Tammy always keeps a spare toothbrush for him, he hears Jess whispering through a crack under the door. “Are you sure that’s what you saw?”

“I don’t know,” Hannah whimpers. “I thought it moved.”

“It was a bad day.”

Crane sleeps on the couch. Stagger sits at the end, entranced by the documentary playing on TV, volume turned down to the notch just before mute.

It’s about filial cannibalism in the animal kingdom.

The mother hamster eating her pup to regain the nutrients it stole.

A bird destroying its own chicks so it doesn’t have to care for them anymore.

Crane tosses a pillow onto Stagger’s lap and lies down and watches professors talk about caloric reclamation until his eyes hurt.

His phone buzzes.

Aspen: Hey, Crane.

Aspen: Birdie’s asleep, but I just wanted to let you know we’re thinking about you.

Crane can’t stand to read the texts as they roll in. He jams the screen against the couch and stares at the TV, presses his face into the pillow or Stagger’s leg, and waits until his phone stops vibrating and he can read them all at once.

The one class Sophie and Aspen shared for that single overlapping semester was Intro to Art.

Honestly, Aspen scared Sophie. Aspen was angry—always bursting into frustrated tears or storming out of class.

Looking back, of course they were. Their parents kicked them out of the house for days at a time and the much-older boyfriend whose house they ran to was a massive piece of shit.

But they must have made enough of a connection for something to click, right?

Because when Aspen reactivated an old social media account to celebrate their second anniversary of HRT, Crane had been brave enough to ask where they’d gone.

That’s how it started. With an account Crane was supposed to have deleted, with Crane in the shotgun seat of Birdie’s car, driving down to Planned Parenthood with a bruise on the side of Crane’s neck that raised one too many questions.

What are they doing? Why do Aspen and Birdie keep doing this to themselves, thinking they can say the right words and fix this?

He can’t go back. He won’t.

Aspen: If we’re pestering you, let us know and we’ll lay off. But I know when I was with that motherfucker, people stopped reaching out to me and it was worse than being alone, even when I never knew how to respond to them.

Aspen: So no matter what happens, we’re here whenever you want to come back to us.

Aspen: Even if it’s with a baby.

There’s a baby inside him. Somehow, out of all the things it could’ve been, a tangle of tapeworms or squirming pile of grubs, this is the worst.

Crane doesn’t respond.

In middle school, Sophie was obsessed with childbirth in the same way that kids become obsessed with watching the same scary movie over and over again, the same way she would become obsessed with that dog on the other side of the backyard fence. She liked it because she hated it.

It started with reading the Wikipedia page, because she was an autistic child and that’s how autistic children handle situations like this: by consuming as much logical, practical information about the topic as possible.

(She memorized the Wikipedia pages for everything else that scared her, too: prion diseases, fatal familial insomnia, computer viruses, and “Timeline of the far future.”) She started on the “Childbirth” page and then jumped to “Vaginal delivery,” then “Pregnancy” in general, but the “Pregnancy” page wasn’t quite as interesting, since she already knew that much sucked.

That was terrible; that was a given. But childbirth held a fabled status in the collection of terrible things in Sophie’s head.

As much as she wanted to know about it, though, she could never bring herself to actually see it.

She absolutely could have seen it if she’d wanted to.

There’s an industrial complex of family bloggers posting their deliveries on YouTube for views, ranging from tasteful vlogs to snuff-style full frontals, complete with splattering amniotic fluid and shit and all.

The videos get cycled around by overeager teenagers running blogs named “I can’t wait to be Pregnant,” TERF-y mommy forums, and pronatalist internet corners festering with borderline-fetishistic reverence for the act, and then straight-up actual fetishists who at least have the guts to admit that it’s a fetish , unlike the others, who simperingly pretend to have any other motive.

But they were all too much. Sophie couldn’t handle any of it.

Then there was the video in biology class— the video.

Sophie’s eighth-grade bio teacher was out sick, and the substitute was visibly hungover, so she found a documentary and stuck it on the screen while she leaned her head back and napped in the corner.

The video contained a ten-second clip of a cow pushing out a calf.

