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I’ve got this.
Start with a smile. Tell her I just moved here for school. Ask about her tattoo. Make sure she sees my eyes linger as she pulls up her sleeve to show me the whole thing. There aren’t any other customers in line; we have all the time in the world. I ask a question to make it clear I’m really asking if she has a boyfriend. Get the answer I want.
Next I lean closer. Ask if I can get her number. Then, when she says yes, take the marker from the counter, the one she uses to write names on the cups, and ask her to write her number on my arm. Big.
“That way,” I say, “I won’t forget it.”
She’s game. She’s charmed. Writes her name and her phone number from my wrist to my elbow. Even adds a winking smiley face at the end.
Now it’s time to find this guy’s girlfriend.
Leigh says the cold brew is on the house, but I tell her no way, and make sure I’m generous with the tip jar. It’s not my money, so I can afford to be generous. This particular teenager drives a BMW; Mommy and Daddy give him a pretty good allowance.
The Girlfriend texts again. Every time she texts, I want to punish her more.
I don’t let her know I’m on my way.
I make a mockery of the speed limit and run red lights when there aren’t any cars coming. I’m a young, privileged white boy—if I get pulled over, the worst thing that will happen is I’ll be a few minutes late to somewhere I don’t need to be. If I were a young, privileged white girl, I wouldn’t even get a ticket, if my smile was effective enough. But I’m not worried about this guy paying for a ticket. Plus, he listens to Maroon 5. He deserves a ticket.
Lucky for him, there aren’t any police around to oblige. I find his campus parking spot, then head over to Girlfriend’s dorm. A swipe of my ID gets me in. Her room is on the ground floor. I don’t text ahead—I just pound on the door. When she opens it, she doesn’t look happy to see me. She looks pissed.
“Where the fuck have you been?” Girlfriend says.
I force myself to remember her name. “Gemma,” I say, “it’s so good to see you.” I grin, and she’s completely thrown off guard.
She doesn’t ask me in, but I push my way in anyway.
She goes back to wanting a fight. Says it’s not that she needs to know where I am all the time, but promises are promises.
I stand there grinning. For all I know, this guy really loves Gemma. For all I know, he’s fine with his dating life being a surveillance state. For all I know, he’s the kind of guy who’d never cheat.
Too bad.
I hold my arms out in a what-can-you-do? pose. I start counting. It takes her six seconds to notice.
“What’s that?” she asks, pointing to my right arm. “What the fuck is that?”
I don’t say a word. Just keep grinning.
She comes over and grabs my wrist. Turns my arm so she can read it.
“Who the fuck is Leigh?”
I stop grinning. I look her dead in the eye and say, “That’s none of your business.”
I think I’m the only one in the room enjoying this. She’s angry as hell and starting to cry now, which makes her angrier, that she’s crying in front of this guy. She wants to yell, but when she lets out, “What do you mean, it’s none of my business?” it’s more like a plea. I’m sure if he were here, it would break his heart wide open.
“You need to calm down,” I tell her.
As expected, this only makes her madder.
“Calm down?” she yells, shoving this guy in the chest. “Don’t you fucking tell me to calm down. ”
I start laughing, because really, it’s all so predictable. She doesn’t like me laughing (also predictable) and launches herself at me.
Dumb move. I am taller than her. Bigger than her. I could beat the shit out of her. I could smash her face in. I could break her arm in three places. I could put my hands around her throat and strangle her right here and that would be that. She is entirely at my mercy because there is nothing to hold me accountable. She has no idea what kind of stupid danger she’s in as she swats at me and screams. If I weren’t finding it so funny, I could start hitting back. I could take the lamp off her desk and bash it down. I could knock out her teeth or crack her skull. She has no idea. She thinks her boyfriend is here. She thinks her boyfriend would never do that. But if I wanted to, I could do it. I have all the power here.
She swings at me and I catch her arm. I yank it behind her back. Her anger turns to terror. This guy’s never come close to crossing this line.
