Half Life

by Lillian Clark

  I laugh, and he says, “Kiss.”

  I roll my eyes even as my cheeks heat.

  “And no cop-outs. Like grandma kisses or anything.”

  I swallow. He’s so close. And I like it. But also. “In that case, I don’t have one.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really,” I say, not whispering. “And yes, I’m embarrassed about it.”

  “Why?”

  In the light from the screen, I give him a look. A What are you talking about, of course it’s embarrassing look. Then word vomit: “Because I’m sixteen and have never been kissed. Because this is my first real date. Because this is my first any kind of date. Because kissing people is the normal thing to do.”

  “If you’re allo, maybe,” he says. “Or not. What’s normal, anyway? Does not wanting to kiss anybody make you abnormal?”

  “Of course not, but—”

  “But then you’re embarrassed only because you think I’ll judge you for never having kissed someone?”

  I don’t know what makes me want to be honest, to lay all my insecurities bare. The dark, maybe, interrupted only by the screen’s shifting light. Or the other people, quietly watching the movie, apart but together. “No,” I say, whispering again. “I’m not embarrassed because I’ve never kissed anyone. I’m embarrassed because no one’s ever wanted to kiss me.”

  “I want to kiss you.” Smiling, he shifts even closer, his face barely an inch from mine. “If you couldn’t already tell, thanks to my impossibly subtle word choice.”

  “Okay.” I barely breathe it.

  But, this close, he hears me.

  And brushes his lips against mine.

  I lift my chin, and kiss him back.

  * * *

  “Speaking of backpacking,” Marco says.

  “Backpacking?” Sitting in the dark, parked at the curb in front of my house, everything above a whisper feels too loud. We lean against each other over the center console, neither of us in a hurry to move. No curfew, no need. I could stay out here all night if I wanted to. Go anywhere, do anything.

  With his head resting on mine, I can feel Marco’s jaw move. “Yeah. Macaroni. Backpacking with my dad. Keep up.”

  I breathe a laugh. “Got it.”

  “When does your school start again?”

  “Why?”

  “Well, for the past few summers my friends Taylor and Remi and I have gone backpacking the week before school starts. Meaning next week. And, well.” He takes a deep breath. “Do you want to come?”

  My lips still feel swollen, almost sore. I used to think that was fake, that you can feel kisses lingering on your lips. Turning to look out the window at my darkened house, I lift a hand to touch them.

  No fires.

  No pitchforks.

  Not a single text or call.

  She’s in there right now. I’m in there, as far as my mom’s concerned. School starts Monday, but “I” can still be there. I can go backpacking, be with Marco, and still do exactly what I’m supposed to do. I can be everything, have it all. And no one even has to know that it’s not all me.

  So I turn back, meet Marco’s eyes, and say, “Sure, I’ll come.” Because I can.

  LUCY

  I pull the handle, half open the car door, and pause.

  “You’ll be fine,” Lucille says in the driver’s seat. “It’ll be good.”

  I take a slow breath (in, one, two, three, out, one, two, three) and finish opening the door. Out on the sidewalk, I turn back, bend down. She’s wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap. Lucille Harper, Off Duty. “Will you pick me up, or should I walk?”

  “It’ll be too busy after school, so walk? Or I could pick you up a few blocks away?”

  “I’ll walk.” I step back and close the door. Lucille waves as she pulls away from the curb. She’s trying so hard. And I get it. I literally feel it. But beside her urge to say and do the “right” thing with me is the ticking clock, and her utter indifference about what it means for me. I’m like a Band-Aid for her. There when you need it to cover a wound, easy to discard once you’re healed.

  The Life2 phone buzzes in my (her) messenger bag, and I wonder which chemical concoction my emotions have triggered for the BAN this time. “You planning to check in with me every time I hiccup?” I’d asked at the Facsimilate appointment yesterday, and Thompson had smiled humorlessly and said only, “Yes.”

  I pull the phone out. Status? the text reads. I write back, First day of school.

