The Plus One

by Sarah Archer

  • • •

  The next morning, Kelly had to drag herself into work. Last night’s dinner had lasted long past the unwelcome unveiling of Diane’s improvised cheddar cheesecake. Fueled by wedding mania, eyes stretched and gleaming like a junkie’s, Diane had refused to let Kelly go until she got her fill of details and gave Kelly far more than her fill of tips and inspirations (and cheddar). So tired was Kelly this morning, in fact, that she forgot to take off her ring before heading into work.

  But it turned out she was a step behind anyway. The elevator doors opened onto their floor to reveal Priya standing there, apparently waiting for her, her face betraying some ominous combination of rage and excitement. “Um, hello,” she said emphatically.

  “Hi,” was Kelly’s only reply. She knew, logically, that her avoidance of Priya was unsustainable, but it was just so much easier, moment by moment, to continue it than to break the inertia and either address the tension between the two of them or come clean. She had hoped that Priya just wouldn’t notice what she had been doing. “I can’t talk right now, I have to work.” She tried to head toward her desk, but Priya grabbed her by the forearm.

  “No, ma’am. You are not avoiding me this time. Hell to the no.” Yeah, Priya had noticed.

  “Congratulations!” another coworker shouted enthusiastically.

  “Yeah, congrats,” echoed another engineer.

  For a wild second, Kelly wondered if her Confibot project had already secured some sort of early backing from the investors. Or maybe she had won the lottery? She hadn’t entered the lottery. But maybe she had done it on Ambien and didn’t remember. She had never taken Ambien, but then again, if she had, would she remember taking it?

  “This is a turn of events,” announced Robbie, appearing from nowhere. “This—this is a turn.” He looked as if he wanted to say something else but couldn’t find the means. He opened his mouth, soundlessly formed a word, and stopped, as if talking behind aquarium glass.

  “What are all of you talking about?”

  “Come on, you know you can’t play me,” Priya said. “I can’t believe I found out from your mom and not from you.”

  Kelly paled. “Please tell me she just told you about that third nipple I had removed in elementary school.”

  “No, but we’re putting a pin in that nipple story. Did you really think I wouldn’t know? It’s all over Facebook.” Priya pulled out her phone and showed Kelly Diane’s Facebook page, the top post of which proclaimed, “MY BABY IS GETTING MARRIED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” Along with the post was a candid picture of Kelly taken at dinner last night with a mouthful of food, along with a grainy, paparazzi-style close-up of her ring.

  Kelly groaned. “I should have known this would happen.”

  “That you’d end up with Ethan? Because I didn’t see it coming. I didn’t get that vibe at all from seeing you together. Not that long-term vibe. Not what I got at all.” Robbie’s voice was a good octave higher than it should have been.

  Kelly shook her head. “This is not what it looks like, this was just supposed to be between me and my family. Please tell me you didn’t tell everyone in the office.”

  Priya and Robbie exchanged a guilty look. At that moment Anita appeared, because of course she did. “I hear congratulations are in order,” she told Kelly. She somehow made it sound like a command.

  “Thank you,” Kelly said.

  “Wedding planning can be quite a time suck, I’m told,” Anita went on. “Allocating your energies between that and the intense pressure of perfecting Confibot for the final rollout, with the date of our presentation close at hand—you have my sympathies.”

  Kelly sensed more sympathy radiating from the trash can next to her. Perfect. Now on top of everything, she had called extra attention to her risky relationship, attention from a boss who clearly thought that any sign of a personal life was treason. “But congratulations,” Anita reiterated, and glided swiftly away in her Louboutins. Kelly sighed.

  “Did you really expect people not to find out? You’re not exactly being subtle.” Priya seized Kelly’s hand and brought the mammoth ring right up to her eye to inspect it, then started jiggling Kelly’s whole hand up and down to feel out the weight. “Why so secretive, anyway? Ethan’s hot as hell. From what little of your fiancé you’ve actually let me see.”

