Ashley Ashton’s life is defined by her attractiveness. Beauty can come naturally, but it’s hard to be stunning by accident. A lot of work has gone into this face, this body. I’m sure there’s a complete morning regimen that I’m supposed to undergo before heading into the day.
I don’t want to have any part of it, though. With girls like Ashley, I just want to shake them, and tell them that no matter how hard they fight it, these teenage looks aren’t going to last forever, and that there are much better foundations to build a life upon than how attractive you are. But there’s no way for me to get that message across. My only course of rebellion is to leave her eyebrows unplucked for the day.
I access where I am, and discover I’m only about fifteen minutes away from Rhiannon.
A good sign.
I log on to my email and find a message from her.
A,
I’m free and have the car today. I told my mom I have errands.
Want to be one of my errands?
R
I tell her yes. A million times yes.
Ashley’s parents are away for the weekend. Her older brother, Clayton, is in charge. I worry he’s going to give me a hassle, but he’s got his own things to do, as he tells me repeatedly. I tell him I won’t stand in his way.
“You’re going out in that?” he asks.
Normally, when an older brother asks this, it means a skirt is too short, or too much cleavage is showing. But in this case, I think he’s saying I’m still dressed as the private Ashley, not the public one.
I don’t really care, but I have to respect the fact that Ashley would care—probably very much. So I go back and change, and even put on some makeup. I’m fascinated by the life Ashley must lead, being such a knockout. Like being very short or very tall, it must change your whole perspective on the world. If other people see you differently, you’ll end up seeing them differently, too.
Even her brother defers to her in a way I bet he wouldn’t if she were normal-looking. He doesn’t blink when I tell him I’m going out for the day with my friend Rhiannon.
If your beauty is unquestioned, so many other things can go unquestioned as well.
The minute I get into the car, Rhiannon bursts out laughing.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she says.
“What?” I say. Then I get it.
“What?” she mocks me. I’m happy she feels comfortable enough to do it, but I’m still being mocked.
“You have to understand—you’re the first person to ever know me in more than one body. I’m not used to this. I don’t know how you’re going to react.”
This makes her a little more serious.
“I’m sorry. It’s just that you’re this super hot black girl. It makes it very hard for me to have a mental image of you. I keep having to change it.”
“Picture me however you want to picture me. Because odds are, that’ll be more true than any of the bodies you see me in.”
“I think my imagination needs a little more time to catch up to the situation, okay?”
“Okay. Now, where to?”
“Since we’ve already been to the ocean, I figured today we’d go to a forest.”
So off we go, into the woods.
It’s not like last time. The radio is on, but we’re not singing along. We’re sharing the same space, but our thoughts are spreading outside of it.
I want to hold her hand, but I sense it wouldn’t work. I know she’s not going to reach for my hand, not unless I need it. This is the problem with being so beautiful—it can render you untouchable. And this is the problem with being in a new body each day—the history is there, but it’s not visible. It has to be different from last time, because I am different.
We talk a little about Kelsea; Rhiannon called her house a second time yesterday, just to see what would happen. Kelsea’s father answered, and when Rhiannon introduced herself as a friend, he said that Kelsea had gone away to deal with some things, and left it at that. Both Rhiannon and I decide to take this as a good sign.
We talk some more, but not about anything that matters. I want to cut through the awkwardness, have Rhiannon treat me like her boyfriend or girlfriend again. But I can’t. I’m not.
We get to the park and navigate ourselves away from the other weekenders. Rhiannon finds us a secluded picnic area, and surprises me by taking a feast from the trunk.
I watch as she picks everything out of the picnic hamper. Cheeses. French bread. Hummus. Olives. Salads. Chips. Salsa.
“Are you a vegetarian?” I ask, based on the evidence in front of me.
She nods.
“Why?”
“Because I have this theory that when we die, every animal that we’ve eaten has a chance at eating us back. So if you’re a carnivore and you add up all the animals you’ve eaten—well, that’s a long time in purgatory, being chewed.”
“Really?”
She laughs. “No. I’m just sick of the question. I mean, I’m vegetarian because I think it’s wrong to eat other sentient creatures. And it sucks for the environment.”
“Fair enough.” I don’t tell her how many times I’ve accidentally eaten meat while I’ve been in a vegetarian’s body. It’s just not something I remember to check for. It’s usually the friends’ reactions that alert me. I once made a vegan really, really sick at a McDonald’s.
Over lunch, we make more small talk. It’s not until we’ve put away the picnic and are walking through the woods that the real words come out.
“I need to know what you want,” she says.
“I want us to be together.” I say it before I can think it over.
She keeps walking. I keep walking alongside her.
“But we can’t be together. You realize that, don’t you?”
“No. I don’t realize that.”
Now she stops. Puts her hand on my shoulder.
“You need to realize it. I can care about you. You can care about me. But we can’t be together.”
It’s so ridiculous, but I ask, “Why?”
