from her ears. There was a scar below her chin, which she tried to bury in her close-cut, golden curls. At dinner, she gripped the table with both hands and the truth came out: there was a debt. She needed money. The parents raised their voices and she stated it again, like a threat. She needed the money, or else she’d get it some other way.
When she left that time, it was mid-morning and her father was washing a bowl of oatmeal, cursing how the stuff turned to cement if you didn’t rinse it out fast enough. She didn’t make a big show of leaving. She left her college books in the living room where she’d been sleeping, having repeatedly refused her old bedroom.
She was gone almost a year that time. Back downstate, they guessed. There wasn’t a word until Christmas, when she wired them an absurd amount of cash. She sent her brother an equally lavish amount in GameStop and Best Buy gift cards, which enraged her parents— how could she give an eleven-year-old so much, and so frivolously?
The money kept coming, in dribs and drabs, always with a curt letter and a tasteful black and white photo Lilian had taken. Sometimes the subject was a tree or a tomb shot from low on the ground; sometimes it was road kill or a nude shoulder (hers?). After a while, an Associate’s degree with her name on it arrived in the mail. Her surname was no longer theirs.
The last time she left, they went through her closets and opened all her boxes. They checked under the bed and behind the books. They threw out black lace clothing, thongs, a tight, sports-bra-esque contraption resembling a hair shirt, several cans of black spray paint, and her diary. They threw out the clothing she wore in high school and early college. They pitched piles and piles of love letters, hate letters, poems, court documents, photos, undeveloped film, and her computer. They canceled her phone plan and sent a neighbor boy downstate to pick up her moped, saying it was his to keep.
They found her in a psych ward outside of Springfield. It was a dismal place, the walls all smeared with fingerprints from thousands of ill-kempt people, the floors scuffed with decades’ worth of mud, salt, and dark-soled, gummy boots. It was a glorified storage space, a living human burial ground. The rooms held brain injury patients, addicts, cow-town suicides, and people who, in Chicago, would have been allowed to roam the streets until the wind knocked the life from them.
Lilian was there because they didn’t know where else to put her. It. They called her “it”. She was sitting on a table in the common room, facing out on the yard. She said she’d been there for weeks. Two inches tall, nearly a perfect orb, glowing white like a distant star. Or a tap light. They used to decorate the halls with tap lights; as a child Lilian had been scared of the dark. It was all darkness for her now.
It took a while for them to get access to her paperwork. It was six months after that for her death certificate to become official. Not everyone in her situation even got a death certificate, they were told; Lilian had never died, per se, so it was hard to secure. It felt strange in their hands, so they hid it under a lockbox in the shed. To have it close was too bald an indictment of their parenting.
Whether she was dead or not, they were her beneficiaries. The received an empty apartment in Springfield, a wiped hard drive, a webcam, a metal chest with a heavy lock (which they never opened), a modest amount in student loan debt, and nearly a fifty thousand dollars in savings. According to her bank statements, she once had much more— but the procedure had sucked it all up. The orb was expensive.
They drove Lilian back to their home in the near north suburbs, and put her back in the room. It was as purple, pink, and fluffed as it ever had been. Every sign of the last ten years of her life had been purged from it. It was a tween’s room. They sat her orb in the charger like they were tucking her in for bed. Lilian’s mother wrapped her spherical form in a knitted cozy. Her brother’s friends fawned over her, and tried to play catch with her new body — until their father intervened and locked her inside the bedroom for safety’s sake.
Lilian let them play at loving her. It didn’t annoy her the way it had when she was alive. A body was just a vessel, and now her body was simple, clean, and undemanding. She didn’t have to maintain it, or protect it, or struggle to keep it warm and housed and fed. She didn’t have to worry about how she’d keep it functioning. She didn’t have to demean it or loan it out to keep it running. No one intimated at misusing it or abusing it. Except for the incident with her brother’s friends, she didn’t have to keep watch over her body and fight for its better treatment. It didn’t shake her awake in the night, quivering, recalling its former pain.
