Frozen

5. VISITING DAY

“They were late. Only by ten minutes, but that was weird enough. Kahn family policy: never be late. It meant an immediate disadvantage, a forfeit of the moral high ground. Still, at 10:10 a.m., I was alone in the “social lounge,” which, if the building-block architecture, hard-backed benches, and spartan white walls were any indication, was clearly intended to preclude any socializing whatsoever. I didn’t want them to come. Any of them. I hadn’t invited them, hadn’t agreed to see them… hadn’t been given a choice.

10:13 a.m.: Waiting, my back to the door, staring at the wall-length window without seeing anything but my reflection, ghosted into the glass.

10:17 a.m.: Three more ghosts assembled behind me, milky and translucent on the spotted pane. Three, not four.

Not that I’d expected Walker to show up, to pester my parents until he got an invitation to come along, to perch nervously in the backseat, his long legs curled up nearly to his chest, his back turned to Zo as he stared out the window, watching the miles roll by, suffering the Kahn family as a means to an end—to me. If he’d wanted to visit, he wouldn’t have any need to tag along with them.

If he’d wanted to visit, he already would have.

“Lia,” my father said from the doorway.

“Honey,” my mother said, in the tight, shivery voice she used when she was trying not to cry.

Zo said nothing.

I turned around.

They stood stiff and packed together, like a family portrait. One where everyone in the family hated one another but hated the photographer more. The huddle broke as they moved from the doorway, my mother and father a glued unit veering toward me, Zo’s vector angling off to a bench far enough from mine that, if she kept her head in the right position, would keep me out of her sight line altogether.

My mother held out her arms as if to hug me, then dropped them as she got within reach. They rose again a moment later; I stepped backward just in time. My father shook my hand. We sat.

My mother tried to smile. “You look good, Lee Lee.”

“This brain hates that nickname just as much as the last one.”

She flinched. “Sorry. Lia. You look… so much better. Than before.”

“That’s me. Clean, shiny, and in perfect working order.” I raised my arms over my head, clasped them together like a champ. “You’d think I was fresh off the assembly line.” I told myself I was just trying to help them relax. My mother wiped her hand across her nose, quick, like no one would notice the violation of snot-dripping protocol.

“Lia—” My father hesitated. I waited for him to snap. The unspoken rule was, we could—and should—mock our mother for her every flaky, flighty word until he deemed (and you could never tell when the decision would come down) that we had gone too far. “The doctors tell us you’re nearly ready to come home. We’re looking forward to it.”

That was it. His tone was civil. The one he used for strangers.

You did this, I thought, willing him to look at me. Not over me, not through me. And he did, but only in stolen glances that flashed to my face, then, before I could catch him, darted back to the floor, the ceiling, the window. Whatever I am now, you chose it for me.

“Zo, don’t you have something for your sister?” my mother asked.

Zo shifted her weight, then rolled her eyes. “Whatever.” She dug through her bag and pulled out a long, thin rod, tossing it in my direction. “Catch.” I knocked it away before it could hit me in the face, but the body’s fingers weren’t fast enough to curl around it. The stick clattered to the floor.

“Zo!” my mother snapped.

“What? I said ‘catch.’”

I picked up the stick, turning it over and over in my hands. It was a track baton.

“We won the meet last week,” Zo muttered. “Coach wanted me to give it to you. I don’t know why.”

“We?”

My father smiled for the first time. At Zo. “Your sister’s finally discovered a work ethic.” He beamed. “She joined the track team. Already third in her division, and moving up every week, right?”

Zo ducked her head; the better to skip the fakely modest smile.

“You hate running,” I reminded her.

She shrugged. “Things change.”

“Tell us about your life here,” my mother said. “How do you spend your days? You’re not working too hard, are you?”

I shook my head.

“And you’re getting enough to—” She cut herself off, and her face turned white before she could finish her default question: You’re getting enough to eat?

“Ample power supply around here,” I said, tapping my chest and noting the way her smile tightened around the corners. “My energy converter and I are just soaking it in.”

I wish I could say I wasn’t trying to be mean.

