Page 47 of You Weren't Meant to Be Human
They finish their dinner, getting drunker than they should, Irene poking fun at Levi’s terrible taste in alcohol and dropping the wordfaggottoo hard. Levi doesn’t find it funny. Crane can see it on his face—he can’t wait for her to get the fuck out of town. Still, when she leaves, Levi leaves with her anyway.
Nineteen
The next morning: banging on the door. Hard. Loud.
It wakes Crane with a jolt, or maybe that’s Stagger shaking his shoulder. He sits up, gasping.
The alarm clock on Levi’s side of the bed glares at him with a bright green 4:52 a.m. It’s dark out. No slips of sunlight creep past the blackout curtains, and Levi’s not in bed beside him. Figures. For the past few days, all this shit with Irene, Crane never knew if he was going to fall asleep beside Levi or not, wake up to find the bed empty or not, and it’s left him frazzled.
It’s not that he wants Levi right now. And Levi certainly doesn’twant him, either; sometimes he finds Levi sleeping on the couch. (At least Crane gets the bed. Apparently putting Crane on the couch while this pregnant is too far, even for Levi—small mercies.) But the uncertainty of his daily routine recently has been unmooring.
Another flurry of knocking. Stagger grumbles.
Yeah, yeah, he knows. Crane drags himself out of bed—that’s been getting harder recently, what with his center of gravity shifted to his belly—and frustratedly wrestles into whatever shirt Stagger pulled from the dirty clothes for him as he makes his way to the door. Stagger follows through the dark apartment, hunched dutifully within arm’s reach in case Levi has returned in a mood. Or if Irene has returned at all.
God, did Levi forget his key when he left with her, drunk, last night? That’s what he gets.
Crane unlatches the dead bolt, already prepared to find the key somewhere and shove it into Levi’s hands so he can go back to sleep. Or watch another documentary when he inevitably can’t pass out again. Whatever he has to do to keep from fantasizing about shoving a pen through his orbital socket.
But when he opens the door, it’s not Levi or even Irene standing in the dirty hallway.
It’s Jess.
Visibly ill. Reeking of cheap liquor and metal and sweat.
“Thereyou are,” she slurs with the same barely contained disgust from her previous visit—as if to say how dare Crane, this ugly unwashed creature, not be expecting her this god-awful early. She shoves forward, tries to get past him into the apartment, and succeeds only in fumbling over the threshold. Her hair sticks in clumps to her clammy face.
She says, “Wondered if you’d finally gotten your shit together and killed yourself.”
That wakes him the fuck up.
The heavy door slams shut. Crane catches her by the upper arms. Tries to get her attention and get her to breathe. Not because he likes her, which he doesn’t, but because when you panic you get stupid, and when you get stupid you get hurt. And she’s already getting stupid if she’s running her mouth. How gone is she? How did she get here? Did shedrive?
“But you didn’t,” she says. Thick and phlegmy. She’s smiling with too many teeth and she’s not breathing steady. “God. That’s pathetic.”
Her eyes focus just long enough to catch sight of Stagger in the dark.
She startles. Full-body flinches. Tears herself out of Crane’s grip and hits the armchair.
“Fuck,” she says. “Fuck you.”
It’s Stagger that gathers her up this time, keeps her from eating shit on the hardwood. She’s sweating and gasping for air. Throat twitching with her pulse. Alcohol poisoning, maybe? Did she take too many pills?
“Fuck you,” Jess insists, louder. “You’re pathetic.”
Crane doesn’t have a phone anymore. He makes the stereotypical gesture forphone, thengive it.If Jess drove, took the only car at 636 Victory Lane, then Tammy won’t be able to come get her, but at least the old woman should be able to talk her down. Deal with whatever the hell this is. Maybe the part of Harry’s brain that gave out that day is giving out here too.
“If you actually wanted that thing out of you,” Jess says, “if you actually wanted to die, you would’vedone it already.”
This fucking bitch.
She vomits.
Crane jerks back. Jess tries to catch it and only ends up spilling a watery mess all over her hands and shoes.
Shit, okay, okay. Not here, not in the living room. Crane pushes Jess to the back of the apartment. She doesn’t fight. Too busy short-circuiting with puke on her hands and the taste in her mouth—she’s groaning, making a sick hiccup-laugh noise. Stagger puts himself between her and the wall when a knee nearly gives out. Bathroom, come on.
“You would’ve done it,” she continues. As soon as she’s through the door, she stumbles, barely catches herself on the toilet and the edge of the bathtub. “Have you even tried? I don’t think so. You know what, I think you like it. That’s what this is. The hive was right. You want it.”