  Robbie looked suspiciously from Kelly to Priya. “There’s no need to be secretive with me, Kelly,” he said. “Whatever the reason for your concealment is—a green card situation, perhaps a sordid criminal history on Ethan’s part—I’m here to lend you my full ear.”

  “You can keep your ear, Robbie. And I’d like my hand.” Kelly wrested her hand back, trying pointlessly to hide the flashy ring, and started to maneuver away toward her desk, but Priya grabbed her arm again. She was shockingly strong. So much for the wimpy nerd stereotype.

  “Nice try. You’re telling me the full story, missy.”

  “Fine,” Kelly grumbled. “Can we at least go somewhere where the rest of the country can’t hear?” Priya steered her eagerly away.

  * * *

  • • •

  As soon as they got into the empty lab, Priya rounded on Kelly. “You know how much I hate to ever admit that Robbie’s right. But, like, seriously, what is this?”

  “It’s just a normal engagement,” Kelly insisted.

  “Just a normal engagement to a guy you’ve known for less than two months and who you suddenly made a lifelong commitment to even though you think it’s too risky to wear a brown belt with black shoes, or just a normal engagement that you totally saw coming and talked about in advance and still said nothing about to your best friend?”

  “Um . . .” Kelly wasn’t sure which answer would be better—or less bad. “The first one?”

  But Priya barely stopped for breath. “I still haven’t even had an actual conversation with this guy!” She gestured in large motions with her hands while she began to pace. “I mean, what I’d like to be able to say right now is ‘Oh, Kelly, congratulations! I’m so happy for you!’ But I can’t really be happy for you if I don’t even know if this dude, I don’t know, hates his mother, or does a weird tongue thing when he talks, or—or—”

  “Loves his mom, normal tongue.”

  “I mean, I found out on Facebook! And it wasn’t even your post!”

  “Okay, I’m sorry, it’s not that big of a deal—” Kelly started, but Priya broke in.

  “Yes it is! Yes, it is a big fucking deal.” She stopped pacing, turning to Kelly, putting her hands over her chest. “What have I done?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I must have done something. You never want to talk about Ethan. You still haven’t met my boyfriend. You’re always off somewhere else at work when we normally hang out together.” Priya’s face was contorted with frustration and pain. Her words spilled out like they’d been contained for too long. “You’ve obviously been distancing yourself from me for a while, and I know I have this habit of being too blunt and saying the wrong thing and pushing people away, and I must have done it now to you, and okay, whatever, that’s your right to move on and live your own life if that’s what you want, but it’s really freaking frustrating that I’m too dense to even figure out what I’ve done wrong, and I kind of wish you’d just tell me so we can go our separate ways in peace.”

  Kelly blurted the next words before she knew what she was saying.

  “Ethan’s a robot.”

  twenty

  • • • • • •

  “What?” Priya asked incredulously.

  Kelly took a deep breath, gripping the metal of the counter, steeling herself. “Ethan is a robot. I built him here when I couldn’t find a wedding date. I’ve been passing him off as my boyfriend the whole time and nobody knows.”

  Now it was Priya’s turn to steel herself against the counter. “Okay, um, wow. Num
ber one: What the fuck? Number two: That is hilarious and ridiculous and you should obviously have involved me from the beginning because the opportunity to build a boyfriend on spec is something I need yesterday.”

  “I couldn’t—”

  But Priya held up a hand, barreling on. “Number three: Clara’s wedding has come and gone, so why is Ethan still around? And now you’re marrying him? I’m so confused. Tell me what I’m missing here.”

  “I’m not actually marrying him,” Kelly insisted, eager to say something that felt like a sensible answer. “It was just that my mom was getting on my back again and so the whole engagement thing just sort of made sense in the moment.” She found it a lot harder to justify her actions out loud than she had in her own head.

  “Right,” Priya said, considering, pausing. Then—“But did it, though?”

  “But Ethan’s wonderful, really,” Kelly pressed. “Making him has honestly been my best engineering accomplishment to date, and I’m learning so much from observing him. And he’s nice, and he’s funny, and he’s sweet . . .”

