The Last Invention Read online

  “Don’t try to move,” Melanie said. “You’re hurt.” I remembered my suicide attempt. I had really damaged myself after all. Pangs of shooting pain raced through my neck.

  “Thirsty,” I whispered. Melanie fed me water from a small cup. It dripped down my chin.

  “This is a long dream,” Melanie said, wiping the water away.

  “Cold,” I said. My legs were bare. I wasn’t in the pajamas that I had peed in. I was wrapped in something else, but I couldn’t tell what it was. Melanie covered me with the blanket. I fell asleep.

  When I woke up again, Melanie was lying next to me, sleeping peacefully. Her face was close to mine. It was exactly like my daydream—we only had one small pillow and blanket to share. Somehow I got the strength to lift up the blanket and look underneath. I was wearing a white tunic, and so was Melanie. The kind from Ancient Greece! That’s why I was so cold. Every last detail of my fantasy had come true. I had become Ganymede, brought here to serve the goddess Aphrodite. I was immortal now, and it would be my job to look after her for all eternity up here on Mount Olympus. Well, the tower wasn’t exactly a mountain, but you get the idea. I looked at Melanie’s mathematically perfect face, her warm red lips. A surge of adrenaline raced through me. I wanted to kiss her so badly. So far I had only gotten kisses from Logan when I was using the Body Builder, and from Colin and myself when I was using the Roleplaying Ring. Now that I was using the Interrogatrix, wasn’t it about time I got that kiss from Melanie? I wondered if the device could answer that question.

  The devices. Were they here?

  I used all my strength to push myself into a sitting position. The tower top was small. The words “Ganymede loves Aphrodite” were carved on nearly every stone surface. A small shelf with five devices on it sat against one of the stone turrets. Melanie had brought them! The Body Builder, the Sol Enhancer, the Voxinator, the Roleplaying Ring, and the Interrogatrix. We could play with them together, explore the mysteries of the universe, figure out where we were, and what to do next. I dragged myself over to the Interrogatrix and hit the power button. Nothing. The device was dead and lifeless. I tried the others. None of them worked. I stuck a small sliver of stone into those little holes to reset them. Still nothing. We had no technology after all—only each other.

  I crawled back to the blanket, trying not to think about the pain in the side of my head. I flopped back down on the pillow and felt Melanie’s warm breath against my face. Every molecule of my body wanted me to kiss her lips, to touch her soft skin. But I was her servant. It would have been so wrong. Instead, I just examined each part of her face with awe, moving my eyes really close until I could see each individual pore. She really was perfect, and I had never gotten such a close-up view of her. Her skin smelled like fresh flowers dipped into a barrel of perfectly aged honey. Her breath, a gentle breeze from a tropical island covered in sweet and tangy fruit trees. Since she was breathing on me, I breathed back on her. I did that for a long time until she started waking up.

  “Your breath smells like piss,” she said.

  My heart raced. It wasn’t very romantic, but it didn’t matter. Anything that happened between me and Melanie on our tower top was perfect because it was just us. Nobody else was here to ruin it.

  “Thanks for rescuing me.”

  Melanie sat up at once. She glanced around with a frightened look on her face. Pinching herself, she stood up and walked over to the stone turrets and peered out.

  “Why haven’t I woken up yet? I’ve never had a dream where I take a nap, and then I’m still stuck in the dream. It’s like a dream within a dream.” She walked over to me and leaned down. She shook me by the shoulders. “Adrian, tell me what’s going on. How can this be happening? I know you know.”

  “I’ll tell you,” I said, reaching out to hold her hand. “It’s not a dream. You’re Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty. I’m Ganymede, a regular human boy brought here to protect and serve you. The alien readers must have made all this from my mind. This tower, these clothes.” She dropped my hand and stood up, pacing back and forth.

  “Adrian, don’t start with that weird stuff again. This is serious. What’s going on?”

  “Don’t you remember becoming a dragon? You rescued me from prison. You did such a good job, Melanie.”

