I haven’t explained my history with Gabriel because there was no history, except for a long trail of lustful thoughts that were, as far as I knew, all on my side. Still, I should fill you in. He came to our school when he was fourteen. He was kind of gangly and his voice was still kind of high, but the blond hair and dark eyes really got to me. I became weirdly focused on his hands too, which were too big for the rest of him, the hands of a man, I thought, and right away I wanted them to touch me. It was the first time I had ever lain in bed and imagined a specific boy doing specific things to me. Jonas and I had been boyfriend and girlfriend before he moved away (before I’d even met Gabriel) and we’d actually done specific things, but I’d never fantasized about Jonas. I’d never had to; he was always with me. The at-a-distance crush on Gabriel was something new.
Other girls liked Gabriel too, in a more general way—he was good-looking and he went to our school, so, yeah, he was naturally on the list of Guys to Like. It wasn’t until he was fifteen and had shoulders and biceps and a deep voice, though,that other girls really started to pay attention. They liked him when he was an obvious choice. I’d liked him so much longer. He flirted with girls at school, but the rumor was that he had “other girlfriends” outside our little St. Anne’s group.
I thought about him for a year, and then in the hospital, when the lights were off for the night and I was alone with the sounds of machines that were keeping me alive, while the meshline and its various internal components were being created, I thought about him some more. That fantasy Gabriel diverged more and more from the one I had vaguely known at school, until, when I finally returned to St. Anne’s, it took me a moment to recognize him. But only a moment. Then the real-world crush was back, as strong as ever.
So here we were, in his car together, the first time I’d even been alone with him. We were in the front seats, with a cardboard tray of tacos between us, and I’m not going to lie to you, the conversation was awkward. In my imagination, conversation hadn’t been necessary, if you know what I mean. Fantasy Gabriel had done whatever I wanted. But here we were, stuck with words.
“Is the volume okay?” he asked, fiddling with the knob unnecessarily. It felt like our taco tray was the Pacific Ocean and he was all the way on the other side of it, by Japan, maybe.
“It’s fine,” I answered.
“Seems like we never really talked before this year. Why is that?” he asked. Before I could answer, he added, “When you came back to school, I realized that—that I wanted to get to know you.”
“Yeah, me too,” I said, trying not to stare at his sexy hands. “We’ve been at the same school for almost three years. Why don’t we know each other better?”
Honestly, I was spouting almost random words to fill up the space between us; I wasn’t looking for an answer to this question. I already had a theory as to why Gabriel had finally noticed me after basically looking through me for years. (Even back when we were fourteen, when he’d still been short and really skinny and I’d had breasts, he hadn’t been interested.) But when they’d rebuilt my left eye, the orbit had changed shape a little bit; I’m talking about just the ordinary plastic surgery when the surgeon had to put it back together, not fancy stuff like they did with the rest of me. Then, because the left was different, they’d changed the right eye socket to match so it didn’t look like the two halves of my face were arguing with each other. When this was done, something in the overall appearance of my eyes and eyebrows had been subtly altered for the better. I don’t think it was on purpose, but when I healed, my eyes were a little wider and more perfectly shaped, and I was a little bit prettier.
So … Gabriel’s new interest was easily explained: I’d been attractive when I got back to school, and he assumed I was just growing into my looks, because as far as anyone at St. Anne’s knew, I had only broken my legs and my jaw in the accident. It felt like cheating, getting his interest this way, but why should I be ashamed of finding a silver lining?
We lapsed into silence as, up on the screen—or rather, hovering in the air outside our car, so crisp and hyper-detailed that they were almost more real than reality—a parade of superheroes in the coming attractions threw 3D stuff at each other, stuff like cars and horses and battleships and, I am not kidding you, even an orca that appeared to spin around right in front of our windshield, spraying water from its toothy smile onto the glass. I laughed involuntarily and made a sort of choking snort—a sound my friend Lilly had kindly pointed out was like a barfing dog. (Laughs are weird sometimes; it’s something to do with the partial larynx, or maybe the way the meshline travels through it. I forget exactly.)
“Are you okay?” Gabriel asked, because of, you know, the barfing dog sound.
“Um, yeah—taco went down the wrong way,” I lied.
He held my drink out chivalrously, and as I took it, his hand brushed against mine, sending a shiver up my arm.
“Is, uh, is Milla short for something?”
I dread this question, because the answer usually takes too long—but this time it didn’t. I said, “I’m named for St. Ludmilla, who lived in the Czech Republic like twelve hundred years ago—”
“Wait,” he said, interrupting, “are you talking about St. Ludmilla of Bohemia?”
I was thrown. “Yes.”
“I know her.”
“What, like personally?” The sarcasm slipped out. It wasn’t intentional. I didn’t want anything to get in the way of the genuine interest that had appeared in his eyes.
“I know who she is,” he said. He was shaking his head in mild disbelief. “St. Ludmilla.”
I stared at him a moment. “You are seriously one of the only people who has ever known who she was.”
“She brought Christianity to her people,” he continued, very pleased with himself. And even better, our conversation no longer felt awkward.
“Well, she tried,” I said. “Then her daughter-in-law had her strangled.”
“You mostly don’t get to be a saint by living happily ever after,” he pointed out, with what struck me as a rather sophisticated worldview.
“That’s true. Getting murdered helps a lot. Are you Catholic?” We recognized saints in the Episcopal church, but he seemed unusually knowledgeable.
“My mom’s sort of Catholic, but the Episcopal school was less expensive and she says it’s basically the same. My grandmother thinks I’m going to school with a bunch of dangerous nonbelievers, so she made me memorize the life stories of a hundred saints before I started at St. Anne’s.”
“And Ludmilla was one of them?” There were thousands and thousands of saints. This was a huge and unlikely coincidence. Had he secretly been researching me? Had he been as in love with me all this time as I’d been with him? When I’d imagined him touching me with those hands, had he been imagining the same thing?
“My grandma’s from the Czech Republic, so it was, like,mostly saints from around there that she wanted me to focus on,” he explained. “I liked St. Ludmilla. She was cool.”
Ah. I felt a stab of disappointment. Only a coincidence. Still, the ice had broken. Gabriel was gazing at me and I fancied there were hidden depths in him that I hadn’t suspected.
“You have really pretty eyes,” he told me.
I smiled, and mentally I thanked Dr. Watanabe for his facial reconstruction skills.
On the screen were more movie trailers, and on every side of the car were rows of other cars, all the occupants trying hard