The bus window chilled the skin of my forehead. I wanted to turn myself off to the world but didn’t dare sleep for fear of being robbed. Not that I had anything worth stealing. Anything of value I’d ever owned was gone. Even Pumpkin. My sisters needed those things more than I did. I’d dropped them off at Nana’s and left with nothing but my old gym bag, a spare set of clothes, and a toothbrush. Although, I didn’t actually know if my teeth needed brushing.

I thought about those kinds of things a lot. What human habits did I perform every day that I didn’t have to do? Would I die if I didn’t eat? Would my body get fat if I ate too much? Would I get sick if I didn’t wear a jacket in the cold? Could I get sick at all? Had I ever even been sick? And if I had the complete list of all the things I didn’t need to do, would I continue to do them? Should I? I’d spent my entire life believing I was human. Now that I knew I wasn’t, I didn’t know what to do with myself.

I scrolled through random threads on my phone to keep my mind occupied. That’s when I learned the news about Howard Blaise. Everywhere I surfed, the headlines stood out. Genesis Android Designer, Howard Blaise, Arrested. He’d stirred up a great deal of controversy by passing off his personal android, Rebecca, as human. The whole thing triggered a worldwide discussion on the ethics of creating human-like robots. A worldwide discussion about me.

According to the internet, Blaise’s family—a wife and daughter—died several years earlier in a house fire. The android was a therapy model he’d designed and built himself, intended to help him cope with the loss. But he’d raised her like a real person. Even enrolled her in school. No one knew she wasn’t human until she broke her arm in a volleyball game. The school nurse was first on the scene, and, after he discovered the truth, he leaked it onto social media.

The next article in the thread described a group of kids dressing up as rabbits, breaking into homes, and terrorizing neighborhoods.

The world had lost its marbles.

“Crazy, right?” said the girl sitting beside me. “Can you believe that guy? Pretending his android was a real person? That’s sci-fi movie shit right there.”

“Dollar for the swear jar,” I uttered.

“What?”

“Nothing.” I stuffed my phone into my jacket and put my hood up.

She clicked her tongue. “Fine. Don’t talk to me.” Her butt slid across the seat, and she put her legs up on the chair in front of her. Her ruby red lips caught my eye as she tucked her black hair behind her ears. I leaned forward to get a better look, but the curtain had already fallen back into her face.

I turned my attention to the window. It was too dark to see anything but the reflection of the other passengers. The girl beside me tucked her hair again, and, as I suspected, she was pretty. Like a porcelain doll. Her shocking blue eyes inspected me from head to toe.

I turned, and she snapped her head the other way.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“Presumptuous much? What makes you think I want something?”

“I could see you watching me.” I tapped the window with my knuckle.

A giggle fluttered from her red lips like the sound of a hungry cat chirping at a bird. “Okay, okay. I was looking. But can you blame me? You could open a bottle on that jawline.”

A girl like her took notice of me? I should have been flattered. But I wasn’t. I was starting to think the only emotion I’d ever feel again was shame. “I’m an android,” I told her. It was the first time I’d said it out loud, and I might as well have plunged a screwdriver into my chest.

She let out another chirpy giggle, and her teeth flashed a sweet smile.

I leaned back into the window.

“Wait,” she said. “You’re joking, right?”

Saying it the first time was hard enough, so I let it go.

She twisted until she faced me. “You’re serious? No way. You’re lying.” She reached into my crossed arms and pulled out my hand. Her fingertips tickled as they traced the curves and bends of the lines on my palm. “You feel pretty human to me. If you’re really an android, my hat’s off to the artist who made you.”

I took my hand back and shoved it into my pocket.

“So, Mr. Android. Where are you headed?”

“Nowhere.”

“Last time I checked, you don’t have to take a bus to get there. What are you running from?”

“I could ask you the same thing. You don’t look much older than me. Don’t you have school tomorrow? Where’s your family?”

“Dropped out.” She shrugged, and her pretty lips pulled her face into a scowl. “And I don’t do family.”

“Me, either. Not anymore, anyway. The only family I ever cared about decided they’d rather go live with their Nana.” I let out a steady stream of breath rather than shout. “She’s a terrible person, but she’s rich, so at least they’ll have money.”

She perked up. “Rich? Like, how rich?”

“She bought my parents a lake house as a wedding gift.”

“Yup. That’s rich.” Her blue eyes darted around. “And she took away someone you care about?”

“My sisters, and she didn’t take them. They wanted to go.”

“Your sisters? I thought you were an android?”

I chuckled, if one could call it that. It was more like a gulp.

“Well, that’s not right. You’re going to stand for them up and ditching you?”

“There’s nothing I can do. She’s their legal guardian.” I clenched my teeth and turned away so she couldn’t see my eyes. They were probably red.

She placed her hand on my arm. “Come with me. I’m from Nowhere. I can show you around.”

“I thought treating androids like people was sci-fi shit?”

“Dollar for the swear jar,” she teased. “Don’t worry. I’m a fan of sci-fi.”

