Skinned (10 page)

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 full-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 finally being forced to resort to jeans and an old print-shirt that snatched random phrases from the network and scrolled 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 officially 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 hills 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, pulling into the lot. It began with a rocket-launched embrace, arms locked, shoulders encircled, styles critiqued, stories spilled, all, it seemed, released in a single, shared breath. This time I had no stories, at least none I was willing to share. This time nothing was normal. But as the car pulled into the lot, I saw them bounce off the steps in front of the school. I opened the door and heard the squeal.

It begins now.

The first thing that registered were their clothes. Loose, ill-fitting, dull-colors, Cass in a T-shirt with a printed, unchanging slogan, Terra in jeans that sagged on her ass and a black shirt too loose and too worn, without any visible tech, like something you’d find in a city, or from one of those thrift zones Zo was always haunting for new retro rags.

The second thing:
“Zo Zo!”

That was Cass’s squeal, Cass’s wide grin—and then she saw me, and both of them faded away.

She’d cut her black hair short and spiky, cropping it with a dusting of pink. “Lia?” Cass narrowed her eyes as if squinting would squeeze my features back to their familiar shape—or maybe block them out altogether. “Is that…you?”

“It’s me.” I didn’t dare try a smile. “In the flesh.”

No one laughed. Terra looked sick. She hip-bumped Zo.

“Zo Zo, why didn’t you tell us that your sister was coming back today?” she asked with a determined perk. “We would have…done something special. To celebrate.”

Terra’s hair was the same, but she was actually—it didn’t seem possible—wearing
lipstick
. And some kind of purple glitter above her eyes. Which didn’t make sense, because no one wore makeup anymore, except the wrinkled poor who couldn’t afford gen-tech or lift-tucks, and trashy retro slummers who thought it was cool to pretend they fit in to the first group. Oh, and seniles, who didn’t count, since they didn’t even know what year it was and so couldn’t be expected to remember that makeup had gone out with TVs and artificial preservatives. Why spend all that credit on the perfect face if any random could match the effect with a black marker and some pinkish paint? Zo was wearing lipstick too, of course, but that was nothing new.

“I asked, uh,
Zo Zo”
—I shot Zo a look. She ignored it—“not to say anything.” A lie. Like I could ever have imagined Zo talking to
my
friends. “Don’t blame her.”

“Doesn’t matter now,” Cass chirped. “You’re back!”

“Tell us everything,” Terra said.
“Everything.”

“Zo Zo wouldn’t spill,” Cass said, thwapping Zo’s shoulder. “No matter how many times we asked. And, of course,
someone
has been totally zoned out forever.”

“Yeah…” I didn’t want to explain how I’d been lurking on the network in stealth mode, peeking over everyone’s shoulders, or why I hadn’t texted anyone back. Especially not with Zo—excuse me,
Zo Zo
—standing right there, listening to every word. “Sorry about that. I had a lot to, you know, deal with. For a while.”

“We can imagine,” Cass said.

“No, we can’t.” Terra sounded pissed. “Because we don’t know anything.”

“But we want to.” Cass touched my shoulder. “We do.”

Zo flicked a finger across her inner wrist, and the small screen she’d temp-adhered flashed twice. “Time, ladies.”

“Oh!” Cass blushed. “Right. We’re late. So, info dump later? Lunch?”

“Uh, sure—Wait, no, it’s Monday.” When it came to ruling the pack, lunch was key, but that was Tuesday through Friday. Mondays belonged to Walker. That had always been the deal, from the beginning.

“You and
Walker
?” Terra asked. “You mean he didn’t—”

“Walker will deal,” Cass cut in.

He didn’t what?
I thought. But didn’t ask.

“It’ll be fine,” Cass said. “Trust me. Lunch.”

“Lunch,” I agreed. Walker could wait. “But where are you going?”

“Too complicated.” Cass giggled as Terra tugged her away. “Later. Lunch.”

“Right. Later. Lunch.” I grabbed Zo before she could follow them. “So?”

She shook me off. “So what?”

“So since when do you steal my best friends?”

She smirked. “Maybe they stole me.”

“And where are you all going?”

“They’re
your
best friends. Shouldn’t you already know?”

“You know I haven’t talked to them in months,” I said.

“Exactly.”

“Zo!”

“I’m late.” She spun away, pausing only to shoot back the last word. “And at school it’s Zoie. Or Zo Zo.”

I was used to people watching me. I just wasn’t used to them gawking, then twisting away as soon as I caught them at it. The hallways were the worst. Conversation died as soon as I got close—sometimes tapering off, like a seeping wound that finally, as the heart stops pumping, runs out of blood, and sometimes cut off in its prime, a gunshot victim dropped by eight grams of lead. I knew the conversations that reached a violent, abrupt end were the ones about me, the machine roaming the halls claiming to be Lia Kahn. The other ones—the stumbling, mumbling trailings off into awkward silence—were just the result of nobody knowing what to say. That was at least better than the randoms who came up to me all day knowing
exactly
what to say, and this—no matter which words they used to disguise it—boiled down to “smile for the camera” as they aimed their ViMs at my face, zooming in for a close-up, pumping me for details they could post on their zone or a local stalker site and turn us both into fame whores.

I didn’t smile.

In class, even the teachers stared, not like they had much else to do beyond babysit us while we got our real education from the network. Which meant I watched my ViM screen while the rest of them watched me. The only relief came in biotech, usually the worst of all possible evils, but hidden behind the thick plastic face mask, hunched over my splicing kit, I could almost pass for normal.

