The room was empty. Rose was alone in the room. Rose was alone.
David had just gone. She was naked, mouth open, breath coming in shallow quivers. The arrow in her mind, unbending, pointed to where David had stood, where now a yellow wedge shone beneath the door. She didn’t know how long she stared before her hands began to move. They gathered her dress and sheathed her in its dark silk. She burst into the hallway, bumping a kissing couple, and ran to the hall window, throwing herself against the glass. David’s Nightbird was pulling away, onto the driveway and into the night.
“She’s drunk,” the boy said.
“Dean, be nice.”
Rose rushed past them and down into the throng. Her vision was blurring, turning red. Wrong, her mind told her. She pushed through the crowd. People stared. Forbidden. She was outside, tripping into the mud.
“Whoa, you OK?” someone asked.
Go back. The voice pursued her down the driveway, hammering her temples, turning the world — the world without David — into a smoldering inferno. No more tiny halos. The sky was red, the night burned.
A car’s headlights blinded her. A horn blared. She stumbled into the woods, wiping at her eyes. She was lost. Her arrow spun, searching for her boy, but couldn’t find him. And every moment away from him was wrong.
She felt as if her head would explode. Her mind wrestled with the impossible tangle. She was made for David; she was not made for David. She must return to him. She must please him. To be with him displeased him. She was impossible; life impossible.
She didn’t know how long she wandered. Dawn came with horrible glaring sunlight. How had she ever thought it pretty? She wished for dark clouds. And it was then she came through the brush and saw the still black water and made a choice, her first real choice: to jump.
“Dad! Dad!”
Charlie guided her back into Thaddeus’s lab. His father was nowhere in sight. He laid her gently on the couch. There were blankets in the closet. He wrapped her up, letting the water soak into the musty fabric. Charlie checked the thermostat. Dead. The power was still out.
What she needed was heat, hot water. The Bunsen burners ran on gas, but with the power out, he needed a spark.
“Stay there.”
Her gaze was empty, her skin the color of fresh newspaper. Please, God, please don’t let her die.
There was a box of matches in a kitchen drawer. The burner lit on the first try, the flame prancing above the metal tubing. He grabbed a tumbler from the shelf and filled it with tap water. Not big enough to put her feet in, but he could tuck it under the blankets to warm her up. Her breathing was raspy, which could mean pneumonia. But at least she was breathing.
Charlie sat on the floor, his face inches from hers.
“What’s your name?”
No response.
“Why were you up there?”
Nothing.
“Can you hear me?”
Bubbles rose in the bell-shaped tumbler. Charlie wrapped the hot glass in a towel to keep it from burning her and tucked it by her feet.
“Let me know if that’s too hot. But we’ve got to keep you warm. I don’t want you to freeze to death.” Words worked their way out of him, like the bubbles in the boiling water. “This is what they used to do in the 1800s, you know, except then they’d use coals in a hot pan. Did you ever go to Old Sturbridge Village? It’s one of those historic re-creation places. I learned that there.”
One hand fell loose from the blankets. The wrinkled, icy fingertips had flecks of polish clinging to the nails. Charlie stopped babbling. His throat felt full of thick bile. He coughed. At least her trembling had stopped.
A tangle of maroon hair clung to her neck. She was beautiful. And somehow familiar.
“Have . . . have we met before?”
“Blue,” she said, her voice almost too quiet to hear.
“What did you just say?”
“Blue,” she said again, still staring at the ceiling. “Blue jacket.”
Charlie looked down. He was wearing his old blue parka.
“Yes.”
“In the road.”
“. . . yes,” Charlie said.
“And I saw you . . . lying.”
“Lying where?”
Her words were dreamy and slow, like a sleepwalker’s. Maybe she was asleep. Or in a trance.
“Lying in the road,” she said. “My second day.” Her eyes met his, flashing emerald. “Charlie.”
And then he remembered. The car running him off the road. The girl coming to see if he was all right. Her red hair.
“Rose.”
A smile, just barely visible, tickled the corner of her mouth.
“That’s me.”
And so they met. Again.
Charlie pulled a sweatshirt over his damp torso. The dry clothes felt good. His skin was chapped and red, as if burned by the cold. Water drummed in the shower. Charlie tugged on heavy socks and tried not to picture the movements of the beautiful naked girl suggested by the changing pitch of ringing droplets.