“Why? Because one morning you could wake up on the other side of the country. Because I feel like I’m meeting a new person every time I see you. Because you can’t be there for me. Because I don’t think I can like you no matter what. Not like this.”
“Why can’t you like me like this?”
“It’s too much. You’re too perfect right now. I can’t imagine being with someone like … you.”
“But don’t look at her—look at me.”
“I can’t see beyond her, okay? And there’s also Justin. I have to think of Justin.”
“No, you don’t.”
“You don’t know, okay? How many waking hours were you in there? Fourteen? Fifteen? Did you really get to know everything about him while you were in there? Everything about me?”
“You like him because he’s a lost boy. Believe me, I’ve seen it happen before. But do you know what happens to girls who love lost boys? They become lost themselves. Without fail.”
“You don’t know me—”
“But I know how this works! I know what he’s like. He doesn’t care about you nearly as much as you care about him. He doesn’t care about you nearly as much as I care about you.”
“Stop! Just stop.”
But I can’t. “What do you think would happen if he met me in this body? What if the three of us went out? How much attention do you think he’d pay you? Because he doesn’t care about who you are. I happen to think you are about a thousand times more attractive than Ashley is. But do you really think he’d be able to keep his hands to himself if he had a chance?”
“He’s not like that.”
“Are you sure? Are you really sure?”
“Fine,” Rhiannon says. “Let me call him.”
Despite my immediate protests, she dials his number and, when he answers, says she has a friend in town that she wants him to meet. Maybe we could all go for dinner? He says fine, but not until Rhiannon says it’ll b
e her treat.
Once she hangs up, we just hang there.
“Happy?” she asks.
“I have no idea,” I tell her honestly.
“Me either.”
“When are we meeting him?”
“Six.”
“Okay,” I say. “In the meantime, I want to tell you everything, and I want you to tell me everything in return.”
It’s so much easier when we’re talking about things that are real. We don’t have to remind ourselves what the point is, because we’re right there in it.
She asks me when I first knew.
“I was probably four or five. Obviously, I knew before that about changing bodies, having a different mom and dad each day. Or grandmother or babysitter or whoever. There was always someone to take care of me, and I assumed that was just what living was—a new life every morning. If I got something wrong—a name, a place, a rule—people would correct me. There was never that big a disturbance. I didn’t think of myself as a boy or a girl—I never have. I would just think of myself as a boy or a girl for a day. It was like a different set of clothes.
“The thing that ended up tripping me up was the concept of tomorrow. Because after a while, I started to notice—people kept talking about doing things tomorrow. Together. And if I argued, I would get strange looks. For everyone else, there always seemed to be a tomorrow together. But not for me. I’d say, ‘You won’t be there,’ and they’d say, ‘Of course I’ll be there.’ And then I’d wake up, and they wouldn’t be. And my new parents would have no idea why I was so upset.
“There were only two options—something was wrong with everyone else, or something was wrong with me. Because either they were tricking themselves into thinking there was a tomorrow together, or I was the only person who was leaving.”
Rhiannon asks, “Did you try to hold on?”
I tell her, “I’m sure I did. But I don’t remember it now. I remember crying and protesting—I told you about that. But the rest? I’m not sure. I mean, do you remember a lot about when you were five?”
She shakes her head. “Not really. I remember my mom bringing me and my sister to the shoe store to get new shoes before kindergarten started. I remember learning that a green light meant go and red meant stop. I remember coloring them in, and the teacher being a little confused about how to explain yellow. I think she told us to treat it the same as red.”
“I learned my letters quickly,” I tell her. “I remember the teachers being surprised that I knew them. I imagine they were just as surprised the next day, when I’d forgotten them.”
“A five-year-old probably wouldn’t notice taking a day off.”
“Probably. I don’t know.”
“I keep asking Justin about it, you know. The day you were him. And it’s amazing how clear his fake memories are. He doesn’t disagree when I say we went to the beach, but he doesn’t really remember it, either.”
“James, the twin, was like that, too. He didn’t notice anything wrong. But when I asked him about meeting you for coffee, he didn’t remember it at all. He remembered he was at Starbucks—his mind accounted for the time. But it wasn’t what actually happened.”
“Maybe they remember what you want them to remember.”
“I’ve thought about that. I wish I knew for sure.”
We walk farther. Circle a tree with our fingers.
“What about love?” she asks. “Have you ever been in love?”
“I don’t know that you’d call it love,” I say. “I’ve had crushes, for sure. And there have been days where I’ve really regretted leaving. There were even one or two people I tried to find, but that didn’t work out. The closest was this guy Brennan.”
“Tell me about him.”
“It was about a year ago. I was working at a movie theater, and he was in town, visiting his cousins, and when he went to get some popcorn, we flirted a little, and it just became this … spark. It was this small, one-screen movie theater, and when the movie was running, my job was pretty slow. I think he missed the second half of the movie, because he came back out and started talking to me more. I ended up having to tell him what happened, so he could pretend he’d been in there most of the time. At the end, he asked for my email, and I made up an email address.”
