How to Repair a Mechanical Heart - By J. C. Lillis Page 0,16
tuning out his dumb words and staring at his abs. They were almost obscenely gorgeous in a soft and classical kind of way, like he’d just touched fingers with God and waltzed off the Sistine ceiling. Mom was knitting pink and blue blankets for the Genesis Pregnancy Center. Her needles stopped clacking and I caught her watching me watch him, and then her ears turned pink and she said Sweetie, why don’t we watch Cooking with Carlene instead?
“I’m really sorry,” Abel says.
“Aren’t you sweet,” Bree says.
“It sucks. Happened to me once, too.”
She leaps off the stage when he says that. Like literally leaps, the way a jungle cat would, and lands hard on her feet right in front of us. The crowd hushes. She steps closer and brushes her hand across Abel’s cheek. Cameras flash and I start to absorb it: Bree LaRue is twelve inches away from me. She’s a real person, with farm-girl freckles peeping through her face powder and a Band-Aid on one finger.
“Why can’t I just be with a guy like you?” she whispers.
“I’m gay,” says Abel.
“Exactly.”
She smiles sadly. More camera flashes. Then Worried Guy steps down, helps her back onstage. She wobbles when she stands. The spindly heel of her left boot has snapped right off. We glance around and Abel spots the heel on the floor, a few feet in front of us. I grab it and hold it up, but she just gives a shrug and a vague wave: What’s the point? Hopelessly broken.
“Miss LaRue?” Abel calls.
“Yeah.”
“That was a no…right? To the Cadsim question?”
“Step back,” Worried Guy says. “She has to go to her room.”
“Yes it was a no, honey. God. Sim is completely asexual.” She’s being escorted out now, limping with dignity like crazy Blanche DuBois in that Streetcar play our school did last spring.
Over her shoulder, she adds: “And he’s frickin’ lucky!”
Chapter Six
We settle the Sunseeker at tonight’s free campsite, the parking lot of a 24-hour SavMart a couple miles outside Cleveland. I crank the old generator and Abel whips up Mac-in-a-Minit and canned chicken, crooning I miss yous to Kade on speakerphone while he arranges food on paper plates and snips fake parsley sprigs from one of Mom’s wall wreaths. While we scarf down dinner, we upload the Bree LaRue video evidence for the Cadsim girls, with a header that’s maybe more gleeful than necessary: BRANDON & ABEL = 1, CADSIM SHIPPERS = 0, in sparkly purple text.
Then Abel’s like, “Change your shirt. I’ll call the cab.”
“We’re going out?”
“What’d you think we were going to do? Play WordWhap?”
“Where are we going?”
“We have to celebrate. Victory Number One!”
“Isn’t that kind of ghoulish?”
“Uh, no. Trust me, this’ll be the turning point of Bree LaRue’s career. She should thank Cash Howard for making her interesting.” He unzips his bag, chucks a shirt at me. “If they write her off the show she’ll be in some Lars von Trier film within a year. Guaranteed.”
“I was just going to—”
“Stay here, stagnate, watch Castaway on your phone. Forget it.” He pulls on a Blondie t-shirt and zips up his fake python cowboy boots. “We’re gonna stir shit up. You and me.”
I know what he’s up to. I scramble for brilliant excuses. Migraine. Tainted cheese powder.
“Jesus, will you relax?” he says. “I’m putting your boy renaissance on hold. You don’t have to talk to anyone but me.”
I don’t trust him. “Bec, will you come?”
“Nope.” She has her flip-flops kicked off and she’s eating rice crackers and reading Blankets again. “Too hot. You’re on your own.”
“What if someone breaks in?”
“I’ll blind them with spray cheese.”
I uncrumple the shirt Abel threw me. It’s hot-pepper red with SEX BOMB on the front in army green. The O is a grenade at a jaunty tilt, the sex bomb in mid-hurtle toward its target. It’s so ridiculous I have to smile.
“I wore it the night I met Kade.”
“At that astrophysics lecture, right?”
“Put it on.” Abel gives me a shove. “You dress like you want to disappear.”
Don’t do it, says Father Mike.
What if I did?
That isn’t you. I know you better.
I close my eyes, dig my nails into my palm until it hurts.
“I’ll go,” I say.
But I don’t put on the shirt.
***
The sign on the red door says THE EDGE OF HEAVEN in chipped gold curlicue letters. Underneath is a ragged flyer for the Cleveland OutPride Film Festival, stapled over a mural of two male seraphim doing something distinctly unholy.
I think of Bec white-robed and pink-haired in her punk-angel costume two Halloweens ago;