Page 19 of You Weren't Meant to Be Human
“You almost done?” he calls, opening the Mossberg’s action with a menacing click for a final check before dropping it into the bed. The tone is the same one Crane’s teachers used during the last meltdown he’d let himself have. What had it been over, anyway. Somethingstupid. A kid spilling tomato soup on Sophie’s leg in the lunch line.“She’s acting like her foot got amputated,”the teacher on duty mumbled. (Or maybe it’s the tone her first dentist took when he said,“We can’t handle this, ma’am,”and Mom held down her thrashing child, repeating,“Sorry, I’m so sorry.”)
When Crane doesn’t respond, Levi comes over to the Camry, plucks the keys out of the ignition, and lets himself into the gas station.
“Shh,”the man says one more time.
Crane wants to be quiet. He wants to so bad. He’s being a child. Grow up.Stop.He fights for an ounce of composure and can’t get it. He’s going to be sick.
He doesn’t realize Levi’s back until Levi opens a bottle of water and pours half of it over Crane’s head.
Crane splutters at the sudden cold. His hair plasters to his face and his shirt is wet. It’swet.He wrestles it over his head and throws it because his clothes absolutely cannot under any condition bewet, it’s cold and it clings and it makes him want to scream. Some of it’s splattered onto the man with the worms under his skin, and he doesn’t seem to care. What is it like, not wanting to howl and sob when something doesn’t feel right. Crane can’t imagine. Crane can’t think much of anything.
Levi says, “Are you done?”
Half-lucid and half-naked, gulping down air, Crane nods. Yes. He’s done. Just don’t do that again. Please.
So Levi leans against the Camry and casts his gaze toward Corridor H, scoping out his territory. Crane still is crying, but that’s acceptable. He can cry quietly.
In the lot—with stars slowly disappearing in the encroaching sunrise, Crane leaning all his weight onto the man with the worms under his skin—Crane tries as hard as he can but can’t recall anyone else inthe hive getting pregnant. At any hive, ever. Which is weird, because people have babies. As a species, as a whole, it happens more often than not. It seems like the sort of thing that’d get passed up through the grapevine, even if only via nasty rumors; Levi eating dinner over the sink and calling into the living room to ask if Crane heard about Samantha from outside Chattanooga, who left her kid in a hot car and killed him.Holy shit, what a dumb bitch.
Is Crane the first?
He can’t be. That’s not how probability, or birth rates, or the general human population works.
“I ain’t gonna ask where you were,” Levi says, “or why. This ugly bastard found you—” The man makes a displeased clicking sound reminiscent of a worm snapping its jaws. “And we’ve got bigger things to deal with, so. It’s water under the bridge. Okay?”
Aspen and Birdie and Luna are safe. Crane doesn’t believe in God but thank God. A drop of water falls from his hair onto his bare breast.
“Okay.” Levi replaces the cigarette Crane knocked out and fishes in his pocket for the lighter. With the cut on his face slicing through the growing bruise, blood on the corner of his mouth, dog tags dangling down his chest, it’s almost lewd. Crane focuses on the blood. He drew blood.Fuck you.“Figured this was gonna be rough, but the pipe, that got me. Forgot you had that.”
He finds the lighter. Lights up.
Levi says, “Here’s how it’s going to work. I’ve already gone through the apartment and locked up anything you could make a mess with. Razors, scissors, knives, bleach—you want anything, you’re gonna have to ask me. And you’re a smart son of a bitch, so we’ll have to keep an eye on you. That’s why this motherfucker is here. We’re not taking any chances.”
The man snorts scathingly.
“Speaking of.” Levi looks down at him. “You didn’t do anything to it, did you?”
No, of course he didn’t get the chance to scrape this thing out of him.
“Good.”
Good.
Why does Levi care? Why did he say it like that?Good.
Did Levi knock him upon purpose?
That can’t be right. Crane is aware, vaguely, that there are men out there whose whole thing is getting trans guys pregnant. They get off on it: putting a mutilated woman in her place. Yeah, Levi’s an asshole, but he’s not likethat. He didn’t help Crane start T, but he never tried to stop him, either. Sure, sometimes when they fuck, Levi calls him a bitch, or a slut, but that’s technically gender-neutral, if he ignores the time thatgood girlslipped out too, if he ignores how wet it made him. Levi was the first person to make Crane feel like a man. This couldn’t have happened on purpose.
And now he’s really thinking about it. Cobbling together the future from books and movies and the pregnant women he looked away from when he passed them in the street. His tits swelling with milk, his belly fat and heavy with a creature he’s only ever been able to conceive of as a literal chestburster. He’ll have to push it out or cut it out. It’s going to hurt. It’s going to eat him alive.
He’s hyperventilating again. Beating his face with his hands. If he caves his skull in this willstop, this will all be over, he won’t have to do this,please don’t make me do this, please just let me talk to the hive.
Levi says, “Shit.” Kneels on the ground and grabs Crane’s wrists tight. The man with the worms in his head holds Crane to his chest.
He can’t do this. He can’t he can’t he can’t.
“I know this is going to suck for you,” Levi says. His voice, rightnow, is the kindest it’s ever been. “But listen to me. I’m gonna make myself clear. Alright? The hive wants you to have this baby. You hear me? So you’re having this fucking baby.”
