Freaks Under Fire by Maree Anderson Page B

hear it,” Jay said. “And if you’re very lucky, I’ll even pick a name you can pronounce.”
    Caro stuck out her tongue—her default response whenever she couldn’t come up with a witty rejoinder—and it was all so
normal
that Tyler forced himself to fully relax and enjoy the moment.
    He was in the backyard with his family and his girlfriend. Everyone was together, everyone was getting along, and for now, everyone was safe. He counted his blessings, because one thing he’d learned since meeting Jay, was to count ’em while you could. You never knew when some megalomaniac with delusions of grandeur would set you in his crosshairs. Or when some rogue cyborg was gonna try messing with your girlfriend.

Chapter Five
    The three-day interlude at the Davidson family home had turned out a great deal more pleasant than Jay had anticipated. Tensions had escalated again the first evening, when the subject of sleeping arrangements had been broached, however Tyler had quickly smoothed over the awkwardness, announcing he would sleep downstairs on one of the couches rather than share his old room with Jay. He’d claimed he didn’t like disturbing her when he couldn’t sleep. And, rather than consider the reality that a cyborg didn’t require sleep, and would hardly be disturbed by a human pacing the floors—as Tyler tended to do when in the throes of composing a new piece of music—Marissa had simply lamented that her son’s insomniac ways hadn’t improved any.
    Jay admitted to taking what she’d later identified as mild offence at Tyler’s clumsy signals for her to remain silent and let him do the talking, and at the time had countered with a firm statement that she would be quite comfortable “sleeping” on the couch. That wasn’t to say she hadn’t been
tempted
to explain that although she did not
require
sleep, if she felt any requirement to mimic the state at least
she
wouldn’t suffer any discomfort lying on one of the Davidson family’s well-used, somewhat saggy couches, that were hardly optimal sleeping surfaces. But she hadn’t given in to the temptation because she saw no reason to exacerbate a potentially fraught situation.
    Tyler shouldn’t have felt compelled to prompt her not to tromp all over Marissa’s desire to continue treating her like any other human purporting to be her son’s girlfriend. Jay again considered discussing the matter with him, but ultimately deemed it prudent to let it go. It was her problem, not Tyler’s, that it was becoming increasingly more challenging to suppress her human side and be the cyborg that was immune to hurt feelings.
    Detecting potential social minefields, however, was becoming a little easier. As was navigating them without attracting too much unwanted attention—although Jay could still find herself floundering, despite blink-of-an-eye access to extensive information on any subject. Parent/child dynamics was one such constant source of both confusion and fascination. Take, for example, a son sleeping in the same room as his girlfriend. To a parent, “sleeping” in the same room appeared to be synonymous with their son and his girlfriend having sex under their roof. And to a parent, it frequently appeared perfectly reasonable to insist on separate rooms in an effort to prevent such an act from taking place—surely an illogical reaction if the parent already knew that their son and his girlfriend were sharing an abode and presumably having intercourse.
    So far as Jay could determine, the reasoning was along the lines of “my house, my rules”—even if such rules wouldn’t prevent one party from sneaking into the other’s bed if either the son or girlfriend felt the risks of being caught worth the reward.
    In the end, no one had slept on the couch because Caro had insisted on what she’d called “a mini sleepover” in her old room. Jay wiggled her sparkly-purple-painted toenails—one of the many rituals Caro had forced her to undergo. Others had