Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful

Honestly, I was spouting almost random words to fill up the space between us; I wasn’t looking for an answer to this question. I already had a theory as to why Gabriel had finally noticed me after basically looking through me for years. (Even back when we were fourteen, when he’d still been short and really skinny and I’d had breasts, he hadn’t been interested.) But when they’d rebuilt my left eye, the orbit had changed shape a little bit; I’m talking about just the ordinary plastic surgery when the surgeon had to put it back together, not fancy stuff like they did with the rest of me. Then, because the left was different, they’d changed the right eye socket to match so it didn’t look like the two halves of my face were arguing with each other. When this was done, something in the overall appearance of my eyes and eyebrows had been subtly altered for the better. I don’t think it was on purpose, but when I healed, my eyes were a little wider and more perfectly shaped, and I was a little bit prettier.

So … Gabriel’s new interest was easily explained: I’d been attractive when I got back to school, and he assumed I was just growing into my looks, because as far as anyone at St. Anne’s knew, I had only broken my legs and my jaw in the accident. It felt like cheating, getting his interest this way, but why should I be ashamed of finding a silver lining?

We lapsed into silence as, up on the screen—or rather, hovering in the air outside our car, so crisp and hyper-detailed that they were almost more real than reality—a parade of superheroes in the coming attractions threw 3D stuff at each other, stuff like cars and horses and battleships and, I am not kidding you, even an orca that appeared to spin around right in front of our windshield, spraying water from its toothy smile onto the glass. I laughed involuntarily and made a sort of choking snort—a sound my friend Lilly had kindly pointed out was like a barfing dog. (Laughs are weird sometimes; it’s something to do with the partial larynx, or maybe the way the meshline travels through it. I forget exactly.)

“Are you okay?” Gabriel asked, because of, you know, the barfing dog sound.

“Um, yeah—taco went down the wrong way,” I lied.

He held my drink out chivalrously, and as I took it, his hand brushed against mine, sending a shiver up my arm.

“Is, uh, is Milla short for something?”

I dread this question, because the answer usually takes too long—but this time it didn’t. I said, “I’m named for St. Ludmilla, who lived in the Czech Republic like twelve hundred years ago—”

“Wait,” he said, interrupting, “are you talking about St. Ludmilla of Bohemia?”

I was thrown. “Yes.”

“I know her.”

“What, like personally?” The sarcasm slipped out. It wasn’t intentional. I didn’t want anything to get in the way of the genuine interest that had appeared in his eyes.

“I know who she is,” he said. He was shaking his head in mild disbelief. “St. Ludmilla.”

I stared at him a moment. “You are seriously one of the only people who has ever known who she was.”

“She brought Christianity to her people,” he continued, very pleased with himself. And even better, our conversation no longer felt awkward.

“Well, she tried,” I said. “Then her daughter-in-law had her strangled.”

“You mostly don’t get to be a saint by living happily ever after,” he pointed out, with what struck me as a rather sophisticated worldview.

“That’s true. Getting murdered helps a lot. Are you Catholic?” We recognized saints in the Episcopal church, but he seemed unusually knowledgeable.

“My mom’s sort of Catholic, but the Episcopal school was less expensive and she says it’s basically the same. My grandmother thinks I’m going to school with a bunch of dangerous nonbelievers, so she made me memorize the life stories of a hundred saints before I started at St. Anne’s.”

“And Ludmilla was one of them?” There were thousands and thousands of saints. This was a huge and unlikely coincidence. Had he secretly been researching me? Had he been as in love with me all this time as I’d been with him? When I’d imagined him touching me with those hands, had he been imagining the same thing?

“My grandma’s from the Czech Republic, so it was, like,mostly saints from around there that she wanted me to focus on,” he explained. “I liked St. Ludmilla. She was cool.”

Ah. I felt a stab of disappointment. Only a coincidence. Still, the ice had broken. Gabriel was gazing at me and I fancied there were hidden depths in him that I hadn’t suspected.

“You have really pretty eyes,” he told me.

I smiled, and mentally I thanked Dr. Watanabe for his facial reconstruction skills.

On the screen were more movie trailers, and on every side of the car were rows of other cars, all the occupants trying hard to block out the rest of the audience and pretend, like I was doing, that they were the only people in the world at that moment.

