Frozen

9. DATE NIGHT

“You’re going like that?” Zo asked, leaning in my doorway. The cat hissed at her from the foot of the bed. Psycho Susskind had, without my permission, made it his new home.

“What?” I braved the mirror again. Black retro shirt, baggy pants that looked like some kind of insect had gnawed off the cuffs, and—courtesy of an illicit raid through Zo’s supplies—plum-colored lipstick and some kind of violet grease smeared across my eyelids. I looked like Zo. I also looked, as far as I could tell, like crap, but these days, so did everyone else who mattered. So at least I would fit in.

Zo rolled her eyes. “Nothing.”

I shoved past her. “See you tomorrow.”

“See you tonight.”

I paused at the top of the stairs. “You’re going?”

“Terra’s picking me up in five,” Zo said. “Is that a problem?”

Like she cared. “No problem.”

She looked like she wanted to say something else. But she waited too long, and I was out the door.

Walker’s car was in the driveway.

“You’re early,” I said, slipping in beside him. “You’ve just been sitting out here?”

He nodded. “It’s okay.”

“If I’d known you were out here…”

“It’s okay,” he said again, and put an arm around me. His pupils were wide; he’d obviously gotten an early start on the night, tripping on something or a lot of somethings. But it didn’t matter. Not if he was going to put his arm around me again.

“You ready?” He leaned forward, keyed in Cass’s address, then paused, waiting for permission, like the old days.

I wondered what would happen if I told him that we should skip the party, that when he’d said he wanted to go out, I’d thought he meant the two of us, alone.

Before, I was the one who dragged us to parties. Again? he would whine, like a little kid, and it would be cute, but not cute enough to change my mind, so we would spend another night surrounded until the waiting got too intense, and then he would squeeze my hand or I would squeeze his ass and—signal sent, message received—we would sneak off together to one of the extra bedrooms or a closet or that spot between the trees or once, after everyone else had passed out, the glassed-in pool, our bodies glowing in the eerie blue of the underwater lights. It was tradition, and keeping it tonight had to mean that he wanted to go backward. I wasn’t about to risk a change.

I thought he might kiss me as we sped along in the dark; that was tradition too. But he stayed on his side of the car and I stayed on mine, and his arm rested on my shoulders, a dead-weight that might as well have belonged to some invisible third passenger.

“Want to play Akira?” he asked.

“Not really.”

“Mind if I do?”

“No.”

Sometimes it felt like the body took over. That the body wasn’t the stranger, I was—just a passenger, carried along wherever the body wanted to go. Because that wasn’t me, letting Walker disappear into the network when I just wanted him to be with me—or, more to the point, wanted him to want to be with me. The strange voice that poured out of the strange mouth told him he could do whatever he wanted, I would go wherever he went, I didn’t care, I was fine, everything was fine, it was all good. That wasn’t Lia Kahn.

The car stopped in the usual place, at the bottom of the curving driveway that sloped up to Cass’s guesthouse. Walker grabbed my hand before I could get out. He leaned close, and when he spoke, his stubble scratched against my ear; it didn’t hurt. “Upstairs?” he said. “Later?”

“Definitely.” I turned to face him, my cheek scraping against his, but he pulled away just before our lips made contact. Even in the dark, his eyes were closed. “Later.”

Inside, things were the same as always: bodies sprawled on the couches and across the greenish-gray carpet, writhing in the throes of whatever new b-mod mix Cass had cooked up; walls pulsing in time with the music; couples tangled up in each other; lonelyhearts on the prowl; screens encircling the room, set to flash up Cass’s favorite vidlifes and a rotating selection of random zones; the lost dancers, gyrating to music that played only and forever in their heads; and in the glassed-in pool, girls with swanlike bodies skimming through the water, giggling, sputtering, chasing boys, chasing one another, the shifting patterns of their solar bikinis fading as the light disappeared.

The bikinis weren’t the only tech. Sonicsilk, LBDs and LCD tees, net-skirts, girls in microminis smartchipped to grow—or shrink—when they bent over, gamers in screenshirts that broadcast their kills… Almost everyone was in something lit up or linked in, everyone, that is, except for me. And Zo, of course, who didn’t count.

Bliss met us at the door, wearing a dress I’d seen before—a transparent fabric made opaque by the careful patterning of glowing light, but always, in its shifting translucence, offering the promise that if you watched closely enough, a glimpse of milky skin would slip through. She raised an eyebrow at my dead black shirt. Then leaned forward, voice lowered and fakely kind. “You should know, that retro look is totally wiped.”

“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 tell 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 wall or, worse, to make conversation.

Finally 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 really 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 all 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’ll find out eventually,” I said. “You might as well tell 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 usually 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 all 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 all 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 pull 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 all 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 all 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. All of which added up to not thinking at all. I punched him in the stomach.

“Bitch!” he wheezed, doubled over.

