Switch (6 page)

52

She smiled back but didn't agree.

Then the lightning flashed and I woke up on the floor, sweating in a sleeping bag. I opened my eyes slowly. It was dark, but I could see two other forms on the floor.

"Hey, Avon, we thought you fell asleep."

Avon was here? I looked around, searching. Would she know me behind a stranger's eyes?

"Hey, Avon, you okay?" It was Ricki talking, I suddenly realized. Which meant that the other girl was ... Dayna.

"What?" I said softly, testing my new vocal cords. "Yeah, I'm fine. I guess I just drifted off."

You know how it is when you hear your own voice on an answering machine or a video camera and it sounds nothing like you think it does? Well, that's how it felt hearing Avon's voice coming out of my mouth--her mouth. I recognized it, but it sounded different, lower or something.

"So, what were you going to say about Claire?" Dayna asked.

"Claire?" I said, my own name feeling odd on Avon's tongue.

"Did you see what she wore on the last day of school?" Ricki said.

"What she wears every day of school." Dayna snorted.

"Sweatpants," Ricki said. "My God."

Dayna laughed. "Avon said Claire buys all of her clothes at Sears--in the
boys'
department!"

Ricki gasped, her hand flying across her mouth. "Didn't you say that, Avon?" said Dayna. I stared at them.

"Avon?" Dayna said. Lightning flashed, reflecting against Dayna's braces. It looked like she had more braces than teeth.

53

Ricki and Dayna squealed at the lightning, then looked back at me--at Avon. I shrugged. "Sears has some cool clothes."

They paused, silent for a moment, then broke into a fit of giggles. "Avon, you are
so bad,"
Ricki said. "You totally crack me up."

"I can't believe Claire doesn't know who her father is," Dayna said. I stared at her. Everyone knew who Dayna's father was. He was the McDonald's night manager who left his wife, Dayna's mother, for a twenty-year-old fry cook.

"Yeah, really," Ricki said. "And, like, how she stares at strange men to see if they look like her, like maybe they could be her father? It's totally creepy."

My breathing grew shallow. My palms were sweating. I had told Avon that I searched men's faces (in quick glances; I never stared) for clues: eyebrows shaped like mine or tiny clefts in their chins. I had told Avon and no one else.

"It's not as bad as her grandmother, though," Dayna said. "My mother said she went crazy and had to be put away. You think craziness could be catching? Like, genetically?"

I think I stopped breathing for a moment. I hadn't told anyone about my grandmother being sent to an insane asylum. Until that moment, I hadn't known myself. Was it even true, I wondered? Maybe Dayna was just saying that to be mean--well, meaner. But at some level, I knew that it must be true. First Avon's betrayal--now this. It was almost too much to process at once.

"What did you tell Claire about what we were doing tonight?" Dayna asked me. "Did she know about my birthday?" She turned to Ricki. "Claire kept asking Avon to hang out this weekend."

54

"Eew," Ricki said.

The lightning flashed again, and then the thunder came, a low rumble in the distance. The storm was moving away. "She told me she was going to her cousin's house," I said softly.

"What?" Ricki said, confused. "Claire was going to her cousin's? I didn't think she had any relatives."

"I mean, that's what I told her," I said. "I told Claire that I was going to my cousin's house." I swallowed hard, but the lump in my throat wouldn't go away. "I lied to Claire."

I tried to sleep, but Ricki and Dayna wouldn't stop talking-- about who was too fat, too short, too loud, too shy. It was almost daybreak before their venom dried up. Finally, I closed my eyes and flew away from Avon's body--and from a friendship that, I knew now, had disappeared a long time ago.

55

***

10

It never gets normal, this business of leaving my body, but it has grown less terrifying, at least. We have developed a routine, Evelyn and I. She sits next to me in bed, her presence feeling like a cool draft. I close my eyes, take deep breaths, and wait for the inevitable.

After that awful switch with Avon, I asked Evelyn about the insane asylum. She stared at the wall for a long, silent time before admitting that it was true. "Though I wasn't crazy," she said. "Not for an instant."

"Was it really you in there?" I asked. "In ... that place?" The mental hospital where Evelyn spent her last months was up in the hills, right at the edge of town. It has since been turned into condos.

