Authoress's Note: Hi again! Here's the second chapter. A big thank you to KityPryde and Riza-san for reviewing Chapter One! :) REVIEW EVERYONE!

My Best Friend Is An Android

Chapter Two: Fingerpainting As Fine Art

(Erek's POV)

I looked around the room, bored. There were four-year-old kids everywhere—listening to stories on CD, coloring in coloring books, playing with pattern blocks, building towers of connecting PVC pipes, pretending to cook on the plastic toy stoves, playing with stuffed animals.

I sighed and wandered over to the fingerpainting table. I took out a clean piece of paper and plunged my hand into the can of red paint.

I don't care what you or Lourdes say, fingerpanting is fun.

I dipped my other hand into the blue paint and smeared both my hands on the paper. While I painted, I decided to think of all the good things and bad things about being in preschool.

Pros—fingerpainting , no work, free cookies and milk at snacktime.

Cons—storytime, being treated like a baby, listening to annoying preschool teacher, being forced to lie down and take a nap at naptime, being in the same room as other preschoolers who will just not shut up and stop singing that idiotic song, no access to any movie rated higher than G.

So far the cons were winning.

I was so preoccupied with thinking of this list (and, yes, maybe with the fingerpainting, too) that at first I didn't notice the little girl standing next to me. She had brown hair up in two pigtails that came to her shoulders. Her eyes were bright blue—like the color of the sky. I recognized her—she lived across the street from me.

As soon as I glanced up at her, she turned to me and smiled. "Hi! Guess what? I'm taking gymnastics!" she said brightly. "My mommy signed me up for it!"

Umm… oookay.

She looked back down at my painting. Her big blue eyes were fixed on it with serious concentration and thought. The look on her face was almost like that of an art critic studying a masterpiece. She stared at it for a moment more before finally saying, "That's a good picture."

I looked down at it in surprise. It was just a bunch of multicolored blobs.

"Umm… thanks," I replied.

"You live across the street from me, right?" she asked.

"Yeah. My name's Erek."

She gave a big smile. "I'm Tessa."

Tessa sat down in the seat next to me and tapped the picture with one finger. "It looks like it's abstract art or something," she continued.

I jerked in surprise. "What?"

Where on Earth had she learned a word like abstract?

Tessa must have thought that I didn't know what the word meant. "Abstract means when a picture doesn't look like anything. When it looks like scribbleys and blobs," she explained, very seriously. "My mommy taught me that. She works at the art museum. She gets to decide which pictures they hang up."

Ah. So that explained the "art critic" look.

"Where does your mommy work?" Tessa asked me.

"I don't have a mom," I told her. "My dad works in one of those big buildings that are really tall." I had to talk like a four-year-old.

Tessa nodded, this vague explanation made perfect sense to her. "Did you like the story Miss Davidson read to us? I liked it, only I had already read it before. It's-"

"You mean your mommy read it to you?" I interrupted.

"No. I read it," she replied, with a touch of pride.

"You mean, you can read?"

"Yeah. Can't you?"

"No."

"Oh." She looked surprised. "Didn't your daddy teach you? Cause my mommy taught me. And Ben's parents taught him. And so did Maddie's parents."

Okay. Apparently, now, in this day and age, parents taught their kids how to read before preschool. How was I supposed to know? In the 40s, kids didn't learn how to read until kindergarten.

Great. Now I was stuck looking like the class idiot.

Tessa must have known what I was thinking, because she said, "It's okay if you don't know how to read. You'll probably learn how. I think you 'value the arts more than literature,' anyways."

I just stared at her. Who was this kid?!

She grinned. "That's what my mommy always says about me. Cause I can read, only I like drawing and stuff better."

She dunked her hand into the can of green paint and put a handprint on a new piece of paper. "Look! It looks sort of like if there was a broccoli factory that exploded!"

I just stared at her and shook my head. Tessa was one strange preschooler.