Every Day

  “That’s not funny!” she says. But she’s laughing.

  “I only have eyes for you,” I say.

  Just six words, and the conversation turns serious again. I can feel it like a shift in the air, like when a cloud moves over the sun. The laughter stops, and we sit there in the moment after it’s faded away.

  “A—” she starts. But I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear about Justin or impossibilities or any of the other reasons why we can’t be together.

  “Not now,” I say. “Let’s stay on the nice note.”

  “Okay,” she says. “I can do that.”

  She asks me about more of the things I noticed when I was in her body, and I tell her about the birthmark, about different people I noticed in her classes, about her parents’ concern. I share the Rebecca memory, but don’t tell her my observations about Justin, because she already knows those things, whether or not she admits them to me or herself. And I don’t mention the slight wrinkles around her eyes or her pimples, because I know they would bother her, even when they add something real to her beauty.

  Both of us have to be home for dinner, but the only way I’m willing to let her leave is to extract a promise that we’ll share time together soon. Tomorrow. Or if not tomorrow, the next day.

  “How can I say no?” she says. “I’m dying to see who you’ll be next.”

  I know it’s a joke, but I have to tell her, “I’ll always be A.”

  She stands up and kisses me on the forehead.

  “I know,” she says. “That’s why I want to see you.”

  We leave on a nice note.

  Day 6017

  I have gone two days without thinking about Nathan, but it’s clear that Nathan hasn’t gone two days without thinking about me.

  7:30 p.m., MONDAY

  I still want proof.

  8:14 p.m., MONDAY

  Why aren’t you talking to me?

  11:43 p.m., MONDAY

  You did this to me. I deserve an explanation.

  6:13 a.m., TUESDAY

  I can’t sleep anymore. I wonder if you’re going to come back. I wonder what you’ll do to me. Are you mad?

  2:30 p.m., TUESDAY

  You have to be the devil. Only the devil would leave me like this.

  2:12 a.m., WEDNESDAY

  Do you have any idea what it’s like for me now?

  The burden I feel is the burden of responsibility, which is a tricky one to deal with. It makes me slower, heavier. But at the same time, it prevents me from floating away into meaninglessness.

  It is six in the morning; Vanessa Martinez has gotten up early. After reading Nathan’s emails, I think about what Rhiannon said, what Rhiannon feared. Nathan deserves no less of a response from me.

  It will never happen again. That is an absolute. I can’t explain much more than that, but this much I know: It only happens once. Then you move on.

  He writes me back two minutes later.

  Who are you? How am I supposed to believe you?

  I know that any response I give runs the risk of being posted on Reverend Poole’s website within seconds. I don’t want to give him my real name. But I feel if I give him a name, it will make it less likely he sees me as the devil, and more likely he will see me for what I am: just a person like him.

  My name is Andrew. You need to believe me because I am the only person who truly understands what happened to you.

  Not surprisingly, he replies with:

  Prove it.

  I tell him:

  You went to a party. You didn’t drink. You chatted with a girl there. Eventually she asked you if you wanted to go dance in the basement. You did. And for about an hour, you danced. You lost track of time. You lost track of yourself. And it was one of the most fantastic moments of your life. I don’t know if you remember it, but there will probably come a time when you are dancing like that again, and it will feel familiar, you will know you’ve done it before. That will be the day you forgot. That’s how you’ll get that part of it back.

  This isn’t enough.

  But why was I there?

  I try to keep it simple.

  You were there to talk to the girl. For just that one day, you wanted to talk to that girl.

  He asks:

  What is her name?

  I can’t get her involved. I can’t explain the whole story. So I choose to evade.

  That’s not important. The important thing is that for a short time, it was worth it. You were having so much fun that you lost track of time. That’s why you were at the side of the road. You didn’t drink. You didn’t crash. You just ran out of time.

  I’m sure it was scary. I’m positive it’s hard to comprehend. But it will never happen again.

  Answerless questions can destroy you. Move on.

  It’s the truth, but it’s not enough.

  That would be easy for you, right? If I moved on.

  Every chance I give him, every truth I tell him, lightens the burden of my responsibility that much more. I sympathize with his confusion, but I feel nothing toward his hostility.

  Nathan, what you do or don’t do is no concern of mine. I’m just trying to help. You’re a good guy. I am not your enemy. I never have been. Our paths just happened to cross. Now they’ve diverged.

  I’m going to go now.

  I close the window, then open a new one to see if Rhiannon will appear in it. I realize I haven’t yet determined how far away I am from her, and am disheartened to find she’s nearly four hours away. I break the news to her in an email, and an hour later she says that it was going to be hard to meet up today, anyway. So we aim for tomorrow.

  In the meantime, there’s Vanessa Martinez to contend with. She runs at least two miles every morning, and I am already late for the routine. She has to make do with a single mile, and I can almost hear her chiding me for it. At breakfast, though, nobody else says anything—Vanessa’s parents and sister seem genuinely afraid of her.

