19. Am I a Real Boy?
Am I a Real Boy?
AIDAN
I stood in place on the revolving platform waiting to unveil our penultimate scene.
My skin, though clean, held on to last night’s activities. I fizzed with a desire for another night in Henry’s bed, connecting and touching like that. No wonder Samantha Jones liked sex so much. It got my blood pumping. It cleared my head. It made me happy.
It made Henry happy, too. He seemed ecstatic when he climaxed, collapsing into me like a marionette whose strings had been cut.
I tamped down my desire as best I could because in seconds I’d solidify.
No, not just down there. Everywhere.
I listened for the familiar sounds.
The pop of the light switch.
The splat of the flipped sign.
The click of the turned lock.
The metallic grind of the curtains opening.
At the end of the usual concerto, I would be plastic again. Mindless and staring.
Instead, that morning, I blinked out through the glass window onto a confused crowd gathered on the front porch of Isla’s Attic.
Many of them lowered their phones, turned to their neighbors, and cupped a hand to their mouths.
I strained to make out the whispers. Alexa and Sid stood at the front of the pack squinting up at me in the snowy scene.
My heart—which should’ve flickered off by then—raced for warring reasons.
A whirring machine hidden above my head pumped out something called “snow fluid” through the air, which possibly obscured the reality that I was not a mannequin in the window. I was a man.
Still .
Elation radiated through my still pumping veins, still working muscles, and still twitching fingers. I reined it in as best I could. This was good for me, but bad for the display. Very bad, judging by Henry’s sky-high eyebrows as he pushed to the front of the pack to see what was wrong.
I held as still as I possibly could to create an illusion. I tried to keep my chest from rising and falling as I took sparing, gulping breaths.
The concerto reversed itself.
Metallic grind. Click. Splat. Pop.
Then started over.
Pop. Splat. Click.
“Aidan?” Henry called through the scenic flat.
“Yes?” I responded, which prompted the loudest, throatiest groan ever followed by, “Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck.”
I’d wanted to hear that word again from Henry’s mouth, but not in a scenario like this.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“I wish I knew,” he said. “I wish! I wish! Wishes only come true when it’s convenient, it seems! I think we broke you.”
I bristled, afraid Henry was regretting me again. Regretting wishing for me, kissing me, making love to me.
The four-letter word “love” overtook my thoughts, despite the confused chatter of the crowd obscured by the curtain feet away from where I was standing.
“Or fixed me,” I countered.
If the sign and the lock and the lights didn’t trigger me to become a mannequin again, then did that mean…
No. It couldn’t.
Did Henry love me ?
Fast footfalls echoed behind me.
“Psst,” Henry called finally. “I’m going to try this one more time. When the curtain opens, if you’re still… you know, you, just stay still. I think I can save this.” The panic underpinning his statement left me uneasy.
The shop-concerto played a third reprise to no standing ovation.
Nope, just standing, stunned, possibly appalled silence.
The fake snow thinned out, and the audience outside Isla’s Attic knew without a fraction of a doubt that there was a fully grown man standing inside the window in place of the mannequin they’d come to know.
Henry appeared, elbowing his way to the front again.
“Ta-da!” he shouted, hands splayed and shaking.
“Uh, our final surprise of Isla’s Attic’s great revolving window is a real-life model/actor, Aidan Smith!
Aidan, take a bow.” I was still locked into the feet mechanisms, but I bent at the waist as best I could without falling.
“I did a search far and wide for a model who looked just like the main mannequin in our scenes. Aidan will be posing for photos all day as the owner of ‘The House on Holly Lane,’ Ivan Ivy. Please enjoy the conclusion to our story.”
Henry’s shoulders dropped as soon as the applause rang out. Clearly, they were buying the lie he was selling, and as soon as Henry opened the door for the shoppers, they stormed in to raid the shelves for last-minute gifts.
I hung tight on the platform, playing up the scene with my plastic female love interest as company. My cheeks hurt from smiling so hard.
Henry came and unlocked me occasionally. He brought me water and whispered about how much merchandise he was selling.
From my post, I overheard a conversation between Henry and Alexa.
“Guess this is why Aidan was mysteriously not around for the other unveilings,” Alexa said.
“Had to save the big reveal for last,” Henry said, sounding waveringly smug.
Around late morning, once we’d swapped to the final side, the big finale, one older man outside shouted through the window, “Give your lady a kiss then, how ’bout it?”
The group around him seemed to like the suggestion.
Since that was what was supposed to be simulated with the tableau anyway, Henry shrugged and conceded the stage to me.
Grudgingly, I leaned in and kissed the female mannequin.
The plastic pressed to my lips was cold and hard and wrong.
Nothing like kissing Henry, who was supple and warm and tender and possibly in love with me !
In love! With me!
Since this was for Henry, I played it up more.
I closed my eyes and dipped the female mannequin like a sailor and a nurse in an old black-and-white photo I’d seen online.
A bright light went off. “Ah, dammit. Stupid flash fudged up the whole thing. Once more, champ!” the guy who suggested this shouted.
Henry gestured me on because I guessed this was somehow good for sales.
As midafternoon rolled in, a reporter from the local newspaper came around.
He was a tall man with a bushy mustache.
A photographer trailed him. Henry was preparing the store for closing as most customers had families to visit and dinners to eat and early gifts to exchange, but he stopped what he was doing to answer some questions for a feature article.
I sat behind the register, legs tired from standing all day, and listened.
Henry beamed and his words pranced lightly on the air.
His social anxiety seemed to be in remission for the day.
He spoke with candor about his art and me as his muse.
A glowing kinship hung like a priceless ornament between us.
“This was such a spectacular Christmas treat for the citizens of Ocean Glen,” the reporter said to Henry. “Do you think this will be a yearly occurrence?”
Henry smiled back at me. His sunshine brightness packed me with new energy. “I sure hope so,” he said.
“Wonderful! Delightful! Would you mind if we got a final professional shot for the profile?” the reporter asked.
“Not at all. Where, um, do you want us?” Henry asked, straightening the collar on the button-down he wore beneath his chunky cable-knit sweater.
“Oh, actually,” the photographer said, “I was hoping for a shot of Aidan and his mannequin doppelganger…”
The breathable air plunged out of the shop. “Um…” Henry stalled.
I blew out my cheeks, racking my brain for a convenient reason this couldn’t happen.
“He was stolen,” I said at the same time Henry cried, “He broke!”
A stricken look zipped between us.
“What we meant to say is that he broke and then he was stolen,” clarified Henry, which seemed to only partially mitigate the confusion from the newspaper team. “When we took him down, he fell and— pop —off went his head! Then as we tried to fix him, one of the arms came loose. Then a foot…”
I cringed as Henry detailed my hypothetical disembodiment. “We put the parts out back with the intention of returning to them after Christmas,” I said, guilty once again over lying to other humans. “Someone must’ve seen them by the trash and took them by mistake.”
The reporter nodded and jotted it down in the tiny notebook that looked straight out of a movie. “Duly noted. Well, thank you both for your time. Let’s get that photo of the two of you, then.”
The photographer asked us to stand on the side of the circular platform facing into the store where fake snow still stuck to the wooden floor.
Henry placed an arm around my back. I placed one around his shoulders.
The photographer counted us down from three but stopped before hitting one.
“Can you two look at one another and pretend to laugh like you just told a funny joke? The pictures always come out better when there’s a bit of motion in them. ”
As instructed, we looked at one another, but we didn’t need to pretend a lick. Because as soon as we locked eyes, the laughter of having pulled this off fanned out of us in very merry waves.