“No,” he said, but stopped her before she could leave again. “Come in, though, please. I don’t … I don’t know what I want.” He rubbed his eyes, exhausted, and laughed drily. “I want to go back in time and stop this. Destroy my research, burn down my laboratory, whatever it takes.”
“My mother always said you can’t change the past,” said Lilly. “The best you can do is learn from it.”
“That’s very easy for your mother to say,” said Lyle. “What’d she do that was so horrible, kill a guy?”
“My father,” said Lilly. “The court ruled self-defense.”
Lyle forced himself to close his mouth. “I’m sorry. I mean, I’m glad she’s okay. I mean … All of a sudden I feel like kind of a huge tool.” He winced and grabbed a chair. “Do you want to sit down?”
“I’m fine,” she laughed, “this is all ancient history. I’ve dealt with it, I’ve learned from it, and I’ve moved on.”
“Sit down anyway,” said Lyle, and grabbed a chair for himself. “I feel like I’ve been dragged behind a semi for … I don’t know, nine months?” He laughed again, small and sad. “Forty-two years?”
She stepped into the room, revealing from behind her back two bottles from the food supply: a year-old Coke, and a bottle of spring water at least twice that old. She handed him the Coke and sat down. “Normally I’d prescribe ice cream for depression, but we have limited resources.”
“They’re going to be really mad at us for drinking these,” said Lyle, but he took the bottle anyway.
“We’re going to put it back,” said Lilly, dismissing the protest with a mischievous smile. “We’ve got the greatest water reclamation system in the world, here, right? Just drink it up, hit the restroom, wait a few days, and boom, it’s back in the tap and ready to refill the bottle.”
Lyle laughed, not defeated this time but amused—the first time in days that he’d laughed with genuine humor. “I don’t think mine will be quite as fizzy by then.”
“You ‘think’ it won’t be?”
“Well, you can never be sure.”
“That concerns me.” Lilly screwed off the cap and took a swig from the bottle. “There’s, what, twenty of us on the island?” She pointed at him in mock seriousness. “I fear for the future of the human race if five percent of the surviving gene pool has carbonated urine. You’ve been keeping secrets from me.”
Lyle laughed again, and opened his own bottle. It was tepid, but the carbonation bit his throat, and the taste and feel of it was almost shockingly comforting after so much chaos. “No,” he said, swallowing and shaking his head. “I don’t have any secrets left. I’m Lyle Fontanelle—you probably met at least ten of me before we ever even knew each other.”
“Five at the most,” said Lilly. She paused, and said her next sentence with her eyes fixed on the floor. “None of them was half as interesting.”
Lyle paused, the bottle halfway to his lips. Did she say what I think she said? He didn’t want to look stupid, or eager, so he brought the bottle mechanically to his mouth and drank, all the while wondering what she had meant, and what she was feeling. When he allowed himself to look back at her, he saw she was looking at him. He wiped his mouth with his hand, feeling self-conscious, and looked at the bottle because it was easier than looking at her.
He leaned forward, playing with the bottle in his hands, looking at her feet instead of her face. “I feel like I barely know you.”
“You don’t.”
“So tell me about yourself.” He looked up, caught her eye, and held it this time. She seemed to smile not just with her mouth or her eyes but her entire face. She was more beautiful than she’d ever been, because each new scrap of understanding showed that she was kinder, wiser, funnier than he’d ever imagined. But she was still a mystery. “I want to know everything.”
She opened her arms wide, as if encompassing the entire world. “We’ve got plenty of time.” She took another sip of water, and made a beckoning motion with her hand. “Hit me. What’s your first question?”
“What does your illness mean to you?”
“It means I can’t eat pizza.”
“I’m being serious,” said Lyle. “You have a genetic illness that has warped your health, your diet, your social life, your entire existence, into a daily struggle just to get by. ReBirth could have solved that problem in a heartbeat—a few thousand dollars, four months of nutritional supplements, and you’d never have to worry about your health again. You could eat pizza, hamburgers, cake, candy bars; you could drink Coke; you could live a normal life again. And yet you never did it.”
