Skinned

by Robin Wasserman

  I flashed on the image of the two of them, lips fused. If she wasn’t enjoying it, she was a better actress than I’d thought. “Then why—”

  “Because she would have wanted me to protect what she had.” Zo looked down. “Because if someone’s going to replace her, it damn well isn’t going to be you.”

  “But it is me.” I came closer again. She stiffened.

  “Don’t touch me.”

  “Fine.” I stayed a couple feet away, hands in the air. See? Harmless. “I’m not dead. I’m not. You didn’t kill me. I know I look…different.” I wanted to laugh at the understatement, but it didn’t seem like the time. “It’s still me. Your sister.”

  Zo shook her head. “No.”

  “Remember when we had that food fight with the onion dip? Or when we got iced in the house for a week and filmed our own vidlife?” I asked desperately. “Or how about the time you thought I hacked your zone and posted that baby pic of you, the one in the bathtub?”

  “You did,” she muttered.

  “Of course I did,” I said, grinning. “But only because you rigged my smartjeans and I ended up bare-assed in front of the whole seventh-grade class.”

  She almost laughed.

  “How would I know all that unless I was there?” I asked. “Every fight we ever had, every secret you ever blabbed, everything. I know it. Because I was there. Me, Zo. Lia. It’s still me.”

  She looked like she wanted to believe it.

  But she decided not to. I saw it happen. The mask fell back over her features, stiffening her lips, hardening her eyes. She decided not to care.

  “No,” she said. “Lia’s dead. You’re a machine with her memories. That doesn’t make you real. It definitely doesn’t make you her.”

  “Then why am I still here?” I asked angrily. “If I’m just some imposter, why do Mom and Dad—excuse me, your mother and father—want me living in Lia’s house? In Lia’s room.”

  “They don’t,” she murmured.

  “What?” But I’d heard her.

  “They don’t,” she said louder. “They don’t want you here. They wish you’d never come.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “You wish.”

  “They love me,” I said, needing to believe it. “They know it’s me.”

  “They loved their daughter. Past tense. You just make it hurt more. They thought you’d make it better. That’s why they did it—made you, like you’d be some kind of replacement. But you make everything worse.”

  “You’re lying,” I said again. It was the only weapon I had.

  “If I am, then why is Dad up every night, crying?”

  “He doesn’t cry.”

  “He didn’t used to,” Zo said. “But he does now. Thanks to you. Every night since you came home. He waits until he thinks we’re all asleep, he goes to his study, and he cries. Sometimes all night. Don’t believe me? He’s probably at it right now. See for yourself.”

  “Get out of my room.” Nothing she said could make me believe that about my father. Nothing.

  “None of us want you here,” she said.

  “Get out!”

  Zo shook her head. “I should feel sorry for you, I guess. But I can’t.”

  She slammed the door behind her.

  I told myself she was lying. Being cruel for the sake of cruelty. And maybe I couldn’t blame her, if she really thought her sister was dead, if she thought it was her fault. But that didn’t mean I had to believe her about our parents.

  If my mother had fallen apart, if she thought I was just an inferior copy—Well, that I could deal with. It made even more sense than Zo. Our mother was weak, always had been. It wasn’t her fault; it didn’t mean I didn’t love her. But it meant lower expectations.

  My father was different.

  He was the strong one, the smart one.

  And, although I knew he would never admit it—not to me, not to Zo, not to anyone—I was his favorite. He was the one who knew me the best, who loved me the best. No, things hadn’t been the same since the accident, but they were getting better. It would take some time, but I would get him back. Because he saw me for who I was, Lia Kahn.

  His daughter.

  I knew Zo was lying. I was sure. But not so sure that I stayed in my room and lay down in bed and closed my eyes. Not so sure that I didn’t need proof.

  My parents always turned on their soundproofing before they went to bed. So they wouldn’t have heard Zo and me fight, not if they were already asleep. As they should have been at three in the morning. But when I crept downstairs, I saw the light filtering through the crack between the door to the study and the marble floor. And when I pressed my ear to the heavy door, I heard something.

