Man Made Boy (37 page)

“What?” she said.

I shrugged. “You look great.”

“Oh.” She smiled sheepishly. “Thanks. You too.”

Once we got to the club, I understood why Claire had wanted to go: it was a cowboy-themed club. It had all kinds of random country-western stuff decorating the walls, like leather saddles and cowhides, and the bar looked like the kind you see in old
Clint Eastwood movies. But there was also a big dance floor with flashing lights and a booming sound system.

“Check that out.” Claire pointed to a mechanical bull on the other side of the dance floor.

“Come on,” said Guilder, his pointed features rising up into a grin. “Let’s do it!”

So Guilder, Claire, and I made our way around the perimeter of the dance floor to where a small crowd was gathered around the mechanical bull. We watched a human stay up for a few seconds on the massive, shifting torso, then slide off into the padded mats that surrounded the bull.

“Elves are natural riders.” Guilder pulled the knit cap that covered his pointy ears down tight and winked at me. “This will be a snap.”

It threw him pretty quick.

“Harder than it looks!” he shouted to me over the music, his pale face flushed as he climbed out of the padded ring.

“You going to do it?” Claire asked me.

“Why?” I asked. “I’d just be showing off. There’s no way it could throw me.”

“Ha! So you say.”

“I’ll do it if you will.”

“Hmmm,” she said.

“Let’s sweeten the deal,” I said. “Whoever falls off first…I don’t know. Has to do something.”

“Whoever falls off first has to make the other one dinner.”

“But I don’t know how to cook!”

“Already pretty sure you’ll lose, huh?”

“Oh, that’s it! Game on!”

So I climbed up onto the mechanical bull. As soon as it started, I realized why it was so hard. The seat was really slippery,
there was nothing to grip on to, and the machine used your own weight against you. It dipped me one way, then pivoted underneath me so that my legs were moving in a new direction, while my upper body was still moving in the old direction. And the harder I fought to stay on, the more I slipped off. It didn’t take long before I landed in the padded mats.

“Told you!” laughed Guilder as he helped me up.

“Fifteen seconds!” said Claire, grinning in this wild way I’d never seen before. “That was pathetic!”

“Your turn,” I said. “Let’s see you last half that long.”

She stuck her tongue out at me, then climbed up onto the mechanical bull. It jerked into action, and for a moment, it looked like she was about to get tossed immediately. But then she stretched her long legs out wide, and started to swivel her hips almost like she was dancing. That was when I realized that the key to staying on was not strength, but fluidity. Grace. The ability to constantly adjust. I usually thought of Claire as someone who wasn’t very flexible. But that wasn’t what I was seeing up there now, so maybe it wasn’t really true. At least, not anymore. I’d sure changed a lot. Maybe she had, too. Or maybe there were things about her that had never been able to come to the surface before. Maybe a little space and stability was all she needed. Her silky black hair whipped around her smooth, tanned face. She had a little flush to her cheeks right now and there was an openness in her eyes. And she was laughing. I don’t think I’d ever heard a real laugh from her before. It was loud and rich and a little bit clumsy. And I loved it.

The rest of the crowd loved it, too. As she hung on there longer and longer, the announcer started calling people over, shouting that she might break the all-time record. Someone threw her a cowboy hat. She caught it in one hand, still moving with the
mechanical bull, and waved the hat in the air. People started coming over from the dance floor, the music dropped away, and the whole place was just screaming for her. Finally, the announcer declared that she’d broken the record. Everyone went wild at that. She looked at me, then, with this triumphant grin, and pantomimed stirring a pot. That’s when she fell off.

She was still laughing as I gave her a hand up. Laughing so hard she fell into me. The heat of her exertion was pouring off her, and our faces were right up close to each other.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen this side of you,” I said.

“I’m layered,” she said, still leaning into me. “You have to look deeper sometimes.”

“I try, but you don’t usually let me get that close.”

“No?” She raised an eyebrow. “This close enough for you?” And then she kissed me hard, her fingers locking onto the back of my head. I hadn’t realized how badly I’d been waiting for that. I grabbed her and I squeezed her as hard as I could. I knew she could handle it. With Claire, there was no need to hold back. And as we kissed at the feet of the mechanical bull, the crowds still cheered. And I don’t know if they were cheering for the record being broken or for something else, but it felt like they were cheering for
us
, for this moment that had taken us so long to get to.

When she finally broke away, she pressed her cheek against mine so that her lips were on my ear. “That was nice. But you still owe me dinner.”

THE NEXT MORNING, I sat by the pool and stared into its sparkling depths as I drank my coffee. The naiads were curled up on the bottom, their little gills slowly opening and closing as they
slept. I thought about how I was feeling about Claire. I thought about how I still felt about Sophie. I didn’t have a ton of experience with romance, but if there was one thing I had learned from being with Liel, it was that I couldn’t just wait around expecting things to work out on their own. If there was something I wanted, I had to take a risk and put myself out there. And if it failed…well, it wouldn’t be the first time my heart had been broken.

A little while later, I knocked on Kitsune’s door. She opened it, but said nothing. She just stood there in a sleek, green silk robe and gazed at me with her golden fox eyes.

“Do you…know how to cook?” I asked.

The next few weeks, I practiced every night with recipes Kitsune scratched out on empty corners of her sketch pad. I would bring in things I’d made for her to try and she would critique them, tell me what I was doing wrong, what I should try next.

