Skinned -1 (15 page)

“Yeah,” I said. “I got that.” I turned to blast Walker for letting me walk in blind, not that he could be trusted on the subject, being barely able to dress himself, much less me, but I was decked out in freakwear and needed someone to blame. Too bad: He’d already slipped away, probably off to join the gamers or get zoned.

Terra drifted over, her face—like everyone else’s—cosmetic clear, her shirt whispering melodies with every move. She stopped dead when she saw what I was wearing.

“Nice, uh…outfit,” she said.

“You could have told me.” It’s not like we made some big announcement about which looks were in and which were out. But things got old fast, and when they did, either you knew—or you didn’t.

Terra shrugged. “Since when do you need
me
to tel you what’s wiped?”

Zo found me later, sitting in a corner, head tipped back toward the ceiling as if I were zoned. Anyone who knew anything knew that I wasn’t in the business of getting zoned anymore, but it saved me from having to stare blankly at a wal or, worse, to make conversation.

Final y someone I could blame. “I can’t believe you let me leave the house looking like this.”

“What?” she asked innocently, perching on the side of the couch. “Like me?”

“You knew better.”

“You’re right,” she said. “So why didn’t you? Lia Kahn always knows what’s cool, right? Lia Kahn decides what’s cool. So what’s
your
problem?” I wanted to slap her.

“What’s yours?” I asked instead. “If you knew retro was over, why come here like
this
?” I jerked my head toward her clothes, which were only slightly less gross than my own. But she was acting as if she didn’t care that the look was wiped, and no one else seemed to care either. Like the rules were somehow different for her.

“Because maybe Zoie Kahn decides what’s cool too,” she said.

“You can decide whatever you want. It doesn’t count if no one agrees. There’s no such thing as a majority of one.”

“Yeah, one’s the loneliest number, so I heard,” she said. “Two is working out a lot better for me these days.”

“Two?” I scanned the room, as if Zo’s new guy, if he real y existed, would bear the mark on his face. “Who?” She mouthed a curse, as if she’d broken something. “No one.”

This was getting interesting.
“Who?”
Zo and I had never been the kind of sisters who stayed up al night, giggling in the dark about pounding hearts and stolen kisses. But she’d ruined enough of my dates with her tattling, her teasing, and, as she got older, her eavesdropping and clumsy stabs at blackmail. She was, and always had been, addicted to information about my personal life; the more personal, the better.

Karma’s a bitch.

“I told you,
no one.
”

“I’l find out eventual y,” I said. “You might as wel tel me.”

“Instead of wasting your time on my love life, maybe you should focus on your own,” Zo snapped.

“Meaning?”

Zo tapped her wrist and I noticed that, like Auden, she was wearing a watch. Maybe
he
was her mystery man. Lame and lamer—they’d make a good match. “It’s one a.m.: Do you know where your boyfriend is?”

“He’s around.” But nowhere I could see. I wondered if he’d gone upstairs without me, if he was waiting for me to find him. Or if he wasn’t alone.

“He always is.” Zo scowled and stood up.

“Seriously, why do you hate him so much?”

“I don’t.”

“You’re usual y a better liar that that.”

“Believe whatever you want,” she said.

I wanted to ask her something else. I wanted to ask her why she suddenly hated
me
.

I didn’t want the answer.

“Later,” she said, giving me a bitter half wave. “Terra’s got some new boots she wants to show me. Weird, isn’t it?” Zo smirked. “The way al your friends suddenly want
my
opinion?”

“They’re just bored and looking for something different to play with,” I shot back. “You’re like their little retro
mascot
. Their token freak.” Zo shrugged. “Why would they need me for that? They’ve got you.”

Venom released, she wandered off; I stayed where I was. I knew I should be circulating, but al I wanted to do was hide. Staying in place seemed like an acceptable compromise. And when I felt a pair of hands squeeze my shoulders, and a chin rest on the top of my head, I knew I’d made the right choice. I lifted my arms, let him grab my hands and pul me to my feet. “About time.” I turned around. “What took you so—”

I yanked my hands away.

Cass’s mouth breather leered. “Feels just like real hands,” he slurred. “Dipper thought they’d be, like, stiff or some shit like that, but…” He slithered his fingers across my waist. I knocked them away. “Feels real enough to me.”

