Skinned by Robin Wasserman Read Free Book Online

sent it the night of the accident, when I was still alive, when, according to call-me-Ben, I was hemorrhaging and suffocating and seizing, all at the same time.
    The next one came weeks later, when I was lying in the bed, eyes closed, listening to footsteps and waiting to die.
    “The turtle is hungry,” it says. “The turtle is starving.”
    Code. Left over from our first few months, when Zo wouldn’t go away. She was always snooping in my room and hacking my zone, all big ears and a bigger mouth, so Walker and I talked in riddles and nonsense until eventually she left and we stopped talking altogether.
    “The turtle is hungry.”
    Meant “I love you.”
    I want to see him. I want to touch him. I want to at least voice him back. But what would I say?
    Ahhh ovvvvv ooooooo.
    We speak in different codes now.
    I stay in stealth mode. They are all linked in and to one another, Cass to Terra to Walker to Zo, all in priv-mode, and I wonder if they are talking about me, but I can’t find out without showing myself, and I can’t do that, not today.
    There are 7,346 new pub-pics and texts, and there will be more behind their priv-walls, and I know I should catch up, but I can’t do that, either.
    There’s no point.
    I try my favorite vidlife, technically a realistic one because there are no vampires or superheroes, but there’s nothing particularly realistic about the number of people Aileen manages to screw—and screw over—each night. Since the last time I watched, Aileen has already forgotten about Case, and is screwing some new guy and, secretly, the new guy’s sister, who’s engaged to Aileen’s former best friend’s cousin, and I can’t keep up with all the new names and bodies, and I don’t understand how so much can happen in six weeks.
    I used to feel sorry for the woman who lives as Aileen, and for Case and for all of them. I used to think it was pathetic, arranging your life around someone else’s script, letting some random text the words you were forced to speak. So they got rich on it, so they got famous, so I watched all night sometimes because I didn’t want to miss anything, so what? It wasn’t their life they were living, it wasn’t anyone’s.
    But now I don’t know.
    If someone gave me a script, if someone whispered in my ear and told me how to act, what to say, what to do, if I could be their puppet and they could pull the strings, that would be easier. That would, maybe, be okay. But I have no script and no off-screen directions, and I sit frozen, watching the screen, waiting to know what to do.
    Whatever else has changed, at least my av is still the same.
    There was a time when I changed it every day—new eyes, new hair, bunny whiskers one day, cat ears the next—but that was before. That was kid stuff. Now my av is me, the virtual Lia, the better Lia, the Lia that would exist in a world without limits. Purple hair so dark it looks black, until you see it shimmer in the light. Violet eyes; wide, long lashes pooling across half the head, like in the animevids. Pouty blue lips. The morning of the accident, I gave her a pink boa and spray-on mini, like the one I’d just seen a pop-up for but knew I probably wouldn’t have enough credit to buy, because that’s another of my father’s favorite lines: “ We’re not rich. I’m rich.” The credit is mine to ask for; his, depending on his mood, to deny. Now I wonder whether I am the virtual Lia, while my av is real. There is nothing left of what I used to be.
    But she is exactly the same.
     
     
    I didn’t get in touch with Walker, not that night or any of the nights that followed. Even after I got my voice back— a voice, at least, although it would never sound like mine —I couldn’t do it. I didn’t know what I would say. I didn’t want to know what he would.
    “I still think it might be good for you to meet with one of our other clients,” Sascha said. “She’s your age.”
    That meant nothing. All the skinners were my age.