How to Build a Boyfriend from Scratch

by Sarah Archer

  “Uh-oh. Does someone have a case of the Mondays?” Dot-10’s high voice pulled her from her thoughts. The robot blinked at her with wide, empty eyes. Kelly grimaced and powered her down with a decisive gesture.

  Like a burning chemical plant smoldering in the distance, family dinner glowered on Kelly’s horizon once more. The excitement of Ethan’s first introduction had worn off, and with Clara’s wedding nearly upon them, Diane’s Diane-ness was peaking dangerously. These days, she found herself more worn out by the end of a family dinner than after a twelve-hour day at work. Former Kelly might have wished to spend these nights at home alone with a rosé, a PB&J, and some deliciously bizarre reality TV special, but now she just wished for a night in with Ethan.

  But as it was, she found herself in the fitted gray pantsuit she had donned to go out, driving Ethan to her parents’ house. “Let’s try to get out quickly,” she said. “Halfway through the main course, maybe you could say you have a headache. Then we’ll be able to make our excuses and get out before dessert.”

  Ethan massaged his temple. “I can feel it coming on. Probably eye strain; I’ve been putting in so much time at the office.”

  “Wonderful.” Kelly beamed.

  “If you want to get out early, then why do you want to go at all?” he asked.

  “I don’t want to, I have to.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I always do. It’s complicated.”

  “I guess I still have a lot to learn about these things,” Ethan mused, looking out the window as they passed the curved tile roofs of Japantown.

  Kelly was silent. She had never yet questioned her compulsion to do what her mother told her to. This despite the fact that she had been living under her own roof and supporting herself for years. That she was a grown-ass woman. After all, her thirtieth birthday had come and gone the week before, though she had barely marked it with everything else going on. Priya had begged to plan a night out at a very grown-up restaurant, followed by a trip to eat very non-grown-up unicorn-themed cupcakes, but since Kelly already had dinner reservations with Ethan, her friend had simply brought her a cupcake at the office instead. Now she decided that the age milestone had at least earned her the right to start making some of her own decisions.

  “I guess I’ve been putting in a lot of time at the office too,” she said slowly.

  “You always do. I don’t know how you do it,” Ethan agreed.

  “I could have eye strain. I could have a headache.”

  “Do you?” Ethan looked at her with concern.

  “No, but I mean, I could. I could tell my mom I’m not feeling up to it. That’s not terrible, right? I’ll see them all on Friday for the rehearsal dinner.”

  “I don’t think that’s terrible at all. In fact, I think it’s quite logical.”

  Kelly pulled out her phone and tossed it to him. “Here, I’ll dictate you a text.”

  “Then we can have TV time at home. I DVRed you a special about middle-aged twin brothers who live together and hoard baby dolls.”

  “Heck no, I still have real clothes on. We’re eating out.”

  Ethan chose the restaurant, a tapas place that was popular on Yelp. Behind the unassuming strip mall exterior was a vibrant setting of wood-beamed ceilings and deep red walls. Kelly loved it, and Ethan was always up for anything. He regaled her with a blow-by-blow account of his altercation with the washing machine that afternoon and a news article he’d read about a man arrested for crossing international borders in a hot air balloon rigged from a propane torch and tarp. Kelly didn’t bother to check the news feed on her iPad much anymore; Ethan knew what she was interested in, so he offered a perfectly curated selection, and his retelling was usually more enjoyable than the original anyway. Even when she wanted to hear about inane stuff like that runner-up from that singing show who got a face-eating spider bite, or where Octomom was now, he didn’t blink.

  As they nibbled on manchego and stuffed red peppers, her spirits were buoyed by a sense of rebellion, a sudden lightness. She didn’t want to go to family dinner? She could just … not go. It was revelatory. She even justified not answering Diane’s barrage of phone calls that came in response to her text by thinking she would tell her tomorrow she had gone to bed early to soothe her head.

