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Barbie wakes up from an already-uneasy sleep with her heart pounding and a sour taste in her mouth. For a moment, she feels a stab of panic before it’s replaced, almost as quickly as it came along, with the balm of Ken’s presence; the muted but still vital part of her that always knows whether Ken is with her or not.
And he’s with her right now, unlike the other night, when she woke up to...
She swallows.
They’re home now. That’s what’s important.
(She is home now, and Ken’s going to start considering this home soon, she promises herself as though she’s promising him.
She doesn’t promise anything to him, not out loud.)
Barbie sits up. She draws her legs to her chest, wrapping her arms around them, gently pressing her cheek against one of her knees. She watches Ken, who’s huddled in his pink sleeping bag. His eyes are shut, his breaths even.
It’s still strange to see the new signs of humanity so stark on Ken’s body—the way his face is lined with worry right now, the ragged edges of his nails, the little wound on his face where he’s been picking his skin...
The way blood spilled from the gash in his arm.
Barbie feels a surge of nausea. She swallows it down.
She keeps watching him.
Since the evening he stumbled out of her room breathing hard and sticky with tears and cold sweat, Barbie’s kept count of each day Ken’s been a human.
This is day six.
Her eyes flick over to the digital clock on her nightstand. It reads three a.m.
This is day seven.
Not long ago at all, Barbie would’ve said Ken was coping pretty well with the big change, but maybe that was wishful thinking. Maybe he hasn’t been human long enough to cope with anything.
She wishes she could write off what happened a couple of nights ago as a learning experience, but she can’t convince herself of that.
Instead, it feels like a bad sign.
Her eyes are burning.
She blinks slowly, and they cool off.
(She feels a surge of annoyance at herself. She’s a human now; how does she keep forgetting she actually needs to blink?)
Ken shifts in his sleeping bag.
He’s been told many times that he can sleep in the living room if he wants, that the pull-out couch is probably a lot more comfortable. Since the big change, it’s been pointed out more than once that he’s definitely past thirty, physically, which means he’s going to hurt his back. But he refuses to sleep anywhere else. Of course he does.
If he’s in the sleeping bag, he can sleep in the same room as Barbie.
Barbie doesn’t mention that. Everyone knows.
She’s sure that if she insisted, he’d start sleeping in a different room.
She’s relieved that she hasn’t insisted yet.
Before, she let him stay in her room because that way she could make sure that he still existed, that he was getting better and not worse.
Now…
What’s the phrase?
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
+++
“He’s usually really dramatic when he gets hurt,” Barbie babbles. She wishes she’d quit it with the nervous rambling, but it’s a habit, one of those things that was cute and charming when she did it as a doll but that she finds horribly embarrassing now. “So it’s kind of freaking me out that he’s so calm.”
“The blood loss might be chilling him out,” Gloria admits.
Barbie gasps. “Really?!” A shudder runs through her. “This is horrible.”
“We can’t panic,” Gloria says, even though she seemed panicked before, panicked along with a bunch of other complicated human emotions that Barbie would be much better at making out if she weren’t on the edge of being in agony.
“He cut himself so open, Gloria!” Barbie points out, because she can’t help but explain why she’s not doing her best job at being un-panicky right now.
“I know, Barbie, but he’s in the backseat of the car right now, so—”
“Wait, can I sit in the front?” Ken asks, the first words he’s said since Barbie shoved him into the car and told him not to forget to buckle his seatbelt.
(At least he didn’t forget.)
“No!” both Barbie and Gloria say. It’s not like there’s space in the front right now.
“Aw,” Ken says, sitting back disappointed. In the rearview mirror, Barbie sees him pull the towel from his arm curiously and let out a sound of surprised pain when it peels away from his wound and the sluggish flow of blood starts again.
“Put that back!” Barbie says, feeling a heady, miserable mix of exasperated and sad and…angry?
“Okay!” Ken snaps in sullen response. There’s a long silence from the backseat, and then, much quieter, “I don’t feel good…”
To her horror, Barbie lets out a wordless, distressed little sound, high-pitched and wobbly. She shoves her fist against her mouth, biting into her knuckles to keep herself from making any more noises.
“I know, honey, just hold on a minute,” Gloria says sympathetically. “You don’t have to talk so much, okay? Just relax.”