  A realization dawned on Priya’s face. “You’re sleeping with him, aren’t you? It? Him . . .” Kelly may have hesitated a second too long. Priya’s eyes were widening. “Are you serious?”

  “Just keep it down—”

  “Holy shit. You’re in deep. But what if you get caught? Who will I sit with at lunch when you get fired? But no, no, wait—did you give him the vibrating—”

  Priya fell silent at the arrival of another engineer in the lab, who seemed to have caught only the last word. Kelly recalled another of her friend’s invented improvements to the human body while the engineer grabbed his supplies and made a speedy exit.

  Finally Kelly let out her breath and turned to Priya with a low voice. “I’m not going to get fired because no one’s going to find out,” she said firmly.

  “How do you know?”

  “I’m not going to get fired!” Kelly insisted again.

  Priya paused before talking, which was rare. Kelly sensed that she was treading very, very daintily around their fragile friendship. Priya leaned beside Kelly on the counter and took her hands. “It’s your life, Kelly, and I’m not going to tell you what to do. But I just don’t want you to screw it up. Literally!” Kelly glared at her. “Sorry. But you’re at such an exciting place right now at work. You’re actually leading your own project for the first time. I know how hard you’ve worked for this, I’ve been there for the long nights and the Red Bulls and the tears. I can’t let you just throw this all away. I know I’ve always said I wished you were crazier, but not Girl, Interrupted crazy.”

  Kelly knew that she had a point. And if Priya, the outrageous one, the risk-taker, the flew-cross-country-for-a-Tinder-date-and-banged-the-pilot one, was telling her she was acting reckless, this was a red flag bright enough for Kelly to see even through the haze of her confusion. “I just don’t know what to do,” she sighed.

  “Get rid of him! Disassemble him!”

  The word was clinical, but to Kelly’s ears, it was repulsive. She tried to imagine taking Ethan apart. She forced herself to envision pressing his Off switch, watching all motion go out of him for the last time. Using acetone to detach all his hair at the roots. Slicing his skin from navel to clavicle while his eyes stared woodenly at the ceiling. The thought of it sickened her. Would she do it at home or at the lab? What would she tell him beforehand? Even if she tried not to let on, he would know something was wrong; he was too intelligent, too attentive to her every signal not to. She wondered what he would feel—sadness, fear, betrayal. Logically, Kelly knew that even to attribute emotion to him was questionable. But the anguish she herself felt just thinking about it was undeniable.

  “I’ll—I’ll figure it out, Pri,” she said quietly, and slipped away to go back to her desk.

  * * *

  • • •

  “Urrggghhh,” Kelly groaned when she walked through the door of her apartment that night. Ethan met her with a quick kiss.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Just a day,” Kelly sighed. “Just a real day.”

  She followed Ethan into the kitchen, where he poured them both a glass of wine without even asking. “Is Confibot giving you grief again? Want me to give him a talk, mandroid to mandroid?” he asked.

  “Still just the same old there,” Kelly replied, taking a sip. “But everyone at work knows about the engagement now.” She still felt slightly foolish talking about the engagement in front of him. “Priya now knows you’re, well, you, and thinks I’m crazy, and Anita is all ‘Don’t get distracted before the presentation,’ and Robbie was acting weird, I think he might be jealous, which is actually pretty hilarious.”

  “Who’s Robbie?”

  “Oh, haven’t I mentioned him? Just a coworker.” Kelly felt her cheeks flush, and it was more than the wine. While she had never mentioned Robbie to Ethan simply because she had never thought to, the fact that he had never come up before seemed like an intentional omission now.

  Ethan’s brow furrowed. “Why would he be jealous? Does he like you?”

  “Ha! I can honestly say I have very little clue what Robbie truly likes. But I mean, we did date a few years back.”

  “Like, one date?”

  “Like, six months.” Kelly quickly brought her glass to her lips, accidentally clinking her tooth painfully against it in the process. She tried to cover and just gulped down too much wine instead. “It wasn’t serious, though.”

