Bridget

I wasn’t born.

I wish I had been, it would’ve been much easier, but that’s a fact and no matter my wishing, no one can change it. Just like no human can pick who they were born to, I can’t change the fact that I was never born at all.

They created me.

“Come on, Bridget,” says Jenny, voice stressed and tresses of her red hair falling from her ponytail. “We’re late.”

“Yes, Jenny.”

My name isn’t actually Bridget, but Jenny was so little when they brought me to her, and she had trouble calling me BRD2 - Body Robot Demo 2 - and as she wrinkled her nose trying to get the letters out in the right order, she finally gave up and called me ‘Bi-get’ instead. I’ve been Bridget ever since.

The screen always before my eyes, integrated in my video feed, blinks 8:26:14, no :15, now :16 - all right, I can’t focus on the seconds passing by or I’ll be gone the rest of the day - and we are indeed late for Jenny’s first day of high school. We hurry across the schoolyard as I study the map she scanned for me, to find the classroom we’re headed for.

“ETA 1 minute, 29 seconds,” I say. 

There are people everywhere, and there are a lot of robots. Most, possibly every single one, are newer and way more advanced than me - I’m a demo version, looking every bit the robot I am with my metal arms and roller skates beneath my feet so they didn’t have to program me with walking skills. The robots these days look almost human, with feet and smooth walking styles and faces that smile and grimace and frown, unlike my stone face. Then again, they never expected me to stay online long enough for them to develop facial expressions and walking. Most robots are deactivated after a year or two - both a decade ago and these days - and their components are melted and formed into new, more modern parts, for new, more modern robots. 

But Jenny kept me. Over a decade, we’ve been together, and when I asked her about it, she scowled at me, her green eyes going from bright to furious in a second. 

“I wouldn’t throw my best friend away,” she said, sounding as though I’d offended her. She was eight, and we’d already been together several years, ever since her parents decided they couldn’t be bothered driving her around and playing with her all the time. 

Where they had no patience, mine was endless. 

Where they had careers, I had Jenny.

Where they loved their phones and new tech and hours developing the future, I loved their daughter and stayed in the now.

I push her wheelchair across the grounds, uneven rocks in the way making the brief journey bumpy. 

There’s a bunch of girls thirty feet away - older than Jenny, possibly seniors, hair colored and their skirts slightly shorter than allowed according to the school’s code of conduct - and I note that they’re whispering and pointing at me and Jenny. For the millionth time, I wish she’d exchange me for something newer. I don’t want to be the reason they laugh at her behind her back. 

But Jenny only raises her chin and stares the girls down. I don’t have to wonder where she got that strength from - I know, because I’ve been beside her for so long and my memory is the kind where nothing disappears.

I’ve seen her being left out, because the other children didn’t understand that she was like them, only unable to walk. I’ve heard the things they’ve said about her. I’ve seen her try to fend for herself, her only help an old robot.

Kids can be mean.

As I turn my head - it sounds whizz-whizz as I do, also a sign of how old I am - I understand kids don’t stop being mean just because they get older. 

“Ignore them, Bridget,” Jenny says, her face clearing from the glare as she twists to look at me instead of the giggling girls. “They’re just jealous because I have you, and they have those boring bots.”

‘Those boring bots’ are brand new, this year’s model, their skin almost human, but a little too shiny because apparently human skin is difficult to mimic, and their movements are smooth like a dancer’s. 

Jenny’s parents create bots like those. Jenny should have one of them, not one like me. Maybe if she had the latest tech, they wouldn’t giggle at her. And Jenny’s parents have tried, have rolled their eyes and nearly screamed at her as she insisted on keeping me despite “how it looked” that the CEO of the foremost robot company in the world had a daughter with a robot from the Stone Age. 

We reach the classroom door and she reaches out to open it. 

The classroom falls silent, going from loud to quiet in the blink of an eye. If one has eyelids, that is. I don’t. 

“Oh, I didn’t know we were doing the steampunk theme today,” says a girl with shiny black hair in a short bob and blue eyeshadow around her brown eyes. Asian. Same age as Jenny. Five foot five, about a hundred and ten pounds. My computer brain supplies me with these facts in rapid succession, but it doesn’t give me anything on how to respond. The prompt ‘steampunk’ pulls a bunch of strange images from my database. 

I wish I fit in better. That I could figure out how to respond to disarm the situation, but nothing in my programming can help me. There isn’t a single line of code in my programming to tell me how to respond to rude teenagers.

Jenny’s fingers tighten around the wheelchair handles, but she says nothing. When the evening comes, she’ll have figured out a hundred different responses to the black-haired girl, hours too late. I wish I could come up with them even a few hours later, because if I did that, I could teach myself to come up with them quicker, until they come at the right moment.

We move inside, a little trouble crossing the too high threshold both for my roller skate feet and her wheelchair, but we get inside. A boy, blonde and too round for it to be healthy - diabetes in the future, risk of cardiac infarction - leans over to another boy - brown hair, fit and tall enough to be on the basketball team - to whisper in his ear. My hearing is good enough to pick up on his cruel words, and I hope Jenny doesn’t. 

“Settle down, class,” says the lady in the front of the classroom, as though she hasn’t heard a word of the cruelty her students have uttered. “Jenny Davis, I suppose?” She stands and walks over to me and Jenny. “There’s a spot right here for you, I was told you were coming.”

“Thank you,” Jenny says, always the stoic one.

Jenny would’ve preferred to be in the middle row, to the side, rather than in the front row. She never melts in, but I know she wants to, and it’s easier from the middle row. We share that wish, and I sometimes suspect that’s why she keeps me around. Because though she’s human and I’m not, we still share the same dream. 

Maybe she’ll one day reach her dream. Though her parents can create the most advanced computers and robots the world has ever seen, they could never solve the problem of her legs - but perhaps they might some day.

And however much I long to fit in, to be everything she needs, however much I love her and want to stay beside her and help her with whatever she needs - however much all of those things are true, my greatest hope is still that one day, she will leave me behind. If I am, that means Jenny no longer needs me. Either someone will have found a way to make her walk, or she’ll find someone who accepts her the way she is. Loves the dimples in her cheeks as she laughs, sees the specks of blue in those green eyes. Knows how she likes to drink her tea - a small spoon of sugar, a little milk - and that she when she gets a bag of candy, she’ll eat her favorites first, to be sure that she enjoys them the most. 

We’ll make it through today, just like we’ve made it through every day before this one - together. And as we travel through her life, I’ll finally become obsolete.

I’ll never fit in. With every passing day, I fit in a little less. 

And I realize then, as though someone just wrote me a new line of code, that I don’t want to fit in. All I want is for her to fit in. That they see all the great things I see in her, all the secrets she’s told me, all the wonders about her I am privy to. 

“All right, class,” says the teacher. “Welcome to a new year.”

Maybe it will be my last year.