  Gently, noiselessly, I eased open the door.

  He was on his knees.

  He faced away from me, his head bent. His shoulders shook.

  “Please,” he said, in a hoarse, anguished voice. I flinched, thinking he must be speaking to me, that he knew I was there and wanted me to leave before I hurt him even more. But it was worse than that.

  “Please, God, please believe me.”

  My father didn’t pray. My father didn’t believe in God. Faith was for the weak, he had always taught us. Backward-thinking, cowering, misguided fools who preferred to imagine their destiny lay in someone else’s hands.

  “I’m sorry.”

  And worse than faith in God, my father had taught us, was the ridiculous faith in a God who listened to human prayers, who had nothing better to do than stroke egos and grant wishes. An omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent being who troubled himself with the minor missteps of the mortal world.

  “Please forgive me.”

  He hunched over, bringing his forehead to his knees. “I did this to her. It was my choice. I did this. Please. Please forgive me. If I could do it again…” His whole body shuddered. “I would make the right choice this time. If I had a second chance, please…”

  I closed the door on his sobs.

  The right choice.

  Meaning, the choice he hadn’t made.

  The choice to let me die.

  LETTING GO

  “They would age, they would die. I would live.”

  There was only one place I wanted to go. And only one person I wanted with me. If he was willing. I left two messages, voice and text, both with the same apology, the same request, and the same coordinates. Then I snuck out of the house—easy enough when no one cared where you went or when—and pushed the car as fast as it would go, knowing that the longer it took to get there, the more likely I’d be to turn back. The waterfall looked even steeper than I’d remembered it.

  I had forgotten how at night, you couldn’t see anything of the bottom except a fuzzy mist of white far, far below. I had forgotten how loud it was.

  But I had also forgotten to be afraid.

  Auden wasn’t there.

  But then, I hadn’t told him to meet me at the top. My message had been very clear, the coordinates specific. If he’d woken up—and if he’d forgiven me—he would be waiting at the bottom. I would tell him everything that had happened, what my sister had said. I might even tell him how my father had looked, trembling on his knees, bowing down to a god in whom he was, apparently, too desperate not to believe. And just telling Auden would make it better. I knew that.

  But this was something I had to do without him. Just another thing he could never understand, because he was an org. He was human, and I was—it was finally time to accept this—not. Which is why he was waiting at the bottom, if he was waiting at all. And I was at the top, alone.

  I took off my shoes. Then, on impulse, I stripped off the rest of my clothes. That felt better. Nothing between me and the night. The wind was brutal. The water, I knew, would be like ice. But my body was designed to handle that, and more. My body would be just fine.

  I waded into the water, fighting to keep my balance as the current swept over my ankles, my calves, my thighs, my waist. Wet, my brain informed
me. Cold. And on the riverbed, muddy. Rocky. Sharp. The temperatures, the textures, they didn’t matter, not yet. But I knew when I got close enough to the edge, when the water swept me over, the sensations would flood me, and in the chaos the distance between me and the world would disappear.

  Not that I was doing it for an adrenaline rush. Or for the fear or the pain or even the pleasure. I wasn’t trying to prove something to anyone, not even myself. It wasn’t about that.

  It was about Zo and my father and Walker and all of them—all of them who hated what I’d become. Maybe becaus it had replaced the Lia they really wanted or because it was ugly and different and, just possibly, if Jude was right, better. Maybe they were scared. I didn’t know. I didn’t care. I just knew they hated me. I knew my sister didn’t believe I existed, and wanted me gone. My father wished—prayed—I was dead. Maybe it would be easier for all of them if I was.

  Too bad.

  I was alive. In my own unique, mechanical way, maybe. But alive. And I was going to stay that way for the foreseeable future. They would age, they would die. I would live.

  There were too many people too afraid of what I’d become. I wasn’t going to be one of them. Not anymore.

  I didn’t take a deep breath.

