Another Day (9 page)

“You did?” I ask. The idea of leaving your body sounds almost fun to me. A relief.

“Of course,” he says. “Imagine being homesick, but without having a home. That’s what it was like. I wanted friends, a mom, a dad, a dog—but I couldn’t hold on to any of them more than a single day. It was brutal. There are nights I remember screaming and crying, begging my parents not to make me go to bed. They could never figure out what I was afraid of. They thought it was a monster under the bed, or a ploy to get a few more bedtime stories. I could never really explain, not in a way that made sense to them. I’d tell them I didn’t want to say goodbye, and they’d assure me it wasn’t goodbye. It was just good night. I’d tell them it was the same thing, but they thought I was being silly.”

Now it doesn’t sound fun at all. It sounds lonely.

He goes on. “Eventually I came to peace with it. I had to. I realized that this was my life, and there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t fight the tide, so I decided to float along.”

I can’t get my mind around it. No friends. No people in your life from day to day.

So lonely.

“How many times have you told this story?” I ask him.

“None. I swear. You’re the first.”

There’s only you.
Why am I thinking of Justin right now? Why am I thinking of the time, drunk on wine in the passenger seat of my car, he said those words to me? I wasn’t even mad. I didn’t mind driving. Instead of
Thank you,
that’s what he said. And he was so grateful when he said it. So damn grateful.

But I can’t think about that. Instead, I go back to A’s story. “You have to have parents, don’t you?” I say. “I mean, we all have parents.”

He shrugs. “I have no idea. I would think so. But it’s not like there’s anyone I can ask. I’ve never met anyone else like me. Not that I would necessarily know.”

I don’t always get along with my parents, but I am still glad they’re around.

I think he’s going to tell me more about not having parents, about not having roots. But he surprises me.

“I’ve glimpsed things,” he says.

I expect him to say more. To tell me what this means, what he’s seen. But I have to remember: He’s new at this. He’s still very unsure.

“Go on,” I prompt.

Permission. He smiles, happy for it. I want to hug him, if only for that smile. “It’s just—I know it sounds like an awful way to live, but I’ve seen so many things. It’s so hard when you’re in one body to get a sense of what life is really like. You’re so grounded in who you are. But when who you are changes every day—you get to touch the universal more. Even the most mundane details. You see how cherries taste different to different people. Blue looks different. You see all the strange rituals boys have to show affection without admitting it. You learn that if a parent reads to you at the end of the day, it’s a good sign that it’s a good parent, because you’ve seen so many other parents who don’t make the time. You learn how much a day is truly worth, because they’re all so different. If you ask most people what the difference was between Monday and Tuesday, they might tell you what they had for dinner each night. Not me. By seeing the world from so many angles, I get more of a sense of its dimensionality.”

“But you never get to see things over time, do you?” I ask. “I don’t mean to cancel out what you just said. I think I understand that. But you’ve never had a friend that you’ve known day in and day out for ten years. You’ve never watched a pet grow older. You’ve never seen how messed up a parent’s love can be over time. And you’ve never been in a relationship for more than a day, not to mention for more than a year.”

“But I’ve seen things,” he says. “I’ve observed. I know how it works.”

“From the outside?” I’m really trying to get my mind around this, but it’s hard.
Blue looks different.
“I don’t think you can know from the outside.”

“I think you underestimate how predictable some things can be in a relationship.”

I should’ve known we’d get here. I should’ve known this would come up. He met me as Justin, after all. He knows the deal. Or thinks he does.

I need to make it clear. “I love him,” I say. “I know you don’t understand, but I do.”

“You shouldn’t. I’ve seen him from the inside. I know.”

“For a day,” I point out. “You saw him for a day.”

“And for a day, you saw who he could be. You fell more in love with him when he was me.”

This is very hard to hear. I don’t know if it’s true or not. If you’d asked me yesterday, maybe yes. If you ask me now, after Girl Scout cookies, maybe no.

He goes for my hand. But I can’t do it. It’s committing too much. “No,” I say. “Don’t.”

He doesn’t.

“I have a boyfriend,” I go on. “I know you don’t like him, and I’m sure there are moments when I don’t like him, either. But that’s the reality. Now, I’ll admit, you have me actually thinking that you are, in fact, the same person who I’ve now met in five different bodies. All this means is that I’m probably as insane as you are. I know you say you love me, but you don’t really know me. You’ve known me a week. And I need a little more than that.”