His comment about my eyes, and the way he kept glancing over at me, sent hormones racing into my bloodstream in poorly regulated batches. He was into me, I realized. More than I could have hoped. My body translated this knowledge into an unbearable level of excitement and an equal portion of terror. The adrenaline and make-out hormones were sliding past each other like aggressive rival gang members. All the parts beyond the meshline were beginning to give me that weird tingle/hotness/overload feeling that meant the fake parts didn’t know what to do with everything I was throwing at them. I started to freak out. What had I been thinking, coming on this date with him? My body, my voice, any part of me might do something drastically wrong—

“Do you care about the movie, Milla?” Gabriel asked. The trailers had ended and the theater was dark as the movie began. His voice had gone all whispery. He was leaning toward me so his breath brushed my cheek.

Holy shit, he was really into me. Something was going to happen right now, unless I stopped it. But Gabriel was giving me his full attention, those dark eyes, his jawline, the curve of his shoulder muscles beneath his shirt, his hands …

“No, I don’t care about the movie,” I found myself whispering back.

He turned down the volume, inched closer, and said, “Hey.”

Stop him! I yelled at myself. Get out of here!

I did neither of these things. Instead I sat rooted to the seat as he gently put his lips on mine.

Gabriel Phillips was kissing me. Alone in my hospital room, alone in my bedroom at home, I had seen this moment a thousand different ways. But now it was real: lips, pressure, warmth.

When the kiss was over, my mind replayed it obsessively on an auto-loop. I might have been staring at him in mute shock for a full minute.

He didn’t notice. “Do you want to get in the backseat?” he asked, with that combination of excitement and nervousness that I used to see on Jonas’s face when we were first boyfriend and girlfriend. “We could, I don’t know …”

“Okay.” My body was telling me to Run! but it was also, very much, telling me to stay.

It’s not like I’ve had so many boyfriends (I’ve had two, if you count the one from middle school), but I knew what was what with the kissing and whatnot, even if I hadn’t done any of it in ages. (Jonas had moved away, and then I’d been in the hospital for almost a solid year. Believe me, no one wanted to kiss you there.) I liked making out, and the sexy hormones were winning out over the adrenaline, even as the parts behind the meshline continued to send me uncomfortable warning signals.

In the semidarkness, I climbed between the front seats into the wide backseat, and Gabriel slithered after me, laughing as he pulled his legs through. One of his feet hit the radio and it switched from the movie soundtrack to a talk radio station.

“… but it’s about our definition of what it means to be human. What did the Lord intend for us? What was His vision for humanity in this world?” a smooth, slightly Southern male voice was saying, filling the car. Half preacher, half rabble-rouser. “What did He withhold from us? He made us in His image. We know that. This, this ordinary human body is in His image, then.” He sounded young, but his voice made me think of liquor and cigars. He emphasized words I would never have expected him to emphasize, as though he paid more attention to the cadence of his sentences than their content. “We can’t go tinkering around and making fake hearts and livers and growing new stuff Jesus never wanted to see—”

“Ah, sorry.” Gabriel was obviously embarrassed. He hurriedly reached forward and switched the radio back to the movie track.

When he got to the backseat, he leaned over to kiss me again. It was a shock to see myself move out of reach, but that’s exactly what I did. A sense of dread was spreading through me, the real parts and the fake, crossing the meshline like no other emotion usually could. I had stumbled upon something here.

“Was that … was that what’s-his-name?” I asked, nodding at the radio.

“Reverend Tad Tadd? The one with two first names?” he said with a laugh. “Yeah. My grandma listens to him all the time.”

It took a few moments to unpack the various implications of this answer. I grasped at the easiest piece to question and said, “Wait, this is your grandma’s car?”

It was a big, old car, which I’d thought was kind of cool when I thought it belonged to Gabriel. I mean, it’s retro for a teenager to even have a car, and having a really old car is doubly retro. But now that I looked around the backseat a little more closely, in the movie’s low light, I saw old-lady signs that he’d failed to hide before our date: a crocheted blanket spread across the space behind the head rests, a pair of very thick reading glasses in the little rear door pocket, next to a lace handkerchief. These unsexy articles, that voice on the radio—

“Yeah. I mean, I use the car all the time,” he said, following my gaze and seeing traces of his grandmother. “It’s, like, a family car. My grandma sometimes still drives it—and listens to Tad Tadd, like half the people in LA.” He shook his head as if to say, Grandmas—what are you going to do? Then, seeing something in my face that told him everything was not okay, he added, “She barely drives it anymore, if that’s what’s bothering you. It’s basically mine.”

