I try to imagine myself in other bodies, steering them around, experiencing how they’re seen. The conclusion I reach: I don’t like my body very much, but I’m not sure I’d like anyone else’s body any better. They’re all strange when you look at them for too long.
I know A is not here, but I want A to be inside one of the bodies I’m staring at. I want a head to turn and for me to see A inside. Because only A could understand all of the crazy places my mind is going. Because A has taken my mind there. A has made me want to reach past all the cars, to get to all the drivers.
“Are you okay?” Preston asks at lunch. “You’re really out of it today.”
“No,” I tell him. “I’m really, really inside of it.”
He laughs. I think a laugh is like the driver honking the horn, advertising pleasure.
I think that if A were in Preston’s body, I’d kiss him hard.
I know this is a ridiculous thought. I have it anyway.
Preston, of course, has no idea what I’m thinking. He sees me, yes, but not in a way that would give away my thoughts.
The car can smile all it wants, but that doesn’t mean you can see the driver’s expression.
I receive emails from A.
He tells me:
The girl I am today is not nice. I can make her nice for a day, but what does that do?
He says:
I want us to be walking in the woods again.
He asks:
What are you doing?
And I don’t know what to say.
I don’t really talk to Justin until after school. He wants me to come over to his house and I can’t. I don’t have any excuse; I just know I can’t.
I have loved his body for so long. I have loved it with devotion, with intensity. If I close my eyes, I can see it better than I see my own, because I have studied it, traced it, detailed it with so much more attention than I have ever spent on myself. It still attracts me. I still feel attachment to it. But it’s also just a body. Only a body.
If I kiss him now, I will be thinking this. If we have sex now, I will be thinking of this.
So I can’t.
Of course he asks me why not. Of course he asks me what else I have to do.
“I just need to go home,” I say.
It’s not enough. He’s pissed. It’s one thing for me to say I’m going shopping with Preston, or have made plans with Rebecca. It might even be bearable if I said I had homework or wanted to go home and be with my mom.
But I’m telling him I’d prefer nothing, and that makes him feel like less than nothing. I understand that, and feel bad about it.
But I can’t. I just can’t.
The next day, A is only forty-five minutes away from me. In the body of a boy.
I have a math quiz in the morning, so I can’t cut out until lunch. It’s not even that I care so much about math. But I realize this could be what my life is becoming, trying to go to as little school as possible to get to wherever A is. And if this is going to be my life, I am going to have to be careful about it. I am not about to flunk out because of a crush, or whatever it is. But I’m also not going to stay away any longer than I have to.
Since A is being homeschooled today, he has to come up with a plan to escape. I wait for his message, and then get it around noon—he’s made a dash for the public library, and I should get there as soon as I can.
I don’t waste any time. As I drive over, I picture him there—which is strange, because I don’t know what he looks like today. Mostly, I’m imagining Nathan from the party. I don’t even know why.
The library is very, very quiet when I arrive. The librarian asks, “Can I help you?” when I come in, and I tell her that I’m looking for someone. Before she can ask me why I’m not in school, I walk swiftly away from the desk and start to scan the aisles for A. There’s a ninety-year-old man checking out the psychology section, and a woman who very well might be his wife taking a nap in a comfy chair by an old card catalog. In the kids’ section, there’s a mother nursing.
I’m about to give up when I see a row of desks by the window. There’s a redheaded boy sitting at one of them, reading a book. He’s completely lost in it, not noticing me until I’m right next to him. I notice that he’s cute in an adorable way, and at the same time I get angry at myself for noticing this. It shouldn’t matter. I need to think about A and not care about the body he’s in.
“Ahem,” I say, to lead him back from the world of the book he’s reading. “I figured you were the only kid in the building, so it had to be you.”
I’m expecting a smile. A glint. A relief that I’m finally here.
But instead the boy says, “Excuse me?” He seems supremely annoyed that I’ve interrupted his reading.
It has to be him. I’ve looked everywhere else.
“It’s you, right?” I ask.
I am not ringing any bells in this boy. “Do I know you?” he asks back.
Okay. Maybe not. Maybe A’s in the men’s room. Maybe I’m at the wrong library. Maybe I need to stop walking up to strangers and assuming they’re not strangers.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I apologize. “I just, uh, am supposed to meet somebody.”
“What does he look like?”
Now I’m going to seem like an idiot. Because I should know the answer to that question, but I don’t.
“I don’t, um, know,” I tell the boy. “It’s, like, an online thing.”