“Stop! Just stop.”
But I can’t. “What do you think would happen if he met me in this body? What if the three of us went out? How much attention do you think he’d pay you? Because he doesn’t care about who you are. I happen to think you are about a thousand times more attractive than Ashley is. But do you really think he’d be able to keep his hands to himself if he had a chance?”
“He’s not like that.”
“Are you sure? Are you really sure?”
“Fine,” Rhiannon says. “Let me call him.”
Despite my immediate protests, she dials his number and, when he answers, says she has a friend in town that she wants him to meet. Maybe we could all go for dinner? He says fine, but not until Rhiannon says it’ll be her treat.
Once she hangs up, we just hang there.
“Happy?” she asks.
“I have no idea,” I tell her honestly.
“Me either.”
“When are we meeting him?”
“Six.”
“Okay,” I say. “In the meantime, I want to tell you everything, and I want you to tell me everything in return.”
It’s so much easier when we’re talking about things that are real. We don’t have to remind ourselves what the point is, because we’re right there in it.
She asks me when I first knew.
“I was probably four or five. Obviously, I knew before that about changing bodies, having a different mom and dad each day. Or grandmother or babysitter or whoever. There was always someone to take care of me, and I assumed that was just what living was—a new life every morning. If I got something wrong—a name, a place, a rule—people would correct me. There was never that big a disturbance. I didn’t think of myself as a boy or a girl—I never have. I would just think of myself as a boy or a girl for a day. It was like a different set of clothes.
“The thing that ended up tripping me up was the concept of tomorrow. Because after a while, I started to notice—people kept talking about doing things tomorrow. Together. And if I argued, I would get strange looks. For everyone else, there always seemed to be a tomorrow together. But not for me. I’d say, ‘You won’t be there,’ and they’d say, ‘Of course I’ll be there.’ And then I’d wake up, and they wouldn’t be. And my new parents would have no idea why I was so upset.
“There were only two options—something was wrong with everyone else, or something was wrong with me. Because either they were tricking themselves into thinking there was a tomorrow together, or I was the only person who was leaving.”
Rhiannon asks, “Did you try to hold on?”
I tell her, “I’m sure I did. But I don’t remember it now. I remember crying and protesting—I told you about that. But the rest? I’m not sure. I mean, do you remember a lot about when you were five?”
She shakes her head. “Not really. I remember my mom bringing me and my sister to the shoe store to get new shoes before kindergarten started. I remember learning that a green light meant go and red meant stop. I remember coloring them in, and the teacher being a little confused about how to explain yellow. I think she told us to treat it the same as red.”
“I learned my letters quickly,” I tell her. “I remember the teachers being surprised that I knew them. I imagine they were just as surprised the next day, when I’d forgotten them.”
“A five-year-old probably wouldn’t notice taking a day off.”
“Probably. I don’t know.”
“I keep asking Justin about it, you know. The day you were him. And it’s amazing how clear his fake memories are. He doesn’t disagree when I say we went to the beach, but he doesn’t really remember it, either.”
“James, the twin, was like that, too. He didn’t notice anything wrong. But when I asked him about meeting you for coffee, he didn’t remember it at all. He remembered he was at Starbucks—his mind accounted for the time. But it wasn’t what actually happened.”
“Maybe they remember what you want them to remember.”
“I’ve thought about that. I wish I knew for sure.”
We walk farther. Circle a tree with our fingers.
“What about love?” she asks. “Have you ever been in love?”
“I don’t know that you’d call it love,” I say. “I’ve had crushes, for sure. And there have been days where I’ve really regretted leaving. There were even one or two people I tried to find, but that didn’t work out. The closest was this guy Brennan.”
“Tell me about him.”
“It was about a year ago. I was working at a movie theater, and he was in town, visiting his cousins, and when he went to get some popcorn, we flirted a little, and it just became this … spark. It was this small, one-screen movie theater, and when the movie was running, my job was pretty slow. I think he missed the second half of the movie, because he came back out and started talking to me more. I ended up having to tell him what happened, so he could pretend he’d been in there most of the time. At the end, he asked for my email, and I made up an email address.”
“Like you did for me.”
“Exactly like I did for you. And he emailed me later that night, and left the next day to go back home to Maine, and that proved to be ideal, because then the rest of our relationship could be online. I’d been wearing a name tag, so I had to give him that first name, but I made up a last name, and then I made up an online profile using some of the photos from the real guy’s profile. I think his name was Ian.”
“Oh—so you were a boy?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Does that matter?”
“No,” she tells me. “I guess not.” But I can tell it does. A little. Again, her mental picture needs adjustment.
