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 be 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.”