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but she felt sure he was bigger—bigger and less apprehensive and nowhere near as sweet. Down came the sailing vessels, up went the turkeys. The first-grade teacher married a man with legs made of wood. It was a mast year; a tremor ran through all the mothers. The wind blew. The clouds spread out and draped themselves across the face of the weather. A snowflake fell and then another and then many snowflakes. There was a holiday recital during which Cindy XA did twenty solo fouettés, passing wraithlike through matter like a neutrino.
    The wind was a woe but not personal. Spiky black balls blew off the sycamores lining the street. Two of the “special” children sickened and died. At some point in high school Mary got contact lenses and stopped wearing glasses; Eddie was very tall now and slicked his hair back with a comb he carried in a shirt pocket located in the same place as the one the girl with golden hair had flown into years earlier. There was never any question that he and Mary would become sweethearts, but things never went back to being the way they’d been when they were young.
    Even so, the look of Eddie—his obvious preoccupation with a secret he kept hidden from everyone, the way he glanced from under his lowered eyelids while counting something off on his fingers, one, two, three —excited Mary; she would sneak out of class to meet him in the last stall in the girls’ bathroom. Though he insisted he wasn’t any different from the way he’d always been, something about him felt completely different to her, almost like he was made of the same material as the horse they had to jump across in gym. Whenever she tried asking him where he’d gone that summer night so many years ago he looked at her like she was crazy. “Don’t be a jerk,” he’d say. “I never went anywhere.”
    But she knew Eddie wasn’t telling her the truth. Ever since that night the world had been lit differently—everything had grown brighter, much too bright, really, facing west toward the world’s rim.
    Of course he was her date for the prom.
    The dress Mary wore was on loan from the robots—the master bedroom closet at number 37 contained many such treasures, though, sadly, the original Mrs. Andersen’s feet had been a lot smaller than hers. The dress, on the other hand, seemed like it had been made for her. “You have to come try it on after school,” Cindy told Mary, the idea being that they were supposed to behave like friends. As far as Mary knew, she was the first person invited inside number 37 since the robots moved to the neighborhood.
    The house felt overpoweringly stuffy. The windows were never opened, the robots having no need of air, and the sofa cushions were lumpy and slick, the robots having no need of comfort either. At the time of Mary’s visit they were flying around and around the ceiling fixture, making a faint sound like hedge clippers—as soon as she was gone they planned to roost there and recharge. She could hear the sound they made but she didn’t know what was making it. She could also hear a muffled set of thumps, exactly like the sound a pair of feet might make coming down a flight of stairs, though she couldn’t see anyone. It seemed like the sound was coming from the other side of the wall in number 39, like the way Miss Vicks’s feet sounded to her coming down the stairs in number 49, only heavier. The people who lived in number 39 had moved out right after the robots moved in. A For Sale sign appeared on the front lawn, but it got taken down soon afterward.
    Presently something came into the room and sat beside Mary on the sofa. Its physical presence was cold and large and animal-like yet not so heavy that it made a dent in the cushion; it had sour breath with a sweet edge as if it had just eaten those pellets the special children in room 12 fed their guinea pig. This must be Downie, Mary thought.
    Before the robots moved into the house the Andersens had lived there. Mr. Andersen had