But just as I finally opened my mouth, she spoke again:
"I'm not like you. UKARI isn't a god to me. I won't forgive it for making a mistake like that. Giving you something just to rip it away? I hate that."
Christina went on to tell me about a time back in elementary school. To this day, she still harbored a burning hatred for a teacher who had accidentally logged an A for her dictation test in the grade book. When the actual paper came back, it was marked a B. When Christina went up to ask about it, the teacher explained that ten or more corrections meant an automatic grade drop. Realizing there was a discrepancy in the system log, the teacher simply reached over and changed the A in the grade book to a B. It was unfair. It was wrong. Low-down and dirty. "I hate it."
And for a split second, I thought I heard a choked sob, but then Christina suddenly burst out laughing and said the whole thing reminded her of an old joke.
A stoner is sitting on a park bench, staring fixatedly at a trash can, going, "Down... do-o-own." A concerned passerby peeks into the bin, sees a suspicious box, and calls the cops. The police interrogate the stoner about what's inside. The stoner just keeps repeating, "Down... do-o-own." They call in the bomb squad. The squad carefully disarms what turns out to be a completely empty box. But the stoner keeps going: "Down... do-o-own." The local beat cop finally loses his mind. "What on earth is down there?!" The stoner finishes the tune: "Down-town, Funk-y Town!"
"That joke is literally me," I snickered. "When I was a kid, I'd point a finger and go, 'Nn-nn!' People would start explaining what the thing was, or even bring it to me, but I'd just start bawling because what I actually wanted was for them to pick me up and carry me over there."
"For me, it was just a diversion tactic. The adults would turn around, and I'd already vanished into thin air," Christina caught her breath. "Just tell it straight. We're too different. UKARI promises to match people with more or less the same interests, but you and I are an obvious glitch. We both knew it from day one. Even if we'd gotten married, say, if there was no Christina, it wouldn't have ended well for us. We'd just be another miserable couple making endless compromises, giving up on our own lives, only to end up trapped in a room like this, hating each other's guts." Christina rolled onto her back and stared up at the ceiling. "So maybe UKARI was coded wrong from the start if it can't tell friendship apart from love? Hey! UKARI! You can hear me, right? You're not a fairy. Don't push people all the way to dead leaves. That's just low."
Christina turned her head on its side, looking over at me.
"You look like somebody died."
"Well," I forced a fake smile to mask the ache in my chest. The thought that a bitter fallout might actually be waiting for us down the line made my lungs feel tight. "I'm not a dead soul."
"A dead brain," Christina echoed, calling back to yesterday's lecture, and just like that, the heavy mood dissolved into a quick grin. "Honestly, I'm just glad I didn't fall into UKARI's trap like your Christina did."
"Did she tell you about that?" I asked, a bit surprised.
"We're friends, aren't we?" Christina said. "I've already got this candy in my mouth. I can't just spit it out and shove you in instead. You'd just end up mixing the flavors, and nothing good ever comes of that."
"Yeah," I agreed, remembering how whenever you pop two candies into your mouth at once, the flavors bleed together into a gross mess, but... "Lemon and cola are pretty good together, though."
"Banana and melon aren't bad either."
"Look at you with your exotic tastes," I commented, feeling a small pang of envy at the exoticism.
"My dad actually taught me how to mix flavors. But that's beside the point. Things were simpler when we were kids. People were always asking me to share, even trying to pull a lollipop right out of my mouth by the stick, but I'd just clamp my teeth shut. Nobody stood a chance at taking what was mine. I was the biggest scrooge on the block. Everyone knew you shouldn't ask me for a bite: if you gave it to me, I was eating the whole thing. It's better now, of course. If something isn't mine, I don't cling to it. And besides, I'm not helpless anymore."
Christina launched into a story from school about a time someone yelled out "F!" out of turn while the teacher was calling out grades, and the teacher mistakenly wrote a failing grade next to Christina's name. By the time it was over, it wasn't even the vice principal but the principal herself begging Christina to just let them put a normal grade in the grade book. Christina had decided to unleash a full bureaucratic hellscape on the school. She had screenshots, and her classmates were already gloating over the top student getting an F. The school tried to write it off as an innocent mistake, but the local authority eventually decided it was easier to give Christina what she wanted than keep fighting her. The teacher lost her next pay progression, and from then on, she hated Christina's guts and never gave her a break. But Christina had tasted blood. Now it made total sense why she was coming down so hard on UKARI. She wasn't looking for a payout. She was proving a point. She refused to be reduced to a system error.
