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name?”
    â€œNusku.” Bobby lurched onto his tiptoes, balanced on a rock, and peered over her shoulder down the hill. No one was coming. It had suddenly occurred to him what might happen if he was seen talking to her by someone from school. They would tease him, push him around, and until Sunny recovered to full cyborg capability, he’d be left to face them alone. He had to get away from her as quickly as possible.
    Bobby had never experienced this heightened self-awareness before, and it shamed him. What would his mother say when she returned—to find Bobby the antithesis of everything she’d taught him about kindness and acceptance?
    The girl pulled the elastic on her tracksuit bottoms then let it go, briefly revealing their white imprint on the flesh above her knickers.
    â€œMy name is Rosa Reed,” she said. “Do you want to play?” She clambered down from the tricycle. In her hand was a black felt-tip pen. She held it out toward Bobby like a runner’s baton. “Do you want to play?” she said again. He twirled a blade of long grass between his fingers.
    â€œPlay what?” he said. Teeth marks ribbed the plastic pen. “What do you want me to do with that?”
    â€œWrite your name.” She reached into the basket bolted to the front of the tricycle and pulled out a gnarled notepad with Rosa Reed Rosa Reed Rosa Reed written over and over in a fractured jerky scrawl.
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œI collect names.”
    â€œBut you only have one.”
    â€œBobby Nusku,” she said, shaking her head, “sometimes you are funny.” He took the notepad, wrote down his name and handed it back to Rosa as quickly as he could. It felt important not to be linked physically, by them touching or holding on to the same thing at the same time. Bobby shifted his weight from his left foot to his right. He began to salivate, as if his own unexpected prejudice might actually make him vomit.
    â€œNow,” he said, “you have two.”
    â€œWait here,” Rosa said. She walked over to the house on the corner and fetched a scuffed leather basketball from the garden. Bobby had had no idea it was where she lived. He’d not afforded her that level of normalcy, to live in a home on a street—his street—just like him. This made him doubly sickened by how embarrassed he remained at the prospect of their being seen together. He tried to swallow the feeling, a morsel of unpalatable meat.
    They sat on the curb and bounced the ball to each other. Though she was clumsy, her fingers short and unready, they quickly established a pattern where Bobby imitated Rosa every time she dropped the ball and she laughed until her sides ached. He kept watch for people coming but no one did.
    Rosa mimicked Bobby, but her movement was unwieldy. Bobby imagined she was being controlled from the inside by someone much smaller struggling to reach the pedals. Every game they played disintegrated into a disharmonic routine of call and response. He raised an arm, she raised an arm. He threw the ball, she threw the ball. There was no competition, just a strange mirrored dance done in silence, like they were two petals on a flower, tickled split seconds apart by the same gentle breeze.
    Bobby was having fun. For the first time since visiting the hospital, Sunny drifted from his mind, as did the notion that he and Rosa might be discovered. For a few lovely moments, self-awareness relinquished its grip on him, and he was happy. This, time spent with Sunny had taught him, is what friendship is. To be given the key to a locked part of your soul.
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    The first breath of dusk cooled Bobby’s skin and gave him goose bumps. Somewhere in the distance he heard laughter. It bounced around the air and turned soft, disappearing like an idea of no merit. He began to panic.
    â€œRosa,” Bobby said suddenly, “I need to go.”
    â€œWhy?” she