My eyes were fixed on the front seat, where I envisioned an old woman turning to stare at me in disgust as she listned to Tad Tadd. She wagged a disapproving finger in my direction.

“What’s the matter?” Gabriel asked.

“That guy spews hate. Why would your grandmother listen to him? How can he use faith to attack people who have medical problems? And why can’t he have a normal last name?” The words were out of my mouth before I could stop myself. The meshline was tingling with adrenaline, an unpleasant version of how it felt when I drank coffee. It was like needing to pee, but feeling that sensation everywhere.

“Have you ever listened to talk radio?” he asked me, laughing a little. “It’s full of crazy people. It’s mostly crazy people. Hey, come on.” He reached over and tucked a lock of my hair behind my ear. Despite the dread and adrenaline, I was touched by this. Like he and I were a team. Or we could be.

“Does your grandma agree with him?” Again, the words were out before I could stop them. Why was I arguing about his grandmother’s political/religious/racist views on our first date? I shouldn’t even be here in a backseat where … But since I was here, I definitely shouldn’t be bringing up this subject. I hadn’t brought it up, I reminded myself. The radio had been set to that station. Even if Gabriel’s grandmother was the one who’d set it, he must have listened in at least once or twice.

“I don’t know,” he said. The romantic energy was visibly leaking out of him. “I guess she agrees with him. She’s really old and super religious. They were going to grow her a new heart last year, you know, where it’s mostly real heart, but some of the parts are, like, robotic or something?”

I did know. I knew because a heart matching that description was currently beating way too fast in my half-real chest. And I cared about that heart very much.

“She refused, because she thinks God wouldn’t approve,” he went on. And then he shrugged. “She’s old. You can’t argue with her.” He wasn’t saying whether or not he agreed with his grandmother, but his tone hinted that he didn’t.

It was dark again, because up on the screen, something was happening in a shadowy hallway. Gabriel was close to me, the outline of his face traced by movie light. When he saw my expression soften, he touched my lips with his own. A light kiss, an exploratory kiss, but ready for something much better.

“What do you think?” I asked, pulling away. I wanted to kiss him more, but I could not keep my mouth shut on this topic. It was like the mesh was my baby sister and even though I fully intended to keep it hidden, I felt honor-bound to root out any signs of prejudice. Because prejudice was everywhere. You didn’t know that until you crossed an invisible line and you yourself were in its crosshairs.

“Why do you care so much about Reverend Tadd?” he asked. “He’s just a nutjob on the radio.”

This was the precise question I didn’t want to answer. I felt myself retreat in fear and I stammered, “I—I just wanted to hear what you think. I’m trying to get to know you.” I managed to make the last part sound flirty.

Gabriel shook his head, as if he would humor me because obviously he was so into me. “I don’t know.” He shrugged again. “I mean, we’re religious, all of us at St. Anne’s, aren’t we? And, like, should we be doing everything that God can do? What about these people who are going to other countries to freeze themselves and avoid a natural death? Even kids? They might be frozen forever. Is that what their lives are supposed to be? Does that seem like something we should be doing? I don’t know.”

“So you agree with Reverend Tad Tadd?” I whispered the question, knowing that if I tried to say it in a normal voice, it would come out too loud.

Here’s the thing. I’d heard snippets of Reverend Tadd’s broadcasts from time to time and seen him spouting sound bites on TV, but I’d never really thought about him too much. Sure, he was a ridiculous bigot, yet the important word had always been ridiculous. Tonight, though … tonight his hatred had unexpectedly intruded upon our intimate space, and it was like his voice and his sentiment had somehow become tied up with the pain and with the monstrous weight of death that had pressed down on me for so many months. And now, even if I was scared of where the conversation would lead, I couldn’t let him go.

Gabriel said, “I think Reverend Tadd is crazy. He sounds like … like …” He groped for the words.

