Skinned Page 10

  Walker and I, on the other hand, did nothing but talk. Which wasn’t exactly our strong suit. I didn’t see him at school, not for days. That was no accident. He was avoiding me, and for a while, I let him. I wasn’t stupid. It’s not like I expected we’d just keep going like nothing had happened. Not right away, at least. He was weirded out, so for a few days, I let him hide. But I knew Walker, and I knew what he needed, even if he didn’t. He needed me.

  I staked out his car. He emerged from the building surrounded by people—girls, to be specific, but there was nothing new about that. Walker was that type; he got off on it. But that was fine, because he always ended up with me. As he did this time. The girls spotted me before he did, and faded away.

  I watched him walk. It was more of a lope, arms swinging wide, legs sucking up pavement. Walker had never asked me out, not in any kind of sweaty-palmed, bumbling, would-you-like-to-whatever kind of thing, not that anyone did that, but if someone were going to, it wouldn’t be Walker. When it happened, it had happened fast and unmemorably, as if all along both of us had known we would eventually end up together. There had been yet another party, yet another buzz. There had been a late-night, early-morning haze, a group of us sprawled on someone’s floor, heads on stomachs, legs tangled, fingers absentmindedly intertwined, lids dropping shut until only two of us were awake, and while I hadn’t been waiting up for him and he hadn’t been waiting up for me, it seemed like we had. Like the whole night—the party, the group, everything—had been expressly designed to deliver us to this point, to an empty patch of carpet shadowed by the couch, to his arm oh-so-casually sprawled across my thigh, to whatever would happen when he slid toward me and I rolled to face him and our bodies ate up the space between. By which I mean, I had known him forever, but I had never wanted him—until that night, when I suddenly did. He was the one who acted. Brushed my hair out of my face. Kissed me, sleepy-eyed and loose-lipped, soft, and then, like we’d waited too long, even though we hadn’t waited at all, hard. Afterward, when it was already obvious that this wasn’t just another night, that this was a beginning of something, he pretended that he’d been planning it for a while, secretly pining and plotting. He wasn’t lying, not to me, at least. I knew he believed it. But I also knew it had been the same for him as it was for me: lying there, fighting sleep without knowing why, knowing there was a reason to stay awake, something that needed doing, and then, somehow, just knowing.

  And doing.

  “You’re avoiding me,” I said, leaning against the hood of the car.

  He shook his head no.

  I shook my head yes.

  He shrugged. “Been busy.”

  “You’re never busy,” I said.

  “Things change.”

  Tell me something I don’t know.

  “Walker, I…”

  “What?”

  I let myself sink back against the car. It was a thing; it had no choice but to hold me up. “It’s been a long week, that’s all.”

  “You want to…talk about it?”

  “Not really.” And I wasn’t even saying that because I knew he wanted me to, although he clearly did. Mostly I just wanted him to kiss me again, for real this time. But what was I supposed to do. Ask?

  “So…you want to get something to eat?”

  I just looked at him.

  “Oh. Yeah. Sorry.”

  “No problem.” He would learn; we would adjust.

  “You want to come over, play some Akira?” he said.

  We’d been into the game for months, although he liked it more than I did, especially since he spent most of his play on hunting ghosts in Akira’s craggy moonscape, and zooming down the canyons and slithering through the worm-ridden tunnels always made me a little motion sick. Not that queasiness was much of a problem anymore, but boredom was. Generally after twenty minutes or so of busting virtual creepy crawlies while Walker flirted with slutty snake-women, their naked chests covered with shimmering scales and their users probably a thousand miles away, looking for a quick and easy love-link, I was ready for a nap. Or at least, I was ready to lie down. Usually, with the right combination of sulk and seduction, with Walker on top of me. And maybe that was the point.

  “Sure.”

  And soon, side by side on his couch, goggled up and strapped in, we disappeared into the world of the game, his av and mine creeping down haunted hallways, hand in hand, touching without feeling, reality forgotten, or at least irrelevant, which was enough.

