Every Day

People take love’s continuity for granted, just as they take their body’s continuity for granted. They don’t realize that the best thing about love is its regular presence. Once you can establish that, it’s an added foundation to your life. But if you cannot have that regular presence, you only have the one foundation to support you, always.

She is sitting right next to me. I want to run my finger along her arm. I want to kiss her neck. I want to whisper the truth in her ear.

But instead I watch as she conjugates verbs. I listen as the air is filled with a foreign language, spoken in haphazard bursts. I try to sketch her in my notebook, but I am not an artist, and all that comes out are the wrong shapes, the wrong lines. I cannot hold on to anything that’s her.

The final bell rings. She asks me where I’ve parked, and I know that this is it, this is the end. She is writing her email address on a piece of paper for me. This is goodbye. For all I know, Amy Tran’s parents have called the police. For all I know, there’s a manhunt going on, an hour away. It is cruel of me, but I don’t care. I want Rhiannon to ask me to go to a movie, to invite me over to her house, to suggest we drive to the beach. But then Justin appears. Impatient. I don’t know what they are going to do, but I have a bad feeling. He wouldn’t be so insistent if sex weren’t involved.

“Walk me to my car?” I ask.

She looks at Justin for permission.

“I’ll get my car,” he says.

We have a parking lot’s length of time left with each other. I know I need something from her, but I’m not sure what.

“Tell me something nobody else knows about you,” I say.

She looks at me strangely. “What?”

“It’s something I always ask people—tell me something about you that nobody else knows. It doesn’t have to be major. Just something.”

Now that she gets it, I can tell she likes the challenge of the question, and I like her even more for liking it.

“Okay,” she says. “When I was ten, I tried to pierce my own ear with a sewing needle. I got it halfway through, and then I passed out. Nobody was home, so nobody found me. I just woke up, with this needle halfway in my ear, drops of blood all over my shirt. I pulled the needle out, cleaned up, and never tried it again. It wasn’t until I was fourteen that I went to the mall with my mom and got my ears pierced for real. She had no idea. How about you?”

There are so many lives to choose from, although I don’t remember most of them.

I also don’t remember whether Amy Tran has pierced ears or not, so it won’t be an ear-piercing memory.

“I stole Judy Blume’s Forever from my sister when I was eight,” I say. “I figured if it was by the author of Superfudge, it had to be good. Well, I soon realized why she kept it under her bed. I’m not sure I understood it all, but I thought it was unfair that the boy would name his, um, organ, and the girl wouldn’t name hers. So I decided to give mine a name.”

Rhiannon is laughing. “What was its name?”

“Helena. I introduced everyone to her at dinner that night. It went over really well.”

We’re at my car. Rhiannon doesn’t know it’s my car, but it’s the farthest car, so it’s not like we can keep walking.

“It was great to meet you,” she says. “Hopefully, I’ll see you around next year.”

“Yeah,” I say, “it was great to meet you, too.”

I thank her about five different ways. Then Justin drives over and honks.

Our time is up.

Amy Tran’s parents haven’t called the police. They haven’t even gotten home yet. I check the house phone’s voicemail, but the school hasn’t called.

It’s the one lucky thing that’s happened all day.

Day 5998

Something is wrong the minute I wake up the next morning. Something chemical.

It’s barely even morning. This body has slept until noon. Because this body was up late, getting high. And now it wants to be high again. Right away.

I’ve been in the body of a pothead before. I’ve woken up still drunk from the night before. But this is worse. Much worse.

There will be no school for me today. There will be no parents waking me up. I am on my own, in a dirty room, sprawled on a dirty mattress with a blanket that looks like it was stolen from a child. I can hear other people yelling in other rooms of the house.

There comes a time when the body takes over the life. There comes a time when the body’s urges, the body’s needs, dictate the life. You have no idea you are giving the body the key. But you hand it over. And then it’s in control. You mess with the wiring and the wiring takes charge.

I have only had glimpses of this before. Now I really feel it. I can feel my mind immediately combating the body. But it’s not easy. I cannot sense pleasure. I have to cling to the memory of it. I have to cling to the knowledge that I am only here for one day, and I have to make it through.

I try to go back to sleep, but the body won’t let me. The body is awake now, and it knows what it wants.