To Barbie’s relief, Ken goes completely silent again. Barbie keeps watching him in the rearview mirror to make sure he’s still alive, and at the same time tries to sift through her mind to figure out what exactly happens now, if things are going to go smoothly once they’re in the hospital.
She knows Mattel made fake papers for Ken like they did for her.
(Once Ken came along, Mattel even started paying Gloria for helping Barbie and Ken out.
Gloria seems to feel bad about it, reassuring Barbie that she isn’t helping them because she’s getting paid for it and that if they do decide to move out all that money will start going directly to them, but Barbie is grateful. It means she can live with Gloria and her family longer without so much guilt, because in spite of her original plans, she really doesn’t want to move out.
Not by herself, and definitely not with Ken.
She can’t imagine having to help explain the world to him by herself when there are still a million and one parts that confuse her, especially when Ken is so—
Slow sometimes.
That’s not fair, Barbie shouldn’t think that, but it’s true and at least she’s not saying it.
There are many, many things she’s not saying to anyone, instead keeping them tucked away in what she imagines is a pocket on her human heart where all the things she swallows down live like a baby kangaroo.)
Barbie’s struggling to remember what was in those papers. Heck, she definitely did memorize hers and yet she can’t quite get that story straight right now either. She hopes Ken remembers, though she’s pretty sure he doesn’t.
She feels sick, like they should be walking up to the big, scary glass doors of the Emergency Room for her, except that’s not true, obviously, because Ken is still bleeding, and the worst part is that Barbie wants to yell at him.
Actually, she wants to scream at him. She wants to ask him why he does literally anything without asking her if it’s not absolutely crazy and stupid first, as though she’d want that, as though the way Ken always clung to her wasn’t exhausting, as though it’s not better that even now, even with this huge transition into humanity, the grip of his clinging is still slightly weaker.
He’s a lot more likely to let go of her to go explore, so at least some things from his months (well, they were months out here; time is different in Barbie Land, faster or slower or not moving at all depending on the moment) discovering himself are still irrevocably carved into him.
And yet Barbie still wants to scream at him, because, sure, maybe it’s better that he doesn’t constantly ask her for permission or consult with her about every single little thing he does or assume she’s as wrapped up in him as he is in her anymore, but can’t he give her a heads-up about the big things?
She’d be fine with that.
+++
“So what’s it like?” Sasha asks with the morbid fascination of a kid who’s grown out of playing with dolls and gotten really into Edgar Allan Poe. “I mean, does it go all the way through or is it just…the top?”
It’s Ken’s third visit, and Sasha’s gotten used to him. She actually kind of likes him. Well, she’s liked him since his second visit, and she’s felt some kind of way about him since they first (sort of) met. She told herself it was just her female socialization making her feel bad for whiny manbabies, but…
There was his whole rant about being respected just for who he was, and at first she felt like rolling her eyes because hello, she’s never felt that before, she’s always had to fight for respect, but then she thought about how Barbie didn’t even know where the Kens—any of the Kens—lived, and realized that maybe he’d never felt that either.
Also, he said something about being allowed to style his hair now and that one of the things he thought meant he was ultra-respected was being asked the time, which was pathetic enough that Sasha couldn’t help but feel some kind of weird fascinated pity.
It was still totally fucked up to do what he did, so she didn’t actually feel bad reinstating Girl Power Land, but she couldn’t help but swallow down a bad taste in her mouth when those Kens asked President Barbie for a Supreme Court Justice and got a flat no and a flimsy concession.
Though, like, do Kens even get an education? It doesn’t seem like they were built with one like Barbies were.
This Ken doesn’t seem to have gotten much of one.
This Ken was apparently completely built as an accessory for Barbie, which Sasha hadn’t quite been able to wrap her head around until the whole plastic thing.
And who can blame her for being curious about how that even works? She’s the one who’s living with giant dolls. She deserves to ask questions, even though Barbie, who’d followed her into the kitchen at some point, smacks her shoulder lightly as though she’s not curious too.
Ken doesn’t seem to mind. There’s a lot he doesn’t seem to mind, including, as far as Sasha can tell, the whole plastic thing.
When he’s not Toxic Masculinity Ken, he’s pretty chill.
