Top of the Class (2 page)

I braced myself for the departure, the terrible swirling and sinking down a hot, clammy tunnel of air. My breath quickened. I wanted it over with. I couldn’t wait to dive—literally—into my next mission. Maybe the next case I solved would be the one to bring me home again.

I feel like I’m coming into my own as a Shadow. I seem to have a great memory for detail. I know how to make people feel better. Will even said that I was courageous. How many Shadows has he guided through the ranks before me? Could it be that I am one of the more gifted ones?

If I had possessed a hand, I would have smacked myself for being self-congratulatory. Shadowing was by far the hardest thing I’d ever done, and I was sure that my next mission would throw me some sort of curveball, though I couldn’t help feeling proud of all that I’d done so far. I had earned a memory of my past life, which had to count for something.

And then, it happened—the dreadful ejection, the spinning, the rushing, the headache-inducing fall through the rabbit hole.

I stopped an inch before I hit bottom and snapped my eyes open. I sat up, gasping for air. My chest was pounding. Slowly, my surroundings came into focus. I was sitting in a bed, beneath a single, rumpled jersey sheet. I could feel every fold of the sheet, every wrinkle, as if I were naked.

Wait.

I
was
naked.

Then I sensed something next to me, moving gently back and forth, expanding and contracting like a balloon that couldn’t decide how big it wanted to be. It brushed my side, and I knew instantly what it was: more naked skin.

I wasn’t alone.

Panicked, I scooted over, away from the breathing, unclothed body next to me. I stared down at the hardwood floor: wrinkled men’s jeans, a collared shirt, and a white undershirt dropped haphazardly on the ground like leaves on the street after a rainstorm.

Oh boy.

Maybe the girl whose body I just landed in runs a nudist colony? I thought hopefully, as I glanced around for my clothes.

That’s when I heard sniffling. It was the unmistakable sound of somebody trying to hold back tears. I turned my head to investigate, then let out an audible gasp.

I saw hair. Long, black hair. Wavy, shiny, conditioned, coconut-smelling hair that ended midway down the spine of a languid, curving, female torso.

I leapt out of bed and ran to the floor-length mirror attached to the back of the bedroom door. There, in the reflection, was me, Abby Grace, fully clothed in the outfit I seemed always to be wearing: a short-sleeved dress of white linen with buttons down the front—something between a beach dress and a lab coat.

But when I looked at the floor, my feet told a different story. They were huge, with long toes, and covered in thin tufts of black hair.

Was I a hobbit?

I looked at my legs, which were long and also covered in black hair.

Was I a hippie
and
a hobbit?

Then I looked a little farther up my body and suddenly it all made perfect sense.

I was a boy.

I held my hands up in front of my face: big, hulking hands with hairy knuckles. I touched my chest: less hairy, and flat, except for some impressive pectoral bulges.

I ran my fingertips along my jawline. It was covered in short stubble that felt like hundreds of little acupuncture needles sticking out of my face.

I touched the top of my head and felt thick hair—probably black, given the color of the rest of my fur—that was gelled into messy waves above my forehead.

“Oh. My. God!” I said.

This was the most bizarre part yet. My voice was so…
masculine
. To speak in low, manly tones, I’d normally have to dip my chin and open my throat and furrow my brow. Now I didn’t have to do any of that. I just let the words pour out, and they sounded like they came from a lumberjack.

I instinctively pitched my voice upward to place it in my usual register. “Oh my God!” I screamed in a falsetto.

“What?!” the girl shouted. “What’s wrong? Why are you screaming like a girl?”

“I don’t know!” I said, trying to lower my voice, or rather, to speak normally. It was like getting on an escalator for the first time and thinking that you have to do something—run faster, or try desperately to keep your balance—when really you don’t have to
do
anything, you just have to stand there. “I don’t know,” I said again, calmer this time, letting the words flow naturally. It was a nice voice—deep, but not Barry White deep. Just mellow.

“Oh no, is your mom home?” the girl said, holding the jersey sheet up over her chest. “I thought you said she was gonna be at the PTA meeting until ten!”

I looked over at the window. Thin strips of starry night were visible at the edges of the drawn blinds. I checked the clock; it was 9:30 p.m. “Don’t worry,” I said. “She probably is.”