She wriggles in my grip. I lean into her ear and whisper, “You text too much.”
She starts to really scream. “GET OUT! GET OUT!” I let her break free. She screams it again. “GET OUT!”
I know how this plays out. In a minute, maybe less, there will be a knock at the door, a friend or floormate asking if everything’s okay. Worst-case scenario, I’m face to face with a campus cop.
Or at least that’s the worst-case scenario for me. For Girlfriend, there are even worse options.
But I’m tired now. There’s always a point in a joke like this when it stops being funny enough to merit the mental energy it’s taking. She’s shaking and crying now, looking at him in horror. I try to take it in as much as I can, so when he wakes up tomorrow, he’ll feel the echo of his own horror, vaguely remembering what happened but having no idea why he did what he did. It’ll probably drive him crazy. She’ll never forgive him.
I guess that’s enough for me.
“See ya,” I say. There’s a teddy bear on her bed, clearly beloved. I grab it and take it with me, for effect.
In the hall, there are three people who’ve been listening in, debating what to do. When I pass them, I say hey, and one of them says hey back to me.
Girlfriend needs a better support system. But that’s not really my problem.
I can’t go back to this guy’s room now, just in case there’s going to be some immediate follow-up to what just happened. It’s better to keep him out of the way until he’s himself again and has to deal with it.
I leave the car behind. I walk awhile. When I have to pee, I pee, shocking a pair of elderly women out for an afternoon stroll. I consider peeing on them, but even the elderly carry phones nowadays, and I’m not in the mood to be in the back of a patrol car. I think for a moment about leaving this guy with a broken leg or spine—maybe if he’s in traction, Girlfriend will somehow feel like it’s her fault, which would be an interesting twist. But it’s too hard to time it so I wouldn’t have to deal with the pain and mess. Better to make a clean departure. Lucky boy.
I get him a hotel room. Let him wonder tomorrow how he got there and what the phone number on his arm means. Let the rest dawn on him. His life is about to get very ugly.
When sleep comes, I’m sure to let go fully—I bring his memories to the front of his mind, and give up on my presence entirely.
The next morning, I wake up inside someone else, and within a few minutes I know I’ve done well. A divorced divorce lawyer. Rich and miserable. His kids no longer speak to him. His hypochondria is acute. His hair is greasy; his shirts all have small splattered-soup stains that only a person who doesn’t care could ignore. There’s no one around to tell him to take his shirts to the cleaners, no one around to take out the trash when he’s worried he’ll throw out his back. It’s almost like he welcomes me when I arrive. The less time he has to spend in his own life, the better.
I can use that.
NATHAN
It’s not that we hit dead ends. There aren’t even roads to turn onto.
I can tell Rhiannon’s boyfriend, Alexander, is a little confused by my sudden presence in her life. He can’t put his finger on what connects us . . . and who can blame him for that? She told him we met at a party—technically true. But there’s no way to tell him the reason I’m so attentive isn’t because I want to sleep with her or date her. I’m attentive because she’s the only one besides me who knows the most unknowable thing about my life.
A lot of the couples in my school are glued together emotionally, but Alexander is all about them having their own lives—which is great for me, because it means he doesn’t get all weird when he comes over and finds me and Rhiannon on her computer, searching the Internet for news of body snatchings.
“Watching more Lorraine Hines videos?” he asks. This is a pretty good guess, since it feels like everyone’s been watching them lately.
“Just searching for the elusive truth,” Rhiannon replies. Which could be taken to mean we were trying to get the elusive truth from a Lorraine Hines video. But I know A’s location is the real truth that eludes her.
I don’t know how Rhiannon does it. It’s clear that she likes Alexander. It’s clear that he treats her well, and that Rhiannon is still getting used to the thought of being treated well. I also notice that she never lies to him, if only because he doesn’t know the right questions to ask. And even if he did, even if she told him everything . . . the strange part is that he might actually believe her. Us. But I can see how it’s easier not to risk that.