  This is my first tipoff to something I will see evidenced again and again throughout the day: Vanessa Martinez is not a kind person.

  It’s there when she meets up with her friends at the start of school. They, too, are afraid of her. They’re not dressed identically, but it’s clear they’ve all dressed within the same sartorial guidelines, dictated by you-know-who.

  She has a poison personality, and I feel that even I am susceptible to it. Every time there’s something mean to be said, everyone looks to her for a comment. Even the teachers. And I find myself stuck in those silences, with words on the venomous tip of my tongue. I see all the girls who aren’t dressed within the guidelines, and see how easy it would be to tear them all apart.

  Is that a backpack that Lauren has on? I guess she’s acting like she’s in third grade until her chest fills in. And, oh my God, why is Felicity wearing those socks? Are those kittens? I thought only convicted child molesters were allowed to wear those. And Kendall’s top? I don’t think there’s anything sadder than an unsexy girl trying to dress sexy. We should have a fund-raiser for her, it’s so sad. Like, tornado victims would look at her and say, “No, really, we don’t need the money—give it to that unfortunate girl.”

  I don’t want these thoughts anywhere near my mind. The weird thing is that when I withhold them, when I don’t let Vanessa say them out loud, I don’t sense relief from any of the people around me. I sense disappointment. They’re bored. And their boredom is the thing that the meanness feeds on.

  Vanessa’s boyfriend, a jock named Jeff, thinks it’s her time of the month. Her best friend and number one acolyte, Cynthia, asks her if someone died. They know something’s off, but will never guess the real reason. They certainly won’t think she’s been taken over by the devil. If anything, they’re suspicious that the devil’s taken a day off.

  I know it would be foolish of me to try to change her. I could run off this afternoon and sign her up to volunteer in a soup kitchen, but I’m sure when she arrived there tomorrow, she’d only make
fun of the homeless people’s clothes, and the quality of the soup. The best I could probably do would be to get Vanessa into a compromising position that someone could blackmail her about. (Did you all see the video of Vanessa Martinez walking through the hallway in her thong underwear, singing songs from Sesame Street? And then she ran into the girls’ room and flushed her own head in a toilet?) But that would be stooping to her level, and I’m sure that using her own poison against her would cause at least a little of it to fall back inside me as well.

  So I don’t try to change her. I simply halt her ire for a single day.

  It’s exhausting, trying to make a bad person act good. You can see why it’s so much easier for them to be bad.

  I want to tell Rhiannon all about it. Because when something happens, she’s the person I want to tell. The most basic indicator of love.

  I have to resort to email, and email is not enough. I am starting to get tired of relying on words. They are full of meaning, yes, but they lack sensation. Writing to her is not the same as seeing her face as she listens. Hearing back from her is not the same as hearing her voice. I have always been grateful for technology, but now it feels as if there’s a little hitch of separation woven into any digital interaction. I want to be there, and this scares me. All my usual disconnected comforts are being taken away, now that I see the greater comfort of presence.

  Nathan also emails me, as I knew he would.

  You can’t leave now. I have more questions.

  I don’t have the heart to tell him that’s the wrong way to think about the world. There will always be more questions. Every answer leads to more questions.

  The only way to survive is to let some of them go.

  Day 6018

  The next day I am a boy named George, and I am only forty-five minutes away from Rhiannon. She emails me and says she’ll be able to leave school at lunch.

  I, however, am going to have a harder time, because today I am homeschooled.

  George’s mother and father are stay-at-home parents, and George and his two brothers stay at home with them each and every day. The room that in most homes would be called the rec room is instead called “the schoolhouse” by George’s family. The parents have even set up three desks for them, which seem to have been left over from a one-room schoolhouse at the turn of the last century.

  There is no sleeping late here. We’re all woken at seven, and there’s a protocol about who showers when. I manage to sneak a few minutes at the computer to read Rhiannon’s message and send her one of my own, saying we’ll have to see how the day plays out. Then, at eight, we’re promptly at our desks, and while our father works at the other end of the house, our mother teaches us.

  By accessing, I learn that George has never been in a classroom besides this one, because of a fight his parents had with his older brother’s kindergarten teacher about her methods. I can’t imagine what kindergarten methods would be shocking enough to pull a whole family out of school forever, but there’s no way to access information about this event—George has no idea. He’s only dealt with the repercussions.

  I have been homeschooled before, by parents who were engaged and engaging, who made sure their kids had room to explore and grow. This is not the case here. George’s mother is made of stern, unyielding material, and she also happens to be the slowest speaker I’ve ever heard.

  “Boys … we’re going to talk … about … the events … leading up … to … the Civil … War.”

  The brothers are all resigned to this. They stare forward at all times, a pantomime of paying perfect attention.

  “The president … of the … South … was … a man … named … Jefferson … Davis.”

  I refuse to be held hostage like this—not when Rhiannon will soon be waiting for me. So after an hour, I decide to take a page from Nathan’s playbook.

  I start asking questions.

  What was the name of Jefferson Davis’s wife?