That’s when Cass finally decided to show up. “What the hell, 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 rolled her eyes. “And contrary to popular belief—excuse me, your belief—they weren’t all 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 telling 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 all—you know. She defended you. She said you were still 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, over-enunciating. 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 actually 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 still a challenge. “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 hill—the same hill that, when we were kids, Cass and I had rolled 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 call-me-Ben about it, back in rehab, hadn’t been the worst moment of that hell, not even close. But it had been humiliating enough.

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

And call-me-Ben had had the nerve to laugh. “You’re fully waterproof.”

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

“The body will 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 follow 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, call-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’ll come to us,” said call-me-Ben. “Just like you’d go to the doctor. And we’ll 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’ll find this body much more durable than the old one.”

“Why?”

He looked surprised. “Well, for all the obvious reasons. It seemed economically 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… Well, I have this boyfriend, so… Could he and I…?”

Call-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 will be fine,” he clarified. “All 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.

“Sorry,” he said yet again, rolling off me. I pulled my shirt back on. It was one thing for him to touch the body, but I didn’t want him to have to look at it while we were lying there. I didn’t want to look at it. If I didn’t have to see it, I could pretend. That was easier in the dark. “I can do this, I just need a minute.”

“It’s okay,” I said. Like a parrot who only knew one phrase.

“I know it’s okay,” he snapped. “I just need…” He snatched a pill out of his pocket, popped it into his mouth. “It’ll be fine.”

“What was that?”

“Nothing. Just a chiller. Help me relax.”

“Another one?” I knew he’d been popping them all night, and probably most of the afternoon.

“Don’t worry about it.” He rolled over on his side. “Okay. Ready?”

I pressed my hand against his chest, holding him in place. “You say that like you’re gearing up for battle.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It would just be nice if you didn’t need to be totally zoned out before you could touch me.”

“I don’t need anything.”

“Every time you come near me, you look like you’re being punished.”

“And what about you?” he asked. “I touch you, and you freeze up. It’s like hooking up with—Forget it.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Just say it,” I insisted, and, maybe out of habit, he followed orders.

“With a corpse.”

I sat up. “What a coincidence. Me being dead and all.”

He sat up too, and hunched over his knees, cracking his knuckles. “You have to admit… it’s kind of weird.”

“Oh, really? I hadn’t noticed. Life has been oh-so-normal for me these last couple months. Not that you would know.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means my life is shit,” I spat out. “And where are you?”

“I’m here, aren’t I?” Walker drove a fist into the grass. “What do you want from me?”

“I want you to be like you used to be.”

“And I want you to be like you used to be,” he shouted, “so I guess it’s tough shit for both of us!”

Silence.

“You hate this,” I said quietly. “Me. Like this.”

“Lia, I didn’t—”

“No.” I sat very straight and very still. “Just admit it. The truth will set you free and all that.”

He sighed. “Fine. I hate it. Not you. This. This whole thing. It’s weird, it’s gross, it freaks me out, but I’m doing my fucking best. I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Because you feel sorry for me,” I said.

“No.”

Yes.

“Because you think you owe me something,” I said.

“Don’t I?”

Yes.

“Whatever it is, this isn’t it.” I stood up.

“Don’t do this,” he said.

“I don’t need this,” I said. “I don’t need your trying. I don’t need you forcing yourself to be with me, like I’m your personal charity case.”

“I’m not telling you to go.”

Which wasn’t quite the same as telling me to stay.

“This is you, Lia. Giving up. If you walk away, just remember, that’s on you.”

“And if I don’t walk away, I get stuck with someone who has to dope up before he can even look at me. I think I can do better than that.”

“Yeah? Who?”

And that was the question, wasn’t it?

Cass’s mouth breather didn’t count. He wanted to screw a mech-head, some kind of fetish fantasy, nothing real. It wouldn’t count even if he weren’t scum, which he was.

No one normal—and especially no one beyond normal, no one like Walker—would choose me, not the way I was now. But Walker was stuck with me, and I knew he would stay, mostly out of obligation, with a little nostalgia thrown in for flavor, because I knew Walker. I could keep him. I could sit down beside him and let him kiss me, ignoring the fact that it made him cringe. Ignoring the fact that when he touched me, it felt like nothing. Not because I couldn’t feel his body on mine, but because the feeling was meaningless. It was like trying to tickle your own feet. Graze your fingers across your skin in the same places, with the same pressure, at the same speed, the mechanics all the same, but somehow the effect is entirely different, the sensation lifeless. Not that I was ticklish at all, not anymore.

The old Lia Kahn wouldn’t have hesitated. The old Lia Kahn knew she deserved better. But of course, the old Lia Kahn was hot. Her boyfriend couldn’t keep his hands off her.

There was also the fact that I was probably in love with him.

“What am I supposed to do?” he said, still on the ground.

Not The turtle is hungry. Not I’m sorry. Not I love you.

Maybe I wouldn’t have believed him anyway.

Maybe I would.

“I’m still Lia,” I said finally.

“So? What’s that mean? Staying or going?”

“It means you should already know.”