“But didn’t you feel it that day? On the beach? Didn’t everything seem right?”

Yes. Everything within me jumps to that one word:
yes.
It did seem right. But that was feeling. All feeling. I still cannot speak to any fact.

But I cannot withhold my answer, either. So I tell him, “Yes. But I don’t know who I was feeling that for. Even if I believe it was you, you have to understand that my history with Justin plays into it. I wouldn’t have felt that way with a stranger. It wouldn’t have been so perfect.”

“How do you know?”

“That’s my point. I don’t.”

I shouldn’t have left Justin. I shouldn’t have made an excuse to go. This is too dangerous, because none of it can be fact.

I look down at my phone. I haven’t been here long, but it’s getting close to too long.

“I have to make it back for dinner,” I tell him. Technically correct. If I want to get back in time, I should be leaving now.

I’m thinking he’ll put up a fight. Justin would put up a fight. He’d make it clear he wanted me to stay.

But A lets me go.

“Thanks for driving all this way,” he says.

Should I tell him he’s welcome? What does that even mean? Welcome to what?

“Will I see you again?” he asks.

I don’t have the heart to say no. Because there’s a part of my heart that wants to stay, and will stay with him until I come to get it back.

I nod.

“I’m going to prove it to you,” he tells me. “I’m going to show you what it really means.”

“What?”

“Love.”

No. I am scared of that.

I am scared of all of this.

But I don’t tell him that. I tell him goodbye instead—the kind of goodbye that’s never, ever final.

I remember the way everyone reacted when I got together with Justin, when we became a thing. They didn’t think I was paying attention, but I was.

Rebecca told me I could do better. She told me Justin could never really care about anyone because he didn’t really care about himself. She said I deserved to be with someone who had his shit together. I told her I didn’t know anyone who had their shit together, including her. She told me she was going to pretend I hadn’t said that. She told me I was smarter than I thought I was, but I always liked to prove myself stupid by making bad decisions. I told her I loved him anyway, and my use of the word
love
surprised us both. I held up; she backed down.

Preston said he was happy for me, and when I asked him why, he told me it was because I had found something meaningful. He didn’t think Justin was unworthy of my love, because he believed everyone was worthy of love. “He needs you, and that’s not a bad thing,” he told me. “We all need somewhere to put our love.” I remember liking this thought—that I had this certain amount of love that I needed to store someplace, and I’d decided to keep some of it in Justin.

Steve said Justin was decent.

Stephanie said she wasn’t sure.

I don’t think any of them—even Preston—expected it to last longer than a month. Any love I stored in Justin would ultimately be given away, lost in a fire, left by the side of the road.

And if this was their reaction to Justin, I couldn’t imagine what they would say if I told them about A.

The thought will not leave my head:

If this is possible, what else is possible?

I get to school and walk to my locker, and it’s only when I’m at my locker that I realize I haven’t stopped to look for Justin.

And then, even stranger: I don’t go looking for him.

I wait to see how long it’ll take him to come looking for me.

Not between first and second periods.

Not before lunch.

Even at lunch, I sit between Preston and Rebecca, and instead of taking the spot across from me, he sits farther down.

It isn’t until the end of lunch that he says something to me.

And what he says is, “I’m so tired.”

I know I’m not the one who’s going to wake him up.

I find myself wondering who A is today. Where A is.

And at the same time, I wonder if all the A’s I’ve met are in a room together, laughing at me. Not believing how a girl could be so stupid. Looking at the video of my face over and over again. Daring each other to push it further.

That’s not it,
I tell myself.

But what else is possible?

I check my email after lunch and find word from him (her?).

Rhiannon,

You’d actually recognize me today. I woke up as James’s twin. I thought this might help me figure things out, but so far, no luck.

I want to see you again.

A

I don’t know what to say to this.

Trick or truth?

Yes, I want to see A again.

Yes, I’m afraid.

No, it doesn’t make sense.

But what does?
I’m asking myself this all afternoon. Does it makes sense that Preston is seen as The Gay One when none of the rest of us are seen as The Straight One? Does it make sense that Stephanie’s father freaked out when she (briefly) dated Aaron because Aaron is black? Does it make sense that Justin and I can get as close as two people can be, and still can’t figure out anything to say to each other when we’re separate and walking the halls of school? Does it make sense that I am sitting here learning about the gestation cycle of a frog when there is no way that this knowledge is going to matter to me as soon as the next test is over? Does it make sense that Mr. Myers is spending his life teaching the gestation cycle of a frog to kids who mostly don’t care?

