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  Right then, Bobby learned of the dizzying nausea that arrives in the wake of a freshly made mistake. Mistakes are those moments when we grip the future so hard that it breaks, and we know we must build another future from the pieces, but one that shall never be as good. Bobby wondered how many pieces there would be, and if any would be too small to pick up.

  • • •

  Jules returned to find Bobby cradling her son’s broken head. In her panic she pushed Bobby to the ground, and became blind to everything but the boy, whose skull moved beneath her fingers.

  “He fell,” Bobby said, “it was an accident,” but it was as if she couldn’t tune to the frequency he was using, that she’d changed to some emergency channel, the unique language shared by a whale and her lost calf.

  “Call an ambulance!” she screamed. “Call an ambulance!” Bobby rooted through her handbag for the house keys and ran inside to use the telephone.

  An ambulance spirited Sunny and his mother away. Bobby was left sitting in a puddle on the ground. Rain turned it from blood red to the gray of the others around it.

  He waited there all night until Jules returned, alone, at dawn. Dark bags hung beneath her eyes. Tears clotted her lashes. Bobby threw his arms around her waist and sobbed against the warm pillow of her pelvis. He held her hands and prepared to be told that his best friend was dead.

  “He was awake, for a while,” she said, staring at the wall.

  “For a while?”

  “Long enough to say it was an accident. That it wasn’t your fault.” Bobby crumpled at her feet. “Come,” she said, “I’ll drive you home.”

  He cried for the entire journey, leaving a sodden clump of tissue in the footwell. As the car pulled into a space outside his house, he spoke the words he had only heard in the movies Sunny had played for him.

  “I am deeply sorry for your loss.” Jules pinched Bobby’s earlobe and tugged, gently, as if she might produce a coin from behind it.

  “Bobby, honey,” she said, “I think you’ve misunderstood me. Sunny isn’t dead. I mean, he’s not well, but he’s not dead.” Though she was crying the chime of her laughter filled the car. “My boy is indestructible, it seems.”

  • • •

  Sunny had never been in hospital this long before. Eventually Bobby was permitted to visit. Given his presence at her son’s continuing brushes with death, it wouldn’t have been unreasonable for Jules to consider Bobby a bad omen. But, knowing how happy seeing his friend would make Sunny, she slipped a note through Bobby’s door the moment he was well enough to receive him.

  This wasn’t the first time Bobby had visited Sunny in hospital. Navigating his way to the children’s ward was easy using the back corridors, past the morgue and the kitchens, one of which always smelled of boiling vegetable water and old men’s skin. Bobby zipped his hood tight around his face so that only his eyes were visible and slunk into the ward behind a porter’s cleaning trolley.

  Three rooms down on the left he found Sunny, chemically dazed, and was quickly met by the inescapable realization that he didn’t look quite the same anymore. Something had changed. He still had two eyes (peering out from the centers of bruised purpling circles), a nose (broken) and a mouth (missing five teeth). He was still bigger than all of the other boys on the ward. His head had a slight dent in it, hinted at beneath the bandages, but nothing to explain the overwhelming sense of changed physiology. Bobby couldn’t be sure what, but something wasn’t right.

  “Hello,” Sunny said. His voice was deeper and wetter and stuck in his mouth, face slack and creeping down his skull. Only then, when he could no longer use it, did Bobby realize how big Sunny’s smile used to be.

  Sunny offered Bobby a grape—his arm and hands still worked, evidently—but Bobby felt it rude to take it all, so he had half and gave the other back, nestling it on Sunny’s tongue. It fell off and rolled under the bed. The sound of laughter came from Sunny’s mouth, in time to the rhythmic jerking of his chest, but there was no reflection of it in his expression. It was as if Bobby was hearing Sunny’s thoughts. The muscles in Sunny’s face no longer worked, an avalanche of synapses blocking this specific neural pathway. Bobby wanted to reach inside himself, tear out whatever it was Sunny now lacked and hand it over, still bloody and twitching in his grip.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Sunny said, “this is the best thing that could possibly have happened. How many cyborgs do you know who walk around smiling all of the time?”

