by Carol Snow
I blacked out, only for a few minutes, I think, though it may have been longer.
I woke up in a room I had never seen before, the storm still raging outside. I leaped out of bed and came face-to-face with a mirror--but the brown eyes staring back at me were not my own.
I screamed. There was a shuffling sound in the hallway, and a woman came in, her eyebrows arched with concern, her light eyes wide with love.
"Kimmy, baby, are you okay?"
I shook my head no, my throat too tight with fear to speak. I kept staring at the mirror. Every time the lightning flashed, I'd get a quick, overlit view of the girl's face, like a camera bulb going off over and over.
Kimmy's mother took me in her soft arms. Her hair was black, like her daughter's, only without the thick white streak. She smelled like the yellow moisturizer you put on after you've been in the sun all day. I clutched her, sobbing wildly, the wailing sound unfamiliar to me, so much higher and squeakier than my own cries.
"It's just a thunderstorm," Kimmy's mother cooed. "You haven't been scared of thunder since you were a little girl."
I buried my head in her shoulder and nodded as if I believed her. She led me back to the bed, which was narrow, hard, and covered with a nubby white bedspread. I lay down, quivering as she sang the mockingbird song over and over. I squeezed my eyes shut. Maybe if I didn't see this unfamiliar woman, this unfamiliar
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room, they would stop being real. Kimmy's mother sang until I finally drifted off into a dreamless sleep.
When I woke up the next morning, I was back in my own bed, Evelyn lounging at the end with her usual cigarette. "It's time we had a talk," she said.
Evelyn told me the universe is filled with electrical fields none of us can see--invisible highways and paths that swerve and veer and join us in ways most people would never imagine. According to Evelyn, she and I have unusually strong electrical and magnetic fields that jump and pull against our will. Normally, the pulls are not strong enough to take us out of our bodies. The danger comes when the electrical forces around us become so powerful that the electricity within us darts out to join them. When that happens, our spirits look for a body to land in, much the same way that lightning seeks the quickest path to the ground. That's when we switch.
"Can I land in any body?" I asked, my eyes widening at the thought of looking into a mirror and seeing Pillsbury or Mr. P staring back at me.
She shook her head. "When you were born, the moon set your magnetic signature. You can only switch with a close match, someone who was born under the same moon as you." I checked the moon cycles for the year I was born: I can switch with someone born a week before or three weeks after me. Because males and females emit different magnetic fields, I only switch with girls.
"How do you know all of this?" I asked Evelyn once the shock
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of what she had told me had sort of sunk in. "Did someone tell you? Someone from ... beyond?"
She looked up at the ceiling. "No one told me anything. I just figured it out."
I stared at her. "So, do you know this? Or are you just making it up?"
She scowled at me and pulled herself up tall. "You got a better explanation?"
So far, Evelyn has been right. I only switch with girls my own age who have birthdays in March. I only switch during an electrical "event"--a thunderstorm, usually. Afterward, when the outside forces dissipate, and I fall asleep, I return to my own body.
Now, when a storm approaches, I close my eyes and breathe deeply. Switching doesn't hurt, really. I just can't breathe for a moment, like when you get the wind knocked out of you. When I arrive--wherever I arrive--I keep my eyes closed for a few moments and take a deep breath. Sometimes I try to guess where I've landed, though in the summer it's almost impossible because there are so many strangers around.
Storms tend to hit Sandyland at night, which works well. I don't mind sleeping in strange beds, at least not too much. One time I ended up in a tent off the beach. That was a rough night, and I barely slept, but the next morning, as always, I wound up back in my own bed, my body feeling oddly relaxed and refreshed. One stormy day I switched during the afternoon and found myself in a roomful of people watching a slasher movie on DVD. The family all looked so bored with one another and so annoyed to be stuck missing a beach day because of the rain that nobody said a
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thing, but just stared and stared at the little television set. I leaned back into the scratchy couch (which smelled of mildew) and closed my eyes. When I opened them again, I was home.