“Like you did for me.”
“Exactly like I did for you. And he emailed me later that night, and left the next day to go back home to Maine, and that proved to be ideal, because then the rest of our relationship could be online. I’d been wearing a name tag, so I had to give him that first name, but I made up a last name, and then I made up an online profile using some of the photos from the real guy’s profile. I think his name was Ian.”
“Oh—so you were a boy?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Does that matter?”
“No,” she tells me. “I guess not.” But I can tell it does. A little. Again, her mental picture needs adjustment.
“So we’d email almost every day. We’d even chat. And while I couldn’t tell him what was really happening—I emailed him from some very strange places—I still felt like I had something out there in the world that was consistently mine, and that was a pretty new feeling. The only problem was, he wanted more. More photos. Then he wanted to Skype. Then, after about a month of these intense conversations, he started talking about visiting again. His aunt and uncle had already invited him back, and summer was coming.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Yup—uh-oh. I couldn’t figure out a way around it. And the more I tried to dodge it, the more he noticed. All of our conversations became about us. Every now and then, a tangent would get in there, but he’d always drag it back. So I had to end it. Because there wasn’t going to be a tomorrow for us.”
“Why didn’t you tell him the truth?”
“Because I didn’t think he could take it. Because I didn’t trust him enough, I guess.”
“So you called it off.”
“I told him I’d met someone else. I borrowed photos from the body I was in at the time. I changed my fake profile’s relationship status. Brennan never wanted to talk to me again.”
“Poor guy.”
“I know. After that, I promised myself I wouldn’t get into any more virtual entanglements, as easy as they might seem to be. Because what’s the point of something virtual if it doesn’t end up being real? And I could never give anyone something real. I could only give them deception.”
“Like impersonating their boyfriends,” Rhiannon says.
“Yeah. But you have to understand—you were the exception to the rule. And I didn’t want it to be based on deception. Which is why you’re the first person I’ve ever told.”
“The funny thing is, you say it like it’s so unusual that you’ve only done it once. But I bet a whole lot of people go through their lives without ever telling the truth, not really. And they wake up in the same body and the same life every single morning.”
“Why? What aren’t you telling me?”
Rhiannon looks me in the eye. “If I’m not telling you something, it’s for a reason. Just because you trust me, it doesn’t mean I have to automatically trust you. Trust doesn’t work like that.”
“That’s fair.”
“I know it is. But enough of that. Tell me about—I don’t know—third grade.”
The conversation continues. She learns the reason I now have to access information about allergies before eating anything (after having been nearly killed by a strawberry when I was nine), and I learn the origin of her fear of bunny rabbits (a particularly malevolent creature named Swizzle that liked to escape its cage and sleep on people’s faces). She learns about the best mom I ever had (a water park is involved), and I learn about the highs and lows of living with the same mother for your entire life, about how no one can make you angrier, but how you can’t really love anyone more. She learns that I haven’t always been in Maryland, but I move great distances only when the body I’m in moves great distances. I learn that she’s never
been on an airplane.
She still keeps a physical space between us—there will be no leaning on shoulders or holding hands right now. But if our bodies keep apart, our words do not. I don’t mind that.
We return to the car and pick at the remains of the picnic. Then we walk around and talk some more. I am astonished at the number of lives I can remember to tell Rhiannon about, and she is amazed that her single life bears as many stories as my multiple one. Because her normal existence is so foreign to me, so intriguing to me, it starts to feel a little more interesting to her as well.
I could go on like this until midnight. But at five-fifteen, Rhiannon looks at her phone and says, “We better get going. Justin will be waiting for us.”
Somehow, I’d managed to forget.
It should be a foregone conclusion. I am a seriously attractive girl. Justin is a typically horny boy.
I am hoping that Rhiannon’s theory is right, and that Ashley will only remember what I want her to remember, or what her mind wants her to remember. Not that I’m going to take this far—all I need is confirmation of Justin’s willingness, not actual contact.
Rhiannon’s picked a clam house off the highway. True to form, I confirm that Ashley doesn’t have any shellfish allergies. In truth, Ashley has tricked herself into thinking she’s “allergic” to a number of things, as a way of narrowing down her diet. But shellfish never hit that particular watch list.
When she walks into the room, heads actually turn. Most of them are attached to men a good thirty years older than her. I’m sure she’s used to it, but it freaks me out.
Even though Rhiannon was concerned about Justin having to wait for us, he ends up coming ten minutes after we do. The look on his face when he first sees me is priceless—when Rhiannon said she had a friend in town, Ashley was not what he pictured. He gives Rhiannon her hello, but he’s gaping at me when he does.
We take our seats. At first I’m so focused on his reaction that I don’t notice Rhiannon’s. She’s receding into herself, suddenly quiet, suddenly timid. I can’t tell whether it’s Justin’s presence that’s making this happen, or whether it’s the combination of his presence and mine.