  “I thought I was in one of those flying dreams,” she said. “Gentle voices told me to bring you here.”

  “Don’t you remember the Sol Enhancer? You got it from Ricky and the pig.”

  “A long…dream. It must be. These things are impossible.”

  She stared at me with a blank look. That’s when I realized that all my dark fantasies with Melanie—when I roleplayed her while stuck in that prison—hadn’t changed our friendship one bit. Our relationship was exactly like we had last left it, the day she stormed out on me during our tutoring session. Everything after that—being in her warm body, her bed, her shower, making her kiss Colin—was just a long dream to her. Now I had to start all over again.

  “I’ll tell you, but you have to promise not to get mad.”

  “Ok, start.”

  I told her everything. About Ricky and the Pig and their bankrupt company. Asekz 13 and its strange, obsessed teenagers. The futuristic devices. The sci-fi romance that was being created with me and Melanie in it. All the weird details came pouring out of my mouth. I had been dying to talk to somebody about it.

  “I remember some of it,” Melanie said. “When I woke up just now, all that stuff seemed like a distant dream, all the way back to that weird garage sale.”

  “They made it that way on purpose. The kids are allowed to change parts of the story as it goes. Maybe they did that so you would fall helplessly into my arms, where I could protect you.” I suddenly realized that I hadn’t been doing too much protecting. Melanie is the one that rampaged through New York like some beautiful Godzilla, killing hundreds of people just to save me and bring me here. She had nursed me back to health.

  “I know it’s a story,” Melanie said. “It’s not a dream, it’s just a story we’re in.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I can hear you narrating.”

  My heart skipped a beat. I’ve often wondered why I’ve been telling this story. It’s been a lot of work, and it would be way easier to not do it. Was Ricky making me do it, like the slave that I am? Up until now, I had always been alone when I was talking to you. In prison, in my cell, in bed. Nobody heard me—other Earthlings, that is. But Melanie had heard every word of this story since I started telling it again on this tower top. I tried to remember everything that I had already said. How much did she know? How much did she remember?

  “I remember…Colin,” Melanie said, dropping her face into her hands. “And that night. It seemed like a…nightmare. But what do they want from us? What is all this?”

  My face got warm. I couldn’t say it. It was too embarrassing.

  “Just say it, Adrian.”

  “They want us, to, uh, be in love. Those aliens are jealous of humans because they can never love each other so privately, like we can.”

  Melanie buried her face in her hands.

  I scrambled over and put my arms around her. I thought she would push me away, but instead she held me tightly. I waited patiently while it all sank into her brain—the bizarre, alien truth, our new reality, stuff that probably went against everything that Melanie had ever read in those physics and math books. I had gotten used to it gradually, knowing it was real, except for that morning I woke up in the open grave and thought it was a dream. Melanie’s mind had handled the whole thing differently, never believing it was real, maybe because she was older. Her brain now had to rearrange itself to accept this freakish truth. We clutched each other for a long time, until she finally calmed down.

  “I get it. I remember. It just slipped away for awhile.”

  Suddenly, it got cold. Really cold. We lay down on the tiny pillow and covered ourselves with the blanket. We held each other for warmth
while swirling breezes whipped around the tower top, delivering fresh oxygen. Hours passed, and we stayed in that same position as the temperature dropped even more—her warm body protecting me from the alien weather. The wind began howling. I should have been scared, but my insides were dancing with joy the whole time. The only touching Melanie and I ever did before was when she used to squeeze my cheek. Now full-fledged cuddling was normal.

  “Cuddling…that’s such a cute word,” Melanie said. She pinched my cheek.

  “Very funny,” I said, pushing her fingers away.

  “I don’t want to lead you on again,” she said. “It’s like you’re my little brother. I would hold my little brother if he was in trouble.”

  “But you liked that I fell in love with you. I’ve been inside your brain, so I know. You liked it, didn’t you?”

