Free When We Wake by Karen Healey Page B

know this is shallow, but in my time, I was really good-looking.
    Not, like, model-hot, ’cause I’ve always been short, but I was noticeably pretty, and I knew it. Clear skin, high cheekbones, symmetrical features, and huge, dark eyes. I had—still have—big boobs for my size, which didn’t fit the ultraslender ideal, but sure attracted attention. Conditioning for free running kept meslim and muscled, and I had long, black hair, which was sort of my trademark. I could leave it loose or tie it up in one of those casual knots that usually took me ten minutes to get just right, or throw it into a fancy style for special occasions.
    Boys like Soren used to like me because I was pretty, not because I’d been a corpse and was now a pseudocelebrity. It wasn’t until that first morning at Elisa M that I wondered if I just wasn’t attractive anymore.
    And I was shocked by how uneasy that thought made me.

    So, right then, when I was feeling ugly and insecure, he walked in, and the air emptied out of my lungs. My vision narrowed to that familiar form as he scanned the classroom and sat down at the front of the room, slouching a little in his seat.
    Then I was standing in the aisle behind him with no memory of how I’d gotten there.
    “Dalmar,” I whispered, and reached for his shoulder. My hand was shaking. “How did you get here? Dalmar?”
    Zaneisha appeared at my side. “Tegan…”
    “No!” I said, and ducked away from her, reaching for his arm. “Dalmar! Dalmar! Look at me!”
    He did.
    The face was so close: strong cheekbones and full lips with the exact curve of those that had kissed my bare skin. The perfect shape of his naked skull was the same, and the shade of his skin like rich earth. But this close I could see the differences—the three freckles Dalmar had had under his left eye were missing, and this boy had a wider, flatter nose. His eyelashes weren’t as long, and his eyes were a different shape and much lighter, golden-brown instead of a brown so dark it was nearly black.
    And the contempt in those eyes was chilling. Dalmar had never looked at me like that.
    “My name is Abdi,” he said in a lilting accent that was nothing like Dalmar’s Australian English. “I don’t know this
Dalmar
.”
    “You look just like him,” I said, because my brain was still coming back from a century ago.
    It was the worst thing I could have said. The contempt in his eyes deepened.
    “I am Abdi,” he said definitively, and turned his face away.
    That hurt so much that it shot through my haze. I looked up. The classroom was packed, thirty people at least, and every person in it was staring at me. Soren was gleefully typing something into his computer. Bethari was looking at me and wincing.
    I’d just completely lost it in front of my new classmates.
    And, oh god, worse—I was a white girl who’d called a black boy by the wrong name and insisted he looked just the same. Like he was interchangeable. Like he wasn’t a person in his own right.
    “Bazza,” someone whispered.
    Facebreaking
, I thought, the word like little splinters of glass in my head. The school day hadn’t even started, and I had broken my face into bits.
    “I’m sorry,” I told Abdi. “I’m really—oh,
god
.”
    And then I ran away.

    Even in the future you have to have a place to put your cleaning supplies.
    My eyes were tearing up, but as I rushed out of the classroom and down the corridor, I could still make out the mop symbol on the little door. I yanked it open and ducked inside.
    The air in that little room was even hotter than it was in the corridor, and it was dense with the scent of pine and lemon. I crouched on the floor, wrapped my arms around my shoulders, and tried to rock myself into something resembling calmness.
    I had just done something awful
and
made a fool of myself in front of all my new classmates. I tried reminding myself that worse things could happen, and, in fact, several of them had happened to me, but it