David Levithan - Every Day

“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.”

Rhiannon asks, “Did you try to hold on?”

I tell her, “I’m sure I did. But I don’t remember it now. I remember crying and protesting—I told you about that. But the rest? I’m not sure. I mean, do you remember a lot about when you were five?”

She shakes her head. “Not really. I remember my mom bringing me and my sister to the shoe store to get new shoes before kindergarten started. I remember learning that a green light meant go and red meant stop. I remember coloring them in, and the teacher being a little confused about how to explain yellow. I think she told us to treat it the same as red.”

“I learned my letters quickly,” I tell her. “I remember the teachers being surprised that I knew them. I imagine they were just as surprised the next day, when I’d forgotten them.”

“A five-year-old probably wouldn’t notice taking a day off.”

“Probably. I don’t know.”

“I keep asking Justin about it, you know. The day you were him. And it’s amazing how clear his fake memories are. He doesn’t disagree when I say we went to the beach, but he doesn’t really remember it, either.”

“James, the twin, was like that, too. He didn’t notice anything wrong. But when I asked him about meeting you for coffee, he didn’t remember it at all. He remembered he was at Starbucks—his mind accounted for the time. But it wasn’t what actually happened.”

“Maybe they remember what you want them to remember.”

“I’ve thought about that. I wish I knew for sure.”

We walk farther. Circle a tree with our fingers.

“What about love?” she asks. “Have you ever been in love?”

“I don’t know that you’d call it love,” I say. “I’ve had crushes, for sure. And there have been days where I’ve really regretted leaving. There were even one or two people I tried to find, but that didn’t work out. The closest was this guy Brennan.”

“Tell me about him.”

“It was about a year ago. I was working at a movie theater, and he was in town, visiting his cousins, and when he went to get some popcorn, we flirted a little, and it just became this … spark. It was this small, one-screen movie theater, and when the movie was running, my job was pretty slow. I think he missed the second half of the movie, because he came back out and started talking to me more. I ended up having to tell him what happened, so he could pretend he’d been in there most of the time. At the end, he asked for my email, and I made up an email address.”

“Like you did for me.”

“Exactly like I did for you. And he emailed me later that night, and left the next day to go back home to Maine, and that proved to be ideal, because then the rest of our relationship could be online. I’d been wearing a name tag, so I had to give him that first name, but I made up a last name, and then I made up an online profile using some of the photos from the real guy’s profile. I think his name was Ian.”

“Oh—so you were a boy?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Does that matter?”

“No,” she tells me. “I guess not.” But I can tell it does. A little. Again, her mental picture needs adjustment.

“So we’d email almost every day. We’d even chat. And while I couldn’t tell him what was really happening—I emailed him from some very strange places—I still felt like I had something out there in the world that was consistently mine, and that was a pretty new feeling. The only problem was, he wanted more. More photos. Then he wanted to Skype. Then, after about a month of these intense conversations, he started talking about visiting again. His aunt and uncle had already invited him back, and summer was coming.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Yup—uh-oh. I couldn’t figure out a way around it. And the more I tried to dodge it, the more he noticed. All of our conversations became about us. Every now and then, a tangent would get in there, but he’d always drag it back. So I had to end it. Because there wasn’t going to be a tomorrow for us.”

“Why didn’t you tell him the truth?”

“Because I didn’t think he could take it. Because I didn’t trust him enough, I guess.”

“So you called it off.”

“I told him I’d met someone else. I borrowed photos from the body I was in at the time. I changed my fake profile’s relationship status. Brennan never wanted to talk to me again.”

“Poor guy.”

“I know. After that, I promised myself I wouldn’t get into any more virtual entanglements, as easy as they might seem to be. Because what’s the point of something virtual if it doesn’t end up being real? And I could never give anyone something real. I could only give them deception.”