Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful

by Arwen Elys Dayton

  When I was out on the sidewalk, I caught sight of him at the crosswalk. Well…no. I want to be honest. The truth is that I searched the crowds wildly until I spotted him again, and then I fought my way over.

  What was I thinking at that moment? I’ve asked myself this question a hundred times. And the answer is this: I wanted to radiate my fury, my humiliation, at him. That’s all. I’m pretty sure that was all I wanted.

  The light there takes forever, and a bunch of people were waiting at the crosswalk. Next to me was a girl with a subdermal bracelet implant, and for a moment I was distracted by the patterns it was projecting up through her skin. Flickering lights danced around her wrist, looking too cheerful with her heavy black makeup and the safety pins through her eyebrows. She obviously didn’t mind tinkering with herself, and no one nearby seemed to mind either. But some of them probably did.

  It was hard to breathe. I wanted to cry.

  The sound of Gabriel slurping his coffee brought me back. He was right at the curb and I was directly behind him. He turned his head, so I could see his face in profile. It was so odd. He was still really good looking, all blond, with dark brown eyes and thick lashes and that square jaw. But his looks had morphed into something I associated with pain, and staring at him wasn’t the same as it had been a week ago.

  I thought, Can’t he feel me standing here boring holes into his back with my eyes?

  Obviously he couldn’t.

  The traffic from the north was coming at us—four lanes at full speed, half of the vehicles without drivers, including a huge, automated City of LA bus that filled up an entire lane. The noise of the cars was punctuated by the constant whine of the air-drones that fly north and south above La Brea Avenue all day, along the route to the airport. I could have whispered Gabriel’s name and he wouldn’t have heard me. I didn’t, though. I gave him no warning, other than my silent, hostile presence.

  I stepped forward so I was right behind him, reached out my hands…

  Shit. You’re going to hate me.

  I have to start earlier.

  2. CHURCH BELL

  I go to an Episcopal school that only has about three hundred students. Everyone knows everyone, even if everyone isn’t friends with everyone, if that makes sense. I’m pretty smart, maybe a little bit nerdy, but honestly, a lot of kids at my school are smart and a little nerdy. I’m reasonably good looking, but again, there are plenty of good-looking girls at St. Anne’s. So I’m average, socially, economically, academically. Is this even relevant to my story? I don’t know. It’s possible I’m stalling.

  So.

  A week earlier, a week before what happened outside Go Get ’Em Tiger, my mom dropped me off at school. I’d been leaning against the passenger door, using the minimum possible number of words to respond to her attempts at good-morning-sweetheart-how-are-things conversation. Then, just as we arrived, she asked the question she’d probably been working up the courage to ask all along: “How was your date last night?”

  My reaction surprised even me. My dark mood snapped into something worse, something that could not be contained in sullen silence. Without any warning, I yelled, “Can’t you let me live my own life for one second, Mom, for chrissakes? I’m not five! Can’t I keep a secret if I want?”

  I slammed the door behind me, leaving her sitting behind the wheel, shocked but resigned. (“Just let her be angry,” my father was always saying.) I stomped off into the main building, knowing that fury directed at my mother was ridiculous and unfair. And seriously, how would her asking me about my date imply that I was five years old? There was no logic. Also this: I hadn’t meant to yell, I honestly hadn’t, but it’s weird what I can and can’t regulate. Sometimes the volume of my voice is in the “can’t” category.

  People at school were looking at me, but, you know, obviously, I thought, because I’d just slammed the car door like a five-year-old. It wasn’t until my friend Lilly caught my arm, pulled me into that weird little alcove by the trophy case, and whispered, “Did you really, Milla? You hardly even know him,” that I realized I had no secret to keep. Everyone already knew.

  I walked to class feeling like an accident victim staring back at the rubberneckers who’d slowed down to watch me bleeding all over the roadside. That last part had literally happened to me, though when it did, I wasn’t awake to watch. I don’t even think I was alive.

