Erin tried showing her the obituaries on her phone, but the android just shoved the phone away and checked the driver’s seat again like somebody might’ve climbed in since the last time she looked. “Where’s my dad? Dad!”
“I guess she doesn’t understand,” said Erin.
“We could turn her over to the police,” Carlos suggested. “There’s got to be some way to dispose of these things. Maybe the robot company recycles them.”
They sat three in a row in the ruined backseat, Hailey against the door, Erin in the middle, and Carlos on the other side. Hailey had settled down with Erin’s homework, a Bible verse crossword puzzle on the dangers of gossip. When given small tasks to do, Hailey stopped asking about her dad.
“It’s not fair,” said Erin. “She’s just doing what they made her for. She didn’t ask for this. I wish we could set her free.” She sewed Hailey’s artificial skin closed with tiny brown stitches, making a long, unhealed scar down her arm.
Neither of them had mentioned last night’s make-out session. Both were suddenly careful not to touch, not even when sitting nearly butt to butt in the backseat. In full daylight, it all seemed too risky, the kind of thing that got you married off to some guy your dad picked at a convention.
Carlos paged through an onionskin book nearly as dense as the Bible. “Okay, we’ve got a couple options. There’s a soft reset sequence in her manual. It looks pretty simple. We could give it a try. It’s supposed to put her back in a neutral state, so she can imprint with different parameters. There’s also a hard reset, but it’s complicated. That’ll strip out everything—name, personality, all of it.”
“Let’s try the soft reset.”
It took a few tries to figure out the directions, and even longer to access Hailey’s interface. She had a port in her left armpit where you could plug in a USB keyboard.
“One sec,” said Erin. “I wrote her a spell for this.” She slid a blackout poem under Hailey’s tongue.
In the beginning
create formless and empty darkness
call the light the night
Carlos typed something long and erratic. Hailey’s eyes focused on Erin’s. Her arms went slack.
“I think it worked,” Erin said.
“Awesome,” said Carlos.
“I bet she can do all kinds of things,” said Erin. “I bet she could count cards at a casino, or even carry all the water jugs from Ralph’s stockroom. She’s so strong.”
“Maybe we could give her your personality,” said Carlos. “Leave her in your bedroom for when your parents marry you off. I bet they won’t even notice the difference.”
“Oh, they’ll notice. She’ll talk back a whole lot. Then when she gets smacked, they’ll notice.” Erin knocked on Hailey. She rang like a bell.
“I’m joking, you know,” said Carlos.
Erin chewed her bottom lip, digesting the dread inside her. “It’s hard to joke about this stuff right now.” Carlos’s parents were religious, too, but not like Erin’s. He was going to college. His sister Sofia was halfway through a psychology major at a college in Idaho. Erin’s dad had bought tickets to the marriage convention. Just getting the lay of the land, he said. No pressure.
“You want to talk about it?”
“What’s there to say? It’s in the Bible. It doesn’t matter if I agree.”
“Not everyone agrees with all of it,” said Carlos. “Did I tell you Sofia’s new boyfriend is Catholic?”
Erin scoffed. “My parents would murder me first.”
“I just don’t think you should feel guilty all the time. What if it’s okay to just be happy?”
“I don’t know,” she said in the tiniest, squeaking voice, folding into herself as all the nots bombarded her, found the memory of Carlos’s lips and turned it into raking fire. She didn’t know how to shut them out. She didn’t know how something so good as Carlos’s smell could be so completely wrong.
He opened his arms, but Erin shook her head just the tiniest bit, flinching away from the hug. “I’d better get going.”
“There’s some good news in all of this,” said Carlos.
“What’s that?” Erin really needed good news, almost as much as she needed something decidedly Questionable.
“I got a new battery.” He climbed into the cab and revved up the engine. It was loud and free and open-throated, and when she heard it, her spirits lifted, the shame blown away in the exhaust. Erin gave him a double-thumbs up and started up the hillside.
The car door opened, and Hailey struggled out into the pond mud.
