How to Repair a Mechanical Heart - By J. C. Lillis Page 0,63
well, you had other stuff going on that night.” She holds Plastic Lagarde up to her cheek and bats her eyes. “Will you all wait in line with me? Please please please?”
“Sure—oh. We can’t, babe.” Abel knocks the heel of his hand against his head. “We’ve got that stupid-ass lunch with Miss Maxima.”
I forgot all about that. “Ugh.”
“Brandon, tell me what possessed us to call a truce with her again? Was it really just postcoital bliss?”
“’Fraid it was.”
“Aw. You guys,” Bec saps, messing up my hair. She still thinks we’re moving too fast, I can tell, but she’s been nice enough to act totally happy for us this week. I relax a little. I swing my arm around her waist and give her a squeeze.
“Oh farts, there she is.” Abel pokes me. “The one and only.”
He points. My eyes connect his finger to a girl on the far side of the room, shouldering her way through the crowd. Miss Maxima looks just like she does in her profile picture on the Cadsim comm. Like one of those women they used to warn sailors about when my great-great uncles were in the war: fake mole, leopard pillbox hat, tight red dress with big black buttons, five-alarm lipstick on a sideways smirk. She’s dragging along a short doughy kid with a paler, plainer version of her face; the girl’s got on a cartoon vampire t-shirt and she looks like she wants to disappear. I would too if Maxima was my big sister.
Hello boys, Miss Maxima mouths, her red lips enlarging each syllable. She sends us a dainty finger-wave.
“Gross,” says Abel.
“Completely,” I say.
“She’s so amazing,” says Bec.
We both whip around.
“Not Miss M,” Bec eyerolls. “Della Wolfe-Williams. Did you know she’s a first-degree black belt in tai chi?” She pets the bio in the CastieCon program. “She has two Siberian huskies and on the weekends she goes mountain biking and makes salsa verde from scratch.” She blushes. “Sorry.”
“Dear fangirl,” Abel says, “have you no idea who you’re talking to?”
“Do you think she’d take a picture with Plastic Lagarde?”
“Dunno. She seems deadly serious. You should grease her up with some sweet talk about the feminist subtexts of the swamp-monster episode. Or tell her you write fic where Lagarde saves the world with her magic vagina.” He winds his arms around me from behind. “What do you think, Bran?”
I hear the words but they breeze right through me. I’m thinking of “How to Repair a Mechanical Heart,” blipped out of existence with the rest of hey_mamacita, the copy I salvaged filed sad and unfinished in a private folder on my laptop.
“Sure,” I mutter, but no one hears.
Della Wolfe-Williams is coming.
You see her legs first, the thigh-high black warrior boots with skull-shaped buckles and impossible heels. Leather pants, studded belt, brown tank top two shades darker than her skin. Her buzzcut’s grown out into short little spikes that look soft and hard at the same time. No makeup except a sharp perfect outline around each eye.
“I want to be her when I grow up,” Bec whispers.
“So do I,” whispers Abel.
Della’s sweeping the lip of the stage, letting her fingers brush fans’ outstretched hands. Her face is this cool haughty mask and I wonder if she’s smiling inside, parodying herself just a little. She used words like obdurate and paradigm in her last Popwatch interview, so probably not.
She grabs the mike like a weapon.
“Greetings, fellow travelers.”
Some cheers and yeahs and a piercing whistle. Bec clutches Plastic Lagarde and looks like she’s about to pee or faint. Della raises her hands, tamps down the praise.
“I certainly hope everyone’s ready for an intelligent discussion, because as we all know…” She leans in, her lush lips brushing the mike. “I don’t suffer fools.”
The cheers amp up. Abel swings an arm around me and I flinch a little. I hope he didn’t notice.
“Well, you all look fairly tolerable, so let’s dig right in. Shall we?” Della frowns at the mike and adjusts it. “Tons to discuss and debate this season, right? Some very rich visual metaphor, a few controversial arcs and plot twists, shifting character dynamics with deep implications that could reverberate next season and beyond. Someone kick us off with a good smart topic!”
“Did Sim and Cadmus hook up in the spider cave?”
Everyone turns like she’s farted in church. Miss Maxima is standing with one ridiculous hand on her ridiculous hip, the fingers of her other hand poised for an imaginary cigarette. Della Wolfe-Williams blinks at her and tilts a little,