Six (8 page)

Mom caresses my cheek, then shakes her head again. “You said it yourself, Adam. The thing inside the machine would be a copy. It might sound like you when it talks and even think of itself as Adam Armstrong. But it wouldn't be you.”

“Why not?”

She gives me an exasperated look, as if the answer should be obvious. “Because you have a soul. And after your body dies, your soul goes to God.”

“But your soul is tied to your memories, right? When your soul is up in heaven with God, you'd still remember your life on earth, wouldn't you?”

“Yes, certainly. The soul and the mind are connected.”

“So if they can travel together all the way to heaven, why couldn't they make a short hop into a computer? If you can believe in the afterlife, why not believe in this too?”

She pulls away from me. I feel a pang of regret when her hand comes off my cheek, and for a moment I wish I could take back what I said. But it's too late. Mom's chin is quivering. “You're seriously considering it? Going back to Colorado?”

If she asked me that question a minute ago, my answer would've been no. Now, though, I'm not so sure. Talking about the procedure has made it seem less impossible. It's still frightening, but at least I can imagine choosing it.

“If I don't do it, I'm going to die soon anyway. Probably much sooner than six months. My chest hurts all the time now.”

Mom gets up from the bed and takes a step backward. “Every minute of life is precious, Adam. Don't leave us before you have to.”

Her face is reddening, her eyes welling up. She thinks I'm considering suicide. I want to tell her she's wrong, but I don't know how to convince her. “What if it works, Mom? What if I wake up in the machine and it's really me inside? Then you won't lose me. We can still be together.”

She turns her head aside, as if she's afraid to look at me. The tears come down her cheeks as she gazes at my Super Bowl posters. She turns her head again and stares at my shelf of comics. Then she turns a third time and stares at the floor. She looks desperate, like a cornered animal.

Now I'm worried she's going to have another screaming fit, maybe as bad as the one she had in the hospital. “It's all right, Mom,” I say in a softer voice. “Everything's going to be okay.”

She suddenly reaches for something on my desk. She grasps my Pinpressions toy, curling her fingers around the two squares of transparent plastic and the hundreds of silver pins sliding between them. At first I think she's going to hurl the toy at the wall, or maybe even at me. But instead she raises it to eye level and presses her face against the back of the thing. It looks like she's trying to hurt herself.

“Mom! Stop!”

For a couple of seconds she just stands there with the toy pressed to her face like a mask. Then she pulls her head back and carefully sets the toy on my desk. Through the clear plastic I see the heads of the silver pins arranged in the shape of her face. Some of the pins jut forward, forming impressions of her chin and nose and cheekbones. Above them are two shadowed craters that look like her eyes.

She points at the thing. “That's what you're talking about. A copy made of metal.” Her voice is loud, agonized, heartbreaking. “I won't have anything to do with it, Adam. I won't go with you to Colorado! I won't even look at it!”

With an angry swat, she knocks over the toy, erasing the impression of her face. Then she runs out of the bedroom.

• • •

Fifteen minutes later Dad comes into my room and performs the usual chores of washing and dressing me. He doesn't say much and neither do I. I think he overheard the argument between me and Mom—she was really yelling at the end—but he doesn't mention it. He just whistles a random tune as he bends over my bed and tugs a pair of jeans up my useless legs. It's a little weird that he's so calm and quiet now. If he wants to save my life, why isn't he trying to convince me to say yes to the procedure?

But Dad just keeps whistling as he zips up my jeans and slips a T-shirt over my head. I guess he realizes it's my decision to make. Do I want to live inside a huge bullet-shaped robot? With no muscles or bones or lungs or heart, with circuits instead of a brain, and steel armor instead of skin, and cameras instead of eyes? It sounds so horrible, but what's the alternative? Mom believes you go to heaven after you die, but what if she's wrong? What if there's
nothing
? Wouldn't any kind of life be better than that?

Dad finishes dressing me. Sliding his hands under my back, he lifts me from the bed and straps me into my wheelchair. Then he smiles. “So what do you want to do today?”

He's acting as if it were just an ordinary Friday afternoon and we had plenty of time to kill. I don't understand it. “What do
you
want to do?”

