Page 10 of You Weren't Meant to Be Human
Right?
Crane realizes, slowly, that he’s not sure.
Tammy regards him like he’s a child, and it makes him hate himself a bit. “Just take it,” she says. Crane shakes his head. “Sweetheart, I am sixty-five goddamn years old. Believe me when I say I’ve seen my fair share of girls in denial. Not that I’m saying you’re a girl, but I’m saying I know it when I see it.”
She holds the box against his chest until he gives in.
All Crane can think is that pregnancy tests, for a minuscule while,had been gender neutral. There’d been a whole campaign about it when Sophie was in high school. Nobody had been asking for much—just, could companies please say pregnant people instead of pregnant women, and maybe could there not be so much pink on the box?
It’d worked, for a time. A few companies made the switch, taking the opportunity to turn a minuscule packaging decision into a sweeping promotional campaign celebrating their progressiveness, their inclusivity, their whatever. One commercial even showed a man looking down at his (flat) belly while a handsome husband rubbed his shoulders. How wonderful. After decades of fighting tooth and nail, a trans guy got to see himself on TV for three seconds.
But it backslid quick. None of it had made the companies more money, because of course it hadn’t, and some far-right fuckface posted a video on social media with a gun, talking about finding the marketing execs responsible and executing them in Times Square. So this box in his hand is bright pink and sayswomenso many times that it feels like groveling.See? We’re reasonable people who know what a woman is.
He can’t be pregnant. He can’t.
Five
The first time Crane let Levi fuck him, it was the first time he’d let anyone fuck him. He’d been eighteen, and if he had to guess, Levi had a decade on him, and yes, thatwaspart of the appeal—he’d been thinking about Levi fucking him for a while, and an age gap had become integral to the fantasy.
Looking back, Crane is unsure what Levi had seen in him. That was what he considers to have been histry-hardera: where a trans guy trying to look too much like a man simply embarrasses himself in the process. The haircut situation was in limbo, none of his thrift-store clothes fit the way they should, he hadn’t lost the babyfat on his cheeks. He wouldn’t even start testosterone for another few months.
Levi hadn’t minded that, though. Or the silence. Levi knew what he wanted, and he knew Crane was going to give it to him. Maybe Crane had been obvious. Maybe it’d written itself on his face without his permission. He thought about Levi fucking him when Levi shared his cigarettes, offered hand-me-down camo jackets, and took him behind the store to teach him how to use the shotgun. He thought about it when Levi sat him up in the dirt after he’d been pulled from the trunk, and he thought about it when Levi shoved him to his knees in front of maggot-infested roadkill and told him to get in there with his hands. He was sick and terrified, and he wanted Levi to shove fingers down his throat.
Turns out if you treat the mute behind the counter like a real man, he’ll do whatever you want.
When it finally happened, Levi had his jeans down to his thighs in the back of the F-150, saying he’d be gentle, it’d only hurt at first. Crane had blood on his face. He was shivering. Ten minutes ago, a cop had seen the security monitor and panicked, and Crane killed him; Levi was proud, he said, he kept saying how proud he was. Crane’s job was to defend the hive and he’d done the right thing. In the back seat, Crane’s tits were bitten red and black and he was having trouble breathing. He’d done it. He was scared. When the cop was dead, Levi had taken him outside and let him cough and wheeze, and he couldn’t quite remember how he’d ended up in the truck with his bra shoved up and his boxers caught on one ankle.
But while Levi opened a condom wrapper with his teeth, Crane typed a sentence on his phone and pushed it into Levi’s face.
Get me pregnant and I’ll kill you.
What he’d meant wasI’ll kill myself.He just hadn’t been able to type it out.
Big words for a man who couldn’t even work up the nerve to set himself on fire.
Crane drives to the apartment just outside Washville with the box of pregnancy tests in his shotgun seat like another passenger. The radio is stressing him out. The country station runs sermons between songs:“Do you have a personal relationship with Jesus?”NPR reports on the wildfires choking out every inch of sky west of the Mississippi and an increase in deadly foodborne infections. The late-night host on the Top 40 station thinks disabled parking spots are stupid. He turns it off.
He’d known from a young age that he didn’t want kids. It started as a general revulsion toward children and motherhood; hell, he hadn’t liked kids when he was a kid. In elementary school, when the news ran sob stories about newborns abandoned in dumpsters or left behind in hospitals, he never understood why those mothers were called monsters. If he ever had a baby, he thought, that’s what he’d do.
When he was older and he learned the mechanics of it all, it certainly didn’t change his mind. A fetus cannibalizes the mother. It crushes organs, saps nutrients, would starve its host to death if biology allowed it. “Birth is a miracle,” a health teacher claimed, but all Sophie could see was the blood. That night, she googled birth complications until she fell asleep, dreaming of uterine rupture and postpartum psychosis.
Then, the final nail in the coffin: Crane is a man. Sure, whatever, trans men can have babies and want them and love them, he doesn’t give a fuck.Do you understand that if there is a parasite inside me I’ll kill myself?
According to Aspen’s review of the last slate of Supreme Court rulings, abortion is not only banned but now officially a murder charge in ten states. Including West Virginia. Effective immediately.
In the parking lot, Crane shivers. He can’t swallow right anymore.
The apartment complex is less a complex and more a line of run-down, flat-faced squares built into a hill. When he and Levi moved in together, they weren’t being picky. Just trying to get out of Tammy’s guest bedroom and off Mike’s couch, respectively. But the rental ad sounded decent. Cheap, close to the gas station, hardwood floors. The ad had not, however, detailed the pest problems and constant utility failures. This year, Crane is keeping a log—July 2nd, no hot water, had to boil a pot on the stove to wash hair—in hopes that he can get rent knocked down upon renewal, though he has a sneaking suspicion that nobody monitors the leasing office’s email account anymore.
It takes five minutes to bully himself out of the car and into the complex. Someone’s left a mess in the laundry room. The second washing machine is broken again, the lid wrenched off and propped up in the corner. And through the too-heavy apartment door, their one-bedroom shitbox isn’t much better. Stained gray couch, cheap flat-screen set on a table pulled off the side of the road; clothes rack shoved into the corner because the dryer is three dollars a spin, next to the big black gun safe.
Crane dumps his go bag in the galley kitchen and locks himself in the bathroom, even though Levi’s all the way across the state. The pink of the box is jarring here. The bathroom is all-white tile, stained mirrors, too-bright lights.
The anxiety is making him overheat. He strips off his shirt and stands there in his sports bra.
In the Schrödinger’s space before he takes the test, there is both one line on the display and two. He is both pregnant and not. There is a universe where he gets a negative result and, he imagines, burstsinto relieved tears. He’ll collapse into bed, text Aspen and Birdie about how stupid today was, and pass out until noon. It’ll be a bad day, that’s all. He’s had a lot of those.
In the universe where it’s positive—