  We spent the next phase of time comparing notes. I say “phase” because there were no days or nights on top of our stone tower. The green fog blocked out any sun, moon, or stars. If we got thirsty, a little sink near one of the stone turrets provided cold water. If we got hungry, a mini fridge next to the sink gave us food—multicolored morsels that tasted like sesame chicken. (We ate and drank quickly and then ran back under the blanket for warmth). When we got tired, we took a nap in each other’s arms. Pure happiness.

  All my worries about my family faded into the background—my parents would always be there, waiting for me. One day I would return and make it all up to them. I would be the good son they’ve always wanted, talking to them nonstop at dinner and telling them every last detail about my life. I would ask dad to tell me stuff about girls and demand that he give me a super tuck-in and play sports with me like he did when I was little. All these reasons for living flooded my mind—Mom’s chocolate cake on my birthday, her smell of detergent, her forehead kisses. Everything suddenly seemed right again, other than our being kidnapped by aliens. At least I get kidnapped by aliens that want me to be madly in love with the girl of my dreams. It could have been so much worse—like some anal probe or something.

  So Melanie and I shared our stories with each other, filling in all the details that we didn’t know about the other’s tale—Logan, Colin, Ricky, Oinkleberry, the dragon, the devices. She told me what she learned the night she roleplayed inside my body—about how to reset the Body Builder, all of its superhero capabilities, how not to program all the features at once. It took her awhile to put it all into motion, and my letter and the gentle words I had planted in her brain had kept her going. She wasn’t mad at me, after all. It’s just that she didn’t want to leave her mom all alone at home—until one night she woke up, believing that every event since the garage sale was just part of the same dream. Voices told her that the long dream would end if she obeyed them. She kissed her sleeping mom goodbye and used the Body Builder to make herself into a dragon, the beautiful beast that came to rescue me on that violent night in New York City and the trip to this tower, where she nursed me back to health. But it wasn’t a dream after all, just this strange story that I’ve been narrating to you. In the end we knew everything that the other person knew—no more secrets. Well, very few secrets. It probably took many days, but who knows? All I can say is that it took 123 medium-strength hugs, 17 tight hugs, and one cheek squeeze (bleh) before we were done.

  “I am flattered that you love me so much,” she said. “But I don’t want you to get hurt.” She rubbed my hair.

  “You will never hurt me.” I gave her another tight squeeze just to make it an even number. I didn’t even care anymore that she heard every word I narrated. I wanted her to know everything, all my deepest feelings.

  An icy breeze whipped around the top of the stone tower—the temperature was plunging fast. We squeezed even closer together beneath our tiny blanket. Our feet didn’t fit under it unless we bent our legs, but that made our knees knock against each other. So we let our feet stick out, and we just piled them on top of each other for warmth, rubbing them together constantly. We rubbed our noses and cheeks together to make them less numb. I wondered if she could feel my heart beating against her chest.

  “I can. It’s beating fast.”

  “Melanie, there’s one more thing. I’ve been wanting to tell you. You’re perfectly beautiful. According to math. You don’t have to feel bad about yourself.”

  She touched my cheek, but didn’t pinch it. She rubbed it gently, wiping away little frost crystals.

  “Do you want to watch Oprah?” I asked, my teeth chattering.

  She laughed. That perfect smile appeared, the one that makes two dimples on her cheeks. Her lips looked so soft. Her warm breath on my face gave me goose bumps—useless, ancient goose bumps. That’s how deep my love for her went. All the way back through time to the beginning of mankind. But would she let me kiss her, or was I still her little brother?

  “Little brother,” she said, her lips shaking.

  The wind got brutally cold around the tower, like an arctic winter during an ice age. I wondered if those freakish alien kids were sending freezing rays up here so Melanie and I would squeeze closer together. Well, it worked. Face to face, we gripped each other as tightly as possible, stretching the blanket around us as far as it would go. We had to bend our knees and interlock them. It got too cold to have any body parts outside the blanket, even if they were joined together for warmth. She rubbed the back of my tunic against my shoulders for friction.

