Man Made Boy (14 page)

She turned back to me, her eyes narrowed. “For real? Always?”

“Of course! I thought it was written all over my forehead.”

She started walking back toward me, still looking guarded. “Then why didn’t you ever tell me before?”

“I don’t know. I guess because it never seemed like you liked me like that.”

“Asshole!” She punched my arm. “I’ve cried in front of you
twice
now! If that doesn’t send up any red flags, then you don’t know anything about trowe girls.”

“Then, all this time, you’ve felt the same way? About me?”

“Who else?”

“I thought maybe Shaun…”

She shook her head. “Shaun’s a self-absorbed dick. I could never be serious with him. But you…” She grabbed my upper
arms, got up on her tiptoes, and pressed her nose against mine. “You are my Boy.”

I had almost forgotten what it felt like to have someone look at me without fear or pity or discomfort. To have someone look at me with real affection. At least there was one person in this city who didn’t think I was ugly. Maybe that was all I needed.

I kissed her then. The frozen winds howled around us, pulling at our coats. I didn’t know what we were going to do, how we were going to make this work. But right at that moment, the only thing that mattered was her strong body in my arms and her warm lips pressed against mine. We kissed like it could stop time.

But of course, it couldn’t really last forever. Finally, she stepped back and looked up at me with a strange expression.

“What?” I said.

“So who the hell wrote that message?” she asked.

EVEN THOUGH LIEL rewrapped the scarf to cover her face, the few people on the subway that late at night gave her weird looks. We’d have to get her sunglasses to cover up her eyes. But then she’d just look strange in a different way, all wrapped up like the Invisible Man. And what would happen when it got warmer?

I pushed those thoughts away. We’d figure something out. We had to.

“So, was the rest of the message right, too?” asked Liel over the clatter of the subway train. “You have a job? You’re making it?”

“Technically that’s true, I guess. But I don’t really make much money. Just enough to pay rent.”

“Rent?” Her eyes went wide. “Wow, so you have, like, an apartment and all that?”

“Sure, that’s what everybody does. And I have a roommate.”

“You live with a
human
?” she asked, like it was the most amazing thing ever.

It made me laugh a little.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing. It’s just funny. This is all so normal to me now. I forgot how strange it used to seem.”

“You’ve been gone a while,” she said, leaning against my shoulder.

“How are things at The Show?” I asked.

“The same. Nothing ever changes there. I think it’s slowly driving them all crazy. Nobody’s meant to be cooped up like that forever.”

“How are my parents?”

She sighed. “Well, you know. They were really upset. Your mom…well, she wouldn’t talk to anyone for a while. Not even your dad. And your dad, he wanted to take the city apart looking for you. But Ruthven wouldn’t let him.”

“Are they…doing better now?”

“Sort of. Your mom is at least talking now. Your dad…” She looked at me, her eyes squinting in the little open space that the scarf left. “Well, he spends a lot of time disconnected.”

“Shit,” I said.

“Don’t feel bad. You have your life to live. They need to accept that.”

“Yeah…” I wished it felt a little more worth it. I didn’t even know what I was doing out here.

Then the train came out of the tunnel and slowly rose over the building tops of Queens. Liel gasped and squeezed my hand.
I remembered my first night on this train and how amazed I had been by the view.

“Pretty cool, huh?”

“So much…
space
!” she said in a way that actually sounded a little scared.

“It’s okay.” I squeezed her hand back.

She shivered, then nodded. The scarf made it difficult to see her expression.

“This human you live with,” she said.

“Gauge.”

“Does he know? What you are? About the rest of us?”

“No. But I think we’re going to have to tell him some of it at least. It’s not like you can just hang out with a scarf wrapped around your head forever.”

“Right…” she said, her eyes narrowing in a frown.

“Hey, don’t worry about it. We’ll figure something out.”

She nodded, but I could tell she wasn’t really convinced.

As we got off the train and walked to the apartment building, I tried to follow my own advice and not worry about how we were going to make this work. But as we walked the three flights up to my apartment, I got really nervous about telling Gauge. Everything was so concrete with him. So scientific. He wasn’t the kind of guy who believed that magic was possible. Or even desirable.

But as it turned out, it wasn’t something we had to deal with right away because Gauge wasn’t home.

“Oh, thank God I can take all this crap off!” said Liel. She threw the scarf, gloves, and coat in a heap on the floor. Then she fell back onto the couch and kicked her boots off into Gauge’s junk corner.

It was really weird having Liel in my apartment. But it was
also really nice. I felt like I got back some part of me that had been missing.

“I’m not sure where Gauge is.” I sat down on the couch next to her.

“Hmmm.” She stretched out on the couch so that her legs were in my lap.

“He’s
always
home. About the only reason he ever leaves is to see a movie.”

“So we’ve got a few hours at least until we have to deal with him.” She stretched her arms up and burrowed her feet into the cushions so that her legs pressed down on my thighs. “You know, you keep telling me not to worry, but I think you’re way more worried than I am.”

I shrugged. She didn’t really understand everything we’d have to deal with. But maybe she didn’t need to know yet. It had been a stressful transition for me. I wanted to make it easier for her. So I didn’t say anything.

“Do you know what I like best about the city so far?” she asked.

“The subway tunnels?” I asked.

“Well, those
are
nice,” she admitted. “But no. My favorite is that part where you kissed me. Why don’t you do some more of that?”

