Page 45 of You Weren't Meant to Be Human
In the kitchen, Jess finds a trash bag and shakes it out. Stagger grumbles at the noise.
“Getting bigger,” Tammy muses, pressing her hands against the bump. “You feel her yet?”
Crane looks up. Her?
“You’re carrying high. Just a guess.”
Well, stop guessing. Crane is going to continue to useit, thank you very much.
As for movement, he shrugs. It isn’t very active. Just a jostle every now and then, brushing against the inside of his body. It makes him think he’s swallowed a fly and it’s crawling its way through his intestines.
Jess fetches the trash from the bathroom, the bedroom, dumps it all into a bag, and hauls it out the door without a word.
Tammy asks her usual questions—has he been drinking enough water, has he been smoking, any pain that he’s concerned about. And then there are new ones—how rough is Levi during sex. (They haven’t been having sex at all, and Crane vacillates wildly betweenfuckingtouch meanddon’t even look at me.) Is Stagger being gentle. (Always.) Is he safe. (No response.)
Jess comes back, the heavy metal door shutting too heavily like it always does.
“Are you okay?” Tammy asks.
What the fuck is Crane supposed to say to that?
“Saw someone out there trolling for parking stickers,” Jess cuts in, saving him. “Should probably head out soon if we don’t want to get towed.”
Tammy groans and forces herself to her feet. “Goddamn tow trucks. Let me go to the bathroom and I’ll be right back.”
Tammy shuffles off, and Jess crosses her arms by the front door.
Jess has put on muscle since she started working for the hive. Or maybe she was way too skinny before, and she’s finally getting meat back on her bones. She’s been helping Tammy in the yard all summer, lugging boxes of drinks and overflowing bags of garbage through the gas station, dragging bodies to the hive. She doesn’t flinch away from Stagger anymore, either.
“Levi out?” Jess says, presumably to either of them.
Crane nods.
“He gonna be out for a while? Few days, or?”
Crane thinks for a moment about the specifics, then shrugs. There’s an enforcer from South Carolina who’s just come down. She’s new to the job and swung by to learn the ropes. Crashing in Sean’s old house for the week, actually. Levi’s been in and out. Why, what does she care?
Jess seems as if she’s preparing to say something else but stops herself. Her jaw is taut. Her knuckles are white. She looks at this entire place with unrestrained disgust—but especially him. Of course it’s him. With his too-long hair and bloated stomach like a festering corpse andcomplete inability to get off the couch anymore. A miserable creature rotting in the corner of a cheap apartment.
Tammy comes out of the bathroom and presses a kiss to the top of Crane’s head. “?’Night, baby.” And then she steps out into the ugly concrete hall, crinkling one of the neighbor’s windswept chip bags as she goes.
Again, Jess hesitates. Still in the doorway. Jaw moving, her teeth grinding.
“Whatever,” she says, and follows.
Eighteen
Without a phone, Crane and Stagger’slearning rudimentary ASLproject has disintegrated into an exercise in frustration and guesswork. The two of them sit at the folding table that makes up the entirety of their dining room, Stagger with his chin in his hand as Crane’s pregnancy brain refuses to let him recall the sign forPorQ.
Stagger taps the notepad between them. The motion to give up and ask for help. Crane refuses.
Wash County does have a library—it’s a tiny building with terrible hours and a struggling selection of materials—but Crane is not aboutto ask Levi to swing by and check if they have an ASL textbook. He could ask Tammy the next time she comes around, but the more he thinks about it, the more he doesn’t want her to do that either. If Levi or Tammy knew he was working on this, there’s the chance they’ll insist on getting involved, or his refusal to communicate will become a directed insult.Yes, I’m finding ways to communicate—but not with YOU.
Crane racks his brain for the shape of the letters and comes up with nothing. Lacking a way to look up new words, they’ll have to rely on finger spelling, and that’s going to be difficult when he can’t recall a bunch of signs on agoodday.
He writesP, Qon the notepad. Stagger shows him how to hold his hands. Crane is pissed Stagger has a better memory than he does.
Levi comes home with dinner, consisting of two pizza boxes balanced on one arm, and a stranger.
