How to Build a Boyfriend from Scratch

by Sarah Archer

“And then?” Hazel demanded.

  “Then he stood up and got down on one knee and said, ‘Will you marry me, Kelly?’ And all the other customers were watching, so when I said yes, everyone clapped.” She cast an eye back at Ethan, who was reading quietly on her e-reader. He knew that she was carrying on the ruse of a fake wedding, and had said absolutely nothing against it. Still, she felt unaccountably embarrassed telling this story in front of him.

  “Again! Again!” Hazel exclaimed.

  “Again? Isn’t it past your bedtime, little lady?”

  She heard Gary’s voice yell through on speakerphone: “One more time! I’d rather hear you than another Baby Einstein video right now.”

  Kelly sighed. “So Ethan told me he was taking me out to dinner, but he didn’t say where …” She truly couldn’t fathom why even a trio of children would be so captivated by this story. A ring in the dessert? She had gone with this story at first because it was the first one that popped into her head. But every time she had to tell it to someone, it felt more silly, more cliché, more inauthentic. She felt increasingly embarrassed that she hadn’t at least come up with a better lie.

  “Again!” Bertie cried as Kelly wrapped up the story once more, but she resisted.

  “No more tonight, Bertie,” she said firmly. “Aunt Kelly’s talked enough.” She thought she saw Ethan’s eyes flick up at her wearied face as she ended the call.

  The next night, Kelly hauled herself back into the apartment, exhausted from another difficult day with Confibot. Strangely, the lights in the apartment were out. She flicked them on and headed toward the kitchen, but Ethan’s voice cried out to her.

  “Stop! Turn the lights back out.”

  Confused, she complied. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust, but when they did, she noticed some kind of glowing green smattered across the walls. It looked like she had walked into the aftermath of a Ghostbusters scene—this could not be good. Then, from the darkness, stars resolved, the little plastic, five-pointed kind kids sometimes stick on their ceilings. They striped the walls of the living room in clusters, which, on closer inspection, turned out to be constellations.

  “What is this?” Kelly called out. Maybe it was just because of the darkness, but she couldn’t spot him anywhere in the main living area.

  “Just read them,” his voice replied.

  Kelly was confused, until she noticed her name spelled out in stars along the hallway leading into her bedroom. She approached the room, reading off the words under her breath, “Kelly, will you …”

  She entered the bedroom to find Ethan, who was suddenly illuminated by a swirl of stars. Beside him was a revolving star projector light—he must have switched it on just as she entered.

  “Will you—” he began, then stopped. “Oops, sorry.” He lowered himself to one knee. “Kelly, will you marry me?”

  In many moments of Kelly’s life, small and especially meaningful ones, her brain lit up with a whirl of anxious thoughts, more frantic than the tornado of phantom stars above. But now, there was only one thing in her mind.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Oh good,” Ethan said with relief, standing. “I hope you don’t mind what I did to the apartment, I’ll clean it up, I just knew that it would be easier for you if you had a real proposal story and I wanted to give you one—”

  All Kelly could do was rush at him, grab him, and shut up his stupid wonderful talking mouth with a kiss.

  “So why the stars?” she asked him later that night. She would never have imagined this scenario in her quest to invent an engagement story. She saw now that the problem with all the other stories she had told was that they were about Ethan, but they hadn’t come from him.

  Ethan shrugged. “It seemed appropriate. When I think of stars, I think of you.”

  “Same here,” Kelly said, snuggling back against him as they lounged in bed, still watching the citrus-colored light washing over the ceiling. “You’re the one who showed them all to me.”

  “Oh no.” Ethan stiffened a little, looking as if he was struggling to understand something. “It’s the opposite. Before you, I had never even seen the stars.”

  twenty-one

  Kelly might have lost the battle to tame her mother’s urge to build a winter wedding mood board, but there was one more person whom she could still warn off throwing herself into this wedding full tilt. And so as Kelly headed to the dry cleaner’s on a Saturday, driving past strip malls full of nail salons and taquerias, she called up Clara. She hesitated for an instant before starting with, “What are you doing?”

