How to Repair a Mechanical Heart - By J. C. Lillis Page 0,20
a minute, leaning up against the counter.
“You’re really freaked out,” he says.
Eternal fiery torment.
“Just tired.” I start filling the basin again. Hot rinse.
“I’m sure it’s just a big joke.”
“I’m sure it is.”
He reaches over and shuts my water off. He lets his hand brush mine as he pulls it back and I get this stupid lightning-flash impulse to grab it and tell him the whole truth. Pull the plug from the drain. Tell him all about Father Mike. Fake Zander.
“I shouldn’t have done that before,” he says. “Sent Ian over.”
“It’s fine.” I don’t look at him. “I was a jerk too.”
“No, you want to know why I did it? Why I care or whatever?”
I stare into the sink, at the suds escaping down the drain. Abel picks up the silver Castaway Planet superball he bought from one of the vendors. He starts bouncing and catching in a slow clockwork rhythm: shthunk, twack, shthunk, twack.
“Jonathan,” he says.
“Who?”
Shthunk, twack.
“My Zander.”
I’m not sure I want to hear more, but that never stops Abel, and before I can make up some excuse he’s pulled me into his tenth-grade trauma and I’m there with him at this holy roller wedding, exchanging sultry looks with the pretty blond boy at the groom’s table. “I knew I was getting in trouble,” he says. “Everyone at the wedding had like fourteen kids with the same haircut and a Jesus fish on their car, and they all made this huge creepy deal about how the bride and groom hadn’t even kissed yet, like not even one single time. I mean, freako.”
Put on the Brakes!, Chapter 5: Avoid “friends” who would mock the idea of a close relationship with God.
“So anyway, Jonathan gave me a couple super-intense looks across the room and then he left, and I followed him outside and there he was all nervous and shy loosening his tie under a tree, and of course I got a total hard-on for the whole situation, like who wouldn’t want to deflower the sweet innocent closeted Christian boy who’s been force-fed poison his whole life—like, no offense, Brandon, I know you’re cool and you don’t believe all that.”
My stomach drops. Abel goes on and on about how they snuck around that whole summer, how he was so in love, how every time they kissed or whatever it was like some time-lapse film of flowers bursting open and sunrises sprawling across the sky.
“…And then all of a sudden, he just stopped. Stopped taking my calls, stopped meeting me. Defriended me on Facebook. So I got totally desperate, right, and I sent him this stupid ID bracelet with the date we met engraved on it, and that made him call me but instead of being like ‘oh, baby, I love you too,’ he was like, ‘I don’t identify myself with your lifestyle anymore.’ Your lifestyle. All cold and robotic, exactly like that. And he kept saying things like that, like you know he’d been brainwashed, and I started crying and yelling at him and stuff, and finally he told me his mom had read our emails and they had this huge family blowup and they were going to send him to one of those get-right-with-God lobotomy camps unless he turned his life around. So I told him they were a bunch of sick freaks, and he should lie through his teeth and do whatever he had to for now to keep a roof over his head, and he was like—are you ready for this?”
I nod.
“He was like, ‘But they’re right. God is more important than feeling good.’ And I said well, can’t you have both? And big surprise, he was like ‘No. I’m sorry. Not like this,’ and then bam, he hung up and that was the last time I ever talked to him.” He flings the superball across the room; it thwacks the moose pillow and rolls lamely off the couch. Abel rakes a hand through his hair. “So, but the point is—I was absolutely wrecked. I wasted six endless months brooding exclusively over this little piece-of-shit cult-member coward, Brandon. Do you believe it? Like, how many amazing people could I have met in six months? My brother had to literally kick my ass to get me over it.”
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
“I didn’t tell you that so you’d be sorry! The point is, don’t be like me, okay? Because…” He sighs. “Because you’re pretty much too awesome for that, and I’m one hundred percent sure this Zander tool is not worth