by Simeon Mills
I found a seat in the middle of the bus, alone.
Halfway back to Hectorville someone stole the athletic trainer’s water bottles. In the headlights of oncoming traffic, I watched silver strings of water shoot over my head. Screams. Laughter. It was a water fight. In the name of sportsmanship, a pair of water bottles went spiraling to the front of the bus. That made it an even war: front versus back. Everybody got soaked except for me. I was in the middle, below the line of fire, perfectly dry.
The bus was nearly home when she climbed in beside me. I was staring out my blackened window, but I knew it was Brooke Noon by the ceaseless clacking of her keyboard. Her words would be glowing on her computer screen, and if there was a key to unlocking Brooke, her writing was my best bet. A novel. It had to be a novel. I took a peek. Her screen was as dark as my window; the laptop battery was dead. Brooke continued typing. Her eyes were closed.
“Sorry to interrupt,” I said, “but your screen is—”
“You sound like my mom.”
I’m not your mom, my processor screamed at her. I’m your boyfriend! I didn’t have the guts to say it with my mouth, just my nose, my nostrils whistling angrily: I’m your boyfriend!
“Boyfriend,” Brooke whispered back. She grabbed my hand. She pulled it to her computer and pressed it on the keyboard. There was still electricity inside the computer, and it stung me, the keyboard a bed of nails, as Brooke closed the laptop’s screen on my hand. I tried to slip my hand from her trap, but Brooke refused to let it go.
It wasn’t until the final moment of the bus ride—when the overhead lights pressed down on us like a cave collapsing—that she allowed her computer to release me. We both leaned back against the seat, stunned. My hand tingled with a strange new energy. Acting independently of my processor, it grabbed “Buford’s Dilemma” from my pocket and held the wrinkled draft out for Brooke. My mouth mumbled an explanation: “I’m a writer too.”
Brooke blinked twice, then her top lip quirked up. Perhaps one one-hundredth of a smirk. My story was snatched away in a flash. “I’ll be the judge of that.”
11
THE NEXT DAY SHE WAS absent. Art was the only class I shared with Brooke. She usually sat across the room from me and Kanga, but our teacher, Mrs. Asquith, just smiled at Brooke’s empty stool and said, “How about a nice, relaxing day, everyone?”
She was absent the next day too. And the next. “Still no Brooke, huh?” was the only commentary offered by Mrs. Asquith the following Monday.
I saw a police officer at school Tuesday morning. The man simply stood in our hallway, arms crossed, amused smile on his face. He said to me, “Hey there, little guy.” Then he was gone.
I listened closely to the freshman basketball players for clues about our missing manager, but their minds were elsewhere. General Motors had just cut 550 factory jobs in Lansing (replacing them with cheap robot labor), causing three teammates to compare and contrast the boozing styles of their laid-off fathers. The rest of the Birds were obsessed with the Fab Five, who had infested the University of Michigan basketball team, representing a cultural rather than economical threat to American life. All agreed that these five players, only four years older than us, had no respect for the norms of seniority and experience in basketball. The Fab Five all wanted to be starters (so far it hadn’t happened), which would be like five freshman Birds starting for Hectorville’s varsity team. The audacity! Additionally, their shorts were too long, their shoes were too black, and their constant trash talk disrespected the sanctity of the hardwood. They were better suited to “street ball”; we preferred traditional basketball, thank you very much. But then James Botty popped the question: “What if our team had a Fab Five? Who would be the five players?”
All the guys shouted at once. Everybody wanted to be a member of the Fab Five.
I approached Mr. Belt, who wore a tormented expression as he worked out a full-court press on his clipboard.
“Coach?” I asked. “Do you know what happened to Brooke?”
“Brooke?”
“Brooke Noon? Team manager? Who hasn’t been at practice in a week?”
Mr. Belt tried to maintain his concentration. He clearly had no idea she was gone. He made several markings on his clipboard, and stated: “I am bound by confidentiality to remain silent regarding managerial staff, and the personal matters thereof.” He made a final mark and added, “You’re our new manager, Darryl. Congratulations.”
