Robin Wasserman - Frozen

“Well, what if, when something happened—I mean, if something happened, I just wanted…” Not that I would want that. I wouldn’t, I told myself. It was the principle of the thing; it was knowing I had the choice. “What if I’d told you ahead of time. No new body. What if I just wanted this one to be it?”

“Then we’d get you a new body,” he said, with the same matter-of-fact inflection he’d used the first time.

“No, you don’t understand, I mean—”

“No, Lia. I do understand.” With my father it was always hard to tell the difference between disinterest and rage. Both were delivered in the same rigidly controlled voice, his lips thin, his face expressionless. “You’re underage. Which gives me legal control over your medical condition. And I would prefer said condition remain ‘alive.’ So, in your hypothetical scenario, you’d be overruled.”

It was just hypothetical. But he didn’t ask for reassurance on that front. “Until next year,” I said instead.

“Because?”

“I turn eighteen,” I reminded him. “Then it’s my call. Legally.”

He gave me a thin smile. “Legally. Yes. If one were to play by the rules.”

“You taught us to always play by the rules.”

He nodded. “Necessary. Until you’re in a position to make the rules. Which I am.”

“So you’re saying—”

“Lia, in case you hadn’t noticed, I’m trying to work.” He tapped the screen. “Which means I don’t have time for your ridiculous hypotheticals.”

“Sorry. Yeah, of course.” I stood up. Backed out of the room. “Later, maybe. Or, whatever.” So he didn’t want to talk to me. Even about this. So what?

But then he spoke again. Without looking at me. Barely loud enough for me to hear. “I’m saying I won’t let you die. Will not . Not again.”

Upstairs, I sat on the edge of my bed, alone again. I didn’t want to be dead, I knew that. Even living like this… It was living. It was something. I couldn’t imagine the other option. I tried, sometimes, lying in bed, thinking about what it would be like: nothingness. The end. Sometimes I almost caught it, or at least, the edge of it. A nonexistence that stretched on forever, no more of me, no more of anything. The part I couldn’t grip was all the stuff I’d leave behind, the stuff that would stay here and keep going when I was gone.

When I was a kid I used to wonder if, just maybe, the world existed only for me. If rooms ceased to exist when I stepped into the hallway and people disappeared once they left me, the rest of their lives imagined solely for my entertainment. Other times I used to wonder if other people thought—I mean really thought—the way I did. They said they did, and they acted like they did, but how was I supposed to know if it was true? It was like colors. I knew what red looked like to me, but for all I knew, it looked different to everyone else. Maybe to everyone else, red looked like blue, and blue looked like red. It was, I had to admit, just like the Honored Savona had said. How could you ever know what was really going on in someone else’s head?

What I’m saying is, when I was a kid, I knew I was real. I just wasn’t sure anyone else was. And even if I didn’t think that way anymore, I still wasn’t convinced that the world could go on without me.

I didn’t want to die.

But that wasn’t the point. The point was now I couldn’t. My father wouldn’t let me.

Zo peeked into the room, hesitating in the doorway. “I heard,” she said.

Big surprise. “That’s what happens when you eavesdrop.”

Zo scowled. “I wasn’t—whatever. Forget it.”

“I’m sorry.” Not that I was, not really. But I didn’t want her to go. “This day just sucks.”

“Yeah.” She looked like she didn’t know what to say. Neither did I. Zo and I had never talked much before, and now we didn’t talk at all.

“You think he’s right?” I finally asked.

“What, Dad?” She shrugged. “What’s the difference? You planning on another accident? Or should I say”—she curled her fingers into exaggerated quotation marks—“ accident ?”

I wondered, again, why she seemed to hate me so much. But I couldn’t ask.

She might answer.

“Not Dad,” I said. “The Faith guy. About—you know. All of it.”

“There’s no such thing as a soul,” Zo said. “So I kind of doubt you have one.”

“But the rest of it? About me being just a machine, fooling myself into believing… You think he could be right?”

She hesitated. Too long. Great—another answer I didn’t want to hear.

“Forget I asked,” I said. “Of course he’s not right. I’m just—”

“I don’t think you’re fooling yourself,” Zo said slowly. “And I don’t think… I don’t think it’s true what he said. About it not being natural. What’s natural anymore? Besides…” She glanced toward the window. The fog—or smog or haze or whatever it was—was bad today, so thick you couldn’t even see the trees. “Nature sucks.”

I laughed. She flinched.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing.” Zo shifted her weight. “I’m just not used to it yet.”

“My laugh.”

“Your whole… Yeah. Your laugh.”

“Remember when Mom decided she wanted to be a singer, and she made us sit through her rehearsal?” I didn’t know what had made me think of it.

A smile slipped onto Zo’s face, like she couldn’t help it. “And we just had to sit there while she butchered that stupid song over and over again. What the hell was it called?”

We both paused. Then—

“‘Flowers in the Springtime’!” Together.

She giggled. “Everything was going fine until you made me laugh—”

“ I made you laugh?”

“You made that face !” she said accusingly. “With your cheeks all puffed up and your eyebrows scrunched….”

“Yeah, because I was holding my breath, trying not to laugh at you , looking like you were having some kind of seizure.”

“Okay, but how could you not laugh, when she kept singing that stupid song—”

“‘Flowers in the springtime, apples in the trees,’” I warbled in a falsetto. “‘Your hand in my hand, gone weak in my knees.’”

“She sounded like a sick cat,” Zo sputtered.

“Like psycho Susskind, that night we left him outside in the thunderstorm.”

Zo shook her head. “Like psycho Susskind, if we threw him out the window. Howling for his life.”

“And when you started laughing—”

“When you started laughing—”

“I thought she was going to kill us both.”

Zo grinned. “At least that was the end of her singing career.”

“Career,” I said. “Yeah, right. A bright future in breaking glasses and shattering eardrums.” I shook my head. “And remember when Walker showed up that night, I had to explain why I was grounded, but that just started me off laughing again, and then you started again, and we couldn’t get the story out? I wonder if I ever did tell him what that was about.”

“You did,” Zo said flatly. She’d stopped laughing. “You texted him later and told him.”

“Oh. Right, okay. How do you even remember that?”

“I have to go,” Zo said. It was like the last few minutes hadn’t happened. “I’m late.”

“Where are you going?”

“What do you care?” she snapped.

I didn’t say anything.

She sagged against the doorframe, just a little, not enough so most people would notice, but I was her sister. I noticed. “I’m going out with Cass, okay? Is that a problem?” But she didn’t ask like she really wanted to know.