He says, “Oh, it goes all the way through. Like…” He pauses, frowning, seeming to struggle to find the words to describe it. Then he grabs a butcher knife with no warning, which automatically freaks Sasha out because a white man with a butcher knife in her kitchen (who’s not her dad) is the start of a two hundred word news article that gets buried under bad things happening to white girls and billionaires and celebrity bullshit.
But Ken just stabs the knife into his own forearm, the part that’s still plastic. Barbie gasps and Sasha lets out an embarrassing shriek.
The knife only pierces the plastic because Ken was driving it down so hard. He moves around the butcher knife a little to make a larger tear, which makes Sasha gag, and then sets the knife on the counter and shows her the expanse of plastic that he’s gashed a line into.
“See?” he says almost proudly. “All the way through.”
“Yep, all the way through,” Sasha says faintly, staring wide-eyed at the not-wound.
“Ken!” Barbie says, voice huffy and annoyed like he didn’t just stab himself. “That’s so weird! Don’t do that!”
“But it didn’t do anything,” Ken says, wilting.
“Yeah, it did! Now you’re going to have a big cut until you get your skin back.”
“No I’m not! It goes away. Doctor Barbie and Nurse Ken wanted to see so I let them cut it with the scissors before I came here, and after a little while the plastic just filled itself back in.”
Barbie makes a face. “You let them cut you open?”
Ken shrugs. “Yeah, for fun and also learning. It’s okay, it doesn’t hurt, and they have ethics, they wouldn’t cut it all off even when I asked.”
“That’s kinda messed up,” Sasha mumbles, but if Barbies and Kens want to do shit for science, who is she to judge?
Barbie sighs. “Oh…I guess that’s fine, then…”
Ken beams.
Sasha wishes she hadn’t seen him stab himself. She doesn’t care that there wasn’t any blood, even though it would’ve been way worse with blood.
+++
“I thought I wasn’t supposed to take the towel away from my arm,” Ken mumbles. Something in his voice borders on mocking, like he’s messing with them.
Gloria doesn’t have the time. She wants Ken to get medical attention, she wants both Ken and Barbie to be okay, and she really wants to get back to the terrified daughter she left crying in her husband’s arms.
“Kenneth,” she says through gritted teeth.
He eyes her nervously, and peels the towel away, hissing miserably in pain.
The triage nurse’s eyebrows go up. “Yeah, that’ll need stitches. We’ll bring you back in a minute. What happened?”
Before Ken or Barbie can say a word, Gloria says, “His hand slipped while he was cooking.”
Ken’s actually still supposed to stay away from the kitchen for incredibly obvious reasons, most of which boil down to how he’s only had a human body for like four or five days and some of which boil down to how he’s kind of dumb, but that’s not important. What’s important is that Gloria‘s had the “he cut himself cooking” excuse locked and loaded since getting Ken into the car, and it looks like it’s working.
“Okay,” the triage nurse says. “Just sit tight for a moment, Mr…” She looks down at the paperwork Gloria hastily filled out for him. (It wasn’t hard. Most of it couldn’t actually be filled out.) “Handler.”
Ken blinks at her for a moment before nodding. “That’s me,” he says. Barbie pats his shoulder.
(Gloria personally thought it seemed kind of incestuous to have both Barbie and Ken as Handlers, but she wasn’t about to discourage one of his first actual human decisions.)
Ken presses the towel to his arm again, whimpering in pain. Barbie flinches at the sound, a movement Ken seems to notice, since he looks like a kicked dog about it.
Gloria’s phone buzzes in her pocket, and she fishes it out, breath catching when she sees Fred’s name on the screen. Her painfully tense muscles relax minutely when she reads his text: Sasha’s asleep. She’s calmed down, she’s ok.
Thank god, Gloria replies, though baseless guilt still sits heavily in her chest.
Another text: How’s Ken?
Gloria looks up from her phone screen. There’s another nurse heading over to them.
He’s fine but he’s gonna get stitches soon pray 4 me, she texts quickly before tucking her phone away again as the nurse comes closer.
“Mr. Handler? My name’s Nurse Drewyer. Come with me,” she says, smiling kindly.
Ken gives her a big smile in response. “Why?” he asks.
Barbie rolls her eyes. “She’s going to help you!” she hisses.
“Oh, right,” Ken says, getting to his feet.
Barbie and Gloria stand along with him. Nurse Drewyer frowns. “You two are…?”