We search and search the Internet for some trace of A. We read about other people’s experiences of being taken over, and wonder whether they’re like us, or whether they’re just crackpots, making it up in a way we’re not making it up.
Finally I ask her the question that’s been nagging at me the most. We’re in her room, looking at the same “strange phenomena” websites for the twelfth time.
“We’re looking for a sign of him, right?” I say.
Rhiannon nods.
I press on. “What about leaving him a sign? Why not let him know you’re looking?”
“How?” she says. She sounds defensive.
“There’s this thing called social media? And you have a pretty distinctive name?”
“What am I supposed to say? Status update: Missing you, A. Alexander will see that and say, Hey, babe, I’m right here. ”
“He wouldn’t actually say babe, would he? Ew.”
“No. But anything I post, everyone sees. Not just A.”
“You don’t need to write him a message. Just give him a sign.”
“Like what?”
I think about it for a second. “Do you guys have, like, a song?”
She looks at me strangely.
“What?” I ask.
She shakes her head slightly. “Nothing. I mean, it’s just that—you were there for it. When A and I talked about it, A was you. In your body. It’s stupid, really. Just a song.”
“What’s the song?”
She tells me the name of the song, and I feel the echo of a memory—that’s the only way I can describe it. I don’t actually remember talking to her about the song. But the fact that she and I talked about it once makes sense to me.
“Watch,” I say.
I go on YouTube and find the video for the song. Then I copy and paste the link into her status box. In front of it, I type: Listening to this on repeat.
“Okay,” Rhiannon says. I hit return. Then I go back to YouTube and type I miss into the search box. Among other things, I get an old Johnny Cash song, “I Still Miss Someone.” I copy the link for that, then go to the comments section under the original song, type This one, too, and add the link.
“Not very subtle,” Rhiannon tells me.
“Maybe to you. And to me. And to A. To everyone else—totally subtle.”
I hit return.
RHIANNON
It feels wrong.
It feels like I’m pleading.
It feels like I’m saying I’m unhappy with my life.
It feels like I’m saying I’m unhappy with Alexander.
It feels exposed.
It feels like I’m shouting into the wilderness.
It feels like I’m setting myself up for disappointment.
It feels like I’m setting myself up for silence.
It feels like I’m breaking a promise I never really made.
It feels desperate.
It feels like I haven’t thought it through.
It feels like I’m giving something that was ours away to the world.
It feels like I don’t have enough things that were ours to afford to give one away to the world.
It feels treacherous.
It feels like I don’t really have a choice.
Posted by M at 10:34 p.m.
I don’t think I can do this any longer. And by “this” I mean “life.” The pain is out of control—and I am not talking about the kind of pain where you can get medication to make it go away. I am talking about a pain I carry with me everywhere, a pain that has nothing to do with biology or chemistry. The pain started because of who I am. Now it is all I am. There is no way to treat it. No way to calm it down. No way to get it to stop clawing. A thousand times a day I try to think of a way to destroy myself without hurting someone else. A thousand times a day I fail. My pain is the feeling of that failure. My pain is louder to me because it is inaudible to others. I don’t expect anyone to be able to help me. The world around me does not exist. I am alone in this, and if I could find a way to die alone, I would.
A
Day 6082
I used to think nobody could see me. The body I was in was impenetrable from the outside—no one else would ever expect I was there, and therefore even when I slipped up, it would be written off as the action of the person whose life I was borrowing. No one is entirely predictable—we all have surprising bursts. I hid behind that.
I got better at hiding over time, once I figured out what was going on. As a kid, I was a poor mimic, but because kids produce surprising burst after surprising burst, nothing I did ever seemed so out of character that any parent, teacher, or friend suspected the truth. Around ten or eleven, I better understood the ways to disappear, even if I still didn’t understand why I was so different from everyone else. The past couple of years, I treated it like a test I was passing. I stopped wondering what I sounded like, because the sound of my thoughts was enough. I stopped wondering what I looked like, because whatever I looked like that day was enough. I stopped wanting people to see me, because to have them see me would be the ultimate failure of the test.
