Every Day

This is what her handwriting looks like. This is how it is made. This is how she signs her name.

There’s a quiz in English class. It’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, which I’ve read. I think Rhiannon does okay.

I access enough to know she doesn’t have any plans after school. Justin finds her before last period and asks her if she wants to do something. It’s clear to me what this something will be, and I can’t see much benefit to it.

“What do you want to do?” I ask.

He looks at me like I’m an imbecile puppy.

“What do you think?”

“Homework?”

He snorts. “Yeah, we can call it that, if you want.”

I need a lie. Really, what I want to do is say yes and then blow him off. But there could be repercussions for that tomorrow. So instead I tell him I have to take my mom to some doctor for her sleep problems. It’s a real drag, but they’ll be drugging her up and she probably won’t be able to drive herself home.

“Well, as long as they give her plenty of pills,” he says. “I love your mom’s pills.”

He leans in for a kiss and I have to do it. Amazing how it’s the same two bodies as three weeks ago, but the kiss couldn’t be more different. Before, when our tongues touched, when I was on the other side of it, it felt like another form of intimate conversation. Now it feels like he’s shoving something alien and gross into my mouth.

“Go get some pills,” he says when we break apart.

I hope my mom has some extra birth control I can slip him.

We have been to an ocean together, and a forest. So today I decide we should go to a mountain.

A quick search shows me the nearest place to climb. I have no idea if Rhiannon’s ever been there, but I’m not sure that matters.

She’s not really dressed for hiking—her Converse don’t have a whole lot of tread left on them. I plunge forward nonetheless, taking a water bottle and a phone with me, and leaving everything else in the car.

Again it’s a Monday, and the trails are largely clear. Every now and then I’ll pass another hiker on his or her way down, and we’ll nod or say hello, in the way that people surrounded by acres of silence do. The paths are haphazardly marked, or perhaps I’m just not attentive enough. I can feel the incline as it’s measured by Rhiannon’s leg muscles, can feel her breath shift into more challenging air. I keep going.

For our afternoon, I’ve decided to attempt to give Rhiannon the satisfaction of being fully alone. Not the lethargy of lying on the couch or the dull monotony of drifting off in math class. Not the midnight wandering in a sleeping house or the pain of being left in a room after the door has been slammed shut. This alone is not a variation of any of those. This alone is its own being. Feeling the body, but not using it to sidetrack the mind. Moving with purpose, but not in a rush. Conversing not with the person next to you, but with all of the elements. Sweating and aching and climbing and making sure not to slip, not to fall, not to get too lost, but lost enough.

And at the end, the pause. At the top, the view. Grappling with the last steep incline, the final turns of the path, and finding yourself above it all. It’s not that there’s a spectacular view. It’s not that we’ve reached the peak of Everest. But here we are, at the highest point the eye can see, not counting the clouds, the air, the lazy sun. I am eleven again; we are atop that tree. The air feels cleaner because when the world is below us, we allow ourselves to breathe fully. When no one else is around, we open ourselves to the quieter astonishments that enormity can offer.

Remember this, I implore Rhiannon as I look out over the trees, as I catch her breath. Remember this sensation. Remember that we were here.

I sit down on a rock and drink some water. I know I am in her body, but it feels very much like she is here with me. Like we are two separate people, together, sharing this.

I have dinner with her parents. When they ask me what I did today, I tell them. I’m sure I tell them more than Rhiannon would, more than the day usually allows.

“That sounds wonderful,” her mother says.

“Just be careful out there,” her father adds. Then he changes the conversation to something that happened at work, and my day, briefly registered, becomes solely my own again.

I do her homework as best I can. I don’t check her email, afraid that there will be something there that she wouldn’t want me to see. I don’t check my own email, because she’s the only person I’d want to hear from. There’s a book on her night table, but I don’t read it, for fear that she won’t remember what I’ve read, and will have to read it again anyway. I thumb through some magazines.