  I digress.

  Kevin Lopez smirked as he leaned against the wall. Next to him, Kahil Neelam was making a weird hand gesture at me—he was using one hand to snap at the pointer finger of his other hand, like a fish biting a stick.

  I was pushing through my homeroom door when I saw Matthew Nowiki—Matthew, who had been my friend since middle school—doing the robot and snickering as his gaze swept over me. He disappeared into his own homeroom, but not before snapping his fingers, pointing, and bestowing upon me a dramatic wink.

  I had taken a seat at my desk when I realized what Kahil’s hand gesture had meant. The pointer finger had been a penis, and the other hand grabbing it was supposed to be a robot vagina crushing it, over and over.

  Humiliation spread between my organs like sticky black tar. Heat bloomed across my face, informing me that I was turning red. The thing is that I don’t really blush anymore, because blushing, in my current configuration, is almost impossible. That it was happening now meant so much adrenaline was flooding into my blood, it was literally bypassing the entire meshline to set my face aflame. I was blushing and sweating, which attracted everyone’s attention.

  Just kidding. They were already looking at me anyway.

  “I don’t even see where…” I heard behind me in a loud whisper.

  “How did he even…,” someone else asked.

  “He has no fear, obviously,” a third person said, in a whisper so loud people on the other side of the city probably heard it.

  This would have been an excellent time to cry. But I haven’t managed to do that in a year. Instead, I sat through my morning classes as the humiliation slowly hardened into something else.

  * * *

  At lunch, I went up to Gabriel in the courtyard where we all ate and I threw my soup in his face. It felt wonderful, it felt like vindication, even though the soup was lukewarm clam chowder and didn’t make much of an impact. Still, every person in the courtyard was watching me as I screamed, “How could you be such an enormous dick?”

  Looking back, I realize this wasn’t the worst insult I could have chosen. I’m not sure anyone noticed my phrasing, though, because the words had come out so unbelievably loud that I thought the church bell on top of the chapel had somehow rung at the exact moment I opened my mouth.

  It wasn’t the church bell. It was my voice. Gabriel stared at me, spellbound.

  Jesus H. Christ, this is still making it look as though I came after Gabriel like the unhinged robot girl people were whispering that I was. Correction: no one was actually whispering. At that moment, Kahil Neelam, a few yards away from Gabriel in the courtyard, was yelling, “Does not compute! Does not compute!” again and again and miming smoke coming out of his ears. He was pretending to be me. Get it?

  I’m sorry for using Jesus’s name to swear. I’m trying to be better about that. I’m pretty sure Jesus would be solidly on my side, so I don’t want to piss him off too.

  Shit.

  I have to explain the night itself.

  The drive-in movie and the making out.

  I’m blushing even to think about it. (I’m not, though. There’s a sensation in my cheeks, but no redness—I checked in the bathroom mirror. Sometimes things work and sometimes they don’t. I’m glitchy.)

  Anyway.

  3. CAST OF THOUSANDS

  It was the night before that day in school. We were at Cast of Thousands, the drive-in movie theater in Sherman Oaks with the huge screen that doubles
onto your own car’s windshield. You look through the movie image on the windshield to the much larger screen in the distance and somehow your eyes combine both into the most oh-my-God-that’s-incredible 3D image. The sound was piped directly into the car’s stereo system, so it was like our own private movie, and I was in Gabriel Phillips’s car.

  I haven’t explained my history with Gabriel because there was no history, except for a long trail of lustful thoughts that were, as far as I knew, all on my side. Still, I should fill you in. He came to our school when he was fourteen. He was kind of gangly and his voice was still kind of high, but the blond hair and dark eyes really got to me. I became weirdly focused on his hands too, which were too big for the rest of him, the hands of a man, I thought, and right away I wanted them to touch me. It was the first time I had ever lain in bed and imagined a specific boy doing specific things to me. Jonas and I had been boyfriend and girlfriend before he moved away (before I’d even met Gabriel) and we’d actually done specific things, but I’d never fantasized about Jonas. I’d never had to; he was always with me. The at-a-distance crush on Gabriel was something new.

