The Plus One Read online

  She strode past Ethan into the kitchen and pulled down the makings of her favorite guilty pleasure breakfast: a box of Cheez-Its and a jar of Nutella. She dunked with vigor. Working herself blind all weekend had really worked up an appetite. “Come here,” she called to Ethan, and he dutifully approached the kitchen. “Want one?”

  He accepted the Nutella-topped Cheez-It as if it were the greatest gift anyone had ever given him. Which, technically, it was. “Thank you, Kelly. This is so generous of you.”

  “It’s a Cheez-It, not the Hope diamond,” Kelly responded. She watched with some anxiety as he chewed and swallowed, but he simply smiled back at her. She gave herself a little internal high five. This was the first time she had built a comprehensive food and drink consumption pathway, including programming Ethan to dispose of his own masticated food waste in the bathroom, and so far, everything was looking peachy. She crunched a Cheez-It with glee. “There’s nothing on this Earth I love more than Cheez-Its and Nutella,” she mused.

  Kelly had an extra bounce in her step as she got ready for work, singing that annoyingly catchy new Taylor Swift song in the shower, flipping her hair back like a mermaid when she was done blow-drying it. When she walked back into the bedroom, she jumped again. There Ethan was, sitting at her computer, his face aglow with a sort of bright-eyed shyness. He leaped from the chair. “I hope you don’t mind me using your computer, Kelly,” he said. “I wanted to give you a little something.”

  Peering at the monitor, Kelly saw that he had found his way to her design program. And on the screen was a bouquet of digital flowers, exquisitely drawn in a rainbow of pixels, yellow gladiolus flaring above a shimmer of violets, the colors more real than life. The image rotated slowly, showing fifty or more unique flowers bundled into the arrangement.

  “Why did you do this?” Kelly asked, utterly baffled. She hadn’t commanded him to give her flowers, hadn’t programmed in anything of the sort. Immediately she was intrigued to understand this unforeseen behavior of her creation.

  “I know that they’re not as nice as real ones,” Ethan responded anxiously. “But since I have no means to buy anything, I determined a drawing to be my best alternative—”

  “But why flowers? Why give me anything at all?”

  “To make you happy, of course. Do you not like them?”

  Kelly stared at the bright image sweeping softly around the screen. She realized that she’d never been given flowers. “I do,” she said after a moment. “Thank you.”

  She finished dressing and moved out to the living room, Ethan following behind. Her mind swirled with questions and ideas. Already her robot was surprising her with the unanticipated independence and creativity of his actions. Though she wasn’t quite sure what she had anticipated. She was eager to learn more, but she would have to switch him off so he didn’t do anything else surprising while she was at work.

  As she stepped into her ballet flats and looped her bag over her shoulder at the door, she looked at Ethan. His face was luminous with all the excitement of his first day on Earth. And the feeling was catching.

  Kelly hung her bag back on its hook. “Come on,” she said. “I’m calling in sick.”

  * * *

  • • •

  She had known that, sooner or later, she would have to take Ethan out in public. Though the thought of walking out into the world with him made her stomach churn with anxiety, she decided to bite the bullet. She had to assess how other people reacted to him before she could risk him meeting her family. Besides, she’d already played hooky for the first time in her life.

  Half an hour later, Kelly and Ethan stepped through the wide automatic doors of Safeway. She had figured that the grocery store would be a relatively safe place for her companion’s debut—quotidian, judgment-free (this wasn’t Whole Foods, after all), full of people, but unlikely to contain anyone Kelly knew. Still, she swiveled her eyes so rapidly between Ethan and the other customers near the entrance that she nearly swung them loose. She clocked the potential threats like an undercover operative: nine o’clock, a woman in a brown trench coat testing the softness of a baguette. At two o’clock, a young mother gently wheeling her toddler back and forth in the cart while she waited at the deli counter. An older gentleman in a tweed cap tentatively selecting his jar of chilled pickles, dead ahead.

  But as she wrested loose a cart and edged into the minefield, her heart rate began to relax. She and Ethan were just . . . two more customers. Nobody looked at them strangely. Nobody looked at them at all. And suddenly, Kelly felt a warm surge of pride. She had never seen a humanoid robot as realistic as Ethan, but the fact that he was here now, out among the unsuspecting public, and nobody knew a thing, confirmed that her work was that good. She was exhilarated.

  An involuntary smile slipped onto her face, and when she looked from the other customers across to Ethan, she noticed that he was smiling too. Gaping may have been more accurate. He gazed at the plethora of items in the store. “Where does one even start?”

  “Come on.” She pivoted him by the elbow. “I’ll show you.”

