Every Day

First published in the USA in 2012

by Alfred A Knopf,

an imprint of Random House Children’s Books,

a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

First published in Great Britain in 2013

by Electric Monkey, an imprint of Egmont UK Limited

The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN

This edition published 2018 by Egmont UK Limited

Text copyright © 2012 David Levithan

MOTION PICTURE ARTWORK © 2018 ORION DISTRIBUTION COMPANY LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

First e-book edition 2018

ISBN 978 1 4052 9127 9

eISBN 978 1 7803 1197 5

www.egmont.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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For Paige

(May you find happiness every day)

Cover

Title page

Copyright

Dedication

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

About the Publisher

DAY 5994

I wake up.

Immediately, I have to figure out who I am. It’s not just the body – opening my eyes and discovering whether the skin on my arm is light or dark, whether my hair is long or short, whether I’m fat or thin, boy or girl, scarred or smooth. The body is the easiest thing to adjust to, if you’re used to waking up in a new one each morning. It’s the life, the context of the body, that can be hard to grasp.

Every day I am someone else. I am myself – I know I am myself – but I am also someone else.

It has always been like this.

The information is there. I wake up, open my eyes, understand that it is a new morning, a new place. The biography kicks in, a welcome gift from the not-me part of the mind. Today I am Justin. Somehow I know this – my name is Justin – and at the same time I know that I’m not really Justin, I’m only borrowing his life for a day. I look around and know that this is his room. This is his home. The alarm will go off in seven minutes.

I’m never the same person twice, but I’ve certainly been this type before. Clothes everywhere. Far more video games than books. Sleeps in his boxers. From the taste of his mouth, a smoker. But not so addicted that he needs one as soon as he wakes up.

“Good morning, Justin,” I say. Checking out his voice. Low. The voice in my head is always different.

Justin doesn’t take care of himself. His scalp itches. His eyes don’t want to open. He hasn’t gotten much sleep.

Already, I know I’m not going to like today.

It’s hard being in the body of someone you don’t like, because you still have to respect it. I’ve harmed people’s lives in the past, and I’ve found that every time I slip up, it haunts me. So I try to be careful.

From what I can tell, every person I inhabit is the same age as me. I don’t hop from being sixteen to being sixty. Right now, it’s only sixteen. I don’t know how this works. Or why. I stopped trying to figure it out a long time ago. I’m never going to figure it out, any more than a normal person will figure out his or her own existence. After a while, you have to be at peace with the fact that you simply are. There is no way to know why. You can have theories, but there will never be proof.

I can access facts, not feelings. I know this is Justin’s room, but I have no idea if he likes it or not. Does he want to kill his parents in the next room? Or would he be lost without his mother coming in to make sure he’s awake? It’s impossible to tell. It’s as if that part of me replaces the same part of whatever person I’m in. And while I’m glad to be thinking like myself, a hint every now and then of how the other person thinks would be helpful. We all contain mysteries, especially when seen from the inside.

The alarm goes off. I reach for a shirt and some jeans, but something lets me see that it’s the same shirt he wore yesterday. I pick a different shirt. I take the clothes with me to the bathroom, dress after showering. His parents are in the kitchen now. They have no idea that anything is different.

Sixteen years is a lot of time to practise. I don’t usually make mistakes. Not anymore.

I read his parents easily: Justin doesn’t talk to them much in the morning, so I don’t have to talk to them. I have grown accustomed to sensing expectation in others, or the lack of it. I shovel down some cereal, leave the bowl in the sink without washing it, grab Justin’s keys and go.

Yesterday I was a girl in a town I’d guess to be two hours away. The day before, I was a boy in a town three hours farther than that. I am already forgetting their details. I have to, or else I will never remember who I really am.

Justin listens to loud and obnoxious music on a loud and obnoxious station where loud and obnoxious DJs make loud and obnoxious jokes as a way of getting through the morning. This is all I need to know about Justin, really. I access his memory to show me the way to school, which parking space to take, which locker to go to. The combination. The names of the people he knows in the halls.

Sometimes I can’t go through these motions. I can’t bring myself to go to school, maneuver through the day. I’ll say I’m sick, stay in bed and read a few books. But even that gets tiresome after a while, and I find myself up for the challenge of a new school, new friends. For a day.

As I take Justin’s books out of his locker, I can feel someone hovering on the periphery. I turn, and the girl standing there is transparent in her emotions – tentative and expectant, nervous and adoring. I don’t even have to access Justin to know that this is his girlfriend. No one else would have this reaction to him, so unsteady in his presence. She’s pretty, but she doesn’t see it. She’s hiding behind her hair, happy to see me and unhappy to see me at the same time.

