by Sarah Archer
He cocked his head, considering. “Not at the moment, thank you. I’ll let you know.”
Kelly wasn’t even sure how she made it from the lab back to the testing room. Suddenly, or maybe it was really finally, everything was crashing down. Robbie knew about Ethan. He had the power to end everything with the lift of a finger: Kelly’s job, her entire career, Ethan himself. There was something nauseating about the whole situation. It felt like plunging into an ice bath: Kelly could no longer deny who, or what, Ethan was.
She threw open the door to the control room, the breeze of its motion whipping her hair back. Catching sight of Confibot, she groaned. She had almost forgotten what she just did to him. “Ugh, motherfucker!”
“I believe the usual greeting is ‘hello.’ ” For an instant Kelly thought that Confibot, the loose cannon that he was, had assumed a female voice. Then, to her horror, she saw that it was Anita speaking, sitting behind the control panel, her legs crossed, her long-fingered hands draped across her knees with the serenity of a dove’s folded wings. But a reptilian fire glinted from her eyes.
“Anita, I—I didn’t realize you were here.”
“Yes, I concluded as much. I came by to ascertain your progress on Confibot.” She gestured to the android, his gaping face absurd above his trim body in his neat shirt and khakis.
“I’m further along than it looks,” Kelly said desperately, inching to the side to block Anita’s view of the discarded face in the trash, but Anita simply pointed at the chair opposite her.
“Sit,” she instructed. Kelly did, crossing her own legs then quickly uncrossing them and settling into her chair with a loud squeak, turning the whole moment into an unnecessary comedy of errors.
Anita raked her with her eyes, searching, evaluating. Kelly was just about to inject the uncomfortable silence with something, anything, when Anita spoke instead.
“Why do you think I am the way I am?”
There was literally no good answer to that question. What was the way Anita was? If Kelly said powerful or successful or intelligent, it would sound sycophantic. But voicing the adjectives she was really thinking would be even worse.
She gaped, flummoxed, and Anita was losing patience. “Okay, let me put this another way. How many Hispanic women run companies in Silicon Valley?”
At least this time, Kelly thought she could hazard an answer. “One?” she returned tentatively.
“One. You have the privilege of working under her. It has not been easy to ascend from the child of immigrant factory workers to the position I hold today, Kelly. Being ruthless is my survival mode. To get here and to stay here, I have subtracted everyone and everything from my life that is not me. Don’t think that it ever gets easier. Don’t think that you can rest in your position. And don’t think that I will hesitate to subtract you if you stand in the way of my personal success.”
Kelly gulped. “I know, you’re right—I’m really trying here—”
“No, you’re not. What more do you need me to give you, Kelly? Have I not provided you with all of the tools you need to complete your project?”
“Yes, you have.”
“Have I not furnished you with state-of-the-art facilities?” Anita gestured around the workspace, the touch-pad controllers, the banks of slick computers.
“Yes.”
“Did I not give you a top-notch consultant, one of the highest-paid psychologists in the country? Do you not have a brain trust of other intelligent, eager individuals here at your disposal?”
“Yes,” Kelly said, so quietly that it was barely audible even in the enclosed space.
“Yet here you are. So what is the problem?”
There was only one way to fill in the blank. “It’s me,” she answered.
Anita paused just long enough for Kelly’s words to echo inside her own head. “I am pushing you, Kelly, not to be cruel, but because I think you can get it,” she continued, her voice low and insistent. Her face contained something that could almost, in Kelly’s comprehensive files of microexpressions, have been classified as an emotion. “And so I will extend to you a benefit that I rarely extend. I will repeat myself. But don’t expect me to say this a third time. Engineering is personal. It’s collaborative. If you cannot handle the higher nuances of design, you will not be placed in a position to design your own project again.” Anita unfolded her legs and strode from the room without a backward glance.