  Kelly had always hated grocery shopping. She wasn’t much of a cook—she found the whole process unnecessarily messy, unpredictable, and time-consuming—yet she refused to relinquish control over her own selections by taking advantage of one of the grocery delivery services proliferating in the Valley. Now with Ethan at her side, she saw the commonplace store with new eyes. He knew what all the products were, of course, but marveled at the very quantity and selection of them. He asked her questions that she didn’t know how to answer, but wished she did, like “Why are there seven varieties of Diet Coke?” and questions about herself she’d never considered, like “How do you decide which flavor of Jones Soda to purchase?” They fell into a natural routine, Ethan pushing the cart and Kelly pulling from the shelves, checking off items on the list on her phone. His smarts came in handy in the produce aisle. When Kelly went to pick a watermelon based on color, he picked the candidates up instead, deftly judging their weight and knocking for a hollow sound before placing the winner in the cart. “This one,” he said with confidence. He knew that the best avocadoes were from New Zealand and that red grapes, at this time of year, should come from Chile. He instantly calculated the best deals per unit. She started to feel like she was part of a team. The mundane aisles took on a novelty for Kelly; the colors were dialed up, the fluorescent lighting cheerier.

  As they rounded the aisle into condiments, Kelly noticed a middle-aged woman glance at Ethan for one second too long. Her pulse thrummed—this was it. The woman was full-on staring at Ethan. Just as Kelly was reaching for his arm, moving to steer him away before the woman could question them, or catch them, or whatever she was about to do, the woman caught Kelly’s eye, smiled, and offered a small wink before turning back to the vinegars. Kelly looked at Ethan and realized he did stand out here, but not because he looked like a robot. Against the everyday setting of the grocery store, his planed cheekbones and strong jaw were cast into even sharper focus. He was gorgeous, a twenty-first-century Paul Newman. As she pushed on down the aisle, side by side with Ethan, she held her head a little higher.

  Normally Kelly beelined for the self-checkout. Her past interactions with store employees involved, at best, neutral silence, at worst, the sorts of embarrassing mishaps that led her to now read too much into every nuance of the interaction, trying to avoid saying the wrong thing and coming off as cold in the end. But now, feeling cocooned within her bubble of two, she went along with it as Ethan steered the cart to the nearest cashier, even smiling at the man. “How are you?” she asked as she and Ethan stacked products on the belt.

  “Pretty good.” He held up her box of Velveeta. “This stuff is my guilty pleasure.”

  “It’s my cardinal sin,” she admitted. She gestured to the rubber divider for the belt. “I’ve always wondered, what happens if two people forget to put the divider between
their groceries? Do they just have to go home and make a life together?”

  “Yep. Grocery store law.”

  Kelly laughed with him. The whole thing was so easy. For once, as she left the store, she realized she hadn’t even bothered to track whether or not the cashier wished her a good day.

  At home, Ethan pitched in to put the groceries away, helping out in particular with the elusive top shelves. Kelly had resigned herself to an acceptance that the packages stuck at the back of those cabinets would never again see the light of day until the San Andreas Fault shook them down. But here was Ethan, organizing them with aplomb.

  Kelly settled at her desk in the bedroom to get some work done, drafting a parts request for the lab supply manager, scanning the latest issue of Cybernetics and Systems on her tablet. But as the day went on, her mind wouldn’t stay put. Flush with the coup of a successful grocery store trip, she itched to take Ethan out again. If his company had done so much to improve a boring errand, what would a night on the town with him be like?

  Besides, there were too many distractions for her to focus here anyway. Priya kept texting to ask if Kelly was totally sure that she didn’t need her to come over and bring chicken soup or a medical evaluation helicopter or anything. The sick day had raised some alarm bells—normally Kelly was the sort to work through her own funeral. And her mom had been trying doggedly to reach her since Saturday to continue the conversation about this Ethan person. Kelly gave up on working. She glanced into the living room—there he sat on the couch, politely awaiting her next instruction. First she needed to sit down with him and figure out who this Ethan person was.

  * * *

  • • •

  You could tell that the shops and restaurants on Santana Row were expensive even if you never breached their doors. The minimalist compositions behind the plate glass of the store windows, the doormen with wired earpieces and folded hands, the gusts of sandalwood air exhaled from the open doorways—even the spotless street exuded a feeling of “invitation only.” Most of the district held little appeal for Kelly, who would rather blow a paycheck on a high-speed charging dock than a belt. But in the few times she ventured out there, one spot had always caught her eye: La Vigna. More accurately, it had caught her nose. The smells of garlic, wine, and rosemary perfumed the Italian restaurant’s entire block. She had wanted to try the place for years, but would never have dared to venture past its tall, sculpted oak doors alone. But now, walking through those doors at Ethan’s side, she thought she might actually fit in. She had changed into her trusty green date-night dress, and it somehow felt more festive tonight than it had when she went out with Martin.

  The stiff-faced waiter came for their drinks order just as Kelly was trying surreptitiously to adjust her bra under her dress. She swiftly dropped her hands, hoping he hadn’t noticed, and picked up the wine list. She went by price, choosing something that wasn’t the cheapest but wasn’t the most expensive, since none of the names meant anything to her anyway. “We’ll have a bottle of the—” And it was not until she reached the end of the sentence that she realized she had no clue how to pronounce the name, which had an indecent number of consonants. “The Mmblggrwgitz,” she tried quietly, as if lowering her voice would hide the fact that she didn’t know how to pronounce the word, yet somehow still get the correct name across.

  “Pardon?”