“I like being me.”
“I don’t doubt that,” said Lyle. “I imagine everybody likes you. But nobody works that hard to accommodate a curable disease unless the disease itself is an integral part of who they are, or at least of who they think they are. Who they want to be. I don’t think you like yourself in spite of celiac sprue, I think you like yourself because of it.”
Lilly looked at her water bottle, twirling it in small circles and watching the liquid swirl around inside. “That’s … a little deeper than I was expecting this conversation to be. I think the thing is…” She took another drink, a long, slow guzzle that gave her time to gather her thoughts. “I’m not gorgeous.”
“Yes you are.”
“I’m a professional model, Lyle. I know the difference between pretty and gorgeous, and I’m pretty. In any other social circle I’d say I’m very pretty, though I hate saying that because it makes me sound conceited, but on a shoot with a bunch of supermodels I can’t help but feel self-conscious. Especially because I’m usually ‘the black girl’ they brought in to round out the demographics.”
Lyle felt a pang of guilt. He’d been a part of those demographic hiring conversations too many times.
“For a while,” she continued, “my first few months in the industry, celiac was my excuse. ‘I can’t be as pretty as her, I can’t have her body, I can’t follow her exercise program, because I’m sick.’ It made me different, and being different made me feel better, but it doesn’t take long for ‘I feel better than you do’ to turn into ‘I feel better than you are.’ Celiac became my consolation prize—my snide little triumph that maybe you never ate bread, but I never ate bread or else I’d die. Maybe you had a strict diet, but I had an even stricter diet with my life hanging dramatically in the balance. Maybe you were prettier than me, and featured a little more prominently in the group poses, and got more shots overall in the final magazine, but I was a martyr an inch away from the hospital. It made me feel better about my insecurities; I had something that nobody else had.”
Lyle shook his head. “I don’t believe you.”
“You don’t think I’m that shallow?” She raised her eyebrow. “Or you don’t want to think I’m that shallow?”
Lyle smiled thinly, looking down at his Coke. “Nobody that self-aware is shallow. Which, conversely, makes me the most shallow person in the world.” He laughed drily. “Maybe literally, at this point.”
A hint of Lilly’s playfulness crept back into her voice. “How can someone who’s met himself ten thousand times not be self-aware?”
“Out there,” said Lyle, gesturing toward the front of the barracks, “earlier tonight, when Cynthia suggested that you could get a new body you almost punched her. Which I kind of wish you had, actually.” He puffed out a long, slow breath. “That … fierce protectiveness, that zeal to defend your disability. Celiac’s not just something you lord over the other models.” He looked her in the eyes. “I think celiac makes you who you are because it threatened to make you something else, and you didn’t let it. You’re not a victim, you’re not a patient, you’re not a dropout or a charity case or anything like it—you’re a happy, healthy, successful woman, not because life made you that way but because you, personally, overcame everything life put in your way to stop you. You love it because it’s the mountain you climbed to become great, and now that you’re standing at the top you can see farther, and be greater, than you ever could before.”
Lilly stared back at him, holding his gaze without ever looking away. “That might be the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
Lyle looked at her, warm in the dim light, tired and disheveled and wonderful. He stood up, still looking her in the eyes, and she practically leaped across the room. He held her in his arms and kissed her urgently, hungrily, and she kissed him back with the same fierce desperation. She pressed him back, two steps toward the bed, until his legs knocked against it and all he wanted to do was to fall backward, to pull her down with him, to bury himself and his problems and the entire world in one moment of pure physical perfection. She pressed against him, hot and ravenous, but it was wrong, and he was wrong, and she was wrong. He felt corrupted inside, like he was already dead. Spoiled meat. He pushed her out to arm’s length. He was gasping for breath.
She looked confused. “What’s wrong?”
“I can’t just forget,” he said.