Of course Kelly debriefed Priya as soon as possible, appreciating the fact that she could talk freely now after having confessed to her about Ethan. When she reached the part about Robbie’s dramatic blackmailing, Priya couldn’t resist crowing triumphantly. “I knew it! I always knew he was loony underneath! How many times did I tell you to search his apartment for his mom’s dressed-up body in a rocking chair?”
“What am I going to do, Priya?” Kelly groaned. “I don’t have time to build random parts for Robbie whenever he asks, and I can’t pull Confibot apart, not right before the competition. I’m already in hot water with Anita.” She dragged on her temples in exasperation.
“I mean, you do already have another robot fully built,” Priya pointed out.
Kelly shook her head vigorously. “No way. I’m not hurting Ethan like that. Besides, I can’t pull him apart right before our wedding. What am I going to walk down the aisle to, a motherboard in a tux?”
“Wait, hold up, you’re not actually planning on having a wedding, right?”
“No, it’s just … you know.” Kelly wrung her hands helplessly.
“No, I really don’t.” Priya was looking at her with an expression of confusion and disbelief probably very similar to the one Kelly had just shown Robbie. “What’s going on, Kelly? I was worried about your job, but now I’m worried about your freaking head. Is this some kind of quarter-life crisis?”
“No!” Kelly cried. “I just want some support right now, not judgment, okay? I need … I need answers.”
“I gave you an answer. You rejected it.”
“Priya …”
“Come here.” Priya folded her into a hug, patting her on the hair. “It’s a good head. Don’t lose it.”
“I’ll get out of this,” Kelly grumbled, submitting to her hug.
“Of course you will. Let me know what I can do to help.”
“Actually, there is one thing.” Kelly pulled her head out and looked up at Priya hopefully.
“Name it.”
“Will you be my bridesmaid?”
“Not that.” Priya crossed her arms.
“Come on, you said that you wished you had been involved in this whole Ethan thing. Here’s your chance.” Kelly hoped that her bright voice was convincing to Priya, because she was struggling to convince herself.
“Okay, maybe in the beginning this whole dealio would have been fun, but now it’s, like, a little too real-life-bad-Lifetime-movie for my taste.”
“All you have to do is let my mom take your measurements for the dress.” Kelly clasped her hands together, pleading. “She keeps insisting on doing it Saturday and it’s so soon, I don’t have time to fix the whole thing before then.”
“Well, I don’t have time to spend my Saturday getting measured for a fake dress. Monday’s the deadline for turning in my prototype to Dr. Hanover. I was at my desk until eleven last night.”
She did look wiped. Kelly couldn’t recall if she had forgotten about Priya’s deadline, or if she had even known it was coming up. She realized now that she hadn’t talked to Priya much about her work lately, or about her personal life, for that matter. Whenever they did get a chance to chat, the conversations were usually dominated by discussion of Ethan. Maybe that was why Priya had been sounding a bit edgy lately. “You should have told me, I was here till nine.”
“Yeah,” Priya said listlessly. “It’s not like I had anywhere else to be last night anyway.” She carefully turned her face from Kelly, scrolling on her phone. “Andre and I are—I don’t know. We had a fight over the weekend and we haven’
t spoken since, but we never officially said we were breaking up.”
“I’m sorry, Pri. That sucks.”
“It’s whatever. We never officially said we were together anyway.” Priya laughed hollowly. But then she threw her hands up with sudden animation. “But I don’t even know what I did wrong! I went to see him do stand-up and when he asked what I thought of the show, all I did was tell him. It’s not my fault that all his race jokes were derivative. I thought he wanted honest feedback.” Kelly put a hand on her arm in solidarity.
“I’m too blunt, aren’t I?” Priya asked. “It’s why I chase everyone away. I thought I finally had someone who got me, who, like, got me, and knew that I mean well, and now I’ve screwed that up too.” She paused before murmuring, uncharacteristically quiet, “It just sucks. I really liked him, Kelly.”
“Let’s go out this weekend!” Kelly exclaimed. “We’ll drink away our woes and you can let other guys hit on you and make you feel better.” Her loathing for going out was unabated, but she wanted to cheer her friend up. “I’ll bring Ethan! You still haven’t properly met him.”