  It was enough until it wasn’t anymore, and then I slipped out of the game and back into the world. He stayed in, twitching, ducking his head, clutching the air, and grabbing for invisible demons, a careful space between us. I could have touched him then. He was too lost in the virtual universe to notice a hand on his leg, his lower back, his face. I’d done it before, more than once, making a game of it; how far could I go before calling him back to the surface, how deep had he sunk, how quickly could I reel him back in. But I didn’t touch him, just waited for him to tire of the game, and when he did, I went home.

  “No,” the coach said when I finally found the courage to ask her. “I’m sorry, Lia. I wish I could, but…no.”

  “I know I’m out of shape, but I can get up to speed. I know I can.”

  “It’s not that.” She was slim and blond, and I wondered, as I often did, why she’d chosen coaching as her hobby instead of teaching or crafts. Something cozy and indoors, like most in her position, afraid of leathering their skin under the open sky. I got that she had to do something. It was a social imperative for the jobless rich, since the children of the wealthy weren’t going to raise themselves (nor, obviously, be raised by the parents of the poor), but why opt for something that required so much actual work?

  I suspected it was because, like me, she loved to run. Missed it, missed the uniforms and the competitions and the trophies and even the outdoors. I could imagine myself doing the same thing—except, of course, that I was destined for productivity. Let my spouse, whoever he turned out to be, ply his hobbies. I’d been informed from day one—still in diapers, spitting and drooling—that I would have a career. Eventually.

  In the meantime I would run.

  “Did you give my spot away?” I asked, glancing over at the track. Zo was powering through her second mile. We had the same genetic advantages, I reminded myself. The same muscle tone, coordination, stamina—she’d just never bothered to use hers before. And meanwhile I’d used mine up.

  “It’s not that, either.”

  “What, then?”

  “It’s…” She looked me up and down, then grimaced, like it was my fault for making her say it. “Lia, I can’t let you run with the team, not like this. It wouldn’t be fair.”

  “What’s not fair?” I asked. “It’s not like I can run any faster.”

  “I have no evidence of that,” she said. “As far as the league is concerned, you’d be running with an unfair advantage.”

  That was almost funny. “Trust me, there’s no advantage.”

  “It’s just not natural.”

  I couldn’t believe it. More to the point, I couldn’t accept it. I needed to run. “Jay Chesin runs with a prosthetic leg—that’s not natural.”

  “That’s different.”

  I closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them, I caught her sagging a bit in relief, as if she’d spent the whole conversation waiting—in vain—for me to blink.

  “What about the Ana League? I’d run with them if I had to.” As far as I was concerned, it wasn’t real running, not if you were chemically amping your strength and speed. I knew I’d never be able to keep up if I ran natural, but much as I loved my trophies, I didn’t need to win. I needed to run.

  The coach shook her head again. “They won’t let you run either.”

  “But they’re anabolic,” I said. Paused, reminded myself not to whine. Be calm. Be rational. Be irrefutable. “It’s a whole league for people who don’t play fair. How can I be against the rules if there are n
o rules?”

  “There are rules,” she said, mouthing the official party line, even though everyone knew the Ana League was anything goes. “They wouldn’t let you drive a car to the finish line…and they won’t let you run. Not like this.”

  “But—”

  “Lia, be realistic,” she snapped. “You don’t breathe. You don’t get tired. For all anyone knows, you can run as fast as you want, as far as you want. Slotting you in would make a mockery of the whole race. Do you really want to ruin things for everyone else?”

  I didn’t care about everyone else. And until recently I’d never needed to pretend I did. When you’re winning, no one expects you to care. They only expect you to keep winning.

  “I guess not,” I said.

  “I really am sorry.” Like we could be friends again, now that I’d let her pretend she was doing the right thing.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Yes.” She looked like she wanted to say no.

  “Is it actually written in the rules somewhere that…” I still didn’t know what to call the thing I’d become. “…people in my situation aren’t eligible?”

  The coach hesitated. “This particular…situation hasn’t come up before. Not in this league.”