Walker didn’t respond to my text about lunch, and when I showed up in the cafeteria, he wasn’t there. So I sat with the usual suspects—plus Zo—at the usual table in the front of the room, where everyone could look as much as they wanted. Surrounded by my friends, it was almost possible to pretend they were staring for the old reasons, wondering what we had that they didn’t, where they’d gone wrong between
then
—the half-remembered, better-forgotten days of all-men-are-created-equal playdates and birthday parties when no one cared how loud you were, how rude you were, how ugly you were, how stupid you were, how lame you were, because we were all too young and so too dumb to notice—and
now
, when how you looked and how you talked mattered as much as it should.

The Helmsley School was built three hundred years ago, for people who were almost as rich as we were, and the cafeteria, with its wood panels, floor-to-ceiling windows, and scalloped ceiling, was a suitably regal match for the exterior, all stone columns and brick arches. Thanks to the population crash and the upswing in linked ed, only half the tables were filled, but any group larger than three is enough for an us/them divide. After all, that was—as we’d learned in kindergarten—the key to civilization and the survival of the species. Finite supply plus infinite demand equaled conflict, battle, nature red in tooth and claw; bloody struggle for turf, status, sex equaled survival of the fittest. And we were the fittest.

Staying at the top meant defying expectations and reversing the norm, because there was nothing exclusive about acting like everyone else. Which meant that if the rest of the school was gaping at my new face and freakish body, my friends, not to mention the people I counted as friends by virtue of social proximity, would ignore the obvious, forgo the questions, and act as if they ate with a skinner every day—as, from now on, they would. Except for the fact that the skinner wasn’t eating.

Which wasn’t as awkward as the fact that my sister was. And was doing so at
my
table.

Or the fact that everyone else was tricked out in retro slum gear, just like her. I was the only person wearing anything with visible tech—the only person at the table, at least. I was dressed exactly like everyone else in the room. Normal.

But the clothes didn’t explain why everything felt so wrong. You didn’t claw your way to the top of the pyramid without knowing how to read people. You needed a radar, something to sense the smallest of fluctuations in the social field. You needed the skills to know, even with your eyes closed and your ears plugged, who was scheming, who was suffering, who was gaining on you, who was on the way out. If you couldn’t figure out that last one, chances are, it was you.

It wasn’t the kind of thing you could learn. You either had it or you didn’t.

Except it turned out there was a third option: You had it, and then you lost it.

Part of it was them. No one could act normal, not while I was in the room.

Part of it was me.

The things I used to know about people, the things I
understood
…It wasn’t a rational thing. It was just something I
felt
, like the way I could feel when someone was watching me.

I couldn’t do that anymore either.

I felt like I’d gone blind.

It didn’t help that I barely knew half the people at the table, especially the two grunters pawing Cass and Terra—the reason, I quickly found out, they’d run off so quickly that morning. New season, new boys.

No sign of Walker.

No one asked me where he was.

Bliss had picked that day’s b-mod, which meant—big surprise—everyone was blissed out. Everyone except me, since b-mods wouldn’t do much for someone without brain chemicals to modify. I’d half expected them to opt for some retro drugs to match the retro clothes. Some of Zo’s dozers, maybe, or even something alcohol based, like in the bad old days of hangovers and beer bellies. But no matter how in retro was, it couldn’t offer anything that would kick in immediately and wear off by the end of the period. Advantage: b-mods. As far as I was concerned, bliss mods were bad enough when I was on them too, always leaving a weird moody aftertaste, like crashing after a sugar high. Staying cold sober while the rest of them blissed up? Infinitely worse.

“So do you have, like, superpowers?” That was Cass’s mouth breather. It was worse when guys giggled. That just wasn’t natural. “Are you an evil crime fighter now?” Cass glared at him, smacking his hand away when he tried to squeeze my bicep.

Terra tugged at my print-shirt. “You got a uniform on under here? For your secret identity?”

Zo blew out a laugh. It was the first time since the accident that I’d seen her with a real smile. “
I’m
the superhero.” She narrowed her eyes at Cass. “The power to wither with a single glare.”

Cass clutched at her chest. “You got me!” She toppled over, tumbling into me. “Oh. Sorry.” She sprang up, posture straight, arms assembled in her lap, a careful four or five inches away from mine. No one spoke.

“Apparently I have the power of awkwardness,” I joked. Awkwardly. “Lia Kahn, super-buzz-killer.”

No one laughed.

Terra’s boy—Axe or Jax or something; it wasn’t clear and since no one else seemed to care, I didn’t either—grunted something about his balls itching, and how he’d prefer the power to scratch them without anyone seeing. Cass elbowed her guy, who was busy making an adjustment of his own. “How about
you
try that power sometime.” She pulled his hand out of his lap—and didn’t let go.

“Power,” the guy repeated. “Pow-er. Weird word. Word weeeeiiiird.” He wrapped his hairy arms around Cass, who dissolved into a shivering mass of giggles.

The bliss mod was kicking it up.

“What if we only walk in wouble-woo words,” Bliss suggested, laughing.

Zo shrugged and flashed a sly smile. “Whatever works.”

“Why?” Terra asked.

“Why wot!” her boy crowed.

“Where’s Walker?” Bliss said, in a way that made me wonder if the whole
w
thing hadn’t just been a convenient way of getting around to the question, except that Bliss wasn’t smart enough to formulate such a plan, even when off the drugs.

“Walker’s waiting,” Cass said, and the others nodded, as if that made any sense.

“Wise Walker.”

“Or Walker’s whizzing!”

“What would Walker want?”