  A sense of guilt still weighed down her spirits, though. It was only a regular family dinner she was missing. But despite Kelly’s complicated relationship with her family, she showed up for them. She went to her nieces’ dance recitals, sitting through two hours of other people’s kids just to watch the girls dart around the stage for two minutes, looking as lost as if they had woken up on the moon. When Clara needed a moving crew to help her into her new apartment, Kelly was there with her hair back and her sneakers on. Ethan could tell that something was off as she picked at her braised short ribs.

  “I was just thinking about this presentation I have coming up at work,” she said slowly. “It’s going to be simulcast publicly online, you know, like they do with Apple product launches and that sort of thing. I had been thinking, oh, I should tell my family about it, maybe they’d like to watch. But then I thought, who am I kidding, of course they’re not going to want to watch. And then I started getting mad at them in my head for not caring. Meanwhile, I’m the one who didn’t care enough to show up tonight. So who’s really the problem here?” She laughed uncomfortably.

  Ethan frowned. “What do you mean, they wouldn’t want to watch? I wouldn’t assume that.”

  “Come on, why would they be that interested in what I do?”

  “Because it’s interesting!” Ethan insisted.

  “Not to them.” Kelly’s voice was firm. She took a sip of water and paused, thoughtful, before continuing. “There was this one time—gosh, it’s so long ago, I can’t believe I even still care.”

  “What was it?” he encouraged.

  “There was this science fair I had in sixth grade, and I worked for months on my project. It was something about soil drainage—I remember thinking that my dad might think it was cool. I’d actually chosen it so I could learn more about what he does, since it involved similar principles. I mean, he never really talked to me about his work, but sometimes I would sneak a look at his papers just to see what he was up to. Anyway, I had, like, this whole tank I had filled with different types of stones and a soil mixture I made. It actually won first place and I went onstage to accept the ribbon, but then I looked out and they weren’t there. My parents, Gary, Clara—nobody had come. They had said they were going to, and my mom always went to Clara’s soccer games, so I was kind of looking for them. I think maybe my mom had to stay late at work and my dad—I don’t even know, actually, I never asked. He probably just forgot.” She looked down, twiddling her fork. “And I got invited to bring my project to compete in the statewide fair the next month, but I just didn’t go. I guess I was kind of bummed about the whole thing. I didn’t even tell anybody. Not until you, now. Anyway,” she said, suddenly spearing a piece of beef, “it wasn’t a big deal. Like I said, I can’t believe I even still care.” She forced down a bite.

  “I can believe it,” Ethan responded quietly.

  “I mean, it’s totally irrational to get hung up on it,” Kelly went on quickly. “It was one event, and it was years ago, and I never even told them that it was important to me, so how could I have expected them to know? I feel stupid even talking about it now. I guess my point is, I’d just rather spare us all from going through that whole rigmarole again.”

  “You are many things, Kelly, but you are not stupid.” Kelly tried to smile at him, but with the food in her mouth and a pesky rush of wetness in her eyes, she was pretty sure she looked crazed instead. She started laughing at herself, which only made it worse as she tried not to choke. Ethan poured more water from the pitcher and offered her the glass. “Maybe we should work on your chewing skills, though.”

  At last, Kelly managed an actual laugh. She had always minimized the whole science fair debacle in her hea
d. But now that she had finally shared it with someone, she felt weightless.

  She had more to drink than usual at dinner, her feeling of adventurous freedom taking her from her accustomed wine to a more exotic cocktail. Something about the night’s shared transgression made her feel closer than ever to Ethan. More and more, she understood that expression about there being two types of people in the world: there was her and Ethan, and there was everyone else.

  After dinner, she felt too energized and was having too much fun to go home just yet, so Ethan took over the driving and they wound their way to the East Foothills, stopping to take in the view over the city. It was an unseasonably balmy night and there were other couples gathered outside, teenagers mostly, but something about the darkness wrapping the two of them as they found a rock to perch on, the spill of electric lights tumbling from west to east at their feet like a bed of white flowers, made it feel like the view was only theirs.

