Page 8 of You Weren’t Meant to Be Human

Six

Aspen and Birdie live in an HOA-approved townhouse three hours down the mountain, thirty minutes outside Washington, DC, all butterfly gardens and pride flags surrounded by soccer moms and SUVs.

They bought the place when Birdie learned her brother was wanted for terrorism and turned over his info, dropping the reward on a down payment and bathroom repair.

(The bathtub was leaking into the ceiling; sold as is.)

“I hate the feds as much as the next bitch,” she’d said during one of the times Crane had found the time to visit.

He was keeping her company while she potted flowers in a pink sundress, neckline plunging down to the scar her brother had left the first time he’d tried to kill her.

Crane had taken to playing in the dirt. “But he’s in prison and I have a house, so! Fuck it.”

Crane has a key to the front door. It’s on his key ring right now. He still knocks and waits for an answer.

Considering the situation, Crane thought he’d be having a worse reaction. Shouldn’t he be having a meltdown? Completely losing his shit? Trying to DIY a hysterectomy, or whatever it is vets do when they spay cats and scoop out whatever half-formed kittens they find to toss into the biohazard bin?

He decides he’s in shock.

Granted, when Aspen opens the door in boxers and an oversized T-shirt, rubbing sleep from their eyes, he does get pretty close to crying.

“Oh shit,” Aspen says instead of hello, then hollers up the stairs: “ Birdie! ”

“ What? ” Birdie calls back.

“Crane.”

It must be something about being a father that allows Aspen to load a name with so much weight and concern that it needs no further explanation. Birdie rushes down the stairs with their three-year-old daughter Luna on her hip as Aspen guides Crane inside.

“Crane!” Luna says, though at her age it comes across more as a situationally inappropriate Cwane.

Birdie puts a hand on Luna’s head to shush her. “Hey,” she starts, eyeing him carefully because she’s the person in the room most familiar with suicidal breakdowns. “Is it bad?”

Crane nods—and there it goes. He’s sniffling in the foyer, then sobbing, and Aspen leads him into the living room with a pitying hum.

“Okay, come on, let’s go,” they say, setting him onto the couch and fetching the weighted blanket to drape around his shoulders.

Crane wraps it tighter. He needs the pressure.

“There we go. Let me get—the iPad, where is it—here.”

Aspen sits on the coffee table and holds out the tablet. Across the room, Birdie prompts Luna to pay attention to the TV, but Luna isn’t having it, instead trying to figure out why Crane gets the device and not her. “Over here,” Birdie whispers to her. “Let’s give Crane a moment.”

The tablet is open to the AAC app. A keyboard, a collection of prepared phrases, the saved history of sentences too complex to convey through facial expressions: “ Please.” “Thank you.” “I don’t like that food.

” “How’s the restraining order holding up?

” “Did you hear about the queer center that got bombed last week?” The usual.

Crane takes it, reacquainting himself with the screen through blurred vision. There’s always a pang of guilt when he looks at this. AAC apps are expensive; what was this one, over a hundred dollars? And it’s not like he had a stroke. He’s not nonverbal. He could talk if he wanted.

“Can we ask?” Aspen says. “What happened?”

Whatever he types, the app will parrot in its synthetic voice. The cursor blinks invitingly. It is incapable of judgment.

He writes, “ I’m pregnant.”

Birdie says, “Oh fuck.”

The thing about Aspen and Birdie is that they seem convinced they can “save” him. Why not? They managed to save themselves.

From what Crane has pieced together, the two of them barely made it to their mid-twenties alive.

Birdie, for example, was raised by a drove of rich fascists alongside a brother who’d tried to off her at least twice.

She transitioned in homeless shelters, catching glimpses of her family only when her father showed up on TV dog whistling the Great Replacement and white genocide.

“Please let him be one of them,” she’d muttered once, wine drunk and doomscrolling, refreshing her feed in hopes she’d find her dad’s name in the list of the dead.

Reports were coming in from the Virginia State Capitol Building that afternoon—a homemade IED had taken out a few Democrats, with a singular Republican as collateral damage.

Conservatives began the martyrdom process before the fumes cleared, and liberals weren’t doing shit.

Crane, who had no idea at the time that Birdie’s brother was the culprit or that her father was a state senator, stared at her blankly.

“God, do you think it was Dad’s idea?” she said. “You think he’s in on it?”

