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.
5. MIRACLE
So, yeah. That happened.
And then the next day at school, everyone knew. Gabriel must have started telling people immediately, maybe even on his way home that night. He had told them everything—but mostly about the strange new contents of my body.
Kevin Lopez smirking in the hall, Matthew Nowiki doing the robot with extra hip thrusts thrown in, Kahil Neelam making that hand gesture that told the story of my robotic vagina eating Gabriel’s penis, over and over, because obviously that’s what robot vaginas would be designed to do.
It wasn’t like I could yell back, I don’t have a robotic vagina, okay? That part of me is still real! I don’t think that would have helped.
After I threw my soup in Gabriel’s face and yelled at him so loudly my voice echoed off the Hollywood Hills, I ran out of the courtyard. Behind me I heard hoots and high fives, and girls giggling, and Kahil going on and on with the robot jokes. My meltdown was the most exciting thing to happen at St. Anne’s in at least a year. I like to think someone back there stood up for me. Maybe Lilly came to my defense, though maybe not. She was upset that I hadn’t told her about the sex. Or the injuries. She felt left out, and it was true, I’d left her out.
The headmaster, Mr. Kinross, found me by the back fire stairs, sitting in the shadows and not crying. My eyes stung, the meshline was pulsing with my shame, and that was all the relief I could hope for. He took me to his office, where he offered me a large bowl of wrapped toffees. I immediately stuffed two into my mouth and was surprised at how much they helped.
Mr. Kinross was fairly young, in his midforties maybe, Irish with black hair and blue eyes. There was even a hint of an accent still in his voice, kind of retro, because he’d come to the US when he was a teenager. It was as though the board of St. Anne’s had found him through a casting call. He was nice.
He let me eat my toffees in silence for a few moments, and then he said, “Ludmilla”—he was one of only a few people who insisted on calling me by my full name—“your parents told me about the extent of your injuries, when you came back to us. It’s not my place to discuss them with anyone else, of course, but I do have some idea what you went through. You sitting here is a miracle. I want you to know that we treasure miracles at St. Anne’s.”
Through the side windows bracketing his door, I watched students passing by in the hall. A few glanced in at me but turned away quickly when they realized there was a chance I might make eye contact.
“It’s like they think I’m a heretic,” I said.
It was such an old-fashioned word, but it felt right. Mr. Kinross thoughtfully unwrapped a toffee and put it in his mouth.
“There’s nothing so medieval as high school,” he muttered.
“I didn’t want to tell people because I thought they would feel sorry for me. Or secretly think I was unnatural. I didn’t think they would, you know, decide that I was a disgusting joke.”
My voice broke and I looked down, trying to blink away the burning in my eyes.
“Something ugly is happening to our world,” he said. “If God gave us minds, should we not embrace the fruits of those minds? Surely it is a mercy, and a beautiful calling, to minister to the injured and the ill?” This didn’t sound as formal as it might have, because it was said while sucking at a piece of toffee that kept clicking against his teeth. His kind eyes studied me—sad, seething, half-artificial me. “And yet, I see families with an entirely different view. They have taken it upon themselves to decide what God allows—which is surely exactly what they accuse the doctors of doing.”
It was a relief to hear an adult—a religious adult—say what I was thinking. Even so, I kind of wanted to get out of there, because he’d probably heard about the sex too, and I guessed I would be in for a lecture about the evils of premarital intercourse if I lingered in his office too long. The prickle of a nonblush was coming over me.
But all Mr. Kinross said was “I will have a chat with the boys.” He must have seen the worry in my face, because he quickly added, “I won’t let them make it worse for you, Ludmilla. There are some advantages to running a religious school. I can call on the fear of God when it’s warranted.” He smiled. “Think of your namesake, St. Ludmilla,” he said gently, when he saw my lingering doubt. “She faced opposition at every hand and yet she held to her faith.”
I muttered, “Did she? Or is she a saint only because she died?” And then I asked him the question that had been haunting me all year. “And was…was I supposed to die?”
“Ah. Do you think you were meant to be St. Ludmilla of Los Angeles?”
“I could never be a saint,” I said, “but I do wonder if I’m supposed to be here at all.”
“Perish that thought, Ludmilla,” he told me with a gentle certainty that was as soothing to my ears as the toffee was to my stomach. “You are being tried. Do you know that it’s often much harder to stay alive? You’ve chosen the thornier path. I admire you for that.”
Even if this sounded like a speech he’d lifted from a 1950s film, it made me feel better.
6. ST. LUDMILLA
Gabriel told Matthew Nowiki that I had been so desperate to prove I was still normal, I’d begged him to have sex with me. Actually begged. Like a prostitute offering her “wares” to a policeman to avoid arrest. Gabriel had been very clear with Matthew that my parts “didn’t feel right”—the
implication being that something down there had been irregular, that Gabriel and his manhood had had a lucky escape.
According to Matthew (as relayed to me by Lilly), Gabriel had wanted to take me home early in the evening, but I hadn’t let him because I’d wanted to lose my “human virginity.” As if I’d been having sex with aliens and werewolves and centipedes for years and was trying to prove that I was still a real girl. “My human virginity.” This phrase captivated everyone. In an objective corner of my mind, it even captivated me, and I recognized how well it summed up my differences, my desperation, and how I’d abused Gabriel. That the latter two were entirely fabricated didn’t matter. And I was weird. Let’s face it. Everyone sensed that something had been off since I’d returned to school.
I didn’t go outside for lunch that week, but when I peeked through a second-floor window at the courtyard below, I could see and hear Lilly and my other friends gossiping with everyone else over the details and whether I was still, technically, a normal human. Maybe I would have done exactly the same thing if it had been someone else they were talking about. Even nice people didn’t want to commit themselves until a general consensus could be reached: Was I a perversion of nature to be shunned, or was I in the category of the meek and thus worthy of protection and sympathy? What if I was both?
* * *
So I was standing right behind Gabriel on the street corner outside Go Get ’Em Tiger. There was a tingle all up and down the meshline from the coffee, but this sensation was at war with the hot jitters rushing through me. Gabriel was slurping his coffee, and when he turned his head slightly, I saw his square jaw, his dark eyes beneath his blond hair. So handsome, but painful to look at now. Can’t he feel me standing here boring holes into his back with my eyes?
Four lanes of traffic came at us. In the closest lane was the huge City of LA driverless bus, so wide it almost didn’t fit in one lane.
I was overcome with thirst, which wasn’t real thirst but a side effect of internal imbalance. She wanted it so bad, and I gave it to her so hard, but it was weird down there….
Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful Page 5