I have to wonder what my parents were thinking when they had me. Like, actually had me; squeezed me out onto a hospital bed and bribed the doctor not to tell anyone what freaks they were—having a live baby and all that. To me, the easier solution would be to smother me after I was born. Stop the crying, implant my Anachronisms and bring me back as a pasty deadgirl. It seems like it would've been so much easier than spending eighteen years trying to fool everyone—neighbors, friends, family—into thinking that they were a perfectly normal home of Deadpeople with a perfectly normal deadgirl. So much easier than fooling themselves.

"You ever notice how each generation's got their own messed up jokes?" Patch asked me in our English class as we waited for the teacher.

One of my eyebrows arched up. "Where'd that come from?"

"My dad and I were talking the other day and he told me that his dad's generation of jokes were dead baby jokes, if you can believe it."

"You're kidding."

"I shit you not." She grinned, crossing her arms on the table and leaning on them. Her dark eyes glimmered with the amusement she usually got from sharing something shocking. "What's the difference between a pile of dead babies and a Ferrari?"

"My mom didn't give birth to a Ferrari, much to my dad's chagrin." Patch rolled her eyes. "Alright, what?"

"I don't have a Ferrari in my garage."

"That's a really crappy joke, Patch." I shook my head and turned back to the homework I'd neglected to do the night before. The Scarlet Letter wasn't my version of a good time, but if I bombed a class my senior year, my mom was going to kill me—she's been looking for an excuse since I was born.

"I guess it was funnier back then, I dunno. I just thought it was kinda interesting, you know? They had dead baby jokes and suddenly there's dead babies. Deadboys and deadgirls everywhere. We've got anti-jokes, so what does that say about us?"

"Our collective sense of humor is dwindling to the point where we're making obvious statements." I muttered, trying to read.

"What's red and smells like paint?"

"Red paint."

"What's blue and smells like paint?"

"Red paint in disguise. Can I get back to work now?"

"You're seriously no fun, Oz."

"Only when I'm trying to do my damn homework." She rolled her eyes again.

"Novel idea; do it at home."

"Valid point made. Done?"

Patch grumbled something under her breath before returning to her iPod and I could hear the faint sound of Tegan and Sara escaping her ear buds before I put my own back in and cranked up the volume.

The most difficult part about being around Patch and me is believing that we're actually best friends. Looking at us, we have nothing in common. Talking to us, we have nothing in common. Being who we are, we have nothing in common. The biggest difference between us? I'm alive. Patch isn't.

According to textbooks, the last living child—Breathers, as they're called now—was born almost a century ago. His name was Martin Dorsee, but he's not really that important. He had deadkids, just like everyone else. Stillbirths and miscarriages became the norm for the longest time (and they still are) which is almost fine in its own way, as the human race could always go with a good pruning every now and then. But after two world wars and then 'Nam, I guess we'd decided that we'd all been pretty pruned out.

There was research and, of course, that was met with opposition. A big chunk of the world worked themselves into a real tizzy when the 'God Plan' was announced; a scheme to usher the world into a new age of imitation life. Pro-Choice groups were pissed when abortions were outlawed. Expected reactions happened and people moved on. Everything changed in 1946 when the breakthrough was made.

They called it the 'Baby Boom', but nothing really exploded, so it was kind of anticlimactic. Devices called Anachronisms are either implanted in babies when they're born, or they aren't. Those that get them are deadkids, those that don't are just dead. Most do, though.

Ice in the form of slender fingers touched my arm and I jumped, jerking away. Deadkids were cold. Kept their Annies from overheating. Being alive, body temperature was one of the many differences between Patch and me. I paused my song, pulling out a bud. "What?"

"God, you're burning up again. Do you want me to take you to the Cooler?"

Deadkids didn't have nurses, they had Coolers and Repairmen for when their Annies were too hot or damaged.

"I'm fine, Patch. Did you need something?"

"Yeah." She looked down at her worksheet and tucked a stray pumpkin-colored curl behind her ear. Patch was a ginger, but one of the ones that ended up with a creamy complexion, slim figure and striking eyes. "Did you get the question about the rosebush? What it symbolizes?"

