How to Repair a Mechanical Heart - By J. C. Lillis Page 0,3

even though Abel and I are just business partners I know exactly the kind of business he gets up to when I’m not around, and now they collapse on the closet floor and all I see are four feet nuzzling and I know they’re whispering sexy things I can’t imagine without feeling unzipped and turned inside out.

HHREEEEAAOONNNNK. Crap. I lift my elbow off the horn, but it’s too late.

Here comes Abel. He’s creeping up to his window like Elmer Fudd hunting wabbits, shading his eyes in the late-morning sun. He points down at me, and then he rips his robe open and does a goofball shimmy, pale belly pressed to the glass. My eyes squinch shut. I see the cover of the book Father Mike gave me, the clean blond boy thrusting a fist in the air: Put on the Brakes! The Cool Kid’s Guide to Mastering Sexual Temptation.

Come in, Abel mouths. He makes a frantic camera-cranking gesture. Vlog post. Now!

I gesture back. Aren’t you busy?

He wiggles his fingers above his head and patters them down on his shoulders. Greenshorts is getting in the shower, I guess. I climb out of the Sunseeker, hoping that wasn’t some obvious sex code for five more minutes. I don’t want my cover blown.

Abel and I met last October in a Castaway Planet fan forum. I was shytown with the Sim-in-the-snow icon, he was x_offender with the shopped icon of Cadmus in a Speedo. This was right after I had The Talk with my parents and word spread at school; I hadn’t gotten any black eyes or hot-pink FAGs on my locker, but guys I’d known since kindergarten were suddenly keeping their distance or talking to me in a weird stilted way, as if I were an alien whose friendliness might just be a cover. Nights when I wasn’t on Bec’s couch picking at popcorn and snickering at telenovelas with her, I was shut up in my room, hiding out in the forum with other Casties. The Abel thing happened fast. I wrote a rant about the “deep and irrefutable stupidity” of Cadsim fanfic after Episode 4-14, he thought it was funny, we spent a few days chatting about Castaway Planet and old sci-fi B movies, and then we figured out we lived twenty minutes from each other and he asked me to co-run his vlog with him. He sent an actual invitation to my house on cream stationery with a plea in fancy script: Abel McNaughton requests the honour of your collaboration on “Screw Your Sensors,” the Internet’s third most popular Castaway Planet fan vlog. Please please please be my awesome business partner!!!

No guy ever called me awesome before, so the lies started pretty much the second I hopped up his marble front steps. I told him I’d been out for six years instead of two weeks. My parents were one hundred percent fine with me, just like his. Aftershocks from twelve years of Catholic school? None at all, and I’m certainly not a freak who has panic attacks in Dairy Queen bathrooms after a guy tries to kiss me. I even invented a tragic heartbreak to shield me from his matchmaking: some pre-med sex god named Zander, who had me dreaming of a picket fence and two adopted kids before he dumped me for a bartender and ruined me indefinitely for all other men.

If Abel found out about the real me, he’d start gazing down from a lofty throne of pity, so I have to be careful every second I’m around him. I keep it cool and mysterious, like Sim. His dry little comments. His ease in his own synthetic skin. His decision to cut out his evolution chip, so he could enjoy nice safe friendships without all the terrors of falling in love.

I wind my mechanical heart and open his door.

***

“You ready, partner?” he says.

“We’re unveiling now?”

“We have to. The girls’ve been trolling us all morning. Wait’ll you see.”

Abel and I hunch in front of his laptop at the glass kitchen table, next to a stack of cruddy glasses and plates I very much want to scrub. He’s crunching Cookie Crisp from a china bowl that probably cost more than my car. His limited-edition Plastic Cadmus grips the pocket of Abel’s robe with his super-ripped hero arms and I side-eye him; even three inches tall, Cadmus is a smug bastard. No one’s home besides us, as usual. Abel’s dad’s at Mercy fitting someone with a new heart, his mom and little