Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful. Arwen Dayton Elys

I whispered. “Do you have a condom?”

      “A condom? But if you can’t …?”

      “It’s not that …”

      I couldn’t get pregnant, but I could still get diseases (how many girls had he been with?), and the effect of a disease would be so much worse in my current state—

      “Right, of course,” he whispered, still kissing me.

      He sat up, scrabbled with his backpack on the floor of the car and then with the crinkly condom packet, before coming back to me.

      And then we were doing that thing that was supposed to be such a momentous experience in my life as a teenager. I expected pain, but I felt only good sensations.

      When it was over, we lay in the backseat together, with my head on his chest and his arm around me.

      “That was amazing,” he said, catching his breath.

      I intertwined my fingers in his hand, marveling that I was touching one of those hands I’d been lusting over for so long. “That’s not how I expected it to happen,” I murmured. The tides were changing inside me again. I felt as though I were floating in an in-between state.

      “What?” he asked.

      “You know, my first time,” I said. “Kind of a big deal. You imagine how it might be and then—”

      “It’s not really the same, though, is it?” he whispered. “I mean, it’s not really like virginity exactly.”

      “What?” It took a few moments for me to be sure I’d heard him correctly. When he said nothing else, I sat up enough to look down at him. In the semidarkness, he was nearly hidden in shadows. “What?” I said again.

      “Well … you were all cut up inside there,” he said, lifting himself up onto an elbow.

      A flower of misgiving bloomed inside my chest. “What are you saying—”

      “The doctors’ hands were everywhere,” he whispered earnestly, “and the robots. They use robots, right, to fix stuff? All over you and in you and through you.”

      The flower grew, twisted itself into outrage. Was I understanding him correctly? “What does that—?”

      “I’m just saying, I wouldn’t have tried if you were really … but it’s not like you were still actually a—”

      “Do you think I fucking lost my virginity to a surgical robot? I was in a car accident, not an orgy!” I had totally lost control of my voice and was, like, SHRIEKING. His sympathy, my admission of what had happened—had it only added up to an easy way for him to sleep with me? “I’ve never had sex with anyone before. It’s kind of a big deal to me!”

      I pushed him away and I yanked up my pants, and then I started to open the back door, even with my bra poking out the neck of my shirt.

      “Wait, Milla! Stop, please.” He’d gotten up and was half kneeling on the floor, trying to pull the door shut. “I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry!”

      “How could you say that?” I screamed. “How could you think that?”

      “Please, Milla!” he whispered frantically, knowing my voice would carry to other cars now that the door was open. “I didn’t mean it. I said the wrong thing!”

      The light had come on when I opened the door, and in the brightness, he looked desperate and repentant. I had just remembered that we were parked in the middle of the crowded drive-in, with cars all around us. My voice and the dome light were beacons. People in other cars were turning toward us.

      When I tried to picture myself actually getting out of the car and walking away, my anger deflated. I pulled the door closed, extinguishing the light, and then I ducked down until the heads in other cars turned back toward the screen.

      Gabriel had his hands out as though I were a wild animal he was trying to soothe. “Of course it’s a big deal, Milla,” he said. “I don’t know why I said that. I don’t … I’m sorry.”

      I leaned against the closed door, waiting for my heartbeat and breath to slow.

      “You said it because it’s what you think, isn’t it?” I asked him, when I’d gotten my voice under control. The damned movie was still playing out beyond the windshield and across our bodies. “You think I’m something different, something less.” I nodded toward the radio, which had broadcast Reverend Tadd’s voice. “You think I’m like …”

      He was shaking his head. “I didn’t want to think that I’d pressured you, that I’d made you do something you didn’t want to do, so I said—”

      “You didn’t pressure me.” I had chosen, willingly. Didn’t he understand?

      “I’m sorry.”

      Every emotion I’d felt throughout the evening seemed to have been mixed in a blender and poured down my throat. They added up to exhaustion. I leaned against the backseat and looked out through the windshield at the enormous images hovering in the air.

      “I’m sorry,” he said again.

      “Okay, okay,” I said. “Can we just stop talking and watch the movie?”

      “Yeah, let’s do that.”

      He eased closer to me on the seat. I stared at the movie images without seeing them. When a few minutes had passed without me yelling, he tentatively took my hand, and when I didn’t resist, he continued to hold it.

      We sat together like that until the end of the movie.

      He took me home after that.

      At the bottom of my parents’ driveway, he pulled over, turned off the car. We kissed again. This time, there was no adrenaline, no make-out hormones. I was wrung out, the real parts and the parts beyond the meshline equally numb. He leaned his forehead against mine.

      “Milla?” he whispered.

      “Yeah?”

      I could feel his hesitation. “You still don’t want to tell anyone about …” He gestured toward my body in a way that let me know he was referring to the damaged parts. “Right?”

      “Honestly it’s kind of a relief that it’s not a complete secret anymore. I don’t know. Eventually I might. Or not. I guess I’ll have to see how I feel.”

      I pulled away from him, and then I paused, my hand on the door handle. Something about his demeanor was odd. He looked almost scared. I wondered if he was worried that I would tell people he’d forced me.

      I touched his hand. “I’d never make you look bad, Gabriel,” I whispered.

      “Right.” He nodded, first at me, then toward the view beyond the windshield, as if to a large, invisible audience out there. “Sure,” he said.

      We glanced at each other, contemplating another kiss. Without a word, we both decided against it. Those moments of intimacy had passed and they already felt a long way away.

       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