I decide to make sure that this is true. I zone out of math class and tune in instead to Alexander’s memories. The way I access him, it’s like turning on a hundred televisions at the same time, I’m seeing so many parts of him at once. The good memories. The hard memories.
His friend Cara is telling him she’s pregnant. He is not the father, but she trusts him more than she does the father. His father doesn’t want him to spend so much time on the guitar, tells him music is a dead-end calling. He drinks his third can of Red Bull, trying to finish a paper at four in the morning because he was out with friends until one. He is climbing the ladder of a tree house. He is failing his driver’s test and fighting back tears when the instructor tells him. He is alone in his room, playing the same tune over and over again on an acoustic guitar, trying to figure out what it means. Ginny Dulles is breaking up with him, saying it’s just that she likes him as a friend, when the truth is that she likes Brandon Rogers more. He is on a swing set, six years old, going higher and higher until he is convinced this is it, this is the time he will fly. He is slipping money into Mickey’s wallet while Mickey isn’t looking, so later on Mickey will be able to pay his share of the check. He is dressed as the Tin Man on Halloween. His mother has burned her hand on the stove and he doesn’t know what to do. The first morning he has his license, he drives to the ocean to watch the sunrise. He is the only one there.
I stop there. I stop at this. I lurch back into myself. I don’t know if I can do this.
I can’t block out the temptation that Poole offered: If I could stay in this life, would I? Every time I pose the question to myself, I get knocked back into my own life from Alexander’s. I get ideas, and once they take hold, I can’t stop them.
What if there really was a way to stay?
Every person is a possibility. The hopeless romantics feel it most acutely, but even for others, the only way to keep going is to see every person as a possibility. The more I see the Alexander that the world reflects back at him, the more of a possibility he seems. His possibility is grounded in the things that mean the most to me. Kindness. Creativity. Engagement in the world. Engagement in the possibilities of the people around him.
The day is nearly half over. I only have a short time to figure out what to do with Alexander’s possibilities.
The clock always ticks. There are times you don’t hear it, and there are times that you do.
I email Nathan and ask him for Poole’s email address. I get a quick response. I email Poole a few simple questions.
I get another quick response.
I email Rhiannon and tell her I’m going to come by this afternoon.
I say it’s important.
She tells me she’ll be there.
Alexander has to tell Mickey that he can’t make their band practice after school.
“Hot date?” Mickey asks, joking.
Alexander smiles mischievously and leaves it at that.
Rhiannon is waiting for me at the bookstore. It’s become our place.
She knows me when I walk through the door. Her eyes follow me as I come closer. She doesn’t smile, but I do. I am so grateful to see her.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey,” she says.
She wants to be here, but she doesn’t think it’s a good idea. She is also grateful, but she is sure this gratitude will turn into regret.
“I have an idea,” I tell her.
“What?”
“Let’s pretend this is the first time we’ve ever met. Let’s pretend you were here to get a book, and I happened to bump into you. We struck up a conversation. I like you. You like me. Now we’re sitting down to coffee. It feels right. You don’t know that I switch bodies every day. I don’t know about your ex or anything else. We’re just two people meeting for the first time.”
“But why?”
“So we don’t have to talk about everything else. So we can just be with each other. Enjoy it.”
“I don’t see the point—”
“No past. No future. Just present. Give it a chance.”
She looks torn. She leans her chin on her fist and looks at me. Finally, she decides.
“It’s very nice to meet you,” she says. She doesn’t understand it yet, but she’s going to go with it.
I smile. “It’s very nice to meet you, as well. Where should we go?”
“You decide,” she says. “What’s your favorite place?”
I access Alexander, and the answer is right there. As if he’s handing it to me.
My smile grows wider.
“I know just the place,” I say. “But first we’ll need groceries.”
Because this is the first time we’ve met, I don’t have to tell her about Nathan or Poole or anything else that’s happened or about to happen. The past and future are what’s complicated. It’s the present that’s simple. And that simplicity is the sensation of it being just her and me.
Even though there are only a few things we need, we get a shopping cart and go down every aisle of the grocery store. It doesn’t take long before Rhiannon is standing on the front of it, I’m standing on the back of it, and we are riding as fast as we can.
We set down a rule: Every aisle has to have a story. So in the pet-food aisle, I learn more about Swizzle, the malevolent bunny rabbit. In the produce aisle, I tell her about the day I went to summer camp and had to be part of a greased-watermelon pull, and how I ended up with three stitches after the watermelon shot out of everyone’s arms and landed in my eye—the first case of watermelon abuse the hospital had ever seen. In the cereal aisle, we offer autobiographies in the form of the cereals we’ve eaten over the years, trying to pinpoint the year that the cereal turning the milk blue stopped being cool and started being gross.