  “Just heading into work,” replied Clara.

  “Really? You don’t usually work on Saturdays.”

  “It’s busy season. And I wanted to get out of the house. So what’s up?” Clara’s voice had an edge to it that wasn’t usually there, something hurried and verging on testy.

  “It’s about the wedding. You know how Mom’s crazy with this stuff, and she’s determined to plan everything right now, even though we don’t even have an official date, so she’s starting to get into bridesmaid outfits and all that, and with you as the maid of honor, or matron, which sounds hideous, so let’s say ‘maid’—you would still want to be maid of honor, right? I know you always said you would.” Kelly finished with a sudden nervous laugh.

  “Sure, of course.”

  “Right. She’s already thinking about asking the wedding party to buy shoes and everything, and I just wanted to get to you first and tell you to hold off. All of this is premature. So don’t let her hassle you into buying hundred-dollar shoes or let her show up at your place at midnight for a dress fitting or anything crazy like that.” Kelly knew that Clara loved her job at a vintage boutique, but also that it didn’t pay well. She hated to think of her wasting money on the non-wedding.

  “Right, I won’t.”

  After a strained pause, Kelly tumbled on. “It’s just that I know how much you love this wedding stuff and how excited you get, and I appreciate your help in advance, but just don’t get too into it, okay? You don’t need to do that much.”

  “Oh good,” Clara said, relief making her voice animated for the first time in the call. “Because I was meaning to tell you, I just don’t have that much time right now to give to the wedding, between work and—and everything. And I don’t have much money, since I just spent a ton on my own wedding. So this actually helps me out.”

  “Oh.” Kelly felt unaccountably disappointed. She didn’t want Clara dispensing time and money into the wedding, but that didn’t mean she wanted Clara not to want to. “Are you—aren’t you excited at all about it?”

  “Of course I am, Kel,” Clara said hurriedly. “I just pulled up at work, can we talk later?”

  “Sure. I mean, we don’t really need to, I guess.”

  “Okay. Bye, Kel.” Clara was gone. Kelly looked at the phone in her hand in confusion. What had happened to her bubbly little sister? Was there something going on with her? Was she angry at Kelly? Kelly thought back to her dismissal of the notion that Clara would take offense at Kelly announcing her own engagement the day after her wedding. It seemed uncommonly petty of her. But maybe Kelly didn’t know her sister as well as she had thought.

  She called Priya while waiting in line at the dry cleaner’s, hoping for some reassurance. But it wasn’t forthcoming. “I just don’t get why Clara not being interested is an issue,” Priya said. “The wedding’s not even happening.”

  “I know, it’s just—” Kelly shifted to pull her ticket out of her purse. “I guess it’s not an issue. I don’t know, we can talk about it Monday.”

  “I’ll try; I’m going to be in meetings with Dr. Hanover most of the day.”

  “Oh. Right. Talk to you whenever, then.” Kelly had never set much store in horoscopes, but when she got off the phone, she wondered if her stars were crossed.

  Kelly tried to focus on the lines of code on the computer screen in front of her, but it was pretty hard to ignore Confibot on the other side of
the room. The robot finally had a face now, but it was every kind of wrong. “Good morning,” he said pleasantly when she entered a command on her computer. Then suddenly his face morphed to an image of profound concern—or was it anger? It was hard to say, but his eyebrows angled with the severity of a mountain peak. “Are you ready for your medications?” Of course, his eyebrows were kind of a mess to start with. And his whole face. His eyes looked too large for his nose, his mouth too wide to be human.

  With less than a month to go until the presentation, Kelly had given in and thrown all her paint on the canvas at once, so to speak. She had chosen every element of how Confibot presented himself to match what seemed best according to her research, micromanaging each intonation and reaction according to the data she had amassed. But the final result was a mishmash of features and expressions. He veered wildly from surprise to care to disappointment, his voice and gestures seeming at every moment to be trying to do too many things at once. She didn’t need a statistical analysis to tell her that the whole thing was a disaster. The more time she spent with Ethan, the more she cared for him and witnessed his intelligence and sensitivity, the more she realized the enormity of the responsibility she bore in designing this new robotic person, and the more she dug into the data, determined to get this right.

