I pull the car to a stop. I unlock the doors.
She leans over and kisses me. My senses are alive with the taste of her, the smell of her, the feel of her, the sound of her breathing, the sight of her as she pulls her body away from mine.
“That’s the nice note,” she says. And before I can say anything else, she’s out the door and gone.
I don’t get a chance to say goodbye.
I guess, correctly, that Justin’s parents are used to him being out of touch and missing dinner. They try to yell at him, but you can tell that everyone’s going through the motions, and when Justin storms off to his room, it’s just the latest rerun of an old show.
I should be doing Justin’s homework—I’m always pretty conscientious about that kind of thing, if I’m able to do it—but my mind keeps drifting to Rhiannon. Imagining her at home. Imagining her floating from the grace of the day. Imagining her believing that things are different, that Justin has somehow changed.
I shouldn’t have done it. I know I shouldn’t have done it. Even if it felt like the universe was telling me to do it.
I agonize over it for hours. I can’t take it back. I can’t make it go away.
I fell in love once, or at least until today I thought I had. His name was Brennan, and it felt so real, even if it was mostly words. Intense, heartfelt words. I stupidly let myself think of a possible future with him. But there was no future. I tried to navigate it, but I couldn’t.
That was easy compared to this. It’s one thing to fall in love. It’s another to feel someone else falling in love with you, and to feel a responsibility toward that love.
There is no way for me to stay in this body. If I don’t go to sleep, the shift will happen anyway. I used to think that if I stayed up all night, I’d get to remain where I was. But instead, I was ripped from the body I was in. And the ripping felt exactly like what you would imagine being ripped from a body would feel like, with every single nerve experiencing the pain of the break, and then the pain of being fused into someone new. From then on, I went to sleep every night. There was no use fighting it.
I realize I have to call her. Her number’s right there in his phone. I can’t let her think tomorrow is going to be like today.
“Hey!” she answers.
“Hey,” I say.
“Thank you again for today.”
“Yeah.”
I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to ruin it. But I have to, don’t I?
I continue, “But about today?”
“Are you going to tell me that we can’t cut class every day? That’s not like you.”
Not like me.
“Yeah,” I say, “but, you know, I don’t want you to think every day is going to be like today. Because they’re not going to be, alright? They can’t be.”
There’s a silence. She knows something’s wrong.
“I know that,” she says carefully. “But maybe things can still be better. I know they can be.”
“I don’t know,” I tell her. “That’s all I wanted to say. I don’t know. Today was something, but it’s not, like, everything.”
“I know that.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
I sigh.
There’s always a chance that, in some way, I will have brushed off on Justin. There’s always a chance that his life will in fact change—that he will change. But I have no way of knowing. It’s rare that I get to see a body after I’ve left it. And even then, it’s usually months or years later. If I recognize it at all.
I want Justin to be better to her. But I can’t have her expecting it.
“That’s all,” I tell her. It feels like a Justin thing to say.
“Well, I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Yeah, you will.”
“Thanks again for today. No matter what trouble we get into tomorrow for it, it was worth it.”
“Yeah.”
“I love you,” she says.
And I want to say it. I want to say I love you, too. Right now, right at this moment, every part of me would mean it. But that will only last for a couple more hours.
“Sleep well,” I tell her. Then I hang up.
There’s a notebook on his desk.
Remember that you love Rhiannon, I write in his handwriting.
I doubt he’ll remember writing it.
I go onto his computer. I open up my own email account, then type out her name, her phone number, her email address, as well as Justin’s email and password. I write about the day. And I send it to myself.
As soon as I’m through, I clear Justin’s history.
This is hard for me.
I have gotten so used to what I am, and how my life works.
I never want to stay. I’m always ready to leave.
But not tonight.
Tonight I’m haunted by the fact that tomorrow he’ll be here and I won’t be.
I want to stay.
I pray to stay.
I close my eyes and wish to stay.
Day 5995
I wake up thinking of yesterday. The joy is in remembering; the pain is in knowing it was yesterday.
I am not there. I am not in Justin’s bed, not in Justin’s body.
Today I am Leslie Wong. I have slept through the alarm, and her mother is mad.
“Get up!” she yells, shaking my new body. “You have twenty minutes, and then Owen leaves!”
“Okay, Mom,” I groan.
“Mom! If your mother was here, I can’t imagine what she’d say!”
I quickly access Leslie’s mind. Grandmother, then. Mom’s already left for work.
As I stand in the shower, trying to remind myself I have to make it a quick one, I lose myself for a minute in thoughts of Rhiannon. I’m sure I dreamt of her. I wonder: If I started dreaming when I was in Justin’s body, did he continue the dream? Will he wake up thinking sweetly of her?
Or is that just another kind of dream on my part?
“Leslie! Come on!”