“Family,” Gloria says firmly. “Trust me, you’re gonna want us there.”
She’s definitely going to want Gloria there, at least, because Barbie’s looking thoroughly freaked out. She’s been to doctor’s appointments, but this is her first time in a real hospital, and she’s just been getting paler and paler between looking at different patients in the waiting room and listening to the sounds of the hospital.
Ken seems surprisingly okay with it all, but Gloria really thinks she might’ve been onto something when she said the blood loss was chilling him out, not because he’s actually lost that much blood, but because he’s been distracted enough with this new thing his body’s doing to keep himself from getting too distressed.
She’s pretty sure that’s going to change soon, considering that another new thing is going to happen to his body, and it’s going to involve some foreign material going in there, which…is that going to be a trigger for him? Are they going to have to watch him to make sure he doesn’t lose it and try to remove his stitches?
Oh, shit.
They’re led to the ER, and Ken’s deposited onto an examination table behind a curtain. Gloria and Barbie both find uncomfortable chairs to sit on.
Barbie’s eyes are jumping around the area, staring at the medical equipment and the tiled floor and the green curtain separating them from the goings-on of the rest of the Emergency Room.
Her bright pink sweatpants and lighter pink shirt clash violently with the muted silvers and greens and whites that surround them. Ken, who’s wearing sky blue sweatpants and a white tank top, isn’t fitting in much better. For a moment, Gloria feels dizzy and ridiculous. She is truly in an ER with two living (former) dolls at one in the morning.
This is actually her life.
Then Nurse Drewyer comes back, followed by a doctor, and Gloria returns to earth.
The doctor is small and brown-haired, young enough that Gloria’s pretty sure he can’t have been a doctor long. He gives Ken a smile. “Hi, my name’s Dr. Jamison. I hear there was a cooking mishap.”
Ken nods uncomfortably.
“May I see?” Dr. Jamison asks, gesturing to the very bloody tea towel pressed against Ken’s wound.
Ken lets out a huffy breath and pulls the towel away again. “Ow,” he says forlornly.
The doctor scrunches up his nose. “Okay, yeah, that’s going to need some stitches. Don’t worry, we’ll fix you right up! Nurse Drewyer here is going to apply some topical anesthesia and she’ll clean that wound for you. Then I’ll get you stitched up!”
Barbie’s eyes widen.
Ken just looks deeply confused. “Wait, what? I don’t know what any of that means.” He looks over at Barbie, agitated. “What does that mean?”
“Ummm,” Barbie says, reaching out to hold the hand attached to his uninjured arm. “They’re going to…help you?”
“Yes, they’re going to help you,” Gloria says in response to Ken’s clearly growing concern. “They’re going to stitch you up, like with a needle and thread, but first they’ll numb the area so you won’t even feel it.”
Barbie’s mouth drops open. Ken’s does the same.
“They’re going to put stuff in me?!” he asks, aghast. “And they’re going to make me numb?! I want the opposite of that!”
“It won’t be numb for long and they’ll take the stitches right out later, honey,” Gloria says, using her most comforting voice. Damn it, she knew this was going to be an issue. She glances over at the doctor and nurse, who are looking at her, Ken, and Barbie with confusion and concern.
Gloria scrambles.
“Sorry, they’re, uh…oh, I’m, I’m Gloria, by the way, Gloria Salvador-Gardner, I, uh, I’m a friend of Ken’s and, um, Barbara, this is Barbara, anyway, I drove them here, and yeah, so, anyway, they, um…” She clears her throat, taking a deep breath to grasp the backstory she and Barbie workshopped soon after Barbie became human, and then lowers her voice conspiratorially to say, “…they just got out of a cult situation.”
Barbie makes a face, but thankfully doesn’t say anything.
“Ohhh,” Dr. Jamison and Nurse Drewyer say in sage response. Dr. Jamison turns to Ken and smiles kindly. “Don’t worry, Mr. Handler, we’ll take care of you here. If you want, we can get you some Xanax.”
“That’s a great idea,” Gloria cuts in, relieved. “Ken, they’re going to give you a pill that’ll make you feel better, okay?”
“Oh,” Ken says faintly. She’s never seen him so pale, which makes sense. He didn’t have blood before. The look of fear on his face makes Gloria’s heart ache. “Okay.”
