Before Carl and Clarita went to bed, Carl looked to her from across the bedroom door directly across the hall from hers. He asked in a faint whisper if they should kiss again. And she looked at him with brave concern and said like a cool headed, but worried, adult, "I think I'm going to ask my friends about their experiences with their humanoid teenage boyfriends first. When I come back tomorrow I'll tell you what they said. And actually, they might come over and meet you. If not though I am still interested in talking to you and letting our relationship blossom more to see things pan out. Organic relationships are the best relationships," she said. "At least that's what my friend said."

Carl seemed disappointed. But he nodded and bowed his head to her goodnight. He left and she closed her door. Her eye watching him until the crease between the door and the wall closed.

Clarita went to bed that night and was unable to sleep. She wondered if Carl was having trouble sleeping as well. She wondered if the orthodox laws pertained to humanoids at all. She knew that it was a mitzvah for married couples to have sex on Shabbat. But she didn't know if having sex with your humanoid boyfriend your mother bought as an early birthday present counted as a mitzvah. What if it was a sin? She couldn't stand the guilt that would impose on her. Gross. No, she would ask her friends if they felt guilty about kissing and, well, doing what her other popular friend did with her humanoid.

She wondered if sex with a humanoid boy would corrupt her. Would she still be the same Clarita as before? She remembered the word Carl used to describe his feelings immediately after they kissed. Addicted. Addicted was possibly the term. She could still fell his lips on hers. So warm, so soft. How in the hell did her whole body react that way when he kissed her? It was such a climactic moment. Her body turned warm and her blood seemed to flow faster because her heart was beating yet she felt her whole body go numb at the same time. Totally bizarre. She felt like she'd lost all control.

At the same time, she wondered if it was because she was afraid to kiss him. Which was interesting because, he isn't a real boy. Does that even count as her first kiss? She's kissed her stuffed animals in the past. Her Ken Barbie doll, too. Is he any different? He is an artificial thing, right?

She would maybe get up from her bed and kiss her Ken doll and check to see if the same reaction came from it. No, what was she talking about in her head? Goodness gracious, what was her problem? Relax, relax. Okay. Tomorrow, dad will walk her to her friend's house, they'll talk about their experiences, introduce her to their new boy toys, and then she'll come back with some sense of the situation.

While her plan was sound, there was only one thing wrong with it. Her father wouldn't be there in the morning to walk her anywhere at all. (Not that she needed any walking; she was old enough and her father had a tradition of walking with her so he could hang out with her friend's father so they would walk to shul together.) But, no. Francisco had left; he as well as Clarita's brother. Because while Carl and Clarita had gone for their walk in the backyard, she had no clue that her father had nearly slapped the shit out of her mother.

She also didn't know that her father had grabbed her brother and taken him away on a cab to the company. Francisco's wife was so distraught she went straight to her bedroom and closed the door and called a friend. Three friends actually. In fact, her mother was still in her room on the phone and was now speaking to Clarita's grandmother, complaining about her husband. And her grandmother got so mad that Clarita's grandmother called Francisco's mother and the three of them partook in a heated call. First it was a debate about the character of Clarita's father. After all, what kind of man leaves his family and takes the son with him, leaving all the women of the house alone? Aside from the robot maid, robot butler, robot gardener, robot pool boy, and humanoid boyfriend who was recently purchased.

The conversation changed once Clarita's mother and Clarita's mother's mother convinced Francisco's mother that in fact that was an irresponsible move on Francisco's part and the three of them joined forces to talk about a way to get back at him and make sure he came home with Clarita's brother and never tried this kind of stunt again.

First Francisco's mother hung up and called her son. She called ten times. Left ten messages. No answer. Why wasn't Francisco answering his own mother's calls? They were so close, after all. What was going on? Didn't she treat her son right enough to deserve an answer?

Well, the reason she received no answer was, in fact, that Francisco was ignoring his mother's calls on purpose because he knew his wife had called her and he decided he would talk to no one in the family until two things happened: The first was that he would come to a permanent conclusion: that he would never return to his wife and their home again. This had to be set in stone. The cemented signature had to be dried under the contract of this promise to himself before he would risk anybody talking him out of it. He wasn't happy dammit. And so he had to let the situation marinate, and he had to come to his hard, immovable decision on his own. He would know it when this happened. The emotions would drain from him and it would become his identity. I am a divorced man and I am a happy man.

