Читать книгу Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful - - Страница 17

I think my parents suspected.

It was too much of a coincidence, me happening to be on hand at the time Gabriel was hit by a bus. Yet they asked me very little about that afternoon. I gave them the official version of events and we didn’t discuss it further. But as the days passed, I noticed they never mentioned to any of the other parents from school that I had been there, that I had tried to save Gabriel, just as I never mentioned it. The topic was a gray cloud that hovered in the air between us. Days turned into weeks and the cloud dissipated into a thin fog, but it never went away. They had decided, I suppose, that they would rather not know.

Now here I was, months later, with my mother driving me to school in silence. Sometimes we chatted in the car, in the way we had always done, but other times, like this one, there was nothing to say. I leaned against the door, my eyes half closed, and concentrated on my breath, in and out. Since the accident with Gabriel, I had learned to achieve a better state of equilibrium with the meshline. If I kept my body steady, my motions smooth, things felt almost normal—my lymph system, my lungs, my hormones. The doctors had told me I would get there eventually, and I had.

My mother smiled when we pulled up in front of the school. I was her broken girl, put back together now. “Have a good day, Milla.”

The moment I got out of the car, I sensed that something was different. For no clear reason, my heart rate increased. I knew he was there even before I turned around.

Gabriel. He was walking through the front door of the school, surrounded by friends who were welcoming him back. His time in the hospital hadn’t been kept a secret. Rumors had floated back to school weekly: the rift in his family when his father and mother decided to allow the doctors to use every tool at their disposal to save him; his grandmother’s disavowal of his parents and him; the fact that the bus had absolutely demolished his lower intestine, his liver, his pelvis. There was rampant speculation about whether he had a working penis or not. The most up-to-date rumors suggested his man parts were fake, but they still worked—a miracle of squishy biomachinery.

If he saw me, he gave no sign, but it took me an hour to get my body calmed. At lunch, I sat in my normal spot, at the rickety picnic table in the far corner of the courtyard, my back to everyone, alone. Sometimes Lilly and a few others sat with me out of a lingering sense of duty, but mostly they had given up. I’d stopped being friendly.

The newspaper that day carried the story of a hate crime in Boston against a woman who had just returned from the hospital, rebuilt. I scanned the words, then folded them away so only the crossword was showing. I had been chewing my sandwich methodically, staring at the half-finished puzzle, when Gabriel sat down across from me. I couldn’t help sweeping my gaze over his midsection, looking for any sign of what might be underneath his uniform pants. His face was the same, his blond hair a little longer, some light stubble on his chin, his dark eyes still beautiful, if I could ignore the uneasy mix of feelings they provoked in me.

I assumed people in the courtyard were staring at us, because I could hear multiple whispered conversations, but I was turned away, and I ignored them all. Gabriel unwrapped his own lunch and started eating across from me. He wasn’t avoiding my eyes, nor was he seeking them out. He was simply sitting there, an inescapable presence. I continued to chew, the food cardboard in my mouth.

“Why are you sitting here?” I muttered after a while.

He shrugged. Then, looking at me without malice, he said, “I saw you there.” He didn’t need to explain. I knew he meant at the scene of the accident. “And before, in the coffee shop.”

I forced down a bite of sandwich, made myself take a sip of water. For months I’d been living in a state of hopeless isolation with the knowledge of what I’d done. Hearing Gabriel say those words out loud made me feel wretched, guilty, caught.

But also relieved.

His gaze on me was searching. “Did you do it on purpose?” he asked.

He was giving me a chance to lie. But I had already died once in my life. Keeping this secret any longer would kill me again.

I met his eyes and I whispered, “Yes.”

All the parts beyond the meshline felt like jelly, unstable, dissolvable.

“It was … it was the most awful, evil thing,” I said. “And I did it.”

He stared at his burger for a little while. At last, meditatively, he said, “I hated you for months. I lay in the hospital, hating you. But … I did it on purpose too. After the movie, telling people. I wanted to … I don’t know …”

“Keep away from the freak?” I prompted, still in a whisper.

“Yeah.”

“Make it your story, not mine?”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “I kept thinking about my grandma finding out. I thought she’d get into the car and she’d just know—what we’d done, and what you are.”

It didn’t offend me to hear him say what you are. Because whatever I was, he was too. He’d been scared that people would learn about me, and he would be tainted by association: the guy who got off on machines; the guy who liked weirdos; the guy who had sex with the artificial girl because he couldn’t get anyone else. So he’d thrown me to the wolves preemptively. And I’d thrown him to the bus.

“I shouldn’t have told people,” he said.

“You shouldn’t have told people,” I agreed. “But I shouldn’t … It was …”

“You, like, martyred me for my beliefs,” he murmured, taking a bite of his burger. He licked a gob of ketchup from the corner of his mouth.

“You didn’t die,” I pointed out. “A martyr has to die.”

“Did you want me to die?” he asked. He was looking at me with open curiosity. I imagined him in the hospital, turning over this question in his mind.

I shook my head. Even a moment after I’d pushed him, I’d wanted so badly to take it back. Undo, Undo! If there had been such a button, I would have pushed it over and over, taking back the bus, the theater, my accident, everything.

“If I’d died, then I really would have been a martyr,” he went on, as if the idea pleased him. “Or even a saint. You’d have to light candles to me and memorize my life story, Milla.”

“Hagiography,” I told him. “That’s what you call the life story of a saint.”

“Yeah. I think I knew that,” he said around another mouthful of burger. “You’d have to memorize my hagiography and ask for my help warding off evil and interceding with God on your behalf and finding your lost keys and stuff.”

I smiled at that, and then, setting down my sandwich, I declaimed, “St. Gabriel. A true warrior of faith. Succumbed to temptation and slept with a cyborg, then became one himself.”

He laughed.

And there was nothing more to say about what had happened between us.

“Want my fries?” I asked. “I’m not that hungry.”

“Yeah.” He dumped the fries on his napkin, squeezed ketchup all over them. He ate the fries with an expression I recognized. He knew he liked fries and the taste was good, but they didn’t provide him with quite the same feeling he was used to. “Ugh. They’re like fry-flavored Styrofoam,” he said, his mouth full. “But coffee’s different now, isn’t it? It’s, like, way better.”

My eyebrow quirked up almost lasciviously. Coffee. “It tingles around the edges,” I told him, hearing dreaminess in my own voice, “like the coffee is eating the mesh, digesting it so—”

“—so it blends back into everything else,” he finished for me, in the same rapt tone. “Like the fake parts are starting to become real again.”

Yes. That was exactly what drinking coffee felt like now. It was why I’d been in that coffee shop in the first place.

“Have you had the coffee at Go Get ’Em Tiger since …?” I asked him.

“No. Is it special?”

“It’s like what you were describing,” I told him, “but ten times more.”

“Hm. Maybe we could go there sometime,” he suggested casually.

I snorted at that, sounding less like a barfing dog than usual. Laughs, snorts, coughs—they were all getting better. Was he really asking me out?

“Sure, we could get coffee,” I told him, “but don’t think that I’m going to have sex with a robot.”