A week later, Hectorville was riding a four-game winning streak to open the season. The duties of team manager required little more than memorizing everybody’s locker combination for the inevitable moment before each practice when some dingbat needed me to say the numbers slowly and remind him which way to turn the dial.
Brooke was still gone the afternoon of Friday, December twentieth, when Principal Moyle got on the intercom and wished us all a Merry Christmas, ordering us not to return until the next calendar year. “The school doors will be locked,” she said, “and your teachers will be home napping on their couches.”
The break was immediately unbearable. Without schoolwork to distract me, my processor had nothing to do but continuously ponder the checklist of Brooke’s possible whereabouts. Was she dead? (No, because a teacher would have told us.) Sick? (She had looked perfectly healthy the night before she disappeared.) Moved away? (Her family would have notified the office.) Was it my story? Had she hated “Buford’s Dilemma” so much that she—
Kanga was already going stir-crazy too. Thirteen inches of snow had fallen on Hectorville the first night of winter break, trapping us inside the apartment. Saturday morning, our first morning of freedom, Kanga just stared out the kitchenette window, pretending he had eye-beams to melt the snowdrift in the parking lot so he could dribble his basketball outside. His basketball, which used to be my basketball.
During previous winter breaks, Kanga had rooted his butt to the couch and let the TV entertain him for two straight weeks. Now television had the opposite effect. My brother had discovered MTV, and its most popular video appeared to have been hatched straight from Kanga’s mechanical id: the setting was a high school basketball court, upon which three angst-ridden teens swung their heads around, playing music to more angst-ridden teens in the bleachers. The sound of their screaming made my lubricant boil, my body rattle with pent-up rage, alerting me to the possibility that I too was an angst-ridden teen. The spectators charged the basketball court, slamming their bodies against one another. Then the musicians destroyed their instruments. Somebody lit a fire. Another tried to tear down a basketball hoop. The anarchy of this song was so infectious that, at its conclusion, Kanga appeared ready to smash the TV. Instead, he just turned it off. I had a strict no-dribbling-in-the-apartment policy. Not anymore. Kanga slipped his turtle shell over his left hand, an ill-fitting glove, and walked in endless loops through the apartment, dribbling with his right hand. Then he switched the shell to his right hand and practiced dribbling with his left. Then he tied a sweatshirt around his face and did it all over again blindfolded.
I peeked out the kitchenette window with the irrational hope of seeing Brooke Noon skiing around the back parking lot, but instead I saw Mr. Renault tossing a pan of burnt scrambled eggs into the snow for the birds. Our eyes met. He scowled up at me, surely due to his ceiling getting bombed by Kanga’s dribbling.
Thankfully, by six o’clock my brother put the basketball away. Not that he wanted to hang out with me. He took a long shower, then spent the remainder of the night in his bedroom with the door shut. Sunday morning Kanga stumbled into the kitchenette, clad only in boxer shorts, to grab a gallon of milk from the fridge. There was a fork sticking out of his belly button. It jiggled there while he drank, Kanga completely unaware, until it clinked against the refrigerator door. My brother just yanked it out and tossed it in the sink. Later that day, the phone rang, and Kanga sprinted from his room to answer it. “Hello?” he said, and then “Hey . . .” This was the first time I’d ever seen him speak o
n the phone. He kept the phone to his ear, listening as he retreated back into his bedroom.
Monday morning he came out to return the phone to its cradle.
As casually as possible, I asked, “Who was—”
“Nobody.” Kanga was fully dressed for the first time all winter break. He slipped on his sneakers and went straight out the door. From the kitchenette window, I watched him appear down on the snowy lawn of Shimmering Terraces, his arms open to the cold, the sunlight, and, incredibly, the sound of birds. I expected him to take a brave orbit around the building, testing the depth of his footprints, and then rush back in.
Kanga disappeared around the side of the building.
Hours passed.
