yw

Hey, I think she's waking up.
Oh hey, now she's actually looking at me.
Her eyes are getting teary, and she's smiling a little. I think that's the "thank you so much" look.
Hmm; I should give her a "you're welcome" smile back.

Oh god, are we having a 'moment?'

Timothy Pt. 2 / ty

Eventually, my mental rewind theater got to the point where I was being choked. Looking back now, that was both the worst and best part of the story. It was where my life completely changed.

I was lifted off my feet; I couldn't move or breathe. I tried kicking him, but he barely flinched. As I felt myself trying to gasp for air, I realized that I couldn't do a thing.

Now, I am not a girly girl. I haven't fantasized about being rescued by a handsome prince since I was six years old. I don't like needing to rely on other people, and I hate knowing when I can't do everything for myself.
But right then, at that moment, all I could think of was "please, somebody save me."

And somebody did.

But at the same time, I hated seeing Tim get shot. I know, it's stupid. He tried to kill me; why should I care? But I do. I wasn't head-over-heels in love with him or anything, but he was always there for me, even if he was a bit quiet. He was the one boy who looked me straight in the eye when we danced at our senior prom--I knew I shouldn't have worn such a low-cut dress--and he'd never done anything to hurt me until now.

Eventually, I snapped out of my melodramatic flashback.
This boy--my 'savior,' whose name I still didn't know--was looking me in the eyes.  He looked concerned. Concerned was something that Timothy never was. If I had a problem, Tim would see it, understand it, and try to fix it, but he didn't ever seem to feel sad for me; nothing ever upset him.
This guy, strange as he was, seemed to be genuine.
I guessed that I could trust him.

I wanted to say "thank you," but the best I could do was make eye contact. I think that was enough--he smiled back as if to say "you're welcome."

Suddenly, a disturbing thought ran through my head:
Oh god, are we having a 'moment?'

I Shouldn't Have Snapped Like That

"By shooting their robot boyfriends."
Yeah, that was really nice, I thought to myself with extreme sarcasm.  She just finds out that her boyfriend isn't human, and now I'm cracking jokes about it.
She stopped moving for a moment and just stared at me, shocked.  Not mad, just shocked.  After a few seconds I realized that she wasn't staring at me; she was lost in thought.  For a moment I wanted to wave my hand in front of her face to see if she'd even notice, but fortunately I waited long enough to see the tears in her eyes.
She must be feeling horrible.

Yes, please? / Timothy

Did he just ask me if I wanted orange juice?
At this point, I was ready to believe that I'd dreamt the last several minutes of my life; it'd make more sense that way.
A strange young man had blown away my boyfriend, hit him with his car, kidnapped me, walked me through his little bunker, and was now offering me orange juice.
I halfway resigned myself to the dream.
"Uh... Yes, please?"
He awkwardly handed me the cup. I didn't take a sip.

Now that he'd extended me some kind of weird courtesy, he seemed to shake himself of whatever awkwardness he'd been wearing, and looked me straight in the eye.
"You'd better sit down; I should explain things," he said. I wasn't exactly ready to argue, and sitting down actually sounded like the only way I wasn't going to go crazy.

We sat down at a tiny table in what barely passed for a dining room. He gave himself a moment to compose his thoughts, then started to speak.
"So you saw all the books, right?"
"Yeah; what kind of super-commando are you?" I asked in a sarcastic tone.
He smirked. "Nothing of the sort." He paused for a moment, apparently slightly disturbed at my joke. "Those books are what I use to help people."
Of this I was skeptical. "By shooting them?"
"By shooting their robot boyfriends," he snapped back, with a distinct "you stupid ungrateful girl" tone.
I suddenly stopped. Stopped talking, thinking, and breathing.
Timothy was a robot?
It sounded so stupid that I wanted to laugh, but I couldn't. I'd seen the false skin torn away from the shotgun blast; I'd seen the metal fibers that made up his muscles--I always thought he seemed strong.