Her dress lay in a knot by the bathroom door, reminding him of the black leathery seaweed that lined stony beaches. She’d worn no shoes, and her feet and knees had been caked with mud, as if she’d been wandering the woods for days. A half-crazed refugee from a gala event.
Flashlight in his teeth, Charlie shimmied under the generator with the cobwebs and old hornets’ nests. He popped out the old transistors, the glass brown and smudged, and replaced them. He crawled back out and flipped the flat switch at the back. There was a noise like something heavy dropping inside the metal casing, and the fan began to sputter and turn. A few cartoonish wheezes, and the generator was pumping again. The lights in the house came on, and he could hear the furnace turn over in the basement.
Charlie threw his hands in the air like a prizefighter.
Rose was in the living room, wrapped in a towel.
“Oh,” Charlie said, averting his eyes. She was awfully curvy, and that towel wasn’t much cover. “Sorry.”
She wore Thaddeus’s ancient Sony headphones, the thick cord corkscrewing to the stereo.
“These are wonderful!” she shouted. “You can’t hear anything but the music!”
Charlie turned down the volume. “Yeah. They’re pretty retro.”
She removed the phones and ran her fingers along the book spines.
“What are these?”
“Those are my dad’s,” Charlie said. “Well, some of them are my dad’s technical books. He loves them, but they’re a little dry for me.”
The shower had completely revived her. Her cheeks were pink. She was pink all over. Her eyes were sparkling, though slightly unfocused. Her bare foot tapped the carpet.
She took down a book and opened it sideways, like a laptop, her brow lifting in wonder. She turned the spine so the text was readable, and jabbed the page with her finger. She scowled and jabbed again.
“What’s wrong with this?”
“What do you mean?”
“The links don’t work.”
“There aren’t links. It’s a book.”
She dropped it to the floor.
“What’s that?” she pointed.
“And that?”
“A La-Z-Boy.”
“And that?”
“A toaster oven. You don’t have one at your house?”
“No, ours was different. Ours . . .” The word hung on her lips. Her toe stopped tapping. She teetered once and dropped to her knees.
Charlie crouched beside her. “Rose! Are you OK?”
“Ours,” she said, blinking.
“Whose?”
The clouds cleared from her eyes, passing as quickly as a summer shower. She grasped his sweatshirt, a smile breaking across her face. “Do you have beer?”
“Excuse me?”
“Or cigarettes? I want to try them.”
“Uh, no,” he said. “Sorry.”
“Damn.” She bit her lip. “Damn. Shit. Fuck. I like swearing.”
Charlie examined her eyes. If she was concussed, one pupil would be larger than the other. “Are you OK?”
She stared into the middle distance, not seeing him. “I can do whatever I want! I’m disconnected.” She tapped her temple. “And malfunctioning. I’ll probably shut down automatically in a few moments.”
“Rose, you need to go to the hospital.” Charlie got to his feet. “You’re concussed.”
“That’s not what I want,” she said. Her eyes searched. “I only want to do what I want.”
“Uh-huh. . . .” Charlie backed toward the phone. “Just stay there. I’m going to call an ambulance.”
Rose stood with purpose. She grabbed his belt.
“Have you ever done this?”
“W-what?”
She kissed him.
In a lifetime of kisses, some must be better than others, and the odds are low — for any of us — that the first will be the best. But few have had a better first kiss than Charlie Nuvola.
He sank into her lips, like an ocean of silk. The smell of her skin, the warmth of her breath, the damp strands of hair that tickled his brow. He felt her breasts beneath the towel, the arc of her hips, the smooth warm pressure of her leg between his knees. Charlie fell apart and dissolved inside her. They were a solution of hair and breath and skin and terry cloth. He floated and dipped and re-formed with every sweep of her tongue, and just as his body completed its transformation from water to fire to lightning to sound, she pulled away.
His lips refused to form words. They’d found a new purpose.
“No sparks,” she said.
Charlie shook his head, apology in his eyes.
She smiled. “No, no. That’s a good thing.”
She kissed him again, opening her mouth. Rose felt him shudder under her touch. She took her time, enjoying herself, experimenting. Her lips lingered on his as she pulled away again, her eyes closed happily. She hugged herself, lost in her own enjoyment.
Charlie shivered. He’d gone numb. “I . . . think I need to sit down.” He steadied himself against the bookcase, his thoughts clumping like dough in a bowl. “I thought . . . you . . . uh, I thought you and David were . . .”