The courts must’ve decided that Birdie’s father was not, in fact, in on it. Crane could pull up the Wikipedia page for the Virginia State Senate and find her father’s name still on the roster.

And Aspen. Crane gets the sense he should know more about Aspen than he does, considering they went to the same high school.

Saying they went to school together wouldn’t be quite right, since there was only an overlap of one semester, but the point stands.

To Crane, Aspen exists in three distinct pieces: there is Aspen the father, of course, who cares too much and collects floral tattoos as scar cover-ups on their wrists.

There is Aspen the high school senior, who read gay porn in class and screamed at substitutes who read their legal name during roll call and spent a lot of time crying in the school darkroom.

Then there’s Aspen the tangled knot of trauma that is not discussed under any circumstances.

Crane’s stumbled across threads he wasn’t meant to find and never knows what to do with them.

Aspen detransitioned and married the first guy they dated so their parents wouldn’t have legal control over them anymore.

Aspen didn’t go to high school graduation because their husband-of-two-months wouldn’t let them.

Aspen didn’t finish college and, in the eyes of the law, hadn’t technically kidnapped Luna because she hadn’t been born when Aspen bailed, but it’d been a whole thing.

It’s better these days, Aspen insists. With the restraining order and all.

Now the two of them see Crane and, Crane thinks, they see a bizarre remnant of what they’d been. A chance to help some version of themselves.

It’s not that simple.

“Okay,” Aspen says again, with forced calmness this time. “Okay. When did you find out?”

Crane types, “ This morning ,” then, “ Last night ,” then, “ 2am I think.”

“Luna baby,” Birdie whispers. Luna, who is reasonable for a toddler in Crane’s experience, looks up at her curiously. “Why don’t we let Dad and Crane talk for a bit? Let’s make breakfast.”

“It’s Levi’s?” Aspen asks, as if Levi isn’t the only person Crane has ever fucked in his life.

Crane nods.

“Does he know?”

Crane shakes his head.

“Are you safe?”

There’s no good way to respond, no matter what version of the question Aspen is asking.

Crane can see two branching implications.

Are you safe from that boyfriend of yours?

That question is fine, and has an answer, even if Aspen doesn’t like it: yeah, sure.

Crane can handle Levi. He’s been handling Levi for a while, and he’s good at it, and their relationship actually works, believe it or not.

As if anyone else would want to fuck Crane.

As if anyone else would put up with him for more than a few days or give him what he asks for.

But are you safe from yourself? That’s another thing entirely.

Aspen’s lips draw into a thin line. “How worried do we have to be about you?”

Birdie, overhearing this, hurries Luna off to the kitchen, turning on the fan above the stove to drown out their conversation. Crane clutches the iPad but doesn’t type. He can’t make his fingers move.

If he goes far enough back in the app history, he’ll find the log from when he explained what happened before the swarm came. What he almost did. They know how much time he spent as a child staring into the mirror, trying to pull the skin off his face; they know he has the self-destructive drive.

The cursor on the tablet continues to blink. In the kitchen, Birdie starts the stove, sits Luna up on the counter, shows her how to crack an egg.

“Crane,” Aspen says. “You like it when I’m straightforward, so I’m being straightforward: I’m not gonna sit here and guess why you don’t talk. It’s your disability, not mine.”

Crane wants to protest the word disability , but on what grounds? He’s fucking disabled.

“But you’ve told me yourself you’re verbal, you’re perfectly capable of typing, all that.

Maybe—and I’m sorry, I’m going to sound like my therapist here—maybe you stopped talking because you felt like nobody listened, or because you struggled for so long to be understood that you said hey, screw this, you’re done, it’s everyone else’s turn to do the hard part. And I get that. Really.”

Aspen leans in, settles their elbows on their broad knees.

“But we’re meeting you halfway. We’ve put in the work, haven’t we? We’re worried about you. So type something .”

Crane’s fingers hover above the screen.

It takes him a moment—he keeps hitting the wrong keys, fumbling for the backspace button—but eventually the program murmurs, “You know what I’m going to do.”

It’s not much, but it is confirmation of the worst-case scenario. The sort of crisis Aspen must’ve predicted would come around, no matter how many times Crane tried to deny it.

They’re going to use this, aren’t they? You couldn’t even tell your boyfriend ; one more item to include in the list of myriad reasons why Crane needs to dump Levi and move away from Wash County. For his own safety.

God, they probably feel so vindicated right now.