Companion

Chapter 1             

          The shop is cold, cold from the over-air-conditioned air to the wintery gray-and-white tones everywhere to the sterile feel the place exuded. The irony of it all didn’t escape me, and certainly didn’t make me feel better about coming here. I stopped halfway through the door, poised to turn around and make a run for the craft parked just outside. Unfortunately, Mother noticed my indecision and managed to wrap one of her well-manicured hands around my arm.

                “Come along, Ashley,” Mother whispered impatiently, tugging me further into the store. Goosebumps prickled my arms, and not just from the dramatic change from the humid summer-air outside to the impersonal air inside. The merchandise—the only thing sold in the store—lined all the aisles within my sight, the sensory-deprivation tanks they were contained in looking like giant metal seedpods. It all made me feel a little woozy, thinking that something was alive in all of them.

                I knew girls who had them, girls who wanted them and saved up for years to get them, girls that would never in their lives own one but would always wish for one. I wasn’t any of those girls. I didn’t want one, but Mother had decided that my “surprise” for my sixteenth birthday would not, as I had been hoping, be a craft for myself so I could finally stop borrowing Mother’s to get to school, but my own Companion to take care of.

                 I couldn’t take care of something to save my life. I hated the responsibility that came with pets. I once killed a cactus. How could Mother think that getting me an uber-expensive, high-maintenance, humanoid alien life-form was what I wanted?

                She didn’t. She did, however, think that I needed a “confidence boost” and “more faith in myself”, and that getting me a Companion who would worship the ground I walked on would do the trick. “I didn’t get one for you,” she had told me when, after I had blown out the candles on my cake and waited eagerly to be taken to the garage, “because I thought you should make your own choice on which Companion you want.” She said it as if me choosing the Companion made up for the fact that I didn’t want it to begin with.

                Actually, it was sort of worse. Right now, I could be with Kenna, Summer, and Andy, clustering at the mall or watching a movie. I could be at home, reading that new story I had downloaded into my E-book, or writing that short story I had had on my mind for the past few days. I could even be writing that report Mr. Lenzi wanted done by next week that I hadn’t started yet. Instead, I would be spending the next three hours trying to convince Mother to just let me go home and forget about this, while she would insist I just pick one already from the hundreds of perfectly formed and gorgeous beings shipped from that planet far, far away that no one really knows anything about.

                We hadn’t walked two steps when a perky young blonde in a green T-shirt with the name-tag that said Hello! I’m Stacy, and I will be helping you today! walked up to us in a manner that could only be described as fake cheerfulness. She looked like the kind of girl Mother wanted for a child—the perpetually happy, uber-gorgeous bouncy girl that was tanned, friendly, bright-eyed, and most likely a cheerleader just like Mother had been as a teenager, and completely unlike the dark-haired, thin-as-a-stick girl with attitude problems and debatable low self-esteem that she ended up getting. Ah, the strangeness of genetics.

                “Hello!” she chirped. “I’m Stacy, and—”

                “—you will be helping us today?” Mother surreptitiously poked me in the ribs in warning (don’t be snarky, dear), and I scowled at her.