  Other girls liked Gabriel too, in a more general way—he was good-looking and he went to our school, so, yeah, he was naturally on the list of Guys to Like. It wasn’t until he was fifteen and had shoulders and biceps and a deep voice, though, that other girls really started to pay attention. They liked him when he was an obvious choice. I’d liked him so much longer. He flirted with girls at school, but the rumor was that he had “other girlfriends” outside our little St. Anne’s group.

  I thought about him for a year, and then in the hospital, when the lights were off for the night and I was alone with the sounds of machines that were keeping me alive, while the meshline and its various internal components were being created, I thought about him some more. That fantasy Gabriel diverged more and more from the one I had vaguely known at school, until, when I finally returned to St. Anne’s, it took me a moment to recognize him. But only a moment. Then the real-world crush was back, as strong as ever.

  So here we were, in his car together, the first time I’d even been alone with him. We were in the front seats, with a cardboard tray of tacos between us, and I’m not going to lie to you, the conversation was awkward. In my imagination, conversation hadn’t been necessary, if you know what I mean. Fantasy Gabriel had done whatever I wanted. But here we were, stuck with words.

  “Is the volume okay?” he asked, fiddling with the knob unnecessarily. It felt like our taco tray was the Pacific Ocean and he was all the way on the other side of it, by Japan, maybe.

  “It’s fine,” I answered.

  “Seems like we never really talked before this year. Why is that?” he asked. Before I could answer, he added, “When you came back to school, I realized that—that I wanted to get to know you.”

  “Yeah, me too,” I said, trying not to stare at his sexy hands. “We’ve been at the same school for almost three years. Why don’t we know each other better?”

  Honestly, I was spouting almost random words to fill up the space between us; I wasn’t looking for an answer to this question. I already had a theory as to why Gabriel had finally noticed me after basically looking through me for years. (Even back when we were fourteen, when he’d still been short and really skinny and I’d had breasts, he hadn’t been interested.) But when they’d rebuilt my left eye, the orbit had changed shape a little bit; I’m talking about just the ordinary plastic surgery when the surgeon had to put it back together, not fancy stuff like they did with the rest of me. Then, because the left was different, they’d changed the right eye socket to match so it didn’t look like the two halves of my face were arguing with each other. When this was done, something in the overall appearance of my eyes and eyebrows had been subtly altered for the better. I don’t think it was on purpose, but when I healed, my eyes were a little wider and more perfectly shaped, and I was a little bit prettier.

  So…Gabriel’s new interest was easily explained: I’d been attractive when I got back to school, and he assumed I was just growing into my looks, because as far as anyone at St. Anne’s knew, I had only broken my legs and my jaw in the accident. It felt like cheating, getting his interest this way, but why should I be ashamed of finding a silver lining?

  We lapsed into silence as, up on the screen—or rather, hovering in the air outside our car, so crisp and hyper-detailed that they were almost more real than reality—a parade of superheroes in the coming attractions threw 3D stuff at each other, stuff like cars and horses and battleships and, I am not kidding you, even an orca that appeared to spin around right in front of our windshield, spraying water from its toothy smile onto the glass. I laughed involuntarily and made a sort of choking snort—a sound my friend Lilly had kindly pointed out was like a barfing dog. (Laughs are weird sometimes; it’s something to do with the partial larynx, or maybe the way the meshline travels through it. I forget exactly.)

  “Are you okay?” Gabriel asked, because of, you know, the barfing dog sound.

  “Um, yeah—taco went down the wrong way,” I lied.

  He held my drink out chivalrously, and as I took it, his hand brushed against mine, sending a shiver up my arm.

  “Is, uh, is Milla short for something?”