And what of my own body? What happens when someone else looks in the mirror and sees me looking back?
"I won't let that happen," Evelyn said softly. "Whenever you leave your body, I'll jump in and hold your place." Finally she looked me in the eye. "What happened to me ... I won't let it happen to you."
"What happened to you?" I asked, unsure whether I really wanted to hear the answer.
"You are a gift to me," she said, ignoring the question. "Before you were born, I felt myself fading away. It was like I was looking at your mother and grandfather through a dense fog. Your birth let me see again."
If I am a gift to Evelyn, her gift to me is this: Whenever she sees my spirit leaving my body, she jumps in it to hold my place.
We weren't sure if it would work, at first. Evelyn wasn't born under the same moon as I. Heck, when I was born, she wasn't even alive. But she's been floating around for so long and has absorbed so much random energy that she's become a kind of universal donor of switching.
"Think of it as musical chairs," she told me. "We've got three spirits and two bodies. If your body is suddenly vacant and I'm right there, I should be able to slip in first."
I thought of a hotel with a "Vacancy" sign one minute, a "No Vacancy" the next. I liked the chair idea better. But however you
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want to look at it, Evelyn was right: As long as she's nearby, she can switch into my body the instant I leave it.
As for the third spirit, the one without a chair (which sounds much better than "without a body"), it's left to hover in a kind of unconscious in-between state that resembles neither life nor death. Evelyn says I should think of it as a kind of deep, peaceful sleep. I try to.
The next (and last) time I switched with the girl named Kimmy, I snuck into the yard to see where her rented cottage was: a block from my own house, closer to the ocean. I sniffed the sea air and then tiptoed back inside, slipping under Kimmy's nubby white bedspread.
In the morning I awoke in my own bed, with a stomachache.
"It worked!" Evelyn crowed from the end of my bed. While I'd been tiptoeing around Kimmy's cottage, Evelyn had been raiding the freezer. She'd been craving ice cream for forty years. It was just as good as she remembered, though maybe she should have passed on that third bowl.
Now I'm no longer shocked when I look in the mirror and see someone else's face peering back. I tell myself that it's not so bad, that it will only happen when lightning gets too close, and mostly in the summer, when Sandyland's population doubles. I tell myself that ultimately I'm in control: To return to my body, all I have to do is sleep.
I told myself all of this for two years. And I believed myself. That was my mistake.
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***
6
The first time I saw the girl, I was walking along the beach with Beanie. We had left the wide public stretch and were strolling along a narrow strip of sand that disappeared at high tide. A wall of boulders parallel to the beach kept the ocean from washing away the expensive houses that rose above it. Each house had a set of concrete steps leading to the beach. Each set of steps had a sign that read, private property: keep Off steps. Other signs told us to keep Off rocks. Walking on the beach was allowed, if reluctantly.
We went all the way to the water's edge, the chilly sea licking our feet. An occasional seashell glinted through the froth before slipping back into the surf,
Beanie and
I wore our red lifeguard swimsuits--hers a one piece, mine a two, both with racing backs. It was the last day of sea-guard camp, and my muscles felt floppy from a morning spent battling the waves, paddling on a surfboard, and hauling a succession
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of fake drowners back to the shore. It was my fifth summer in the camp. I'd passed my certification test long ago, and there wasn't much more for me to learn, but I liked the routine of running into the ocean on foggy mornings. Besides, my mother worked long hours at the health clinic, and I liked having someplace to go.
Next year I'd be sixteen, which meant I could get a job as a junior guard, helping teach some of the younger kids about water safety. Until then, I had to make do with the money I earned from babysitting. Thanks to my mother's endless referrals, I was booked practically every Saturday night. Not all of the kids were as well behaved as my mother made them out to be, but she spared me the biters and the bed wetters, at least.
The girl was sitting on a towel in front of what Beanie and I called the Ice Cube House. It was all gray concrete and tinted glass, boxy and ugly in a big-money kind of way. Next to the girl, two little blond boys, dressed in identical orange swim trunks, dug in the sand.