“Okay!” Dr. Jamison says cheerily. “Let’s get started. We’ll be back in just a minute.”
With that, he ducks out of the curtained area, followed by Nurse Drewyer, who hesitates before leaving, choosing to turn back to Barbie and smile sympathetically at her. “Your brother’s going to be just fine, Miss,” she tells Barbie softly, squeezing her shoulder.
Gloria coughs in surprise, shooting Ken a nervous look, but he seems too wrapped up in his own growing anxiety to have heard what the nurse said to Barbie.
Barbie, for her part, stiffens, before turning a glossy, lost gaze on the nurse. She gives her a thin smile. “Thank you,” she says. “I hope that’s true.”
+++
Ken stares at the blood dripping down his arm and onto the kitchen tiles.
The color is so rich and bright; brighter than most colors in the Real World.
Ken didn’t see a lot of red in Barbie Land.
Maybe Mattel thought it looked too much like blood.
Ken takes a deep breath, and then another one. His head feels heavy, like it’s going to explode.
His arm should hurt.
He’s not sure if it does.
But it’s not numb, at least. He’s almost certain it’s not numb.
Then he hears: “Ken?”
He hadn’t noticed anyone else was here, so it can’t be Barbie, though he’s so distracted by now that he’s not sure that even Barbie’s presence would’ve managed to break through his haze.
He wouldn’t know, though, because the voice isn’t Barbie’s anyway.
He manages to lift his head to look at Sasha. She’s wearing pajamas—a long black shirt with a skull on it—and she has her hair up. He thought she went to sleep hours ago, but humans wake up in the middle of the night all the time.
(He woke up in the middle of the night.)
None of that really matters.
What matters is that Sasha’s big dark eyes are even bigger right now, and they’re shining with tears, like streetlights off a pond.
She opens and closes her mouth. Her eyes travel down to Ken’s arm, which is still dripping blood. There’s a lot more blood than he thought there would be.
It’s not that he’s never seen himself bleed before, not that he isn’t aware that he can bleed, but he still wasn’t sure there would be blood at all this time.
(He’s more concerned than comforted by the fact that there is.)
Sasha crosses her arms over her stomach like she’s trying to hug herself. “What are you doing?” she asks, her voice wobbling like a cup on the edge of a counter.
“It’s okay,” Ken says gently. “I just…I thought there was plastic.”
Sasha swallows hard. “Was there?”
Ken frowns, looking down at his forearm. He wraps his hand tighter around the knife. “I don’t think so,” he says. “But I really wanted to check.”
He’s not planning on cutting himself again.
He doesn’t think he is, at least.
But there must be something about the way his fingers curve around the knife or some twitch of his muscles that makes Sasha think otherwise, because she screams, “Mommy, help!”
Her voice is so terrified and tear-choked that Ken gets scared too.
He drops the knife. It falls to the floor with a sharp little sound.
Metal on tile.
Things make so many different sounds when they fall, here in the Real World.
(Ken doesn’t know it, but it takes Gloria less than twenty seconds to respond to her daughter’s scream.
Last time Sasha called her “Mommy,” she still played with Barbies.)
+++
In another world, Ken would have things to do that aren’t waiting for Barbie.
But this is the Real World, and though the parts of himself that were hurting before—hurting as though the plastic growing out of him was actually being driven into his skin with a Construction Worker Barbie’s hammer—don’t hurt anymore, most other parts of himself ache with use.
And Barbie is at work, so he’s sitting on her bed, waiting for her.
He hasn’t left the room yet—Barbie’s room—his room too?—since he finished crying in Barbie’s arms for a long time about the big change, scared and frustrated and so, so sad.
He looks down at his hands.
Before, they were always perfect. Now they…still look perfect, mostly, except for the ways they don’t, because now that there’s more to him, there’s a lot more ways to not be perfect.
He pokes at one of his cuticles. It looks kind of uneven, he thinks. It looks wrong.
He picks at the tiny ragged patch of skin on his index finger over and over again. There’s a tug that becomes a sharp little pain when he pulls away a whole section of skin like he never would’ve been able to before, back when his nails were carved into his hands. He yelps, surprised, as a small globe of red rises to the surface of his skin, bubbling through the tiny tear he made in his finger.
Wow.
