I stop swinging and plant my feet on the ground.
“This is stupid, Owen. You have five seconds to tell me what happened, or I’m going to head right back home, and you’ll be on your own for whatever happens next.”
Owen is surprised. “What do you want me to say? Josh Wolf gets me my pot. Today we got into a fight over it—he was saying I owed him, when I didn’t. He started pushing me around, so I pushed him back. And we got caught. He had the drugs, so he said I’d just dealt them to him. Real smooth. I said that was totally wrong, but he’s in all AP classes and everything, so who do you think they’re going to believe?”
He has definitely convinced himself it’s the truth. But whether it started out being the truth or not, I can’t tell.
“Well,” I say, “you have to come home. Dad’s trashed your room, but they haven’t found any drugs yet. And they didn’t find any in your locker, and I’m guessing they didn’t find any in the car, or I would’ve heard about it. So right now, it’s all okay.”
“I’m telling you, there aren’t any drugs. I used the weed up this morning. That’s why I needed more from Josh.”
“Josh, your former best friend.”
“What are you talking about? I haven’t been friends with him since we were, like, eight.”
I am sensing that this was the last time Owen had a best friend.
“Let’s go,” I tell him. “It’s not the end of the world.”
“Easy for you to say.”
I am not expecting our father to hit Owen. But as soon as he sees him in the house, he decks him.
I think I am the only one who is truly stunned.
“What have you done?” my father is yelling. “What stupid, stupid thing have you done?”
Both my mother and I move to stand between them. Grandma just watches from the sidelines, looking mildly pleased.
“I haven’t done anything!” Owen protests.
“Is that why you ran away? Is that why you are being expelled? Because you haven’t done anything?”
“They won’t expel him until they hear his side of the story,” I point out, fairly sure this is true.
“Stay out of this!” my father warns.
“Why don’t we all sit down and talk this over?” my mother suggests.
The anger rises off my father like heat. I feel myself receding in a way that I’m guessing is not unusual for Leslie when she’s with her family.
I become nostalgic for that first waking moment of the morning, back before I had any idea what ugliness the day would bring.
We sit down this time in the den. Or, rather, Owen, our mother, and I sit down—Owen and me on the couch, our mother in a nearby chair. Our father hovers over us. Our grandmother stays in the doorway, as if she’s keeping lookout.
“You are a drug dealer!” our father yells.
“I am not a drug dealer,” Owen answers. “For one, if I were a drug dealer, I’d have a lot more money. And I’d have a stash of drugs that you would’ve found by now!”
Owen, I think, needs to shut up.
“Josh Wolf was the drug dealer,” I volunteer. “Not Owen.”
“So what was your brother doing—buying from him?”
Maybe, I think, I’m the one who needs to shut up.
“Our fight had nothing to do with drugs,” Owen says. “They just found them on him afterward.”
“Then what were you and Josh fighting about?” our mother asks, as if the fact that these two boyhood chums fought is the most unbelievable thing that’s occurred.
“A girl,” Owen says. “We were fighting about a girl.”
I wonder if Owen thought this one out ahead of time, or whether it’s come to him spontaneously. Whatever the case, it’s probably the only thing he could have possibly said that would have made our parents momentarily … happy might be overstating it. But less angry. They don’t want their son to be buying or selling drugs, being bullied or bullying anyone else. But fighting over a girl? Perfectly acceptable. Especially since, I’m guessing, it’s not like Owen’s ever mentioned a girl to them before.
Owen sees he’s gained ground. He pushes further. “If she found out—oh God, she can’t find out. I know some girls like it when you fight over them, but she definitely doesn’t.”
Mom nods her approval.
“What’s her name?” Dad asks.
“Do I have to tell you?”
“Yes.”
“Natasha. Natasha Lee.”
Wow, he’s even made her Chinese. Amazing.
“Do you know this girl?” Dad asks me.
“Yes,” I say. “She’s awesome.” Then I turn to Owen and shoot him fake daggers. “But Romeo over here never told me he was into her. Although now that he says it, it’s starting to make sense. He has been acting very weird lately.”
Mom nods again. “He has.”
Eyes bloodshot, I want to say. Eating a lot of Cheetos. Staring into space. Eating more Cheetos. It must be love. What else could it possibly be?
What was threatening to be an all-out war becomes a war council, with our parents strategizing what the principal can be told, especially about the running away. I hope for Owen’s sake that Natasha Lee is, in fact, a student at the high school, whether he has a crush on her or not. I can’t access any memory of her. If the name rings a bell, the bell’s in a vacuum.
Now that our father can see a way of saving face, he’s almost amiable. Owen’s big punishment is that he has to go clean up his room before dinner.
I can’t imagine I would have gotten the same reaction if I’d beaten up another girl over a boy.
I follow Owen up to his room. When we’re safely inside, door closed, no parents around, I tell him, “That was kinda brilliant.”
He looks at me with unconcealed annoyance and says, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Get out of my room.”
This is why I prefer to be an only child.