She nodded sadly.

"Did they put you in there because of ... the switching?" I asked, afraid to hear the answer.

56

"It was because I wasn't careful enough," she said. She wouldn't give any more details about the experience; she said it was too painful. And I didn't ask her about it either, because I was afraid of what I might learn.

Here's what Evelyn did tell me: As the years passed, she felt her spirit fading until she feared she would disappear altogether. It was getting harder and harder to see her daughter. It was like she saw everything through a thick ocean fog, the kind that creeps in during the middle of the night and refuses to burn off, even as the day grows long.

And then I was born. Evelyn doesn't know how it happened; she has no idea who my father is. My mother had never married, hadn't dated seriously in years. But then, so much had been lost in the fog.

Evelyn says my birth cleared the air for her, at least within the walls of our house. Outside, everything was still hazy.

"Switching is simply a fact of our lives, some genetic quirk," Evelyn has told me, time and time again. "It's what makes us different, like being left-handed or having red hair."

"I wish I could have red hair instead," I said one time.

"There's always Clairol," she replied.

The night after the mall trip, I spent the evening trying on my new clothes and deciding what to wear on the first day of school. I pictured Nate Jameson (I was good at that). Would he be more apt to notice me in my new jeans (which, okay, came from Sears, but from the juniors' department, at least) or in the cute skirt that I had found, miraculously, in Macy's?

57

Like it mattered. I could walk by Nate wearing nothing but a lacy black thong, and he'd still call me "dude."

I called Beanie to tell her about running into Avon at the mall. "She and Dayna got matching makeovers."

"There isn't enough makeup in the world ..." Beanie said.

"I didn't even recognize her at first," I said. "She looked like a mime."

"If only she talked like one."

Beanie doesn't know how I found out what Avon said about me, of course; she just assumes I heard it secondhand. Beanie says Avon was always a nasty cow, and she always wondered why someone as nice as me would hang out with someone as transparently evil as Avon.

Beanie and I agreed to meet at the beach at ten o'clock the next morning to enjoy our last day of summer vacation. When I got off the phone, I looked back at the pile of clothes on my bed, with Fluffernutter sprawled on top. I buried my face in his stomach to hear him purr, then I shifted him off the clothes. No matter what outfit I chose, I'd be wearing white and orange fur on my first day of tenth grade. I finally settled on jeans and a top that looked like three shirts but was really just one.

That momentous decision out of the way, I crawled onto my bed and curled myself around Fluff. Just for a moment, I told myself. Right. I fell asleep on top of my covers, still wearing the new jeans and layered top.

When I woke up, I was all cramped and kind of cold. Fluffernutter had moved to the foot of my bed. I checked the clock: 4 A.M. My mother must have turned out my light, because

58

it was dark. Evelyn wasn't in my room. I've told her it creeps me out when she watches me sleep. She was probably in the kitchen, messaging her MySpace friends. You'd expect death to be exhausting, but Evelyn never sleeps.

A full moon lit my room. I peeled off my clothes and shuffled across the new beige carpet. I couldn't see my pajamas in the darkness of the closet, so I groped inside for the light switch. I flipped the switch, and I saw a flash. Something stung my hand.

And then I was gone.

59

***

11

My first thought wasn't,
Where am I?
or even,
Who am I?
, but rather,
Why!
Except for my very first switch, in science class, I'd only left my body during storms. But the night had been clear. And Mr. Pieteroski was nowhere to be seen.

I was
so
not in the mood for this right now.

I sat up in bed. It was a nice bed--big, comfortable. It had a shiny black headboard and a pouffy white comforter. Large square paintings hung on the walls. This did not look like a fifteen-year-old girl's room.

I examined my hands. The fingers were long and slender, the tips of the nails painted bright white. There was a name for this kind of manicure. Avon would know it.

I peeled the comforter away slowly. I was wearing an oversize, heather gray T-shirt. Under it, my legs flowed long and smooth and skinny. My toenails were bright pink.

The room was dark for such a bright night. I squinted, finally

60

spotting a window. I slipped out of bed and crept over. The space between the window and the hillside was maybe two feet. No wonder it was so murky in there.

