Uninvited: An Unloved Ones Prequel #2 (The Unloved Ones Prequels) (3 page)

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” he asks.

Becka probably has a backpack or something. I glance around for it, and see a grungy knapsack by the front door. It looks vaguely familiar. “I’ll grab my bag on the way out,” I say.

Her parents laugh again, and this time even the two children join in. The little girl throws out her arms.

“Good-bye hugs!” she screams.

“Good-bye hugs,” the other two echo in unison.

Then—and I’m not making this up—they all stand up and circle around me to give me a tight hug, and while they do it, they chant “Good-byeeeee, Becka!” in what sounds like the beginning of a song.

“Good-bye,” I say, and break away from them. I hear them laughing behind me as I run to the door. There I find Becka’s black leather boots, her filthy knapsack, and a frayed coat with a big hood. As the family follows me to the front entrance, I step outside and close the door behind me.

It’s cold. I stumble out into the morning light, and make my way down a wet pathway to the street. The sky is overcast but bright, and I see my breath float before me as I walk along the sidewalk. I hear the sound of running water as melting snow travels through the gutter. I turn the corner of the block, and my pace slows.

I want this dream to end, but I have this sinking feeling that I’m not in a dream. Dreams aren’t this linear. They don’t involve details and sensations. I remember the bathroom light that I could control. My eyes wander ahead on the sidewalk, and they fall on a newspaper wrapped in plastic.

Reading. You can’t read in a dream. I am sure of that.

I near the newspaper, dreading what I am about to discover. If this is a dream, it’s one I might not be able to wake from. And if this is reality… I don’t even know what that implies.

I crouch down and pick up the newspaper. Beads of dew are cold against my skin, and I rip the plastic wrapper down the seam. I hold open the newspaper before me, letting the front page fall open. I stare at the headline.

EDEN PRARIE HEATS UP WITH RECORD HIGHS

I can read it. I can read every word.

I walk the six blocks to my own house in mental silence. I can’t even comprehend the birds chattering in the trees, the cars driving through slush on the streets, or the sound of my (Becka’s?) boots clomping along the sidewalk. It’s all just noise, and none of it feels real.

Except it
is
real. I’m starting to understand that now. Somehow I’ve switched places with Becka, and my mind has entered her body overnight. It doesn’t make sense to me, and I’m not sure what is the appropriate way to handle this situation. All I know is that it seems reasonable to walk toward home, in a dream logic sort of way.

Because if I’m her, it only makes sense that she woke up as me. Maybe we can figure out things together.

I reach my house. The driveway is empty, and I’m glad that my mom won’t be around to deal with this. I can only imagine the stupid things Becka would say to her as me, and I’d rather not have to explain that later. I just want to find her and get us back the way we were. I walk up the path and automatically reach to my left side to take my key out of my purse.

Except my purse isn’t there, because I’m not me.

I look at the door for a moment, dumbfounded. Then I shake myself, and reach out to press the doorbell. When I see
her
hand performing the action, it gives me a sick chill. But that’s nothing compared to what happens next.

While on the front porch, I hear the doorbell chime from within the house; but at the same time, I hear it all around me, echoing from the sky as if the entire world were in the house, hearing the doorbell. I nearly fall over, and the shock of it makes my vision grow fuzzy.

But not fuzzy like when before I put in her contacts. The entire world seems to grow bright, as if it’s an overexposed photo, and I feel even more detached from the world than before. It scares me, because my first thought is that I’m dying, and I struggle to maintain consciousness. It takes all my focus, but I manage to make the world come clear again, and when I do, I find that I’ve collapsed onto my front porch.

I stagger up, gripping the door handle to steady myself. I look at the doorbell, but am too afraid to press it again. Instead, I step down from my front porch, and walk along the side of the house, back toward my bedroom window. Maybe I can sneak in that way.

I hear Becka’s boots crunch on the dead grass along the way. It’s odd, because even in this short time, I am starting to think of this as
my
body, not hers, but her clothes and her hair and features, that still feels like hers. It’s like I’m wearing her clothes, even though in actuality a more accurate description would be that I’m wearing
her
.

My window is shut, but when I press my face against the screen on the outside of the glass, I can make out the room through the sheer curtains well enough. There is my desk, with my school papers laid out neatly. There is my dresser, freshly-dusted and everything in its place. My eyes linger longingly on these details, and then glance down to my bed.

I gasp and nearly fall backwards. But I force myself to go back to the window, to press my face against it, and make sure I didn’t imagine it.

I didn’t. There I am, asleep in my bed.

Or, should I say, there is my
body
, asleep in the bed.

I know this is somewhat close to what I expected, but it still catches me off-guard. I feel like a ghost looking down at herself in a coffin. Out of everything that has happened to me so far this morning, this moment feels the most unreal.

If Becka is inside my body, she is still asleep. I know I have to wake her up.

I tap lightly on the glass.

And again, I hear not only the tapping in front of me, as it should be, but also a disconnected tapping, coming from outside of reality. It doesn’t scare me as much this time though, and the world doesn’t melt around me. I tap again, to test it, and again it’s like tapping outside the world, only…

For a split-second, it’s like I’m two places at once. I’m both looking in the window at myself, as Becka, and inside my room, inside my body, feeling the heaviness in my limbs. My nose is filled with the smell of my pillow, and the scent of my—
my
body’s—hair conditioner.