  “I don’t know any cyborgs, apart from you.”

  “Well, trust me. Cyborgs don’t have feelings. Like the Terminator. That’s why they strike fear into the hearts of their enemies.” Bobby stroked the bedsheet. It was rougher than he’d thought it would be and he hoped it wasn’t irritating Sunny’s skin.

  “Bobby,” Sunny continued, “I got my metal plate. I am complete now. Nobody can ever hurt you again.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE PRINCESS

  Sunny’s absence proved as vivid a pain as a toothache. By day, Bobby stayed in his bedroom alone, killing time by peeling off the wallpaper. He set about unpicking the curtains thread by thread. Eventually boredom permeated everything. He could taste it in the rations from the biscuits and apples he had squirreled away. He could feel it rattle in his lungs with every breath he drew. When he slept he dreamt of nothing.

  Bruce and Cindy ignored him as much as possible. Occasionally when he heard them laughing he would slip into the room hoping they would share with him what they had found so funny, but they never did. What bothered him most was not that they didn’t speak to him. It was that his father always said good night before he went to bed. Of all the day’s possible interactions, why had he chosen the one that brings with it such finality, one that could not really be answered at all? It was, in fact, for that exact reason.

  At night when they were fast asleep, Bobby recorded, by looking at the leftovers in the bin, what his father had eaten for dinner. Changes in his culinary behavior since his mother left could then be plotted on a graph. He devoted many hours to his files, minded only by the moon through the window, the monocle of a watchful one-eyed God.

  When he had finished archiving, Bobby sat on his mother’s rug and watched television with the lights off and the sound muted, so the colorful amorphous blobs illuminated the walls around him. He watched the news. Fourteen police cars surrounded an old farmhouse in the countryside, the city a distant twinkling conga. The farmer’s chin puckered and his lip trembled as though he only felt things with the bottom half of his face, the way men do. He was worried by what might be hiding in the hay. Across the bottom of the screen scrolled a caption, The search continues . . .

  Bobby switched on the bathroom light. Patches of piss on the toilet seat blinked like frog spawn. His father was asleep on the floor. A zip line of drool linked his mouth to the tiles.

  Bruce opened his eyes and stared at his son until he came into focus. Instinctively his first feeling was one of great shame. Bobby was this shame manifest, cowering by the laundry basket.

  “You think it’s funny to sneak up on your old man?”

  “No.”

  “To spy on me?” he said, standing.

  “No, I promise,” Bobby said, shrinking. Bruce rubbed a thumb over his belt buckle. Bobby ran from the room, through the kitchen and up the stairs, where it didn’t smell of stale beer.

  For the rest of the week, neither addressed the cold space between them, as real as a prison wall. When his father did talk to him Bobby jumped like he’d just popped a blister. Soon he found it hard to get to sleep, day or night. Slumber always came anyway, but late, an unapologetic party guest.

  • • •

  On a drab Monday morning, Bobby ate scraps from the bottom of the cereal box, a paltry handful of beige dust, and walked to the top of the hill. Looking down, the neighborhood formed a basin with his street at the center. Soft grassy inclines rimmed the outskirts of the town, as if the w
hole place resided inside a dead volcano and its people fed on the warmth of lava underfoot.

  Bobby headed to The Ponds, where he’d often come with his mother, to check whether it was frog season yet. No such luck. Stagnant water held aloft a sponge cake of algae, which burped pungent bubbles at the air.

  The graying lady at the corner store had spruced up her chocolate selection with some new additions, a pyramid of ruby-red wrappers. Bobby complimented her on her eye for an attractive display, hoping that they might talk, that she might let him stay around a while, or perhaps put him to work restocking the shelves.

  “I might be old,” she said, carefully topping the pyramid with a Belgian chocolate bauble, “but I’m not a fool.”

  “Sorry?” Bobby said, and she turned to face him. Her perfume smelled of rosewater, the kind usually worn by a much younger woman, and Bobby was surprised how pleasant he found it.