"A sweet moral blossom. Literally says that in the text." I sighed. "Are you hungover again?" A grin lit up her face and I had a feeling I'd hit the nail on the head. Because I had.

"You should've been there, Oz. It was a great party. Patrick's friend, Tristan, was there and he was looking for you."

"Why?" I could feel the skepticism on my face and Patch shook her head in the slow, high school girl-esque way that says, 'I don't know why I bother, but allow me to impart some totally obvious knowledge on your ass'.

"'Cause he finds you interesting."

"Tristan finds dissecting frogs interesting."

"So?"

"And birds. And cats. And dogs. Odds are he's just moved on to people and I'm not eager to be his first test subject."

An amused snort escaped before she could turn it into something amused. "Alright, alright, fair enough. Yeah, he's a bit of a sociopath, but you're already dead. The worst you could get out of it would be losing your virginity."

"You know, you could say that a little louder if you wanted. I don't think they could quite hear you in China."

She chuckled and turned her focus back to the piece of paper in front of her. Brief answers in elegant script, Patch was never one to mince words. She said what she wanted, when she wanted and how she wanted. It got her in trouble sometimes—a lot of the time, actually—but it was just how Patch was.

I finished my worksheet and leaned back in my seat, closing my eyes briefly in hopes that the scenery, or at least the temperature, would change. When I opened them, neither had.

Outside the window, a flurry of snow blew; a frozen Minnesota tempest. The weather forecast had promised a snow day and the superintendent had guaranteed otherwise. A few years ago, a teacher took it upon himself to explain that school was canceled for the elementary school students, not high schoolers. High schoolers (they assumed) didn't have to stand at the bus stop, waiting for a bus that would arrive ten minutes too late because of the snow.

And with Annies in their bodies, kids don't do anything but welcome the cold. Overheating your Annies means a really dead deadkid, so vacation hotspots like California and Florida emptied out really fast. Cold weather, now there was a savior in disguise.

When you were a deadkid that was, especially one with cheap Annies. My parents pretended that mine were utterly horrible up until middle school. The only thing that convinced them was the day I came home from school with frostbite blisters the size of red peppers on my fingers and they realized, for the first time, that it might be hard to explain how a deadgirl died from the cold. So they took me out of school for a week to drain the blisters under the excuse that my Annies were being updated and by the time I went back, I was allowed to cozy up in sweatshirts, scarves and jeans as much as I wanted, instead of standing at the bus stop in tank tops and shorts.

Footsteps echoed down the tile hallways; heavy, hurried thumps through a sparkling clean cavern. They're all tile, the better to discourage warmth among the student body. The janitorial staff waxed those floors until they gleamed like knives and polished the stainless steel whenever it crossed their line of vision. The doors didn't squeak, the windows were never dirty, and any cold gum left to dry on the wall and under the table was scraped and scrubbed away before the class period was over.

Talk about inhuman skill.

Quinn slid into the classroom just as the bell rang and threw up his hands, demanding applause. Patch agreed to humor him, but only because she found Quinn cute—I could never tell in what sense though. The 'cute little puppy' sense or the 'give me a chance and I'll jump your bones like I'm on a trampoline' sense.

She pushed out of her seat and made her way to the back of the classroom, where her real spot was, and Quinn replaced her, elbowing me slightly in greeting. I glanced over at him and flashed a small smile. For me, Quinn was puppy-cute and might have been the other type of cute if he had a pulse to go along with those big brown eyes. The one thing that I enjoyed most about his company was his crappy Annies; he was warm to me.

"Just in the nick of time, huh?" He grinned.

"I'm just waiting for the day you're actually late." We'd made a bet ages ago, probably back during sophomore year, that if he was ever late for class then he'd have to take me on a four-hundred dollar shopping spree for whatever I wanted. Better yet, he'd have to stay with me the entire time to carry my bags.

If he's never late, then we go out on a date—Patch's suggestion and not one that I initially agreed to. But I did, in the end.

"You really hate the idea of going out with me that much?"