She didn’t ask any more questions. Instead she talked. Aunt Clair was helping design a new virtual-museum zone with a focus on early twenty-first-century digital photography. Great-uncle Jordan had come through his latest all-body lift-tuck without a scratch, literally, since the procedure had worn away that nasty scar he’d gotten skateboarding in the exquisitely lame Anti-Grav Games, which, it turned out, were actually full-grav, anti-knee-pad. Our twin cousins, Mox and Dix, were outsourcing themselves to Chindia—Mox had snagged an internship at some Beijing engineering firm and Dix would do biotech research for a gen-corp in Bombay. Last I’d seen them, Dix had “accidentally” broken Zo’s wrist in a full-contact iceball fight, and Mox had tried to make out with me. Second cousins, he argued, so it was okay. Bon voyage, boys.

Then there was our parents’ best friend, Kyung Lee, who was having trouble with his corp-town, the workers who lived there rioting for better med-tech, something about a biotoxin that had slipped through the sensors. Kyung was afraid if things didn’t calm down soon, he might have to ship them all back to a city and hire a whole new crop, although the threat of that, according to my mother, should be enough to settle anyone.

As the half-hour mark passed, I tuned out. After another twenty minutes my father stood up, giving his pants a surreptitious brush, like he wanted to shed himself of the rehab dirt lest it soil the seat of his car. A new car, according to my mother. After all, I’d ruined the last one.

“This has been a lot of excitement for you today, Lia,” he said politely. “You must be tired.”

I didn’t get tired anymore. I only shut down at night because it was on the schedule, and I only followed the schedule because I didn’t have anything better to do.

I nodded. They filed toward the doorway, and I followed, half-wishing I could leave with them and half-wishing they would go and never come back. This time my mother forced herself to hug me, and I let her, although I kept my arms at my sides. It was strange to have her so close without breathing in the familiar scent of rosemary. But then, it was probably strange for her, with our chests pressed together and her arms around my shoulders, that I wasn’t breathing at all. I thought about faking it for a few seconds, just to make things easier for her. But I didn’t.

“We’re so proud of you,” she whispered, as if I had done anything other than what I was told—turn off, turn on, survive. I felt something brush my cheek as she pulled away, but I couldn’t tell what. Maybe a stray hair. Maybe a tear. Maybe I was just wanting to feel something so badly that I’d imagined it.

My father squeezed my shoulder. The new body was taller than mine, I realized. He and I were the same height. He didn’t say he was proud of me.

Another family policy: Kahns don’t lie.

Zo was last, and I stopped her before she could slip out the door. Her hair was looking better than usual. Not so greasy. And cut shorter, so that it bounced around her shoulders, the way mine used to when it was real.

“Zo, people at school…” I kept my voice low, so our parents wouldn’t hear. “Are people asking about me? Or, you know. Talking about me?”

She gave me a funny half smile. “Aren’t they always?”

“No, I mean…” I didn’t know what I meant. “Have you seen, I mean, have you talked to any of my friends? You know, Terra or Cass or…”

“Walker knows I’m here, if that’s what you’re asking.” Zo leaned against the doorway and kept scratching at the bridge of her nose, which, unless she’d developed a rash, seemed mostly like a convenient way to stare at her hand rather than at me.

“Did he—” But if he’d sent along a message, she would have said so already. And if he hadn’t, I didn’t want to ask. Besides, he would never reach for me that way, through Zo. “Is he doing okay?”

“I know it’s hard to believe, but the world is managing to revolve on its axis even without your daily presence,” Zo snapped.

“Rotate.”

“What?”

“The world rotates on its axis,” I corrected her, because it was all I could think of to say.

“Right. It revolves around you. How could I forget?”

I grabbed her arm. She yanked it away, like I’d burned her. Her face twisted, just for a second, and then the apathetic funk was back so quickly, I almost thought I’d imagined the change. “Why are you acting like such a bitch?” I asked.

“Who says I’m acting?”

I hadn’t necessarily expected her to burst into tears and sweep me into her arms when she first saw me, just like I hadn’t expected her to tell me how much she loved me and missed me or to gush about how scary it had been when she thought I was going to die. I guess, knowing Zo, I hadn’t even expected her to be particularly nice. But we were sisters.

And she was the reason I had been in the car.

I’d expected… something.

“Come on, Zo. This isn’t you.”

She gave me a weird look. “How would you know?”

“I’m your sister,” I pointed out, aiming for nasty but landing uncomfortably close to needy.

She shrugged. “So I’m told.”

After she left, I sat down again on one of the uncomfortable benches and stared out the window, imagining them piling into the car, one big happy Lia-free family, driving away, driving home. Then I went back to my room, climbed into bed, and shut myself down.

