“It’s easier without anybody,” I tell her. “You don’t know how easy it can be.”
“You don’t believe that.”
I look her right in the eye and say, “I do.”
She sees something then—something in her brother that scares her. She blinks it back, but I catch the moment before the blink, the slip of the composure.
“Let’s get dinner,” she says.
“I don’t want dinner,” I tell her.
“You’ve got to eat.”
“Yeah. But I don’t have to eat with you.”
She tries to smile it off with a sarcastic reply. She says, “I forgot how much I love this side of you.”
“It’s called the front,” I tell her.
She doesn’t flinch. She keeps looking me in the eye. Searching for something she’s not going to find.
“We don’t have to go out,” she presses. “I can get some groceries and we can have dinner here. I’ll make you some Grumpy Food. Remember Grumpy Food?”
I don’t go looking for the memory. Or at least I don’t mean to. But somehow it pushes its way in, and I am seeing her much younger, making him dinner because their mom is working and their dad is angry. Mac and cheese, right from the box. String cheese peeled and placed on the top.
I try to shake off the memory. I don’t care. I don’t care about her, or him, or any of this.
I need to make her understand that.
I need to cut the tie. I’ve cut all the others.
“You’re pathetic,” I say to her. “Can you hear yourself? Grumpy Food? What kind of piece-of-shit baby says something like that?” I see my words are hitting. I hit some more. “You’re the last person I want to see and the first person I want to get away from.”
She’s genuinely shocked now. “Pat, don’t—”
“Don’t what? Tell the truth about what a sad, weak woman you’ve become? It’s like the worst of each of our parents, bundled up in one homely body. If I never see you again for the rest of my life, I will consider it a triumph.” She’s crying now. Good. “You’re nothing but deadweight to me, Wil. You are complete dead—”
I don’t get to finish the sentence, because before I can finish the sentence, there’s a shooting pain across my chest, then another. It is unlike anything I’ve felt before, and is so monumental it feels like it could be unlike anything anyone’s ever felt before. I grasp at my chest, gasp.
“Pat!” she screams. I spin a little, then lower myself into the chair where she’d been sitting.
“Pat! Are you okay?”
I can’t even joke that no, I am not okay. It’s the body—the body is doing this. The body is pushing back. That has to be what this is.
I fall in and out of consciousness. She’s called an ambulance. An ambulance is here. I understand what they are saying. They tell me to hold on. I am holding on. They have no idea how I am holding on, to this body that wants to destroy me, this body that wants me gone. I don’t know for sure this is it, that if the body dies, I die—but I’m not about to risk it. I do everything they tell me to do. I let them do whatever they have to do. His sister holds his hand. We get to the hospital. He is hooked to machines. I am fighting this. The monitor traces the heartbeats, and while I know they are his heartbeats, I pretend for a moment that they are mine, that I am in total control, that I can survive this. They say he needs a bypass. They say they need to put me under. Under what? I think. I try to keep my eyes open. My eyes close. I am losing I am lost I am nowhere but I am inside, I am inside, as the body is opened and the body is closed, I am inside, and nobody knows I am here, nobody will ever know I am here, and this doesn’t make me sad—it makes me angry. I am angry at him, angry at this body, angry that it pushed back, landed me here, like this. I am flickering and I am here. I sense movement. I sense I am being moved. When I open my eyes, they tell me to sleep. So I sleep. And then I wake up the next morning somewhere else, good as new.
A
Day 6106
So what do I do?
I try to live the life in my head and the life of my body at the same time, and feel like it’s an impossible balance.
I wake up in the body of Colton Sterling. He’s fallen asleep in his clothes, and the clothes feel like they’ve been on for a few days. Or at least the jeans have. His room is a haphazard wreck. He’s fallen asleep with a game on pause. The screen is asking me if I want to resume.
I access some of Colton’s life and realize quickly that it’s a solitary one. No real friends come to mind. Just a lot of games, and a lot of people he talks to during games, using his headset. Unreal real people. Voices that manifest in pixelated bodies as imaginary worlds are explored and imaginary enemies are pulverized.
He hasn’t charged his phone overnight, so it sits as a shell version of itself on the floor. I plug it in, wait for there to be enough charge to get an email to Rhiannon. It would be so much easier to text her or call her, but that would leave a trace, and I don’t want to leave any of the lives I take for a day with mysterious numbers on their phones.
I head to the bathroom and take off his clothes. There are bruises on the outsides of Colton’s legs that I can’t explain. There are half-picked scabs on his arms. I can’t wash them off in the shower, but I try to rid myself of the musty rind that covers his skin. I wonder if it’s something he’s grown used to, doesn’t care about. I wonder if tomorrow he’ll feel vulnerable without it. Exposed.
I want Rhiannon to see me now. I want her to take a good look at me and tell me whether she really thinks she can love me no matter who I am.
Which isn’t fair to Colton. I recognize this. And in recognizing this, I get back at least a little bit of the sympathy I used to feel for each body I was in. I remember to see him through my eyes, not anyone else’s.
When I get back to the room, I have to dig a little to get to the clean clothes. There isn’t much time before school.
I send Rhiannon a quick message.
R,
Good morning. Or afternoon, if you don’t check this until lunch. I’m a boy named Colton today. I think he spends a lot of time playing games online—want to meet up in an Elf Parlor later this afternoon? I’ll be the Orc with a rose in its teeth.
(If only it were that easy to meet in real life.)
A
There’s more to say. And I imagine if I skipped school to laze around all day, Colton wouldn’t mind. But my responsibility is to do right by him, not right by me or right by what he wants. So I head to school.