“Probably?” cried the girl. She darted to the other side of the room and threw on her jeans, which lay rumpled in the corner. She had a flat stomach and long slim legs and I had never seen such shiny black hair or such perfectly arched eyebrows. I felt jealous of her, which was bizarre, given that she was now my girlfriend. “What do you mean,
probably
?”

Oh no, I thought. Had I not acted manly enough? What would a boy say to calm a girl down?

“Chill, babycakes,” I said, flicking my chin into the air and winking, like a stud.

She scowled at me and rolled her eyes. Exactly how I would have reacted, come to think of it, if a boy had called me “babycakes.”

“I should go now,” the girl muttered as she laced up her sneakers. “This was so crazy. Inevitable, but crazy. Probably a mistake.”

Why was it a mistake? I wondered. Was I not her boyfriend, after all? Was I a total loser?

“Eric…” she began.

So my name was Eric. Like the prince in
The Little Mermaid
, I wanted to shout. Miraculously, I stopped myself.

“Code of silence, right?” she continued. “We’re really in this now, just you and me. We keep the code of silence.”

“Code of silence,” I repeated solemnly. But why? I wanted to ask. What was so bad about her and Eric?

I looked around the room. Aside from the rumpled bed sheets, things looked in careful order. The walls were painted navy. A poster of a massive, domed building of white marble, its facade lined with Greek columns, hung above the bed, with the title
University of Virginia
. A second poster hung near the bookcase, a portrait of a man in a wig, entitled
Thomas Jefferson
. A third poster hung above the dresser, featuring a picture of the Capitol Building. Eric certainly had a thing for politics.

He—I—didn’t seem like a drug dealer, or a delinquent, or a wife-beater. So why was this girl with perfect eyebrows so desperate to keep our bedroom activities a secret?

“Tonight was…amazing. Wrong, but amazing.” She pulled her coral sweater down over her stomach and slung a leather bag onto her shoulder. “I love you,” she said, kissing my cheek. “It’s crazy the way I love you.” She looked into my eyes, wincing and smiling at the same time, like she wanted both to marry me and kill me. “God, you are so hot.”

She giggled as she tore herself away and shut the door behind her. I heard the clacking of boots as she hurried down the stairs, then the slam of the front door. I pulled back the blinds and watched as she hurried out to the curb and opened her car door, looking around nervously to make sure no one was watching.

I stared out at the quiet residential street for a while, watching the occasional car cruise past, until I abruptly realized that I was standing naked in a lit window at night. Whoever Eric was, he probably wouldn’t appreciate me turning him into an exhibitionist.

I scooted to the back of the room and pulled on my boxer briefs—supportive!—and then my jeans, careful not to get my precious new cargo caught in the zipper of my fly.

I knew this mission might involve a curveball, but it never occurred to me that it might involve
two
curveballs.

I felt something in the back pocket of my jeans. I reached in and pulled out a black leather wallet, bulky but neatly organized. I removed the driver’s license and read it: Eric McCormack. Evanston, Illinois. Organ Donor. Male.

This, I thought, might be the mission that breaks me.

Chapter
2

Thursday, 7:10 AM

“E
ric!”

I bolted out of bed. “What?” I looked around frantically. The bluish sunlight of early morning was filtering through the tiny spaces between the blinds.

There were other voices, muted voices, coming from the flat-screen TV mounted to the wall. I looked up—some guy was standing in the kitchen of a diner, taking a bite of a Reuben sandwich three inches thick. “Winner, winner, deli dinner!” he said.

I had fallen asleep watching
The Food Network
.

A woman threw my door open. I had slept in my jeans, but I was shirtless, so I scrambled to pull a sheet over my chest.

“What? Did you get a tattoo you don’t want me to see?” she said, half chuckling, half serious.

Of course. My chest no longer had anything to hide. I pulled the sheet away and showed her my torso, bare of everything except a few hairs.

“Good. Cause you know that if you do get a tattoo, you can’t be my son anymore, right?” Again, half chuckling, half serious.

My new mother was about fifty and adorable, with a graying brown bob and glasses with thin silver frames. She looked over at the TV.

