Brave New Worlds

tender. It feels like the boys she wishes would touch her. Like laughing so hard her stomach hurt back in Westchester, when life was easy and she was Giggles. Like her mother's embrace. Like love. It feels just like love.
    Begin , a recorded female voice announces over the loudspeaker. Its mechanical quality reassures her. This is too intimate for human witnesses. Too special. Oh, how she loves the doctor.
    She pulls the wad of paper from her spandex jeans and starts: "I'm afraid for Lulu. " She always begins with this one, but so far every time they excise it, the worry grows back. ". . . In school they say that early cultures believed in this thing called a soul. It scares me. I don't know why. Like we've all got these ghosts that live inside us. Like I'm haunted by my own ghost. "
    Continue , the voice tells her. Its soft voice travels through the tubes so that her port vibrates.
    "The actors in the movies—it doesn't make any sense that they look so different from the people I know. They're so pale and thin—they never have mechanical lungs. . . I hate the way I look. I wish I could cut myself into little pieces. I wish I was pretty. . . "
    The tube in her arm is getting backflow. Red blood mixes with morphine, pink and pretty like all girls should be. Except she's brown and pudgy.
    "I got so mad last week I bit my hand. You can still see the teeth-marks. They're smaller than you'd think. Looks like baby teeth, so I told everyone at school it was a neighbor's little kid. Well, actually, nobody asked. But if they did, that's what I'd tell them. "
    She looks at her list. The rest are the items that her father invented: You don't like sour milk; You want to devote your life to your country. You're so excited about Patriot Day that you can't sleep . Then he added, like it was an afterthought, but she knew it wasn't: You want to be popular but you don't fit in. You don't understand that you're special. Your worries are a gift. She'd felt her face flush when he said that, because suddenly the gig was up, and they both knew that nobody at PS 30 thought she was cool.
    She decides she'll say the honest one. Maybe it'll stop being true, once she says it. Maybe the doctor is magic. "I'm not pop—" she starts, and then stops, because if she says the words, her father will be right. Because that smack had been so unexpected, and undeserved. Because every day for as long as she can remember, things have been worse than the day before, which is how she knows that last night wasn't a fluke. He might be sorry for it, but next time he gets drunk, he'll hit her again.
    The morphine has wound all over her, like amniotic fluid. It feels so good, and safe. The doctor will know what to do. She crinkles the paper into a ball, and for the first time, tells the doctor what's on her mind. "I'm so sad. . . . My mom doesn't take pills because she wants to be happy. She just wants to be numb. I'd take pills if they made me numb, but they don't. "
    She sniffles, and bites her lip hard until she's sure she won't cry. She'd like the doctor to take everything this time. She'd like to be so empty that she doesn't remember how to breathe.
    The machine starts clicking and humming. She gets nervous. Was she wrong to say that pills don't work?
    Continue , the voice tells her.
    The thing she really wants to say sits on her tongue like a sliver of reconstituted nectarine. She bites down, and lets its juice run down her chin. This is not her problem. She is not accountable. He has done this to her. Her father. The doctor, too.
    "I hate my father. He drinks. He hit me last night. " She notices, dully, that her voice now echoes. I'm being recorded , she thinks, and then: Good. Now he'll really get in trouble .
    "He makes us wear air filters in our chests, even though the EPA says we don't need them. He fills the apartment with them, too. He says he's working on safe cigarettes at the lab, but really he's testing metal dust on mice again. He says it's the debris from the bombs that's killing us. All those falling buildings. He's going to move us to Canada because they're granting amnesty—I heard him talking. He wants to get out before the mandatory ports go into effect. "
    As she talks, the drug warms her. She's almost sleeping. Sweet, thick dreams. She will be sick from this for days. But for now it is so good. Continue , the voice says, but she doesn't have anything else to say.
    "That's all. "
    Continue.
    She tries to make something up, but her