Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful

5. MIRACLE

So, yeah. That happened.

And then the next day at school, everyone knew. Gabriel must have started telling people immediately, maybe even on his way home that night. He had told them everything—but mostly about the strange new contents of my body.

Kevin Lopez smirking in the hall, Matthew Nowiki doing the robot with extra hip thrusts thrown in, Kahil Neelam making that hand gesture that told the story of my robotic vagina eating Gabriel’s penis, over and over, because obviously that’s what robot vaginas would be designed to do.

It wasn’t like I could yell back, I don’t have a robotic vagina, okay? That part of me is still real! I don’t think that would have helped.

After I threw my soup in Gabriel’s face and yelled at him so loudly my voice echoed off the Hollywood Hills, I ran out of the courtyard. Behind me I heard hoots and high fives, and girls giggling, and Kahil going on and on with the robot jokes. My meltdown was the most exciting thing to happen at St. Anne’s in at least a year. I like to think someone back there stood up for me. Maybe Lilly came to my defense, though maybe not. She was upset that I hadn’t told her about the sex. Or the injuries. She felt left out, and it was true, I’d left her out.

The headmaster, Mr. Kinross, found me by the back fire stairs, sitting in the shadows and not crying. My eyes stung, the meshline was pulsing with my shame, and that was all the relief I could hope for. He took me to his office, where he offered me a large bowl of wrapped toffees. I immediately stuffed two into my mouth and was surprised at how much they helped.

Mr. Kinross was fairly young, in his midforties maybe, Irish with black hair and blue eyes. There was even a hint of an accent still in his voice, kind of retro, because he’d come to the US when he was a teenager. It was as though the board of St. Anne’s had found him through a casting call. He was nice.

He let me eat my toffees in silence for a few moments, and then he said, “Ludmilla”—he was one of only a few people who insisted on calling me by my full name—“your parents told me about the extent of your injuries, when you came back to us. It’s not my place to discuss them with anyone else, of course, but I do have some idea what you went through. You sitting here is a miracle. I want you to know that we treasure miracles at St. Anne’s.”

Through the side windows bracketing his door, I watched students passing by in the hall. A few glanced in at me but turned away quickly when they realized there was a chance I might make eye contact.

“It’s like they think I’m a heretic,” I said.

It was such an old-fashioned word, but it felt right. Mr. Kinross thoughtfully unwrapped a toffee and put it in his mouth.

“There’s nothing so medieval as high school,” he muttered.

“I didn’t want to tell people because I thought they would feel sorry for me. Or secretly think I was unnatural. I didn’t think they would, you know, decide that I was a disgusting joke.”

My voice broke and I looked down, trying to blink away the burning in my eyes.

“Something ugly is happening to our world,” he said. “If God gave us minds, should we not embrace the fruits of those minds? Surely it is a mercy, and a beautiful calling, to minister to the injured and the ill?” This didn’t sound as formal as it might have, because it was said while sucking at a piece of toffee that kept clicking against his teeth. His kind eyes studied me—sad, seething, half-artificial me. “And yet, I see families with an entirely different view. They have taken it upon themselves to decide what God allows—which is surely exactly what they accuse the doctors of doing.”

It was a relief to hear an adult—a religious adult—say what I was thinking. Even so, I kind of wanted to get out of there, because he’d probably heard about the sex too, and I guessed I would be in for a lecture about the evils of premarital intercourse if I lingered in his office too long. The prickle of a nonblush was coming over me.

But all Mr. Kinross said was “I will have a chat with the boys.” He must have seen the worry in my face, because he quickly added, “I won’t let them make it worse for you, Ludmilla. There are some advantages to running a religious school. I can call on the fear of God when it’s warranted.” He smiled. “Think of your namesake, St. Ludmilla,” he said gently, when he saw my lingering doubt. “She faced opposition at every hand and yet she held to her faith.”

