Man Made Boy Read Free Page B

so…delicate.”
    “Gotcha.”
    She pulled out several more tops for me to look at. It took a little while, but eventually, we settled on one that was frayed and broken in enough to appeal to Liel and still romantic enough for the girl.
    “Oh, yeah, she’ll like this,” said the girl. “And it’s a blue tag.” She pointed to a sign above the register in the corner. “Blue tags are half price today.”
    “Thanks for helping me. I think I would have been totally lost.”
    The girl shrugged. “It was fun.” Then she seemed to lose her confidence for a moment. She looked away, then looked back at me. Looked me full in the face, which she hadn’t done much.“Hey, I don’t know if this is weird or whatever, but what happened to your face?”
    “My face?”
    “You know. The, um…” Her fingers fluttered across her own face for a moment. “The stitches.”
    “Oh!” I said. Then I realized that if I was supposedly a human, I needed a reason to have stitches. I should have thought of a cover story ahead of time. “An…accident.”
    “A car accident?”
    I almost agreed with her. It seemed to be the most obvious answer. But for some insane reason, I said, “No, it was a thresher.”
    “Like on a farm?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Whoa, like, you used to live on a farm?”
    “Sure,” I said, trying to remember movies I’d seen that took place on farms and what that looked like.
    “That’s probably why you’re so big.”
    “Big?”
    “You know.” She lifted her arms out to the side. “Built.”
    “Yeah.” Was that a good thing? I couldn’t tell. “I guess so.”
    “So, why did you move to the city?”
    “Oh, uh…”
    Then I heard Ruthven’s voice:
    “Frank? There you are.”
    I looked over and saw Ruthven walking down the aisle toward us, an easy smile on his face, his trench coat billowing around him.
    “Are you ready?” he asked.
    “Sure.” I held up the shirt for Liel, like it was proof that I had everything under control.
    “Oh, just lovely. I’m sure she’ll like it.” He turned to the girl. “I hope my nephew wasn’t taking up all your time.”
    She looked a lot more spooked by Ruthven than she did when she first saw me. “N-n-n-o, it’s cool.”
    “Excellent.” Then he turned to me. “Shall we go, Frank?”
    Once we had paid and were back out on the busy sidewalk, I asked, “Frank?”
    “Sorry, I just can’t resist little jokes like that.” Then he raised an eyebrow. “And what about that thresher?”
    “You were listening?”
    “Of course. It was your first time out among humans. You didn’t think I was just going to let you run wild, did you? All in all, I think it went rather well. Up until the point when you dug yourself too deeply into a pointless lie and I had to come and rescue you.”
    “Yeah, I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess I was trying to impress her or something.”
    “You were trying to impress her with a story about getting mauled by a thresher?”
    “It made sense at the time.”
    “Ah, youth.” He sighed. “Do you know what I would give to be young again?”
    “No, what?”
    “Nothing. In fact, you’d have to pay me.”
    We walked on in silence for a while. Now that I was getting used to the constant movement around me, I was able to relax a little. In some ways it was easier than being in that store. It was so crowded that nobody really paid attention to any one person. I almost felt invisible. But in that store, talking to that human girl, I had never felt so out of place. So…monsterish.
    “Hey, Ruthven, what do I look like to humans?”
    He turned toward me and frowned. “What a strange question. Why do you ask?”
    “That girl. She was really nice and all. But when she first saw me, she gave me this look. Like girls in the horror movies when they see the bad-guy monster. Did I scare her?”
    “Probably a little. Humans don’t like to see things they aren’t expecting to see. It didn’t last, though, did it?”
    “No, she got