I’d set my handy internal alarm to wake me nine hours later. But the brain was programmed to wake in the event of a loud noise. A survival strategy. The footsteps weren’t loud, but in the midnight quiet of floor thirteen they were loud enough.

“Sleeping Beauty arises.” A girl stood in the doorway, silhouetted by the hallway fluorescents, a cutout shadow with billowing black hair, slender arms, and just the right amount of curves. “I guess I don’t get to wake you with a kiss.” She stroked her fingers across the wall and the room came to light. I sat up in bed.

It wasn’t a girl. It was a skinner.

I knew it must be the one Sascha had told me about, the one I was supposed to be so eager to bond with. I was mostly eager for her to get out and leave me to the dark. She didn’t.

“You’re her,” I said. “Quinn. The other one.”

She crossed the room and, uninvited, sat down on the edge of the bed. “And here I thought I was the one and you were the other one.” She held out her hand.

I didn’t shake.

Instead I stared—I couldn’t help it. I’d never seen another mech-head, unless you counted the vids. Or the mirror. So this was what my parents saw when they looked at me. Something not quite machine and not quite human, something that was definitely a thing, even if it could lift its hand and tip its head and smile. It was better at smiling than I was, I noticed. If you focused on the mouth and looked away from the dead eyes, it almost looked real.

“You’re Lia,” Quinn said, dropping her hand after realizing I wasn’t going to take it. “And yes, it is nice to meet me. Thanks for saying so.”

I didn’t speak, figuring I could wait her out until she got bored and left. But the silence stretched out; I got bored first.

“Quinn what?” I asked.

“Lia who?” she said. “Or Lia when? Lia why? If you want to play a game, you have to fill me in on the rules. But fair warning: I play to win.”

So did I. At least, when I was in the mood. Which I wasn’t.

“What’s your last name?” I asked.

“Doesn’t matter.”

“I didn’t ask if it mattered, I just asked what it was.”

“It was something,” she said. “But now it’s irrelevant.”

I didn’t get her, and suspected that was the idea, like she thought I’d be so intrigued by her ridiculous air of mystery that I wouldn’t kick her out. I wondered if Sascha had put her up to it. If so, they were both seriously overestimating my level of curiosity. “What do you want?” I knew I sounded like a sulky kid. I didn’t care.

“Heard your parents finally showed. Figured I would see how it went.”

They’d driven two hours for a fifty-minute visit, then gotten the hell out.

“Great,” I said sourly. “Heartfelt family reunion. You know how it is.”

She raised her eyebrows. It was a nice trick, one I resolved to master myself. “Not really. My family’s not an issue.”

“Too perfect for ‘readjustment pains’?” I used Sascha’s favorite phrase for anything and everything that could possibly go wrong.

“Too dead.”

“Oh.”

I refused to feel guilty. Not when she’d so blatantly manipulated the conversation to reach this point. “Sorry.” I lay back down again and turned over on my side, my back to her; universal code for “go away.”

“Don’t you want the details?” Quinn asked, sounding disappointed. “The whole poor little orphan saga, from tragic start to triumphant finish?”

If I’d still had lungs, I would have sighed. Or faked a yawn. “Look, if Sascha sent you in here to give me the whole ‘you should be grateful for what you have’ guilt trip, I’m not interested. Yeah, it sucks that your parents are dead, but that doesn’t make mine any easier to deal with.”

Silence.

I couldn’t believe I’d just said that.

“I’m sorry.” I twisted in bed, risking a glance at her face.

She raised just one eyebrow this time, which was even more impressive. “Yeah. You are.” She turned away, revealing a broad swath of artificial flesh exposed by her backless shirt. I didn’t know how she could stand it. Even at night I tried to cover up as much as possible. The more of me I could hide under the clothes, the less there was for others—for me—to see. Beneath the clothes I could imagine myself normal. Quinn, on the other hand, left very little to the imagination. She stalked out of the room, but paused in the doorway, tapping her fingers against the wall console. Lights off, lights on. Lights off. “You coming?”

I was.

“What are you doing?” I whispered as we waited at the elevators. “It’s not like they’ll work for us.”

“Why not?”

“Because…” Wasn’t it obvious? “We’re not supposed to leave here. The elevators are probably programmed.”

“Have you actually tried?” Quinn sounded bored, like she already knew the answer.

“No, but—”

“I have.” The elevator door opened, and as I hesitated, she asked again. “You coming?”

