Читать книгу Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful - - Страница 14

I pulled my shirt down, wiggled upright. He had felt that some things were wrong, but he didn’t have to know the extent of it.

“It’s just, in the accident,” I mumbled. “Some things had to be fixed.” This sounded weak, possibly because it was an absurd understatement.

“Lilly told us it was just your legs. You broke your legs.” The movie played out across his cheek as his shadowed eyes studied me.

“That was … mainly what happened,” I hedged. It was not right that anyone should pass judgment on me if I told the truth. And yet I did not, I did not, want to tell the truth.

“Is it your skin under there?” He sounded almost mesmerized. A lump of fear had formed just above my stomach. He reached for my shirt, but I held it down.

“Mostly.”

That was a lie. The artificial skin he’d felt, covering more than half my torso, was based on my skin, maybe you could say it was partly my skin, but it was combined with the mesh that made a bridge from the parts that were all me to the parts that weren’t me anymore. It felt like skin—until you touched my real skin right next to it, which was what had happened when his fingers traced the meshline across my right breast. Then the difference became glaring.

He was already pulling my shirt back up and I didn’t stop him this time; panic held me motionless. He would see, he would know! What should I have done? Slapped him? Escaped from the car and run from the drive-in?

The movie had gotten brighter and in its light, the variance in texture and color of my body was discernible. The meshline traveled up from beneath my bellybutton, curved across my stomach and then cut across my right breast. On one side of the mesh was me, real flesh, one hundred percent Milla. On the other side, things were harder to categorize.

“How far does it go?” he asked, looking at where the line disappeared beneath my waistband, down toward my “lady parts,” as my mother referred to them.

I was transfixed by … by his searching look, maybe? By the shock and concern in his face?

“You’re looking at most of it,” I whispered.

Another lie. Not visible from my current position was the line that ran from my right breast across the ribs beneath my right arm and then traced a path down the right side of my back. Nor could he see how the damage extended inward to my heart and one of my lungs, to my other organs, and yes, to my lady parts too.

“Your heart?” he asked, as if I had spoken those thoughts aloud.

I could have said that I was burned and the fake skin was just to cover burns. Why did I owe him any explanations? But … the heart in my chest had saved my life. It deserved better than a shamefaced excuse.

“It’s like what you said for your grandmother,” I whispered. “It’s a real heart, mostly. From my own cells, but there are some other parts that make up for the parts they can’t grow yet. Tiny little robotic parts made out of squishy stuff. It’s a combination.”

He sat back, and I yanked my shirt down. A series of emotions marched across his features. Not all of them made sense.

“This is why you hate Reverend Tadd,” he said.

“Yes,” I agreed.

“Why haven’t you told anyone? Lilly told the whole school it was just your legs. It’s—it’s—”

“More than my legs,” I said. What was I seeing on his face? Fear?

“How much of you is real?” he asked. He was starting to sound agitated. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, as if unconsciously scraping off the taint of my counterfeit lips.

“My mouth is real,” I whispered. He was repulsed.

But he wasn’t.

Tenderly, he asked, “You’ve been living with all of this, with no one to talk to about it?”

I was undone by the sympathy of this question, and in the face of his concern, the tension in my chest shifted. It was as though the meshline itself began to relax.

“People don’t need to know all the bad things, Gabriel,” I said quietly. “And how do you even tell people?” I could feel things bubbling up inside me, things I had promised myself I would never say. “How do I even explain that when the car crashed, my mom was thrown free and only broke her arm and her hip? But I was pinned in my seat when the truck came spinning into us? That, like, the whole dashboard went through the right side of my body, crushing it to pulp?” I had begun in a whisper but knew I was about to lose vocal control. Now that I was letting the truth out, it would be no gentle trickle. Wedged in the corner of the backseat, I was going to unload it on Gabriel like a drunk sorority girl spouting the remains of her half-digested tuna sandwich all over the floor. “That the dashboard was what was holding me together all that time while the paramedics and firemen were cutting me out of the car? That I should totally have been dead, first when the truck hit, then before the ambulance got there, then in the ambulance? I should have been dead like ten times, and I probably even was dead for a little while, but we were so close to UCLA, and they began culturing my cells as soon as I arrived, and the doctors are, like, the best in the world at this stuff? So because of a chain of lucky breaks, I’m here, but half of my torso is fake, and my heart is fake, and one of my lungs is fake, and I will never have children because they don’t know how to fix that stuff yet.” The sorority girl was emptying out the full contents of her stomach right into her party date’s lap. And that relief you feel when you throw up? I was beginning to feel that. “And that I can want to make out with you and I can think you’re really good-looking, but I can’t count on how my body will respond to anything? Kissing, laughing, hiccupping—hiccupping is the worst. I sound like a howler monkey when it happens. That I thought about you while I was in the hospital, and I wondered if anyone would ever want to touch me again? How do I tell people that I’m so grateful to be alive, when I know they’ll never be able to look at me with anything but pity, or, or, or judgment from here on out?”

