How to Repair a Mechanical Heart - By J. C. Lillis Page 0,10
good one. We wanted a Castaway expert to weigh in.”
“Wow! Well, I’m flattered. Shoot.”
Bill turns his postcard-pool eyes on me. I get that hot sick feeling I got at Abel’s birthday party in March, when his spinning bottle stopped at me and I feigned a speck in my contact lens. I know who he reminds me of. Ryan Dervitz. Sci-Fi Club treasurer, Timbrewolves tenor, my first and only near-kiss. I see him in his sweaty white dress shirt and khakis, behind our school after we sang “Life Is a Highway” for Parents’ Night. One second he was smiling like normal, flicking a lightning bug off my collar, and the next he was filling my whole field of vision with his pale freckled moonface. His lips only made it to the corner of my mouth before I shoved him away, leaving him limp and baffled against the brick wall while I booked it down the street and shut myself in the Dairy Queen men’s room, Father Mike muttering in my ears the whole way.
Bill smiles politely. “So…ah, what’s your question?”
I can’t talk. My clothes feel see-through.
“It was about Sim.” Abel jumps in, shooting me death rays. “We’re debating if he should’ve stayed human after he got his evolution chip in Episode 2-14.”
“Whoo, excellent question. Hmm.” He bongos the table. “What do you think, Brandon?”
Ryan never looked me in the eye again. We used to talk baseball and debate classic X-Files episodes in sixth-period study hall, but he suddenly had reams of algebra homework that required total concentration. I’d watch him scritch his pencil nub across his notebook, factoring quadratic trinomials with dark broody passion. I never knew I wanted to kiss him back until it was way too late.
“Brandon.” Abel kicks my shoe.
I know what’s happening. Red splotches spreading, one on each cheek. I want to vanish.
Abel glares. “I’ll tell you what I think,” he says. “I think when Sim was ‘human’ it was one freaking excuse after another. That whole arc was one long whine about how inconvenient feelings are and how it sucks to know you’ll never know everything, like, we get it. Stop being so emo about it and get on with things, you know?”
“I guess,” Bill says. “I thought it was sad, though. How he went back to being—”
“A total bore?” Abel stiffens his shoulders and tilts his head. “Captain Cadmus, might I suggest some seventeenth-century poetry to distract your mind from existential torment?”
His robot voice is still dumb, but the dim lights here contour his face in Simlike angles and shadows. I get this quick fanfic flash: his strong hands gripping my wrists, slamming me up against a spider-cave wall.
Put on the Brakes!, Chapter Five: Ask God for the strength you need to flee temptation. And then don’t walk away—run!
I try to shoo the words away. They scuttle into unreachable corners of my mind, prodding me with tiny sharp claws.
Don’t run, I tell myself. You idiot. Don’t listen.
My chair’s already screeching back.
“Brandon?”
Abel charges after me. Grabs my arm by the bakery case. He does it like it’s nothing, like he doesn’t even realize his hand is there, and meanwhile my arm is zapping hot panicked messages to my brain: he’s touching me I’m being touched don’t move don’t breathe act normal be Sim.
“What is with you?” says Abel. “You can’t string two words together?”
“I—”
“Practice! You need practice!” He shakes my shoulders. “What happens when we’re at the Castaway Ball and you see a flawless guy in a Sim suit and he starts walking over? What then?”
“I run from the weirdo.”
Abel gives me a why-must-you-be-you sigh. Whatever. Used to those. I got them a lot from my parents after The Talk: Why him? Makes no sense. He likes the Phillies. He can tie twenty-six different kinds of knots.
“We’ll get you back in the saddle. You may require more intensive intervention than anticipated.” Abel plucks a free lanyard from the basket on the bakery case and hangs it around my neck ceremonially, like we’re in a Hawaiian airport. “By nerd prom night, you’ll be ready for greatness again. Trust me.”
He gives me a kiss on one cheek and goes for the other but I jump back. I can’t help it.
His eyes narrow.
“You okay?” he says.
“I—You smell weird.”
“I do?” He sniffs his pits and shrugs. “I like it.”
Across the room, Bill drums the table and drifts away, probably wondering what kind of curricular adaptations I needed to graduate high school. I touch the spot where Abel’s lips brushed my