  “You distract me with your chitchat, and then the bigger boys burst in and steal all of my stock.”

  “No, that’s not . . .”

  “I’ve seen those boys around here.” She opened the door and flipped the sign to Closed. “Get out. At your age, you should be at home with your parents.” Bobby thought about throwing a brick through her window, knowing he never would.

  He walked to the park fence and peered through a knothole at knee height to see if anyone was there. The three older boys from his school—Big Kevin, Little Kevin and their de facto leader, Amir Kindell—were carving their initials into the wooden posts by the swings. Though they were some distance away, Bobby recognized them instantly. Not from their features, from their gait, the way they swung—something inside them, loose, unbolted, that would emerge through their mouths or their fists in lightning. He knew that if he cut across the park they would catch him, deaden his arms with rabbit punches, and empty his bag into the mud. He closed his eyes and wished that Sunny were there now, using his superstrength cyborg arms to tear the fence to pieces and his shoulder cannons to blow them all to smithereens. Still shaking, Bobby walked back down the main road.

  By mid-afternoon he’d run out of things to do and could think of only one new place to go. Five doors down from his home, on the corner, was a patch of scrubland six steps across and four long. It wasn’t a front garden, it wasn’t a back garden, merely a forgotten botch in town planning under no one’s jurisdiction.

  Weeds and flowers merged in bracken, greens and browns bullied by sharp blasts of cerise. Petals twitched and became butterflies. A bee made deliveries between daffodils, a tabby cat snatched at ballerina seeds pirouetting in the air. Bobby sat atop a moist bank of mud that supped spillage from the well-kept hanging basket above it and stabbed his fingers in deep.

  From behind him, he heard the grind of rubber rolling over grit, and turned to see a girl riding a red tricycle. Not the kind of tricycle meant for a toddler, but one custom-made, the frame specially welded to wheels as wide as beer barrels. The device had a curious majesty to it, like a sturdy metal horse. Blissfully chuntering to herself, the girl had round cheeks that framed lips pocked with chapping. Her hair, the gold of crisp wheat, had been cut into a functional bowl shape, just short enough at the fringe to stay out of her eyes. She was a little over five feet tall, but, Bobby guessed, maybe a year older than he was, despite the brightly colored clothes she wore, patched with cartoon characters he had long outgrown. She pressed an open hand against her belly where it bloomed over the lip of her tracksuit bottoms and held it down hard on her distended stomach to form a pale expanding starfish on the skin.

  Bobby hid in the long grass, not wanting to be seen. What he needed was camouflage, like Sunny and he had used when playing war. Muddy colors, leaves and thicket. Slivers of wintry paint streaked across his face, making him a part of the bark, a nature creature, held in the palm of earth’s hand.

  The tricycle came to a stop and the girl looked right at him as if they knew each other. Embarrassed, Bobby leapt to his feet, as though he had never been hidden at all.

  “What is your first name?” the girl asked.

  Thomas Allen, a boy in Bobby’s class, did an impression of the kids with special needs from the other school, across town by The Deeps. He rolled his tongue, forced it into his bottom lip and spoke slowly in a stupid voice. He couldn’t pretend that she didn’t sound a bit like that.

  “Bobby,” he said.

  “What is your last name?”

  “Nusku.” Bobby lurched onto his tiptoes, balanced on a rock, and peered over her shoulder down the hill. No one was coming. It had suddenly occurred to him what might happen if he was seen talking to her by someone from school. They would tease him, push him around, and until Sunny recovered to full cyborg capability, he’d be left to face them alone. He had to get away from her as quickly as possible.

  Bobby had never experienced this heightened self-awareness before, and it shamed him. What would his mother say when she returned—to find Bobby the antithesis of everything she’d taught him about kindness and acceptance?

  The girl pulled the elastic on her tracksuit bottoms then let it go, briefly revealing their white imprint on the flesh above her knickers.

  “My name is Rosa Reed,” she said. “Do you want to play?” She clambered down from the tricycle. In her hand was a black felt-tip pen. She held it out toward Bobby like a runner’s baton. “Do you want to play?” she said again. He twirled a blade of long grass between his fingers.

