Skinned by Robin Wasserman

But the people who know you, the people who love you, they’ll see beneath the surface. They’ll get that it’s really you under there. You just have to give them some time.
    No one knew me better than Walker. But when I curled the hand around his wrist, he jerked away. “Sorry, I—”
    I stepped back. “No, it’s fine.” It wasn’t. “I shouldn’t have.” He shouldn’t have.
    “No, really. I just…” Walker finally stepped into the room, edging around me as he passed, careful not to touch the body. He sat in my desk chair, back straight, feet flat on the floor. Arms crossed, hugging his chest.
    I dropped back down on the bed and waited.
    “I’m very glad you’re all right,” he said finally, like he was passing along a message from his mother to some old lady who’d broken her hip. Like he’d been rehearsing.
    I risked a smile. I’d been rehearsing too. “I missed you.”
    “You, too.” He stared down at the floor. His hair was longer than I’d ever seen it, almost to his shoulders, like one of Zo’s retros. I wanted to smooth it back. I wanted to stand behind him and bury my face in it, resting my cheek against the back of his head, wrapping my arms around his shoulders, letting him grip my hands in his. But I stayed where I was. “It’s, uh, it’s pretty,” he said. “I mean— you’re pretty. Now. Like this.”
    “You don’t have to lie.”
    He shifted in the seat. “No—It’s just, I guess, I just thought you’d look a little more like…I mean, on the vids, and you looked…But now…I thought you’d look more…”
    “Like me?” But as soon as I said it, I knew that wasn’t what he’d meant. I didn’t look like me, not anymore, not with the hair that was the wrong color and texture and wasn’t even hair, just a synthetic weave that was grafted on and would never grow. The nose was too small, the eyes too wide, the fingers the wrong thickness, the wrong length, the teeth too straight and too bright, the mouth bigger, the ears smaller, the body taller and too symmetrical, too well proportioned, too perfect. But it wasn’t that. I knew what he’d wanted to say; I knew him too well.
    I thought you’d look more…human.
    And I saw the body again like I’d seen it for the first time, like he was seeing it. The skin, smooth and waxy, an even peachy tone stretched out over the frame without sag or blemish. The way it moved, with awkward jerks, always too slow or too fast. The stranger’s face with dead eyes, pale blue irises encircling the false pupils, and in the center of the black, pinpricks of light, flashing and dimming as the lens sucked up images. The eyes that didn’t blink unless I remembered to blink them. The chest that neither rose nor fell unless I pretended to breathe. The body that wasn’t a body.
    His girlfriend, the machine.
    “It’s just weird,” he admitted. “I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t—”
    “It’s okay,” I said quickly. “It is weird. It’s weird for me too.”
    “I mean, I know it’s you, I get that, but you sound different, and you look different, and…”
    “It’s because it was an emergency. They had to give me a generic model. My dad picked it out. He says it’s the one that looked the most like me. Not that it looks like me, I know, but it was the best he could do.” Too much detail, I told myself. Stop talking . But I couldn’t. Once I stopped, he would have to start again. Or he wouldn’t. And then we’d just sit there, and he would try not to stare at me, and I would try not to look away. “Some people get these custom faces designed to look just like them, the way they were—or like anything they want, I guess. It’s totally crazy what they can do. The voice, too. You just make a recording and they match it. I mean, it’s not exactly the same, I know, but it’s…closer. Easier. But you’ve got to place the order in advance. You’ve got to give them time, and if there’s an accident or something, well…”