“Dad?” she called out. “Where are you going?” Hailey stumbled through the grass until she brushed cold fingers against Erin’s arm. “Daddy. I missed you.”
“Oh, shit,” said Carlos. “She’s running the same program. She’s imprinted on you.”
“Damn,” said Erin. “What now? We could try the hard reset.”
He’d already grabbed for the android manual. “I’ll read up on it. It’s a bit more complicated.”
“Later. I’ve got to go,” Erin said. “Dad will kill me if I’m home late.” It was only a small exaggeration.
Carlos ran both hands through his hair. “There’s some bungee cords in with the tools. She’ll have to go in the trunk until we can figure out what went wrong.”
They did their best to tie her up. It looked like something out of a serial killer movie. Erin hated it, hated the idea of Hailey. A girl made to worship her father. She deserved better. They all did.
“Dad!” Hailey’s eyes flashed as they closed her in. “Come back!”
“Monday,” Erin promised Carlos. “Right after Bible school. I’ll be back.”
As she biked home, she thought about dating Catholics and majoring in psychology and wondered what it had to do with sin and crucifixion and the smell of Carlos’s neck. She searched for the spell to change it all around, but you could only black so much out with a Sharpie before you just had nothing.
Erin was thinking they’d sort Hailey out, reset her again, and it’d all be okay soon, but everything went wrong.
H escaped, Carlos texted the next morning. My fault. Didn’t slam the trunk closed hard enough.
It was church time, so Mom made Erin turn the phone off before she could answer. Carlos beckoned from the back pew, but Dad steered her to the seat next to him. She locked eyes on the pastor and tamped down her racing heart by fantasizing about the worksheet. After the service, as her family bustled back to their van, Erin thought she saw a blonde girl stumbling through the weeds behind the annex. She thumbed on the phone beneath her skirt and texted one-handed while Dad drove them to the pancake place for brunch.
H behind church? Hurry.
Carlos didn’t turn up any androids, though. The next day, Erin watched for Hailey during Bible school, jumping every time a bird flitted outside the window. The youth pastor caught her texting under the desk. She had to copy the book of Galatians longhand during lunch.
When she got her phone back, there were three Where RU’s waiting from Carlos.
U find her? she wrote back.
No. U?
Nada.
Pond tonite?
OK
After school, Erin called her mom and said she had an emergency shift to pick up at Ralph’s. She rode circles around the church, looking for signs of Hailey, but only found a clump of stringy hair caught in the brambles down by the baptistry.
Just as she set off for the Stop-N-Fuel, Dad called. “You’re late,” he barked. “Where are you?”
“At church,” said Erin. “I’m about to head to work. Didn’t Mom tell you?”
“I called Ralph. He said you’re not scheduled to work tonight.”
The world fell out from under her. Erin had to stop and plant both feet on the ground to keep from barfing.
“Come straight home. Now.” Dad used a cool, calm voice that meant he was really pissed.
Erin pedaled hard, clipping kids on the sidewalk, darting in front of the cars. Her
heart hammered, a rabbit on the run, hedged in straight toward the cage. She tossed around for a good lie, something sweet and responsible and Permissible.
But it was already too late. At home, Dad sat planted on the couch. A Bible lay open on his lap, half the words blotted out in permanent marker.
Her parents’ justice came down sharp and swift and without any room for forgiveness. When Erin tried to explain about the Bible, Dad grabbed her hair and ear and marched her off to her bedroom and tossed her onto her bed.
“We love you,” said Mom while Dad unscrewed her bedroom door from its hinges. “This is for your own protection.” Mom dug through her drawers and trash for anything else incriminating. You didn’t get any privacy, not when you sinned. Not even a door.
“Was it Carlos?” Dad asked. “Ralph said you see him a lot at work.”
“You never used to be a liar, Erin. What happened?” Big, huge tears hung in Mom’s eyes as she twisted her own hands, one over the other. They kept asking Erin questions but not listening to her answers.
They went through her phone. They asked a lot about Carlos, pretty much the sex worksheet but more humiliating. Erin lied fluently, but that only made it worse. They set her to copying the words of Paul over and over into her journal.