He knows what’s happening, obviously. He’s not stupid, and a bunch of the movies he brought to Barbie Land from the Real World were kind of violent and he watched those a ton, and one time Gloria cut her hand, long but shallow (or so she said), and there was blood trickling from her split skin, soaking through a napkin; more blood than Ken had ever seen in person.
So Ken knows what it looks like to bleed.
He’s just never known what it is like to bleed until now.
Something in his abdomen—his stomach—twists and stabs. He hunches forward.
He wishes he had a computer or a phone to Google what to do when his stomach hurts. He’s gotten really good at googling over the past months he’s been going to the Real World.
His mind is drawn back to the blood as the little opaque bubble of it somehow bursts and slides down the side of his finger.
Automatically, he sticks his finger in his mouth, sucking the blood away.
He makes a face, pulling his finger out of his mouth and balling his hand into a fist, swallowing.
The blood tasted like pennies against his tongue.
Like pennies, he probably shouldn’t have put it in his mouth. That was so weird and gross and he doesn’t know why he did it without even thinking.
He’s not going to ask.
He doesn’t want anyone to think there’s something wrong with him.
His stomach clenches like a fist. He doubles over, wrapping his arms around his middle.
His head feels full and heavy. His eyes feel heavy too. He tries to dig through his mind for things he’s seen from his human friends that he can attach to what he’s feeling, but his mind feels like Real World soft serve ice cream, the kind that comes from a machine in swirls, and when he tries to grab any particular thought, it squishes and melts like it did the time he actually did try to grab Real World soft serve ice cream in his hands, curious about the texture.
(He’s always curious about the textures here.
They’ll probably feel different now.
Will they feel better or worse?)
+++
The medical equipment in the Real World Hospital looks kind of like what he’s used to in Barbie Land, but it’s smaller and mostly silver.
Absolutely no pink.
Ken misses the pink.
He never liked being hurt or having to go to Doctor Barbie, but at least he didn’t have to deal with this threatening mass of muted colors shining under harsh artificial light, these delicate sharp-edged tools, these endless promises that he’ll feel better soon that he doesn’t know how to believe.
They want to put thread in him when he’s supposed to be mostly skin now, skin and hair and fingernails and whatever his eyes are made out of.
Ken checked that his skin was skin, and now he’s just supposed to let them change that?
“They’ll take it out,” Gloria says soothingly before turning to Barbie, whispering something in her ear.
Ken wants to kick something. Are they talking about him?! They shouldn’t be talking about him like this!
But then Barbie detaches from Gloria and takes Ken’s hand again. She gives him a shaky smile that makes his stomach hurt. Is her smile shaking because she's mad at him? Because she’s sad? Because she loves him? He loves her. Whichever way it is that he loves her, he knows he does. It’s the first thing he ever felt.
“They’re going to take out the thread later,” Barbie says evenly. “For real. Okay? You can’t take it out, but we’ll bring you back to the hospital in a few days and they’ll take it out.”
“But I don’t want to go back to the hospital!” Ken says. He’s so tired. He wants to go back to sleep. His arm is burning and aching, but it doesn’t hurt much more than it did when he was turning into a doll.
Isn’t it supposed to hurt more now?
Most things hurt more now.
Once, he cut into the plastic invading his body to show Sasha and Barbie what his arm looked like, back when he was a doll becoming more of a doll.
And now he was showing himself what his arm looks like, and he guesses he showed everyone else by accident, and…
Sasha was screaming, and Barbie kept yelling, “Ken, Ken, what did you do?!”
Like she couldn’t see.
But she could see.
Ken guesses she just couldn’t understand, and he’s not sure how to explain, even though the explanation is simple.
He wanted to check that there wasn’t plastic under his skin.
He didn’t think very hard about what would happen when there wasn’t.
(He shouldn’t have checked. The plastic had never started under his skin before, it started on top and then grew downwards. So if he couldn’t see the plastic, why would there be any?
Why did he check?
He has a hard time remembering now. All he knows is that he wasn’t going to feel okay until he did.
But then he did, and he still doesn’t feel okay.
He actually feels worse.
He didn’t realize he’d bleed that much.
He’s so stupid.)
It all seems far away now.
Maybe that has something to do with the pill they gave him, the one Gloria said would make him feel better. Calmer.