The girl was wearing one of those three-triangle bikinis: two tiny triangles on top, one slightly larger one on the bottom. The suit was chocolate brown with silver and turquoise beads on the straps. I tried to imagine swimming in something like that. One good wave, and that bathing suit would be on its way to South America.
She leaned back on her elbows, legs together, pretty knees bent in front of her. Her toenails were painted hot pink. A fly buzzed around her slender feet. Her tummy was perfectly flat, her legs almost unnaturally long. Her blond hair was thick and streaky--probably out of a bottle.
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Next to me, Beanie tugged at the bottom of her bathing suit, which had a habit of riding up. Like me, Beanie had spent the entire summer in the ocean. She'd hoped to lose some weight, to fit into smaller-size jeans, at least, but all she had to show for her effort was an extra inch or two around her shoulders. Beanie's mother says she should have gone to fat camp, like last year. Beanie's mother has big, big hair. I think she wears it that way to hide her horns.
As for me, my mother says I have a "beautiful, strong body." It's strong, all right, and not fat at all--but beautiful? Not really. Sturdy is more like it. My shoulders are too wide, my bust too small. I have a flat butt and virtually no waist. Mine is the ideal V-shaped swimmer's body, which is totally hot--if you're a guy.
Beanie and I smiled at the girl and said hi--because that's what you do in Sandyland when you pass someone on the beach. Her eyes flickered toward us and then out to sea while the little boys continued to play at her feet. She said nothing.
Beanie and I continued along the beach. We were quiet for a short while, feeling weirdly hurt. Then I said, "She didn't mean to be rude. She's just upset because she lost her tiara in the sand."
Beanie hooted. Beanie has one of those laughs, loud and musical, that makes everyone around her laugh even harder. "Or maybe she's lonely," she whooped. "Maybe Ken stood her up."
"Maybe Ken ran off with one of the Bratz dolls," I said. "Maybe Ken likes the babes with the big heads."
We laughed until our stomachs hurt.
I am not a total tomboy. When I was little, I had Barbies just like everybody else. My Barbies' hair was always ratty, though,
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because I used to take them into the bathtub and pretend they were racing in an Olympic-size pool. Also, I bent all their knees the wrong way--just to see what would happen. After that, they didn't kick very well.
Beanie and I walked until we ran out of beach, the surf slamming into the rock wall. We turned around and headed back, staring at the massive houses rather than the ocean. "I'll take one of those," I said, pointing to a gray shingled house with a copper chimney shaped like a lighthouse.
"I'll buy the one next to you, then," Beanie said, gesturing toward a brown A-frame. The blinds were all shut. Most of these houses were barely even used.
When we passed the Ice Cube House on the way back, we were disappointed to see that the girl had left the beach. We were all set to say, "Hey! How are you? Are you just visiting, or is this your house?" and pretty much just keep talking until she was forced to acknowledge our existence. But she had moved up to the lawn. She lay on a lounge chair, eyes closed, facing the sun, while the little boys scampered around her, tossing fistfuls of goldfish crackers at each other.
"Babysitting for rich people," I muttered. "Nice summer job."
"Yeah, really," Beanie said.
By the time we reached the public beach, we'd forgotten all about her.
Beanie and I have known each other since we were five years old. We had no choice, really. There's only one elementary school in town, with one class per grade, so everybody knows everybody,
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often better than we'd like. Until last year, we were never really friends, though. Beanie was always nice to me, but I didn't think much of it because she was always nice to everybody. Back then, if I'd had to think of one word to describe Beanie, that word would've been jolly, and I didn't do jolly. Then there was her name, which seemed so goofy. I mean--Beanie? It made me think of jelly beans and beanbag animals and stupid little hats. Beanie's real name is Bernice, so you can't exactly blame her for going with a nickname. I just thought she could have come up with something a little more dignified.