  The only thing wrong with the picture was the flatness of the sky overhead. “I wish I lived in a place where we could see more stars,” she said, leaning back on her elbows and looking up.

  “They’re all up there, even if you can’t see them,” Ethan said.

  “It’s hard to imagine them. It’s been so long since I’ve been outside the city. Or just outside.”

  “Hold on, I teach astronomy,” Ethan reasoned. “This is exactly what I’m good for. Look, right over there”—he pointed to the far left—“that’s where Virgo is. It’s kind of a human figure.”

  “Okay, I can picture it.”

  “Close your eyes,” he instructed. For once, Kelly let go and allowed herself to lean back onto the rocks, not even thinking about the dirt. “Then go up and over a little and there’s Ursa Major. You know what the Big Dipper looks like, right?”

  “Yeah, I can imagine it.”

  “Then Mars is a little south …” As Ethan talked, Kelly’s mind populated with a glimmering map of constellations. Behind her closed lids, it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.

  They both lay back for a bit and reveled in the invisible view. And when Ethan took her hand, she didn’t even think about it. When she leaned across and kissed him, she didn’t think about it either. Ethan drove on the way home, and Kelly’s whole being felt soft and misty, body and soul. The part of her brain that was constantly thinking and overthinking seemed dormant. She let herself open each moment like an unexpected gift.

  When they got home, Kelly wasn’t sure if it was her who pulled Ethan into the bedroom or vice versa, but they ended up there, and then they ended up in her bed. The few other times she had been in this position, Kelly had felt self-conscious and exposed, but it was impossible to feel exposed in front of Ethan when he took everything about her as being natural and expected and the way it should be. And everything about him, too, felt natural and as it should be, rawness and surety reflecting back on each other like dual sides of a hinged mirror. Everything about him felt only human.

  sixteen

  Is it possible to do a walk of shame within your own apartment? That’s how Kelly felt as she tiptoed from her bedroom to her bathroom the next morning. Ethan looked so peaceful in bed that she didn’t want to disturb him, but maybe more than that, she didn’t know what to say to him. For the first time, she felt self-conscious in front of him, as if there were expectations of her that she couldn’t meet because she had no idea what they were.

  Kelly’s affinity for cautious, middle-of-the-road living was perhaps even more pronounced in her love life than elsewhere. But now here she was. Yet the main thing needling her was not what other people might think if they found out what she’d done, but how Ethan might act toward her when he woke up.

  Perhaps in some sort of self-flagellating drive to purify by punishment, Kelly answered her mother’s third phone call of the morning.

  “Are you all right?” Diane’s voice came breathlessly through the phone. Even when Kelly was a kid, her mom had applied an outsized worry to every ache and pain. She was the one who forced Kelly to stay home for a week with a cold when all she had wanted to do was get back to school in time for their soda can physics experiments.

  “I’m fine, it was just a headache.”

  “There was a woman on Ellen DeGeneres who had a headache and a week later, she died of a brain tumor.”

  “Then how was she on Ellen?”

  “What did you do? Have you tried inhaling the scent of a lemon, like I taught you?” Diane unfortunately sourced most of her medical advice from Cosmo.

  “I just stayed in with Ethan and we had an early night.”

  “Ah, so he’s spending the night again, I see.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Are you using protection on these sleepovers?”

  “Mom, please.”

  “A good-looking man like that, I’m sure he’s dipped his pen in a lot of other inkwells.” Kelly held the phone farther from her ear, as if that would help. “You have to be careful—”

  “Mom, I know, I’m thirty!”

  “You do robots, dear. Chemistry is my specialty,” Diane asserted. “Well, protect yourself and don’t let him do anything that makes you uncomfortable. But you also have to please him. Are you pleasing him?”

  Kelly put the phone on speaker on the countertop, as far away from her as possible while still being in range and squirted facial scrub onto her washcloth. “I have to go, I’m going to be late for work.”

  “This is important, Kelly, and you have very little experience. Of course you don’t want him to think you have a lot of experience. But you should have a lot so that you know what you’re doing. He has to think you’re a natural. But I have a feeling you’re not a natural.”

