7. An Unexpected Roommate
An Unexpected Roommate
AIDAN
Things That Can Kill Me (an incomplete list)
Raw eggs
Bread with splotches on it
Cars
Cats (ones bigger than Topher)
As if he knew I was typing a note about him, Topher hopped up onto the couch and brushed the top of his head against the back of my hand. I toggled away from the Notes app on my new phone.
“Do I live here now?” I asked Henry, my words underlain by the slosh of my new clothes rolling around in the washing machine behind a slatted door.
When he returned from the “errand” he said he had to run, his eyebrows went up when he saw me still on the couch where he’d left me.
As if he imagined I’d gone somewhere. Done something.
I didn’t really know. I waved and smiled in greeting, but the underlying feeling had me itchy all over like the wool sweater I’d tried on at the mall.
From the white wicker chair in the corner, Henry peered up from the sketchpad he was doodling in. His lips seemed to form words, but no sound came out. I put a face to the phrase I’d heard on TV: “tongue-tied.”
“I ask because my how-to list”—which I pulled up on the screen of my new phone—“says I need to secure my safety by getting or building a house. I looked around while you were out and I didn’t see any building tools or materials, and as I learned today, I don’t have any money of my own.”
He set his pencil aside and sighed. “Yes, you live here. I wished you into existence, so you’re my responsibility now.” He went back to his book, but his pencil hovered over the page for a long time without moving. “Can I see this list of yours?”
He chuckled from the moment he started reading.
“Is there something funny?” I asked. “Don’t all humans have a manual on how to survive and be good?”
“Not one we all agree on. There are rules and laws and religious texts, but none so simplified as this. Being a human is more intricate than following a list,” he said, sliding back in his chair. “But I guess it’s as good a place to start as any.”
I mentally checked step two off my list. “Okay. I looked at the calendar app on this phone, and it says there are only four weeks until New Year’s Eve, which is when the magic that turned me human turns me back again.”
“A real Cinderella situation,” he said.
“Is Cinderella a friend of yours?”
He shook his head at me.
“Anyway, with only 672 hours until the magic reverses itself, it might be wise for me to skip to step three: form human relationships around romantic and sexual attraction.”
“Did you just do that math in your head?” he asked.
“Is that unusual for a human to do?” My mind was a mystery to me. It seemed to be rapidly evolving. What might take a normal human years to master took me minutes.
“No. Sort of. I don’t know. I’m not good at math.” He stared at me. “It’s confusing how… fully… formed you are.”
I looked down at the phone in my hands, swiping my thumb back and forth across the home screen.
“I think I’m like this phone that came preloaded with some apps.
I can read, write, run, dance, do math. All the other things human adults can do.
But there are some skills that feel like they’re still waiting to be downloaded. ”
Henry set his sketchbook aside. “While that may be true, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. Forming relationships and falling in love, they’re not that easy. Four weeks is barely any time at all.”
“It’s 40,320 minutes.”
“Seriously, how do you do that?”
“I don’t know. I just think it and then the number is there.”
Henry repositioned himself, face scrunched. “There are a lot of people in the world. Any number of them could fall in love with you. I mean, you’re stunning. We could get you on a dating app…”
“But you wished for me. I’m your perfect man,” I said, referencing the magical card that I’d had him read to me. “Besides, you said nobody could know that I was a mannequin, which breaks one of the rules on my how-to list for love in step six: complete honesty.”
“I don’t think any human has ever operated under complete honesty,” he protested.
His resistance confused me. If he wanted me so badly that he wished for me, why was he pushing me away? “Why are you creating distance between us?” I asked, unable to filter passing thoughts from rolling right off my tongue.
His top lip curled up. “I’m not. That’s not what’s happening.”
“You’re sitting across the room from me in an uncomfortable chair when there’s three perfectly good cushions on this couch,” I said, laying out the logic of the situation as if he were the one newly human.
“I’m giving you your space,” he said, pulling his knees into his chest.
“Are space and distance different?”
His eyes narrowed. “Okay, fine! This is weird. This whole situation is a lot to process. You’re alive! You’re living in my apartment! I barely just got used to living alone here again.”
“The man whose clothes I’m wearing lived here?
” I asked. There were some signs someone other than Henry had inhabited this apartment: a tube of cream in the medicine cabinet with the name Cameron Patel on it, two different kinds of razors sitting in the holder on the bathroom sink, and pillows that smelled nothing like Henry or the products he stocked in his shower.
Even Topher seemed to always pace and meow by the door after we came back, awaiting the arrival of an enigmatic someone who never showed.
Henry nodded. “I was in a relationship with a man named Cam up until a month ago. We were almost engaged.”