Cass had always liked them dumb and pretty.

“You wanna know what’s stiff?” He lunged toward me, resting his forearms on my shoulders, linking his fingers together behind my neck when I tried to squirm away.

“Fuck off.”

He laughed. “I’d rather fuck something else,” he said. “And I do mean
thing
. Come on.” He plucked at my neckline. “I hear you’ve got al your parts under there, just like a real girl.”

“I am a real girl, asshole.”

“You want to prove it?”

I tried to knock his arms away, but they were too thick and sturdy, and the more I strained against them, the tighter his grip.

“Just because Walker’s too chickenshit to take a test drive—”

This wasn’t a dark and empty path winding through the woods, and he wasn’t some Faither lunatic convinced that God had told him to screw my brains out—I had no reason to be afraid. But I wasn’t thinking through reasons. I was thinking about this loser’s grimy hands crawling al over the body—
my
body—and his breath misting across my face and his puny dick twitching at some fantasy of dragging me off and shoving himself inside me. Al of which added up to not thinking at al . I punched him in the stomach.

“Bitch!”
he wheezed, doubled over.

That’s when Cass final y decided to show up. “What the hel , Lia?”

“She’s psycho,” the drooling pervert hissed, looping an arm around Cass. “Total nut job. Got pissed I wouldn’t do her.” If the mouth had come equipped with saliva, I would have spit at him. “You sleazy piece of crap! Cass, come on.” She was clinging to him, her arm tucked around his waist. “The perv was hitting on me.”

The loser snorted. “Right. Liked I’d want
it
when I have
you
.” He nuzzled his face into Cass’s neck. She let him.

Terra popped up beside them, her boy in tow. The two guys smacked hands while Terra glared at me. “Trouble?”

“Trouble for Cass,” I said. “She’s dating an asshole.”

“You were right about her,” Terra’s guy whispered loudly.

I turned on her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means wake up, Lia,” Terra snapped. “This isn’t like before. You don’t get to have every boy in the world drooling after you. Not anymore.” Cass rol ed her eyes. “And contrary to popular belief—excuse me,
your
belief—they weren’t al after you then, either.”

“I never thought that—”

“Right.” Cass choked out a laugh. “And you weren’t hitting on my boyfriend just now.”

“Why would I want this assface when I’ve got—”

“Walker?” Terra said with me. “You just keep tel ing yourself that.”

“Walker and I are fine.”

“Then take him with you when you go,” Cass snarled. She tugged the mouth breather away, without looking back.

Terra shook her head. “She stood up for you. When you came back, and you were al —you know. She defended you. She said you were stil the same person under there. That we should give you a chance, even if…”

“Even if
what
?”

She looked at me like it was pitiful, the way I couldn’t figure it out for myself. “Even if it’s
embarrassing
,” she said, overenunciating. Slow words for my slow brain. “Being seen with you. Like
this
. And then you try to steal Jax?”

I hadn’t even known that was his name. “I told you,
he
came on to
me
.”

Terra shook her head. “I actual y feel sorry for you. I mean, Lia was always self-absorbed, but whoever you are—whatever you are—could you be any more oblivious?”

“You know who I am,” I pleaded. “Come on, Terra, you
know
me.”

“Yeah, but there’s an easy way to fix that.” She walked away with mouth breather number two, leaving me alone again.

Walker found me by the pool.

“So it’s okay? To get wet?” he asked, sitting down beside me.

I shrugged. I’d taken off my shoes and plunged my bare feet into the water. It was cold, or at least, I thought it was. Temperatures were stil a chal enge. “Everything’s okay.” He dipped his feet into the water, then shivered. Cold—I’d guessed right.

“I heard what happened.”

I shrugged again. That was an easy one for me, one of the first things I’d mastered. Maybe because it was so close to an involuntary twitch.

“You should have texted me,” he said. “I was looking for you.”

I’d been sitting out by the pool for almost an hour. He couldn’t have looked very hard. “It’s fine.”

“So, were you, uh…you and that guy, you weren’t—”

“You’re seriously going to ask me that? You think I was lying too?”

