“Wouldn’t it make sense if we were drawn together for a reason?” she had asked. She told him—insisted, actually—to sneak a look into his parents’ room late at night. Maybe it won’t be true, she said, but either way, you have to know, don’t you?
So that night at three A.M., he’d crept down the silent, echoing hall to the master bedroom to find out the truth. He’d cracked the door open, which thankfully didn’t creak or moan—nothing in his house made noise—and peered in. His father was sound asleep in the king bed. His mother was standing up against the wall, her head tilted slightly down, shut off for the night to reactivate in the morning.
It was all coming back, even the memory wiping—shortly after he’d walked into their bedroom, his father had taken him to the family doctor, and then it all went blurry, his past reinvented.
Gideon shook his head vehemently.
“No. That’s not possible. No way.”
He heard himself echoing exactly what he’d said before. And he’d been wrong. She looked pained to make him so upset, but her voice was firm.
This was the reason rental Ordinarias were always sent across the country from renter to renter: Some visceral memory, like a moment, or even a sound, could bring it all back. Gideon’s father had been very, very careful about it in business—but when it came to his own son, not careful enough.
“I’m half-Ordinaria,” she said.
He closed his eyes.
She finished: “And so are you.”
“How is that even possible?” he yelled.
“Brief, unfortunate flirtation with installing a reproductive system in the first-gen models. Only a handful of those models exist. And there are only two of us half-Ordinaria that I know of. We’re freaks.”
He hung his head, devastated. For a minute they just sat there, him processing and her waiting; the only noise was the rush of cars wetly speeding past them down the damp road.
Finally he said, “I’m sorry I hung out with those guys.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m sorry you did too.”
“What can I do to make it up to you?”
She thought about it. Then she said, softly: “Don’t forget again and leave me alone here.”
Cerebrally, Gideon knew he should be wary of this girl who’d seemingly come out of nowhere. But in his heart, he knew that they were allies and needed each other to survive. At least for now.
He nodded, grave. “I promise.”
They were both silent for a while.
“So then,” he said, “you’ve just had that screwdriver in your purse for, like, years?”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
He laughed a little. “That’s weird.”
She slowly turned to look at him, incredulous.
“That’s weird?”
“I see your point.”
Then they just sat there on the curb, all the shared history back, feeling as comfortable with each other as they’d felt uncomfortable with each other twenty minutes before, staring out at the highway that seemed to go nowhere.
“I hate it here,” he whispered.
“Me too.”
“You know, we don’t actually have to do anything about this. I can pretend I still don’t remember. Maybe I don’t want to choose to be different.”
She shook her head. “In that case, congratulations, because you’re more like Jason Tous than you think you—”
Goddamn it, the doorbell’s ringing.
“—are.”
“Be there in a sec!” I yell. The response is a wordless shriek of fear, like a time-traveling Puritan who just saw her first car.
I click Post, then trudge to the door and open it to find Avery on the stoop, looking petrified, clutching four dresses on hangers underneath clear dry-cleaner cellophane and an industrial-sized makeup bag. She seems taller. It takes a second before I realize it’s because she’s not forced into crone position by a Jansport containing four math textbooks and the entire Western canon.
“I’m freaking out,” she says in the measured tone of someone trying to stop freaking out. She walks past me inside, throws the dresses and makeup on the sofa, then sprawls out on her back on the floor.
“Fuck,” she says. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“Okay, calm down.”
“I don’t know how to do this,” she says in a monotone, staring blankly at the ceiling. “I’m overthinking it even though I know that’s just making it worse.”
“Dude, it’s just a dance.”
“I watched some YouTube tutorials on how to do a smoky eye, and now I look like a raccoon.”
“Noooo! You look like Margot Tenenbaum!” I am an unconvincing liar.
She props herself up on her elbows and glares at me. “Don’t undermine my intelligence.”
“Okay, you’re right, sorry. You look like a raccoon. A pretty raccoon.”
Avery gets up and jokingly starts fake-going through the garbage, making raccoon noises, laughing. I double over, cracking up.
“Hang on a second. Dawn has makeup remover somewhere.” I retreat to the bathroom and rummage around in the medicine cabinet until I find it.