“Like he tells everyone else how to be holy and then he goes back to a house full of alcohol and hookers?” I suggested. The words had been enraged inside my head, but they came out sounding more like a joke. Thankfully.

Gabriel gave me a whispery laugh. “Something like that. Maybe not that bad. It’s just … My grandma’s from a different generation—”

“But what’s the difference between a half-real heart and taking antibiotics, or getting a doctor to set a broken bone?” I asked, still whispering. I was starting to feel ill. And I needed to hear him say the right thing.

“Yeah, that’s what’s crazy,” he agreed. “How are they drawing the line? It’s so …”

“Arbitrary?” This word came out too loud, but it was only one word, so I don’t think he noticed. I bit my lower lip to try to rein in my voice.

“Right, arbitrary. But my grandma is so sure certain things are too close to what God is supposed to take care of. Or not take care of. Maybe certain people aren’t meant to live—she thinks,” he quickly added.

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, tried to untie the knot in my stomach. I was not lying unconscious, crushed inside a car. I was not watching helplessly as doctors called for more blood. I was here at the drive-in and no one was singling me out. To Gabriel, this was only a theoretical debate and I was one of those religious girls who loved to argue. Maybe he was walking a fine gray borderline between skeptical friend and thoughtless objector, but what he was saying wasn’t terrible. No matter what his grandmother thought, Gabriel was trying to be tolerant, which was all I could hope to ask in a world where the Reverend Tadd and others were turning medicine into philosophy.

“I didn’t know you were so into politics,” he said, teasing me a little.

“I guess this isn’t the best topic for a first date.” I managed a little laugh.

The adrenaline pumping through me was calming down. And I was calming down. His arm was around my waist, which was keeping the make-out hormones flowing, in spite of everything. My attention came back to his hands, his lips, the backseat. I was here because I wanted to be here.

So we kissed then. I mean we really kissed. We started out sitting up, but soon I was lying wedged in the corner of the seat and he was almost on top of me, and it felt so good. Like, unbelievably good. The only damage I’d received to my face had been a small jaw fracture and that thing with my eyes, so my mouth and tongue and teeth and everything were totally normal. They wouldn’t feel weird to him, which was important because he was totally in my mouth with his tongue. Which I liked.

But then I didn’t.

As the adrenaline settled, the make-out hormones (some of which were naturally mine, and some of which were, you know, added extras from the meshline) were also cutting out,my body sputtering like an old-school gas engine with dirt in the fuel line. Suddenly it was like watching myself kiss him, like this was another movie, playing inside the car, and I could think that it looked sexy, but I couldn’t feel that it was sexy. It was more like our mouths were raw chicken breasts we were mashing repeatedly against each other.

I was thinking about this while still kissing him, trying to recapture why I’d wanted to put my tongue into his mouth when that now seemed, essentially, disgusting. Because I was distracted, I didn’t notice that he had worked my shirt out of my pants and his hand was sliding beneath it.

“Wait—” I said, struggling to sit up.

“You’re so pretty. I want to touch you …”

“Wait—”

But it was too late. His hand had expertly worked its way up my torso and his fingers were under my bra. Yes—that quickly. The tips of his fingers—some of the most sensitive and discerning parts of the human body—had touched the exterior skin-layer of the meshline. His fingers stopped and I watched confusion vying with arousal in his face. His hand slid out of my bra, down my torso, this time sensing more artificial skin, which he had not noticed the first time he’d touched it.

“What’s …,” he began. That question had already led him up a blind alley he didn’t want to be in. He sat back, confused. “Are you—are you all right?”

4. CAST OF TWO

I pulled my shirt down, wiggled upright. He had felt that some things were wrong, but he didn’t have to know the extent of it.

“It’s just, in the accident,” I mumbled. “Some things had to be fixed.” This sounded weak, possibly because it was an absurd understatement.

“Lilly told us it was just your legs. You broke your legs.” The movie played out across his cheek as his shadowed eyes studied me.

“That was … mainly what happened,” I hedged. It was not right that anyone should pass judgment on me if I told the truth. And yet I did not, I did not, want to tell the truth.

“Is it your skin under there?” He sounded almost mesmerized. A lump of fear had formed just above my stomach. He reached for my shirt, but I held it down.

“Mostly.”