He does feel calmer, possibly. The edges of this sharp place he’s found himself in are softer, at least. It’s allowed him to look at the needle in the nurse’s hand and not scream. It’s allowed him to not even notice the nurse came in in the first place.
He doesn’t like needles, but he’s very brave about them.
“It’ll just be a little pinch,” the nurse says.
Ken screws his face up in confusion.
A pinch? Why would a needle pinch? All they do is press against your arm and—
Ken yelps as the needle slides into and then out of his arm, giving the nurse a wounded look.
The nurse bites her cheek. “It’s okay, just a little more and then it’s all done and Dr. Jamison’ll be in in a few minutes for the stitches.”
The moment she leaves, tears start bubbling out of Ken’s eyes and trickling down his cheeks, the intensity of the night catching up to him. This is awful, and it’s the first time he’s been out of the house as a human. It feels like a really bad sign.
“I don’t want stitches,” he says, but the words come out through sobs. “I’m sorry, I didn’t—I didn’t mean to—please don’t make me…”
“Ken, you’re not getting stitches because you did something wrong, they’re just to help you,” Gloria says.
“But I am getting them because I did something wrong,” Ken points out. “I scared Sasha and I scared you and I scared Barbie and I…” I scared myself.
“You were confused,” Gloria counters, but Ken doesn’t want to listen to her. He doesn’t want to listen to anyone.
“I want to go home,” he insists tearfully. “I want to go home!”
“Oh, Ken,” Gloria says. The words leave her in a tired sigh.
Ken cries harder.
There’s a weight next to him on the examination bed.
He shoots a look at Barbie, and then ducks his head, ashamed.
He’s a liberated man and he knows it’s okay for men to cry except he’s not sure if that was one of those patriarchy things he was supposed to unlearn and—
Barbie wraps her arms around him, pulling him down. His head rests a little uncomfortably against her collarbone, but he still sags against her.
“I want to go home,” he whispers fervently, putting all of himself into the words as if how much he wants it matters at all.
Everything here is overwhelming him with its Real and he just wants to go to his Mojo Dojo Casa House and fall asleep.
He’s been Real for a few days now and he’s tired and he’s so easily torn apart and he hates it, he hates it.
“I know, Ken,” Barbie murmurs. She’s breathing against him, and he thinks he can feel her heart beating, but maybe that’s his.
Metal scrapes against metal as the curtains that have been protecting him from the rest of the hospital are drawn back again.
Ken shudders.
“You’re okay,” Barbie says, detaching from him, even though he chases after her warmth. When he looks at her, there are tears on her cheeks. He wants to curl up and scream until he doesn’t exist anymore. He still needs to send a letter to almost everyone he knows telling them he’s not coming home.
Barbie gives him a small smile. “Just look at me. Look at me, and it’ll all be over soon.”
“I don’t know if that’s true,” Ken says miserably, but he does what she says anyway, letting her talk to him about anything and everything and mostly nothing while something tugs gently, painlessly, on his arm for what feels like forever, but there’s no such thing as forever.
When Ken leaves the hospital, his arm is wrapped in a bandage, and he doesn’t even know what the stitches look like, just that he’ll have to live with them for a little longer.
+++
Sasha is staring out at the overgrown lawn when Ken sits down next to her, trying to comfortably contort his body to fit next to hers on the front porch steps.
She hunches her shoulders, staring down at her feet.
“Hi, Sasha,” Ken says.
“Hi, Ken,” Sasha mumbles. “You’re back.”
“Yeah.” He’s been back for a few hours now, but he only just got up the courage to actually talk to her. He takes a deep breath. “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t know if you’re supposed to apologize about stuff like that,” Sasha says, voice quiet and delicate.
Ken’s chest hurts.
He shrugs. “I am really sorry, though,” he points out. “I’m sorry I scared you. I didn’t mean to.”
Sasha sniffles, wiping impatiently at her eyes. “Yeah.” A beat. “You know the plastic’s gone, right?”
“Obviously I know that,” Ken says automatically.
Sasha gives the bandage around his upper arm a pointed look.
Ken clears his throat awkwardly, pulling the sleeve of his pink hoodie over it. “I see your point, but I do, though. I don’t know what happened to me. It was like I wasn’t me. But I was me. I just…wasn’t the same me.”
“You seemed confused.”
“I’m kind of confused a lot.”
