Page 63 of You Weren't Meant to Be Human
Jess says, “Anyway, I wanted to apologize. For, you know, everything I said last time. I was drunk and fucked-up and had definitely lost a lot of blood, but it was still awful.”
Crane hates apologies, and explaining that she was, in fact, correct about everything she said would probably take too much time. Holding the phone properly is hard enough as it is.“I should be apologizing to you.”
“Don’t you dare. If you say sorry to me, I’m taking my phone back.”
“He does make you feel crazy.”
Jess’s eyes suddenly go a bit glassy. “Oh. Yeah. He does.”
“Did it work?”
Jess sniffles and presses a knuckle into the corner of her eye. “I told myself I wasn’t going to get emotional, you motherfucker.” She clears her throat to get the hitch out of her voice but it doesn’t work, and then she’s hugging him.
Crane freezes. It’s awkward, Jess kind of half-collapsed onto the bench to get down to his level, but her arms are wrapped tight. She smells like Tammy’s cheap body wash and dollar-store hair conditioner, a generic brand of dryer sheets. Like the closest thing Crane’s had to home in a long time.
“No,” she mumbles against Crane’s shoulder, and now she’s really crying. “It didn’t work. Uh, I really managed to wreck my internal organs, but when we got to the hospital and they stitched it all up, turns out the fetus was still fine. Then one of the nurses slipped me this.”
It’s a business card. Shoddy and simple, definitely mass-produced in someone’s living room, but it gets the point across.
Pregnant? Need help? Call.
“They mailed abortion pills to the house. I miscarried. It’s gone.”
Crane, for a moment, is flooded with so much rage and regret and helplessness it makes him sick. It’s not fair that he didn’t realize what had happened until it was too late. It’s not fair that the hive dragged him back before Aspen and Birdie could save him. It’s not fair that this is how it’s ending.
But he is glad for Jess. If anyone deserves to avoid this, it’s her.
Once Jess has finished crying, wiping her nose on her sleeve, she clears snow off the edge of the table and hops up to look out into the forest behind the apartment complex, feet swinging.
“Can you be honest with me real quick?” she says.
“I reserve the right to change my mind.”
She snorts. “That night in the car. When you told me that if I tried to leave, y’all would kill me. Is that true?”
“Do you plan on finding out?”
Jess doesn’t give him anything to go on. She just keeps looking out toward the woods. The big, hibernating trees bending under the weight of wet snow. It’s so quiet out here that, without Jess’s voice or the droning of the app, if they wait long enough, they can hear a branch snap under the weight of it.
“If you ran,” she says, “where would you go?”
Crane is aware that his knee-jerk answer is stupid. Canaan Valley. It’s stupid because Canaan is literally fifteen minutes away from Washville, right past the Wash County line, and also because the main draw of the place is a ski resort, which Crane has no interest in. It’s just that, last year, a customer at the gas station was talking about the townhouse her family rented for a ski trip, and it had sounded so wonderful that he hasn’t been able to get it out of his head since. Rugs on the wooden walls, a spiral staircase, low ceilings, and dark carpets. Crane wouldn’t even do anything. He’d lie on the couch, probably do crosswords in a book left behind by the last vacation-renters, sit on the back porch in his coat alone.
But if Jess was right about one thing, so was the hive.
This world was not made for ones like you.
He’s made peace with how this is ending, he thinks. He’s pretty sure. The idea of running—of getting away, of living—is so impossible to consider that it borders on painful.
Crane types,“I wouldn’t survive out there.”
Jess’s expression is tinged with pity, but she says, “I’ve always wanted to go to California.”
That sounds nice, too.
Even if Cranedidgo back to the world, even if he was capable of leaving all this behind, which he’s not, what would he even do? He has no legal ID that isn’t a fake, no money that actually belongs to him, no place to sleep that wouldn’t be the back of the Camry. Aspen and Birdie want nothing to do with him, and returning to his parents would be an act of unimaginable cruelty. They probably accepted Sophie’s death years ago. Grieved her properly and moved on, still loving the little girl they lost. He can’t do that to them.
When Crane gets back to the apartment, Levi has the TV on. It’s the news, the same thing as always. Cost of living rising exponentially, overlapping zoonotic diseases, investigations of the terrorist who drove a truck into a Thanksgiving crowd. Conspiracy theories that Crane doesn’t believe, like pasteurized milk turning children trans, and conspiracy theories hedoesbelieve, like the vice president having a brain-eating amoeba (because why else would he be acting this way). There are people who believe the theory to the point of trying to give themselves amoebas, though. Crane is gone but he’s not that far gone.