"I really want that shopping spree." I reminded him dryly and he laughed.

"Fair enough. That the homework?" He inclined his head towards the finished sheet lying on my desk. "You actually finished it, nice. You do the journal and the vocab too?"

I sat up straight in my seat. "Vocab?"

"Oh boy." Quinn chuckled, pulling his notebook from his backpack and opening it, the heading 'Vocab 1-4' written at the top in his surprisingly neat script. "Here you go, copy-paste away."

"You're a god among men." A sigh flew out my mouth with the compliment and I set to work on scribbling down his words and definitions as Ms. Gold entered the classroom.

Ms. Gold—or Gold, as we called her. Titles like Ms., Mr., or Mrs. tended to fade away as the years rolled on and by high school it was surnames and nicknames for teachers—always reminded me of a spider and its web.

Not that she was a particularly venomous sort of teacher, and she wasn't big on trapping students or (I think) eating the heads off of deadkids. It was just the way she looked.

She was all limb and hardly any torso; long skinny legs and arms that made little sound when she moved, slender fingers that rested delicately when she held a paper in her hand or set it on a desk. Her skin seemed like it was made less as an organ and more as tissue paper, with how easily it tore. That skin, and the way she seemed to flutter around the classroom without making noise, reminded me a little more of a moth, but my original impression still stood.

Conversation quieted as she stood there, waiting patiently, and then stopped altogether. But the air was relaxed and friendly, almost drowsy, rather than intimidated. She took a seat on the stool at the front of the room and offered us all a fragile smile.

"How would you," She began. "describe Hester?"

One deadkid called out 'strong' and another answered 'independent', and a few more shoveled out the stereotypical feminist adjectives, but Gold didn't so much as glance at them.

Gertrude, who surprised everyone that year by hacking off fourteen inches of her long blonde hair and leaving behind a short bob, raised her hand and answered. "The rosebush in Boston. Like the one outside the prison. It's all full of weeds, but there's that one wild rosebush growing there. That's Hester."

And there came the approving smile, but it was almost a manic grin. A collective shudder ran through the classroom and I exchanged looks with Quinn. He shrugged, but there was a small line of perturbation near his mouth. I knew that line well, having gone to see some of the most pointlessly disturbing movies known to man.

"Gertrude has the right idea." Gold gestured towards the blonde, whose pencil-browned eyebrows arched a bit. Gertrude often had right ideas, but very rarely were they acknowledged. "You can't take anything written in the book at face value because everything written there has a second, or even third or fourth, meaning. Some of them with spiritual undertones, some with sexual ones."

"Oh baby!" Patch smirked and the grin slid off of Gold's face, a stern frown taking its place.

"Very funny, Patricia." A scowl came over Patch's face too, at her real name. We called her Patch for three reasons; her hair color, which reminded us of a pumpkin patch, her love for sewing, and because in elementary school, her Annies were cheaper than anyone's and parts of her became prone to falling off. "Why don't you explain to me how you would describe Hester Prynne?"

"I," Patch leaned back in her seat, smiling again. "Would describe her as having a bigger set of balls a Breather ever did. She's just standing up there, holding her kid, and she won't tell them who the daddy is. Lady's got a steel pair."

I looked down at my book to hide my smile and felt the slight rumble of Quinn's chuckle through the faux-wooden surface. A tiny part of me felt just a little bad for Gold, but I ignored the pangs of guilt and turned another page in the old, dried out book, tuning the rest of the discussions out.

I almost understood how Hester felt, but not really. Sometimes, I felt like it'd be easier to have my Scarlet Letter—my humanity—pinned on my chest, instead of going all these years looking over my shoulder, terrified of someone finding out but secretly wanting them to.

It's the letter that no one sees that burns the hottest.

Quinn gave me a ride home that day, two hours after everyone else had already gone home. My parents had never wanted me to take Driver's Ed—never wanted me to drive—so I shelled out the money for it via the part time job they didn't know about either.

In all honesty, I never really had to worry about them finding out or noticing I was gone. They were never there. Most times I just reheated old dinner they'd eaten without me or popped in an oven pizza and that was my feast for one.