I listened carefully for sounds outside the room. When I didn't hear any, I turned on the light. There were no mirrors in the room, but I could see the paintings now. They were abstract, colorful. I didn't really like them, but I bet they cost a lot of money. The floors were some kind of pale wood, clean and gleaming. The walls were bright white.

This was the point at which I should have climbed back into the pouffy white bed, slipped back into sleep and into my own body. But it was kind of like when you wake up at night and you have to pee. You're torn: You want to go back to the comfort of sleep, but you're not sure if you can do it. Usually, it's best to just get that trip to the bathroom over with. It's like that when I switch. It's hard to fall back to sleep without knowing whose body I'm in. Once my curiosity is satisfied, it is much easier to conk out.

I was trying to decide whether to risk leaving the room to find a mirror when I noticed what must be a closet door. It was worth a try.

I opened it, not really expecting anything. When I saw the full-length mirror, I jumped and gasped.

It was her. Or, rather, I was her--the girl in the brown bikini, the girl Nate liked.

I touched the mirror with my slender fingers and gawked at the beautiful girl. She stared back. I cocked my head to one side. I smiled. I bent over until my thick blond hair almost touched the

61

ground, and then I tossed the hair back over my head so it was even fuller and floatier than before.

"Darling," I said to the girl in the mirror. "You look fabulous."

I checked the digital clock on the nightstand. Only ten minutes had passed. Surely the girl wouldn't get up before, say, 5 a.m. ? I certainly wouldn't. That gave me almost an hour to play.

I thought of Evelyn, back at my house. How much ice cream was she eating right now? Had she found the cookies that Mom hides in the cabinet over the refrigerator? It was bad enough that my mother worried about teenage pregnancies. Next she'd be lecturing me on eating disorders. Evelyn hadn't been in my room when I'd switched, but she couldn't have been far away. Surely she'd sensed something unusual and found her way to my room. Right?

The closet was stuffed with clothes. The girl had a little flippy miniskirt, royal blue with white pinstripes. I put it on with a tank top. It looked nothing like a school uniform. No school had ever been that cool. It felt like playing with a Barbie doll, only without the ratty hair and ruined knees. I wasn't just playing Barbie, though; I was
being
Barbie. Playing dress up had never been so much fun.

Next I tried on distressed jeans with a halter top, then super-short shorts with a little blouse that tied at the waist, then a billowy white sundress. I tried on the brown bikini--and then a blue one that, if possible, was even smaller.

There were flip-flops at the back of the closet, peachy pink with pink and orange flowers at the V. They were girly but funky--dainty but rubber. I loved them. I would never wear them

62

in my real life. They'd look ridiculous on me. But now ... I slipped them on. The soles were thick and comfortable, and they made a satisfying slapping sound as I walked across the floor.

This was nothing like shopping with my mom.

While I played dress up, the numbers on the digital clock counted down the hour. At five o'clock, the sky outside was still black. Well, the thin space between the window and the hillside was dark, anyway. Surely another half hour wouldn't matter. Since I was the beautiful girl, I was probably in the Ice Cube House right now. Just
my luck,
I thought. I
finally switch into a house on the water, and I don't even get a room with a view.

The novelty of the Barbie show wearing off, I tried to find something that looked bad. There was a pair of baggy pants that would have made my real body look stubby. They made the blond girl look urban and cool. I found some flat-front chinos buried in her pants drawer. Aha! I thought. These
will look boring!

But they didn't. They were cut really low in the waist and flared out the tiniest bit at the ankle.

No matter what I did, I couldn't make the body look bad.

At five thirty, I packed it in. I slipped back into the enormous gray T-shirt and put the clothes back where I had found them. In her top drawer, amid belts, scarves, undies, and jewelry, I noticed a couple of greeting cards plus a bunch of business-size white envelopes, all addressed to "Larissa Hughes" in care of somebody named Krystal Calgrove. Krystal--and presumably, Larissa-- lived about three hours away. I opened a red envelope. It was a birthday card dated March 10--surprise, surprise--and it said, "Happy fifteenth birthday to my girl. Love, Daddy."