  Being with Ethan also made her wonder how she was going so off base with Confibot. She was putting so much more thought and analysis into him than she had into Ethan, whom she had thrown together in a frenzy of instinct and excitement. Shouldn’t Confibot be that much more amazing? Sure, there were differences: Confibot, as a caregiver, had certain specific functionalities that Ethan lacked, and she had used some of the parts she’d already built for Confibot to create Ethan. But she knew that those factors weren’t enough to explain the disparity.

  Her phone buzzed on her desk. Her mom was texting again. All morning Diane had been asking whether she could count on Priya for a bridesmaid dress fitting that Saturday. Kelly had been avoiding an answer based on the small fact that she had not yet informed Priya that she needed her to pretend to be a bridesmaid. She could only imagine how that conversation would go. Actually, no, she couldn’t. She was trying her hardest not to imagine that specific thing. She ignored the text.

  She entered a search term on her computer and pulled up an article she had bookmarked on vocal registers, skimming through the lines for some sort of answer, something she could grab on to to make an evidence-based decision for Confibot …

  Her phone buzzed again. “Oh, come on, Mom,” she muttered, snatching it off the desk. But Diane’s latest text was not about the dress fitting.

  I’m putting a deposit down on a florist.

  “No, no,” Kelly groaned.

  Please hold off, she hurriedly typed. Before she could even set the phone down and look back at her work, it buzzed again.

  We’ve got to lock him in, the man’s a wizard with forsythia. And since you clearly got my other texts, I’ll see Priya on Saturday.

  Kelly dug her fingers into the hair at her temples. She couldn’t manage her own wedding. She couldn’t manage her own project at work. She couldn’t do anything. She looked at her browser, with so many tabs of research open that they extended out beyond the right border of the window, on and on forever. Everything she’d done was wrong. She had to start over.

  She snatched a scalpel from a rack of tools on the wall, stormed over to Confibot, and dug in, cutting his face off with a clean oval line, leaving a ghastly mass of exposed wires surrounding two bulging eyeballs and a set of teeth. “There. That’s better,” she asserted stubbornly. She located the trash can across the room and threw the face into it. It was useless to her; she’d have to start over.

  Robbie opened the door just in time to see a flabby silicone face sail past him in midair. In a testament to his rigid unflappability, he didn’t even blink. “Ah, Kelly, here you are. Would you care to accompany me to the lab?” There was an odd brightness in his eyes.

  “It’s not a good time, Robbie,” she said, her breath rough.

  “I promise not to occupy too much of your time.”

  “I’ll come by later,” she said, looking away from him and back to Confibot. She was already regretting her impassioned display, and she had so many more important things to focus on right now than whatever it was Robbie wanted to show her. Knowing him, it was probably the extremely concerning appearance of a minuscule new scratch on the stainless-steel lab counter.

  “You need to come now.” Kelly looked at him. His voice was sharper, more commanding than she had ever heard it. “Oh—okay.” She stepped out to follow him, bewildered.

  As they strode down the hall together, she made it a point to walk quickly to illustrate her haste. “I really do have to be quick about this, Robbie.”

  “It will take as long as it takes” was all he said. Once in the lab, he smoothly shut the door and brought her over to one of the workstations. “This is what I’m working with right now. Tell me what you think.”

  As soon as Kelly bent over the computer to look at the simulation, she was confused. “That looks exactly like Ethan.”

  She glanced up at Robbie, whose prim expression was cracking irresistibly into pride and excitement. “You said it, not me,” he said in a voice nearly strangled with his own delight.

  She stood back, bewildered. “What’s going on?”

  “Don’t rush me”—he held up a hand firmly—“I’ve been working toward this for some time.”