“
The Food Network
?” she said. “Usually you fall asleep watching CNN.”

I shrugged. Figures. I do love my politics.

“Speaking of which…” she began, “Did you see your mama on TV last night at the PTA meeting?”

Uh-oh, I thought. Eric had been otherwise occupied last night. “I’m sorry, Mom, I totally forgot. I was busy…studying. I was studying so hard I just forgot about everything else.”

Her face fell a bit. “Oh. Well, I gave my presentation on the organic lunch initiative. You could feel change swirling in the air, Eric. It was electric. People are fed up—with rBST in their kids’ milk and pesticides in their apples and hormones in their chicken fingers. They’re fed up with the status quo.” She wasn’t really looking at me—her gaze had shifted to the wall, as if she were staring out at a crowd again, maybe a march on Washington for organic food. “It’s not fair to the kids, it’s not fair to the animals, it’s not fair to this earth. And all for what? Profit. Mega-conglomerates like Monsanto and Cargill are getting fat while our kids are starving for honest nutrition, not the same old diabetes-inducing junk that the superintendent feeds them every day, and they have no choice—”

“Ahem,” I said, clearing my throat. I figured she’d probably go on all day if I didn’t stop her.

“Sorry, Eric,” she said, laughing. “I’ll let you get dressed. Also, since when do you call me ‘Mom’? I thought you said it created an awkward power dynamic between us.”

“Old habits die hard, I guess,” I said, grinning stupidly. Great, I thought. Usually I don’t have to bother to learn my new parents’ names before addressing them properly.

“You know, they tape the PTA meetings, if you want to see your mama in action. They keep the archives in the AV room at school. Just saying. If you have a minute. No pressure.” Then she shut the door behind her, leaving me alone to prepare for the day.

I walked to the closet to find a T-shirt, but instead I found a dozen identical white shirts, half a dozen blue blazers, another half dozen pairs of navy trousers, and a few blue-and-white-striped ties. Either my new high school had a uniform, or I severely lacked imagination.

I changed into a fresh pair of underwear and pants, pulling them on one leg at a time, careful not to constrict my new parts. The shirt and jacket were self-explanatory, but the tie presented a problem. I tied it first in a knot, but that didn’t look right, and then in a bow, but that looked even less right. I thought about asking Eric’s mom to tie it but realized that I couldn’t ask her anything until I figured out her first name.

“Well. Look who needs my help.” I heard Will’s voice behind me. His presence no longer startled or confused me—I’d come to expect him to show up unannounced. I wondered whether it might actually be written into his job description: “Guardians will ‘assist’ Shadows in the quest to fix others’ lives by making cryptic, irrelevant quips and spooking them when it is least convenient.”

“I’m fine,” I grunted, wrapping the tie around my neck like a noose.

He laughed. He was wearing the same school uniform I was putting on.

“Where do you get your costumes?” I asked, squinting. He didn’t look bad all dressed up. The waves of dark hair that sat atop his head like a crown appeared particularly regal, and the tiny flaws in the arrangement of his strong teeth were divinely planned, making all the perfect smiles I’d ever seen seem uninspired in comparison.

“Let’s not make this about me, shall we?” he said, obviously relishing this opportunity to be needed. “Let me show my girl how to tie a tie.”

My girl? It was a strange thing to say, but stranger still was how I didn’t really mind it. It was nice, floating through the ether from life to unfamiliar life, to have someone think of me as his girl, even if it was someone mildly irritating.

Will stood next to me so that we were both facing the mirror, and he untied his tie. “Follow along, Abby. Fat on the left, thin on the right. Fat over thin, loop it around, up through the triangle, sneak through the manhole, pull it down.” I got lost at “up through the triangle,” and ended up with nothing.

Will reached over. “No, no, like this,” he said. When he tried to put his hands on mine, they floated right through. It was a subtle sensation, a slight numbness.

“Oh,” he said, hanging his head. “Sorry. I…guess I can’t really provide hands-on assistance.”

It was an awkward moment. I’d never seen Will disappointed. As awful as it was to be tossed around from body to body, I thought that it might be more jarring not to be able to touch anyone else, not to really be there at all. Was Will
more
dead than me? Was such a thing possible?