I'd forgotten until now: why I was running; why he was trying to kill me.
I'd just spent most of the day hanging out with Gina, my oldest and dearest friend. After a day of nothing but girl time, I figured I should randomly drop by my boyfriend's apartment and pay him a visit; he liked that--or at least I thought he did.
He lived alone; I always thought that was weird. He was only eighteen and barely out of high school, but was somehow already supporting himself. He worked a normal teenager's job at a grocery store, and everyone seemed to like him a lot. People sometimes told me that he seemed a little distant and melancholy, only brightening up when I was around. We all took that to mean that he really liked me.
His place wasn't too far from Gina's; I just walked. After all, it was a warm San Francisco afternoon; why would anyone not want to be outdoors? When I got to his apartment, I saw that his door was cracked open. He never left his door open like that; he was way too careful. I saw his car parked outside; he was definitely there. "Timothy?" I called, slowly opening the door. He didn't answer me, but I saw his shadow in the doorway of the bathroom; he had his hands near his head as if he was putting on a bandage or something. I was worried that he might be hurt, so I walked over. When I finally walked around the doorway, I saw his hands adjusting something on the inside of a metal panel. In his head.

He turned and saw me, completely surprised. I don't know how exactly he didn't hear me before; maybe because of whatever needed adjusting in his head?
For a moment I felt like I was looking at one of those optical illusions that messes with your depth perception. How could that stuff be inside his head? What on Earth am I looking at?

I was more than a little jumpy at this point. I hadn't realized it, but I was already stepping back in confusion. Nothing was clear; none of it made sense. What wasn't unclear was his expression: it shifted from the surprised look of the boy I'd adored to the vengeful look of someone completely different. He was staring at me with a scowl, as if he was about to jump forward and choke me to death.
I ran.
I got as far as the parking lot across the street when he caught me.

Orange Juice?

I pulled into the garage, and shut the door behind me.
I paused after the door finished closing. What was I going to say to this girl? "Hey, sorry for shooting your boyfriend; I don't normally like doing that"?
I thought for a moment more, then spat it out:
"I'm sorry it had to go that way; normally I don't like shooting people's boyfriends."

Wow. That went better than I thought it would, but it still sounded pretty bad. I wonder whether she took it as some kind of morbid humor or straight insanity.
Eager to get out of that situation and slightly embarrassed at my prior choice of words, I simply said "c'mon," and stepped out of the car. I figured she'd had enough of me pulling her around, so I let her get the door for herself. Not exactly the most gentlemanly thing to do, but I don't think she noticed. Checking over my shoulder to make sure she followed me into my workshop, I put down my shotgun on the table to my left and continued to the stairway.
I breathed a sigh of relief as we reached the main floor of the house, where things looked mostly normal--except for the two irrationally large bookcases in the living room and the piles of books in the office down the hall.
She noticed the books. Slag it. I'd hoped to be able to explain that before she noticed. Now I'd probably get the "oh my god you're a nerd" speech. I hate that speech.
Moving to the kitchen, I looked through the fridge to try and find something to offer her--if only to distract her from my piles of books. Then again, I thought, the books are probably better than the shotgun. I quickly realized that I had virtually nothing in the fridge. Having nothing else in the form of small talk, I turned to her and offered her the only drink I had.
"Orange juice?"

The Home Drive

After my shotgun-blasting, car-crashing, psycho maniac savior hit my boyfriend with his Camaro, he threw the dented little car into reverse, then pulled a one-eighty in the parking lot. He gunned the engine and drove us out of there as fast as he could, but once we were out of sight he slowed down to a safe speed.
I wasn't exactly comfortable with this guy just yet, but he seemed like someone who genuinely wanted to protect me. After all, he just dented his car. Normally jerks don't let their cars get dented, even if it means impressing a girl.
After a few silent minutes--minutes that seemed like hours--we drove into a basement garage. He turned off the engine, and clicked the remote that closed the garage door behind us. We sat there quietly for a few seconds before he turned to me and said "I'm sorry it had to go that way; normally I don't like shooting people's boyfriends." Was he actually trying to be funny? I couldn't tell. Something else occurred to me--how did he know that Timothy was my boyfriend? For all this guy knew, Tim could've been some random, redhead-choking jerk. Had he been stalking me?

With a slightly awkward-sounding "c'mon," the boy gestured for me to follow him into the next room. Realizing that I had nothing else to do but sit there in the car and be scared out of my mind, I followed him. The next room was still in the basement, but it looked almost like a bunker. There bits of machinery and weapons littered across long concrete tables, and more than a few torn-up robot arms. He kept moving up a staircase on the far side of the room, and I hurried to keep up.