Sasha lets out a wet laugh. “Uh, yeah, but not like that. You were, like…you were bleeding a lot, and I didn’t know what you were doing, and you scared me so bad!” She lets out a frustrated huff of breath. “Sorry.”
“No, it’s okay. I know I scared you. It’s okay to be scared.” That’s what he’s been told, at least, and when he thinks about it, Sasha’s pretty new to the Real World too, so maybe she also needs to hear it. “I’m better now, though.”
That’s true. At least in some ways, that’s true.
Sasha swipes at her face again. Her body relaxes. Ken takes a deep breath. The air is heavy and sour against his tongue.
“I’m better now,” he repeats.
“Don’t say it too many times,” Sasha warns, “or it’ll stop feeling true.”
Ken’s eyes widen. “Oh, whoops.”
He swallows down whatever else he was going to say, and he and Sasha lapse into silence.
They’ve found themselves watching the sunset.
In Barbie Land, the sunset is always shades of pink against their bright blue sky, forever the same comforting, gentle cotton candy hue.
Here in the Real World, the sky’s gone a dark, velvet blue, and all the pink in the sunset has mixed with red and orange and yellow to become something deep and endless, intense streaks of color painted boldly across the sky.
Ken’s breath catches.
Ken never looked at the sunsets or even the sunrises here very closely before now. Barbie always wanted him to, but he was too busy looking at her or the ocean or anything but the sky. He preferred not to look too closely at all of the parts of the Real World Barbie was so in love with, because what he had in Barbie Land was enough for him and he didn’t want to betray it again by admitting that there were parts of reality he could like better.
He still thinks he would’ve remembered if the sunset was this amazing, though; this impossible to tear his eyes away from. He’s certain it’s never looked like this before.
Oh.
Here in the Real World, is it not the same sunset every time?
Does that mean that, if he pays attention, he could see ones that are even more beautiful than this?
(Maybe he could look forward to that.)
“Being human’s not actually that bad,” Sasha tells him. Her words are slow and carefully enunciated, like she’s tasting them.
“The sunset is really pretty tonight,” Ken says in response.
+++
Barbie watches Ken sleep for a few more moments before she finally gives in to her clawing need to make sure he’s still actually, truly there, and says, “Ken?”
Her voice is soft, like cotton candy on the edge of dissolving.
Ken opens his eyes to meet hers.
Somewhere in the core of her being, Barbie is standing in a mostly empty world, and then there’s someone by her side, and she smiles at him thoughtlessly, because he was made for her and isn’t that something to smile about?
He sits up. Barbie tries not to shudder at the sight of the bandage around his arm, instead staying still like a doll. He tilts his head at her.
“Hi, Ken,” she whispers, an echo of one of the first things she ever said.
“Hi, Barbie,” he whispers in response.
That’s definitely the first thing he ever said.
Her lips curve upwards in a tiny smile. He smiles back, small and confused.
(Barbie thinks that without him, some part of her would always be lonely.)
“Will you sleep with me?” Barbie asks. Color rises in her cheeks as Ken’s eyes widen. “In my bed, as my friend,” she clarifies, though her voice is still soft. She knows that Ken will say yes, but she hopes he knows he could say no if he wanted to.
He nods slowly, shimmying his way out of his sleeping bag and then slowly inching towards her bed before sitting on it gingerly, and then lying down beside her, stiff as a doll. Something in Barbie’s chest opens. It’s easier to breathe than it was before.
She doesn’t say anything, and neither does he. After a while, he curls up, making sure to not put pressure on his injured arm, which means he’s facing her. He looks up at her blearily. “Goodnight, Barbie,” he mumbles, apparently having given up on getting any explanation for why she’s asked him to share her bed, not that he asked for one.
“Night, Ken.”
He closes his eyes. Tension bleeds from his body as sleep takes him. Her heart tugs when she realizes she’s never seen him so relaxed while sleeping. Maybe the sleeping bag is hurting his back.
After a few minutes, she feels her eyes getting heavy, and she finally lets herself lie down, curled up on her side, facing Ken. If she scooted forward a little, their foreheads would touch.
She lets out a long breath.
She bites her lip either to keep it from shaking or to keep herself from saying, I’m sorry you have to live like this, but I’m happy you’re alive.
She closes her eyes.