I took the roles I played to heart because I didn’t have a heart of my own. I only showed anger when I thought I was meant to show anger. I only showed affection when I felt it was my obligation to show affection. I didn’t know what most of these emotions actually felt like, because I never got to express them purely. Only sorrow appeared unfiltered, because what made me cry was often the same as what would have made anyone else cry. Joy, though, was the opposite, because my joy was always edged by the fact that it wasn’t really mine.
Only with Rhiannon did I get to be directly myself. Now, after, I fear a part of the impulse has lingered. I fear I am beginning to show through.
On Monday, my (temporary, one-day-only) best friend tells me she senses there’s something I’m not saying, something I want to say. I tell her no, I’m just a little tired, a little lost in my own mind. I don’t think she believes me, and for a second, I have the desire to tell her everything, to tell her about Rhiannon and ask her what I should do.
On Tuesday, two guys in class give me a hard time because they were expecting me to agree that America is better off with closed borders, and that most of the problems facing America today can be traced to immigration. You’re totally reversing your opinion, they tell me, disgusted. I know I should not be deviating from what he would normally say. But I can’t force myself to repeat something I know isn’t true.
On Wednesday, my (not really my) girlfriend must use the same shampoo as Rhiannon, because every time she comes close to me, it’s like a trapdoor. When she kisses me, I trick myself into being in the past, imagining it can be the present. I must put a lot into it, because when she pulls back, she says, Well, Tara, that was enthusiastic. And I tell her, I love the way you smell. She says, I don’t smell like anything. I want to say, You smell like Rhiannon. But what I say is, You smell like Rhiannon you.
On Thursday, I’m on crutches that I barely know how to use. After first period, a friend takes my backpack from me and says, You need to let me help you. I have a feeling the boy I’m in has turned down her help before. But this time, I welcome it.
When Friday comes, I wake up in the body of a girl named Whitney Jones. She gets up at 5:32 a.m. for swim practice, and I force myself to go, even though I know her performance is going to be off. It takes me about two periods in school to realize she’s one of the only black girls in class—a point brought home in third-period history, when both the teacher and other students keep looking at her when they’re talking about Selma, as if her skin color makes her an expert on something that happened decades before she was born. I would guess they don’t even realize they’re doing it—when people are thinking about a difference, their eyes will usually wander to someone they think embodies that difference. It always makes me feel strange, because I’m not nearly as used to it as the people I’m in are. I try to take the scrutiny on the surface level on which it’s intended—they’re looking at Whitney while they talk about John Lewis because their minds are thinking, Black people. But now, paranoid, I wonder if they also see me, a different kind of different one, underneath.
Whitney’s best friend is named Didi, and they have plans to hang out after school at Didi’s apartment. It soon becomes obvious that Didi is obsessed with a popular series of online videos on a site called Truth Serum, created by a woman named Lorraine Hines, whose catchphrase (it’s all over the site) is Truth IS the Serum. Each video on the site is like a public confessional, only confession isn’t really the right word for all of them. Some of the truths are more political—a woman telling how she really feels about being ogled on the subway, a man talking about trying to explain the concept of race to his biracial children. Most of the truths are very, very personal—people not just admitting affairs, but explaining why they think the affairs happened, or people confronting the pain of their childhoods, including (sometimes) their own culpability, or (more often) the culpability of the people they trusted and loved. There’s no narrative imposed, no set structure. The truth unfolds into whatever shape it takes when it’s exposed to the air.
Some videos are five minutes long and reduce me to tears. Others are ten minutes long and make me laugh at how true they are. Didi and I watch five, then ten of them. Sometimes, when Lorraine Hines thinks the person needs to be talking to someone in order to release the truth, she’ll ask some questions. But most of the time, she’s off camera, and the only person you see is the person telling the truth.