  I dread this question, because the answer usually takes too long—but this time it didn’t. I said, “I’m named for St. Ludmilla, who lived in the Czech Republic like twelve hundred years ago—”

  “Wait,” he said, interrupting, “are you talking about St. Ludmilla of Bohemia?”

  I was thrown. “Yes.”

  “I know her.”

  “What, like personally?” The sarcasm slipped out. It wasn’t intentional. I didn’t want anything to get in the way of the genuine interest that had appeared in his eyes.

  “I know who she is,” he said. He was shaking his head in mild disbelief. “St. Ludmilla.”

  I stared at him a moment. “You are seriously one of the only people who has ever known who she was.”

  “She brought Christianity to her people,” he continued, very pleased with himself. And even better, our conversation no longer felt awkward.

  “Well, she tried,” I said. “Then her daughter-in-law had her strangled.”

  “You mostly don’t get to be a saint by living happily ever after,” he pointed out, with what struck me as a rather sophisticated worldview.

  “That’s true. Getting murdered helps a lot. Are you Catholic?” We recognized saints in the Episcopal church, but he seemed unusually knowledgeable.

  “My mom’s sort of Catholic, but the Episcopal school was less expensive and she says it’s basically the same. My grandmother thinks I’m going to school with a bunch of dangerous nonbelievers, so she made me memorize the life stories of a hundred saints before I started at St. Anne’s.”

  “And Ludmilla was one of them?” There were thousands and thousands of saints. This was a huge and unlikely coincidence. Had he secretly been researching me? Had he been as in love with me all this time as I’d been with him? When I’d imagined him touching me with those hands, had he been imagining the same thing?

  “My grandma’s from the Czech Republic, so it was, like, mostly saints from around there that she wanted me to focus on,” he explained. “I liked St. Ludmilla. She was cool.”

  Ah. I felt a stab of disappointment. Only a coincidence. Still, the ice had broken. Gabriel was gazing at me and I fancied there were hidden depths in him that I hadn’t suspected.

  “You have really pretty eyes,” he told me.

  I smiled, and mentally I thanked Dr. Watanabe for his facial reconstruction skills.

  On the screen were more movie trailers, and on every side of the car were rows of other cars, all the occupants trying hard to block out the rest of the audience and pretend, like I was doing, that they were the only
people in the world at that moment.

  His comment about my eyes, and the way he kept glancing over at me, sent hormones racing into my bloodstream in poorly regulated batches. He was into me, I realized. More than I could have hoped. My body translated this knowledge into an unbearable level of excitement and an equal portion of terror. The adrenaline and make-out hormones were sliding past each other like aggressive rival gang members. All the parts beyond the meshline were beginning to give me that weird tingle/hotness/overload feeling that meant the fake parts didn’t know what to do with everything I was throwing at them. I started to freak out. What had I been thinking, coming on this date with him? My body, my voice, any part of me might do something drastically wrong—

  “Do you care about the movie, Milla?” Gabriel asked. The trailers had ended and the theater was dark as the movie began. His voice had gone all whispery. He was leaning toward me so his breath brushed my cheek.

  Holy shit, he was really into me. Something was going to happen right now, unless I stopped it. But Gabriel was giving me his full attention, those dark eyes, his jawline, the curve of his shoulder muscles beneath his shirt, his hands…

  “No, I don’t care about the movie,” I found myself whispering back.

  He turned down the volume, inched closer, and said, “Hey.”

  Stop him! I yelled at myself. Get out of here!

  I did neither of these things. Instead I sat rooted to the seat as he gently put his lips on mine.

  Gabriel Phillips was kissing me. Alone in my hospital room, alone in my bedroom at home, I had seen this moment a thousand different ways. But now it was real: lips, pressure, warmth.

  When the kiss was over, my mind replayed it obsessively on an auto-loop. I might have been staring at him in mute shock for a full minute.

  He didn’t notice. “Do you want to get in the backseat?” he asked, with that combination of excitement and nervousness that I used to see on Jonas’s face when we were first boyfriend and girlfriend. “We could, I don’t know…”