Someone has recently struck her. She has a bruise on her face, and I can see the individual fingermarks.
I shake her hand and try out the name again. “Hi, I’m Adam Allbright. Adam Allbright, nice to meet you.”
Evening is looking back and forth from me to Aislin. I ask her if it’s appropriate for me to call myself Allbright.
“Call yourself whatever you like.”
“Adam Allbright,” I say. “That’s me.”
– 40 –
Aislin is not drooling.
It takes me a while before I notice.
Granted, her boyfriend is in the hospital fighting for his life. But I’ve known Aislin for a long time. Aislin memorizes the face and form of every single attractive male who comes within sight.
Aislin doesn’t look at guys and drop them into a simple binary system of “cute”/“not cute.” She does detail. Amazing detail. If she can’t actually see detail, she extrapolates from what she can see. Show her a guy’s neck, she can draw his chest. Show her a bicep, she can tell you what his thighs are like. Show her a thigh and you really don’t want to know just how much she can extrapolate.
It’s her own weird genius.
Aislin is not even looking at Adam. Maybe it’s overload. Maybe it’s just too much for her to process. But she almost seems shy. Aislin. Shy.
I guess I’m relieved. I don’t want to have to tell her to back off. Adam is mine.
According to the app on my phone, we can get off this bus and catch another bus heading back across the Golden Gate to Tiburon. It will take a while, though. Should I take a taxi?
Am I in a hurry? To get the money for Aislin, I’ll have to confront my mother. Which means I’ll end up telling her everything. Can I do that?
“What the hell have I gotten myself into?” I ask no one.
Adam says, “I don’t know.”
No, I decide. I’m not in a hurry.
I have to find my anger again. My mother used me as a biological experiment.
Yeah, and thanks to her I still have two functioning legs. Thanks to her I’ll run again.
Thanks to her a lot of people dying in harsh hellholes aren’t dying anymore. Or yes, they’re dying, but we all die. They aren’t dying today, right now, of some vile disease because my mother created Spiker Biopharm.
Instantly, all those terrifying photos come back to me. Way too high a price to pay for my leg. But was it too high a price to pay for saving countless lives? Are the two things even connected?
Couldn’t my mother have done one without the other?
We get off the Muni and onto the bus for Marin County. I don’t want to think anymore.
Aislin sits alone. Adam sits with me. He barely brushes against me, but that touch—two square inches of shoulder, six square inches of thigh—is charged with electricity.
“Are you sad?” he asks.
“Am I sad?” I’m going to blow him off with some facile, jokey, ironic answer. But his is not a face you joke with.
And his eyes. They’re Solo’s eyes—they’re the same incredible blue, anyway. But there’s something different about Adam’s eyes. They’re earnest. Utterly sincere.
“I guess I’m nervous. Or something,” I say. “All my life my mother was this perfect, slightly overwhelming person. Well, you’ve met her.”
“I don’t know many people,” he says. “I don’t really know how to judge her.”
“Then take my word for it,” I say.
“Your word as my soul mate?”
So he does have a sense of humor. The sense of humor I programmed into him. Not mean. Sweet, ironic. Just the way I made him.
“Anyway, my mother,” I continue, “was so high up, not even a pedestal really conveys it. It was like she lived on a cloud and I was just a regular person far down below her.”
“And you also had a father?”
“I was a lot closer to my dad. He was the mid-point between me, little Evening Spiker, and the almighty Terra-Mother. We worked that way. Me to my dad to my mother. Then he died and all of that… Some families, maybe it would have made us closer. With us, no. My mother was still way, way up there.”
“Up in the clouds.”
“Figuratively. You get that, right?”
“Yes. I know that people don’t live in the clouds.”
Maybe that’s a joke. I don’t know. I turn to look at him.
We are toward the back of the bus. The seats are tall. No one can really see us. Aislin’s dozing.
“What the hell am I going to do with you?” I ask Adam.
“Do you have to do something with me? It’s my decision what I do with myself. Right?” He genuinely isn’t sure.
I avoid answering directly. “I don’t even know what I’m doing with myself. What if they actually arrest my mother? What, I live with my grandmother?”
“Do you have to live with her?”
“I don’t know if I’m exactly ready for my own house,” I say.
“Freedom,” he says, and he gives the word surprising urgency.
“Responsibility,” I counter.
“Do they go together?”
“So I’ve heard,” I admit.
His beautiful eyes—eyes that I try not to remember as floating loose and unattached—look into my eyes. Eyes that he has never seen loose and unattached. Fortunately.
I have the advantage on him. I can remember everything about him. He can only seem to look into my soul. I can pretty much actually look into his.
“Does this mean you are responsible for me?” Adam asks.
“Do you want me to be?”
He frowns. There’s an instant of panic in his eyes. It surprises me. How has he moved so quickly from childlike naivete to existential panic?
“I don’t know what I am,” he says.
“You’re Adam Allbright,” I say, and I try to flash a smile.
“I find you beautiful, but…” He stops himself.
“I like the part about ‘beautiful’ more than whatever was going to come after ‘but,’” I say lightly. Because what else am I going to do when the most beautiful boy in the world is seated beside me and several inches of him are pressed against me and I swear the taste of his breath is sweet in my mouth?
Joke.
“Do you want me to say you’re beautiful?” he asks. He seems concerned.
“Who doesn’t like flattery?” I ask.
“But it’s not flattery. It’s what I feel. I feel that you are the most beautiful—”
And that’s when the bus lurches as it heads onto the Golden Gate Bridge and oh I’m even closer now and he doesn’t pull away and I start to but I don’t. It’s not possible to pull away.
I kiss him.
He does not kiss me.
His lips are the lips I gave him.