That’s it. Not long at all. It was a regular dairy cow, lying in some straw, while a skinny-limbed creature wrapped in bulbous membranes heaved and shoved its way out of a giant cow vagina.

Sophie replayed the clip in her head for the rest of the school day.

In geometry, she thought about the cow’s desperate lowing as the calf fell out of her.

During a World War II project in social studies, she pictured the gush of brown fluid and the calf’s sudden jerking as if it’d realized all at once that it was alive.

That night, she put on her pajamas (Dad’s Grateful Dead tee plus fuzzy Hello Kitty bottoms) and lay in bed with her face pressed to the pillow and pretended that she was the cow giving birth.

She squeezed her belly as hard as she could because that’s probably what contractions felt like.

She imagined she could feel the baby slipping through the birth canal with its hooves and long sharp legs.

She fantasized about laboring and struggling, and the possibility that the farmer would have to come and grab the calf by the ankles and pull until it all came free.

She sat up, sweating and feeling sick to her stomach. Her hair and clothes were cemented to her skin.

Downstairs, Dad was already in bed, but Mom was half-asleep on the couch in their fancy vaulted living room, watching a ghost hunter show. Sophie didn’t say anything. Just slumped into the gap left between her mother’s legs and the cushions, where it was warm and safe.

“It’s late,” Mom said, squeezing the closest part of her daughter she could find. “You okay?”

“Bad dream,” Sophie murmured. “Sorry.”

“You want a glass of milk?”

Absolutely not.

When Levi does finally show, it’s god-awful early, and Hannah and Crane are half-dressed in the kitchen.

Since it’s not polite to walk around with your tits out in someone else’s house, Crane slept in his sports bra, showing the constellation of uneven black-ink tattoos.

The two-headed lamb, the jaw, the centipede.

Hannah, in her case, hadn’t managed to put on clothes again after the whole thing last afternoon.

When she wanders into the kitchen before the sun can even think about rising, Crane’s already awake and, well, it’s nothing he hasn’t already seen.

A postpartum pad under a pair of loose linen shorts and nothing else.

He hears her rustling around in the cabinets. The TV is still on, the current show following a game warden in Alaska. Stagger has fallen asleep, head lolled to the side. The worms under his skin pulse rhythmically like they’re breathing too.

Crane drags himself into the kitchen, pushing bedhead out of his eyes. Hannah barely looks at him. She’s all knotted hair and delicate ankles and faint stretch lines cradling her still-bloated belly.

It’s not like he thought the stomach deflated after birth. But it never occurred to him that it wouldn’t simply go back to normal after a decent night’s sleep.

“Who’s that?” Hannah says. “On the couch?”

Crane has no way of answering, besides gesturing vaguely and eventually signing, Mine , which is true on a technicality.

He thought it was an obvious sign, a pretty self-explanatory one, but she maintains bizarre, unwavering eye contact—maybe that wasn’t the answer she was looking for—before turning back to the cabinets. Thank god. He hates eye contact.

“I want a cup,” she says.

Crane fetches one from the cabinet over the sink and a bottle of water from the crate beside the fridge. She’s from McDowell, so he figures she’ll get the hint not to drink the well water. She does.

What she doesn’t do is ask what he and Jess had done with what had been inside her. She doesn’t get dressed or apologize for the crinkling sound the postpartum pad makes when she moves.

She says, “It’s weird. When Levi talked about you, it sounded like he loved you.”

Calling their shit love feels like an insult to someone who actually knows how to love. Like Aspen and Birdie, or his parents.

“Don’t make that face,” Hannah says. “I’m serious.” She turns away, the strands of her long hair sticking to the sweat on her back. “Whatever. I hope you’re a piece of shit, so I don’t have to feel bad for you.”

Then there’re three hard knocks on the door, and it’s over. Hannah slips into the guest room. Stagger snaps awake.

When Crane answers the door, Levi is on the porch. He is a crepuscular animal; not nocturnal or diurnal, but something in the middle instead.

In lieu of hello, Levi—barely dressed, basketball shorts and a zip-up hoodie, presumably because it hurts too much to put on an actual shirt with his shoulder fucked-up—presents a cold package wrapped in butcher paper. It’s heavy.