Skinned -1 (11 page)

Giving him time to erase his reaction before I could see it on his face.

Not enough time. When I sat up, he was stil in the doorway, one hand in his pocket, the other gripping the frame, holding himself steady.

“Hey,” I said.

He didn’t move. “Your voice…”

“Weird, right? I hear myself talk and I’m like, wait, who said that?” I forced a laugh, but stopped as soon as I saw him wince. I’d forgotten that I wasn’t very good at the laughing thing yet. Especial y when I was faking it.

“It’s nice,” he said, like he was trying to convince himself. “I like it.”

I hated it. Someone else’s voice, husky and atonal, coming out of the mouth.

My
mouth, I reminded myself.
My
voice. But I could only believe that when I was alone. With Walker final y standing there, watching me, I was forced to admit it: The voice belonged to the
thing
, to the body, not to me.

“It’s been a while,” I said, even though I’d promised myself I wasn’t going to bring it up. He hadn’t voiced me back on Thursday night or on Friday. And then Saturday came, and he was here. That should have been enough.

Walker shrugged. He rubbed his chin, which was shadowed with brown scruff. Without me around to remind him to shave, he’d grown a beard. “I was going to text you, but…”

“Yeah. But.” I stood up. He was stil in the doorway. If he wouldn’t come to me, I would go to him.
It can be difficult at the beginning,
Sascha had said.
But the people who know
you, the people who love you, they’ll see beneath the surface. They’ll get that it’s really
you
under there. You just have to give them some time.

No one knew me better than Walker. But when I curled the hand around his wrist, he jerked away. “Sorry, I—” I stepped back. “No, it’s fine.” It wasn’t. “I shouldn’t have.” He shouldn’t have.

“No, real y. I just…” Walker final y stepped into the room, edging around me as he passed, careful not to touch the body. He sat in my desk chair, back straight, feet flat on the floor. Arms crossed, hugging his chest.

I dropped back down on the bed and waited.

“I’m very glad you’re al right,” he said final y, like he was passing along a message from his mother to some old lady who’d broken her hip. Like he’d been rehearsing.

I risked a smile. I’d been rehearsing too. “I missed you.”

“You, too.” He stared down at the floor. His hair was longer than I’d ever seen it, almost to his shoulders, like one of Zo’s retros. I wanted to smooth it back. I wanted to stand behind him and bury my face in it, resting my cheek against the back of his head, wrapping my arms around his shoulders, letting him grip my hands in his. But I stayed where I was. “It’s, uh, it’s pretty,” he said. “I mean—
you’re
pretty. Now. Like this.”

“You don’t have to lie.”

He shifted in the seat. “No—It’s just, I guess, I just thought you’d look a little more like…I mean, on the vids, and you looked…But now…I thought you’d look more…”

“Like me?” But as soon as I said it, I knew that wasn’t what he’d meant. I
didn’t
look like me, not anymore, not with the hair that was the wrong color and texture and wasn’t even hair, just a synthetic weave that was grafted on and would never grow. The nose was too smal , the eyes too wide, the fingers the wrong thickness, the wrong length, the teeth too straight and too bright, the mouth bigger, the ears smal er, the body tal er and too symmetrical, too wel proportioned, too perfect. But it wasn’t that. I knew what he’d wanted to say; I knew him too wel .

I thought you’d look more…human.

And I saw the body again like I’d seen it for the first time, like
he
was seeing it. The skin, smooth and waxy, an even peachy tone stretched out over the frame without sag or blemish. The way it moved, with awkward jerks, always too slow or too fast. The stranger’s face with dead eyes, pale blue irises encircling the false pupils, and in the center of the black, pinpricks of light, flashing and dimming as the lens sucked up images. The eyes that didn’t blink unless I remembered to blink them. The chest that neither rose nor fel unless I pretended to breathe. The body that wasn’t a body.

His girlfriend, the machine.

“It’s just weird,” he admitted. “I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t—”

“It’s okay,” I said quickly. “It
is
weird. It’s weird for me too.”