It had never occurred to me that I would be allowed to leave floor thirteen. Of course, it had never occurred to me to want to.

“The other floors are biorestricted,” Quinn said, nodding toward the skimmer that would collect and analyze our DNA samples. If, that is, we’d had any to give. “But the ground floor’s all ours.”

“Where are we going?” It felt strange to be talking to someone new after all this time. I had no reason to trust her. But I did.

It’s because she’s like me, I thought. She knows.

But I pushed the thought away. It was like I’d told Sascha. Quinn and I had nothing in common but circuitry and some layers of flesh-colored polymer.

“Field trip.” She smiled, and, again, it killed me how much better her expressions were than mine, how much more natural. In the dark it had been easy to mistake her for someone real. No one would make that mistake about me. “Don’t get too excited.”

The grassy stretch bounding the woods was larger than it had looked from the lounge window. The grass was beaded with dew, cold drops that seeped through the thin BioMax pajamas, but that didn’t bother me. Just like the brutal wind raking across us didn’t matter.

“Can you imagine actually seeing the stars?” Quinn asked. She’d selected a dark swath of grass sandwiched between the floodlit puddles of light, then stripped off her clothes and let herself fall backward, naked against the brush. I kept my clothes on my body and my feet on the ground.

At least at first.

“Get down here,” Quinn had commanded.

“Look, Quinn, it’s okay if you… but I don’t—”

She laughed. “You think I brought you out here for that?” She stretched her arms out to her sides and down again, stick wings flapping through the grass. “Shirts or skins, I don’t care. Just lie down.”

I wasn’t about to take orders from her.

But I lay down.

“You used to be able to see them. Stars and planets and a moon,” she said now, pointing at the reddish sky.

The back of my neck was already smeared with dew. But she’d been right. It felt good to lie there in the grass, in the dark. The sky felt closer.

“You can still see the moon.” The telltale white haze was hanging low, making the clouds shimmer.

“Not like that,” Quinn said. “A bright white circle cut out of pure black. And stars like diamonds, everywhere.”

“I know. I’ve seen.”

“Not on the vids,” she said. “That doesn’t count.”

“It’s the same thing.”

“If you say so.”

We were quiet for a minute. I stared up, trying to imagine it, a clear sky, a million stars. Most of the vids I’d seen came from just before the war turned the atmosphere into a planet-size atomic dust ball. The dust was mostly gone—along with the people who’d built the nukes and the nut jobs who’d launched them and the thousands who’d gone up in smoke in the first attacks and the millions who’d been dead by the end of that year or the next. Along with the place called Mecca and the place called Jerusalem and all the other forgotten places that exist now only as meaningless syllables in the Pledge of Forgiveness. The dust was gone, but the stars had never come back. Pollution, cloud cover, ambient light, whatever chemicals they’d used to cleanse the air and patch up the ozone, the law of unintended consequences come to murky life. Someone would fix it someday, I figured. But until then? No stars. My parents talked about them sometimes, late at night, usually when they were dropped on downers, which made them goopy about the past. But I didn’t get the big deal. Who cared if the sky glowed reddish purple all night long? It was pretty, and wasn’t that the point?

“Why are we here, Quinn?”

She clawed her fingers into the ground and dug up two clumps of grass, letting the dirt sift through her fingers. “So we don’t miss any of it.”

“What?”

“This. Feeling. Seeing. Being. Everything. The dew. The cold. That sound, the wind in the grass. You hear that? It’s so… real.”

I didn’t know I’d had the hope until the hope died. So she wasn’t the same as me, after all; she didn’t understand. She didn’t get that none of it was real, not anymore, that the dew felt wrong, the cold felt wrong, the sounds sounded wrong, everything was wrong, everything was distant, everything was fake. Or maybe it was the opposite—everything was real except for me.

I’d been right the first time. Quinn and I had nothing in common. “Whatever you say.”

“It feels good, doesn’t it?” she asked.

“What does?” Nothing did.

“The grass.” She laughed. “Doesn’t it tickle?”

“Yeah. I guess.” No.

“It’s like us, you know.”

“What, the grass?” I said. “Why, because people around here are always walking on it?”

“Because it looks natural and all, but inside, it’s got a secret. It’s better. Manmade, right? New and improved.”