Does it make sense that some people get everything they want because they’re pretty? Would it make all of us nicer—or at least a little more humble—if we had to switch every day?

“What are you thinking about?”

Justin’s caught me at my locker, in a daze.

“It’s nothing,” I tell him. “Just daydreaming.”

He lets it go.

“Look,” he says. “What’re you doing now?”

It’s the end of the day. I have no idea what I’m doing. I could’ve driven back to the Starbucks and met the twin of the guy from yesterday. Although how would I have known it was really a twin? What if it was the same guy again? It’s not like I could really tell.

Suddenly I’m suspicious.

Really suspicious.

I wonder if tomorrow he’ll say he’s a triplet.

Or that he’s stayed in the same body after all.

Alarm. I’m starting to get pissed off. Irrationally pissed off. Or maybe rationally pissed off.

“Are you even listening to me?”

I am not listening to him. I need to listen to him. Because he is my boyfriend, and he has no idea what’s going on inside my head.

“No plans,” I say.

We both know what’s next. But he’s not going to say it. He wants me to say it.

So I do.

“Wanna hang out?”

“Yeah. Sure. Whatever.”

We go to his house. He wants to watch an old episode of
Game of Thrones.

“Is this the one where someone dies?” I ask as it starts. I’m joking. They’re all the one where someone dies.

“Smart-ass,” he says.

I check my email. Nothing new from A.

Like my silence might push him into confessing.

“Put that away,” Justin says. “It’s distracting.”

I put it away. I sit there. Someone’s head gets smashed in.

We do not make out.

It’s only when three episodes are over and I’m getting ready to leave that he tells me something is on his mind.

“I fucking hate doctors,” he says. I’m a little confused. There hasn’t been a doctor in sight on
Game of Thrones
—it would have been much better if there had been.

“Is there any particular reason you hate doctors right now?” I ask.

“Yeah, because they’re going to let my grandma die. They’re going to put her through hell, and make all of us pay for it, and at the very end, she’s going to die anyway. That’s always what they do. Hospitals wouldn’t make money without sick people, right? They just love this shit.”

“Your grandmother’s sick?” I ask.

“Yeah. Grandpa called us last night. Says it’s serious cancer.”

“Are you okay?”

“What do you mean, am I okay? I’m not the one with cancer.”

I want to ask,
Do you want to talk about it?
But the answer is pretty obvious. He doesn’t want my sympathy. He doesn’t want to tell me he’s sad. He just wants me to be there as he vents his rage. So I do that. I let him yell about doctors, and about how his grandfather is the one who smokes, but look at which one of them ended up with cancer. I let him criticize his parents’ reaction. He’s mad at them for not dropping everything to go see her, when what he really means is that
he
wants to drop everything to go see her. But he won’t say that. Not to me. Not to himself.

I stay until he wears himself out. I stay until he changes the subject. I stay until he decides to watch a fourth episode.

I’ll be there when he wants to deal with it. He knows that, and right now that’s the best I can do.

When I get home, Mom is sitting in her usual spot, watching the news on her usual channel. If the story is really sad—a girl gone missing, a boy trapped in a well—she’ll talk back to the screen, little murmurs of sympathy,
Oh, that’s too bad
or
Goodness, how awful.

I imagine the pretty newscaster looking into this room, looking at my mother sitting in that chair, and saying the same things. Because hasn’t she fallen down her own kind of well? Hasn’t she found her own way of being missing? Liza used to push her—telling her she needed to go out more, once even telling her she needed to get some friends. But now that it’s my turn, I find I’ve given up. It’s probably the only way I can make her happy, to leave her alone. That’s what my dad has done all these years, and it seems to have worked out fine for him.

I think about calling Liza, about telling her what’s going on.

You’re as crazy as she is.
That’s probably what she’d say.

But Mom isn’t crazy. She just doesn’t care anymore.

She enjoys her shows, I think.

I want to see you again.

I don’t think Justin’s ever said that to me. But he hasn’t really needed to, has he? There’s never any doubt that he’ll see me again. Never any need to want it.

I start another email.

A,

I only want to see you again if this is real.

Rhiannon

But I don’t send it.