“I swear, I could watch this all day,” Didi says after we’ve watched a sixty-year-old man talk about how he’s never been interested in sex, and feels like he’s had a completely full life without it. “Although afterwards I’m always torn between wanting everyone to be truthful like this in real life and thinking that it would be a bad, bad idea. Because it’s one thing to watch people do it, and another to have people do it to your face, right?”
I nod.
She continues. “Like, how long do you think we could make it, only telling the truth?”
“Two minutes?” I say. This may or may not be the truth.
“Let’s try it!” she says energetically, as if she just suggested we sneak some chocolate from the kitchen.
I laugh.
“What?” she asks. “Nervous?”
There’s no way to tell her that no, that’s not why I’m laughing. I’m laughing because for a second I was thinking I could actually play the truth game—that any answer Whitney gave could be truthful when I’m doing the speaking.
“You go first,” I say.
“Do a starter question. Like . . . how was your day?”
“Okay. How was your day?”
“It doesn’t have to be—Oh, okay. It’s so funny, because even though I know we’re doing truth serum, my first impulse was to say that my day was fine. And that’s not a lie, really. But I guess there’s more to it than that. I was looking forward to this part all day, because I knew it would be the best part. When I’m in class, I’m paying attention, right? But I’m also kinda not there. Not in the way I’m here, hanging out. I don’t enjoy school. I think you do, at least some of the time. I think when you get an answer right or get an A on a paper, you get a kick out of that. But I think of it as something that means a lot to other people, not to me. You know what I mean? Like, if I get an A, that means a lot to my parents and it will mean a lot to whoever looks at my college applications. But to me? It’s not what matters. How about you? How was your day?”
I think I can answer this one, since it’s the part of Whitney’s life I know best. “I’m still tired from swim practice, which seems designed to ruin you for the whole day. It’s a lift during, but then the buzz wears off and it’s like, shit, there are still thirteen more waking hours to go. I had the usual Token Black Girl experience in history class. I know my life is completely informed by this country’s racial history, but that doesn’t mean everyone has to talk to me like I am the class’s representative of that racial history—as if every white kid in there hasn’t been molded by the very same things! That’s exhausting. And then even at lunch, I have to wonder whether people notice me because of me or because of the way I look. Exhausting. So I guess, coming from another direction, I agree with you: This right now is definitely the best part of the day. I think some of the people on those videos are doing it because they like the sound of their own voices, but I think others genuinely seem to have no idea why they’re telling the truth to a world of strangers—and that is, to me at least, much more truthful. When you’re telling the truth, you should look terrified and exhilarated at the same time, because telling the truth is navigating both of those feelings at the same exact time.” I stop. “Is that truthful enough for you?”
Didi looks like she needs to catch her breath. “I mean—yes. That was great. But what do you mean, Token Black Girl ? That’s not how I see you at all. You’re just . . . Whitney.”
It occurs to me that Didi might have been in my history class. I might not have noticed her there, since we hadn’t had lunch together yet, so I hadn’t identified her as my best friend.
“Not you,” I say. Not because I know it’s true, but because it makes the moment easier. “More Mr. Snyder.”
“Snerder.”
“Didn’t I say Snerder?”
“No, you said Snyder.”
She’s looking at me like I just spit some truth serum out on her floor instead of swallowing it.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
In response, I give her the same words I’ve given so many other people, without any of them ever understanding what I really mean.
“I’m not myself today.”
This defuses the situation somewhat.
“I think watching too much Lorraine Hines will do that,” Didi says. “You probably said Snerder. And he can be a total dick. No matter what color you are.”
I must remember that I am Whitney. I must remember that Didi is her friend. I must remember that if Whitney wants to call Didi on her assumptions, that’s Whitney’s decision, not mine. So instead of telling her what I really think, I say, “All this truth serum’s made me hungry. Do you have any popcorn in the kitchen?”
“Let’s check,” she says, leaving the conversation as fast as she can leave the room.
For the rest of the afternoon, until I can plead a dinner excuse, I go through the motions.
Meaning: I could be anyone.
Also meaning: I am no one at all.