I’m like Dana’s parents, or Dr. P—I want to ask her why. Even from the inside, I can’t figure it out. Because the body can’t answer that.
My limbs are heavy, wooden. But I prop myself up. I edge myself out of bed. I need to find a computer or a phone.
When I get to the door, I find it’s locked. There should be a key that lets me out, but somebody’s taken it.
I’m trapped in my own room.
Now that they know I remember at least some of it, they are letting me stew in my own guilt.
And the worst part is: it’s working.
I am out of water. I call out that I need more water. Within a minute, my mother is at the door with a glass. She looks like she’s been crying. She is shattered. I have shattered my mother.
“Here,” she says.
“Can I come out?” I ask. “There are some things I need to look up for school.”
She shakes her head. “Maybe later. After dinner. For now, Dr. P would like you to write down everything you’re feeling.”
She leaves and locks the door behind her. I find a piece of paper and a pen.
What I feel is helplessness, I write.
But then I stop. Because I’m not writing as Dana. I’m writing as me.
The headache and nausea are subsiding. Although every time I imagine Rhiannon alone in the cabin, I feel sick again.
I promised her. Even though I knew the risk, I promised her.
And now I’m proving to her that it’s too risky to accept my promises.
I am proving to her that I won’t be able to come through.
Dana’s mother brings me dinner on a tray, as if I’m an invalid. I thank her for it. And then I find the words I should have been using all along.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I’m really, really sorry.”
She nods, but I can tell it’s not enough.
I must have told her I was sorry too many times before. At some point—maybe last night—she must have stopped believing it.
When I ask her where my father is, she tells me he’s getting the car fixed.
They decide that I will have to go to school tomorrow, and that I will have to make amends to my friends then. They say I can use the computer for my homework, but then sit there behind me as I make up things to research.
Emailing Rhiannon is out of the question.
And they show no signs of giving me back my phone.
The previous night’s events never come back to me. I spend the rest of the night staring into that blank space. And I can’t help but feel it staring right back.
Day 6022
My plan is to wake up early—around six—and email Rhiannon with a full explanation. I expect she gave up on me after a while.
But my plan is foiled when I’m shaken awake a little before five.
“Michael, it’s time to get up.”
It’s my mother—Michael’s mother—and unlike with Dana’s mother, there’s only apology in her voice.
I figure it’s time for swim practice, or something else I have to do before school. But when I get out of bed, my foot hits a suitcase.
I hear my mom in the other room, waking up my sisters.
“It’s time to go to Hawaii!” she says cheerily.
Hawaii.
I access and find that, yes, we are leaving for Hawaii this morning. Michael’s older sister is getting married there. And Michael’s family has decided to take a weeklong vacation.
Only for me it won’t be a week. Because in order to get back, I’d have to wake up in the body of a sixteen-year-old who was heading home to Maryland that day. It could take weeks. Months.
It might never happen.
“The car’s coming in forty-five minutes!” Michael’s dad calls up.
Under no circumstances can I go.
Michael’s wardrobe consists mostly of T-shirts for heavy metal bands. I throw one on, as well as jeans.
“You’re just asking Homeland Security to give you a full cavity search,” one of my sisters says as I pass her in the hall.
I am still trying to figure out what to do.
Michael doesn’t have his license, and I don’t think it would help for me to steal one of his parents’ cars. His older sister’s wedding isn’t until Friday, so at least I’m not jeopardizing his attendance there. But who am I kidding? Even if the wedding were this evening, I wouldn’t get on that plane.
I know I am going to get Michael in a huge amount of trouble. I apologize to him profusely as I write my note and leave it on the kitchen table.
I can’t go today. I am so sorry. I will be back later tonight. Go without me. I’ll get there somehow by Thursday.
While everyone else is upstairs, I walk out the back door.
I could call a cab, but I’m afraid his parents will call the local cab companies to see if they’ve picked up any metalhead teens lately. I am at least two hours away from Rhiannon. I take the nearest bus I can find, and ask the driver the best way to get to her town. He laughs and says, “By car.” I tell him that’s not an option, and in return he tells me I’ll probably have to head to Baltimore and then back out again.
It takes about seven hours.
School isn’t out yet when I get there, having walked about a mile from the center of town. Again, nobody stops me, even though I’m a big, hairy, sweaty guy in a Metallica T-shirt storming up the steps.
I try to remember Rhiannon’s schedule from when I was inside her head, and have a vague recollection that this period is gym. I check the gymnasium and find it empty. The natural next stop is the fields, which are behind the school. When I walk out, I find a softball game in action. Rhiannon is at third base.
She sees me out of the corner of her eye. I wave. It’s unclear whether she recognizes me as me or not. I feel too out in the open, too much in the line of the gym teacher’s sight. So I retreat back to the school, by the door. Just another slacker, taking a smokeless smoke break.
Rhiannon walks over to one of the teachers and says something. The teacher looks sympathetic, and puts another student on third base. Rhiannon starts heading toward the school. I step back inside, and wait for her in the empty gym.
