Robin Wasserman - Frozen

“Yeah, but…”

“Go ahead,” she said.

“What?”

“Ask. You know you want to.” Quinn brushed her hands through her long, black hair, smiling. “I love this,” she said, dropping the inky curtain across her face, and then giving her head a violent shake, whipping the hair back over her shoulders. “They got it exactly right.”

She was crazy, I decided. It was as if she liked living like this.

“Go ahead, ask,” she said again. “I really don’t care.”

“And I really don’t want to know,” I lied. “But fine. Why no visitors?”

“Dead parents, remember?”

If she wanted to act like it was no big deal, so would I. “Yeah. You said. Poor little orphan. But there’s got to be someone.”

She lay back down in the grass, turning her face away from me. “Doctors. Staff. No one important. Not that it matters now.”

“Why not?”

“Because everything’s different now. Once I’m out of here? It’s a new life. Anything I want. Anything. ”

“How did they die?” I asked quietly.

“I thought you didn’t want to hear the tragic saga?”

“Maybe I changed my mind. Unless it’s too hard for you to talk about.” But I didn’t say it the way Sascha would have, all fake sensitive and understanding. I said it like a challenge, and that’s the way she took it.

“Okay, but I’m just warning you, it’s quite tragic. You’re going to feel pretty sorry for me.”

“Don’t count on it.”

“It was a car accident,” she said.

I flinched. And even in the darkness she must have seen.

“Yeah, weird, isn’t it? Who gets in car crashes anymore? But here we are. Statistically improbable freaks.”

“Were you in the car? When it…”

“I was three. We were—” She paused, then barked out a laugh. “This is the first time I’ve ever had to actually tell someone, you know? I didn’t know it would be so…”

“You never told anyone ?” That was too much, too soon. Especially from a girl who wouldn’t even tell me her last name.

“It’s not like you’re special or anything. I just don’t… I don’t meet a lot of new people. Or I didn’t. Before.”

“You don’t have to—”

“I was three,” she said quickly. “We were going to visit someone, I don’t even know who. I just remember they got me all dressed up, and it was exciting. I mean, they must have taken me off the grounds before, at least a couple times, but I guess I was too young to remember. I remember this, though. I remember being in the car seat, and listening to some song, and playing some stupid vidgame for babies—You remember, the one with the dinosaurs?”

I nodded.

“I was winning. And then—I don’t know. I don’t remember. Next thing, I wake up, and I’m in a hospital. They’re dead. And I’m…” She threaded her fingers through her hair, then let her arms fall across her face. “It was a bad accident.”

“You were hurt.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Bad?” I guessed.

“Worse.”

“Worse than what?”

“Than whatever you’re picturing. Worse.” Her voice hardened. “Let’s just say that prosthetics and organ transplants and all that? Fine. Great, if you’re an adult. But when you break a three-year-old, it’s not so easy to put her together again.”

Enough, I thought. I get it. But I didn’t say anything. And she didn’t stop.

“Picture a room. Lots of machines. A bed. People to shovel in the food, shovel out the shit, shoot up the painkillers. People to clean. People to do anything and everything. And in the bed, well… a thing that eats and shits and gets high and gets cleaned and the rest of the time just pretty much lays there.”

But I didn’t want to picture it. “How long did it take?”

“To 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 all on the vids. Same thing, right? That’s what you said.”

That’s what I had said.

“I had it all,” she said. “Stuff to read. People to talk to. Vids to watch. The whole network at my fingertips. Well, not fingertips. There weren’t any of those. But I got by. Massive amounts of credit will 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 actually 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 actually 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 bullshit. 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 kill you. To chop up your brain, make a copy, and stick it into some machine.”

“Damn right. Quinn Sharpe is dead. I would have killed her myself, if I could. You’re walking around here all 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 actually 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 still.

“You’ll 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, full-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 still.

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 still, 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 person I had always been. I was Lia Kahn. And I was going to do what Lia Kahn always did. Get by. Get through. Work. Win.