What happens instead is even worse:
Nobody seems to have noticed I was gone. Or wasn’t myself.
It starts with my mother, sitting in her usual chair. I ask her if I seemed off yesterday.
“No, you were perfectly pleasant,” she says. “We had a nice dinner.”
I don’t point out that a “nice dinner” should have seemed odd to her. Suspicious.
But she lives in her own world. I’m not surprised she didn’t notice.
My friends, though—I think they would have noticed something. Maybe not everything. But at least something.
I don’t feel them treating me any differently, though. I don’t feel any daylong gap in my friendship with them.
So I ask.
“Was I weird yesterday? Different?”
Rebecca tells me I was fine.
Preston says he didn’t really see me.
Ben pretends he didn’t hear the question.
Stephanie says, “Do you want to know who’s different? Steve’s different.”
And Justin—Justin says, “Yeah, you were weird, but that’s not exactly different.”
He’s joking. I can tell he’s joking. And I can tell from his joking that it was a good day, that we had a good time, that he didn’t mind me going to my mom’s doctor’s appointment instead of going home with him. A didn’t do anything to make things worse between us. If anything, A made it a little better.
I am relieved to have avoided being caught. And I’m pissed that no one noticed the difference.
I leave school a little early. Before anyone can stop me and ask me where I’m going. Before no one can stop me and ask me where I’m going.
As I drive to the bookstore, I reach for more of yesterday. Mostly I see the trees beneath me. I feel what it was like to be standing on that mountain. I breathe in as I remember breathing it in.
I feel better.
A hasn’t told me anything about Dylan, the boy whose body I’m about to meet. But when I step into the bookstore’s café, there’s no question who I’m looking for, because it’s so clear he’s looking for me. Our eyes meet, and our eyes have already met. I head over.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey,” he says back. He’s chosen the same table as last time. And this, of all things, overwhelms me. Everything that’s happened since last time—it’s like I’m feeling it all at once.
“I need coffee,” I say to him. I need to gather my thoughts. And I really do need coffee.
He doesn’t seem to mind. “Yeah, of course,” he says. He’s really geeky today, with a geeky voice. Like something from Big Bang Theory. His T-shirt doesn’t have anything on it—it’s just a blue T-shirt. I wonder how hard A had to look to find one without a joke on it. Then I yell at myself for jumping to so many conclusions just because the guy looks like a geek.
“Do you want anything?” I offer.
“Sure.”
He doesn’t try to come with me, and I’m glad to have the two minutes of waiting and ordering and waiting. I stare at my hands and think of him staring at my hands yesterday. Did they look like the same hands? Or does familiarity somehow alter them? The girl behind the counter calls out my order and hands it over. I carry our drinks to the table and for a few seconds—a few too many seconds—we sit there awkwardly. He’s waiting for me to say something. I’m waiting for him to say something. We’re not saying anything.
I break the silence and tell him, “It feels like the morning after.”
He looks at me kindly, nervously. “I know.”
The morning after. I can’t believe I said that. Because what does he know about a morning after? Isn’t he always somewhere else?
He’s looking at me—at all of me. My hands. My face. My eyes. Even though I do it every day, I wonder what it was like to be inside me, to see the world like this when you’re not already used to it.
Calm. What I feel right now is a strange calm. A and I have just done something it’s possible that nobody else has ever done. I am sitting across from someone who has seen through my eyes. And A is sitting across from someone who can tell him what it was like to have vanished for a day.
“I woke up and I knew something was different,” I tell him. “Even before I saw your letter. It wasn’t the usual disorientation. But I didn’t feel like I’d missed a day. It was like I woke up and something had been…added. Then I saw your letter and started reading, and immediately I knew it was true. It had actually happened. I stopped when you told me to stop, and tried to remember everything about yesterday. It was all there. Not the things I’d usually forget, like waking up or brushing my teeth. But climbing that mountain. Having lunch with Justin. Dinner with my parents. Even writing the letter itself—I had a memory of that. It shouldn’t make sense—why would I write a letter to myself for the next morning? But in my mind, it makes sense.”
Gently, he asks, “Do you feel me there? In your memories.”
I shake my head. “Not in the way you’d think. I don’t feel you in control of things, or in my body, or anything. I feel like you were with me. Like, I can feel your presence there, but it’s outside of me.”
Listen to me. If I turned the TV on at one in the morning and heard a girl saying the things I’m saying, I would think she was a total nutjob. “It’s insane that we’re having this conversation,” I point out.