Chapter 13
Seventh Grade
(age twelve)
All her short life, Am had been used to popularity. Grown-ups hated her a little; boys picked on her; but most girls loved her. Even Kelli, the shy girl who didn’t like anyone, loved Am. That was how it should be.
But now it was all going wrong.
“Look at Lukas. Just look at him,” said Elaine, sitting in the middle of the circle of girls in the corner of the playground, holding up a picture she’d printed out.
Now that they were twelve, they’d been moved from the springy-floored courtyard with the play equipment to a different, bigger one, with an empty field of the same springy floor to play sports on.
Am had been looking forward to playing on that field—not organized sports, which were boring, but games of tag, wrestling matches, feats of agility and strength too daring for the crowded playground with the younger kids.
And, of course, to hear Kelli make up new stories to fit with those new games.
“We were going to play tag,” she objected as all the girls huddled close to look at Elaine’s picture.
Elaine, who was never one to mince words, rolled her eyes. “Yeah, that’s what you always want to play. I want to show you this first, c’mon, look. Did you hear how he was singing in the last episode? People think he’s dark and evil, but really he’s so romantic.”
Lukas was a character from Spirit Singer, the latest AdventureVerse show, which was about a troupe of singers who secretly fought demons—or, in some cases, summoned them.
Lukas was one of those latter cases. He was lanky and pale, with black hair that fell in a wave to his chin. Am scowled down at the picture of him.
“You know he isn’t real,” said Am. “He’s not dark and evil or romantic. He’s a bunch of pixels on a screen and he says whatever the language model thinks he should say. Like Kelli’s old robot, remember? Can you imagine kissing a robot? Bleaugh.”
Am had felt disillusioned with the AdventureVerse ever since the copyright lesson in third grade, and everything she’d learned since then had only strengthened her disdain.
Kelli’s stories were made-up, but telling them involved real people playing together, connecting.
Even when she’d just told her stories to the robot, they’d been stories that came out of her living human brain.
AdventureVerse wasn’t like that. It was all generated to fit some story-generating equation by a piece of software as dumb as the robot.
AdventureVerse wasn’t just made-up, it was fake.
“Who cares if he’s real?” said Elaine. “You can hear it when he sings, right? You can hear how he puts his whole heart in it.”
That made no sense to Am. Lukas wasn’t real, so he didn’t have a heart. But apparently it made sense to the other dozen assembled girls. They nodded in agreement and started to chatter about their own fictional crushes.
“And who do you think he’s singing to?” she said derisively. “You?”
She’d meant it to be a persuasive, cutting argument. But Elaine just sighed happily, looking off into the distance.
“Sometimes,” she said, “it really feels that way.”
Nobody got to play tag that day.
Am knew what was happening. She had paid a modest amount of attention in health class.
When people grew up, their bodies changed, men fell in love with women, women fell in love with men; then they got married, performed a fascinating and disgusting ritual with their bodies, got pregnant, and had babies.
When people had crushes on boys it was because their bodies were starting to gear up to do all that.
In theory, there was nothing wrong with it.
Am didn’t even mind thinking about sex, in an abstract, titillated way, the way she thought about it when they studied gross bugs or the digestive system.
But it wasn’t supposed to have anything to do with her.
Pretty soon nobody even talked about playing tag. All the girls were busy batting their eyelashes and sighing about fake boys from fake AdventureVerse shows. Even worse—sometimes it was actual boys.
“Look, look,” said Navdeep, a bushy-haired girl who Am would later swear she’d never liked anyway, hushing them all right when Am was trying to round them up for one of Kelli’s pretend games. “Ssh, it’s Emeric, he’s right over there. Do you think he’s looking at me?”
Emeric was in fact right over there, wandering around on the grass, talking to two of his friends about a sports game.
He was a boy two years older than them. He had a pimply face and big glasses and just last week he’d called Elaine an evil bitch-monster and chased her the whole way across the yard.
Am had never been so incensed. She wanted to throw Emeric off a cliff, outside, without a spacesuit. These girls were Am’s friends, not Emeric’s. What right did he have to them?
But it was getting to be just as bad, even on the days when they didn’t talk about boys, because on those days, the girls went on jaunts to the shopping concourse, spending their meager allowances on new clothes and painting each other’s faces.
When they came back from those jaunts they looked exciting in a weird way, suddenly grown-up and different.
Am wanted to reach out and touch them sometimes.
But when she thought about joining in and looking that way herself, it felt inexplicably awful.
Like wearing clown paint all day. Am wasn’t going to be a clown.
Which meant she often got left behind on the playground, with nobody much who she liked except Kelli. At least there was Kelli. She had always liked Kelli the best.
“Promise me you’ll never be that stupid,” she said, huddling close to her in the leaves while Kelli doodled on a scrap of paper.
“You’ll never stop being who you are all of a sudden, okay?
You’ll never just suddenly get obsessed with boys and makeup and stop telling stories.
I hate all those other girls. You can’t be like them. ”
“You shouldn’t hate people,” said Kelli absently, intent on her doodles.
Am hunched forward. “But I just don’t get it. Three of them even have crushes on Matthis Hahn—can you imagine? I’m so mad.”
“Mom says there’s no point being mad at people for how they are,” said Kelli.
“When I can’t fit in with people, it’s because I’m on the autism spectrum, and that’s not my fault.
But it’s not their fault either. So, maybe you’re just different from the other girls.
You can’t get mad at them for being different from you. It’s just how they are.”
Whenever Kelli got like this, whenever she recited a set of rules she’d been told, she got a funny little furrow in her brow.
Kelli was as full of rules and platitudes as the robot, because of how the robot had basically raised her.
There was often a falseness in it, to Am’s ear.
Not like she was lying—Kelli generally did not lie—but more like she only believed them on the surface.
Deep down, in some unspoken, unreachable core, she had an inkling that she felt something else.
Am could swear that she saw that sometimes, something tight and brittle and powerful far below Kelli’s surface: a fire that would be unleashed, if she just let go of making herself believe those rules.
Am didn’t know how to make it happen, but one day, she wanted to bask in the glow of that fire.
“Okay, but promise me.” She held out her smallest finger and crooked it. “Promise that you’re always going to be you. C’mon, pinky-swear.”
“Okay,” said Kelli, smiling. “Pinky-swear.”
She hooked her smallest finger in Am’s and shook on it.