  Robbie sprang to the racks of manufactured body parts and marched alongside them, gesturing. “I’ve been noticing for a while now that there are parts missing from the lab. An eyelid here, a pinky nail there. A less astute observer would have just brushed it off. But I started to wonder—where had they all gone? Could there be a connection? So last night, I stayed here until four a.m.” Kelly briefly wondered if she had actually encountered the one human who had less of a life than she did. “And I figured out exactly what was missing. Every last piece. And when I joined all the parts together into a digital model, this is what I got.” He gestured grandly to the screen. Point made.

  Kelly felt sick. But it was just Robbie, she told herself. She could get out of this. Right? “Okay, so there’s a lot of stuff missing from the lab. Why would that have anything to do with me? There are thousands of parts here and dozens of people coming in and out and using them. Things are going to go missing or get out of place. It’s called ‘entropy.’ ”

  “Things that just happen to add up to your fiancé?”

  “It doesn’t even look that much like him.”

  He pulled out his phone, pressed a button, and her own recorded voice played back to her. “That looks exactly like Ethan.”

  “Checkmate,” Robbie said simply.

  twenty-two

  Robbie slipped his phone back into his pocket, waiting for Kelly’s response. As angry as she was about what he was doing to her, the priggishness in his voice was even more enraging. His face was bright with triumph, proud and yet somehow self-conscious at the same time.

  “What are you suggesting, Robbie? If you’re saying I stole parts from the lab, you don’t have any proof.” Even voicing the word “stole” out loud made her stomach lurch like a drunk ballerina. Borrowed, she corrected herself—she had borrowed the parts.

  “I’d say this is more than enough to justify an investigation. Did you really think I wouldn’t realize that something was off? You didn’t want anyone to know when you got engaged, with a gaudy ring that he couldn’t possibly afford on an associate professor salary. Oh yes, I’ve done my research. You thought that you could just waltz in here telling me you were marrying a robot and expect me not to notice? You always underestimated my observational capacities! You thought I wouldn’t see the plot twist coming in that movie we watched, but I saw it! I knew she was his daughter all along!”

  Kelly had never seen Robbie like this before. His whole face was an alarming pink. Even more alarming, he was, for onc
e, displaying actual emotion.

  She backed nervously toward the door. “Okay, well, thank you, Robbie, this was all very—educational. I’m sure we both need to get back to work now.”

  “You go ahead. I’m going to message this image to Anita.”

  Kelly halted. “What are you trying to do, blackmail me?”

  “I suppose you could call it that, if you wanted to be reductive.” He moved around the lab, closing a half-open drawer, straightening a sign, clearly relishing the suspense, his total power over her decisions. “I want …” He stopped to face her decisively. “Body parts.”

  Kelly recoiled. “Robbie, I will not commit a murder for you.”

  “Not from a human, from a robot. If you need help distinguishing the difference, let me know.” He smirked, nodding toward the picture of Ethan. “Any part I want, when I want it, delivered on time,” he added, like the announcer in some gruesome ad campaign.

  “So you want me to build random robotic parts for you?” Kelly asked.

  “Ah, well, I’m not so sure about the ‘build’ part. On time, remember? You’ll have to pull them from your existing builds.”

  “You want me to take parts out of Confibot to give to you?”

  “Where you get them from is your choice. I trust you’ll figure that out.”

  Through Kelly’s shock, she started to realize how little this made sense. She would have pegged Robbie as the type to run straight to the teacher to tattle, not plot blackmail for personal gain. And crazy or not, he was clearly intelligent enough to concoct a more effective plan than this one. He couldn’t use the parts from her builds in Brahma. And if he was hoping to hamper her progress and push her out of the running in the investor competition, it would be much faster and easier to simply expose her to Anita now. But she wasn’t about to point that out to him. She inched toward the door, hoping to get out of the room before he figured it out. Or flipped his evidently precarious lid completely.

  “All right, whatever you say,” she placated. “Is there anything else?”