Robin Wasserman - Frozen

Quinn slid a hand across her mouth, camouflaging her whisper: “If this is home, does that make her our new mommy?”

I smirked. “Kill me now.”

“Lia, why don’t you begin?” Sascha said loudly. It clearly wasn’t a suggestion.

“Lia Kahn,” I mumbled.

“Could you maybe tell us something more about your history?”

I shrugged. “I was born seventeen and a half years ago, on a dark and stormy—”

“I mean your recent history,” Sascha said, all sweetness and light. “Is there anything you want to share about the circumstances that led you to be here today?”

“Circumstances.” That was almost as good as “readjustment.” Such a nice, neat word to sum up the smell of flesh crackling in a fire, the hours and days in the dark, the slices of frozen brain matter scanned in, tossed aside. Just a collection of unfortunate circumstances, nothing more. “You told my parents this was mandatory,” I said. “And they bought it.”

Sascha cleared her throat. “Okay… Quinn? Is there anything about yourself you’d like to share with the group?”

“Selected members of the group, maybe,” Quinn said, glancing at the girl to her right, whose pale skin looked nearly white against the long strands of indigo hair. “I have plenty to offer.”

Sascha moved on. Quickly.

The blue-haired girl was Ani, and had been a mech-head for almost a year. Judging from the effort she was putting into avoiding Quinn’s gaze, she wasn’t much into sharing. Aron and Sloane, who obviously knew each other—and, less obviously but still noticeably, played footsie beneath their folding chairs—were better behaved. Aron had traded in his disease-riddled, six-weeks-to-live body a few months ago; Sloane had tried to kill herself, but only half-succeeded, waking up immortal instead, courtesy of an ill-planned leap from a tall building that wasn’t quite tall enough. They’d met in rehab.

And then there was Len. Perfectly proportioned and handsome, in that plastic, artificial way that we all were, but his looks didn’t match the way he slumped in his seat, his limbs tucked into his body, his head dipping compulsively, flipping his hair back over his eyes every time it threatened to expose him. He slumped like an ugly boy nobody liked.

“Nobody likes me,” he concluded at the tail end of a ten-minute pity fest.

“Can’t imagine why,” Quinn murmured. I turned my snort of laughter into a fake cough, which was an embarrassingly feeble attempt at subterfuge when you consider the fact that I didn’t have any lungs.

“I hate this,” Len said. “I just wish I could go back.”

“But you’ve told us how much you hated your life before,” Sascha said. “How you felt confined by the wheelchair, how you always felt that people didn’t see you for who you are, all they saw was your body—”

“And this is supposed to be better?” Len exploded. “At least I had a body. At least when people stared at me, they were staring at me , not at”—he punched his fist into his thigh—“this.”

“Everyone’s a critic,” Quinn murmured.

“At least it was your call,” said the wannabe suicide. “You got to make a choice.”

“You feel you weren’t given a choice?” Sascha asked. I wondered how much she got paid for serving as a human echo chamber.

“I made a fucking choice,” Sloane said. “This wasn’t it.”

Aron took her hand. “Please don’t.”

She pulled away. “What am I supposed to say? Thanks, Mom and Dad?” She scowled. “You know what happens if I try it again? They’ll just dump me into a new body. I’m all backed up now, safe in storage. Even if I don’t upload every night—They’d probably like that better, because then they get a clean slate. I wouldn’t even remember trying to off myself again. Fuck, for all I know, it already happened, and everyone’s just lying to me. They’d do it, too. They want me, they got me.”

“You sound angry,” Sascha said, always so insightful. “You blame your parents for not wanting to let their daughter die?”

Sloane rolled her eyes. “Wake up, Sascha. They let their daughter die. I’m just some replacement copy. And if I do it again, they’ll make another copy. You think that’ll be me? You think I’m her?”

“You are her,” Sascha said.

“I know I’m still me,” Aron said. “The same me I always was. I can feel it. But sometimes…”

Sascha leaned forward, eager. Hungry. “Go on.”

“This is better than before. I get that,” he said. “But… it’s not just the way people look at me. It’s like, I’m different now. My friends…” He shook his head.

Sloane shoved his shoulder. “I told you, they can’t handle it? Whatever. Forget them.”

“Yeah.” Aron took her hand again, and this time she let him. I reminded myself I wasn’t jealous. Two rejects seeking solace in each other. Nice for them, but it’s not like I was looking to cuddle up with some freakshow of my own. “Sometimes I just think they’re right. It’s not the same.”

“What’s not the same?” Sascha asked.

“I don’t know. Everything. Me. I’m not.”

“Damn right,” Quinn said, loud enough for everyone to hear her this time. “You’re better, haven’t you noticed? Or would you rather be lying around in a hospital somewhere, choking on your own puke and waiting to die?”

“I didn’t say—”

“You said plenty,” Quinn said. “You all did. Whining about wanting to go backward, like backward was some amazing place to be. Like you wouldn’t be sick and your girlfriend here wouldn’t be crazy and you”—she whirled on Len—“wouldn’t be lame. In every sense of the word.” Quinn stood up. “This is supposed to help ?” she asked Sascha. “Listening to them whine about their issues ?”

“What’s supposed to help is sharing your issues,” Sascha said. “And, yes, empathizing with everyone else’s.”

Quinn shook her head. “I don’t have issues. I have a life . Something I’d advise the rest of you to acquire.”

She walked out.

Quinn, I was starting to realize, had a thing for dramatic exits.

“Lia, you’ve been pretty quiet over there,” Sascha said. “Do you want to add anything here?”

Everyone turned to look at me. I fought the urge to slouch down in my seat and turn away. I wasn’t Len. I wasn’t any of them.

“What do you want me to say?” I finally asked.

“Whatever you’d like,” Sascha said. “You could weigh in on whether you wish you could go backward, as Quinn put it, or whether you’d rather look ahead.”

I just stared at her.

“Or you could talk about how it’s been being back at school. Any problems you might be having with your friends or… your boyfriend?” There was something about the way she said it that made me wonder what she knew.

“I don’t have a boyfriend.”

“When you were in rehab, you talked about—”

“I don’t have a boyfriend,” I said louder. “And I don’t have any issues to discuss either.”

“So you would say you’ve had no trouble adjusting to your new situation?” Sascha said. “You’re happy? Nothing that’s been said today rings true for you at all?”

I looked around the circle and suddenly saw how it would all play out. I would open up, confess all my fears about the future, I would empathize with Aron about feeling different, with Sloane about losing my ability to choose, even, maybe most of all, with lonely Len. With Sascha’s help we would let down our guard, become friends, a ragtag group of survivors with nothing in common but our circuitry and our fear. We would go out in public, clumping together for strength in numbers, pretending not to notice the stares or the way crowds parted so as not to touch us—or maybe pressed closer, reaching out to oh-so-casually brush past so as to tell their friends they got a handful of real, live (so to speak) skinner. We would whine, we would confide, we would wish we could still cry, we would bond, we would hook up, make promises, break them, we would cheat and we would forgive, we would stick together, because we would know that we were all any of us had. And eventually we would tell ourselves we were happy. Well- adjusted .