  Logically, Kelly was well aware that Ethan had exactly zero outside sexual experience. She knew that worrying that he wasn’t sufficiently impressed by her bedroom performance was ridiculous.

  But … now Kelly started to worry about it. She recalled with some dismay that he had unlimited internet access. He had undoubtedly seen some Olympic-level bedroom showmanship. Kelly couldn’t do any of that. She could barely take her shirt off without getting it caught on her nose. And, well, he was just so good-looking. She glanced back at him in the bed, where he lay half twisted in the sheets. Even unguarded and asleep, he had the impossible geometrics of an Adonis, his skin burnished, his hair artfully mussed. The sight triggered the same insecurities she had felt on every other morning after in her life, but tenfold.

  “Of course, the landing strip has been a popular option for a while now,” Diane was saying when Kelly zoned back into the conversation. And that was her cue to get out.

  “I have to go, Mom, talk to you later.”

  Kelly wrapped her naked body in a towel and tiptoed back into the bedroom, hoping that the hinge on the closet door wouldn’t squeak as she opened it. It squeaked. Ethan stirred awake. “Good morning,” he said.

  “Oh, hi, I didn’t see you there!” Kelly chirped nonsensically. She yanked a high-necked blouse and long skirt from the closet rail. She felt a reflexive need to be modest today. And then she stood there, clutching her clothes in one hand, the top of her towel in the other, suddenly shy to get undressed in front of Ethan. She looked at him, sitting up in bed but not yet out of it, the sheet still drawn half over him, and realized that he was mirroring her hesitation. They stared at each other, neither willing to move or break the silence.

  Finally, he spoke. “I’ll make you a deal. I wear this sheet forever, you wear that towel forever, and we’ll save a ton of money on laundry detergent, okay?” Kelly laughed. The tensions inside of her suddenly seemed ridiculous.

  “Fine, fine.” She dropped her towel and started getting dressed while Ethan went to his own wardrobe.

  “I guess there’s no point in my being modest,” he went on, “seeing as you made my entire body.”

  “Didn’t do a bad job on it, either,” she said with a flirtatious smile.

  “You’re not so bad yoursel
f.” He kissed her on the cheek and walked away into the kitchen. A little butterfly took up residence somewhere around her heart.

  The whole way into work that morning, Kelly wanted nothing more than to get into the lab with Priya and tell her everything. She was desperate to have someone other than her mom to talk with about last night’s turn of events. Anyone other than her mom. But as soon as she and her friend were settled on their stools in the lab, she went mute. How was she supposed to spill a secret like this anyway? It was just too much. She could never tell.

  Priya positioned her soldering iron. Kelly normally had an almost Pavlovian response to the acrid smell of soldering, with all the memories of hours of creation that it brought—it simultaneously soothed and excited her, making her feel at home. But today, it wasn’t enough to save her from feeling out of sorts.

  “What’s up?” Priya asked her, her eyes focused down on her work.

  I built myself a boyfriend. We slept together. I think I’m falling for him. I really want to talk to my best friend about it.

  “Nothing much,” was all Kelly said.

  When the last bot had battled that night, smashing its opponent into a charred and contorted hunk of metal with one wheel sadly whirling in the air, the show ended and Ethan clicked the TV off. He set the remote down on the coffee table and made to get up from the couch, but Kelly stopped him, curving closer into him instead.

  “Is something wrong?” he asked.

  “No. Yes. I don’t know. It’s just Priya; things have been different with us lately. I wonder if we’re growing apart. Though that sounds like a totally teenage thing to say.”

  “Adults grow too,” Ethan remarked. “Together, apart.”

  “Yeah, I guess I just feel like I can’t talk to her about everything.”

  “You can always talk to me, you know.”

  Always—the word brought sharply to Kelly’s mind something that she had been doing her best to keep out of it. Clara’s wedding was that weekend, and that meant her time with Ethan was almost up.