  It’s gone before I think to reword it. To wonder if the fall semester at DU has even started yet. But no one replies, which is just more proof they don’t care. Lucille’s age is like this open lie we’re all in on. Thompson explicitly, with the others following her lead. As long as my skin’s not sloughing off and I haven’t gotten caught, right?

  I watch her brake at the parking lot’s exit, blinker on, turning left. Away from home. Once she’s out of sight, I turn to the building. I’m more than half an hour early. Early enough that I wonder if the doors are unlocked. I reach in the bag and dig out a pair of earbuds I found in Lucille’s desk.

  I thought about it. A lot. When Lucille left Friday night, when Mom was in the shower, when the movie ended and Mom woke up (she’d fallen asleep halfway through) and shifted her blurry self upstairs to bed. I could’ve done it right then. Climbed the stairs, sat at the desk, opened the computer, and plugged in Isobel’s flash drive. I’d had it in my pocket all night. I even got as far as holding it poised beside the USB slot.

  Then I pulled the Life2 phone out of my back pocket and downloaded a bunch of music onto it instead. Because I (I—I—I—I—I) wanted to.

  And because there are some questions I don’t want answers to. Questions like: Did Thompson tell the truth about what happens when the trial’s over? If so, what happens if I stop serving “my purpose”? Or when a newer model comes along? Will I get scrapped for parts? Clean Life2 bathrooms? What the fuck does “decommissioned” even mean? The asset returns to us, to be decommissioned or repurposed as we see fit. That’s a good one, memories-wise. One that’s so bland and unimportant in Lucille’s mind that it’s mostly blurred. In my head, it’s lit like a fuse.

  But that’s the B team. The first-string questions are even better: Am I an abomination? Am I even human? Do I have a soul?

  The truth is, I don’t know why Isobel gave it to me. Sure, knowing what’s on it would probably help clear that up. But answers or a warning, does it matter? What difference could it possibly make? Knowing won’t suddenly make me not a clone. Not an “asset.” Plus, there’s something terrifying about knowing. About not knowing, too, I guess. But right now I have my knowns. Four weeks to prove to Life2 that I’m a success and can be Lucille, refrain from melting into a pile of exceedingly expensive, manufactured bio-goop, and return whole and seasoned and ready to do my duty as a living prop. All so Life2 can take RapidReplicate to market.

  I control almost nothing, but at least with the drive I control what I know. Once I open it, that’s it. No going back. As (not) my mom loves to say, “You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.” And I don’t know if I want to squish this toothpaste out.

  I couldn’t look at Isobel yesterday. As omnipresent as ever (if not more so) and shadowing me through every diagnostic step. Silent, but with her expectation hanging in the air like exhaled breath.

  Sorry, Isobel, but what I don’t know can’t hurt me, right?

  I head inside, plugging the earbuds into the phone, into my ears, and cranking “Ænima,” by Tool. All the flushing and fucking (not the biblical sort) really speaks to me right now. I wouldn’t say being a clone makes me a nihilist, but that’s only because I don’t know what being a clone makes me. So, thanks, “Dad,” for the easy access to all things nineties rock/metal/grunge, becau
se it’s…helping.

  I click the volume a few ticks higher. So high I can’t hear anything else. Not the few other students and teachers populating the halls at this ghastly hour. Not even my own footsteps as I walk to the library to hide until the warning bell.

  We practiced for this. Lucille (always) had a plan: Study the notebook (which was the driest shit ever, filled with stuff like what she and Mom ate for dinner, what she and Dad watched on TV, and what they talked about—her class and Reach the Sky and SAT prep junk, avoiding all things “Marco” and “clone,” like mentioning them might trigger some ancient curse). Rehearse talking points like what “I” did this summer. Be Lucille.

  Easy, right?

  I close my eyes and take three deep breaths through my nose.

  Mom couldn’t tell the difference.

