Another Day
Page 32“I learned my letters quickly. 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 can’t help wondering about the people whose body A takes for a day. I wonder what they feel the next day. I think about Nathan staring at me so blankly. But mostly I think about Justin.
“I keep asking Justin about it, you know,” I say. “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 not 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 in silence for a minute, then stop at a tree with a ladder of knots. I can’t help but touch one. A touches the other side, and works her hand around to mine. But I keep moving, too. Circling.
Which is my way of asking: Is it possible? Is any of this possible?
“I don’t know that you’d call it love,” A tells me. “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.”
A stops. Looks again at the tree, at the knots.
“Tell me about him,” I say.
“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,” I point out. So Nathan knew what he was doing a little more than I’d thought.
“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.”
This surprises me, that A was a boy in love with a boy. Maybe because it’s a girl’s voice telling me this story. Or maybe because I assume girl when I hear boyfriend. Which I know isn’t right, but it’s where my mind goes.
As she wraps up the Brennan story, A tells me, “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,” I can’t help but say.
“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.”
I know this is meant as the highest compliment A can give me. But I want to know what I did to earn it. I want to know how A knows I’m the right person to tell. I want to know what that means.
I tell her, “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.”
Now she’s curious. “Why? What aren’t you telling me?”
I have known you less than two weeks, I think. I wish I could disarm myself so completely in such a short time. But even if A thinks I’ve earned that, I am not even close to believing she’s earned it. Not because of who she is or what she is. Because it’s so soon.
I get that her life has a special set of rules. But my life has rules, too.
“That’s fair,” she says. Although I can tell she’s also a little disappointed.
“I know it is,” I tell her. “But enough of that. Tell me about—I don’t know—third grade.”
There is no point in talking more about us. We need to talk about ourselves separately for a little while longer.
It’s not entirely separate, of course. We’ve both been afraid of teachers. We’ve both gotten lost at theme parks. We’ve both fallen into hair-pulling, teeth-kicking fights with siblings. We’ve grown up on the same TV shows, being the same age. Only, while we both had dreams of waking up in Hannah Montana’s body and Hannah Montana’s life, A actually believed that the dream could come true.
I ask about all those lives, all those days, and what A can remember. The result is like a series of snapshots—a slideshow of bits and pieces with the faces always changing. All of the firsts—first snow, first Pixar movie, first evil pet, first bully. And other things I wouldn’t have even realized were things—the size of bedrooms, the strange diets parents put their kids on, the need to sing in church even if you don’t know any of the tunes or any of the words. Discovering allergies, illnesses, learning problems, stutters. And living the day with them. Always living another day.