Dad called Ralph and quit Erin’s job for her. Then he began making calls to every family in the congregation with godly young men looking for a wife. All night, his chair scraped against the floor in his office while he fixed her future like the firmware beneath all programs, impossible to modify, impossible to erase.
Erin had cried herself empty and resigned herself to life without a door when Hailey put a fist through her bedroom window.
“Dad,” Hailey hissed. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.” It was 11:00 p.m., and everyone had gone to bed. Hailey struggled over the window sill. Broken glass shredded her t-shirt around her belly. It looked like a crop top.
“Shit,” whispered Erin. Dad’s big mastiff woofed once from the living room. She considered actually leaving Hailey in her place, letting her marry whatever dickwad her dad picked out. But it wasn’t okay, not even if it happened to someone else.
Androids in your bedroom had a way of clarifying things.
If God put dads at the top of the hierarchy, they’d be their own damn dads. “Fuck them,” she told Hailey. “We’ll make our own way.”
She pulled a hoodie over her tank top and stuffed her pajama bottoms into her shoes, slinging her backpack over her shoulder. She wanted her blacked out Bible. She wanted her phone. Mostly, she wanted that open road, that faraway ocean, and the smell of Carlos’s neck.
Erin threw a quilt over the glass shards of the window and hoisted herself down into the flowerbed. She and Hailey hoofed it four miles to the Stop-N-Fuel, praying Carlos would be on duty.
He was at the front counter, selling a pack of cigarettes to a trucker and not expecting androids. Carlos cut his eyes at her and waved her off. Erin snuck around the shelves, grabbed a bottle of Mr. Pibb from the cooler, and swigged it down unpaid for. She picked out a new crossword book and stuffed it in her backpack, then added a pack of salted peanuts for good measure. Then she took a turn down the health aisle and picked up a box of condoms. It felt awfully light, considering the weight of God’s disapproval beating down on her neck.
The moment the customer jangled out the doorway, Carlos caught Erin by the arm and steered them into the stockroom. Erin stuffed the condoms in her backpack and tossed Hailey the crossword puzzles to keep her busy.
“Are you okay? Where did you find her? I tried calling, but no offense, your dad is really scary.”
Erin giggled because suddenly it all seemed kind of funny. “She broke me out. I ran away from home.” Erin wanted to kiss him so badly it burned. “I need your car.”
“Wait a minute.” He really looked at her then. The tiny cuts on her hands from the broken window. The bruise on her cheek from Dad’s discipline. The smiley-dotted pajama bottoms hastily stuffed into her socks. “God, Erin. What happened?”
“Dad found my poems.” Something twisted inside, and it wasn’t funny anymore, it was sad, and she had nowhere to go and no one to help her. “Hailey and I are leaving town.”
“Erin, wait a sec. This is crazy.”
She was shaking, but also crying, which was the worst. “Listen to me. Please. I want you to come.”
Carlos paced back and forth, fixated on Hailey, who was perched against the big pile of replacement jugs for the water cooler. He looked so young all of a sudden, seventeen and not even a full beard, but now someone had asked something so grown up from him. “I can’t just up and leave. My mom would freak out. Where would we go? We don’t have any money or anything.”
“We’ll figure it out.” Pure panic drummed inside her, panic that the trap would still close on her heels after having slipped it. “Come with me. Please. I love you.”
Carlos flinched away, tears gathering in his eyes. “I can’t,” he stuttered. “I want to. But I just can’t.” He slipped out into the drizzle, pulling the door shut behind him.
Hailey blinked at her crossword puzzle, her eye-cams serene and steady. “Dad,” she murmured, and the word rang hollow as the heavy, sick feeling in Erin’s stomach, the sense she’d been desperately wrong about something very important.
“I’ll be right back,” Erin told Hailey. “Stay here.” She threw open the door and bolted out the back of the gas station, making her way toward the tree, the pond, the car.
Erin found Carlos where the grass ran to pond mud. If he’d been crying, you couldn’t tell in the rain. He flinched away from her, a broken-winged bird too long grounded.