Just because the grass—like the trees, like the birds, like pretty much everything—had been genetically modified to survive the increasingly crappy climate, smoggy sky, and arid earth, didn’t make it like us. It was still alive. “The grass still looks like grass,” I told her. “Seen a mirror lately? There’s no secret. We look like… exactly what we are.”

“You got a boyfriend?”

“What?” Under other circumstances I would have wondered what she was on. But I knew all too well she wasn’t on anything. If there were such a thing as a drug for skinners, I’d be on permanent mental vacation.

“Or girlfriend, whatever.”

“Boyfriend,” I admitted. “Walker.”

“You two slamming?”

“What?”

“You. Walker. Slamming. Poking. Fucking. You need a definition? When a boy and a girl really love each other—”

“I know what it means. I just don’t think it’s any of your business.”

“I’m only asking because… Well, have you? Since, you know?”

The thought repulsed me. The idea of Walker’s hands touching the skin, the look on his face when he peered into the dead eyes, the feeling—the nonfeeling—of his lips on the pale pink flesh-textured sacs that rimmed my false teeth. The thick, clumsy thing that functioned as a tongue. Would I even know what to do, or would it be like learning to walk again? Or worse, I thought, remembering the grunting and squealing. Like learning to talk. And that was just kissing. Anything else… I couldn’t think about it. “Have you?” I countered.

She shook her head. “But look at my choices. Like I’m going to slam Asa?”

“You trying to make me vomit?”

“Good luck with that, considering the whole no-stomach thing.” She laughed. “Obviously options are limited. And I’ve been waiting a long time.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Longer than you. Four months, maybe? But that’s not what I’m talking about.” She didn’t offer to explain.

This girl was completely creeping me out. But not in an entirely bad way.

“So you haven’t, uh, had any visitors?” I asked finally. “No guys or… whatever?”

“No guys. No whatevers.”

“Sorry.”

“Why?” Quinn sat up, crossing her legs and resting her elbows on her knees. “According to you, it’s not like I’m missing out on much family fun time.”

“Yeah, but…”

“Go ahead,” she said.

“What?”

“Ask. You know you want to.” Quinn brushed her hands through her long, black hair, smiling. “I love this,” she said, dropping the inky curtain across her face, and then giving her head a violent shake, whipping the hair back over her shoulders. “They got it exactly right.”

She was crazy, I decided. It was as if she liked living like this.

“Go ahead, ask,” she said again. “I really don’t care.”

“And I really don’t want to know,” I lied. “But fine. Why no visitors?”

“Dead parents, remember?”

If she wanted to act like it was no big deal, so would I. “Yeah. You said. Poor little orphan. But there’s got to be someone.”

She lay back down in the grass, turning her face away from me. “Doctors. Staff. No one important. Not that it matters now.”

“Why not?”

“Because everything’s different now. Once I’m out of here? It’s a new life. Anything I want. Anything.”

“How did they die?” I asked quietly.

“I thought you didn’t want to hear the tragic saga?”

“Maybe I changed my mind. Unless it’s too hard for you to talk about.” But I didn’t say it the way Sascha would have, all fake sensitive and understanding. I said it like a challenge, and that’s the way she took it.

“Okay, but I’m just warning you, it’s quite tragic. You’re going to feel pretty sorry for me.”

“Don’t count on it.”

“It was a car accident,” she said.

I flinched. And even in the darkness she must have seen.

“Yeah, weird, isn’t it? Who gets in car crashes anymore? But here we are. Statistically improbable freaks.”

“Were you in the car? When it…”

“I was three. We were—” She paused, then barked out a laugh. “This is the first time I’ve ever had to actually tell someone, you know? I didn’t know it would be so…”

“You never told anyone?” That was too much, too soon. Especially from a girl who wouldn’t even tell me her last name.

“It’s not like you’re special or anything. I just don’t… I don’t meet a lot of new people. Or I didn’t. Before.”

“You don’t have to—”

“I was three,” she said quickly. “We were going to visit someone, I don’t even know who. I just remember they got me all dressed up, and it was exciting. I mean, they must have taken me off the grounds before, at least a couple times, but I guess I was too young to remember. I remember this, though. I remember being in the car seat, and listening to some song, and playing some stupid vidgame for babies—You remember, the one with the dinosaurs?”

I nodded.

“I was winning. And then—I don’t know. I don’t remember. Next thing, I wake up, and I’m in a hospital. They’re dead. And I’m…” She threaded her fingers through her hair, then let her arms fall across her face. “It was a bad accident.”