I muttered, “Did she? Or is she a saint only because she died?” And then I asked him the question that had been haunting me all year. “And was … was I supposed to die?”

“Ah. Do you think you were meant to be St. Ludmilla of Los Angeles?”

“I could never be a saint,” I said, “but I do wonder if I’m supposed to be here at all.”

“Perish that thought, Ludmilla,” he told me with a gentle certainty that was as soothing to my ears as the toffee was to my stomach. “You are being tried. Do you know that it’s often much harder to stay alive? You’ve chosen the thornier path. I admire you for that.”

Even if this sounded like a speech he’d lifted from a 1950s film, it made me feel better.

6. ST. LUDMILLA

Gabriel told Matthew Nowiki that I had been so desperate to prove I was still normal, I’d begged him to have sex with me. Actually begged. Like a prostitute offering her “wares” to a policeman to avoid arrest. Gabriel had been very clear with Matthew that my parts “didn’t feel right”—the implication being that something down there had been irregular, that Gabriel and his manhood had had a lucky escape.

According to Matthew (as relayed to me by Lilly), Gabriel had wanted to take me home early in the evening, but I hadn’t let him because I’d wanted to lose my “human virginity.” As if I’d been having sex with aliens and werewolves and centipedes for years and was trying to prove that I was still a real girl. “My human virginity.” This phrase captivated everyone. In an objective corner of my mind, it even captivated me, and I recognized how well it summed up my differences, my desperation, and how I’d abused Gabriel. That the latter two were entirely fabricated didn’t matter. And I was weird. Let’s face it. Everyone sensed that something had been off since I’d returned to school.

I didn’t go outside for lunch that week, but when I peeked through a second-floor window at the courtyard below, I could see and hear Lilly and my other friends gossiping with everyone else over the details and whether I was still, technically, a normal human. Maybe I would have done exactly the same thing if it had been someone else they were talking about. Even nice people didn’t want to commit themselves until a general consensus could be reached: Was I a perversion of nature to be shunned, or was I in the category of the meek and thus worthy of protection and sympathy? What if I was both?

So I was standing right behind Gabriel on the street corner outside Go Get ’Em Tiger. There was a tingle all up and down the meshline from the coffee, but this sensation was at war with the hot jitters rushing through me. Gabriel was slurping his coffee, and when he turned his head slightly, I saw his square jaw, his dark eyes beneath his blond hair. So handsome, but painful to look at now. Can’t he feel me standing here boring holes into his back with my eyes?

Four lanes of traffic came at us. In the closest lane was the huge City of LA driverless bus, so wide it almost didn’t fit in one lane.

I was overcome with thirst, which wasn’t real thirst but a side effect of internal imbalance. She wanted it so bad, and I gave it to her so hard, but it was weird down there …

I was so close to Gabriel that none of the other pedestrians could see my hands. They were crowded around, but all looking at the crosswalk light, or at the traffic.

How much of you is real?

I flexed my fingers. There was an irresistible gravity between my palms and his body.

It’s not really like virginity exactly.

So help me God, Jesus, and all the saints, I pushed him. The bus was bearing down on us, the last vehicle through the light, and I shoved him, both hands at his hips, every bit of strength I could muster in the move.

Gabriel had been taking a drink of coffee, off balance on one foot. He flew off the curb. I reached after him, as though trying to grab him back, as though I’d seen him tripping before he even realized it himself and was attempting to save him. Was I really trying to save him? I don’t know. What I do know is that Gabriel flailed wildly, the coffee going everywhere, and I accidentally grabbed one of his arms.

That kept him from dying, because I yanked him back toward me on reflex. The top half of Gabriel’s body was tugged to safety. The bottom half … well, the bus hit him full on. I mean, the bus was programmed to protect human life, including pedestrians, but what the hell was it supposed to do? If it came to an immediate stop, it would endanger everyone inside. So the bus passengers got a moderate jolt, and Gabriel got … all the rest. It was the most disgusting thing I’d ever seen, if you don’t count those few moments I was still conscious, when I saw the windshield break in front of me and the dashboard dislodge and go through my rib cage, taking out the vital organs in its path. I only saw that for a moment or two; I saw the whole Gabriel incident in full consciousness, from beginning to end.