  “So you’re just assuming, then.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “If the league didn’t care—if I got my father to talk to someone and made it okay—would you want me back on the team?” I could have done it. I knew it, and she knew it. It’s not about the money, my father always said. These days everyone has money. It’s about the power. And he had that, too.

  But that wasn’t the question. I wasn’t asking if I could bully my way back onto the team. I was asking whether she wanted me to.

  This time she didn’t hesitate at all. “No.”

  Friday morning was Persuasive Speech, a weekly dose of posture, comportment, and projection techniques intended to smooth our eventual rise into the ranks of social and political prominence. The road to power may have been paved with lies, but according to Persuasive Speech guru M. Stafford, said lies had to be carefully candy coated with a paper-thin layer of truth. Or at least, the appearance of truth.

  M. Stafford, of course, rarely told us anything we didn’t already know.

  Of all the useless classes the Helmsley School offered—and there was little else on the menu—none was more useless than Persuasive Speech. M. Stafford was big into tedious presentations on even more tedious current events, which didn’t persuade us of anything except that we’d made an enormous mistake signing up for the class in the first place. A mistake, at least, for anyone who’d been expecting to learn something. For those of us expecting an easy A and plenty of time to lounge in the back of the room, linked in and zoned out while M. Stafford carefully ignored her snoozing audience, it fulfilled our every need.

  So, all good. Except that while I’d been out “uh, sick”—that was M. Stafford’s feeble euphemism—Becca Mai had transferred into the class, and M. Stafford had given my seat away. Which meant that Becca sat in back with Cass and Terra and Bliss while I was stuck at a broken desk in the front row, wobbling on the loose leg every time I shifted my weight and trying to pretend that Auden Heller wasn’t aiming his creepy stare squarely in my direction.

  I was—well, “sure” would be the wrong word, but let’s say “willing to accept the possibility”—that Auden didn’t intend to be creepy. He’d never been particularly creepy before. But then, he’d never been much of anything, except different, and not in the right way. Those glasses, for one thing. No one needed glasses anymore. At least, no one who could afford the fix, and no one without enough credit for that would have been allowed within fifty miles of the Helmsley School. There were net-linked glasses, of course, but those hadn’t been popular since we were kids. Now anyone who wanted that kind of access (and that kind of headache) could just pop in a lens while everyone else went back to screens and keyboards. The only reason to wear glasses now—especially glasses without tech—was to look different. It was the same with his watch. They didn’t even make watches anymore. FlexiViMs you could wrap around your wrist, or tattoo onto your forearm? Yes. But all the watch did was tell time, and—as I’d discovered one day a few years ago when one of Walker’s idiot friends snagged the watch to see if it would make Auden cry—it didn’t even do that right. A couple of miniature sticks swept out circle after circle, and you had to calculate the angles to even know the hour. And, yes, I was smart enough to figure it out, but why bother to do a math problem every time you want to know what time it is, when you can just get your ViM to flash the info and then move on with your life?

  We’d been assigned to deliver a five-minute speech on a current issue that we felt strongly about. “We” didn’t include “me.” I’d been excused by virtue of my “uh, extended illness.” I wondered how M. Stafford would, if pressed, describe my sickly condition. Did she consider death, in my case, to be a fatal disease?

  Auden went first, stammering his way through some lunatic theory that the government could solve the energy crisis whenever it wanted, but preferred using the power shortage to control the cities and the poor, oppressed masses who lived there. He didn’t explain where he thought all this magical energy was going to come from, or why, if the masses were so sad and oppressed, they never did anything about it. Everyone knew you could work your way out of the city if you wanted, and not just to a corp-town—although even that was better since you were guaranteed power and med-tech—but to a real life. If they didn’t want to bother, how was that our problem?

  Auden’s conspiracy theories never came with much evidence or follow-through. I suspected he just liked getting a rise out of people with his flashy, if stupid, claims: The corps are secretly running the country! The Disneypocalypse was an inside job! The organic farmers poisoned the corn crop and pinned it on the terrorists to scare people away from mass production! B-mods are the opium of the masses! Apparently, if they made good slogans, they didn’t have to make good sense.

