A
Day 6141
Victoria has only one roommate, Lara. Their third debate partner, Lionel, is in the room next door. Lara wakes me up at seven-thirty on the dot and tells me I have exactly a half hour before final prep. The debate itself is at ten.
I message the situation to X and say I’ll be there when I can. He messages back, telling me to ditch the debate. I tell him I can’t do that to Victoria, Lara, or Lionel. You don’t even know them, he responds. Then, a few seconds later, he adds, Which is very noble of you. I will see you this afternoon. You know where to find me.
When I get out of the shower, I find Lara’s set up all of our notes on the hotel desk. She must signal to Lionel as soon as I’m dressed, because the knock comes at the door less than a minute later. I sit down at the desk, open the folder, and find the same debate question that Andy had yesterday.
Only we’re the other side.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I say.
“Excuse me?” Lara says.
“You prepared, right?” Lionel sounds anxious.
“Maybe too much,” I mutter.
It feels even worse when we get to the conference room where the debate’s being held, and there are Andy, Shane, and Vaughn, already sitting up on the stage. Shane looks energized, Vaughn looks nerve-ridden, and Andy looks…tired. Really tired. I know for a fact that he was in bed by midnight. But I have no idea what time he got up, or how much catch-up he felt he needed to get before the debate.
I wish I could unlearn everything I saw in their notes. But since I can’t, the dilemma becomes: Who do I owe more, Victoria or Andy?
In some way, Lara saves me, because she speaks whenever she gets a chance. And when she’s not speaking, she’s busy writing Victoria and Lionel notes about what to say. So I follow her lead. I don’t head off the points that I know Andy’s about to make. It remains about as fair as it can be, with me here.
I have no idea if we did well or not. When the judges come back and say that Andy’s team has won, I am neither surprised nor unsurprised.
Lara, though, goes berserk.
“Are you kidding me?” she says, loud enough for the whole room to hear. Our advisor tries to hush her, and that only makes her angrier.
“You can’t win them all,” Lionel mumbles.
“Speak for yourself!” Lara shouts back. Then she gathers up her things, says, “I have to go prepare for my next event,” and storms off.
“If you need half my bed tonight, it’s all yours,” Lionel says. He’s not coming on to me; he’s just afraid of what Lara might do.
“It’ll be fine. I think.”
Our advisor suggests we go to lunch. I start to make an excuse, but then Lionel looks at me with pleading eyes, and I relent.
It’s after two by the time I hit X’s suite.
“Couldn’t pull yourself away from the oral hijinks?” X says as soon as he sees me. I think for a moment that he and Lara might make a great couple.
“It actually played out in a really weird way. Remember Andy from yesterday?”
I tell him about what happened, and the dilemma I felt. He gets me a ginger ale without asking me if I want one. He’s drinking either water or vodka.
“So what would you have done?” I ask.
“I would have used the information I had.”
“But isn’t that unfair to Andy?”
“Maybe—but how do you know Victoria wouldn’t have anticipated Andy’s arguments even without the inside information? You can’t. And if you happened to wake up as her after spending a day as her opponent—that’s hardly her fault. If I were you, I would’ve gone for the kill.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” I say.
I think he might be offended, but instead he smiles. “I’m glad we’re starting to understand one another.”
I know I should ask about Wyatt again…but I also remember how that shut down yesterday’s conversation. And there are other things I want to know first.
“How do you think it works?” I ask X. “How do I get to be Andy one day and Victoria the next? And why are we never the same person twice? Do you think there’s some overall pattern? Do you think any of it is supposed to make sense, or is it all just random?”
“Starting with the easy questions, I see.” X takes a sip of his vodka-or-water. “But I understand. Those were the ones that I kept going back to as well.”
I feel a rush of excitement—is it possible he actually has answers? Then the rush slows when he says, “I can tell you my theories, but they’re just theories. We need to gather more evidence. With you here, at least we’ve doubled the pool.”
“What are your theories?”
“Let’s first tackle the question of why there are no repeat performances. My theory is that the body develops an immunity once we leave. A spiritual immunity, as it were. The door we enter can only be entered once. After we leave, the body knows how to lock it behind us.”
“And what about how we end up where we end up?”
“I think it’s in relation to each other. I think when there are more of us near, we stay closer. Spread apart, we travel farther. But, again, that’s speculation.”
“I’ve thought that, too.”
“The only way to test it would be to have a much larger sample. I suspect that’s not going to happen in the near future.”
“Okay, stepping back: Do you ever wonder what’s behind it?”
“The big question. And the answer is: We’ll never know. Is it God? An algorithm? Are we all just a part of some twenty-fourth-century high schooler’s science project? That’s beyond my expertise. The important thing, I’ve found, is not to care one way or the other.”
We talk more about this, and then about living life in secret.
“You let Nathan think I was the devil,” I say.
“It’s the language he was going to listen to the most. And it was better than telling him the truth.”
“Did you tell Sara the truth?” I ask.
“Somehow I knew you were going to bring her up. And the answer is no, I didn’t tell her the truth.”
“But how did you explain your changes?”
“You can guess the answer to that one.”
Of course. “You stopped changing.”