How to Build a Boyfriend from Scratch. Sarah Archer

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СКАЧАТЬ night, Priya.”

      “Imagine how much better that soup would taste if your robust young lover were spooning it between your eager lips.”

      “Good night.” Kelly tried not to snort with laughter into her soup as she hung up.

      The next day, Kelly was actually glad to be spending her Sunday morning at Gary’s small, stucco house in Santa Clara, babysitting her nieces. She needed a task that kept her mind from drifting to other things. Not that she didn’t have fun spending time with her nieces, but she got it when her brother called these few hours spent running to Costco and to the dermatologist to get his plantar wart frozen off his “me time.” Playing Baby Einstein games with the girls while their father was on hand to swoop in at the first signal of a potty training disaster was a whole different experience than being alone with them for four hours, the only thing standing between them and the kitchen knives. Now Gary was due home any minute and Kelly was exhausted.

      “So what piece looks like it could fit with this piece?” she asked Bertie, the oldest by a few minutes, holding up a gray plastic wheel from the top-of-the-line Lego set she had splurged on as her Christmas gift. Bertie rummaged through the pieces spread on the floor and came up with a gray spoke. “Yes!” Kelly beamed, helping her lock the two together. “And what fits with this one?” She offered a red block. Bertie carefully scrutinized the piece, then responded by taking it and placing it calmly in her own mouth.

      “No!” Kelly wrested the piece back just as she saw the quickest of the girls hurtling into the next room, naked from the waist down. “Emma? Where are you going?”

      She gave chase and emerged into the entryway to see Gary coming through the front door. A Costco box in one arm, he easily scooped Emma up in the other, just in time to keep her from making her grand escape into the street. “Hi, Emma. Nice fashion statement,” he said.

      “I swear she was just clothed,” Kelly panted.

      “Where are Bertie and Hazel?”

      “In the living room. Or at least they were twenty seconds ago, so by now they might be on Jupiter. Do you have any more boxes in the car?”

      She accepted the keys Gary tossed at her with some relief as he walked calmly into the living room, bouncing Emma gently on his arm.

      As Kelly and Gary put the groceries away, the girls happily comparing the animal crackers from the boxes they had pulled from the Costco boxes with glee, she regaled him with the story of last night’s date with Martin. It was a little easier to laugh at after a decent night’s sleep.

      “Mom’s going to kill me,” she sighed, rearranging the produce in the fridge to fit a bulging bag of grapes.

      “Eh, just maim, probably,” Gary replied.

      “If I show up at that wedding without a date, she’ll lose her mind. She’ll sell me to some other family on the black market.”

      “Not sure there are too many couples out there looking to buy twenty-nine-year-old children, but it could happen.”

      “Don’t you have any single guy friends you could set me up with?” Kelly pleaded, turning to look at her brother.

      “Single guy friends? Kelly, my entire life is spent between preschool, Mommy and Me, and these four walls.” He gestured around the house. “I murmur Nickelodeon theme songs in my sleep. I know the origin story of flipping Caillou. What about any of that makes you think I have single guy friends?” He put a bag of oats in a cabinet then turned back around. “Although there is this one guy,” he said slowly.

      “Who? As long as he’s free on March seventh, I’ll take him.”

      “No,” Gary shook his head, thinking. “It wouldn’t work.”

      “Why not? Is he married? Is he a felon? We don’t need to let that come between us.”

      “He’s too similar to your exes. Robbie and—what was that guy’s name from college? The one who didn’t want you to meet his parents until after you’d gotten your teeth whitened?”

      “Nick. So? It sounds like your friend’s my type,” Kelly responded.

      “That’s the problem. Your type isn’t working.”

      It was true that Kelly’s relationship history read like a warning label for women everywhere. Both Robbie and Nick, the college class president with the gargantuan list of extracurriculars, had looked good to Kelly on paper, but made her feel bad about herself in real life. Spotted in between were a few short-lived flings, if “flings” can describe a series of dignified lunch appointments with coders who ended each date with a hug as tentative as if she were an electric fence.

      “You ended up miserable both times,” Gary went on. “I want you to have something better, not the same thing all over again. It’s not a good match.” He broke down the boxes and stacked them by the recycling bin. “Thanks for helping out today. I’m a new man without that wart.”

      “Yeah, sure,” Kelly said, with the slightly deflated feeling that she was being dismissed.

      On the ride home, she couldn’t help but wonder if she had just sealed her own doom again. She was sure that Gary was genuine about wanting the best for her, but she questioned too if hearing about her behavior on the date with Martin made him reluctant to burden any of his friends with her company. She already knew she was a mess. But was she that much of a mess that her own brother couldn’t recommend her? As she pulled into the parking garage beneath her building and shut off the engine, she wondered grimly if Caillou was single.

       three

      

      Back at work that week, Kelly sat in a room that was open, square, and full of lights: fluorescent ceiling beams, glowing computer monitors, and a bank of control panels with switches, knobs, and blinking indicators. Beside her was Dr. Masden, a psychologist whose black eyes angled up in a very attractive way that she would have seen if she weren’t nervously avoiding those eyes. Opposite them, an oversize monitor displayed a digital waist-up image of a being named Confibot. The image looked essentially like a man, sporting short, combed blond hair and a small-check plaid shirt. But where a human face should have been was a set of dotted lines over a blank white space: two oblong rounds for eyes, a triangle for a nose, a straight line where a mouth would go, really just the suggestion of features.

      “We need to pin down his range of facial options before we can settle on a final set of features,” Kelly was saying to the psychologist. “Then we can start building him. So, say, what face should he make when he greets a user who’s just woken up?”

      “A pleasant smile, I would think,” Dr. Masden answered.

      “Well, yeah, but I need you to tell me exactly. Like, here.” Kelly scooted closer to the doctor’s computer monitor on the control panel, blowing up the diagram of Confibot’s head in front of him so that it was minutely imaged under a set of gridlines. “Show me specifically how his mouth should be positioned.”

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