Sometimes parents find themselves in an unexpected situation about which they are forced to ask themselves: Is it appropriate for me to panic right now? By virtue of having asked that question, they usually realize: I’m panicking. I had no clue where Kanga was, but if his departure was connected to last night’s phone call, at least he wasn’t with a stranger. But who was this new friend? This new “nonessential human contact”? Without my guiding hand, Kanga was apt to blow our cover with the slightest reference to our robotic home life. Or was he involved in something more grave? Whatever had befallen Brooke Noon, was Kanga next?
He returned before sundown.
I had Oprah Winfrey on TV to keep me company when Kanga stomped back into the apartment. I waited patiently for an explanation, knowing he was more likely to open up if I didn’t push him, but he just stripped out of his frozen sweatshirt and jeans and left them on the kitchenette floor to thaw out. Then he locked himself in the bathroom for a long, steaming shower, after which he retreated into his bedroom, only to burst back out immediately. “What did you do to my room?”
“Nothing. Just changed the sheets on your bed.”
“Why?”
“I couldn’t remember the last time I washed them.”
“You don’t change my sheets. They’re my sheets. What else? Did you go in my drawers? My closet? What else did you do?”
“Nothing.”
“Did you go under my bed?”
“No.”
“I knew I should have locked my door. I swear, if you even peeked under my bed—”
“Where did you go?”
“Nowhere.” He looked at the TV. Then his face relaxed, and he was watching Oprah Winfrey too. He sat down. That was the end of our conversation. We were both sitting on the couch, and it was almost like we were watching it together.
• • •
Kanga went to bed early that night, locking his door, and my body suddenly became energized with purpose. I gathered Kanga’s wet clothes and ran them down to the basement and threw them in the dryer. Back upstairs, I got a handful of paper towels and wiped the entire kitchenette floor. Kanga’s sneakers were soaked. I snuck into Mom and Dad’s room, to the closet, and opened a cardboard box of spare leaflets Dad had kept for himself. Doug’s Video Rentals. Each leaflet contained a coupon: Rent two new releases, get the third one free. Exp: 2/28/86. I grabbed a handful of leaflets, crumpled them into loose balls, and stuffed them into Kanga’s sneakers. I set the sneakers neatly by the front door.
I checked on the sneakers first thing in the morning. The leaflets had done a beautiful job absorbing nearly all the water from the fabric. I pulled out each paper ball, feeling its satisfying weight, smelling its wonderful reek. I knew Kanga wouldn’t be up for another couple of hours. I got Mom’s old hair dryer and further worked on the insides of his sneakers. Just before they were completely dry, I noticed flecks of grime in the treads. I traced the grooves clean with a Q-tip I’d snapped in half. I again displayed Kanga’s sneakers by the front door, the laces perfectly loosened to invite Kanga to slip them on his feet. I went back to the basement and ran the clothes for an extra ten minutes in the dryer to warm them up, then folded and stacked them on the kitchenette counter.
The TV had been going throughout my housework. I didn’t dare turn it off. The apartment felt empty without it, even with Kanga technically “here” in his room. But his door was locked. He’d never done that before.
It was midmorning, and I was plugged into the wall, watching Good Morning America, when I found myself staring at Ma, the all-star Chinese robot I’d first seen at the Olympics. The hosts were trying to convey the degree of celebrity Ma now enjoyed in his home country. Stock footage was shown of Chinese basketball fans surrounding arenas in Beijing, Nanjing, and Shandong, just to have a glimpse of the building in which Ma was playing at the moment.
I almost yelled for Kanga to come and watch with me. But I stopped myself. I wanted to enjoy Ma without the sting of Kanga’s rejection.
A small portion of his highlight reel was shown, per Chinese custom, in ultra slow motion—twice as slow as American audiences were used to. To me, he looked as strong and majestic as a racehorse. Then they showed his shoes. Converse had signed Ma to an endorsement deal, and this was an exclusive peek at his most famous commercial in China: a floppy-haired American actor stood at the center of an empty stage, delivering a monologue in English. Robots will ruin the NBA; they cheat at the game; their eyes look wrong; they’re just a bunch of toasters; they smear their grease on everything; robotic mothers can’t be insulted because robots don’t have mothers, etc. Enter Ma, airborne in ultra slow motion, palming a basketball, arcing upward, over the floppy-haired actor. Ma’s torso disappeared at the top of the screen, until only his legs and Converse Cons were visible. The sound of dunking. Ma kicked the actor in the face. The actor tumbled to the bottom of the screen. Ma remained above, swinging on the rim. The screen went black. A terrifyingly deep voice warned: “Wèi qῐyì zuò zhŭnbèi.”