"I'm not a statistic. I'm a person," Christina finished her story.
"I'd say a pretty formidable one," I cheered her on, genuinely impressed by her. "Personally, I'd have been way too lazy for all that."
"I'm lazy too. I just prefer to do everything upfront so I can do nothing later."
"Listen, you're an actual genius," I said, my eyes lighting up. "To do nothing, you just have to do everything that's necessary. Not everything-everything, just the bare minimum. I used to just avoid doing extra work, but now I realize I can avoid doing even more. Only problem is, I can't sleep in the middle of the day like you. I couldn't even sleep during naptime at nursery."
"I can teach you some bad habits," Christina smirked. "Lie down, stare at the ceiling, and paint it beige... Just kidding."
I got the joke instantly. Yesterday's lecture had explicitly mentioned that women often check out during sex and end up mentally "painting the ceiling beige."
"...Just don't think about anything," Christina finished her recipe for an afternoon nap. "Your brain will shut off on its own."
"Alright, let me try." I moved onto the bed, lay flat on my back, and folded my hands over my chest.
"Okay, get comfortable. Don't lie there like a corpse at a funeral," Christina remarked.
"I'm comfortable on my side." I turned my head to look at Christina. She was already lying on her side, one hand propping up her head, watching me. I rolled onto my side to face her, slipping my arm under the pillow.
"Now for the hard part," she smiled. "Don't think. Don't think about hairy elephants."
"You mean mammoths?"
"And daddoths, too," Christina added.
"Do you mean DDoS, like the attack?"
"No, like pappoths, but way more brutal."
I definitely couldn't think about daddoths, mainly because I had zero clue what they were supposed to be. Mammoths, but male-coded? How much more brutal could they even be? Did they have force fields and shoot lasers? But thinking about how you can't think is still thinking, right? Christina stayed silent, just looking at me. Is she really not thinking about anything? It felt a little awkward. Or just unfamiliar. She'd never looked at me in silence for this long. That must mean she's completely blanked out. Sleeping with her eyes open. Right, I'm supposed to be thinking about nothing. I think it's working. I just have to keep looking at her...
"So? Did it work?" Christina snapped me out of my trance.
"Nope," I lied. I hadn't been not thinking. I'd been thinking exclusively about her.
"It's not for everyone." Christina flopped back onto her spine. "My parents can't do it either. On the bright side, that's just one more reason to add to the list of why we shouldn't get married."
"And why is that a reason?" I drawled slowly, watching her profile.
"I don't know. Let UKARI figure out why it bums me out."
"That doesn't mean you're a bad teacher," I offered encouragingly. "I'm just a shitty student."
"That's exactly what bums me out."
"Why?" I asked, genuinely confused. "That's my problem."
"I have no clue... Maybe it's love, and I just don't even realize it."
"Unlikely," I tried to soothe her. "Love is a positive feeling."
"Then I've definitely forgotten where I posited it," Christina smiled. "Positive, from posit, as in to put somewhere."
"And negative is from..." I tried to jump into the wordplay game, but couldn't squeeze out anything beyond negate and deny.
"...from negate," Christina finished for me. "'Oh no, oh please don't, oh not there.' When obviously it's a 'yes, please do, and right damn there.' Maybe I'm just like everybody else. Only I convinced myself I was special, and now I'm making a point of proving I don't need any of this."
I stayed quiet because I didn't want to think about what that actually implied.
"I did warn you I'd lose my mind if I got locked up with nothing to do." Christina raised a hand and started examining her manicure. "You know how some parrots pluck their own feathers out when they're bored?" She stuck a nail in her mouth and started biting off a hangnail.
A sharp wave of deja vu hit me, though I kept it to myself. It was surreal. I had used that exact parrot metaphor with the other Christina to explain how the two of them were different. Except this Christina, the one lying right across from me, was supposed to be flying in circles and screaming her head off, not plucking her own feathers out. Guess I'd misread her. Deep down, she really was just like any other girl, just hyperactive from time to time. I didn't want to think about it. Or rather, I was terrified to. Terrified that I'd have to look back and rework it all.