Her name is Rhiannon. And for a moment – just the slightest beat – I think that, yes, this is the right name for her. I don’t know why. I don’t know her. But it feels right.

This is not Justin’s thought. It’s mine. I try to ignore it. I’m not the person she wants to talk to.

“Hey,” I say, keeping it casual.

“Hey,” she murmurs back.

She’s looking at the floor, at her inked-in Converse. Something’s happened between her and Justin, and I don’t know what it is. It’s probably not something that Justin even recognized at the time.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

I see the surprise on her face, even as she tries to cover it. This is not something that Justin normally asks.

And the strange thing is: I want to know the answer. The fact that he wouldn’t care makes me want it more.

“Sure,” she says, not sounding sure at all.

I find it hard to look at her. I know from experience that beneath every peripheral girl is a central truth. She’s hiding hers away, but at the same time she wants me to see it. That is, she wants Justin to see it. And it’s there, just out of my reach. A sound waiting to be a word.

She is so lost in her sadness that she has no idea how visible it is. I think I understand her – but then, from within this sadness, she surprises me with a brief flash of determination. Bravery, even.

Shifting her gaze away from the floor, her eyes matching mine, she asks, “Are you mad at me?”

I can’t think of any reason to be mad at her. If anything, I am mad at Justin, for making her feel so diminished. It’s there in her body language. When she is around him, she makes herself small.

“No,” I say. “I’m not mad at you at all.”

I tell her what she wants to hear, but she doesn’t trust it. I feed her the right words, but she suspects they’re threaded with hooks.

This is not my problem; I know that. I am here for one day. I cannot solve anyone’s boyfriend problems. I should not change anyone’s life.

I turn away from her, get my books out, close the locker. She stays in the same spot, anchored by the profound, desperate loneliness of a bad relationship.

“Do you still want to get lunch today?” she asks.

The easy thing would be to say no. I often do this: sense the other person’s life drawing me in, and run in the other direction.

But there’s something about her – the cities on her shoes, the flash of bravery, the unnecessary sadness – that makes me want to know what the word will be when it stops being a sound. I have spent years meeting people without ever knowing them, and on this morning, in this place, with this girl, I feel the faintest pull of wanting to know. And in a moment of either weakness or bravery on my own part, I decide to follow it. I decide to find out more.

“Absolutely,” I say. “Lunch would be great.”

Again I read her. What I’ve said is too enthusiastic. Justin is never enthusiastic.

“No big deal,” I add.

She’s relieved. Or at least, as relieved as she’ll allow herself to be, which is a very guarded form of relief, the relief of being in the eye of a hurricane and knowing the other wall is probably coming quick. By accessing, I know she and Justin have been together for over a year. That’s as specific as it gets. Justin doesn’t remember the exact date.

She reaches out and takes my hand. I am surprised by how good this feels.

“I’m glad you’re not mad at me,” she says. “I just want everything to be okay.”

I nod. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: we all want everything to be okay. We don’t even wish so much for fantastic or marvelous or outstanding. We will happily settle for okay, because most of the time, okay is enough.

The first bell rings.

“I’ll see you later,” I say.

Such a basic promise. But to Rhiannon, it means the world.

At first it was hard to go through each day without making any lasting connections, leaving any life-changing effects. When I was younger, I craved friendship and closeness. I would make bonds without acknowledging how quickly and permanently they would break. I took other people’s lives personally. I felt their friends could be my friends, their parents could be my parents. But after a while, I had to stop. It was too heartbreaking to live with so many separations.

I am a drifter, and as lonely as that can be, it is also remarkably freeing. I will never define myself in terms of anyone else. I will never feel the pressure of peers or the burden of parental expectation. I can view everyone as pieces of a whole, and focus on the whole, not the pieces. I have learned how to observe, far better than most people observe. I am not blinded by the past or motivated by the future. I focus on the present, because that is where I am destined to live.

I learn. Sometimes I am taught something I have already been taught in dozens of other classrooms. Sometimes I am taught something completely new. I am often given information but have no context. I have to access the body, access the mind, see what information it’s retained. And when I do, I learn. Knowledge is the only thing I take with me when I go.