“So we’d email almost every day. We’d even chat. And while I couldn’t tell him what was really happening—I emailed him from some very strange places—I still felt like I had something out there in the world that was consistently mine, and that was a pretty new feeling. The only problem was, he wanted more. More photos. Then he wanted to Skype. Then, after about a month of these intense conversations, he started talking about visiting again. His aunt and uncle had already invited him back, and summer was coming.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Yup—uh-oh. I couldn’t figure out a way around it. And the more I tried to dodge it, the more he noticed. All of our conversations became about us. Every now and then, a tangent would get in there, but he’d always drag it back. So I had to end it. Because there wasn’t going to be a tomorrow for us.”
“Why didn’t you tell him the truth?”
“Because I didn’t think he could take it. Because I didn’t trust him enough, I guess.”
“So you called it off.”
“I told him I’d met someone else. I borrowed photos from the body I was in at the time. I changed my fake profile’s relationship status. Brennan never wanted to talk to me again.”
“Poor guy.”
“I know. After that, I promised myself I wouldn’t get into any more virtual entanglements, as easy as they might seem to be. Because what’s the point of something virtual if it doesn’t end up being real? And I could never give anyone something real. I could only give them deception.”
“Like impersonating their boyfriends,” Rhiannon says.
“Yeah. But you have to understand—you were the exception to the rule. And I didn’t want it to be based on deception. Which is why you’re the first person I’ve ever told.”
“The funny thing is, you say it like it’s so unusual that you’ve only done it once. But I bet a whole lot of people go through their lives without ever telling the truth, not really. And they wake up in the same body and the same life every single morning.”
“Why? What aren’t you telling me?”
Rhiannon looks me in the eye. “If I’m not telling you something, it’s for a reason. Just because you trust me, it doesn’t mean I have to automatically trust you. Trust doesn’t work like that.”
“That’s fair.”
“I know it is. But enough of that. Tell me about—I don’t know—third grade.”
The conversation continues. She learns the reason I now have to access information about allergies before eating anything (after having been nearly killed by a strawberry when I was nine), and I learn the origin of her fear of bunny rabbits (a particularly malevolent creature named Swizzle that liked to escape its cage and sleep on people’s faces). She learns about the best mom I ever had (a water park is involved), and I learn about the highs and lows of living with the same mother for your entire life, about how no one can make you angrier, but how you can’t really love anyone more. She learns that I haven’t always been in Maryland, but I move great distances only when the body I’m in moves great distances. I learn that she’s never been on an airplane.
She still keeps a physical space between us—there will be no leaning on shoulders or holding hands right now. But if our bodies keep apart, our words do not. I don’t mind that.
We return to the car and pick at the remains of the picnic. Then we walk around and talk some more. I am astonished at the number of lives I can remember to tell Rhiannon about, and she is amazed that her single life bears as many stories as my multiple one. Because her normal existence is so foreign to me, so intriguing to me, it starts to feel a little more interesting to her as well.
I could go on like this until midnight. But at five-fifteen, Rhiannon looks at her phone and says, “We better get going. Justin will be waiting for us.”
Somehow, I’d managed to forget.
It should be a foregone conclusion. I am a seriously attractive girl. Justin is a typically horny boy.
I am hoping that Rhiannon’s theory is right, and that Ashley will only remember what I want her to remember, or what her mind wants her to remember. Not that I’m going to take this far—all I need is confirmation of Justin’s willingness, not actual contact.
Rhiannon’s picked a clam house off the highway. True to form, I confirm that Ashley doesn’t have any shellfish allergies. In truth, Ashley has tricked herself into thinking she’s “allergic” to a number of things, as a way of narrowing down her diet. But shellfish never hit that particular watch list.
When she walks into the room, heads actually turn. Most of them are attached to men a good thirty years older than her. I’m sure she’s used to it, but it freaks me out.
Even though Rhiannon was concerned about Justin having to wait for us, he ends up coming ten minutes after we do. The look on his face when he first sees me is priceless—when Rhiannon said she had a friend in town, Ashley was not what he pictured. He gives Rhiannon her hello, but he’s gaping at me when he does.
We take our seats. At first I’m so focused on his reaction that I don’t notice Rhiannon’s. She’s receding into herself, suddenly quiet, suddenly timid. I can’t tell whether it’s Justin’s presence that’s making this happen, or whether it’s the combination of his presence and mine.
We’ve been so wrapped up in our own day that we haven’t really prepared for this. So when Justin starts asking the obvious questions—how do Rhiannon and I know each other, and how come he hasn’t heard about me before—I have to jump into the breach. For Rhiannon, fabrication is a ruminative act, whereas lying is a part of my necessary nature.
I tell him that my mother and Rhiannon’s mother were best friends in high school. I’m now living in Los Angeles (why not?), auditioning for TV shows (because I can). My mother and I are visiting the East Coast for a week, and she wanted to check in on her old friend. Rhiannon and I have seen each other off and on through the years, but this is the first time in a while.