  Next up, Sarit Rifkin, whose speech on the importance of eating more red meat didn’t include the fact that her family owned the county’s only cattle farm and reaped credit for every steak sold. Cass detailed the criteria she used to select new shoes. Fox T. spewed five minutes of crap about his favorite tactics for racking up Akira kills. Fox J.—also known as Red-tailed Fox, less because of his long auburn ponytail than because of the time he and Becca started making out in her father’s kitchen and Fox planted his ass on the stove, apparently so engrossed in the hot and heavy that it took him a full minute to realize the stove was on—got in about half a minute of arguing that chest lift-tucks should be mandatory for everyone overage and under a C cup before M. Stafford cut him off.

  That was when Bliss, with her Fox-approved D cups, took the podium. She stood there for a long moment without speaking.

  M. Stafford had the kind of voice you might use to talk to a mental patient, slow and measured and just a little too understanding. “Go on, Bliss.”

  Bliss shifted her weight. “I’m not sure I should.”

  “Are you sure you want to pass the class?”

  Bliss reddened. Then glared at me, like she was daring me to blame her for going forward. “I wrote this last week,” she said defensively. “Before I knew that—” She stopped. “I wrote this last week.”

  “Then you should be tired of waiting to deliver it,” M. Stafford said. “Go on, we won’t bite.”

  Bliss Tanzen did bite, I happened to know—courtesy of Walker, who had been out with her a few times before trading up.

  She cleared her throat. “A mechanical copy, no matter how detailed or exact, can never be anything more than an artificial replica of human life.”

  I sat very still, face blank.

  “It is for this reason that I argue that recipients of the download procedure should not be afforded the same rights and privileges of human citizens of society.”

  I look
ed up, just for a second, long enough to note that everyone was staring at me, including M. Stafford. Everyone, with two exceptions: Bliss had her eyes fixed on her clunky speech. Auden had his eyes fixed on Bliss.

  “You don’t have to believe in something called a soul”—someone in back snickered at the word—“to believe that a person can’t just be copied into a computer. They call it a copy because that’s what it is—not the real thing. Just a computer that’s been programmed to act that way.”

  M. Stafford wasn’t going to stop her, I realized. Nor were Cass or Terra or anyone else. And I certainly wasn’t going to say anything. Four more minutes, I told myself. Just tune her out and, when it’s over, move on.

  “Skinners can talk,” Bliss said. Fox J.’s use of the term “tits” had been deemed too offensive for our sensitive ears, but apparently “skinner” was just fine. “But so can my refrigerator, if it thinks I need more iron in my diet. Skinners can move, but so can my car, if I tell it where to go. My refrigerator doesn’t get to vote, and my car doesn’t get to use my credit to buy itself a new paint job.”

  “She’s not a car!” Auden said loudly.

  I wanted to slink down in my seat—slink under my seat. But I stayed still.

  “No interruptions,” M. Stafford snapped. “We allowed you the privilege of speaking your mind; please respect your classmates enough to do the same.”

  “My mind isn’t filled with ignorant trash,” Auden said. “And what about respecting Lia?”

  I wanted to strangle him.

  “You can stay silent or you can go,” M. Stafford said.

  Auden went. M. Stafford looked at me, her face unreadable. “Anyone else?”

  I wasn’t sure if it was an offer or a warning. Either way, I ignored it. And when Bliss continued, I ignored her too.

  When class finally ended, I stayed in my seat long enough to let everyone else drift out of the room. Then I waited just a moment longer, preparing myself for the inevitable onslaught of pity that would hit once I stepped into the hallway, Cass and Terra and random clingers assuring me that I shouldn’t listen, that Bliss was a moron, that she was just jealous, that they were here if I needed to talk—which I did not. Nor did I need anyone’s pity, but I would accept it with grace, because I had been well trained. Rudeness was a sign of weakness. Grace stemmed from power, the power to accept anything and move on.