How to Repair a Mechanical Heart

Chapter Twenty-Six


Her dad left when we were twelve. I knew he was going to leave, just like she probably knew Abel was going to leave sooner or later, but we both know the unspoken rule about comforting someone. You pretend you had no clue what was coming, no privileged outsider’s view. I sat on her yellow bedspread that day with a stiff arm around her and my head bowed like people do at funerals, letting her know I was sharing her sadness. “You don’t have to stay,” she sniffled, but she knew I would. That’s what we do.

“Do you want to go home?”

“I don’t know.”

She’s running with me. We’re running to nowhere, down the wooded path that winds away from our campground.

“Do you want to go after him?”

“No.”

“Are you sure? We could find the bus station.”

The fic writes itself: I track him down at the crowded station, shout his name over the very last call for his bus. He makes me work for forgiveness when I catch up to him, but only for a minute. We fall into each other’s arms and the make-up kiss goes on and on, and all the travelers set down their suitcases to clap for the triumph of love.

I stagger to a stop by a giant cottonwood and close my eyes.

“No,” I tell her. “What’s the point?”

She watches me carefully.

“Okay, well. I’m up for anything,” she says. “Just tell me what you want to do.”

She waits in the near-dark. She’s wearing sneakers with her pajama pants and the sleeves of her black t-shirt are rolled up to her shoulders, like she’s ready for a fight. I think of Sim. Standing outside Lagarde’s hut with a knife pointed to his right temple, where the evolution chip was installed. Take it out, he’d begged Lagarde. How do people live like this?

When she refused, he’d picked up a thick long branch, like this one, and beat it against a tree until it shattered into splinters.

Like this.

Bec watches. She doesn’t try to stop me. She just lets me pummel the poor old tree like a Boy Scout gone savage, smashing one branch after another until I’m out of branches and out of breath and I give up the fight, collapsing limp against the ancient bark.

I hear a distant trill. My phone.

“That’s him,” Bec says.

She sounds so firm and hopeful that I believe it too. I yank the phone out of my pocket and answer fast, in the dark. If I’d checked the screen first, I would’ve seen the warning.

HOME CALLING.

“Brandon?”

Damn.

“Uh. Hey!” I force a smile into my voice. “Everything’s great. Can I call you back?”

“No, actually,” Dad says.

“Brandon,” says Mom, in the same tone she used when I was twelve and she found the Tiger Beat stash in my closet. “Is there something you’d like to tell us?”