The bus struck him and the sound was of something both firm and wet colliding with something very hard. Maybe like what you’d hear if you stomped on stalks of celery with heavy boots, or if you dropped a half-melted bag of ice from a second-story window onto concrete. He was shattered from the ribsdown. His hand, grasped tenuously in my own, was pulled free, and he was thrown a dozen feet as the bus screeched to an immediate halt.

“Oh my God!” I yelled.

Everyone was yelling some version of that. We rushed in a mass to his limp form lying half in the traffic lane, half on the sidewalk. His eyes were open, and as we all crowded around him, they fluttered closed. Not before he’d seen me, though. There was a moment: his eyes, my eyes, recognition.

More people were looking at me as someone called 911. A siren was already audible only blocks away.

“What happened?” one woman asked me. “You tried to pull him back, I saw you.”

“Did he fall, or did he jump?” someone else demanded urgently.

“I—I don’t know,” I stammered. “I just reached out …”

“You saved him.”

And just like that, I was not the villain of this moment but the hero.

7. GO GET ’EM AGAIN, TIGER

I think my parents suspected.

It was too much of a coincidence, me happening to be on hand at the time Gabriel was hit by a bus. Yet they asked me very little about that afternoon. I gave them the official version of events and we didn’t discuss it further. But as the days passed, I noticed they never mentioned to any of the other parents from school that I had been there, that I had tried to save Gabriel, just as I never mentioned it. The topic was a gray cloud that hovered in the air between us. Days turned into weeks and the cloud dissipated into a thin fog, but it never went away. They had decided, I suppose, that they would rather not know.

Now here I was, months later, with my mother driving me to school in silence. Sometimes we chatted in the car, in the way we had always done, but other times, like this one, there was nothing to say. I leaned against the door, my eyes half closed, and concentrated on my breath, in and out. Since the accident with Gabriel, I had learned to achieve a better state of equilibrium with the meshline. If I kept my body steady, my motions smooth, things felt almost normal—my lymph system, my lungs, my hormones. The doctors had told me I would get there eventually, and I had.

My mother smiled when we pulled up in front of the school. I was her broken girl, put back together now. “Have a good day, Milla.”

The moment I got out of the car, I sensed that something was different. For no clear reason, my heart rate increased. I knew he was there even before I turned around.

Gabriel. He was walking through the front door of the school, surrounded by friends who were welcoming him back. His time in the hospital hadn’t been kept a secret. Rumors had floated back to school weekly: the rift in his family when his father and mother decided to allow the doctors to use every tool at their disposal to save him; his grandmother’s disavowal of his parents and him; the fact that the bus had absolutely demolished his lower intestine, his liver, his pelvis. There was rampant speculation about whether he had a working penis or not. The most up-to-date rumors suggested his man parts were fake, but they still worked—a miracle of squishy biomachinery.

If he saw me, he gave no sign, but it took me an hour to get my body calmed. At lunch, I sat in my normal spot, at the rickety picnic table in the far corner of the courtyard, my back to everyone, alone. Sometimes Lilly and a few others sat with me out of a lingering sense of duty, but mostly they had given up. I’d stopped being friendly.

The newspaper that day carried the story of a hate crime in Boston against a woman who had just returned from the hospital, rebuilt. I scanned the words, then folded them away so only the crossword was showing. I had been chewing my sandwich methodically, staring at the half-finished puzzle, when Gabriel sat down across from me. I couldn’t help sweeping my gaze over his midsection, looking for any sign of what might be underneath his uniform pants. His face was the same, his blond hair a little longer, some light stubble on his chin, his dark eyes still beautiful, if I could ignore the uneasy mix of feelings they provoked in me.