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“So, what’s it like?” Walker asked, crossing the room. To the bed—to me. He sat down on the edge, leaving a space between us. “Can you, like, feel stuff?”

“Yeah. Of course.” If it counted as feeling, the way the whole world seemed hidden behind a scrim. Fire was warm. Ice was cool. Everything was mild. Nothing was right.

I held out a hand, palm up. “Do you want to . . . ? You can see what it feels like. To touch it. If you want.”

He lifted his arm, extended a finger, hesitated over my exposed wrist, trembling.

He touched it. Me.

Shuddered, snatched his hand away.

Then touched me again. Palm to palm. He curled his fingers around the hand. Around my hand.

“You can really feel that?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“So what’s it feel like?”

“Like it always does.” A lie. Artificial nerves, artificial conduits, artificial receptors, registering the fact of a touch. Reporting back to a central processor the fact of a hand, five fingers, flesh bearing down. Measuring the temperature, the pressure per square inch, the duration, and all of it translated, somehow, into something resembling a sensation. “It feels good.” I paused. “What does it feel like to you?”

“You mean—?”

“The skin.”

“It’s . . .” He scrunched his eyebrows together. “Not the same as before. But not . . . weird. It feels like skin.” He let go.

I brushed the back of my hand across his cheek. This time, he didn’t move away. “You need to shave.”

“I like it like this,” he said, giving me a half smile. It was the same thing he always said.

“You’re the only one.” That was the standard response. We’d had the fight that wasn’t a fight so often it was like we were following a script, one that had always before ended the same way. And if I acted like everything was the same, maybe . . .

“It looks good,” he argued, the half-smile widening into a full grin.

“It doesn’t feel good. So unless you want to scratch half my face off when—” I stopped.

Nothing was the same.

The coarse bristles sprinkling his face wouldn’t hurt when he kissed me.

If he kissed me.

“Lia, when you were gone all that time, I . . .”

“What?”

A pause.

“Nothing. I’m just . . . I’m glad you didn’t, you know. Die.”

It was what he had to say, and I gave him the answer I had to give. “Me too.” For the first time, sitting there with him, I could almost believe it was true.

Another pause, longer this time.

“When you were in that place—I should have come to visit.”

“You were busy,” I said.

“I should have come.”

“Yeah.”

But I wouldn’t have let him see me like that, spasmodic limbs jerking without warning, muscles clenching and unclenching at random, the mouth spitting out those strangled animal noises, the tinny speaker speaking for me until I could control the tongue, moderate the airflow, train the mechanism to impersonate human speech. If he’d seen me like that, he would never have been able to see me any other way. He would never see that I was Lia.

“I should go,” he said. “You must be . . . do you get tired?”

I shook the head. “I sleep, but it’s not . . . I don’t dream or anything. I just—” There was no other way to say it.

“Shut down.”

“Oh.”

“I’m sorry,” I said suddenly.

“What?” He scrunched his eyebrows together again. “Why?”

“I don’t know.” There were no mechanical tear ducts embedded in the dead eyes. No salt water deposits hidden behind the unblinking lids. Add it to the list of things I wouldn’t do again: Cry. “I just am. I’m sorry that I’m . . . like this.”

I admit it. I wanted him to wrap his arms around me. I wanted him to tell me that he wasn’t sorry. That I was beautiful. That the hair felt like real hair and the skin felt like real skin and the body felt like a real body and he wasn’t weirded out by the thought of touching it. That he saw me.
He stood up. I didn’t. “You going back to school soon?”

“Monday.”

“So I guess I’ll see you there.” He backed toward the door. When he opened it, Zo was on the other side. Like she’d been there the whole time, waiting, as she’d done when Walker and I had first gotten together, and she’d been a kid, annoying, always around, hovering outside with her ear pressed to the door, giggling every time we were about to kiss.

“Guess so.”

He hesitated, like he was waiting for my permission to leave. The old Walker had waited for my permission to do everything.

“Aren’t you going to kiss her goodbye?” Zo asked, sounding so sweet, so helpful, so hopelessly ignorant, and then she smiled, and the smile was none of those things.

Walker didn’t move. Not until she gave him a gentle push, digging her fists into the shallow concavity beneath his rib cage. He lurched across the room, and I felt frozen again, like I had that first day, locked inside the body.

Blink, I reminded myself. But when I shut the lids, I didn’t open them again.

He didn’t taste like anything. Nothing did, anymore. His lips feathered across mine. I registered the touch, and then it was gone.

“Bye, Lia.”

I kept my eyes shut as his footsteps crossed the room. The door closed.

Bye.