Up until eighth grade I was best friends with Avon (which, for some reason, I didn't think was a stupid name). Avon and I were nothing alike. She was all about manicures and movie stars, while I loved swimming and animals. But Avon and I were born two hours apart--in the same hospital, no less--so our friendship seemed inevitable. Beanie was born only ten days later, but until a couple of years ago her birthday seemed insignificant.
The next time we saw the girl was a few days later. Even though sea-guard camp was over, Beanie and I were at the beach because there was no place else to go, and besides, we never got sick of the beach no matter how much time we spent there. Beanie and I wore our regular bathing suits instead of the red guard ones. Mine was a blue-and-purple tie-dyed tank with a racer back. Beanie wore board shorts over her one-piece because she hates her thighs.
We were sitting in front of the lifeguard stand. There was no lifeguard down by the rocks; the rich people just had to know
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how to swim. In front of us, out a way, a yellow swim float bobbed in the waves. It was covered with seagulls, which meant that later, when all of us kids swam out to it, it would be covered with bird crap.
The girl was at the beach, but I didn't see her at first. All I saw was Nate Jameson.
"Nate alert," I whispered to Beanie, who was sitting on a towel next to me, rubbing suntan lotion onto her arms.
"Where?"
"Snack shack."
We gazed out to sea for a long moment. Beanie closed her lotion with a snap and dropped the bottle in the sand.
"I could really go for some onion rings right about now," she said. "You?"
I pretended to think about it. "It's a little early for onion rings. But maybe a shake."
We stood up, brushed the sand off our legs, and sauntered over to the parking lot. Nate stood to the side of the snack shack, waiting for an order. The snack shack is white wood and boxy, with bright blue trim. It's been here since before I was born, and the grease they use to cook the fries and onion rings may well be older than me. Not that I'd let that stop me. Food safety is for wimps.
Beanie and I pretended to be deep in conversation. Actually, we were deep in conversation:
Me : Does my hair look all right?
Beanie: Your hair looks cute.
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Me : I shouldn't have gone swimming. My hair would look better if I hadn't gone swimming.
Beanie: Nate has seen you with swim-hair a million times. A billion times.
Me: Maybe that's the pr
oblem. Maybe if Nate saw me with dry hair, he'd think of me in a whole new way.
I was out of my league with Nate. I knew that. Nate was a year older than me. He'd been the junior lifeguard in my camp group--what you'd call a junior counselor if the camp were on land. Next week he'd be starting eleventh grade at Sandyland High.
Nate was the strongest swimmer in the guard program. He was the best freestyler on the high-school swim team. And he was the most drop-dead gorgeous creature I'd ever seen, with blond curls that got lighter and curlier as the summer went on, green eyes that went from wide to crinkly when he smiled, and a nose that would be absolutely straight if not for a fight he'd gotten into with Ryan Kenner in the fourth grade.
None of that would matter if Nate weren't so perfectly good, so perfectly nice. He noticed when I refined my butterfly stroke. He cheered as I hauled Beanie--in her dramatic role as a drowning tourist--out of the surf. ("I lost my diamonds in the waves!" she'd shrieked. "We must go back for my diamonds!") He gave me advice about sophomore teachers: which ones gave the most homework, which ones could be convinced to talk about themselves for the entire class when they should have been teaching algebra.
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Nate liked me: I knew that. He liked me--and here we approach the most dreaded phrase in the English language--as a friend.
As we got closer to the snack shack, I noticed that Ryan Kenner was behind the counter. Ryan had reigned in his aggressive impulses since breaking Nate's nose (rumor has it he went to counseling), but he was still a nasty dweeb who was too tall and too skinny, with a sharp nose and a perpetual meanish grin. He had shaggy reddish-blondish hair and skin that didn't tan. Mostly, he looked right through me, which was just fine. Beanie said I was too hard on him. She liked Ryan, even though she recognized that it might be because she associated Ryan with fried food and she really, really loved fried food.