The smile dropped from her lips. “David?”
Her eyes tightened, as if facing a too-bright light. Rose fell to the couch and began to sob. Charlie stared, dumbstruck.
That was how Thaddeus found them when he came home.
Rose perched on Charlie’s bed. He’d given her a sweatshirt and some of his old jeans to wear. The cuffs bunched around her feet. Her skin still prickled with cold, despite the hot shower, and her neck and shoulders ached. But all Rose noticed was the silence. No voice in her head.
The jump had, as she’d known it would, severed her link to Sakora. The break had wreaked havoc with her physiology. Her emotional center was destabilized. Joy one moment, despair the next, reeling in freedom, then crushed by loss. She was alone, cut off, no sense of what to do, what anything meant, or even who she was. Her body was desperate for touch, yet repelled. She was hot and cold, exhausted but restless.
In other words, heartbroken.
She looked around and saw objects she didn’t recognize. Pictures of strange places, a model skeleton of an unidentifiable creature. But when she sent her questions, no answers came back. No one told her to cover up after her shower. No one said she shouldn’t sit on a strange boy’s bed. Rose was free. But rather than relief, she felt alone. Until now she’d been connected to something, and for better or worse that connection was all she knew. Now she was on her own.
Her feelings were like . . . water, just before it boils.
“I think my dad’s chill now,” Charlie said, coming into the room. “That took some explaining.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That you’re a friend who’s going through a bad breakup.” Charlie stood at his desk, afraid to come closer. “That’s right, isn’t it? You broke up with David?”
She nodded.
“So is that why you . . . ?”
“Why I what?”
Charlie cleared his throat. “Why you tried to kill yourself?”
“I wasn’t trying to kill myself.” Her eyes ached, as if straining in a glare. She was grateful for the quiet, dark room, and for quiet, dark Charlie. He was so different from David. “But I don’t know what I’m going to do without him.”
“Well, I don’t think throwing yourself in the lake is the answer.”
“I don’t have a better one.”
“What happened?”
“He left me.”
Charlie scuffed the carpet with his toe, leaving a track. “That’s the worst thing a person can do.”
Rose looked up. “Is it? I thought it might be.”
“Maybe you could find someone else?”
Rose shook her head. “I’m not . . . maybe some girls can change like that. But I can’t. I’m not like them. I’m not normal.”
They were silent a moment. It was raining, and the trees shivered silently in the window.
Charlie said, “Listen, I had someone tell me I was . . . not normal. I know how that feels. It feels like a door closing.”
She nodded. “Yes, it is like that.”
“And you feel totally alone. Cut off from everything.”
Rose leaned forward, her hair falling in a curtain around her face. “Yes. Cut off.”
She stared at him so intently, Charlie had to look away.
“I’m sorry I kissed you. I was confused.”
“That’s fine,” he said too quickly. “I got that.”
“It’s a malfunction.”
Charlie sucked in through his teeth. “You keep saying that. You know that’s not right, don’t you? I really think you might need a doctor.”
Rose blushed. “I don’t need a doctor. I’m . . . a Companion.”
The word bounced in his brain, off an old definition that didn’t fit. She didn’t mean truest pal.
“You . . . you’re joking.”
She shook her head.
Charlie stared. The tension in his body evaporated. His shoulders slackened. He took a careful step forward. Her pale skin looked soft, seemed warm. He wanted to touch her — for science — but stopped himself. “Can I . . . ?”
“I suppose if I could still shock you, I would have already.” Rose blushed.
He took her arm gingerly. He squeezed her fingertips, rubbed his thumbs up her forearm. Her skin felt real, soft and pliant. Even the rigid structures beneath felt like real bones. And yet there was something wrong. He felt hard bumps at regular intervals, and knots of what seemed like wiring at her joints. Where her ears connected to her skull there was a tiny seam, and even her hair itself grew from her scalp in a grid, like a doll’s. But only under close scrutiny did she appear to be anything but perfectly human.
Charlie was stunned by the careful, loving detail Rose’s creators had put into her features, right down to minute imperfections. Especially the dark oval on the edge of her right palm — a mole. Her skin seemed to be warming as he touched it, and when he looked up, he saw that her eyes were closed. The planes of her face were calm, her lips slightly parted.
Charlie dropped her hand.
