Free Skinned -1 by Robin Wasserman Page B

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 al on the vids. Same thing, right? That’s what you said.”
    That’s what I had said.
    “I had it al ,” she said. “Stuff to read. People to talk to. Vids to watch. The whole network at my fingertips. Wel , not fingertips. There weren’t any of those. But I got by. Massive amounts of credit wil 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 actual y 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 actual y 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 bul shit. 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 kil you. To chop up your brain, make a copy, and stick it into some machine.”
    “Damn right. Quinn Sharpe is dead. I would have kil ed her myself, if I could. You’re walking around here al 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 actual y 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 stil .
    “You’l 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, ful -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 stil .
    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 stil , 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