  Kelly cleared her throat. “The house red,” she said. Maybe this whole evening was a bad idea, she considered. Of course she didn’t fit in at a place like this. Then she looked across the table at Ethan, who offered her an easy smile. Each time she saw him, she had to blink, taken aback. He was just so good-looking, he almost didn’t look real. Of course, he wasn’t real, she corrected herself.

  Dinner was as flavorful as the fragrances had advertised, and Kelly and Ethan sampled each other’s wine-glazed roast and leek risotto with enthusiasm. She was discovering yet another benefit of being paired off: you get to try twice as many dishes. Ethan’s conversation was so easy that she forgot that it could have been hard. His speech was eloquent, if stiff, and while he brought no real personal experience to any topic, he was so voracious for details of Kelly’s experiences, so genuinely absorbed in her words, that it was easy for her to chatter throughout the night.

  “One of my coworkers in the Commercial Products division is working on this really cool new aquatic robot. It moves with a sort of undulating fin system that allows it to go really fast.”

  “A corollary would be the cuttlefish,” Ethan responded.

  “Exactly!”

  “Perhaps an analogous system could have potential for subterranean exploration. Think of the musculature of the earthworm.”

  “You’re right.” Kelly paused with her fork halfway to her mouth, considering. “I never thought of that. I should suggest that to him.” Normally Priya was the only one she could have these types of conversations with. She thought back to her attempt to discuss robotics with Martin, which had gone over with all the success of a paper umbrella. In contrast, Ethan’s literacy and intelligence were astonishing. He could understand any topic she brought up. In fact, he could teach her a thing or two—or twenty.

  “I can suggest a selection of literature on the topic that you might find elucidating,” he went on.

  Now Kelly frowned. Ethan’s intelligence was almost too much. His voice itself was great, but his speech patterns and vocabulary were too formal. He understood colloquial phrases only in an academic way. Before she could ever introduce him to her family, she had to get this right. She had to make him sound like a twenty-first-century American.

  “I think we need to dumb you down,” she declared.

  Ethan was confused. “What do you mean?”

  “You’re getting it already!” she joked. He didn’t respond. “Never mind, just—you have the whole internet in your brain, right? Read through it. I want you to look at websites that Americans use every day—Reddit, Twitter, CNN, whatever—and just try to imitate what you see there. Common expressions, slang.”

  “I should talk like people on the internet?” Ethan repeated dubiously.

  “Yes,” she said firmly, taking a decisive bite of risotto.

  “Buona sera!” A robust voice jolted them from their conversation. A short man with full gray hair and a laughing red face barreled toward them. In each hand he held a shot glass full of a velvety substance, which he placed before Kelly and Ethan. “Chestnut velouté. An amuse bouche for la bella coppia, courtesy of the house.”

  “Thank you,” Kelly and Ethan said in unison.

  “And what are we celebrating tonight?”

  “Oh, nothing, just—dinner,” Kelly responded.

  “Dinner is not nothing! Dinner is something to celebrate! You are young, the night is young, the moon is full.” Kelly was fairly positive she had seen a crescent moon on the way in, but even she wanted to allow herself to be lifted on the gust of the ebullient romance of this man. “You need anything, you ask for Paolo.” He gave a short bow, hand over his middle. “This is my house. I am the house!” Paolo turned away, laughing.

  Kelly turned to Ethan. “I wonder what ‘la bella coppia’ means.”

  “The beautiful couple,” he translated instantly. Kelly had never seen herself as beautiful, and when she had been in a relationship with Robbie—and with Nick from college—she had never quite felt a snug fit with the word “couple.” But now she smiled.

  The prim waiter glided their way, refilling their water glasses with decorum. “And how are you finding everything?” he asked.

  “You’ll never guess what happens next,” Ethan answered.

  “Pardon?” the waiter said again. They seemed to be testing his limits of the word tonight.

  “You have to see Victoria’s Secret model Alessandra Ambrosio’s Malibu nip-slip to believe it.”

  Kelly dropped her fork to her plate with a clatter.
The few surrounding customers who hadn’t looked over at Ethan’s declaration were looking now. She coughed, trying to choke down her food before speaking. “Everything’s great,” she said. She looked at Ethan—did he have a glitch?

  “Would you care to review the wine list again?” the waiter asked.

  “Seventeen struggles all curly-haired girls know. Me AF,” Ethan answered.

  “No wine, we’re fine!” Kelly cried. A few diners around them snickered. The waiter’s eye began to twitch alarmingly.

  “These Asian babes are sick of being alone,” Ethan continued, entirely straight-faced.

  Dear heaven. He was talking like people on the internet.

  “We don’t need anything, thank you,” Kelly gasped, not meeting the waiter’s twitching eye. “We’re fine.” He left her with an expression that clearly indicated that he didn’t believe they were.

  Ethan called after him as he walked away, “Is this the most satisfying pimple popping video yet?”

  “Ethan, stop!” Kelly said.

  “What?” he asked. “Or no: ‘What happened when I spent the night in a haunted hotel. Not clickbait. Parentheses, emotional.’”

  “Stop doing that! I didn’t mean for you to literally talk like people on the internet. I just wanted you to sound normal.”

  “As in colloquial? Casual?”