He ponders the question, looking out my window at our backyard. “We could visit Shannon Gibbs. Her house is just a mile down Banner Road.”

“And why would we want to do that?”

“Well, she's facing the same decision you are. Maybe it would be useful to talk it over with her.”

It's amazing how clueless Dad is when it comes to social situations. I mean, I like Shannon—we were on the same Learjet coming back from Colorado, and we had a long talk during the flight, mostly about the kids we hated at Yorktown High School—but if the tension in her house is anywhere near the level in ours, that's the last place I'd want to be.

“I don't think so. It would just complicate things.”

He continues to stare at the backyard. A robin flies past the window in a brown-orange blur. “We should get outside at least. It's a beautiful day.” He glances at his watch. “And it's already two thirty.”

Two thirty on a Friday afternoon. Just half an hour before the final bell rings at Yorktown High, sending hundreds of jubilant students home for the weekend. Now I know where I want to go. “Okay, let's get in the car.”

By three o' clock, Dad's Volvo is idling in the high-school parking lot. We're in the corner of the lot farthest from the school, but I still have an excellent view of the kids streaming out the front doors. This section of the lot is where the jocks and cheerleaders hang out before piling into their cars and heading for the first of their Friday-evening parties. The boys swagger past in their varsity jackets, happily insulting one another, while the girls gather in huddles of denim and polyester.

This wasn't my crowd at Yorktown. I didn't belong to any crowd or clique; I was an outlier, an oddity. But I knew someone who was a full-fledged member of the jock club, and now I see him coming this way, just as I expected. With his right hand, Ryan Boyd exchanges high-fives with his buddies, and with his left, he clasps the waist of his girlfriend, Donna Simone.

Ryan's a couple of inches taller than he was the last time I saw him. He's also twenty pounds heavier, and all of it is muscle. He doesn't look like a kid in a Giants jersey anymore—he looks like an actual New York Giant. Donna looks tiny beside him. She's dressed in tight jeans and a crop top, and there's a three-inch-wide gap between the waistband of her pants and the bottom of her shirt. The index and middle fingers of Ryan's left hand touch the bare skin at her waist.

I'm so jealous I squirm in the Volvo's passenger seat. Ryan's handsome and athletic and popular. He's like my avatar in the virtual-reality program, the perfect quarterback, the hero of the game. He's everything I wanted to be.

I wait until Ryan and Donna come within ten yards of Dad's car. Then I press the button that rolls down the passenger-side window. “Hey, Ryan!” I yell. “Over here!”

He looks my way and does a double take. “Adam?” He steps cautiously toward the Volvo, dragging Donna along. “Adam, is that you?”

Ryan grins, and for a moment all the years fall away and I see the face of my best friend, beaming with pleasure. But as he gets closer to the car I notice the differences: the blond stubble on his chin and upper lip, the crooked scar on the bridge of his nose, which got broken in the game against Lakeland High last fall. (I read all about it in the school newspaper.) His grin falters a bit when he comes up to the Volvo and sees my wasted body strapped into the passenger seat, but after a second's hesitation he reaches into the car and gives me a hearty clap on the shoulder.

“Man, I don't believe it!” he shouts. “I haven't seen you in forever!”

I'd like to smile back at him, but I can't. I'm too angry. “Yes,” I say, my jaw clenched. “Not since last June.”

Ryan's grin disappears. Clearly uncomfortable, he glances at my father, who's minding his own business in the driver seat. “Hey, Mr. Armstrong,” Ryan says. Then he points at his girlfriend, who has a queasy look on her face. “Adam, you know Donna, right? She's on the cheerleading squad.”

I don't know anything about Donna except for the fact that she's an idiot. She takes a step backward, pulling away from Ryan. The queasiness on her face is mixed with irritation. She seems annoyed that her boyfriend has spoiled her after-school mood. “I'm gonna go talk to Ashley for a second,” she says. She pats Ryan on the back and speed-walks away.

At the same time, Dad shuts off the Volvo's engine and pulls his cell phone out of his pocket. “Excuse me,” he says tactfully. “I need to make a call.” Then he steps out of the car, leaving me alone with Ryan.