  I’d felt like a cinnamon roll, all warm and sweet and gooey. A trivializing simile, I know. But I don’t know how to describe it in a way that’d do it justice. Sitting with her Friday night, wrapped up in the same blanket on the couch. The warmth, the calm and simple existence. And not just existing, but belonging. I fit. I fit. In all my Lucille-shaped, ersatz individuality.

  It was the best moment of my life.

  I open my eyes and sigh a laugh. “My life.” All nineteen conscious days of it, counting the fourteen spent on the Facsimilate hamster wheel.

  The first bell rings, a ten-minute warning, and I push out of the chair, trying to wrap that cinnamon-roll feeling around me. But it flakes off with every step.

  First up is AP calc. I pick a seat in the back and keep my head down while the other desks fill up around me. No one says hi to me. No one says anything. I can’t decide if it makes me feel relieved or impressively, immaculately lone-, lone-…“Lonely?”

  “No,” she says. “Why would I be lonely?”

  Cass shakes her head. “Because you spend every lunch in the library like a fourteenth-century monk?”

  “How specific,” Lucille mutters flatly, but I feel the sting, a crystalline film between my muscles and skin.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Yeah. I do.”

  “So?”

  Annoyance. Impatience. That’s what Lucille heard. In the memory, I could feel her hear it, like anticipating a blow.

  But.

  Like with so many of my (her) memories, it’s like looking through a filter. A heavy tinge of Lucille, her biases, her assumptions. Coloring Cass’s stance and expression and tone until every flicker of genuine interest and concern had been tainted.

  (Project much, Lucille?)

  Someone kicks my desk, and I flinch.

  I look to my right at a senior I recognize from pre-calc last spring. He points to the teacher at the front of the class, who asks, “Lucille Harper?”

  “Yeah.” It comes out more croak than word. I clear my throat. “Sorry, yeah. Here.”

  He nods and calls the next name, finishing out the list. Then class starts, and like every first class in the history of first classes, it’s pointless. Books. Syllabus. Goals. Hopes. Dreams. Then thirty minutes of pre-calc refresher before the bell rings and we file out toward second period, which is art. Painting, specifically.

  I duck into the art room, lean against the wall beside the door, rest my head back, and close my eyes. It smells like clay. Wet, heavy, cold…beneath my bare feet, flip-flops discarded in the grass. “You sure your mom’s not going to be mad we’re digging a hole in your yard?” Cass asks.

  “It—It—It…” I shrug. “It’s just dirt.”

  We’re nine. With muddy hands and muddy toes, knee-deep in a fresh hole with full shovels and the summer sun so bright and hot in my hair—

  “Lucille?”

  I open my eyes.

  It’s Bode. Coming out of the connecting kiln room, arms full with a roll of canvas and lengths of wooden framing, wearing dark-rimmed glasses, a neon-pink T-shirt, black pants, and worn-out skate shoes.

  I can feel them. A heat, an ache. A flip-book of strobing images, feelings, assumptions. Every single memory she had of Bode, peeling, cracking, bending. Shifting rapidly from hers to mine, mine, miiiii­iiiii­—

  “You okay?”

  I blink.

  “Yeah.” Take a breath, deep and slow. “Yeah.” I step forward, hands out. “Need help?”

  “Sure,” he says, and gestures for me to take the canvas roll.

  I slide it out from where he’s got it wedged under his arm and follow him toward a massive table set up by the slop sinks in the back corner of the room. Bode drops his armload of frame lengths onto it. I set the roll of canvas beside them.

  “So,” I say. He’s the first external person to “meet” me as Lucille, and I feel like my guts are going to writhe their way out of my abdomen. Maybe this is it. What they’ve been so diligently testing for. Day nineteen, and it starts with my intestines. IntestinalAbsconding.

  No.

  It’s nerves. Regular-ass nerves.

  “You’re in this class?” I ask.

  Arranging the lengths of framing by size, Bode smiles. It’s one Lucille’s seen before. Close-lipped, eyes averted. In her memory, it’s tinged with polite indifference. But now I think he just looks shy.