"Plans tonight?" Quinn asked when we pulled up to a stoplight, tapping his hand on the steering wheel to the beat of the music. His car was an old, four-seater Asian car which production of had long since halted. Lucky dice hung from the rear-view mirror and I pulled them off. "Hey, now! Put those back!"

"They're illegal. They distract you from driving."

"Ozzie, if anything distracts me from driving, it's you. Now give 'em back."

"You can have them back after you drop me off. Get into a car accident on your own time." I held fast to the fuzzy dice, rubbing my finger along the soft fabric. "Why do you have them? Not like you gamble."

He flashed me a bright grin. "Lucky charm. So that I can be on time every day."

"Oh, now you're definitely not getting them back." I chuckled, rolling them around in my hand. "These dice are my ticket to four hundred bucks worth of clothes and shoes."

Quinn grimaced. "That's what you're going to spend it on?"

"Well, yeah. Can never have too many pairs of jeans."

"What about that new book you've been wanting?"

"It doesn't exactly cost four hundred. And neither does that new game that just came out—both of which I already bought with my own dang money."

"That'll keep you busy for awhile, at least. Until something new comes out."

"Not really, I beat the game in, like, eleven hours. It was great, though. The combat was a little iffy, but way too easy, so I'm thinking I'll play through it again on hard mode."

He sighed. "I love it when you talk dirty." I smacked him on the arm. "Hey, hey, now! What happened to not distracting the driver?"

"The driver is distracted no matter what he does anyways."

"I'm never distracted when I talk to you." He flashed me a grin and I rolled my eyes, putting the fuzzy dice in the glove compartment and out of his reach. "You work tonight?"

"Nope. Just me, the pizza and another cop show marathon."

"Sounds exciting. Mind if I join you?"

There, I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, but it wasn't Quinn that made me uncomfortable. The offer was sweet. But my house wasn't a home, it was more like an experimental building. I'd been to his place and it was warm—not in temperature, but in feeling. My place was heated, but frozen when it came to emotion. Nothing moved there. It was kind of like winter and spring in Minnesota, where you feel like something should be changing, but nothing does.

"Maybe another time, Quinn."

His smile sagged slightly, but not enough to rain on his entire parade. Quinn was probably used to me rejecting his offers to visit by now. "Alright, but I'll hold you to that."

"Hope you do."

"In other exciting news, I hear Tristan's interested in you."

"In dissecting me." I corrected him.

"I also hear he's nice to the people he doesn't want on an operating table."

"Have you heard that I'm not interested in him at all?"

"Just making sure there won't be a problem when I win the bet and take you out to dinner."

"If, not when. We're going to dinner?"

"I was planning on it, yeah. Would you rather see a movie?"

"All the movies out these days are crap anyways."

"As opposed to... when?" He chuckled.

"A time when they weren't crap."

"Alright, alright, point made."

I shifted in my seat, leaning against the car door and resting my head against the window. Steel groans and rattles slightly as the car plows on through the snowfall and the world outside is black, white and brown.

Of course, part of me missed spring because I wanted the warm weather, but another piece of me couldn't help but admire the snowy landscape. Something about how the bark of the skeleton trees looked so black and twisted when the snow was resting on its branches, and how white-coated rooftops blended into the milky, cloud filled sky.

It was a sort of understated, quiet beauty.

The radio scratched, cutting off the song mid-note and Quinn gave an aggravated grumble. "Another damn government notice. I'm already dead, what the hell do I care about some terrorists?"

I shushed him and detached myself from the window, turning up the volume, bringing the background noise to us. Static fizzled through the connection, thanks to his terrible reception, but the voice came through clear enough.

"... is a follow up report on the incident in Rochester early last week. Reports of Anachronisms malfunctioning and burning up long before their randomizer date are currently being investigated and, while there is nothing we can say at the moment, we're unwilling to jump to the conclusion that the terrorist group Breath is responsible."

I twisted the knob, turning the volume back down, and looked at Quinn. He kept his eyes on the road, but his hands were clenched and white on the steering wheel. "... pretty lame name, if you ask me. Breath."