Neither of us says anything at first. Ryan shifts his weight from foot to foot, averting his eyes. After a while I start to feel sorry for him. But then I look at his handsome face and muscular forearms, and I'm jealous and angry again.

“You've gained some weight,” I say. “Aren't you getting a little too heavy to play quarterback?”

“Yeah, I need to cut down a little.” He slaps his midsection, which is actually as trim and sturdy as a tree trunk. “So what are you doing here, buddy? Are you coming back to school?”

I grimace. “No. I'm thinking of transferring to another school, actually.”

“Not Lakeland, I hope.” He attempts another grin.

“No, it's in another state. Out west.”

Ryan nods. “Wow, that's far away.”

“Don't worry. I don't expect you to visit.”

He lets out a long breath. His shoulders slump as he stands beside the passenger-side door. “I'm sorry, man. I'm a total jerk. I should've come to see you.”

“Hey, no sweat. You've been busy, right? With your football buddies. And Donna Simone. She's a real charmer.” I'm usually not like this, so mean and sarcastic, but I'm furious at Ryan and it feels good to let it out. “And besides, I'm gonna make lots of new friends now. At my new school, out west. They've got a great bunch of kids there.”

“I'll do better from now on, Adam. I'll send you emails. I promise.”

“No, that's okay. I understand why you didn't keep in touch. Being friends…with someone who's dying? That's a big…downer.” It's getting hard to breathe. I pause for a few seconds to gather my strength. I need to say this. “But here's what…I don't understand. Why didn't you tell me…about what happened to Brittany?”

Ryan shakes his head. “Oh man. What a mess.”

“Don't you think…I deserved to know?”

“You're right. I'm sorry. It's just…” He raises his hands as if surrendering. “It happened so suddenly, you know? She came to school one day and she wasn't the old Britt anymore. She quit the cheerleaders, started failing her classes. Nobody could figure it out.”

“Did you try…talking to her?”

He frowns. “Of course I tried. But she was acting so weird. You couldn't have a conversation with her. She'd say strange, random things and start laughing. And a few weeks later she ran away.”

“What was wrong…with her? What happened?”

“Man, I wish I knew. When the cops found her in Manhattan, she was in an abandoned building with a bunch of skeevy kids, but she wasn't doing drugs or anything like that. She just didn't want to go home. At least that's the story I heard. And when she ran away the second time, I guess she went back to that building.”

“Where in Manhattan was it?”

Ryan looks up at the sky, trying to remember. “No one told me where specifically. But I think it was in, you know, one of the poor parts of the city. Like maybe Harlem?”

This is frustrating. I can't believe that Ryan knows so little. He and Brittany used to come to my house every weekend. We were like the Three Musketeers. We did everything together. “Why didn't you talk…to her parents? I'm sure they know where…this building is.”

Ryan frowns again. “No, I couldn't do that. Brittany's folks have enough problems. They don't need me prying into their business.”

“But you were her friend! You—”

“Look, Adam, you can't fix everything. There are some things you just can't help.” His eyes dart downward, focusing on my ruined legs. “It sounds brutal, but that's life.”

He's right, of course. And although Ryan doesn't say it out loud, I can sense what he'd like to say next:
You
of
all
people
should
know
how
brutal
life
is.
But it doesn't matter. I'm going to disagree with him, no matter what he says, because I'm still angry. “If you won't do it…I will. I'll go into the city…and find Brittany.”

He shrugs. “Go ahead. I won't stop you.”

While I seethe in the Volvo's passenger seat, Ryan looks over his shoulder. Donna Simone waves at him, urging him to join her huddle of cheerleaders. He nods at her, then turns back to me. “Hey, I'm sorry, but I gotta run. I'll stay in better touch from now on, okay?”

“Yeah, fine. Whatever.”

“It was great seeing you, man. I mean it.” He flashes that big Ryan Boyd grin at me again, the grin that can almost make me forgive him. Then he turns around and walks back to the jock-and-cheerleader club. He greets his buddies and wraps his arm around Donna's waist.