“You were hurt.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Bad?” I guessed.

“Worse.”

“Worse than what?”

“Than whatever you’re picturing. Worse.” Her voice hardened. “Let’s just say that prosthetics and organ transplants and all that? Fine. Great, if you’re an adult. But when you break a three-year-old, it’s not so easy to put her together again.”

Enough, I thought. I get it. But I didn’t say anything. And she didn’t stop.

“Picture a room. Lots of machines. A bed. People to shovel in the food, shovel out the shit, shoot up the painkillers. People to clean. People to do anything and everything. And in the bed, well… a thing that eats and shits and gets high and gets cleaned and the rest of the time just pretty much lays there.”

But I didn’t want to picture it. “How long did it take?”

“To what?”

“To recover.”

“Who said I recovered?”

“I just assumed….”

“Sorry to disappoint, but that was it. That room. That bed.”

“But what about school? What about friends, or…” Or a life.

“I saw it all on the vids. Same thing, right? That’s what you said.”

That’s what I had said.

“I had it all,” she said. “Stuff to read. People to talk to. Vids to watch. The whole network at my fingertips. Well, not fingertips. There weren’t any of those. But I got by. Massive amounts of credit will do that for you. And then as soon as I turned sixteen…”

“What?”

She stood up. “This,” she said, sweeping her arms out and spinning around. “This body that actually works. This life. Anything I want.”

“You did this to yourself?” I asked, incredulous. “On purpose?”

“Did you hear anything I said?”

“I did, I get it, I just can’t imagine anyone actually choosing… this.”

“You obviously don’t get it. Or you would see this was better than anything I could have had. And from what I hear, anything you could have had, after what happened.”

I should have known. The inevitable you-should-be-grateful guilt-trip bullshit. Like she knew anything about me.

“You let them kill you,” I said. “You walked in here—”

“Walked.” She snorted. “Yeah, right.”

“—and asked them to kill you. To chop up your brain, make a copy, and stick it into some machine.”

“Damn right. Quinn Sharpe is dead. I would have killed her myself, if I could. You’re walking around here all day sulking—yeah, I’ve been watching; you’ve been too busy whining to notice—when you should be celebrating. You should be fucking ecstatic.”

“Look, I get it, I do. It makes sense, why you’d want to do it. And I get why this would seem better for you than before. But it’s different for me. What I was, what I lost—It’s different.”

Quinn shook her head. “The only difference is that you don’t get it, not yet. It doesn’t matter how you got here. What matters is that we’re here, now. The past is over. The people we were? Dead. Like you would be. Like you should be. Dead. You want the rest of your life to be a funeral? Or you want to actually live?”

That was my cue. I was supposed to jump to my feet and clasp her hands, spin in circles, somersault through the grass, dance in the moonlight, drink in the fact that I could swing my arms and pump my legs, that I was alive, in motion, in control. I was supposed to embrace the possibilities and the future, to wake up to a new life. It would be the turning point, some kind of spiritual rehabilitation, an end to the sulking and the self-pitying, a beginning of everything.

I lay still.

“You’ll figure it out.” She shrugged. “I’m heading back up. You coming?”

“Later.”

Shooting me a wicked grin, Quinn sprinted back toward the building, her hair streaming behind her and shimmering under the fluorescent lights, her clothes abandoned in a pile by my head. She ran flat-out, full-speed, running like she didn’t know how, arms flailing, feet stomping, rhythm erratic, running like little kids run, without pacing or strategy, running like nothing mattered but the next step. Running just to run. I wanted to join her, to race her, to beat her, and in that moment I knew the legs could do it. I knew I could do it.

I lay still.

I’m not like her, I told myself. Quinn’s life had sucked. Mine hadn’t. Quinn needed a new start. I didn’t. Quinn, if she wanted—because she wanted—was a different person now.

I wasn’t.

No wonder my father had treated me like a stranger that afternoon. I was acting like one. I was sulking in my room, I was snapping at people who were only trying to help. I was shutting myself off, shutting myself down; I was spewing self-pity. I was lying around, standing still, wasting time wondering what I was going to do and who I was going to be, when the answer was obvious. I was the same person I had always been. I was Lia Kahn. And I was going to do what Lia Kahn always did. Get by. Get through. Work. Win.

I wasn’t a skinner. I wasn’t a mech-head. I was Lia Kahn. And it was about time I started acting like it.

One week later they sent me home.