And then the second is over, and I’m back outside again in Becka’s body, and Becka’s body alone.

I step back from the window. This is too much to take-in, and I walk back to the front of my house, down the path, and sit on the curb. I place my head in my hands, and close my eyes. I need to block out the world and think. I start to consider possibilities.

Perhaps I’m dead, and my ghost is possessing Becka.

But I dismiss this theory, as I saw my body move.

Or maybe Becka has gone crazy, and now she thinks she is me trapped in her body.

But then why would I have my memories and not hers? And why would I be able to hear myself knocking from both bodies? Besides, I am far too smart to be Becka. She was a fool. And this alone convinces me that I’m not actually Becka pretending to be someone else. She doesn’t have the mental capability to pull it off.

That only leaves one option that I can see.

I am me, and I have sent my mind into her body, and am now controlling it like some sort of puppet. I’ve read about this sort of thing before. There’s a term for it. Not possession.

Astral projection.

It was in a book about World War II, when the government was so desperate that they hired psychics to spy on their enemies telepathically. These people would put themselves into a state of self-hypnosis, and then claim to project their mind into top-secret locations across the world. The book said it didn’t work, but what if the book was wrong? Or lying? What if that’s what I’m doing right now? I can’t think of anything else that makes sense.

I must have been psychic without knowing it.

I
have
always felt, deep down, that I was different than other people. I always assumed that the feeling was from being smarter than my peers and teachers, and from being better at personal hygiene and manners and attendance than them. But it must have been this too. It’s the only thing that fits.

As I’m sitting, I hear a loud engine make its way down the street. I look up and see that it’s a yellow school bus. It’s how I would normally get to school, and like clockwork, it pulls right up to my house, right in front of where I am sitting, and stops. The door makes a gasping sound, and slides open.

I look up at the driver. He’s a middle-aged man with a potbelly. He doesn’t look back at me. I stand up, at first worried that he might question why there’s a different girl to pick up today, but when I climb onto the bus, he shuts the door behind me and drives down the block.

I suppose he never paid that much attention to who he was picking up in the first place. I walk to the first open seat, in the second row, and sit down by the window. I stare at the swirls in the brown plastic of the seat in front of me, and feel the bus rumble underneath. The more real this feels, the less real it seems. I turn around in my seat, and look at the sparse crowd already picked up. Sleepy faces looking out of windows with cold white light in their eyes. No one is paying me any attention.

I sit back down and face forward. My body is back home, but I am still going to school. I suppose some people might use this opportunity to ditch, but I wouldn’t know where to go. Class is a safe place for me.

As the bus rumbles along, I use the time to pillage the contents of Becka’s knapsack. I know Becka and I share the same first period—SAT Prep with Mr. Tandy—but I don’t know where to go after that. Her bag is full of crumpled papers, and I feel like a hobo digging through the garbage as I dig through it. I find her school planner. We were given these at the beginning of the school year to keep track of our assignments; hers is still in the original shrink-wrap. There are odd notes written in a childish scrawl, a few tests with embarrassingly low scores, loose pennies, and at the bottom of the bag, wadded in a ball, is a piece of canary yellow paper that I recognize as her school schedule. I set the knapsack down and smooth out the schedule on top of it.

REBECCA WALSH, SOPHOMORE
1—S.A.T. PREP (TANDY)—402B
2—READING SKILLS (MEYERS)—12F
3—GEOMETRY (TUTT)—101A
4—THEATRE I (MCMURPHY)—AUD
5—AMERICAN HISTORY (DANIELS)—104B
6—INTRO TO ART (JARVIS)—6F

I scoff. What a joke of a schedule. She’s never going to get into a good school like that. She doesn’t even have a science. I wonder again exactly what her parents are so proud about. The fact that she manages to inflate and deflate her lungs every few seconds? Such an accomplishment.

I glance at the schedule again. I took Geometry in middle school, so I should have no trouble with that. Reading Skills sounds like something that belongs in a preschool (how stupid is this girl?), and the rest is all filler. I won’t have any trouble with the academic side of things, and I
know
without investigating that Becka isn’t involved in any extracurricular activities. Honestly, what do people see in her?

What does
he
see in her?

I’ve been so distracted by the body switch that I haven’t even considered Todd. It’s probably the longest span of time I’ve gone without thinking of him in months.

I realize fully for the first time that Todd will think I’m Becka. He will be nice to me when I’m in her body. It will be like it was before.

It’s painful to consider, and my thoughts come to a halt.

I can be with Todd again. But to be with him, I have to pretend to be
her
. Can I do that? Do I even want to?

Yes, I decide. I will try. I will try to pass for Becka.

The bus rounds the corner into the school parking lot, and the other students fill the aisle before the brakes are even applied. I take a deep breath, place Becka’s dirty old knapsack over my shoulder, and stand up with everyone else.

It’s time for the school day to begin.

I’ve never missed a day of school before. Ever. My mother had made sure I was exposed to chicken pox before Kindergarten, and nothing else has been so serious that a little DayQuil couldn’t get me through. I suppose this is why I’m so surprised when Mr. Tandy doesn’t flinch as he takes attendance in first period and finds me—the real me—absent. He does nothing more than scribble it down on his attendance sheet and then begin the lesson. He doesn’t even care.