  Which states were in the Union?

  How many people actually died at Gettysburg?

  Did Lincoln write the Gettysburg Address all by himself?

  And about three dozen more.

  My brothers look at me like I’m on cocaine, and my mother gets flustered with each question, since she has to look up each answer.

  “Jefferson Davis … was married … twice. His first wife … Sarah … was the daughter of … President … Zachary Taylor. But Sarah … died … of malaria … three months after … they … were … married. He remarried …”

  This goes on for another hour. Then I ask her if I can go to the library, to get some books on the subject.

  She tells me yes, and offers to drop me off herself.

  It’s the middle of a school day, so I’m the only kid in the library. The librarian knows me, though, and knows where I’m coming from. She is nice to me but abrupt with my mother, leading me to believe that the kindergarten teacher isn’t the only person in town who my mother thinks is not doing her job right.

  I find a computer and email my location to Rhiannon. Then I take a copy of Feed off the shelves and try to remember where I left off reading, a number of bodies ago. I sit at a carrel by a window and keep being drawn to the traffic, even though I know it’s still a couple of hours until Rhiannon will show up.

  I shed my borrowed life for an hour and put on the borrowed life of the book I’m reading. Rhiannon finds me like that, in the selfless reading space that the mind loans out. I don’t even notice her standing there at first.

  “Ahem,” she says. “I figured you were the only kid in the building, so it had to be you.”

  It’s too easy—I can’t resist.

  “Excuse me?” I say somewhat abruptly.

  “It’s you, right?”

  I make George look as confused as possible. “Do I know you?”

  Now she starts to doubt herself. “Oh, I’m sorry. I just, uh, am supposed to meet somebody.”

  “What does he look like?”

  “I don’t, um, know. It’s, like, an online thing.”

  I grunt. “Shouldn’t you be in school?”

  “Shouldn’t you be in school?”

  “I can’t. There’s this really amazing girl I’m supposed to meet.”

  She looks at me hard. “You jerk.”

  “Sorry, it was just—”

  “You jerky … jerk.”

  She’s seriously pissed; I’ve seriously messed up.

  I stand up from my carrel.

  “Rhiannon, I’m sorry.”

  “You can’t do that. It’s not fair.” She is actually backing away from me.

  “I will never do it again. I promise.”

  “I can’t believe you just did that. Look me in the eyes and say it again. That you promise.”

  I look her in the eyes. “I promise.”

  It’s enough, but not really. “I believe you,” she says. “But you’re still a jerk until you prove otherwise.”

  We wait until the librarian is distracted, then sneak out the door. I’m worried there’s some law about reporting homeschooled kids when they go AWOL. I know George’s mother is coming back in two hours, so we don’t have much time.

  We head to a Chinese restaurant in town. If they think we should be in school, they keep it to themselves. Rhiannon tells me about her uneventful morning—Steve and Stephanie got into another fight, but then made up by second period—and I tell her about being in Vanessa’s body.

  “I know so many girls like that,” Rhiannon says when I’m done. “The dangerous ones are the ones who are actually good at it.”

  “I suspect she’s very good at it.”

  “Well, I’m glad I didn’t have to meet her.”

  But you didn’t get to see me, I think. I keep it to myself.

  We press our knees together under the table. My hands find hers and we hold them there. We talk as if none of this is happening, as if we can’t feel life pulse through all the spots where we’re touching.

  “I’m sorry fo
r calling you a jerk,” she says. “I just—this is hard enough as it is. And I was so sure I was right.”

  “I was a jerk. I’m taking for granted how normal this all feels.”

  “Justin sometimes does that. Pretends I didn’t tell him something I just told him. Or makes up this whole story, then laughs when I fall for it. I hate that.”

  “I’m sorry—”

  “No, it’s okay. I mean, it’s not like he was the first one. I guess there’s something about me that people love to fool. And I’d probably do it—fool people—if it ever occurred to me.”

  I take all of the chopsticks out of their holder and put them on the table.

  “What are you doing?” Rhiannon asks.

  I use the chopsticks to outline the biggest heart possible. Then I use the Sweet’N Low packets to fill it in. I borrow some from two other tables when I run out.

  When I’m done, I point to the heart on the table.

  “This,” I say, “is only about one ninety-millionth of how I feel about you.”

  She laughs.

  “I’ll try not to take it personally,” she says.

  “Take what personally?” I say. “You should take it very personally.”

  “The fact that you used artificial sweetener?”

  I take a Sweet’N Low packet and fling it at her.

  “Not everything is a symbol!” I shout.

  She picks up a chopstick and brandishes it as a sword. I pick up another chopstick in order to duel.

  We are doing this when the food arrives. I’m distracted and she gets a good shot in at my chest.

  “I die!” I proclaim.

  “Who has the moo shu chicken?” the waiter asks.

  The waiter continues to indulge us as we laugh and talk our way through lunch. He’s a real pro, the kind of waiter who refills your water glass when it’s half empty, without you noticing he’s doing it.