“I’m going down the hall to help Mrs. Christian load some heavy boxes into her car.  You two copy the sen
es on the board.  Remember—two hundred times.”
    Mrs. Booher nodded curtly towards the white, dry-erase  board for good measure.  Printed there in her large, spiked handwriting:

    I will not fight on the playground.
    I will respect each and every person and their feelings.

    Mrs. Booher left the room then, the door closing with a loud crack as if she had already forgotten the chil
dren inside.
    Andy gave the board a token glance and then turned his attention to the only other student in the room—the real reason he was here in the first place—Heather Gambini.  She was a pretty girl, but the adjective bloomed like a flower in the boy’s mind.  To him, Heath
er was the definition of beauty with big brown eyes and her long black hair which curled and thick
ened in the traditional maiden mane.  She was tanned, but Andy only had the vaguest realization of that at
tribute.  She was smart, and she kicked a mean kickball.  Andy had been in love since the second week of school, and now that the temperature was starting to signal sum
mer’s onset, he finally found himself in close quar
ters with the girl he had been dreaming about.  Un
ly, he was in such close quarters because he had pushed her into a deep mud puddle, and if he cared to look, Andy could see the brown stains still drying on her jeans.  He allowed himself a guilty peek at her face, and that’s when he noticed her writing.  Heather’s hand had to be moving at light speed because, if it had not been for the sound her labored writing made, Andy would have wondered if her fingers were not just hang
ing above the paper.  He watched as she wrote on, obliv
ous of him.
    He wanted to speak to her in a way that created an ache in his stomach.  The butterflies that should have been in his tummy had been eaten by monsters that were now banging his insides, trying to get out.  Andy thought hard, trying to bring forth some really cool turn of phrase that would pull Heather out of her writing trance, something that would just make her stop and say, “Wow, what have I been missing all this time?”  He wondered what his hero, Mr. Rear Admiral Albert Calavicci, the project observer for Project Quantum Leap—also known as the actor Dean Stockwell, would say to Heather.  Andy had heard that Mr. Stockwell was a former Broadway actor, and that title gave the man some extra clout; not that Andy knew what clout was.  He just knew it sounded very cool indeed.  Andy was sure Mr. Stockwell, or rather his character on Andy’s favorite television program “Quantum Leap” would be able to think of something to melt young Heather’s knees.  In the show, Al was a hologram that only Sam Beckett could see and hear, a hologram that knew how to melt a woman’s heart.  Andy wished Al was here now to be his invisible guide and feed him some really smooth lines, a sort of holographic Cyrano.  However, that wasn’t going to hap
pen so Andy thought as hard as he could.  Then, he spat out the first clump of words that caught in his mind’s trap.
    “Sorry about pushing you down, Doll, but you’re a tough old girl.  I knew you could take it.”
    As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Andy was sorry.  He felt his cheeks flush and waited for her to call him a dork or a geek or some other name unique to his generation; spaz was popular this week.  Instead, Heather just kept writing.  Andy watched as she stopped, checked the lead in her pencil, tossed it aside, grabbed a new one, and continued to copy the board’s script.  Andy tried again.  He felt Al would be proud.  “Go on, kid, give her what she wants,” the rough Admiral growled in his imagination.
    “I really am sorry.  It was an accident.”
    Well, not really.  At the time, Andy wanted to push Heather because he just wanted to touch her.  Heather, however, finally stopped writing and turned to face Andy.  He had known it would work.  Girls loved it when you showed your sen
tive side—apologized and stuff—and now Heather would tell him how much she loved him.  Her head turned and stopped, turned and stopped.  A sound like a bucket full of screws and bro
ken pencils being swallowed by the garbage disposal issued from her muscles.  Her head jerked, jerked, and amazingly Andy saw water flowing from her ears.  Dirt and grit stood out against her skin as Heather began to make another sound, this one issuing from her mouth, growing in volume.
    “YaaaaAAAAAAA!”  Her eyes had grown large, and they seemed to have fall
en back.  She tried to get up, failed, and pulled herself away from the desk, giving it a kick that sent it over the two desks in front of her.  It crashed, cracking the writing surface and spilling Heath
er’s papers.  Andy could only stare, jaw open.  In response, Heather raised her arms in front of her, hooked her fingers into claws, and advanced on the boy.  Andy managed to get out of his own desk but tangled his feet and landed on his backside.  Hard.  He felt a pencil snap in his back pocket and scrambled to his feet while Heather advanced, pushing him back against the pink brick wall.  She was still hooting her horrid yell, and Andy saw a spring pop from her neck.  The skin tore like a cheap Halloween mask, and the coil bounced comically.  Smoke began to issue from her mouth while sparks flew from her left ear.  The right continued to trickle the very water Andy had pushed her into.  She came on like a B-movie death.
    “YAAAAAAAAAAAAA!”  She screeched in a lit
tle girl’s voice that warbled like a bad recording—or like a good one that has been caught in the wheels of a hun
gry tape deck.  Andy finally began to scream then, his voice overriding Heath
er’s tenor.  He pushed so hard against the unyielding wall that he felt the individual im
tions of the concrete.  They locked eyes.  She drooled blackened spit.  Then, a gear exploded from the opposite side of her neck, flying across the room.  It drew sparks from the wall before embedding itself in the dry-erase board.  Heather stopped, the grating sound of dirt and rocks grinding together increasing, and then the top of her head swung up.  Andy watched as a gray lump pulled itself out using thin spider-legs.  It hoisted itself up and away from Heather’s head.  The lump seemed to regard Andy with its plain, alien face, and then it hopped gingerly to the floor.  Heather’s empty shell fell to the side, smoke and water still flowing out as the brain scooted to the window, hopped up, and jumped out.
    Understandably, Andy fainted.  He was resting un
ably when Mrs. Booher opened the door some fifteen minutes later.

    Heather was sitting in a litter of metal scraps and wires, green and yellow and blue and orange and white and black as if a rainbow had exploded outward from all her subconscious thinking.  The smell of sautéed plastic and strange organic funk rolled around the small closet, bounced off the walls, and collected under her nose for a detection she had long grown accustomed to.  She tapped several keys in a quick secession, and the computer confirmed that the apparatus it was hooked to was going to do everything Heather had pro
grammed it to do.  She did not hear the brain scratching at the window, making a labored way back into the room where it was born.  It plopped to the rug, picking its way past dust-covered toys and neglected stuffed an
mals.  It came into the closet where Heather was work
ing and waited patiently for her to notice it.  She did, turning her eyes to the creation that was supposed to be running her double in school.  She had created the an
droid _of herself so she could stay at home and learn; let the dummy handle the mundane tasks she already knew.
    She didn’t lose her temper or question the brain; that was not her way.  She only gestured it over, hooked the computer to it, and began to download what had hap
pened so she could see how to correct the problem.  It was in the middle of this process that Heather’s mother called from the foot of the stairs:
    “Heather Michelle Gambini!  You get down here, girl!  You’ve went and done it again after we told you not to; haven’t you?”  The phone was still clutched in the mother’s hand.  “I know you’re up there.  You’re certainly not in school like you’re supposed to be!  Now get down here!”
    Heather gathered herself and crossed her room, tak
ing the stairs and thinking that she should design an an
droid to replace her parents.  The one that she had made to replace herself had worked well until Andy had pushed the android into the mud.  The idea sparked off a series of mental schematics and equations in young Heather’s head.  Yes, replace her parents.  She could do it.  And she was sure she already knew how to get around the problem of moisture.  After all, an android mother would have to do dishes, wouldn’t she?
 

Paul Wilson