“I don’t know.” He looked down, tapping his foot against the surface of the water, gently enough that it didn’t splash. “I guess not.” Our shoulders were touching.

“You know what?” I said. “Just go.”

He shook his head. Rested his hand on my lower back. Leaned in. “What if I don’t want to?”

It felt like my first kiss.

In a way, I guess, it was. And just like back then, I wasted it, worrying about where to put my hands and what to do with my tongue and whether I should be moving my lips more or less—and then it was over. At least he didn’t look too repulsed. His eyes were rimmed with red. But they were open.

Most people had vacated the pool area once I showed up. The ones who’d stayed behind were staring at us. We got out.

The grounds of Cass’s estate were huge—and, once you got away from the guesthouse, mostly empty. We had a favorite spot, a clustering of trees at the top of a sloping hil —

the same hil that, when we were kids, Cass and I had rol ed down, shrieking as we bumped and slid, the grass and sky spinning around us. Walker and I stayed at the top. He was shivering.

“Nervous?” I asked. We sat facing each other, his legs crossed, mine tucked beneath me so that I could rise up on my knees and reach for him.

He shook his head. “No reason to be.”

He didn’t ask if I was nervous.

Walker took a deep, shuddering breath, and then his mouth was on mine again, his hands at my waist, slipping beneath the black T-shirt. I stiffened. His hands on the skin—

How would it feel? What would he think of the body when he saw it?

“You okay?” he whispered. His eyes were closed again, his face pinched, like he was expecting a blow.

“Okay.”

“So, you can, like, do stuff?” he asked.

“I can do anything.” I tried to force myself to relax.

Asking cal -me-Ben about it, back in rehab, hadn’t been the worst moment of that hel , not even close. But it had been humiliating enough.

“Can I get wet?” I’d opened with something easy. “Or wil I melt or short-circuit or something?”

And cal -me-Ben had had the nerve to laugh. “You’re ful y waterproof.”

“What about sleeping?” Another lob. Working my way up to the real question. I barely heard his answer.

“The body wil simulate the sensation of fatigue, as a signal to you that it’s time to shut down for a few hours, give the system a rest. Tests show that it’s probably a good idea to fol ow your normal schedule by ‘sleeping’ every night.”

“Can I eat?” That was a no.

Just like there’d be no more bathroom breaks, no more tampons. At this point, cal -me-Ben suggested I might be more comfortable talking to a woman, but by woman, I knew he meant
Sascha
, and I wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction.

“What happens if I break?” I asked.

“You’l come to us,” said cal -me-Ben. “Just like you’d go to the doctor. And we’l fix you up. But if you take care of yourself, it’s unlikely to happen. Although we attempted to emulate the organic form as much as possible, you’l find this body much more durable than the old one.”

“Why?”

He looked surprised. “Wel , for al the obvious reasons. It seemed economical y efficient, not to mention—”

“No. I mean, why that, but no other differences? Why no superpowers or anything?”

Ben frowned. “This isn’t a game. We’re not trying to create a new race of supermen, no matter what the vids want to claim. This is a medical procedure. We want to supply you with a
normal
life, as much like your old life as it can possibly be.”

“So…I should be able to do anything I used to do,” I said.

“Within reason,” Ben said. “Anything.”

“What about…Wel , I have this boyfriend, so…Could he and I…?”

Cal -me-Ben looked like he wanted to summon Sascha, no matter what I said. “As you’ve been told, your internal structure is—obviously—quite different. But the external structure mirrors the organic model completely.”

I must have looked blanker than usual.

“You and your boyfriend wil be fine,” he clarified. “Al systems go.”

I didn’t think to ask him how it would feel.

Now I knew: It felt wrong.

We didn’t fit together: not like we used to. Our faces bumped, my elbow jabbed his chin, his legs got twisted up in mine, and not in a good way. Every kiss got broken by a murmured “sorry” or “ouch” or “not there” or “no, nothing, keep going” or, always, “it’s okay,” and we did keep going, his hands running up and down the body, my fingers searching his, trying to find the dips and rises they remembered, but everything felt different against the fingertips, distant and imagined, like I was lying in the grass alone, pretending to feel the weight of Walker’s body on top of mine.

Things didn’t get very far.