Her eyes opened in surprise. Rose breathed lightly, as if startled. Charlie stood. “You’re . . . impressive.”
“Oh. Thank you.”
“It’s really unbelievable,” he said, staring. “When I saw the catalog, I had no idea.”
“Catalog?”
“The Sakora catalog. I got one from this therapist at school.”
Rose’s eyes widened. “Oh. So you must be disassociated, too.”
Charlie looked away. “Well. Yeah, I guess so.”
“So does that mean you have a Companion?”
“No,” Charlie said, his ears burning. “We . . . I thought it was kind of silly.”
“Silly?”
“Yeah. I mean, it’s kind of crude, don’t you think? Electric shocks?”
“Well, it’s not all about electric shocks.” Rose fiddled with the sweatshirt’s drawstrings. “It’s very complex, the relationship that develops. It requires time and patience and an involved understanding.” Her features darkened. “You know, it’s not like . . . flipping on a light switch.”
“So what, you just have some system to tell you how to be in love?” Charlie shook his head. “It’s like training a dog. You’d have to be an idiot to —”
Rose stood. “Excuse me, David is not an idiot.”
Her tone startled him, but he quickly regained himself. A real girl talking to him that way would have destroyed him. “Well, you’re treating him like one, expecting him to learn by punishment and reward.”
“We were”— she choked on the word —“are in love.”
“Regulated lust is not love.”
“Why should you know any better? Have you ever been in love?”
Her knowing tone stung him. “I thought you things were supposed to be pleasant.”
“Not to you.”
“Oh, right. Because I’m not your assignment.”
“If you were, I’d still think you’re rude.” She stood, hands balled into fists.
“But you’d have to say you love me.” Charlie pointed. “And that would be a lie.”
“A lie? Then what do you call this?”
“An argument!”
“Well, it’s very interesting!”
They faced off in stormy silence, stunned. They’d exploded so suddenly. The air crackled. Her full lips parted, her breathing excited. Charlie had to tear his eyes away.
At last Rose shook herself, ran her hands through her hair, and cleared her throat.
“Thank you for the clothes, Charlie. Good-bye.”
“Where are you going?”
She brushed past him into the hall. “Back to David. I’m sure after a night to think about it, he’s realized his actions were hurtful.”
“I wouldn’t count on it.”
She glanced at him over her shoulder, eyes like flaming arrows. “That’s a difference of opinion.” She grabbed her jacket.
“Fine, go,” Charlie said. “You were starting to get annoying, anyway.”
“And you, Charlie, are a sour jelly bean.”
Around the south side of the lake, cutting through the back lawn toward the house, she returned like a homing pigeon. The damp grass squished beneath her sneakers as she approached the line of privet bushes masking the property fence. Someone was speaking on the other side. Rose approached a small gap in the foliage and peered through. Mr. and Mrs. Sun were standing on the back patio. With them was a man in a suit with gray wispy hair. Their voices were low, conspiratorial.
“Has this ever happened before?” Mrs. Sun asked.
“Unfortunately I can’t divulge that information, but I can say that incompatibility is not entirely unprecedented. Our screening process is thorough, but some clients simply aren’t suited for the program.”
“Our son wasn’t suited for your program?” Mr. Sun crossed his arms. “Sounds like your program doesn’t work, period.”
“As you were informed, we are still in the trial stages.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Again, I can offer a replacement. . . .”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Mrs. Sun said. “I don’t think David’s ready for that.”
“In which case your money will be refunded as soon as we recover the unit.”
“Uh-uh,” Mr. Sun said. “I want my money back now.”
“Sir, the unit is under your charge, and as your contract clearly states —”
“Listen, forget the money,” Mrs. Sun said. “What will happen to her — it — when you recover it?”
The man with the wispy hair took a breath. “She’ll be decommissioned.”
Rose swallowed.
“You can’t . . . reassign her?”
“Babe, who cares?” Mr. Sun said. “Let them sell it for scrap.”
“I can’t help it. She — it was so lifelike.”
Quietly, Rose retreated through the trees, toward the road. By the time she reached the pavement, she was running.
Charlie opened the door. Rose had pulled up the hood to hide her face. Her hands were stuffed in her pockets, and she was trembling.
“Can I, uh . . . can I stay here?” Her eyes searched his pleadingly.
Charlie swallowed. “Sure,” he said, stepping aside. “Come on in.”