Gabriel was sitting on the seat next to me, the red and blue color from the screen dancing across his face and through his blond hair. I hadn’t been yelling, quite, but almost.

“I’m sorry, Milla,” he whispered.

“Me too.”

We sat in the backseat, looking at each other. I had emptied myself and I felt hollow, but it was a clean sort of hollow, the kind of hollow that is ready to be filled with something new.

Very gently, Gabriel pulled me toward him and wrapped his arms around me. I leaned into him, and I almost cried—I even had the feeling of tears forming behind my eyes.

“You don’t have to tell anyone, you know,” he murmured into my ear.

I nodded into his chest. “Some people, they get weird about this stuff. My dad says when he was a kid, everyone wanted medical advances—any kind, they were all good. But now people get … funny.”

“Not very funny,” he said ruefully.

“No, not very funny,” I agreed.

When my breathing had evened out, I became more aware of our bodies touching, of his arms around me. The meshline had no idea what to do with the changing emotional tides of the last few minutes, but somehow the make-out hormones were taking over again.

“It feels really good to tell you,” I told him.

He drew back so he could look down at me. “Did you really think about me when you were hurt?” he asked.

“A little bit.” It was a lie, but it was the best I could manage.

“Can I kiss you again?” he asked softly.

I nodded.

He gently touched his lips to mine. And it was different this time. I had been holding myself back before, and now I wasn’t.

We were kissing and then, by inches, we were doing more than kissing. My bra was unhooked and hitched up by my neck. His lips were everywhere. You may be familiar with how it goes. At some point I realized that my pants were off and his hand was moving gently but insistently. “Can you feel that?” he asked, his lips by my ear. “Does it feel good?”

“Yes,” I whispered urgently. I was actually feeling. Everywhere.

“Can you feel it all the way? I’m not touching …” I was grateful he didn’t finish the sentence: I’m not touching parts that aren’t real, am I?

“Yeah, I feel it all the way.”

That part of me was me. It was above that, the uterus, the ovaries—those had been crushed into oblivion and replaced with, well, nothing.

I was touching him and I knew what I was doing because of, you know, Jonas; I’d had practice. “Wait,” he breathed, pushing my hand away from him. “Let me … Can we …?”

I looked at him carefully from only inches away. He was asking to have sex with me, and I was so blissfully wrapped up in hormones that I almost said yes immediately.

“No, I can’t,” I said, pulling back a little.

“Why not?” he asked gently. He was kissing my neck and Jesus Christ (I’m sorry to use your name again in this vulgar context) it felt heavenly (again, sorry).

“Because I’ve never done it before,” I managed to say, while at the same time my body was screaming Let him do it!

“Never?” he whispered.

“My boyfriend and I got close one time, but we didn’t. And then he moved away. And I … I was in the hospital for a year. And I … haven’t been ready.”

“It’s okay.”

We were kissing again, and he was lying on top of me. The make-out hormones spiked and the meshline was letting just enough of everything through …

“Oh God, Milla, don’t you want—”

“Yes,” I breathed, “I do.”

My pants came off. My underwear came off. Was I really going to do this?

“Wait,” I whispered. “Do you have a condom?”

“A condom? But if you can’t …?”

“It’s not that …”

I couldn’t get pregnant, but I could still get diseases (how many girls had he been with?), and the effect of a disease would be so much worse in my current state—

“Right, of course,” he whispered, still kissing me.

He sat up, scrabbled with his backpack on the floor of the car and then with the crinkly condom packet, before coming back to me.

And then we were doing that thing that was supposed to be such a momentous experience in my life as a teenager. I expected pain, but I felt only good sensations.

When it was over, we lay in the backseat together, with my head on his chest and his arm around me.

“That was amazing,” he said, catching his breath.

I intertwined my fingers in his hand, marveling that I was touching one of those hands I’d been lusting over for so long. “That’s not how I expected it to happen,” I murmured. The tides were changing inside me again. I felt as though I were floating in an in-between state.