“Ooh, yes!” Priya said, some of her spark returning. “How is he with people staring at him creepily and asking him, like, five million questions in a row? Because I have a lot of questions.”
“He’ll love it. Maybe we can go after the bridesmaid dress fitting?” she said hopefully. “I’ll text you the time?”
Priya sighed deeply. “Can’t wait,” she said drily.
All that afternoon while Kelly was at work, she was thinking about getting home to Ethan. But once she got home, somehow the sight of him was not the balm she’d hoped for. Maybe it was because she didn’t truly feel as if she’d left work behind—her head swarmed with painful flashbacks of the day—her struggles with Confibot, Anita’s cutting words, Priya’s weariness. Robbie had made good on his threat, already demanding body parts from her throughout the afternoon, making her feel as if she were manning a butcher’s counter. The more she thought about the specificity of his blackmail, the more she fumed. He had to know what he was doing; after all, he knew exactly which parts had gone into Ethan, she recalled darkly, envisioning the reconstructed image on Robbie’s computer. This wasn’t just a direct attack on her progress with Confibot. This was an assault on Ethan. And to add insult to injury, he had paraded through the engineers’ floor that afternoon with Brahma, casually asking the robot to fetch him things and open doors for him with his too-many arms—only to “test the technology,” of course. Then whenever Robbie wasn’t contacting Kelly, Diane was, unleashing a slow yet relentless trickle of e-mails containing forwards of magazine articles profiling her chosen florist’s artistry, reminding her threateningly that if they didn’t put down a deposit soon they would lose their window with this man—this maestro who had single-handedly revitalized the carnation.
So what Kelly really needed from Ethan was a distraction, and he just wasn’t providing it. “How was your day?” she asked him as she lugged a bag of takeout through the door. She was getting home late so regularly now that their cooking nights had gone by the wayside.
“It was all right, how was yours?” He grabbed the food and began setting out plates.
“Hellacious. What did you do all day?”
“What do you mean, ‘hellacious’?” Ethan set down the napkins he was holding, looking at her with concern.
Kelly waved a hand. “It’s nothing, just a rough day. So what did you do?”
“Kelly, you have to tell me what happened. Maybe I can help.”
“I don’t want to talk about it!” That came out roughly. She backtracked. “I appreciate the offer, but it’s work stuff; there’s nothing you can do. I want to forget about it. Tell me something new.”
Ethan looked up a few degrees, searching through his brain. “Well, today in Syria, the rebels …”
Kelly poured herself a very full glass of wine, listening as he dutifully read her the news. She shouldn’t have snapped at Ethan, she knew. This was her time to put work behind her and finally enjoy a few peaceful hours at home. Time to just have a normal night in. She emptied half her glass in one gulp.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket like a hovering wasp: a demand from Robbie for an eyeball, shade 009. Kelly knew without even logging into the database that their lab had only created one set of irises in this shade because it was such a rare, crystal blue. And that set was currently on the other side of the kitchen, looking through the silverware drawer for a set of forks.
Kelly squeezed her own eyes shut, steadying herself. She was so tired. To build a new eye from scratch would take hours, and the last thing she wanted to do tonight was to drive back to the office and fire up the 3-D printer. In fact, at the moment she was feeling like she never wanted to go back to the office again. She wondered if anyone would hire her to sit at home and eat takeout for the next sixty-odd years.
“Do you want soy sauce?” Ethan turned and looked at her with those eyes—those eyes that she could so easily take out and use if she just powered him down temporarily. Immediately she cursed herself for even entertaining such a barbaric thought.
“Um, yeah,” she answered, a second too late.
Kelly couldn’t kid herself. This wasn’t just a normal night in. If it were, she wouldn’t be in this position in the first place. Priya had been clear today about what she thought Kelly should do, and anyone else looking in on the situation would say the same thing, anyone with a shred of rationality. The only thing that made sense was to get rid of Ethan. She could do it tonight. Her stresses over Robbie would dissipate—he would never be able to prove anything with her creation disassembled. The wedding would be called off, the growing difficulty of restraining her mom from planning too much would disappear, the tensions with her sister would dissolve. She could focus her energies where they were truly needed, on Confibot and her family and Priya. She could get a solid night’s sleep at some point before her exhausted brain rebelled and abandoned her for good.
