Amy's hands hovered motionless over the houses she'd just imagined. To her horror, her eyes filled with tears. She had the strangest sense that if she moved a single inch, if she so much as made a sound, the tears would overwhelm her. So she remained perfectly still and silent. She stayed this way, frozen and quiet, until Javier gently turned her face toward his with a finger. Then the spell was broken, and she blinked and the tears rolled down, and she turned away again.
"Wow," he repeated. "Just, uh… Damn. You cry just like a real girl."
Her indignation put an immediate hold on her tears. "I am a real girl."
"No, no, I mean – it's emergent. Not a plug-in. Nobody told you to start crying."
She blinked wetly. "Why would someone tell me to start crying?"
Javier shrugged. "I don't know. Why do humans do anything they do?" He stood up quickly and made for the trees bordering the playground.
Amy stared after him for a moment. Then she scrubbed at her eyes with the heel of her hand and focused again on her sculpture. It looked so ugly, now. Her first house closely resembled a pile of dog crap on the sidewalk. She moved to wipe it away.
"No, don't." Javier reappeared behind her. He dumped two fistfuls of twigs and pine cones and dead pine needles in the centre of the sandbox, where she'd marked out the park.
"What are you doing?" Amy asked.
"My job." Javier picked up one pinecone with his good hand and screwed it into the sand until it stood upright. "Planting trees."
Amy smiled. She blinked the rest of her tears back. "Thank you," she said. "I was just thinking that there was something missing."
"You don't say." Javier jammed a twig into the sand in front of her little house.
Amy nodded. "You can be my landscape architect."
"You can't afford me." He sucked his teeth and shook his head. "You gringos. Always trying to make us into your gardeners."
Amy's jaw dropped. "That's not true at all! I didn't–"
"Make with the condos, lady, before I let the kudzu run wild all over this thing."
"OK, OK, I'm building!" She paused. "What's a kudzu?"
Javier shook his head again, more softly this time. "Hopeless. You're completely hopeless." But he kept planting.
In the end, their city blossomed in fits and starts, and they talked about where to put things, and whether sidewalks were implied or not (Javier maintained that she should draw separate lines to indicate them, whereas she thought that any self-respecting city would have them already), and if decorative fountains were too wasteful. But when they finished, it looked real and lived-in, and not like a school project. Amy sat on her knees admiring it as Javier stood and stretched.
"I feel like I should be tired, but I'm not," she said.
"Of course you're not." Javier pointed to a broad band of pink in the eastern sky. "Sun's rising."
Amy stood up. "Does it really make that much of a difference?"
"Definitely," Javier said. "If it weren't so damn cold, we could go up to the Arctic and stay awake for months."
Amy tried to imagine living up there amid all the snow. "I think I prefer sleeping."
Javier nodded. "Me too. Let's go back to bed."
"You mean the back of the car?"
"No, I mean the darling little B and B I booked us into. Of course I mean the back of the car." He began crossing the playground, then walked backwards to face her. "Haven't you ever slept in the back of a car before?"
Amy jogged up to meet him. "Not for a whole night."
"Well, that wasn't a whole night, either, so it doesn't count."
"It does too. I fully intended to sleep there the whole night."
"So why'd you leave?"
Amy stopped short. She looked at Javier. He folded his arms and raised his chin. "I just couldn't sleep," she said.
Liar.
"Why'd you come find me?" Amy asked before Granny could say anything further.
"I couldn't sleep, either." Javier turned and continued walking. "You defrag to wake the dead. All those little twitches and moans."
"I was not moaning."
"Oh, so now my voice detection is off, huh? Just all of a sudden since I met you."
"Maybe it's been off all along, and nobody's ever told you."
"Trust me, I know a m–" He stopped short, and she bumped into him. He stood in a stream of sunlight trickling between the trees, eyes shut, letting the brightness wash over his face. Then his eyes opened, and he smiled down at Amy. "Your turn."