and returned the phone to Carla, who was draped, rapt, over the back of the couch.
“Aren’t you ever going to ask her to marry you?” she sighed.
“Good Lord, she’s not even old enough to vote,” I said. “And also, people don’t marry their friends.”
“Yes they do. I saw it in a movie.”
“That’s movies. Nobody does that in real life.”
“Do too.”
I tried to get up off the couch, but as often happened after a busy shift, my legs refused to work. I dug my knuckles into my thighs and stared at the TV, showing some weirdo cartoon with extremely muscular mice. “What are we watching?!”
“She’s the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen,” Carla said. “Did she really murder someone?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Maybe don’t marry her if she’s a murderer.”
“Yeah, write that down somewhere,” I said. “That’s useful advice.”
After Mom came home, I reluctantly crawled back into my car. I didn’t want to go over to John’s; I wanted to take a fifteen-hour nap and not have one single interruption for a missing backpack, broken window, loose tooth, split lip, or stolen diary. And I was keenly aware that I smelled of armpits and rotten apple—like the break room at work, basically, and I had forgotten to put on deodorant this morning. She wouldn’t say anything, I knew, but if Rutger was at the house, there would be some dirty looks. It wasn’t that he didn’t like me, exactly, but that it was far too easy to inadvertently do one of the dozens of things he didn’t like.
Halfway there I realized I had forgotten to phone her, but there was nothing doing except to cuss at myself. Cell phones were great, but both of you had to have one, and I didn’t; Johnny had about six, but I didn’t know the numbers for any of them. I was pretty sure she just used them as emergency lines for her various major labs and research centres. I couldn’t imagine how much they would cost.
For no reason, achingly, I remembered using walkie-talkies in the ravine when we were kids. We had barely needed them, though: I had always known what she was thinking, she always knew what I was about to say. My other heart, the heart that beat outside of me. Had we grown strange to each other in her absence, grown up, grown away, grown into different people? Flying away from each other like the unknowable planets she had found with her telescopes and calculations?
As I turned into her driveway, I had to pull my visor down to know where to stop. What the shit? Every light was on, every room, every floor, hard blocks of white shining in the yellow late prairie sun. No way had she turned on all those lights. And in fact, hadn’t she installed motion sensor lights a couple years ago to make sure only rooms in use were lit? Was she having a party? I glanced around at the mostly-empty street. No, if it were a party, I’d never have been able to park in the driveway. And where was Rutger’s Lexus?
Uneasy, I splashed through the lush lawn in what was rapidly turning from sunset to dusk, triggering a set of halogen spots that shone right into my face as I punched in her code, praying she hadn’t changed it when she got back. The alarm system was wired to call the police if you fed it the wrong numbers.
But it let me in, and I stepped into a blinding photosphere, forearm over my face. “Johnny?” No reply. I toed my shoes off and tried the intercom. “John? It’s me. Where are you?”
“Uh, Hadrian... let me come up and get you, okay?”
“What’s going on?” Every single light was on, even some I hadn’t known existed, tucked away in recesses in the ceiling, behind floor vents, in sunk tracks on the walls. The heat was intense after the coolness of the evening; sweat prickled on my back. Great. Stupid to believe I couldn’t possibly smell any worse. Moisture was condensing under my socks on the cool tiles.
She appeared at the end of the hallway and for a second I thought she’d figured out how to make herself into a hologram—all silver spangles, shimmering and shivering, not really there. I hesitated before following her.
“Sorry,” I said, “I thought maybe you were a T-1000?”
“That’s the last goal of science, not the first,” she said. “But no one will want to be a robot after I show the world what just