“I’m sorry,” said Erin. “Let’s get out of the rain.”
She slipped into the backseat, and Carlos slid in beside her.
“I didn’t mean to pressure you. I don’t know what else to do,” Erin said.
“I can’t just run away from home. Maybe my parents can help. Come home with me tonight,” said Carlos.
Erin considered it, the possibility of Carlos one wall away. But Mom and Dad would check there first. Everyone else thought her parents were so damn nice, so reasonable. Good people, desperate for their runaway daughter. It was worse when they did it out of love. “They’ll look for me there. They’ll hand me over, and you’ll never see me again.” She said it calmly, stating a fact.
Carlos nodded. They sat together and let the silence and darkness take them completely. There was nothing left to say in words.
He lay a hand across her shoulders. She uncurled into his warmth, nuzzled his neck until she found his whiskery chin, his cheek, his lips, and then they were kissing, and shoving aside the seatbelts and stretching together along the worn old fabric in the damp dark. Erin tasted his skin in the flickering streetlight as they moved against each other, opening the condom, fumbling to make contact. It was new, and thrilling, and a little scary. It was so long in the making, like when you’ve hiked all day and night through a winding pass and at last arrive, footsore but whole, to a comfortable bed. She’d never known what it meant for another person to pour into her so wholly. It was Sinful, and it was also completely okay. Outside, the rain picked up pace, drummed fingers on the roof, washing the dust and heat of tired old decades down into the pond.
Afterward, as a seatbelt buckle dug into her hip, Carlos nuzzled into her neck, and it all seemed fine. Erin closed her eyes. She must’ve dozed off because she gasped awake suddenly, a sharp needle of fear rammed through her. “How long have we been here?”
Carlos sat up in the dark. “Shit. I left the store unattended.”
But it wasn’t the store Erin was worried about. She checked her watch. It was well past 1:00 a.m., and the rain had slowed. They fumbled for their clothes in the dark. “Shit, shit, shit.”
They bolted up the hill toward the office, but it was already too late. The door hung open and Hailey lay sprawled and broken, half-crushed, dragging herself by her fingers out into the r
ain while sparks danced along her body. “Dad,” she groaned. “Dad, where are you?”
Broken water jugs rolled around the office floor. Pooling water stained the concrete floor nearly black. A huge, ragged blanket of artificial skin lay pinned beneath a pile of jugs, connected to the rest of Hailey by spiderwebbing wires pulled so taut the skin came off in chunks. The water soaked all her wiring below the waist. Somehow she’d clawed her way toward the door anyway, degloving right out of her own flesh and into the pounding rain. Her eye-cams were shattered. She couldn’t see anything anymore.
Erin held Hailey’s head in her lap, touching the metal plates while her eye-cams whirred, unable to focus. “Dad? Dad!” Hailey called out, unreached by touch, or voice, or any comfort they could give her.
“I’m here,” Erin told her, even though it didn’t seem to help. “Shhh. I’m here now.”
“She must’ve come looking for us,” said Carlos while he hauled the unbroken water jugs off Hailey’s remains. “She must’ve tripped into the jug wall and toppled the whole thing. Damn it.”
Erin wanted to cry, but the tears wouldn’t come. It wasn’t fair, getting crushed like that just when you finally got free. “I know she’s not real, but she was based on a person. There’s the ghost of a scared little girl inside.”
Carlos wrapped his arms around Erin. They made a weird little family, the three of them. “This is my fault. Maybe we can fix her.”
Erin shook her head. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, not really. “I have to get away, Carlos. Now, before I don’t have another choice. Don’t you see? Why they make me memorize all that shit? That’s our programming, Carlos.” They wanted it to come crawling out of your head like roaches from a cardboard box you took with you every time you changed house. You were given a script, and you didn’t get to make up your lines.
But you could go in and black out some of the words, reverse the meaning through obliteration.
Erin made up her mind all at once. “Your sister. Nobody will look for me in Idaho.” Sofia knew about Erin’s church. She’d know what it meant to offer a couch to her.
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