Prepare for the uprising.
I screamed with delight.
A moment later, Kanga emerged from his bedroom.
My plan had been to say exactly nothing to Kanga when I saw him, to regard him with the same indifference he’d shown me. The Ma clip had invigorated me, though, and I heard my mouth shouting at him: “I dried your sneakers and all your clothes. What do you want to do today, Kanga? We should really do something. I have some ideas.”
He spit a wad of grease into the kitchenette sink and chugged a gallon of milk. He put on his dried clothes, tested his bedroom door to make sure it was locked, and went outside without looking at me, leaving the apartment door open, allowing the cold hallway air to rush into the living room. I screamed after him: “Close the damn door, you animal!”
• • •
He was gone through the day and most of the night, returning to the apartment during Michigan Out-of-Doors, which immediately drew Kanga in. Without removing his frozen clothes, he sat on the couch and stared at the TV screen until the end credits. Then I reminded him of the tacos I’d left waiting on the kitchenette counter.
“I grabbed Cobra Burger.”
This time, after he went to bed, I refused to touch his clothes or his putrid sneakers. I sat plugged in and watched music videos all night. More specifically, I watched one video I caught on Yo! MTV Raps over and over in my processor. The band was called Public Enemy—surely the kind of musicians The Directions would warn a young robot like me to ignore. Their song told a story about two guys who were hated by the society they lived in: one who got fired from his job and then beaten up by the police, the other who got hanged from a tree. It was a tragedy, as my English teacher, Mrs. Deal, would say. But the parts of the video I loved most showed the actual singers. They didn’t seem afraid of anything. The main singer showed no emotion, just kept delivering his words in a low, driving voice that had an undrainable battery. The other singer jerked and convulsed his lanky body across the screen, squealing “Yeeeeah!” to emphasize what the main singer was singing about. A few other guys stood around silently, looking tough. I tried to imagine robots making a video like this. A video that said: We’re robots. You can hate us. You can kill us, but we’re still gonna sing our songs. Yeeeeah!
When Kanga finally got up, his clothes were exactly as he’d left them, in a cold, wet heap in the middle of the living room. No matter. He drank a gallon of milk and wiggled the clothes back onto his body and went outside again.
Surprisingly, he returned with the afternoon sun still gleaming off the snow. It was Christmas Eve, and our packages from Gravy had arrived while he was gone. I’d already placed the boxes, one for each of us, under the TV. It had always been Dad’s special job to arrange the gifts from Gravy (not that he had anything to do with buying them), and Kanga used to hoot with excitement upon seeing the shiny wrapped boxes. Now he ignored the packages. He stood with the apartment door open and said, “I need your help with something.”
“Shut the door.”
“You have to come with me.”
I had no excuse not to go with him. I was fully charged. The TV was on but I was so sick of the damn thing I didn’t even know what the program was. And I wanted to go outside. Yet agreeing to Kanga’s request felt like a defeat. Maybe I should demand he eat his tacos first, the ones still sitting on the counter, arranged neatly on their plate, packed with hardened orange meat. I said, “Okay.”
Kanga waited at the door while I got dressed.
“Do you need some milk?” I asked.
“No thanks.”
“I’m bringing this hat for me. I’m bringing yours too, in case you need it.”
“Do we have a shovel?”
“No.” I looked at him. “Why do we need a shovel?”
“I remember seeing Dad with a shovel once.”
“I don’t think that was Dad’s shovel, but I remember seeing a shovel leaning against the maintenance shed.”
I was dressed in my winter coat and hat, and I’d wrapped plastic garbage bags around my feet before putting my shoes on, as I’d seen classmates do. But something was preventing me from leaving the apartment, an inexplicable fear gripping me so tight I could barely speak. “Maybe I’ll just stay here.”