I get out of the shower, dry off, and get dressed quickly. Leslie is not, I can tell, a particularly popular girl. The few photos of friends she has around seem halfhearted, and her clothing choices are more like a thirteen-year-old’s than a sixteen-year-old’s.
I head into the kitchen and the grandmother glares at me.
“Don’t forget your clarinet,” she warns.
“I won’t,” I mumble.
There’s a boy at the table giving me an evil look. Leslie’s brother, I assume—and then confirm it. Owen. A senior. My ride to school.
I have gotten very used to the fact that most mornings in most homes are exactly the same. Stumbling out of the bed. Stumbling into the shower. Mumbling over the breakfast table. Or, if the parents are still asleep, the tiptoe out of the house. The only way to keep it interesting is to look for the variations.
This morning’s variation comes care of Owen, who lights up a joint the minute we get into the car. I’m assuming this is part of his morning routine, so I make sure Leslie doesn’t seem as surprised as I am.
Still, Owen hazards a “Don’t say a word” about three minutes into the ride. I stare out the window. Two minutes later, he says, “Look, I don’t need your judgment, okay?” The joint is done by then; it doesn’t make him any mellower.
I prefer to be an only child. In the long term, I can see how siblings could be helpful in life—someone to share family secrets with, someone of your own generation who knows if your memories are right or not, someone who sees you at eight and eighteen and forty-eight all at once, and doesn’t mind. I understand that. But in the short term, siblings are at best a hassle and at worst a terror. Most of the abuse I have suffered in my admittedly unusual life has come from brothers and sisters, with older brothers and older sisters being, by and large, the worst offenders. At first I was naïve, and assumed that brothers and sisters were natural allies, instant companions. And sometimes the context would allow this to happen—if we were on a family trip, for example, or if it was a lazy Sunday where teaming up with me was my sibling’s only form of entertainment. But on ordinary days, the rule is competition, not collaboration. There are times when I wonder whether brothers and sisters are, in fact, the ones who sense that something is off with whatever person I’m inhabiting, and move to take advantage. When I was eight, an older sister told me we were going to run away together—then abandoned the “together” part when we got to the train station, leaving me to wander there for hours, too scared to ask for help—scared that she would find out and berate me for ending our game. As a boy, I’ve had brothers—both older and younger—wrestle me, hit me, kick me, bite me, shove me, and call me more names than I could ever catalog.
The best I can hope for is a quiet sibling. At first I have Owen pegged as one of those. In the car, it appears I am wrong. But then, once we get out at school, it appears I am right again. With other kids around, he retreats into invisibility, keeping his head down as he makes his way inside, leaving me completely behind. No goodbye, no have-a-nice-day. Just a quick glance to see that my door is closed before he locks the car.
“What are you looking at?” a voice asks from over my left shoulder as I watch him enter school alone.
I turn around and do some serious accessing.
Carrie. Best friend since fourth grade.
“Just my brother.”
“Why? He’s such a waste of space.”
Here’s the strange thing: I am fine thinking the same words myself, but hearing them come out of Carrie’s mouth makes me feel defensive.
“Come on,” I say.
“Come on? Are you kidding me?”
Now I think: She knows something I don’t. I decide to keep my mouth shut.
She seems relieved to change the subject.
“What did you do last night?” she asks.
Flashes of Rhiannon rise in my mind’s eye. I try to tamp them down, but they’re not that easy to contain. Once you experience enormity, it lingers everywhere you look, and wants to be every word you say.
“Not much,” I push on, not bothering to access Leslie. This answer always works, no matter what the question. “You?”
“You didn’t get my text?”
I mumble something about my phone dying.
“That explains why you haven’t asked me yet! Guess what. Corey IM’d me! We chatted for, like, almost an hour.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, isn’t it?” Carrie sighs contentedly. “After all this time. I didn’t even know he knew my screen name. You didn’t tell him, did you?”
More accessing. This is the kind of question that can really trip a person up. Maybe not right away. But in the future. If Leslie claims she wasn’t the one who told Corey, and Carrie finds out she was, it could throw their friendship off balance. Or if Leslie claims she was, and Carrie finds out she wasn’t.
Corey is Corey Handlemann, a junior who Carrie’s had a crush on for at least three weeks. Leslie doesn’t know him well, and I can’t find a memory of giving a screen name to him. I think it’s safe.
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “I didn’t.”
“Well, I guess he really had to work hard to find it,” she says. (Or, I think, he just saw it on your Facebook profile.)
I immediately feel guilty for my snarky thoughts. This is the hard part about having best friends that I feel no attachment to—I don’t give them any benefit of the doubt. And being best friends is always about the benefit of the doubt.
Carrie is very excited about Corey, so I pretend to be very excited for her. It’s only after we separate for homeroom that I feel an emotion kicking at me, one I thought I had under control: jealousy. Although I am not articulating it to myself in so many words, I am feeling jealous that Carrie can have Corey while I can never have Rhiannon.