I have a sense that Leslie would let it go. So I should let it go. That’s the law I’ve set down for myself—don’t disrupt the life you’re living in. Leave it as close to the same as you can.
But I’m pissed. So I diverge a little from the law. I think, perversely, that Rhiannon would want me to. Even though she has no idea who Owen and Leslie are. Or who I am.
“Look,” I say, “you lying little pothead bitch. You are going to be nice to me, okay? Not only because I am covering your butt, but because I am the one person in the world right now who is being decent to you. Is that understood?”
Shocked, and maybe a little contrite, Owen mumbles his assent.
“Good,” I say, knocking a few things off his shelves. “Now happy cleaning.”
Nobody talks at dinner.
I don’t think this is unusual.
I wait until everyone is asleep before I go on the computer. I retrieve Justin’s email and password from my own email, then log in as him.
There’s an email from Rhiannon, sent at 10:11 p.m.
J –
I just don’t understand. was it something I did? yesterday was so perfect, and today you are mad at me again. if it’s something I did, please tell me, and I’ll fix it. I want us to be together. I want all our days to end on a nice note. not like tonight.
with all my heart,
r
I reel back in my seat. I want to hit reply, I want to reassure her that it will be better—but I can’t. You’re not him anymore, I have to remind myself. You’re not there.
And then I think: What have I done?
I hear Owen moving around in his room. Hiding evidence? Or is fear keeping him awake?
I wonder if he’ll be able to pull it off tomorrow.
I want to get back to her. I want to get back to yesterday.
Day 5996
All I get is tomorrow.
As I fell asleep, I had a glint of an idea. But as I wake up, I realize the glint has no light left in it.
Today I’m a boy. Skylar Smith. Soccer player, but not a star soccer player. Clean room, but not compulsively so. Videogame console in his room. Ready to wake up. Parents asleep.
He lives in a town that’s about a four-hour drive from where Rhiannon lives.
This is nowhere near close enough.
It’s an uneventful day, as most are. The only suspense comes from whether I can access things fast enough.
Soccer practice is the hardest part. The coach keeps calling out names, and I have to access like crazy to figure out who everyone is. It’s not Skylar’s best day at practice, but he doesn’t embarrass himself.
I know how to play most sports, but I’ve also learned my limits. I found this out the hard way when I was eleven. I woke up in the body of some kid who was in the middle of a ski trip. I thought that, hey, skiing had always looked fun. So I figured I’d try. Learn it as I went. How hard could it be?
The kid had already graduated from the bunny slopes, and I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a bunny slope. I thought skiing was like sledding—one hill fits all.
I broke the kid’s leg in three places.
The pain was pretty bad. And I honestly wondered if, when I woke up the next morning, I would still feel the pain of the broken leg, even though I was in a new body. But instead of the pain, I felt something just as bad—the fierce, living weight of terrifying guilt. Just as if I’d rammed him with a car, I was consumed by the knowledge that a stranger was lying in a hospital bed because of me.
And if he’d died … I wondered if I would have died, too. There is no way for me to know. All I know is that, in a way, it doesn’t matter. Whether I die or just wake up the next morning as if nothing happened, the fact of the death will destroy me.
So I’m careful. Soccer, baseball, field hockey, football, softball, basketball, swimming, track—all of those are fine. But I’ve also woken up in the body of an ice hockey player, a fencer, an equestrian, and once, recently, a gymnast.
I’ve sat all those out.
If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s video games. It’s a universal presence, like TV or the Internet. No matter where I am, I usually have access to these things, and video games especially help me calm my mind.
After soccer practice, Skylar’s friends come over to play World of Warcraft. We talk about school and talk about girls (except for his friends Chris and David, who talk about boys). This, I’ve discovered, is the best way to waste time, because it isn’t really wasted—surrounded by friends, talking crap and sometimes talking for real, with snacks around and something on a screen.
I might even be enjoying myself, if I could only unmoor myself from the place I want to be.
Day 5997
It’s almost eerie how well the next day works out.
I wake up early—six in the morning.
I wake up as a girl.
A girl with a car. And a license.
In a town only an hour away from Rhiannon’s.
I apologize to Amy Tran as I drive away from her house, a half hour after waking up. What I’m doing is, no doubt, a strange form of kidnapping.
I strongly suspect that Amy Tran wouldn’t mind. Getting dressed this morning, the options were black, black, or … black. Not in a goth sense—none of the black came in the form of lace gloves—but more in a rock ’n’ roll sense. The mix in her car stereo puts Janis Joplin and Brian Eno side by side, and somehow it works.
I can’t rely on Amy’s memory here—we’re going somewhere she’s never been. So I did some Google mapping right after my shower, typed in the address of Rhiannon’s school and watched it pop up in front of me. That simple. I printed it out, then cleared the history.
I have become very good at clearing histories.
I know I shouldn’t be doing this. I know I’m poking a wound, not healing it. I know there’s no way to have a future with Rhiannon.