“Hey,” I say once she steps inside.
“Where the hell were you?” she replies.
I’ve never seen her this angry before. It’s the kind of anger that comes when you feel betrayed by not just a single person, but the universe.
“I was locked in my room,” I tell her. “It was awful. There wasn’t even a computer.”
“I waited for you,” she tells me. “I got up. Made the bed. Had some breakfast. And then I waited. The reception on my phone went on and off, so I figured that had to be it. I started reading old issues of Field & Stream, because that’s the only reading material up there. Then I heard footsteps. I was so excited. When I heard someone at the door, I ran to it.
“Well, it wasn’t you. It was this eighty-year-old guy. And he had this dead deer with him. I don’t know who was more surprised. I just screamed when I saw him. And he nearly had a heart attack. I wasn’t naked, but I was close. I was so ashamed of myself. He wasn’t even sweet about it. He said I was trespassing. I told him Artie was my uncle, but he wasn’t believing me. I think the only thing that saved me was that Artie and I have the same last name. I was there in my underwear, showing this guy my ID. There was blood on his hands. And he said there were other guys coming. He’d just assumed my car was one of theirs.
“The problem was—I still thought you were coming. So I couldn’t leave. I put on my clothes, and had to sit there as they came and gutted that poor deer. I waited there after they left. I waited there until dark. The cabin smelled like blood, A. But I stayed there. And you never came.”
I tell her about Dana. Then I tell her about Michael, and running out of his house.
It’s something. But it’s not enough.
“How are we supposed to do this?” she asks me. “How?”
I want there to be an answer. I want to have an answer.
“Come here,” I say. And I hold her close, because that’s the only answer I have.
We stand like that for a minute, each not knowing what comes next. When the door to the gym opens, we pull away from each other. But we’re too late. I figure it’s one of the gym teachers, or another girl from class. But it’s not even that door. It’s the door from the school side, and it’s Justin who’s walked through.
“What the hell?” he says. “What. The. Hell?”
Rhiannon tries to explain. “Justin—” she begins. But he cuts her off.
“Lindsay texted me to say you weren’t feeling well. So I was going to see if you were okay. Well, I guess you’re real okay. Don’t let me interrupt.”
“Stop it,” Rhiannon says.
“Stop what, you bitch?” he asks. He’s on us now.
“Justin,” I say.
He turns to me. “You’re not even allowed to speak, bro.”
I’m about to say something else, but he’s already punching me. His fist crashes right against the bridge of my nose. I’m knocked down to the ground.
Rhiannon screams and moves to help me up. Justin pulls at her arm.
“I always knew you were a slut,” Justin says.
“Stop it!” Rhiannon cries out.
Justin lets go of her and comes back over to me. He starts kicking my body.
“This your new boyfriend?” Justin yells. “You love him?”
“I don’t love him!” Rhiannon yells back. “But I don’t love you, either.”
The next time he kicks, I grab his leg and pull him down. He crashes onto the gym floor. I think this will stop him, but he jabs his boot out again and gets me in the chin. My teeth rattle.
At this point, some whistle must blow outside, because within thirty seconds, girls from softball are streaming into the gym. When they see the carnage, they cluck and gasp. One girl runs over to Rhiannon to make sure she’s okay.
Justin gets up and kicks me again, just so everyone can see it. It barely grazes me, and I use the momentum of dodging the blow to stand up. I want to hit him, hurt him, but I honestly don’t know how.
Plus, I have to leave. It will be easy enough to discover that I don’t go to this school. And even though I’m the clear loser of this fight, they can still call the police on me for trespassing and brawling in the first place.
I teeter over to Rhiannon. Her friend makes a move to shield her from me, but Rhiannon gestures her off.
“I have to go,” I tell her. “Meet me at the Starbucks where we first met. When you can.”
I feel a hand on my shoulder. Justin, pulling me around. He won’t hit me with my back turned.
I know I should face him. Hit him if I can. But instead I duck out of his grip and run. He’s not going to follow me. He will bask instead in the victory of seeing me run.
It is not my intention to leave Rhiannon crying, but that is exactly what I do.
I make my way back to the bus stop, then use a nearby phone booth to call a cab. Nearly fifty dollars later, I am at the Starbucks. If before I was a big, hairy, sweaty guy in a Metallica T-shirt, now I am a big, hairy, sweaty guy in a Metallica T-shirt who’s beaten, bruised, and bleeding. I order a venti black coffee and leave twenty dollars in the tip jar. Now they’ll let me stay as long as I want, no matter how scary I look.
I clean myself up some in the bathroom. Then I sit down and wait.
And wait.
And wait.
She doesn’t arrive until a little after six.
She doesn’t apologize. She doesn’t explain why it took her so long. She doesn’t even come to my table right away. She stops at the counter and gets a coffee first.
“I really need this,” she says as she sits down. I know she’s talking about the coffee, not anything else.
I’m on my fourth coffee and second scone.