That was a lie. The artificial skin he’d felt, covering more than half my torso, was based on my skin, maybe you could say it was partly my skin, but it was combined with the mesh that made a bridge from the parts that were all me to the parts that weren’t me anymore. It felt like skin—until you touched my real skin right next to it, which was what had happened when his fingers traced the meshline across my right breast. Then the difference became glaring.

He was already pulling my shirt back up and I didn’t stop him this time; panic held me motionless. He would see, he would know! What should I have done? Slapped him? Escaped from the car and run from the drive-in?

The movie had gotten brighter and in its light, the variance in texture and color of my body was discernible. The meshline traveled up from beneath my bellybutton, curved across my stomach and then cut across my right breast. On one side of the mesh was me, real flesh, one hundred percent Milla. On the other side, things were harder to categorize.

“How far does it go?” he asked, looking at where the line disappeared beneath my waistband, down toward my “lady parts,” as my mother referred to them.

I was transfixed by … by his searching look, maybe? By the shock and concern in his face?

“You’re looking at most of it,” I whispered.

Another lie. Not visible from my current position was the line that ran from my right breast across the ribs beneath my right arm and then traced a path down the right side of my back. Nor could he see how the damage extended inward to my heart and one of my lungs, to my other organs, and yes, to my lady parts too.

“Your heart?” he asked, as if I had spoken those thoughts aloud.

I could have said that I was burned and the fake skin was just to cover burns. Why did I owe him any explanations? But … the heart in my chest had saved my life. It deserved better than a shamefaced excuse.

“It’s like what you said for your grandmother,” I whispered. “It’s a real heart, mostly. From my own cells, but there are some other parts that make up for the parts they can’t grow yet. Tiny little robotic parts made out of squishy stuff. It’s a combination.”

He sat back, and I yanked my shirt down. A series of emotions marched across his features. Not all of them made sense.

“This is why you hate Reverend Tadd,” he said.

“Yes,” I agreed.

“Why haven’t you told anyone? Lilly told the whole school it was just your legs. It’s—it’s—”

“More than my legs,” I said. What was I seeing on his face? Fear?

“How much of you is real?” he asked. He was starting to sound agitated. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, as if unconsciously scraping off the taint of my counterfeit lips.

“My mouth is real,” I whispered. He was repulsed.

But he wasn’t.

Tenderly, he asked, “You’ve been living with all of this, with no one to talk to about it?”

I was undone by the sympathy of this question, and in the face of his concern, the tension in my chest shifted. It was as though the meshline itself began to relax.

“People don’t need to know all the bad things, Gabriel,” I said quietly. “And how do you even tell people?” I could feel things bubbling up inside me, things I had promised myself I would never say. “How do I even explain that when the car crashed, my mom was thrown free and only broke her arm and her hip? But I was pinned in my seat when the truck came spinning into us? That, like, the whole dashboard went through the right side of my body, crushing it to pulp?” I had begun in a whisper but knew I was about to lose vocal control. Now that I was letting the truth out, it would be no gentle trickle. Wedged in the corner of the backseat, I was going to unload it on Gabriel like a drunk sorority girl spouting the remains of her half-digested tuna sandwich all over the floor. “That the dashboard was what was holding me together all that time while the paramedics and firemen were cutting me out of the car? That I should totally have been dead, first when the truck hit, then before the ambulance got there, then in the ambulance? I should have been dead like ten times, and I probably even was dead for a little while, but we were so close to UCLA, and they began culturing my cells as soon as I arrived, and the doctors are, like, the best in the world at this stuff? So because of a chain of lucky breaks, I’m here, but half of my torso is fake, and my heart is fake, and one of my lungs is fake, and I will never have children because they don’t know how to fix that stuff yet.” The sorority girl was emptying out the full contents of her stomach right into her party date’s lap. And that relief you feel when you throw up? I was beginning to feel that. “And that I can want to make out with you and I can think you’re really good-looking, but I can’t count on how my body will respond to anything? Kissing, laughing, hiccupping—hiccupping is the worst. I sound like a howler monkey when it happens. That I thought about you while I was in the hospital, and I wondered if anyone would ever want to touch me again? How do I tell people that I’m so grateful to be alive, when I know they’ll never be able to look at me with anything but pity, or, or, or judgment from here on out?”