Page 159 of Beau and the Beast

Beau realized that he didn’t want to cook dinner. He wanted towrite. Somewhere between Violet’s office and the bathroom where he stood now, Beau had realized exactly the way he wanted to end his book.

“Actually, I think I need to go write before I forget what I have in my head,” Beau said. “Can you let Violet know I’m going to be skipping dinner tonight? I’m sure they can find takeout from somewhere. Maybe it’ll be a good break from my cooking.”

“Nonsense,” Wolfram said. “They’ll lament the meal as a true loss—but you’re welcome to skip. I’ll let her know.”

With a towel draped around his waist, Wolfram left the bathroom. Beau dressed and let himself back into the study.

Beau had always heldit in his mind that he was destined to write a great book. Maybe not something that would change the landscape of literature and maybe not something that most people would evenconsiderliterature. But he knew that if he accomplished just one thing during his time on earth beyond raising his brother and keeping him safe, he would write a great book.

Somehow, even as he worked on the biography of Wolfram, Beau had always had that future book in his mind—the unnamed, giant thing that he would work on some other time, down the road, as soon as he had more money and fewer worries.

It had never occurred to him that the book he was writing about Wolfram wasthe great bookhe’d been waiting to start on all his life. And now it was almost finished.

What did it feel like to be destined to do something? Should it feel more profound than it did for Beau in that moment, he wondered as he sat in his underwear on a cushion, hands reaching for the typewriter.

It felt as if the last passage of the book had come into his mind, fully completed—as if he could turn the passage in his mind and look at every angle of it with no part of it degrading, even before he had put the words down. He began to type and the words flowed out of him easily, as if he was repeating a prayer he’d known by rote for as long as he could remember.

Wolfram—my Wolf—is a man, in spite of his looks and his curse. He is a good man. It’s a simple thing to write on a page and a prosaic statement to make, but it’s true.

His goodness isn’t born out of an easy life or a call to faith or a feeling of duty. Wolf’s goodness was hewn out of hatred, fear, and his own misdeeds. In a decade, he took the hurts of his life—those he had caused and those that had been inflicted upon him by his father, by his peers, by himself, and finally by a witch—and he used them as the raw material to create something great.

Like a sculpture that began as a raw block of granite, his hurts now take shape as something beautiful.

Though Wolfram debates with me over the nature of goodness, I am steadfast in my belief that the journey he took to become good is irrelevant. We are more than the average goodness of our past selves because we are beings ruled by time. The shell of Wolfram a month ago, a year ago, a decade ago, has only served as a stepping stone to bring the Wolfram I know today into existence.

The irony, now, is that Wolfram’s curse is only a disadvantage in that it makes the world inaccessible to him. The change in his physical form did not change his ability to dream, to joke, to love. It only served to make the world around him inhospitable.

I dream of a time and a place where Wolfram would be viewed for what he is: a magnificent man in an unusual vessel—a man and not a monster.

I wish I had a crystal ball to gaze into that would tell me Wolfram’s future, whether or not the curse will ever be broken, whether or not he will be free to re-enter society and take credit for all of the goodness he’s brought into the world in the past decade.

He doesn’t expect to be lauded—nor does hewantto be—but he does want to feel the sunshine on his face, to share a smile with a stranger, to walk down the street and be allowed to exist. It strikes me as I finish this story of the man who has changed my life how much he has in common with so many other people who have been treated as less-than-human by this world in which we should all be equals.

There is a personal lesson to be learned from Wolfram’s example: do good in the world and never give up on doing good.

But there is a societal lesson, too: if we as a people made the world accessible for those who aren’t like us, there would be room for all types of people everywhere we go.

I wonder, now, how many of us have passed over the opportunity for something extraordinary—something as impossible and perfect and unexpected as my friendship with Wolf—because we never stopped to consider the rich lives of those who frighten us, of those who are different.

I would’ve never met Wolfram if it weren’t for his extraordinary appearance. Selfishly and perversely, I am thankful for his curse.

When we are together, there is no curse. There is only Wolf and me.

He typed the last sentence, confident that he had an ending. He was done with the manuscript.

Was that it? he wondered.

Was it possible that he’d broken the curse in that moment that he finished the last word of the first draft—that just one room over, Wolfram had transformed back into the man that he had once been?

He heard nothing through the open bedroom door. Perhaps Wolfram had fallen asleep and not awoken during his transformation. Beau got up to see.

But no. Through the doorway, nothing was different than the way that Beau had left it. Wolfram—the Wolfram that Beau knew, not someone with pink skin and nothing remarkable about him—was sprawled on his belly across the bed, naked and sleeping soundly.

Beau’s chest was flooded withreliefand the realization threatened to knock him backward.

I’m relieved that he’s still a beast?

Beau frowned and bit his lip, reminding himself that breaking the curse, that seeing Wolfram change wouldn’t meanlosingWolfram. He would be the same man he’d always been inside.

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