“What?” he asked.

“You know, my first time,” I said. “Kind of a big deal. You imagine how it might be and then—”

“It’s not really the same, though, is it?” he whispered. “I mean, it’s not really like virginity exactly.”

“What?” It took a few moments for me to be sure I’d heard him correctly. When he said nothing else, I sat up enough to look down at him. In the semidarkness, he was nearly hidden in shadows. “What?” I said again.

“Well … you were all cut up inside there,” he said, lifting himself up onto an elbow.

A flower of misgiving bloomed inside my chest. “What are you saying—”

“The doctors’ hands were everywhere,” he whispered earnestly, “and the robots. They use robots, right, to fix stuff? All over you and in you and through you.”

The flower grew, twisted itself into outrage. Was I understanding him correctly? “What does that—?”

“I’m just saying, I wouldn’t have tried if you were really … but it’s not like you were still actually a—”

“Do you think I fucking lost my virginity to a surgical robot? I was in a car accident, not an orgy!” I had totally lost control of my voice and was, like, SHRIEKING. His sympathy, my admission of what had happened—had it only added up to an easy way for him to sleep with me? “I’ve never had sex with anyone before. It’s kind of a big deal to me!”

I pushed him away and I yanked up my pants, and then I started to open the back door, even with my bra poking out the neck of my shirt.

“Wait, Milla! Stop, please.” He’d gotten up and was half kneeling on the floor, trying to pull the door shut. “I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry!”

“How could you say that?” I screamed. “How could you think that?”

“Please, Milla!” he whispered frantically, knowing my voice would carry to other cars now that the door was open. “I didn’t mean it. I said the wrong thing!”

The light had come on when I opened the door, and in the brightness, he looked desperate and repentant. I had just remembered that we were parked in the middle of the crowded drive-in, with cars all around us. My voice and the dome light were beacons. People in other cars were turning toward us.

When I tried to picture myself actually getting out of the car and walking away, my anger deflated. I pulled the door closed, extinguishing the light, and then I ducked down until the heads in other cars turned back toward the screen.

Gabriel had his hands out as though I were a wild animal he was trying to soothe. “Of course it’s a big deal, Milla,” he said. “I don’t know why I said that. I don’t … I’m sorry.”

I leaned against the closed door, waiting for my heartbeat and breath to slow.

“You said it because it’s what you think, isn’t it?” I asked him, when I’d gotten my voice under control. The damned movie was still playing out beyond the windshield and across our bodies. “You think I’m something different, something less.” I nodded toward the radio, which had broadcast Reverend Tadd’s voice. “You think I’m like …”

He was shaking his head. “I didn’t want to think that I’d pressured you, that I’d made you do something you didn’t want to do, so I said—”

“You didn’t pressure me.” I had chosen, willingly. Didn’t he understand?

“I’m sorry.”

Every emotion I’d felt throughout the evening seemed to have been mixed in a blender and poured down my throat. They added up to exhaustion. I leaned against the backseat and looked out through the windshield at the enormous images hovering in the air.

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “Can we just stop talking and watch the movie?”

“Yeah, let’s do that.”

He eased closer to me on the seat. I stared at the movie images without seeing them. When a few minutes had passed without me yelling, he tentatively took my hand, and when I didn’t resist, he continued to hold it.

We sat together like that until the end of the movie.

He took me home after that.

At the bottom of my parents’ driveway, he pulled over, turned off the car. We kissed again. This time, there was no adrenaline, no make-out hormones. I was wrung out, the real parts and the parts beyond the meshline equally numb. He leaned his forehead against mine.

“Milla?” he whispered.

“Yeah?”

I could feel his hesitation. “You still don’t want to tell anyone about …” He gestured toward my body in a way that let me know he was referring to the damaged parts. “Right?”

“Honestly it’s kind of a relief that it’s not a complete secret anymore. I don’t know. Eventually I might. Or not. I guess I’ll have to see how I feel.”

I pulled away from him, and then I paused, my hand on the door handle. Something about his demeanor was odd. He looked almost scared. I wondered if he was worried that I would tell people he’d forced me.

I touched his hand. “I’d never make you look bad, Gabriel,” I whispered.

“Right.” He nodded, first at me, then toward the view beyond the windshield, as if to a large, invisible audience out there. “Sure,” he said.

We glanced at each other, contemplating another kiss. Without a word, we both decided against it. Those moments of intimacy had passed and they already felt a long way away.