As Ethan opened the refrigerator to pull out the filtered water pitcher, a flash of blue caught her eye from the fridge door. “What’s that?” She walked closer to take a look. There, tacked to the front of the fridge, was the blue ribbon she had won at her sixth-grade science fair, the one neither parent had attended.
Ethan smiled shyly. “I was wondering when you’d notice. I found it in an old box when I was straightening up the closet. I thought we should celebrate your achievement, Madame Scientist.” He circled his hand in front of him in a mock bow.
Here he was, pinning her ribbon to the fridge like a proud parent. Kelly wanted so badly to thank him, to throw her arms around his neck and kiss his sweet, smiling face. But instead she froze. She knew that this all had to stop, that every thoughtful gesture he made and every moment where she allowed herself to sink into his warm affection was a step down a ladder into a dark well. How foolish had she been to let things get this far? She couldn’t allow herself to enjoy this moment and tell him how happy he’d made her. Yet she couldn’t—she just couldn’t—get rid of him. She was trapped in the middle.
“I actually forgot something at the office. I have to head back,” she said, forcing herself to be cold, though the words felt like vomiting a knife.
Ethan’s happy face fell into confusion. “Oh, sure, no problem.” He hastily snatched the ribbon down, looking embarrassed. “I can keep dinner warm and wait up.”
“Don’t worry about it, I’m not hungry.” She hurried to the door to get her purse and shoes so she could leave without looking at him, before she could change her mind.
On Saturday, Kelly was so sleep-deprived from the extra hours she was now devoting to Robbie’s demands on top of Confibot that she woke in a fog so deep she briefly wondered if this was the afterlife. Now, as much as she longed to lounge at home all day in her favorite yoga pants, in which she had never actually done yoga, she pulled herself from bed. It was time for her and Priya’s appointment at the shop. She had barely set foot
in her mom’s boutique when an armload of fabric swatches marched toward her, succeeded by Diane.
“All right, now,” Diane said, clipped and professional. She was in her element, a bridal business blizzard, ready to Get. It. Done. “If we’re talking December, I’m thinking winter whites. Now, I know what you’re thinking: white is for the bride. And you are absolutely correct. But I saw this spread in I Do where the bridesmaids all wore white, but accessorized in an accent color. You know, sashes, statement necklaces, heels, all of that. It looked so cute and they did not take away from the bride at all, trust me, you’re just going to be gorgeous and it’s really all about how you pose people in pictures anyway, speaking of which, I’ve been talking to the photographer who shot the new McRib campaign. What do you think?”
As Diane thrust three virtually identical fabric samples into her face at that moment, Kelly wasn’t sure whether her mother wanted a verdict on the swatches or the McRib photographer, but she had mixed feelings on both. She blinked hard, trying to force herself to be fully awake, and asked if her mom had any coffee. She was going to need it.
Twenty minutes and five thousand shades of winter white later, Kelly checked her watch for the third time. Still no Priya. Pulling out her phone, she saw that she had a missed call. “And we must not lose sight of the fact that Kate Middleton served a fruitcake,” her mom was declaring.
“I’ve got to call Priya,” Kelly interrupted, “find out where she is.”
“All right, all right, and tell her to hurry. I need time to take close-ups of her complexion to integrate them into my vision board.”
Kelly dialed as she stepped outside. “Where are you? I’ve been watching my mom go through fabric samples for twenty minutes. She has more shades of white than Congress.”
“Don’t hate me, Kelly.” Priya’s voice came through tentatively. “But I’m not coming.”
“What? Did something happen?”
“No, I’m fine, it’s just that I thought about it last night, and I can’t do this. I can’t participate in this wedding.”