“I mean, I know it’s you, I get that, but you sound different, and you look different, and…”

“It’s because it was an emergency. They had to give me a generic model. My dad picked it out. He says it’s the one that looked the most like me. Not that it looks like me, I know, but it was the best he could do.”
Too much detail,
I told myself.
Stop talking
. But I couldn’t. Once I stopped, he would have to start again. Or he wouldn’t. And then we’d just sit there, and he would try not to stare at me, and I would try not to look away. “Some people get these custom faces designed to look just like them, the way they were—or like anything they want, I guess. It’s total y crazy what they can do. The voice, too. You just make a recording and they match it. I mean, it’s not exactly the same, I know, but it’s…closer. Easier. But you’ve got to place the order in advance. You’ve got to give them time, and if there’s an accident or something, wel …” I tried another smile. “There’s nothing I can do about it now. The artificial nerves and receptors are already fused to the neural pathways or whatever, and they say structural changes would screw with the graft, but next time, I’l do it in advance, so I’l be able to order whatever I want. Then I’l look more like…”

“Lia,” he said.

I
am
Lia
.

But I said it in my head, where there was no one to hear.

“I’l look more like
me
,” I said out loud. Calmly. “Next time.”

“Wait, what do you mean, next time?”

“When the, uh, body wears out or—” I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to block out the echo of the crash, the scream of metal that refused to die—“if something happens to it, they’l download the, uh…”
Data? Program? Brain? Soul?
There was no right word. There was only
me
, looking out through some
thing’s
dead eyes. “They’l do it again. When they need to.”

“So you just get a new body when the old one runs out?” he asked. “And they keep doing it…forever?”

“That’s the plan.” As the words came out of the mouth, I final y saw it, what it meant. I saw the day he found the first tuft of hair stuck in the shower drain or woke up to a gray strand on his pil ow. His first wrinkle in the bathroom mirror. The day he blew out his knee in his last footbal game. The day his potbel y bulged as he stopped playing and kept eating.

Any of the days, al of the days, starting with tomorrow, when he’d be one day older than today; and then the next, two days older, and the next and the next, as he grew, as he aged, as he declined…as I stayed the same. Shunted from one unchanging husk of metal and plastic to the next.

I got there a moment before he did, but only a moment, and then he got there too. I saw it on his face.

“Forever.” Walker grimaced. “You’l be like…this. Forever.” He stood up.

Don’t leave,
I thought.
Not yet.
But I wasn’t about to say it out loud. Even if he couldn’t see it, I was stil Lia Kahn. I didn’t beg.

“So, what’s it like?” he asked, crossing the room. To the bed—to me. He sat down on the edge, leaving a space between us. “Can you, like, feel stuff?”

“Yeah. Of course.” If it counted as feeling, the way the whole world seemed hidden behind a scrim. Fire was warm. Ice was cool. Everything was mild. Nothing was right.

I held out a hand, palm up. “Do you want to…? You can see what it feels like. To touch it. If you want.”

He lifted his arm, extended a finger, hesitated over my exposed wrist, trembling.

He touched it. Me.

Shuddered. Snatched his hand away.

Then touched me again. Palm to palm. He curled his fingers around the hand. Around my hand.

“You can real y feel that?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“So what’s it feel like?”

“Like it always does.” A lie. Artificial nerves, artificial conduits, artificial receptors, registering the fact of a touch. Reporting back to a central processor the fact of a hand, five fingers, flesh bearing down. Measuring the temperature, the pressure per square inch, the duration, and al of it translated, somehow, into something resembling a sensation. “It feels good.” I paused. “What does it feel like to you?”

“You mean…?”

“The skin.”

“It’s…” He scrunched his eyebrows together. “Not the same as before. But not…weird. It feels like skin.” He let go.

I brushed the back of my hand across his cheek. This time he didn’t move away. “You need to shave.”

“I like it like this,” he said, giving me a half smile. It was the same thing he always said.

“You’re the only one.” That was the standard response. We’d had the fight that wasn’t a fight so often it was like we were fol owing a script, one that always ended the same way. And if I acted like everything was the same, maybe…

“It looks good,” he argued, the half smile widening into a ful grin.

“It doesn’t
feel
good. So unless you want to scratch half my face off when—” I stopped.

Nothing was the same.

The coarse bristles sprinkling his face wouldn’t hurt when he kissed me.

If he kissed me.

“Lia, when you were gone al that time, I…”

“What?”

A pause.

“Nothing. I’m just…I’m glad you didn’t, you know. Die.”