He let out a somewhat strangled half-laugh and I noted the slight loosening of the muscles in his neck. "Pretty lame, yeah. They claim to be all anti-God Plan, but they wouldn't be alive if it weren't for that. If they're so against it, they should just sabotage their own Annies. Don't drag other people into it."

"Maybe they're Breathers." I shrugged.

"You know there aren't any Breathers anymore. They're extinct. Pages in our history books, like dinosaurs and cavemen."

I swallowed the lump in my throat, keeping my eyes on the road as I tried to squeeze my next question out. "What would you do? If you met a Breather, I mean."

"Hell, Oz, I don't know." Quinn sighed. "It's weird to think about, you know? I get that they're technically just like us—they're our grandparents and great-grandparents and all that—but this has gotta be the largest generation gap in the world. We're dead, they're alive. To be honest, I'd probably cross the street to avoid them."

"Afraid you'd get infected with a pulse?" A dry chuckle flew out my lips and I saw Quinn crack a grin in the corner of my eye.

"God forbid this tin man grow a heart."

The car swerved along on the first of the many sharp turns that led up to my house and I gripped the dashboard tightly, fingers sinking into the faux-leather surface. "Hey, tin man, just because we're both dead doesn't mean I won't be pissed if we crash."

"I wouldn't be. I need a new car."

"Why? Running out of money for the duct tape that keeps this thing held together?"

"Smartass." The government announcement was all but forgotten by then, and he relaxed in his seat once more—perfectly content with terrorizing me. "You gonna do the reading tonight or tomorrow?"

"Tonight, if I can find a rat's ass to give. Jesus Christ, Quinn, slow down."

He eased up on the gas and slammed on the brake pedal, sending the car into a lurching halt just outside my house.

"You're a madman. I hope you know that." I muttered, more for my benefit than his, as I unbuckled my seatbelt with shaking hands and picked up my backpack.

"Oh, I know." He shot me another grin, and it killed me to admit just how much I loved that grin. "See you tomorrow, Oz."

"Try to be late. I need new shoes."

"How about you just start thinking of where you want to go for dinner. And pick out a nice dress. I'll buy it for you as a consolation prize."

"You and your promises." I shook my head, shutting the door and waving goodbye. He gave me a two-fingered salute before peeling away, and I covered my face with my bag to protect it from the snow. When I lowered it, he was gone, and I stood alone.

The house was empty when I went inside, leaving my boots on the mat in the doorway. Air conditioning was still blasting from when by parents left for work that morning, so I cranked up the heat before heading upstairs to my room.

As rooms went, it was a pretty average setup, if a bit Spartan in nature. There was my bed, where the cat and I slept, the long-since-forgotten cat bed at the foot of it, a dresser and a desk where my laptop sat waiting. I grabbed the laptop, dropped by backpack on the floor, and settled down on the bed.

Bells jingled as Cloche trotted through the halls, nudging the door further open with her head and joining me on the bed. Patch had named my cat for me during her ongoing French phase. My ribcage vibrated with the rumbling of her purrs.

"It didn't work this time, Cloche." I murmured to her. "Maybe next time."

My computer chimed with an incoming invitation and I attached the heart rate monitor to my wrist. That was my password. My earbuds were next, and the slow, steady beating of six other hearts throbbed in my ears. More soothing than a lullaby.

A black screen was all that greeted me. We didn't have names or pictures, we had pulses and colors. Because that was all that bound us. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. I was green. The sixth was white. No one really ever talked to white.

R: you're early

V: Hear the news? We bombed. Again.

G: we'll get it next time.

V: Someone's feeling optimistic today. What's up?

G: got asked on a date.

R: necro

R: necro

R: necro

G: piss off.

B: So, Rochester...

G: like I said, we'll get it next time. someone tell O to stop sulking and just try again.

V: He's just a kid, he'll get over it eventually. He knows we'll make one of them breathe someday, even if we have to go five million to get there.

V: *go through

W: -SESSION CLOSED-