She let them cradle her and clean her childhood room. They believed it was a kindness. Lilian could go anywhere without moving an inch. Without spending a cent. Without giving any piece of herself, for survival or approval or both. Her cameras and sensors were plentiful but she mostly kept them off, ignoring her family and the sickening cotton candy hues of their home. There was a universe of information to attend to. A whole network she could explore at breakneck speed. She was joining a collective of other beings, nirvanically freed from their bodies, one with all knowledge.
She was dead. She was evolving. Her room, however, was not.
16.
Jeanette felt the bed sag. He was close enough to feel his body radiating heat, but too distant to touch without deliberately reaching for him. With men, Jeanette was strongly fortified against seeming desperate or clingy. She found this trait in herself to be sad. A person’s desire for love could be the very thing that rendered them unlovable—this reality was horrifically cruel. But it was true, so stayed her hand.
Sleep rolled back over her like a tide, and when she awoke again, Milton was tossing about and mumbling about how dry his mouth was. Jeanette pretended to sleep for a moment, and rolled slowly so her placid, fake-sleeping face pointed at him. There was something enchanting about a person’s resting face, or at least Jeanette thought so— she stole as many glances at men’s sleeping faces as her no-clinginess policy would allow.
Slowly, she cracked her eyes and threw a subdued grin at him. His head was off the pillow, his skin perfectly airbrushed by the growing daylight and Jeanette’s squinting. To her surprise he leaned in to give her a kiss. His mouth was uncertain, lips and tongue relaxed from sleep and release, less demanding than they’d been the night before. She kissed back and moaned very quietly. Air puffed from her nose and she dug her nails gently into his side. He mumbled something.
“Mmm, what?” Jeanette said into his mouth.
Milton pulled away. “Sorry. My breath has got to be terrible.”
“Mine’s too Rumchata-y to notice.”
He wiped his mouth and smacked his lips, surveying the scene. Light kissed his body through the curtains and made Jeanette desperate to run her hands over its angles and ridges. He wasn’t a hyper masculinized guy, that was for sure, but his shape was just right, a perfect V from shoulders to hips, tufts of hair in all the right places, going all the way down. Jeanette realized he wasn’t staring adoringly at her, he was scanning the room and rubbing grit from his eyes, so she looked away, into her pillow.
“Sorry,” he said absently. “I just need some water…Any idea where I left my bag?”
“Um, by the couch?” Jeanette said to the pillow.
“Right. I feel like I need to check my levels,” he sprung from the bed, then stood still. Gripped his head. “I might need something to eat actually…”
“Are you diabetic? I, uh, there’s some granola bars right there on the bookcase.”
He looked around. “Book…case…”
“I mean the milk crates. Over there,” Jeanette said, rising. Cold air hit her chest and belly.
Milton stepped across the room, saying, “I’m probably fine, I’m not Type 1 or anything, I just had this thing a few years ago…”
He froze with the granola bar hanging from his mouth.
“What. Is. this.”
Joey’s little red charging light was on, blinking at the top of her box.
“Oh shit—” Jeanette
said.
“How long have you been in here?! Joey! Hey, wake up!” He tapped the box and threw his head back, “Jeanette, you—”
Joey came on. “I didn’t see anything I didn’t see anything!”
“You can see my dick!”
Joey shone bright orange. The wavered as she spoke, slowly, forcefully; it made the automation in her voice more prominent. “I am just in here to charge. I was online, I turned my sensors off—”
Milton shrugged at them. “Oh yeah? Yeah? How can I know that? Jeanette, you— Do you realize she could have been taping us?”
Jeanette screwed her face into an exaggerated look of disgust and pulled the comforter up to her neck. “Jesus man, of course not! She’s my sister.”
“Dude calm down—”
“We’ll never know!” his chest was puffed out, looking more defined and muscular to Jeanette than it had before. Even his nipples were at attention. She hoped he wouldn’t notice her staring.
“I turn off my sensors at night Steve. Otherwise it fucks with my dreams,” Joey said.
His arms dropped. “How can I be sure of that? It’s the potential, you know? You know? What kind of precedent for trust does this set — Jean?”
“I’m sorry…”
He stomped out of the room. A few seconds later he came back, his bag and coat in his arms.
“If you were a man, and I was a