I know so many things that Justin doesn’t know, that he will never know. I sit there in his math class, open his notebook and write down phrases he has never heard. Shakespeare and Kerouac and Dickinson. Tomorrow, or some day after tomorrow, or never, he will see these words in his own handwriting, and he won’t have any idea where they came from, or even what they are.

That is as much interference as I allow myself.

Everything else must be done cleanly.

Rhiannon stays with me. Her details. Flickers from Justin’s memories. Small things, like the way her hair falls, the way she bites her fingernails, the determination and resignation in her voice. Random things. I see her dancing with Justin’s grandfather, because he’s said he wants a dance with a pretty girl. I see her covering her eyes during a scary movie, peering between her fingers, enjoying her fright. These are the good memories. I don’t look at any others.

I only see her once in the morning, a brief passing in the halls between first and second period. I find myself smiling when she comes near, and she smiles back. It’s as simple as that. Simple and complicated, as most true things are. I find myself looking for her after second period, and then again after third and fourth. I don’t even feel in control of this. I want to see her. Simple. Complicated.

By the time we get to lunch, I am exhausted. Justin’s body is worn down from too little sleep and I, inside of it, am worn down from restlessness and too much thought.

I wait for her at Justin’s locker. The first bell rings. The second bell rings. No Rhiannon. Maybe I was supposed to meet her somewhere else. Maybe Justin’s forgotten where they always meet.

If that’s the case, she’s used to Justin forgetting. She finds me right when I’m about to give up. The halls are nearly empty, the cattle call has passed. She comes closer than she did before.

“Hey,” I say.

“Hey,” she says.

She is looking to me. Justin is the one who makes the first move. Justin is the one who figures things out. Justin is the one who says what they’re going to do.

It depresses me.

I have seen this too many times before. The unwarranted devotion. Putting up with the fear of being with the wrong person because you can’t deal with the fear of being alone. The hope tinged with doubt, and the doubt tinged with hope. Every time I see these feelings in someone else’s face, it weighs me down. And there’s something in Rhiannon’s face that’s more than just the disappointments. There is a gentleness there. A gentleness that Justin will never, ever appreciate. I see it right away, but nobody else does.

I take all my books and put them in the locker. I walk over to her and put my hand lightly on her arm.

I have no idea what I’m doing. I only know that I’m doing it.

“Let’s go somewhere,” I say. “Where do you want to go?”

I am close enough now to see that her eyes are blue. I am close enough now to see that nobody ever gets close enough to see how blue her eyes are.

“I don’t know,” she replies.

I take her hand.

“Come on,” I tell her.

This is no longer restlessness – it’s recklessness. At first we’re walking hand in hand. Then we’re running hand in hand. That giddy rush of keeping up with one another, of zooming through the school, reducing everything that’s not us into an inconsequential blur. We are laughing, we are playful. We leave her books in her locker and move out of the building, into the air, the real air, the sunshine and the trees and the less burdensome world. I am breaking the rules as I leave the school. I am breaking the rules as we get into Justin’s car. I am breaking the rules as I turn the key in the ignition.

“Where do you want to go?” I ask again. “Tell me, truly, where you’d love to go.”

I don’t initially realize how much hinges on her answer. If she says, Let’s go to the mall, I will disconnect. If she says, Take me back to your house, I will disconnect. If she says, Actually, I don’t want to miss sixth period, I will disconnect. And I should disconnect. I should not be doing this.

But she says, “I want to go to the ocean. I want you to take me to the ocean.”

And I feel myself connecting.

It takes us an hour to get there. It’s late September in Maryland. The leaves haven’t begun to change, but you can tell they’re starting to think about it. The greens are muted, faded. Color is right around the corner.

I give Rhiannon control of the radio. She’s surprised by this, but I don’t care. I’ve had enough of the loud and the obnoxious, and I sense that she’s had enough of it too. She brings melody to the car. A song comes on that I know, and I sing along.

And if I only could, I’d make a deal with God . . .

Now Rhiannon goes from surprised to suspicious. Justin never sings along.

“What’s gotten into you?” she asks.

“Music,” I tell her.

“Ha.”

“No, really.”

She looks at me for a long time. Then smiles.

“In that case,” she says, flipping the dial to find the next song.

Soon we are singing at the top of our lungs. A pop song that’s as substantial as a balloon, but lifts us in the same way when we sing it.

It’s as if time itself relaxes around us. She stops thinking about how unusual it is. She lets herself be a part of it.