“But what if Gauge comes—”

“Kiss!” She sat up so that our faces were close. “Now!”

“You trowe girls are so bossy.”

“You monster boys are just too shy.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

What could I do? The reputation of monster boys everywhere was at stake. So I had to kiss her. And because I didn’t want there to be any doubts, I did it a lot. At first, in the back of my
mind I was still a little worried that Gauge would walk in on us. But this was the girl of my dreams and we were alone in my very own apartment. It had been a rough couple of months and as her body pressed against mine and her legs intertwined with mine, I thought maybe I had earned this.

So I let myself get lost in those glittering, diamond eyes. And for the first time in a while, I didn’t feel poor or alone anymore.

GAUGE DIDN’T WALK in on us. In fact, he didn’t come home that night at all. The next day I had to go to work, and I was worried about leaving Liel there in case Gauge showed up while I was gone. But I couldn’t take her with me, either.

“So leave a note,” said Liel. She was stretched out on the couch, flipping through TV channels.

“Right,” I said. “Somehow I don’t think a note that says, ‘Hey, Gauge, don’t worry about the random troll in your living room, I’ll explain when I get home’ will really do the trick.”

The apartment didn’t have a landline, so I tried calling his cell from an online VOIP service. But I got an automated message that said the number was disconnected. I popped online. I didn’t see surelee or s1zzl3 on, but there were a few other channels I knew that he used and eventually I found some people who knew him. But none of them had heard from him in the last twelve hours. For a lot of people, being offline that long might be normal. But for Gauge it was downright freakish.

“Okay, I’m officially worried about him now,” I told Liel.

“You said he was from California, right?” she asked. “Maybe he just went for a visit.”

“Maybe. But you’d think he would tell me something like that. And why would his phone be disconnected?”

She just shrugged and kept flipping through the channels.

“Well, I can’t be late for work,” I said. “Are you going to be cool here?”

“Sure,” she said. “I’ll just watch TV, I guess. And if he shows up…” She shrugged again.

“Yeah.” But there wasn’t anything to do.

So I left the restaurant number and headed to work. But I was stressing about it the whole day.

“You okay, man?” asked Ralphie while we worked the stoves.

“I guess,” I said.

“Is it that girl you saw last night when we were closing up?”

“Yeah, sort of.”

“Who is she?”

“She’s just…” I started to say “a friend,” but realized that wasn’t really true anymore. “I guess she’s my girlfriend.”

“All right, Frankie!” He slapped me on the back. “You go!”

I smiled as I went back to stirring my skillet. Liel was my girlfriend. I had this juvenile impulse to somehow get ahold of Shaun’s cell number just so I could call him up and tell him that in the end, Liel chose me. Sure, I lived in a shitty apartment, with a shitty job, and no money. But I had the hottest trowe girl in the world
living with me
. Worries about Gauge aside, it was pretty awesome. And I had to admit, not having Gauge there made things easier. Still, I’d have to deal with him eventually, right?

But when I got home, he still wasn’t there. And he didn’t come home the next day or the day after that. I started to think he’d done the same thing as his previous roommate and just taken off for California. Or maybe he’d gotten into an accident or been killed by a mugger. I had no idea. Nobody online had heard from him, and if he had any family, I’d never heard about them. There was no way for me to really take it further. So as the days turned
into weeks, I just started to accept that he wasn’t coming back.

Of course, if he wasn’t coming back, that opened up a whole new set of problems. First, the lease was under his name, so technically the landlord could kick us out at any time. But the more immediate problem was who would pay the other half of the rent?

That’s when the checks started coming in the mail. They came from all over. Rebate checks, refund checks, weird sweepstakes prizes. They weren’t for a lot of money, just five bucks here, ten bucks there. But there were a lot of them. So many, in fact, that when you put them all together (and paid the ridiculous fee at those sketchy check-cashing places that don’t ID), the total net covered a little more than half the rent. Every once in a while, I’d wonder why we were getting all these checks. But things had been so hard for so long, and those first few weeks with Liel were so amazing that I just didn’t want to think about anything that might ruin it.

I’d get home from work and she’d have some crazy, elaborate meal prepared. After we ate, we’d go wandering through the neighborhood, exploring the alleys, the parks, under bridges, in the subway tunnels. After a while we started to explore past Sunnyside into other parts of Queens and Brooklyn. It was dark and we avoided areas with a lot of people, so it felt safe. As time went on, we got so bold that Liel started to walk around without anything covering her face. I loved to watch her wake up to the wider world and discover this place outside the theater. And because she had me to guide and support her, she never had to go through all the bullshit I did. She never had to go to bed hungry or beg for a job. For her, the city was just pure wonder.

One night we ran along the promenade in Brooklyn that overlooked the East River and Manhattan. Kind of a ballsy move, considering
it went through some highly populated and posh neighborhoods like the Heights. But it was four in the morning, that perfect time when pretty much anyone who had been out late was finally home, and the early risers hadn’t quite gotten up yet. I can run really fast for a big guy, and I don’t get tired easily. So I thought I’d smoke her. But the way she ran? It was like a cheetah. Her white hair streamed out behind her and she had this tight, crazy grin on her face, her lower fangs poking out just a little. Her long dancer legs stretched out in front of her, like she was jumping from foot to foot, and her entire body stretched and contracted with each step. It didn’t take her long to pull ahead of me.