  Our hearts beat as one.

  Her lips were inches from me.

  I could feel her breath on my nose.

  It was too much for a boy to take.

  I was dying inside.

  I tried to kiss her on the lips.

  “No, Adrian.” She pushed me away before our lips could touch. “What was I just saying?”

  “But I’m thirteen now,” I said. “We’re closer in age.”

  “I’m sixteen.”

  “Oh. Happy birthday,” I said glumly.

  “You’re a sweet boy,” Melanie said. “But I’m holding you because it’s freezing.”

  “But I’m supposed to protect you.”

  “We’ll protect each other.” I turned my back to her, and let her hold me close to her. My head rested under her chin. She was right. This tower top would be a nightmare of loneliness if it was just one of us up here. We needed each other for warmth and companionship. Once again, my romantic dreams were shattered. I wondered how long I could stand it before my body just crumbled and blew away in the cold, heartless wind.

  “But you said I will never hurt you.”

  “You won’t.” I held her hand tightly. My chest was vibrating uncontrollably from all that shivering. She rubbed my tunic against my stomach and warmed me up, for hours and hours. It got so cold out that icicles appeared on the stone turrets, the wooden shelf, the refrigerator. If our skin touched the cold stone, it would become stuck to it. We had to be careful when making any movement because the blanket was so small. Our heads could never leave the tiny pillow.

  One time when we were shifting around, Melanie’s lips rubbed against my cheek accidentally. Outside the blanket, a gust of warm air swirled around the tower. I had forgotten what warmth felt like.

  “Do it again,” I said.

  Melanie moved her lips against my cheek. Her nostril breath tickled me. Another gust of warm air enveloped us.

  “Let me.” I relaxed my lips and touched them against Melanie’s forehead. The icicles melted and made a big puddle on the stone floor.

  “They’re rewarding us,” I said. “With warmth.”

  She put her lips on my cheek again, almost in the same spot as last time. This time she kissed me there. The melted icicle water sizzled away into steam. Next I kissed her cheek gently a bunch of times. With each kiss I didn’t try to accidentally move my lips closer to hers.

  “Yes you did, now you’re just fake narrating.”

  “Sorry.” I kissed her cheek a bunch more times. Soon it got so warm out that we didn’t even need the blanket! The only
bad part was that Melanie and I didn’t have to cuddle anymore. We unwrapped ourselves and stretched out into a comfortable position. Melanie kissed me one more time on the cheek.

  “What was that for?”

  “Being cute.” She tickled my stomach.

  I fell onto the pillow in glee. I was never going wash that cheek—if I ever washed again at all, that is.

  Life on the tower got even better once my neck muscles and my head healed completely. Even though it was warm again, that thick green fog still surrounded us, preventing us from seeing anything but our small tower platform. I tried our fancy devices every once in awhile, just to see if they came back to life. Nothing. Our whole lives consisted of eating and drinking, hugging and cheek-pinching, and tickling—all the silly stuff that little brother and older sister might do. We made up riddles for each other, and invented games with numbers. The weirdest thing was that we never had to go to the bathroom. It was a good thing because there was no bathroom.

  Months must have passed, and every day was the same. But I was with Melanie, so I never really got bored. She knew that I loved her, and I got as many hugs as I wanted. She also taught me things—weird things about physics and the universe, and about how space was curved into something called “spacetime.” She said that a wormhole connected different parts of curved space. That was how we got to this planet in this distant corner of space-time—through that wormhole in the bright green meadow near the cemetery. After awhile, I realized that Melanie was a genius. She didn’t only read physics books for fun, but stuff about history, art, geography, other cultures. She was like the Interrogatrix, only gorgeous. At bedtime, wrapped in our blanket, I would ask her stuff about the meaning of life. She would go on and on about how the universe was formed, how galaxies evolved, and planets, intelligent life, and how love was such a miracle. She explained it all so clearly that I understood everything. Then I would kiss her cheek to thank her for teaching me. My beautiful tutor.