“Engaged in…?”
“Engaged to be married,” he clarified. His eyes refused to meet mine.
It was becoming increasingly clear that this evasive maneuver was common in humans when they were uncomfortable.
“Until I found him hooking up with one of our sort-of friends and he broke up with me and moved out and now I’m single for another holiday season and I’ve somehow cracked open the universe by wishing you into existence. ”
“That’s a lot,” I said.
“Tell me about it.”
“I can’t tell you about it. I wasn’t there,” I said.
“It’s a turn of phrase,” he clarified. “Meaning I know .”
“I would like to know as well. Can you tell me about it? About him?”
“I… haven’t really talked about it to anyone,” he said. The clang of the old radiator to his left jerked him upright. The pencil he’d been biting the end of slid out of his grip and onto the floor, where Topher pawed at it like it was a toy.
“The tone of your voice says you want to. Your facial expression says you don’t.
” I was rapidly getting good at this—pointing out the contradictions that being human seemed to require to function.
Society, for some odd reason, wasn’t straightforward.
Everything was a lot simpler when I was stationary and for show.
Henry sighed. “This past January, Cam came into Isla’s Attic looking for a birthday gift for his mom.
I had just gone through my first Christmas without Great Aunt Isla—she’s who the store is named after—being there because she wasn’t well, health-wise.
She’s got a weak immune system. I was feeling particularly alone in the world.
The store had been quiet, so I was able to help him pick out these antique jade earrings that had been sitting in the jewelry case for months.
Not only was it a great sale, but he had this deep voice and these chocolatey brown eyes.
I’m not great at customer service, but he was easy to talk to.
He made it easy for me. While I was gift-wrapping, he slipped his phone number to me on the back of his receipt.
It took me days to build up the courage to even text him. ”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because he was a handsome, well-dressed nurse practitioner, and I’m me.” He squirmed.
I remained silent. Did he want reassurance or agreement? Assessing Topher’s wants was easier. The press of his head into my hand meant he wanted scratches. The cadence of his meow signaled his hunger or frustration about a closed door. Henry didn’t have such obvious tells.
“Anyway,” Henry continued, “I guess you could say that was our meet-cute. From there, we U-hauled pretty quickly.”
“What does that mean? ‘U-hauled’?”
“U-Haul is a commercial towing company. They rent out trucks and trailers for you to move your belongings in. ‘U-hauled’ is American slang for quickly coupling up, moving in together, talking about marriage. I had decided in October that I was going to ask him to marry me. We’d been living together for two months at that point while he waited on the house he bought to be built.
It seemed like we were meant to be together forever,” he said, words fading into whispers by the end of them as if the memory was stealing his breath away.
“He surprised me right before Halloween by having sex with our friend in our apartment and then saying I was more interested in perfection than a partner. Whatever that’s supposed to mean. ”
“The magic card said I was your perfect man, didn’t it?” I asked.
“It did.”
“The way I see it,” I said, “is that human relationships are about give and take. From our conversation with Sid and Alexa at the mall, I gathered that you need a date to Christmas dinner. Dates—as I’ve learned from Sex and the City —can lead to relationships and relationships lead to true love.
If I were to work hard to be your perfect Christmas date, couldn’t you possibly fall in love with me? ”
“Anything’s possible,” he said. “I’m just not sure it’s probable .
I’ve loved and I’ve gotten burned. All I have left of that now are a couple articles of clothing, an old toothbrush I really should throw out, a cursed engagement ring languishing in its original box at the back of my underwear drawer, and a dandruffy cat he didn’t even want joint custody of. ”
As Henry spoke, he shrank. The ball of his body tightened until he was barely taking up any space at all on the chair. I worried momentarily that I couldn’t handle four weeks of this, let alone a lifetime. Humanness sounded less and less appealing by the second.
But I was here, and Topher was curled up in my lap. I recalled the jubilance I had felt dancing in the store and the rush of shopping in the mall. There was good to be had here, too. Perhaps I needed to remind Henry of that.
“I still think we could try this. You teach me how to be human and your perfect partner. I show up to Christmas dinner and wow your family and friends. If it doesn’t work, we both go back to how we were before. Maybe it will help you move on from Cam, the man you’re not living with nor engaged to.”
His pink lips pursed. “I could’ve done without that last part but… you’re very perceptive for someone who’s only been a person for maybe forty-eight hours total.”
“I’m not ascertaining an answer in the negative or the affirmative to my offered plan.”
“We can try, but I make no promises, okay?”
A smile forced its way onto my face. “Okay!”
He stood then, scaring Topher into running underneath the coffee table. “If we’re going to do this and do this well, then we have our work cut out for us.”