Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful. Arwen Dayton Elys

      “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?”

      Gabriel was sitting on the seat next to me, the red and blue color from the screen dancing across his face and through his blond hair. I hadn’t been yelling, quite, but almost.

      “I’m sorry, Milla,” he whispered.

      “Me too.”

      We sat in the backseat, looking at each other. I had emptied myself and I felt hollow, but it was a clean sort of hollow, the kind of hollow that is ready to be filled with something new.

      Very gently, Gabriel pulled me toward him and wrapped his arms around me. I leaned into him, and I almost cried—I even had the feeling of tears forming behind my eyes.

      “You don’t have to tell anyone, you know,” he murmured into my ear.

      I nodded into his chest. “Some people, they get weird about this stuff. My dad says when he was a kid, everyone wanted medical advances—any kind, they were all good. But now people get … funny.”

      “Not very funny,” he said ruefully.

      “No, not very funny,” I agreed.

      When my breathing had evened out, I became more aware of our bodies touching, of his arms around me. The meshline had no idea what to do with the changing emotional tides of the last few minutes, but somehow the make-out hormones were taking over again.

      “It feels really good to tell you,” I told him.

      He drew back so he could look down at me. “Did you really think about me when you were hurt?” he asked.

      “A little bit.” It was a lie, but it was the best I could manage.

      “Can I kiss you again?” he asked softly.

      I nodded.

      He gently touched his lips to mine. And it was different this time. I had been holding myself back before, and now I wasn’t.

      We were kissing and then, by inches, we were doing more than kissing. My bra was unhooked and hitched up by my neck. His lips were everywhere. You may be familiar with how it goes. At some point I realized that my pants were off and his hand was moving gently but insistently. “Can you feel that?” he asked, his lips by my ear. “Does it feel good?”

      “Yes,” I whispered urgently. I was actually feeling. Everywhere.

      “Can you feel it all the way? I’m not touching …” I was grateful he didn’t finish the sentence: I’m not touching parts that aren’t real, am I?

      “Yeah, I feel it all the way.”

      That part of me was me. It was above that, the uterus, the ovaries—those had been crushed into oblivion and replaced with, well, nothing.

      I was touching him and I knew what I was doing because of, you know, Jonas; I’d had practice. “Wait,” he breathed, pushing my hand away from him. “Let me … Can we …?”

      I looked at him carefully from only inches away. He was asking to have sex with me, and I was so blissfully wrapped up in hormones that I almost said yes immediately.

      “No, I can’t,” I said, pulling back a little.

      “Why not?” he asked gently. He was kissing my neck and Jesus Christ (I’m sorry to use your name again in this vulgar context) it felt heavenly (again, sorry).

      “Because I’ve never done it before,” I managed to say, while at the same time my body was screaming Let him do it!

      “Never?” he whispered.

      “My boyfriend and I got close one time, but we didn’t. And then he moved away. And I … I was in the hospital for a year. And I … haven’t been ready.”

      “It’s okay.”

      We were kissing again, and he was lying on top of me. The make-out hormones spiked and the meshline was letting just enough of everything through …

      “Oh