6. I’ll Make a Man Out of You
I’ll Make a Man Out of You
HENRY
When I woke up, my eyes were crusted shut. In the night, Topher had decided my head was a suitable pillow. Cam’s absence and my own misguided decision to adopt Topher to impress him continued to hurt me in new and surprising ways. But, unlike Cam, I knew how to commit.
I shuffled groggily to the bathroom to wash my face and take my allergy meds. By the time I was finished, I at least somewhat resembled a person.
In the kitchen, I didn’t know what shocked me more: the sleep-deprived bags under No Name’s eyes or the spread of food he’d laid out on my table.
“I wanted to help after last night. I made breakfast !” He pronounced the word “breakfast” the way a white boomer mom says “pico de gallo” when ordering at a Mexican restaurant.
In the background, Good Morning America ’s second hour played at full volume.
Topher was already perched on the armrest of the couch watching Hoda and Jenna with rapt attention.
He presided as president of their fan club, I swore.
At first, I was touched by No Name’s gesture—no man had ever made breakfast for me before—but then, I inspected my plate.
Aside from getting the utensils correct, he’d gotten everything else horribly wrong.
He’d placed two raw eggs beside three pieces of bread so moldy they could’ve been used for lab experiments.
On top were frozen berries that he hadn’t defrosted and half a stick of butter each, un-spread.
To top it all off, clearly, he’d found my spice rack and poured out every one with abandon.
At least the coffee he served in a clean mug, and it looked drinkable. I splayed my napkin across my lap and said, “I love the initiative, but we can’t eat any of this unless we want salmonella.”
“I liked salmon,” he said, flouncing over to the table.
I didn’t do much cooking—I found cooking for one deeply saddening—but he’d gone into the pantry and fished out the gingham apron with the apples on it that had been Great Aunt Isla’s before she moved to Sunshine Meadows.
She wasn’t much of a chef, either, but she wore that apron anytime we painted props together for the window displays.
I couldn’t bear for her to give it away when she downsized.
Seeing it on a person again gunked up my vision with nodules of nostalgia along with the allergic residue.
“No, salmon ella . Salmon’s bitchy sister—a bacteria that causes stomach cramps and vomiting,” I said.
“Oh, I didn’t like vomiting,” he said, straight-faced.
“Nobody does.”
“Being a human comes with a lot of potential pains,” he pontificated, sitting across from me, clearly uncertain what to do with his hands. I’d told him his meal was inedible, and it was like someone spilled water all over his CPU.
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” I said.
Before wrestling myself to sleep, I spent half the previous night working on a foolproof plea I’d perform—a million new reasons why being human was unimaginably hard.
I came up with several, such as: traffic, natural disasters, and two-factor authentication.
I had this harebrained idea that if he truly didn’t want to be human any longer, he’d change back into a mannequin for good. Aside from changing the store hours to 24/7, this was the only way I imagined making it through the holidays.
“To some, pain implies growth,” said No Name with an unnerving sagacity.
“You sound like a fortune cookie. Did you sleep at all last night?” I asked, tiredness burning behind my own eyes. I tried the coffee and spat it out instantly.
“Is the coffee bad, too?” No Name asked.
Not wanting to hurt his feelings, I said, “It’s fine. Just hot.” But really, it was beyond burnt.
“Hmm. No, I didn’t need to sleep. I was busy watching TV!” he exclaimed. “Oh! I heard a name on it that I liked.”
“Lay it on me.”
“Aidan!” he said. “I’d like to be called Aidan like the man on the TV.
It’s amazing. I can’t believe you just have that in your home,” he said.
“A little window of millions of other humans beamed right into your living room. I learned about fashion and cooking and singing and about this group of four metropolitan women in New York City who are both mean and nice to each other and eat a lot of brunches.”
“By any chance, were their names Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha?” I asked, suddenly placing where I’d heard his wisdom about pain from.
“Yes! Do you know them?” he asked.
“I know of them but I don’t know them. They’re not real…” I said.
“If they’re not real, how are they on the TV?”
“They’re actors. An actor is a job a human can have. Humans pretend to be other humans in front of cameras and those cameras record them pretending for our entertainment,” I explained. “Not everything you see on TV is real. Actually, most things you see on TV aren’t real.”
“What about the Real Housewives?” he asked in a panic.