  “Play what?” he said. Teeth marks ribbed the plastic pen. “What do you want me to do with that?”

  “Write your name.” She reached into the basket bolted to the front of the tricycle and pulled out a gnarled notepad with Rosa Reed Rosa Reed Rosa Reed written over and over in a fractured jerky scrawl.

  “Why?”

  “I collect names.”

  “But you only have one.”

  “Bobby Nusku,” she said, shaking her head, “sometimes you are funny.” He took the notepad, wrote down his name and handed it back to Rosa as quickly as he could. It felt important not to be linked physically, by them touching or holding on to the same thing at the same time. Bobby shifted his weight from his left foot to his right. He began to salivate, as if his own unexpected prejudice might actually make him vomit.

  “Now,” he said, “you have two.”

  “Wait here,” Rosa said. She walked over to the house on the corner and fetched a scuffed leather basketball from the garden. Bobby had had no idea it was where she lived. He’d not afforded her that level of normalcy, to live in a home on a street—his street—just like him. This made him doubly sickened by how embarrassed he remained at the prospect of their being seen together. He tried to swallow the feeling, a morsel of unpalatable meat.

  They sat on the curb and bounced the ball to each other. Though she was clumsy, her fingers short and unready, they quickly established a pattern where Bobby imitated Rosa every time she dropped the ball and she laughed until her sides ached. He kept watch for people coming but no one did.

  Rosa mimicked Bobby, but her movement was unwieldy. Bobby imagined she was being controlled from the inside by someone much smaller struggling to reach the pedals. Every game they played disintegrated into a disharmonic routine of call and response. He raised an arm, she raised an arm. He threw the ball, she threw the ball. There was no competition, just a strange mirrored dance done in silence, like they were two petals on a flower, tickled split seconds apart by the same gentle breeze.

  Bobby was having fun. For the first time since visiting the hospital, Sunny drifted from his mind, as did the notion that he and Rosa might be discovered. For a few lovely moments, self-awareness relinquished its grip on him, and he was happy. This, time spent with Sunny had taught him, is what friendship is. To be given the key to a locked part of your soul.

  • • •

  The first breath of dusk cooled Bobby’s skin and gave him goose bumps. Somewhere in the distance he heard laughter. It bounced around the air and turned soft, disappearing l
ike an idea of no merit. He began to panic.

  “Rosa,” Bobby said suddenly, “I need to go.”

  “Why?” she asked, spinning the ball in her hands.

  “I just do. And so do you. You need to go home.”

  “Why?”

  “Go home!” He pushed her,just gently to turn her around, but she was stronger than she looked and wouldn’t budge. “Please.”

  “Why?”

  He heard the laughter again, rooted, nearby. They were coming. And they would see him with her. This would be it. Bobby gripped her by the shoulders.

  “Rosa, you have to go, now.” She took the pen and paper from her pocket and scribbled Rosa Reed Bobby Nusku.

  “No,” she said, angrily, “I want to play.”

  In silhouette against the fall of the sun he saw them, the three boys from the park, walking up the hill.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Too late to run away, Bobby dove behind the bush, leaving Rosa on the pavement. He dug his head between his legs and wrapped his arms around his knees as tightly as he could. He held his breath.

  They came, but had not seen him.

  “Hello. My name is Rosa Reed. What is your name?” Amir repeated what she’d said as if it were being played back at half speed. The two Kevins laughed. Bobby wanted to run and get help but he was too scared to move. They teased her for a while but she did not understand. Their laughter dipped to a murmur, and then the sounds began to overlap.

  The crash of Rosa’s pen and pad hitting the road.

  The sole of her shoe scraping back and forth against the curb.

  Her wailing, like a freak storm.

  All Bobby could do was listen, petrified, and imagine the worst. She screamed, then it cut off, as if one of them had a hand across her mouth. And the flapping of her trousers where her legs were kicking, that stopped too, as they lifted her feet and slammed her down into the soil.