When we reached the top of the stairs, I was surprised to see a rather nice home, lit gently by sunset light through the windows. Two large dark bookcases held hundreds of books, and in an office just down a short hallway I could see several clumsy-looking stacks of books. Perhaps because some part of me wanted to get away from the boy whose name I realized I did not know, I took a deeper look at the books. I half-expected them to be military or hunting books, but, as I looked closer, I saw that they weren't anything of the sort: they were science fiction novels.
Every single book in the entire house--that I could tell, at least--was science fiction of some sort.  Apparently, I'd been saved by a member of the nerd militia.

Pedal to the Metal Man

I must have scared her out of her mind.

I gunned down her boyfriend. Ugh. There must have been a better way to do this. I'm practically kidnapping the girl after I shot her boyfriend. If she's not in complete shock by now, she'll be very, very upset with me. This is highly problematic.

What model was he? J-class? No... he must be from a new loop. Blast it; I'll have to start charting that.

"Slag it!"
He's getting up again. This is just getting worse. Time to hit the pedal to the metal to the metal man.

Okay, I really need some new internal dialogue jokes.

The Girl in Question

My boyfriend is a robot?

My name is Kate Trineer. Ten minutes ago, my boyfriend--Timothy--had his hand around my neck, and I swear I was going to die. Then, right when it felt like my throat was going to break, he looked to the side and let me go, as if he noticed something more important than my windpipe. Half a second later, I heard a loud bang, and--after I started to breathe again--I saw Tim lying sprawled on the ground.
A boy no older than twenty or so came at me out of nowhere and grabbed my arm, pulling me towards a beat-up old car. I barely had enough breath to stand up, let alone argue with him. Gently but willfully, he pushed me into the passenger seat, then appeared in the drivers' seat a couple seconds later. I looked over at the boy and saw a black shotgun sitting in his lap--he had shot my boyfriend.
It's true that he saved my life, but at this point I'd had quite enough of randomly violent boys, and wasn't sure what this one wanted with me. I turned to the door to try and run--for as far as my short breath would take me--but stopped when I saw that the door wasn't even locked. Did he not want to keep me prisoner?
I heard the Shotgun Boy mutter something under his breath, and looked up to see Timothy standing straight up in front of the car, like nothing had happened. Now that he was standing up in the sunlight, I could see shiny chrome pieces through the holes in his shirt where the shotgun blast had blown away bits of his skin. My heart was already about to explode, but somehow it started to pump even faster. In all the running, choking, and shotgun-blasting, I had completely forgotten what I'd seen earlier: my boyfriend was a robot.
That sounds crazy, I know. Robots aren't real. Well, at least not the kind that can walk, talk, and choke you near to death.
The shotgunner hit the gas pedal, hard. Timothy slammed into the front hood of the car with a metal "chank" sound.
Yeah, he was definitely a robot.

Androgynous Boys are Dangerous

A boy and a girl walk side-by-side. The girl ever-giggling, she knows not the truth that lies within her odd companion.

Seemingly the sweetest of lovers, the two are not in perfect harmony. The boy hides a darkness; an inner secret. He does not portray the masculinity of a normal male his age. He finds comfort in the fanciful and feminine. The girl passes this off as his being "special," and not as any real sign of immasculinity. The boy is lying to her; he does not feel any more attraction to her than he does a slab of marble. In truth, he only stays with the girl in a vain attempt to convince himself that he is not what he knows he is.

One day, the girl stumbles upon the secret that the boy has tried to hide from her for so long. Stunned beyond reckoning, she runs as fast as her light feet will take her. The boy is not upset, but determined. He gives chase, moving with great speed.

As the girl reaches her car, she fumbles for her keys. Before she can get inside, the boy is standing beside her. With an iron grip, he clamps his hand around her neck. "I can't have you telling people my secret," he states with a steely voice.

As the girl's throat reaches its breaking point, a shot rings out from a nearby car. The scattered lead of a shotgun blast slams into the boy's side, and his grip is released. Before the girl can catch her breath once more, a young man pulls her into the car he exited a moment before. She notices the shotgun at his side, and realizes that he is the one who gunned down her former beloved. She begins to open the car door to leave—for she is not a prisoner—but stops when she sees her boy stand up once more. She had hoped beyond all sense that what she had seen was not the truth, but here it stood before her, a testament to her foolish affections:
Her boyfriend was a robot.