Claire knew something was up.

“Why are you eating dinner alone all the time?” she asked me one day while we were hanging out at the pool during our lunch break.

I just shrugged.

Her eyes widened. “You’re practicing cooking, aren’t you?”

“Maybe,” I said.

And I was. But that wasn’t the whole plan. And when Kitsune finally told me that my sushi rolls were acceptable, I started the second half of my plan.

It was a Sunday, Kemp’s day off, so I went to his dorm room and knocked on the door.

“Yes?”

“It’s Boy.”

“Ah! Do come in, Boy. The door’s unlocked.”

Kemp’s apartment was decorated like an old-fashioned
English parlor. The main living area had beautiful Victorian furniture, dark, decoratively carved wood frames with rich, silk upholstery. A tea set sat on a mahogany table, and an antique writing desk sat in the corner. That was more or less what I expected.

What I wasn’t expecting was the person sitting in an easy chair that faced out the window. I was pretty sure it was a woman, but it was hard to make out details beyond that. Everything about her, from her skin, to her hair, to her eyes, was pitch-black. More than black. I tried not to stare at her, but it was almost impossible. She was so dense-looking that I felt like my eyes were getting sucked into her. Like she was a human-shaped black hole, pulling in everything, including light.

An empty pair of pants and a crisp, white T-shirt stood next to the chair. A bowl and spoon floated in front of her.

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry, I didn’t realize you had a guest….”

“Nothing to worry about,” said Kemp. “Boy, this is Millicent, my wife. Millicent? This is Boy. He works for The Studio, helping out with technical things. I’ve told you about him.”

Millicent didn’t respond. She just continued to stare out the window.

After a moment, Kemp said, “Boy, do you remember when I told you how I tried to refine the invisibility formula to stop the aging process without making the person invisible?”

“Yeah.”

“Back then Millicent was…impetuous. She begged me to let her be the first person to try the formula. In my defense, it is difficult to live forever alone, to watch those you love slowly decay. What’s more, not many people are willing to marry an invisible man, I can assure you. I felt I was so lucky to have her
and I always found it difficult to say no to her. And at the time, I was so sure it would work. So damn sure…”

He was silent for a moment. I had no idea whether he was looking at me or her or somewhere else. I just waited.

“I acceded to her wishes,” he said. “And this was the result.”

He carefully scooped out some sort of white liquid from the bowl with the spoon and held it to her mouth. Her lips opened a little and he slid the liquid in.

“Is she always like this?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

“Forever, I suppose.”

“It doesn’t seem fair. It was an accident.”

“Perhaps. But it was my doing, and if I didn’t take care of her, she would surely suffer and probably die.”

“You love her.”

“Oh, yes. But it’s more than that. Consider this: Victor Frankenstein was nothing more than a bright, impetuous med student when he made your parents. He had no idea what he was doing. Creating your parents didn’t make him a bad person. It was a rash, youthful action and I think we all have our fair share of those. But when it was time for him to take responsibility for his actions, he could not. Or would not. It really doesn’t matter because the fact is, he ran. Could you imagine how much happier you
all
would have been, including him, if he had chosen instead to make things right?”

Kemp slid another spoonful of the white liquid into Millicent’s mouth. A little dribbled down from the corner of her mouth and he carefully patted it dry with a soft cotton cloth.

“Boyish mistakes are one thing. We must all learn and grow
from them. And it is the measure of a man, not a boy, how he holds himself accountable for those mistakes.”

“I’ve never really thought about it like that,” I said.

He placed the bowl and spoon on the table.

“Now, what did you come to see me about?”

“Oh, uh…” It seemed a little silly now. “Do you know anything about wine?”

THAT NIGHT I couldn’t get to sleep. For one thing, I was nervous about making dinner for Claire the next night. I had everything all planned out, of course. But I had no idea how she and Sophie would react.

There was something else that was bothering me, though: Kemp and Millicent. I figured Kemp had brought up Victor and my dad because he wanted to use an example I was familiar with to explain how he felt about his wife. But it had felt as if, when he condemned Victor for running away from his creation, he might as well have been condemning me, too.

After about an hour, I decided there didn’t seem to be much point in lying there in bed, staring at the ceiling. I got dressed and went outside for a walk around the grounds.

As I stepped out of the dormitory and onto the lot, the wind ruffled through my hair. LA got surprisingly cool at night. On the East Coast, the heat lingered in the summer, wet and heavy. But here the warmth of the day left with the sun. The evening sky had a strange orange tinge to it, which happened a lot. It seemed kind of magical to me, but Guilder said it was just the pollution.

I wandered down narrow streets aimlessly, my hands in my pockets, wishing I had someone to talk to about the stuff going through my head. Someone like Dad. But of course, he was three
thousand miles away. And even if he were here, the last thing he’d want to talk about with me was the moral obligation a creator had to his creation. When he and Mom had created me, piece by piece, stealing the body parts of children from morgues, they wanted to do everything for me that Victor had never done for them. They tried to simulate a childhood for me, something they had never known. They took responsibility like real parents, and they were there for me. Maybe not always in the way I wanted them to be, but they did the best that two irreparably screwed-up creatures could. And how did I repay them for that? By turning around and becoming another Victor.