Spectacle - 16-year-old giantess and super-wild best friend look for love and a sense of okayness in the world #YA #Literary

Spectacle

by Angie McCullagh


THE DOCTOR’S OFFICE was stark. White paper crinkled under Emily every time she moved. In a rack on the wall were magazines, mostly for little kids: Highlights. My Big Backyard. Cricket. One Seventeen.
This doctor was a pediatric endocrinologist. Emily’s dad, who, unlike Melissa, found her staggering growth infinitely disturbing, had suggested the appointment. Melissa set it up and drove Emily downtown.
The doctor talked to Melissa about things like “bone age” and phalanges and cartilage. He was going to send Emily to the lab to have her hand X-rayed. From the X-ray, the doctor would be able to predict, to a certain extent, how tall Emily would grow.
She’d overheard a conversation between her dad and Melissa a couple weeks before, Emily standing at the top of the stairway while her dad said, “She’s going to lap me, M. Jesus Christ. My daughter’s an amazon.” There was silence then. Until he burst forth with, “We know she doesn’t have anything wrong with her pituitary gland, from what Dr. Watkins said when she was, I don’t know, nine or ten, but my God. What if she’s going to hit seven feet or something?”
Ever the optimist, Melissa said, “WNBA?”
Emily was scared of what the X-ray would tell them. She thought she’d rather not know where she’d end up. Kind of like she’d rather not have any inkling of the day she’d die.