Sarah Archer - How to Build a Boyfriend from Scratch

“But big deal, right?” Priya asked the crowd. “You guys have been walking for years.” Some of the kids giggled.

“But he can also walk sideways , which is pretty cool.” Kelly toggled to the right on the remote, sending Zed into a side-to-side grapevine movement. “And if you add in the arms—”

Priya pressed a sequence of buttons on her own remote and the robot added a rhythmic arm movement to his routine. “Zed’s got some major moves.” The kids in the audience started clapping.

“Observe.” Kelly swept the joystick around, and Zed whirled in a perfect, whip-fast pirouette, stopping on a dime. The sandy-haired boy let out an involuntary “Whoa!”

“Way better than my moves, I have to admit,” Kelly said.

As the crowd laughed and cheered, Kelly sneaked a grin at Priya. They had officially won these kids over with the sweet smell of science. They were superheroes. Now she spoke confidently as she started to explain her process. This was her favorite part: the magic of engineering, the ability to imagine an impossible-to-solve problem, then slowly break it down, unpiecing it until it became possible.

“So how do you teach a robot to walk?” she asked the crowd. They were silent now, utterly rapt. “Imagine you were trying to give someone else the ability to walk for the first time. What would you need to give him?”

“Feet!” one child cried.

“Good, that’s the first thing.” She was actually starting to enjoy this. “What would those feet need to be able to do?”

But the buzz of another phone, conspicuous in the quiet, cut her off. Her eyes shot instinctively to Robbie, waiting for him to nab the culprit. But Robbie’s glare was fixed squarely on her. “I’m so sorry,” she muttered, fumbling her own phone out of her pocket and striking the Ignore button. She could almost physically feel everyone watching.

It had been her mom calling, but she could have guessed that even without looking at the screen. It was always her mom calling. She cleared her throat and tried to resume the presentation, but she had lost her train of thought. “So … the feet. The feet would need to be able to balance flat on the ground, right? What else?”

She felt a smaller rumble in her pocket as a voicemail registered, where it would sit alongside the five or six other voicemails from her mother that could be found on Kelly’s phone at all times. She could already hear what this one would say: “Are you coming to family dinner this weekend?” (Yes, Kelly came to every family dinner, every two weeks like clockwork.) And “Are you bringing a date?” (No, it’s a family dinner, that would be weird.) Of course, Kelly was rarely dating anyone anyway. But that wasn’t the point.

Diane’s energetic voice filled Kelly’s mind so loudly that she failed to hear the kids shouting answers at her in the audience. “Sorry, what? One at a time,” she said. Just moments ago she had been doing so well. She had asked her mom time and time again to not call while she was at work, but Diane just never seemed to think that Kelly’s work was too important to interrupt. “How about balance?” she tried again. “Wait, I just said that. Um—”

Priya gave her a sympathetic glance before stepping forward again. “What did you just say? You, the boy in the awesome SpiderMan shirt? That the feet have to talk to the brain? That’s right. You have to figure out how those feet are going to know what to do.”

This time Kelly stepped back, allowing Priya to take over for her. She had lost the nerve to try again.

The drive from AHI to her parents’ house that Sunday wasn’t far. But passing from the sweeping, glass-bound corporate giants of North San Jose to the leafy suburban streets of Willow Glen always gave her the feeling of entering another world. Maybe she became more of the girl she was growing up there, less of the woman she was now.

The Suttle house was a neat ranch-style home that looked as modestly middle class as ever despite the million-dollar price tag the tech boom had hung on it. The sage-green painted exterior was nice enough, framed by solid bushes and a white bench tucked beneath a shady oak tree, but it gave way to an interior that had, in the decades-long war of attrition that was her parents’ marriage, become almost entirely her mother’s territory. Pillows with an indefensible number of tassels, framed flower prints jockeying for wall space, a menagerie of china and glass figurines—Diane had difficulty saying no to anything beautiful, or at least cute, or at least, well, whatever was appealing about the life-sized sculpture of a cat that glowered at them from the mantel. Family portraits from years gone by had the five Suttles smiling down, pressed and perfect, from every room. But the actual family tableaus formed in these rooms were never so idyllic. Kelly took a heavy breath as she entered the house. Something about the numerous clashing pots of potpourri, the unidentifiable cooking smells, the thick fug of repressed childhood emotions, made the air more difficult to breathe here. Kelly loved her family. But sometimes she thought it would be easier to love them if she didn’t have a career that kept her so close.

As she emerged into the kitchen, she looked to see what her mother was cooking, but her spirits fell when she saw her ladling an ominous, gelatinous something onto plates. The older she got, the more Diane embraced a sort of culinary Russian roulette, throwing ingredients together with abandon, and the results were as likely to be toxic as inspired. Kelly could already tell that tonight would be a miss. Meanwhile, Diane talked in a stream to Clara, Kelly’s twenty-five-year-old sister. Clara had a Disney princess thing going on: she wasn’t a supermodel, but with wide, round eyes and a sunny smile, she was the sort of pretty that made babies smile at her automatically in checkout lines and customers at the vintage boutique where she worked want to give her the sale. Her strawberry-blond head bobbed, listening raptly, while she pushed some parbaked rolls into the oven. Beside her, her fiancé Jonathan, an overgrown but good-natured jock getting soft in the middle since college, dutifully pretended to be doing something with the butter to look busy.

Across the kitchen, Kelly’s older brother, Gary, was half visible under his young daughters, who were summiting him like mountain goats. Kelly knew that there were three of them—triplets, in fact—but sometimes suspected he had picked up an extra one somewhere, like a leaf stuck to his hair. They made way too much sound for three humans and with the way they ran around, really, who could tell how many there were, or what was happening at all? It was like that game where you try to guess which cup the penny is under. The only possible solution is that there’s a secret fourth cup. They were just reaching the age when they were developing truly distinct personalities, and Kelly was half thrilled at watching their minds blossom, half terrified at the notion that all three girls could now run and turn doorknobs.

“I talked to the florist about the camellias,” Diane was saying as she fluttered around the kitchen, her sleeve of bracelets clinking, her dark hair motionless in its eternally perfect coif. Clara’s wedding, which was eight weeks away, was the topic du jour—it was the topic du every jour, taking the place of the gossipy stories that Diane usually recounted from Blush, the bridal shop she ran. “It’s vital that she understand. Gary, can you grab me the salad tongs?” Diane didn’t seem to notice that Gary currently had a shoe in one hand, an upside-down toddler in the other, and an Anna from Frozen doll in his mouth. Kelly dove into the room and scooped up the toddler while Gary seamlessly plucked the tongs from their container.