I want to give her a good day. Just one good day. I have wandered for so long without any sense of purpose, and now this ephemeral purpose has been given to me – it feels like it has been given to me. I only have a day to give – so why can’t it be a good one? Why can’t it be a shared one? Why can’t I take the music of the moment and see how long it can last? The rules are erasable. I can take this. I can give this.

When the song is over, she rolls down her window and trails her hand in the air, introducing a new music into the car. I roll down all the other windows and drive faster, so the wind takes over, blows our hair all around, makes it seem like the car has disappeared and we are the velocity, we are the speed. Then another good song comes on and I enclose us again, this time taking her hand. I drive like that for miles, and ask her questions. I ask her how her parents are doing. What it’s like now that her sister’s off at college. If she thinks school is different at all this year.

It’s hard for her. Every single answer starts with the phrase I don’t know. But most of the time she does know, if I give her the time and the space in which to answer. Her mother means well; her father less so. Her sister isn’t calling home, but Rhiannon can understand that. School is school – she wants it to be over, but she’s afraid of it being over, because then she’ll have to figure out what comes next.

She asks me what I think, and I tell her, “Honestly, I’m just trying to live day to day.”

It isn’t enough, but it’s something. We watch the trees, the sky, the signs, the road. We sense each other. The world, right now, is only us. We continue to sing along. And we sing with the same abandon, not worrying too much if our voices hit the right notes or the right words. We look at each other while we’re singing; these aren’t two solos, this is a duet that isn’t taking itself at all seriously. It is its own form of conversation – you can learn a lot about people from the stories they tell, but you can also know them from the way they sing along, whether they like the windows up or down, if they live by the map or by the world, if they feel the pull of the ocean.

She tells me where to drive. Off the highway. The empty back roads. This isn’t summer; this isn’t a weekend. It’s the middle of a Monday, and nobody but us is going to the beach.

“I should be in English class,” Rhiannon says.

“I should be in bio,” I say, accessing Justin’s schedule.

We keep going. When I first saw her, she seemed to be balancing on edges and points. Now the ground is more even, welcoming.

I know this is dangerous. Justin is not good to her. I recognize that. If I access his memories of her, I see tears, fights and remnants of passable togetherness. She is always there for him, and he must like that. His friends like her, and he must like that too. But that’s not the same as love. She has been hanging on to the hope of him for so long that she doesn’t realize there isn’t anything left to hope for. They don’t have silences together; they have noise. Mostly his. If I tried, I could go deep into their arguments. I could track down whatever shards he’s collected from all the times he’s destroyed her. If I were really Justin, I would find something wrong with her. Right now. Tell her. Yell. Bring her down. Put her in her place.

But I can’t. I’m not Justin. Even if she doesn’t know it.

“Let’s just enjoy ourselves,” I say.

“Okay,” she replies. “I like that. I spend so much time thinking about running away – it’s nice to actually do it. For a day. It’s good to be on the other side of the window. I don’t do this enough.”

There are so many things inside of her that I want to know. And at the same time, with every word we speak, I feel there may be something inside of her that I already know. When I get there, we will recognize each other. We will have that.

I park the car and we head to the ocean. We take off our shoes and leave them under our seats. When we get to the sand, I lean over to roll up my jeans. While I do, Rhiannon runs ahead. When I look back up, she is spinning around the beach, kicking up sand, calling my name. Everything, at that moment, is lightness. She is so joyful, I can’t help but stop for a second and watch. Witness. Tell myself to remember.

“C’mon!” she cries. “Get over here!”

I’m not who you think I am, I want to tell her. But there’s no way. Of course, there’s no way.

We have the beach to ourselves, the ocean to ourselves. I have her to myself. She has me to herself.

There is a part of childhood that is childish, and a part that is sacred. Suddenly we are touching the sacred part – running to the shoreline, feeling the first cold burst of water on our ankles, reaching into the tide to catch at shells before they ebb away from our fingers. We have returned to a world that is capable of glistening, and we are wading deeper within it. We stretch our arms wide, as if we are embracing the wind. She splashes me mischievously and I mount a counterattack. Our pants, our shirts get wet, but we don’t care. We are carefree.

She asks me to help her build a sand castle, and as I do, she tells me about how she and her sister would never work on sand castles together – it was always a competition, with her sister going for the highest possible mountains while Rhiannon paid attention to detail, wanting each castle to be the dollhouse she was never allowed to have. I see echoes of this detail now, as she makes turrets bloom from her cupped hands. I myself have no memories of sand castles, but there must be some sense memory attached, because I feel I know how to do this, how to shape this.