  I didn’t close my eyes.

  I stretched my arms out.

  I shifted my weight forward.

  I let myself fall.

  The world spun around me. The wind howled, and it sounded like a voice, screaming my name. The water thundered. The spray misted my body. And then I crashed into the surface, and there was nothing but rocks and water and a whooshing roar. And the water dragged me down, gravity dragged me down, down and down and down, thumping and sliding against the rocks, water in my eyes, in my mouth, in my nose. It was too loud to hear myself scream, but I screamed, and the water flooded in and choked off the noise. There was no time, no space in my head, to think I’m going to die or I can’t die or Why am I still falling, where is the bottom, when is the end? There was no space for anything but the thunder and the water, as if I was the water, pouring down the rocks, gashed and sliced and battered and slammed and still whole, still falling—and then the river rose up to meet me, and the water sucked me down and I was beneath, where it was calm. Where it was silent.

  Still alive, I thought, floating in the dark, safe beneath the storm of falling water.

  Still here.

  I closed my eyes, opened them, but the darkness of the water was absolute. I was floating again, like I had in the beginning, a mind without a body. Eyes, a thought, maybe a soul—and nothing else. But this time I wasn’t afraid.

  I let myself rise to the surface. The water slammed me, like a building crumbling down on my head, and again sucked me under.

  And again the silence, again up to the surface, again the storm, and again sucked down to the depths.

  I wasn’t afraid. I knew I could stay below, swim far enough from the base of the falls to surface in safety. When I was ready. Which I wasn’t, not yet. I was content to stay in the whirlpool, limp and battered, letting the water do what it wanted, filling myself up with the knowledge that I had done it, that I had jumped, that I had fallen. I had survived. I was alive; I was invincible. I wasn’t ready for it to end.

  Until I surfaced and heard the wind scream my name again. Except it wasn’t the wind, it was Auden, who had come for me, who was screaming. I screamed back, but the water poured into my mouth. I waved an arm, but the water sucked me down again, and when I fought back to the surface, Auden was gone.

  Then I did swim, deep and swift, my mind starting to seep back into itself and with it, panic. I was still invincible; Auden wasn’t. I surfaced again, a safe distance from the churning water at the base of the falls. Nothing.

  “Auden!”

  Nothing.

  Then back down into the dark, swimming blind, my arms outstretched, so that even if I couldn’t see him, I would feel him, but there was just the water, parting easily as my body sliced through, water and more water and no Auden.

  Until I broke through the surface and there he was, gasping and struggling to stay afloat, his hair plastered to his face, his eyes squinty and his glasses long gone. I grabbed him, squeezed tight, kicking hard enough to keep us both afloat.

  “Are you okay?” As we drifted away from the falls, the water grew shallower until we hit a point where our feet touched the bottom, midway between the base of the first waterfall and the edge of the second, smaller drop-off.

  “Okay,” he said, panting. The current was lighter here, easy enough to fight. “You?”

  “Fine. What the hell are you doing?”

  “Rescuing you.” He shivered in my grasp. “You were drowning.”

  I shook my head.

  He looked like he wanted to drop down into the water and never surface. “Stupid,” he said furiously. “Of course you weren’t. I just—I saw you up there, and when you fell, and you didn’t come up, and I thought—”

  “Thank you,” I cut in, hugging him tighter. “My hero.” I didn’t need a hero, and I wasn’t the one who’d needed rescue. But he was soaking and freezing and had nearly drowned, and I figured there was no harm in giving him a little ego stroke.

  “Uh, Lia?”

  “What?” I asked, hoping that he wasn’t going to choose yet another horribly timed moment to start talking about the great love affair that was never going to be. An ego stroke was one thing, but there was only so far I could go.

  “You’re, uh, not wearing any clothes.”

  “Oh!” I let go, and bent my knees until I was submerged up to my neck.

  “I couldn’t see anything, anyway,” he said. “Not without my glasses.”

  I grinned. “So you were looking?”

