Teddy approaches us, as if to hug us, or something, but we both lurch back. He stalls in place, wounded and manic. I angle myself in front of Tai, so that she’s farther from him, and closer to Mina and Saxim. Teddy’s eyes move from Tai’s swollen face, with its attempt at a peaceable grin, to mine, where I’m sure my confusion and anger and despair are peeking through the stony coldness.

He holds his hands up, palms facing us. “You’re upset about Saxim, sure,” he says, with a guilty glimpse at her, standing stiff as a statue on the other side of me, “and your mother’s questionnaire and the Pocket Girlfriend. I could tell. I get that. But I never intended her answers to be—limited to the pockets of lovesick teenagers. I have much nobler plans for her.”

“Nobler plans?” Tai echoes, just as I scoff. Nobler, as if the Pocket Girlfriend is a noble resting place at all.

“Mina?” he asks. “Can you please tell the girls your primary directive?”

“I promise to take care of your family,” she says, in her mellifluous voice.

“Clarify, please, Mina.”

The panel chirps, and I almost smirk, thinking she’s going to give him the big chirping screw-you, before she begins to speak, a pixelated scroll with angel wings unfurling on her panel.

“To assist the struggling elderly, like a doting daughter. To curb the pain and suffering of the sick, like a loyal wife. To protect the health of the young at all costs, like a loving mother.” Her words send a hot knife up my spine.

I take a half step back and clutch Tai’s hand. There’s something so unnatural about Mina, yet so familiar, too. I think it’s that mixture that alerts us that something is wrong, that something is dangerous to us—like poisonous red berries dangling from a tree.

“It sounds familiar, doesn’t it?” Teddy asks, an incongruous grin of pride lifting his cheeks into a frightening mask in the low light. “That’s your mother,” he says, creeping toward us. “That’s your mother, in her role as Mitra the Moroccan nurse.”