  “Sort of,” he says. “First period is my independent study. And right now I’m technically in life studies, but I’m helping Mx. Frank out as their TA for it.”

  “Wow. You get to spend all morning in here?”

  He smiles again, looking up and making quick eye contact this time. “Yep.”

  “I’m jealous.”

  He breathes a laugh. “Really?”

  It’s so strange, because I can hear it the way Lucille would hear it. With a bite of condescension. But I also hear it my own way. With straight disbelief.

  I laugh back, just as breathy. “Obviously.” I gesture to the windows, the colors, the smells. Can you feel nostalgic for a place you’ve never been? Can I feel nostalgia at all?

  “I didn’t think you liked art.” He shifts the roll of canvas on the table, making sure it’s parallel to his sorted lengths of framing. “I remember in junior high how much you hated that papier-mâché mask project we did. And, well”—he glances at me, sidelong—“really, every project.”

  “Huh.” I cross my arms. I can’t find those memories. Not even a whiff. “I don’t remember that.”

  He shrugs.

  It’s uncomfortable. Not being able to recall those memories makes me feel partial. Is it because Lucille doesn’t remember? Or because the Mimeo’s flawed?

  I shake my head. “Well, I’m excited to be in this class.”

  A pair of students walk into the room, talking to each other, oblivious to us. Bode looks at them, then back at me, fidgeting with the placement of the canvas roll again. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Luc—” I catch myself. “I was dreading the art credit, but now that I’m here? I’m, um…excited?”

  “That’s, um…good?”

  A hot little ball of hurt forms in my gut.

  Then he grins. He’s teasing. I grin back.

  The warning bell rings, and people file in quicker now. As the final bell sounds, Mx. Frank walks in through the kiln room that connects to the pottery-drying room, supply closets, and their office, and tells us to circle around the massive table for a demonstration on making our own canvases. Except for when he’s helping with the demonstration, Bode stands with me for the whole class. When the bell rings, he asks, “Coming?”

  I nod and follow him into the hall.

  Lunch. Her memories all wear a brittle Lucille Harper, Overachiever, veneer of Necessity and Productivity. But beneath that sits the tarlike puddle of rejection. Syrupy, viscous. And even though this is what I’m supposed to do (Your goal for the t
rial is full immersion, Lucy. Find the boundaries and test them), I wonder what she’d think of this. Me, walking with Bode. Him, wondering aloud if there’ll be any good vegetarian options this year, or “shitty iceberg salad with, like, two sad cherry tomatoes and a little crouton dust” like last year.

  Me, thinking, Butterflies, just butterflies. From a crush. A normal-ass crush. Thanks to years of memories and feelings and his smile’s so nice, not sections of my intestines going necrotic, necrosis, neurosis, neurotic-tic-tic-tic…

  Him, saying, “It’s not even because meat is murder. Though it is.” He steps into the line in the cafeteria. “Technically. It’s killing. Purposefully. Which is murder, right?”

  Laugh. That’d be normal. He’s joking, kind of. So, laugh, laugh, la-a-a-ahhhhh…I squeeze my eyes shut tight and shake my head. The Life2 phone vibrates in my bag. “Can’t say I know Webster’s official definition of ‘murder’ off the top of my head.”

  He grips the straps of his backpack, high up on his shoulders. “It’s more the muscle part. I can’t get over the fact that you’re eating something’s muscles.” He sticks his tongue out and fake-gags.

  “Mmmm, muscles,” I say.

  We reach the front, and he hands me a tray from the pile before grabbing one for himself. “Right? So gross.”

  “Muscles from a carcass.”

  “See? Yuck.”

  “Or a corpse.”

  He laughs. “Stop.”

  “Ooooh, cadaver.”

  “Okay, but for some reason that one doesn’t gross me out.”

  “A moist cadaver.”

  “Fine. You got me. That’s horrifying.” He loads up his tray with a salad (spinach and arugula, no iceberg lettuce in sight), a banana, and a carton of chocolate milk.