Crashed - Skinned-2 by Robin Wasserman

Author:Robin Wasserman [Wasserman, Robin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Juvenile Fiction, Mysteries & Detective Stories, Fiction, General, Teenage Girls, Social Issues, Science Fiction, Death & Dying, Young Adult Fiction, Fantasy & Magic, Friendship, Love & Romance, Family & Relationships, Death; Grief; Bereavement, Cyborgs, Outcasts, Androids, Human Beings
ISBN: 9781416936350
Google: cz8If6_lPTMC
Amazon: 1416936351
Publisher: Simon Pulse
Published: 2009-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

Normal y there was nothing I hated more than someone pretending to understand what was going on in my head. But this time, it didn’t bother me.

“I keep thinking that someone should have screamed, you know?” Riley said. “It would have made it seem more like a vid. Unreal. But . . .”

“Yeah. No screaming,” I said, letting myself remember. For the first time not fighting back against the images. The dreamers had left an empty space behind them. And the memories rushed in to fil the vacuum.

“There was a girl,” I said. “A kid. I saw her before it al happened. She had this hot pink hair and—”

“Yeah.” He stretched his arms behind him, leaning his weight back on them. “I saw her.”

“She was probably eight or nine,” I said, picturing Zo at that age. She’d been experimenting with different hair colors, showing up with purple streaks one morning, rainbow the next. It was before she’d settled on the retro thing, and instead she was obsessed with av-wear—a phase that we al went through, when instead of modeling your avatar to look like you, you turned yourself into a live-action av, complete with neon hair, net-linked morphtattoos, and the occasional glitter wings.

But Zo had gotten a chance to grow out of it.

He leaned forward, his hands uncertain again, on his lap, then on the floor, then cradled, one in the other. “I stepped on someone. When we were running away. I wasn’t looking, and then—”

“We both did,” I said. I wanted him to stop talking. I wanted to go back to the dream. But it was like we were flying. Like we’d jumped out of the plane, and nothing was going to stop us now, except the ground. “We couldn’t help it.”

He shook his head. “I looked down,” he said. “When I felt it. Something— I don’t know. Soft and hard at the same time. You know?” Soft and hard. The feel of a foot sinking into a chest.

“She was stil alive,” he said. “Mouth wide open.”

“Like she was screaming.”

“It sounds stupid,” he said. “I know. She was just trying to breathe, but . . .”

“It looked like she was screaming.”

“I stepped on her,” he said. “And I didn’t stop.”

“We couldn’t have helped her.”

“You wanted to stop,” he said.

“I didn’t know what I was doing,” I reminded him. “I froze. You got us out of there.”

“And straight into hel ,” he said.

I rested my hand on top of his hands. He stiffened.

“Thank you for waking me up,” I said.

He pul ed his hands out from under mine. Stood up. “You would’ve woken up if I was here or not. Just good timing.”

“Probably.”

There was a loud scratching sound at the door. “Psycho Susskind,” he said. “You want me to let him in?”

“What’d you cal him?’

“Isn’t that his name?” he asked.

Yes, but it was my name for him, mine and Zo’s. Weird to hear it come out of Riley’s mouth.

“He doesn’t seem too crazy to me,” Riley said. “Maybe you weren’t feeding him enough.

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