Smiling felt alien. But I couldn’t help it. I liked this girl. “What’s your name?” I asked.

She smiled back and her fingers tightened against my arm.

“Jamie.”

We took shelter for the night at a grubby motel, the sort of place I’d only seen on crime shows. It was a nest of transients and troublemakers, drug dealers, dog and/or cockfighters, and at least two teenagers running away from home. We had to pool our cash to afford it. Anywhere nicer was out of the question. But the purple neon sign outside could have read Murder Motel for all we cared. It seemed like the perfect place for us. 

Our room smelled of sour milk and wasn’t any warmer than it was outside. I flicked on the light, and it lazily buzzed to life, illuminating the stained green carpet and single queen-sized bed.

“This isn’t so bad,” Jamie lied. She dove face-first onto the mattress. It slipped out of the frame and collapsed sideways on the floor. She screamed at first but instantly recovered into a fit of laughter.

“Jeez, don’t break stuff,” I poked fun.

“God, this place is cold.” She bundled the blankets around her.

“It’s probably haunted by the ghost of the skunk that was left to rot in here.”

“Shit! Look at that! Behind you!”

A painting of a fetus hung behind the door. Or it might not have been a fetus. It could have been some kind of squid. Or maybe it was an upside-down dog. Actually, I had no earthly idea what it was a painting of. The large, ghoulish eyes of the ambiguous blob stared down at us and bored straight into my soul.

“That is terrifying,” I said. “I’m taking it down.”

“No! Don’t do it! It’s probably covering a hole in the wall where some rats are playing poker or something.”

I left the demonic watercolor portal in place and decided to turn on the heater. The clunky gray dinosaur had two knobs: a knob for temperature and a knob for...well, without turning it on, I couldn’t guess what the second knob was for. I cranked them both up to red, but the machine didn’t stir. I couldn’t find any other buttons or switches (I checked twice to be sure) and it didn’t respond to my voice commands. Then again, it was possible I was just stupid.

“Do you know how to work this?” I asked.

Jamie emerged from the bed with the gray-green comforter draped around her shoulders. “I think you just turn the knobs.”

“I tried that.”

“Maybe you need the magic touch.” She took a turn twisting the dials back and forth for nothing. “Is it plugged in?”

“Who knows?” I assumed it plugged into the wall behind it but couldn’t see into the crack between the two. Pulling it away risked damaging the piece of junk, and I didn’t want to disturb any critters who might come crawling out and ruin my night. Jamie, on the other hand, didn’t share that fear. She reared back on one leg and kicked it hard enough to leave a dent. The front panel let out a bang! but the heater remained dormant.

“Hey!” I snapped. “What did I say about breaking things?”

“What? Look at this place. No one is going to notice.”

We shared a laugh and spent the next hour on a mission to warm up the room. We searched high and low for a space heater although would have settled for a rubber heating pad or even a box of matches. Eventually, we were forced to surrender to the unrelenting cold and call the front desk. An automated robotic voice assured me they’d send someone to fix it, but after twenty minutes, we were still alone and freezing. A second call, identical to the first, resulted in the same empty promise.

“Maybe we should build a fire,” I joked, sinking into an ugly floral armchair. The cold crawled up my arms and sent a tremble from the top of my head to my toes.

“Did you just shiver?” Jamie asked from her wigwam of sheets, towels, and blankets.

“Yeah.”

“So, you really feel the cold, then? That’s cool. Do you like, I dunno, go to the bathroom and stuff?”

I nodded and tried not to feel weird about it. My body had to eliminate the food I ate somehow.

“Interesting. What else do you do?”

It took some willpower not to let my mind go anywhere dirty, although I wasn’t sure she’d object. “I do all normal human things,” I said. “I even bleed. I think I was supposed to make my parents feel like they were raising a real human son.”

She emerged from her blanket shelter, crossed the room with a sultry look in her eye, and planted herself on my lap. I could feel her breath from her lips just inches away from mine. She smelled like vanilla.

“I can feel your heartbeat,” she whispered.

“It’s not really a heart,” I admitted. “I looked it up, and it’s actually a thin metal disc that’s compressed at a constant rate. It pops forward and backward between compressions. According to the website, it’s one of the most useless parts of my body. It doesn’t do anything except fake a heartbeat.”

“Wow,” she sarcastically gushed.

“It adjusts its rate according to how I’m feeling, though,” I tried to explain. “And I do feel things. Like, my chest hurts when I feel bad, or, I don’t know, when I am programmed to feel bad? I’m not sure about that part of it.”

“So you have emotions? Can you love?”

“I don’t know.”

She smiled. “Maybe we should find out.”

The inches evaporated, and she kissed me. I never thought I’d enjoy the chalky taste of lipstick so much. I melted into her touch like butter. It wasn’t my first kiss, but it was the first time an electric pulse passed between me and another person. I didn’t want to stop, and it seemed she felt the same. She straddled my legs and kissed me again, and a third time, and then a fourth until there was no distinction between them, and it became one, long, exhilarating connection.

No one came to fix the heater, and we fell asleep in each other’s arms.