He shrugs.
“I was on the decorations committee. So much drama, I can’t even.” (From overhearing snippets of conversation since freshman year, it seems that Ashley has a chronic condition of not being able to even.)
He glances down at her, then looks away and rolls his eyes in sort of a fond way, with an enigmatic little laugh. She links her arm through his and starts pulling him away from me like a determined little tugboat wearing Tory Burch flats. He turns back, once, and points at me.
“Hey. Don’t forget. Sam Kieth.”
“I wo—”
“You’re such a dork,” Ashley tells him sweetly, stepping on my words.
“You’re a dork,” he teases her back, their flirting irritatingly effortless. They start walking away, linking up with a bunch of other popular kids, Gideon looking irritatingly at home with them.
But then he turns around and looks back at me one more time.
Chapter 8
The Ordinaria
Part 2
Submitted by Scarface_Epstein
It was week four of the Miss Ordinaria control test at Pembrooke. Fifteen beautiful teenage robots walking around in the school uniform, pausing and just standing in the dark common room every night and reactivating when the students came in, had become normal-ish. More than that, it was beginning to feel less like a crazy science experiment than a mass craving for the latest smartphone—exactly what Gideon’s dad had hoped for.
It started with the douche-bags. Jason Tous, one particularly obnoxious senior whose parents were massively generous supporters of an unpopular political party—and, worse, he wore a really stupid jacket—had been boasting for weeks.
“My parents say if I get a twenty-three hundred on my SATs, I can get a down payment for one of those. Whichever one I want. Maybe even a custom model.”
The other guys looked insanely jealous. Then they all glanced in what they thought was a subtle way over at Gideon. He knew they were thinking: That quiet loser has what we all want, and he doesn’t even care.
Gideon pretended he didn’t see them and secretly checked his phone under his desk.
Inbox (1)
It was from an address he didn’t recognize: [email protected]. This wasn’t the typical format of student e-mail addresses. Gideon’s was [email protected].
He opened it. It read:
You’re not what you think you are.
That was it. End of e-mail. Gideon read it again and still couldn’t make anything of it.
He glanced around the room to see if someone was messing with him. Mr. Reed stood at the blackboard, two or three kids everyone hated listening intently, the rest zoning out, and Jason Tous talking quietly about a freshman’s weird vagina. Just calculus as usual.
*
Eventually Gideon started trying to dodge Ashbot, but she was tough to lose, considering she was designed to stay only a certain distance from him unless he pressed a tiny sensor on the small of her back. And he was not going anywhere near the small of her back. Not that he wasn’t tempted.
One afternoon, as she followed him to AP Chemistry, it occurred to him that the mysterious e-mail might have something to do with her—maybe someone in Ashbot’s past was trying to intimidate him. Then again, it would mean that his dad had lied, that Ashbot wasn’t actually custom-made for Gideon and fresh out of the box. He had to admit: It wasn’t implausible, considering his dad was full of shit regularly.
But—ugh, did he have to ask her? It was so awkward. Finally he bit the bullet. As the late bell rang, he turned to her.
“Um—this is sort of a weird question, but before this, were you a rental?”
Ashbot froze, reconfigured her face—one of those uncanny moments where she looked genuinely taken by surprise, not like her machinery was processing and forming an adequate response.
“Yeah,” she replied flippantly. “But your dad wiped me. I don’t remember shit.”
(Ever since she and Gideon had the language discussion, she’d been picking it up quite well and sounded nearly normal.)
Naturally, he thought, all that stuff his dad said about making a custom one just for him was bullshit. He should’ve known.
“Oh. So you don’t remember who, um . . . your . . .”
Ashbot shrugged and shook her head. “Nope.”
Gideon felt awful—he didn’t want her to think he was one of those guys who judged rentals. Those guys were the worst. They’d check out the available Ordinarias and then request their full history just to make sure they weren’t getting into any weird territory. Anything unusual on that list, good or bad—NBA players, Forbes-list CEOs, famous gay actors who need low-maintenance beards—would make or break whether they rented her.
Jeez . . . since when did he actually care about them so much?
“Why do you ask, anyways?” Ashbot cocked her head.