“They are the most unreal,” I said.
“Huh,” newly Aidan said, now both disappointed with his cooking skills and his deduction skills. His fingers tapped a strange beat along the length of the scratched table.
“Sorry to burst your bubble. You’re learning! I’ll get us some cereal.” As I poured Cheerios and dairy-free milk into two bowls, I said, “The store is closed on Mondays and today is Monday, so I was thinking since, according to the magical card, you’re, well, you until New Year’s Eve—”
“At least!”
“Yes, at least. Since you’re set on being part human until then, we’ll need to get you human items.”
“Oh, that sounds fun!” he said, rivulets of oat milk dribbling down his strong, smooth chin. I handed him a napkin.
“Don’t get too excited. It’s no great adventure. I need to get a head start on Christmas shopping, so I figured, today we’d go to the mall.”
“Oooh, the mall. Sounds exotic,” he said. “I can’t wait!”
For a Monday, the Monmouth Mall was busier than I expected, and while I grabbed my reusable shopping bags from the back seat of my silver Nissan Sentra, Aidan ventured away into the pre-holiday chaos.
Ignorant to crosswalks and oncoming traffic, he strode with abandon.
I caught up with him just in time to pull him away from a speeding Jeep driven by a bro hell-bent on burning rubber.
“Whoa. Why do I feel a rapid banging inside my chest?” Aidan asked, wide-eyed.
“That’s adrenaline. You could’ve died,” I scolded, shrugging my bags farther up the crest of my shoulder.
“But you said most stuff I saw on TV isn’t real,” he said.
This taking-everything-literally thing meant I was going to have to be more careful with my words. “I meant the stories and the names, but the ideas are mostly based on real life.”
“Does that mean we might see a dragon today?” he asked.
“Did you watch everything HBO has to offer in a single night? No. Dragons are make-believe animals in a fantasy world,” I said. “You’re in the human world. Being human means you’re mortal. Being mortal means if that car had hit you, your life could’ve ended.”
“Ended? But it just started,” he said as I held his hand, looked both ways, and escorted us safely to the opposite sidewalk. He tripped at the curb, but I kept him upright.
“Death does not take brevity into account.” I pushed us through the glass doors and into the musky heat of a decrepit Macy’s. No matter how many ornaments and stockings they hung with care, there was no way to disguise the slow decomposition of the American department store.
“I feel like I need to make a list of things that can kill me so I’m more prepared, because my heart is still beating so fast. Am I always going to feel like this?
” he asked earnestly as we passed through the dizzyingly odorous perfume department.
Actresses smized at us from tacked-up cardboard advertisements.
“Pretty much, yeah,” I said before sneezing.
I beelined it out of the overcrowded, poorly lit store and into the mall. My cell phone provider had a kiosk near there that we needed to stop at.
“I liked it better when if my head detached from my torso, someone could just pop it back on,” he said, catching the attention of an elderly woman passing on our right. I grabbed his elbow and marched us quickly away before he said anything else concerning.
“Modern medicine is not that advanced, I’m afraid.”
Aidan’s eyes grew massive as he took in the size of the space.
Light filtered down from the pointed glass ceiling.
There were shiny, cylindrical trash cans; potted fake plants; and wooden benches dotted along the walkway.
Below us, you could see people strolling about on the lower level.
Christmas music was piped in from every angle.
“It’s a bunch of stores… smushed together?
” he said. His wonderment was cute, if a little misplaced. It wasn’t the nineties anymore.
The strong scent of buttery popcorn wafted out the doors of the nearby movie theater as we stepped off the escalator.
A young white man in glasses and a red polo greeted us at the phone kiosk.
Struggling to lasso my social skills, I stammered before telling him we needed the most basic-model smartphone they offered, and a new line opened under my existing account.
He tapped on his computer, happy to help.
“What are we doing? I’m bored,” Aidan said after only a minute had passed.
“We’re getting you a phone. I need a way to contact and track you in case you wander off,” I said, still uncomfortable to be saddled—nay, burdened—with the responsibility of keeping this newly formed, ridiculously attractive adult human alive .
I wasn’t the only uncomfortable party here. The phone salesman overheard what I said and appeared concerned. I needed a better filter.
“He’s foreign,” I explained poorly. “And, um, bad with directions…?”