  His cheeks turned red. His lips, on the other hand, were nearly blue.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he suggested, hugging himself and jumping up and down against the cold.

  I wasn’t ready, not yet. “You go. I just want…” It was just another thing I couldn’t explain to him, the way it felt to go over the falls, to know that I had absolutely no control and to just let it happen, let myself fall—and to survive. I knew I’d have to drag myself out of the water to see what damage I’d done, if any. I’d also have to deal with everything else. And I would. Just not yet. “I’m staying in. For a while.”

  “Then me too,” he said.

  “You’re freezing.”

  He shook his head, stubborn. Stupid. “I’m fine.”

  “Fine. Have it your way.”

  So we stayed in, Auden making a valiant effort to pretend he wasn’t noticing my body. While I, for the first time, wasn’t noticing it. I wasn’t ashamed, wasn’t repulsed; I was just content to be where I was, what I was—and to be with him. We did backflips and somersaults and competed for who could hold a handstand longer before the current swept us over. We laughed. We didn’t talk about my family or about Jude or about “us” and especially not about what had happened in the city or what was going to happen when we got back to shore. We didn’t talk about much of anything, except some supposedly funny vid he’d seen of a monkey in a diaper and whether if one was in a position to eat, daily chocolate was a required element of a healthy and balanced diet. Meaningless stuff like that. Easy stuff.

  I hadn’t been so happy in a long time. Maybe since the accident.

  “I think…I need…to get out,” Auden finally said as I resurfaced from a perfect handstand. His teeth were chattering so hard he could barely form the words.

  I nodded. “Race to shore?” And before he could answer I took off, digging my strokes into the water, pushing hard to win. I missed winning.

  Midway to the bank I popped my head up, checking to see if he was catching up…but he was swimming in the wrong direction. Swimming along with the current. Away from me, away from the shore, toward the edge.

  “Auden!” I shouted. “Wrong way!”

  He’s not wearing his glasses, I thought suddenly, horri
fied. He can’t see.

  “Auden! Swim toward me! Follow my voice!”

  But he didn’t call back. He didn’t change direction. And I began to realize he wasn’t swimming at all. He was drifting.

  Cold, I thought as the water lapped against my body. But how cold? Cold enough that a person—a real, live, warm-blooded person—couldn’t take it anymore? Couldn’t fight back against the current? Couldn’t make it to shore?

  “Auden!” I screamed, and then I ducked under the water, pushing myself harder than I ever had on the track, when it didn’t count, pushing the legs to kick, the arms to dig, to reach him, to grab him before the current carried him away, before the water caught him and wouldn’t let go, not until it plunged over another edge, down another ripple of jagged rock, into a storm of erupting water, and down, into the silent depths, the center of the whirlpool.

  I swam fast. The current was faster. He was one arm’s length away, close enough that I could see his pale face, his closed eyes, his arms floating limply and his head tipped back, bouncing along shuddering water—and then two arm’s lengths, and then three, and the river carried him away from me, the river claimed him. I screamed, I lunged, one last, powerful kick forward, one desperate grasp—and his body disappeared over the edge.

  I went over after him. This time there was nothing joyous about the plunge. Nothing fast or chaotic. It seemed to last forever. Enough time for me to go over it in my head, again and again, seeing him on the shore, hearing him scream my name, clinging to his body—and then letting him go. Hold on, I thought furiously, as if I could communicate with the past, as if the girl in the memory could make a better choice. It’s cold, I told her. It’s too cold.

  But the girl in the memory didn’t notice the cold or didn’t care.

  She was invincible.

  I was sucked down again at the bottom, but there was no peace in the dark, quiet water. The empty stillness just meant he wasn’t there. I fought my way to the surface, hoping, but I didn’t see him, didn’t hear him, so I dove down again, sweeping the river from one side to the other, swimming blind, arms outstretched. Telling myself that it would be like before, I would catch him, only for him to tell me that he hadn’t needed rescuing, and we would laugh over the misunderstanding, and this time I wouldn’t let go.