Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful. Arwen Dayton Elys

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