It was what he had to say, and I gave him the answer I had to give. “Me too.” For the first time, sitting there with him, I could almost believe it was true.

Another pause, longer this time.

“When you were in that place…I should have come to visit.”

“You were busy,” I said.

“I should have come.”

“Yeah.”

Not that I would have let him see me like that, spasmodic limbs jerking without warning, muscles clenching and unclenching at random, the mouth spitting out those strangled animal noises, the tinny speaker speaking for me until I could control the tongue, moderate the airflow, train the mechanism to impersonate human speech. If he’d seen me like that, he would never have been able to see me any other way. He would never see that I was Lia.

“I should go,” he said. “You must be…Do you get tired?”

I shook the head. “I sleep, but it’s not…I don’t dream or anything. I just…” There was no other way to say it. “Shut down.”

“Oh.”

“I’m sorry,” I said suddenly.

“What?” He scrunched his eyebrows together again. “Why?”

“I don’t know.” There were no mechanical tear ducts embedded in the dead eyes. No saltwater deposits hidden behind the unblinking lids. Add it to the list of things I wouldn’t do again: cry. “I just am. I’m sorry that I’m…like this.”

I admit it. I wanted him to wrap his arms around me. I wanted him to tel me that
he
wasn’t sorry. That I was beautiful. That the hair felt like real hair and the skin felt like real skin and the body felt like a real body and he wasn’t weirded out by the thought of touching it. That he saw me.

He stood up. I didn’t. “You going back to school soon?”

“Monday.”

“So I guess I’l see you there.” He backed toward the door. When he opened it, Zo was on the other side. Like she’d been there the whole time, waiting, as she’d done when Walker and I had first gotten together, and she’d been a kid, annoying, always around, hovering outside with her ear pressed to the door, giggling every time we were about to kiss.

“Guess so.”

He hesitated, like he was waiting for my permission to leave. The old Walker had waited for my permission to do everything.

“Aren’t you going to kiss her good-bye?” Zo asked, sounding so sweet, so helpful, so hopelessly ignorant, and then she smiled, and the smile was none of those things.

Walker didn’t move. Not until she gave him a gentle push, digging her fists into the shal ow concavity beneath his rib cage. He lurched across the room, and I felt frozen again, like I had that first day, locked inside the body.

Blink,
I reminded myself. But when I shut the lids, I didn’t open them again.

He didn’t taste like anything. Nothing did anymore. His lips feathered across mine. I registered the touch, and then it was gone.

“Bye, Lia.”

I kept my eyes shut as his footsteps crossed the room. The door closed.

Bye.

“Survival of the fittest. And we were the fittest.”

I
t began Monday at six a.m., when the bed whispered me awake—or would have if an inner alert hadn’t already forced my eyes open and my brain back to ful -scale conscious dread. It began as I picked through a stack of clothes in disgust, rejecting favorites—the mood dress useless, its temperature-activated swooshes and swirls requiring fluctuations in body temperature which themselves required an actual body; the sonicsilk with its harmonic rippling just another reminder of the music I’d lost; the LBD, a linked-in black dress whose net-knit flared neon with every voice or text, too sensational; the soundproofed hoodie functional and cozy but not sensational enough, blah and gray, like I planned to fade into the background, scenery instead of the star—and final y being forced to resort to jeans and an old print-shirt that snatched random phrases from the network and scrol ed them across the fabric. The look had been very hot, and then quickly very not, but it had settled into a neutral acceptability, and it was the best I could do.

It began—my official return to school and an official y normal life—with breakfast, another meal I could no longer eat. Or maybe with the sound of the car door slamming shut, Zo and me tucked inside, or with the hil s giving way to a long, flat stretch of familiar green, the castle of brick and stone rising above the horizon.

In that old, normal life, it began after every break—whether two days or two months—with a squeal in stereo, Cass and Terra catching sight of me, fashionably late, pul ing into the lot. It began with a rocket-launched embrace, arms locked, shoulders encircled, styles critiqued, stories spil ed, al , it seemed, released in a single, shared breath. This time I had no stories, at least none I was wil ing to share. This time nothing was normal. But as the car pul ed into the lot, I saw them bounce off the steps in front of the school. I opened the door and heard the squeal.