  “We haven’t even been together six months and we’re engaged.” Then Ethan backtracked, “Of course, though, it’s not a real engagement.”

  Kelly looked at him, but he didn’t meet her eyes. “Are you jealous?” she asked teasingly, prodding him on the arm.

  “Should I be?” Ethan looked at her now, and there was no teasing in him, just honesty, a sensitivity so close to the surface that Kelly could almost reach out and touch it on his skin.

  “No,” she said, wonderingly. “Not at all.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Day and night, Kelly’s mom pinged her with texts ranging from pictures of place cards to mysterious, unaccompanied questions like “Canapés????” Coworkers she had spoken to maybe once before stopped by her desk at work to offer their congratulations and hear all the details. Kelly was obliged to satisfy them with a sappy improvised proposal story involving her and Ethan’s favorite restaurant and a ring hidden in her dessert. The whole thing was exhausting. By Saturday, she slept in, then fixed herself a little morning mimosa. It had been that kind of week. It had been that kind of year. As she checked her e-mail, she looked idly at her ring. Its glorious opulence now had a hint of judgment to it. “Who do you think you are to wear a ring like this?” it seemed to say to her, as if the spirit of its seller had possessed it. “Do you really think this was wise?” Or maybe that was the mimosa talking.

  But what right did her own ring have to judge her? She swiveled back and forth in her chair with growing speed as she became increasingly indignant at the imaginary reprimand playing out in her own head. She was stressed, she was tired, she was fed up. So Kelly was making one reckless decision. Other people led whole reckless lives and got away with it. Priya was the one who was always off banging strangers on a beach or cliff diving in Tasmania, why couldn’t Kelly have her day? In reality, this wedding was demonstrably innocuous. Who else had the right to judge what Kelly and Ethan did with their own lives and bodies? They were hurting no one. Kelly believed that a polar bear had the right to marry a penguin if he so chose. She was a bona fide thirty-year-old adult woman living in the US of A and she could do whatever the heck she wanted. She grabbed a pen off her desk with a flourish and wrote a large check mark on a Post-it note for no reason.

  An ad in her e-mail caught Kelly’s fevered eye. Apparently all of her mom’s wedding-related transmissions were setting the
all-knowing algorithm to work. In glittering pastels, a picture of a tiered cake encrusted with impossibly delicate sugar flowers dissolved into the words “What will be the flavor of the most memorable day of your life? Call Sugar Land today to schedule your complimentary cake tasting.” Brides get free cake? Kelly squeezed her champagne glass so hard it almost shattered.

  Four hours later, she had officially fallen down the internet wedding rabbit hole. She had discovered a whole TV show devoted to women judging each other’s weddings. She had also learned about how to have a Disney princess wedding for a grown-up, been warned against the perils of getting a haircut less than two months before The Date, and read cautionary tales of once ordinary women who evolved into bridezillas, demanding that their best friends have arm fat removal surgery to look decent in their wedding photos; tales traded by brides past and future who spoke of these fallen sisters in matrimony as if they were fellow sailors lost at sea.

  There were nice things about being engaged. Total strangers noticed Kelly’s comet-bright ring and offered her their congratulations. She suddenly became magically more interesting to all the females in her life. And also, BRIDES GET FREE CAKE. But what made it hardest, as the days went on, for her to rein herself in from the planning mania was that her mother was just so deliriously happy, so supportive. Sure, a lot of the wedding stuff was more up Diane’s alley than Kelly’s. Kelly had never seen the point of calligraphy and had an almost allergic reaction to lace. But for once in her life, hanging out with her mom was fun. Diane now had more cheerful topics to raise than Kelly having turned the big 3-0 and thus plummeting into the quicksand of time. She was suddenly more forgiving of things like unreturned phone calls: where work had never been an acceptable excuse before, mysterious “bride duties” were now a panacea. She didn’t question Kelly’s relationship with Ethan anymore; Kelly had secured the ultimate prize, the ring, and was now apparently unimpeachable. And where Kelly and Diane’s interests usually had about as much in common as red and green, now they had shared matters to discuss, obsess, and fret over.