In the meantime, he also needed to finish the second thing on his list before he spoke to anyone in the family. He needed to get his son fixed. When he had first told his wife that he was divorcing her and took their son with him, he had stamped over to his son and yanked his son up to his feet by the arm. His wife had squealed when she saw her son's lifeless face--

Their son's irises had turned completely black. It looked like he had enlarged pupils and this made him look almost like a zombie. The whites of their son's eyes had also turned blood shot red from dryness and fatigue. His skin was pale and lifeless from being cooped up inside in the darkness for so long.

Francisco had yelled at the boy, directly in his ear in fact, but their son could not hear his father one bit. His jaw hung down and his mouth was open around a hanging tongue. The boy's black and red eyes seemed to be looking left and right, up and down, and his hands seemed to be both steering an invisible wheel and shooting an invisible gun.

"What is he doing!" screamed his mother.

And Francisco shot her an annoyed look that read: like you don't know, already. Don't play dumb.

Francisco slapped his son and yelled at him to turn the volume down in his earphones. Their son's earphones were surgically implanted for many purposes advertised on online commercials on sites for gamers and porn lovers. (Normally both vocations came hand in hand.)

Just as well, their son had bought virtual reality contact lenses. These types of lenses came in all different colors but their son had bought the frightening black contact lenses. And the reason he had bought the black ones wasn't actually because he thought black was a cooler color than all the other colors. No. Instead, their son bought the black virtual reality contact lenses because his mother wanted to know when he was in virtual reality land and didn't want her son to buy contact lenses that matched his own eye color or else she wouldn't be able to tell the difference and she would definitely be pissed if ever she tried to have a conversation with him and only found out he wasn't even listening to her because he was away in La La Land even though his eyes were open.

When their son was reluctant to turn down his head phones, because he was too damn busy to stop this drive-by shooting and heist videogame, Francisco clutched his son by the neck and dragged him over to the bathroom and stuck his face under the showerhead. Raining cold shower water diluted his son's eye sockets as his father kept him under, and eventually his black contacts spilled out to reveal his blue eyes surrounded by their blood shot red background.

"GOD DAMN YOU, DAD! DAMN YOU TO HELL!"

But Francisco lodged a violent fist into his son's stomach and kicked his son backward into the tub. The water drenched his clothes and his tailbone hit the brick before he crumpled in the tub. That was when Francisco's son, crying all the while, just like his mummy who couldn't stand to see her son in this vile state, finally touched the back of his ears and turned his earphone volumes down on the video game. The racing and shooting sound effects died, the background heavy metal music died, and his ears heard only the quiet ringing that was almost identical to the sound one hears when having a hearing test. That high-pitched ring continued only until he had reached the company building away to where his dad stole him.

While his mother shouted at his father and ordered Francisco never to touch her son again, their son sat idly in the tub, tailbone in pain. He made no movement except to look up at his parents have at it. Their voices were raised and they argued on and on now like he wasn't even there anymore. But that didn't upset him. In fact, he didn't care about their acknowledgement at all. In fact, he very much saw them like they weren't even there. While he watched their violent verbal abuse banter back and forth, he played with his vision, straining his vision in and out of focus. They appeared like false entities above him. They didn't look real. He had noticed after hours and hours of being in virtual reality that the real world didn't seem to match the same graphics quality as his more realistic looking video games. He didn't even know how to explain it to himself, but the games of his contact lenses seemed so crisp and so well defined that his vision in the real world seemed to pale in comparison. The bathroom lacked the same color. It even seemed to lack the same detail. The videogame creators of his virtual reality world had put so much love and detail into the characters and maps of his games that he couldn't help but feel like the real world needed an upgrade, and that he even had the feeling that he loved the virtual world more than the real world.

Their son looked over to the water running down the drain and closed his eyes. He was so upset his father had washed his contacts out of his head. He even noticed in himself a sinking feeling of sadness that he could not return to that world of adventure, of meaning. He sunk low in that tub, just letting that water fall on top him. And when he looked up at the shower head, he even thought that raining sensation didn't feel real either. Water was hitting him and soaking him. And he didn't even believe it. This wasn't the real world, was it? This world, that world. Nothing was real. Everything was a game. And in games, life restarts, and nothing really matters.

Finally, when his parents stopped fighting, and his mother's tears put her to silence, his father ordered him to dry up and pack his things, and so he did. He let his mum hug him, but he gave no effort to hug his mother back. Their son felt numb. And although his angry dad didn't seem to care, that he cared was the sole reason they were leaving. They snuck out the back without telling the girls. No one would hear about Francisco and his son until all was settled. They took a cab, and jetted underground, to the company headquarters.