Skinned -1 by Robin Wasserman Page B

“You’d think I was fresh off the assembly line.” I told myself I was just trying to help them relax. My mother wiped her hand across her nose, quick, like no one would notice the violation of snot-dripping protocol.
    “Lia—” My father hesitated. I waited for him to snap. The unspoken rule was, we could—and should—mock our mother for her every flaky, flighty word until he deemed (and you could never tel when the decision would come down) that we had gone too far. “The doctors tel us you’re nearly ready to come home. We’re looking forward to it.” That was it. His tone was civil. The one he used for strangers.
    You did this, I thought, wil ing him to look at me. Not over me, not through me. And he did, but only in stolen glances that flashed to my face, then, before I could catch him, darted back to the floor, the ceiling, the window. Whatever I am now, you chose it for me.
    “Zo, don’t you have something for your sister?” my mother asked.
    Zo shifted her weight, then rol ed her eyes. “Whatever.” She dug through her bag and pul ed out a long, thin rod, tossing it in my direction. “Catch.” I knocked it away before it could hit me in the face, but the body’s fingers weren’t fast enough to curl around it. The stick clattered to the floor.
    “Zo!” my mother snapped.
    “What? I said ‘catch.’”
    I picked up the stick, turning it over and over in my hands. It was a track baton.
    “We won the meet last week,” Zo muttered. “Coach wanted me to give it to you. I don’t know why.”
    “We?”
    My father smiled for the first time. At Zo. “Your sister’s final y discovered a work ethic.” He beamed. “She joined the track team. Already third in her division, and moving up every week, right?”
    Zo ducked her head; the better to skip the fakely modest smile.
    “You hate running,” I reminded her.
    She shrugged. “Things change.”
    “Tel us about your life here,” my mother said. “How do you spend your days? You’re not working too hard, are you?” I shook my head.
    “And you’re getting enough to—” She cut herself off, and her face turned white before she could finish her default question: You’re getting enough to eat?
    “Ample power supply around here,” I said, tapping my chest and noting the way her smile tightened around the corners. “My energy converter and I are just soaking it in.” I wish I could say I wasn’t trying to be mean.
    She didn’t ask any more questions. Instead she talked. Aunt Clair was helping design a new virtual-museum zone with a focus on early twenty-first-century digital photography.
    Great-uncle Jordan had come through his latest al -body lift-tuck without a scratch, literal y, since the procedure had worn away that nasty scar he’d gotten skateboarding in the exquisitely lame Anti-Grav Games, which, it turned out, were actual y ful -grav, anti-knee-pad. Our twin cousins, Mox and Dix, were outsourcing themselves to Chindia—Mox had snagged an internship at some Beijing engineering firm and Dix would do biotech research for a gen-corp in Bombay. Last I’d seen them, Dix had “accidental y” broken Zo’s wrist in a ful -contact icebal fight, and Mox had tried to make out with me. Second cousins, he argued, so it was okay. Bon voyage, boys.
    Then there was our parents’ best friend, Kyung Lee, who was having trouble with his corp-town, the workers who lived there rioting for better med-tech, something about a biotoxin that had slipped through the sensors. Kyung was afraid if things didn’t calm down soon, he might have to ship them al back to a city and hire a whole new crop, although the threat of that, according to my mother, should be enough to settle anyone.
    As the half-hour mark passed, I tuned out. After another twenty minutes my father stood up, giving his pants a surreptitious brush, like he wanted to shed himself of the rehab dirt lest it soil the seat of his car. A new car, according to my mother. After al , I’d