by Carol Snow
Behind Ryan, Alexei was working the grill. Alexei had come over on a special summer work permit from Russia or one of those other Russian-ish countries. He had yellowish hair and a red face--but probably anyone who spent all of his days alternating between a grill and a fryer would be flushed. He was short but powerful. I say I'm strong, but trust me: Alexei could snap me in two. He wouldn't, though. He's completely and totally kind, and not just because he lacks the vocabulary to be rotten. When he says, "Is nice day, yah? Is sunny, yah?" you just know he's being sincere.
Beanie is in love with Alexei, which kind of makes sense and kind of doesn't. It make sense because he's so sweet and kind of cute, but it doesn't because Beanie is so witty and charming, most of which is lost on Alexei and his fifty-word vocabulary.
According to Beanie, that's the whole point: "It takes the
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pressure off, you know? I never have to worry about being funny, about saying the right thing. I can say, 'Hey, Lex, is it hot back there?' every time--and every time, he'll laugh and smile because he's just so happy to understand me."
Anyway, Beanie and I stood a few feet away from the counter, squinting at the giant, hand-painted menu posted over the order window. This was for effect. We knew exactly what was on the menu, which had been the same for as long as we could remember: hamburgers, hot dogs, fried clams, breakfast burritos, fish-and-chips, milk shakes, fries. And onion rings, of course.
"Hey," Nate called out. I looked over, wide-eyed with fake surprise, and blinked a few times, finally allowing my face to register recognition. He was wearing faded, navy blue swim trunks that hung low on his waist, a slightly damp white T-shirt that was tight at his shoulders and loose around his stomach, and a shell necklace. His feet were bare and sandy.
He sauntered over, grinning. He reached out his arm and made a fist. "Dude," he said.
"Dude," I responded, holding up my fist and tapping his knuckles. A chill ran down my arm.
Beanie and I have discussed Nate's whole "dude" thing. I like it, but it does kind of seem, well, guy-ish. Beanie insists it's a gender-neutral term and a sign of affection.
"Catch any waves today?" I asked.
Nate laughed and ran a hand through his damp blond curls. "Oh, yeah--major crush." This is a running joke between us. (Beanie says that running jokes are another sign of a deep and potentially lasting affection.) Sandyland bills itself as the
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"World's Safest Beach," but it could just as easily advertise itself as the "World's Crappiest Surf Spot." I know how to surf--most of us do--but there are only a few days every summer when the waves are big enough to justify taking out the board.
The sunlight caught Nate's green eyes, making them almost luminescent. "You're going out for the swim team again, aren't you?" he asked. "Time trials are the second day of school."
"Well, yeah," I said. "Though I've spent so much time ocean swimming, I'm kind of out of practice on my strokes."
"You'll do great," Nate said. "Your butterfly's just amazing."
And then his expression changed, softened. His eyes widened. His smile faded--not from disappointment but with something that looked like awe. For an instant, I thought it was because of me, because of my flawless butterfly stroke. Maybe I was like a butterfly myself, just crawling out of my chrysalis, newly transformed.
My entire body grew warm. The world was suddenly more beautiful, more golden. It was like the last moment of a glorious dream, when you believe--honestly know--that you can fly. Or that you've won a gold medal in the Olympics. Or that you know your father's name.
And then you wake up and you realize it was all just a dream, and all you want to do is cry.
That's how it felt when I realized Nate wasn't looking at me at all. He was looking behind me.
She was wearing the brown bathing suit again, the one with all the strings and beads. There were even beads between the two tiny triangles that (barely) covered her breasts. She had a towel
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tied around her waist, so at least we were spared a view of her butt cheeks.
I hadn't gotten a good look at her face before. Now I saw that she was even exquisite from the neck up, with bee-stung lips, a tiny nose, and arched eyebrows. Her eyes were nothing special-- smallish, brownish--but it hardly mattered. Her hair was a streaky blond, thick and wild.
I hated her. I hated her more than I'd ever hated anyone, even Avon.
She had the little boys with her again. "I want an ice-cream sundae!" one whined.
"They don't have sundaes, Cameron," she answered in a flat, nasal voice, her eyes fixed on the menu over the counter.
"I wanna sundae!" The way he said it, sundae had about five syllables: "sun-dae-ae-ae-ae."
She rolled her eyes. "You can have a shake. Prescott, you want a shake too?"
"Fries!" Prescott commanded. He was half a head shorter than his brother, but his voice was just as loud.
She approached the counter and tucked her wild blond hair behind her ears. Ryan smiled at her as she ordered. She didn't smile back.
"Anything for yourself?" Ryan asked, all bug-eyed and drooling. What did he expect her to answer--"A dream date with you"?
She shrugged her bony shoulders. "Just give me a diet soda." Beanie and I exchanged glances: We could have called that one.
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Ryan shouted the order to Alexei, who, to his credit, only stared for a second or five before turning back to his baskets. The girl shuffled off to the side to wait for her order, her arms crossed over her midriff as if in modesty. Sure, I thought: Give the world a good look at your boobs, but cover your tummy.
Beanie, ready to order, stepped up to the counter. "Hi, Ryan."
"Huh?" He was still watching the girl. Then: "Oh, hi." Nate was watching the girl too, I noticed, though not so obviously. My face burned.
"How are the onion rings today?" Beanie asked Ryan, her glaze flickering beyond him to Alexei.
Ryan's eyes shot over to the girl, then back at Beanie. He looked annoyed at the distraction. "You should know," he said, his stupid grin finally gone. "You eat more onion rings than everyone else put together."
You'd think the moment would be silent, that the whole world would stop talking, but this was the beach, and the beach is always noisy. The little blond boys yelped at each other, the waves roared, kids on the beach yelled and laughed. Nate was silent, but that was just because he was so mesmerized by the girl, who was frowning at the menu, not noticing him at all.
Alexei looked up from the fryer. He stared at Ryan and then at Beanie before giving his attention back to a basket of french fries. It wasn't clear whether he'd heard Ryan or if he understood him. I felt like I should say something to Ryan, come to Beanie's defense, but I know Beanie, and she just wanted this moment to be over.
"Okay, I'll just have some, then," she muttered. "A small."
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I ordered my shake, and we sat down at the lone picnic table to wait. The table was covered with crumbs and a few abandoned burrito wrappers. Beanie crossed her arms in front of herself and blinked a couple of times, trying not to cry. Her pretty blue eyes turned pink around the edges.
"He's an ass," I mouthed.
She nodded a little and bit her lip, like she didn't really believe me but wished she could.
When Nate's breakfast burrito came out, instead of taking it to the beach like he normally does, he came over to the table. "Hey, guys," he said.
"We're girls," I wanted to say to him. But instead I just said, "Hey, Nate," and tried to smile.
Rather than putting his food on the table, he sat facing out-- toward the order window, toward the girl--and ate off of his lap. From the corner of my eye, I saw her towel slip down her hips. She yanked it back up and re-knotted the terry.
When Ryan called out her order, Nate dumped his burrito on the table and sprang over to the window. "Can I help you with that?" he asked as she reached for her cardboard tray.
"No," she said,
barely looking at him.
"There's room at the table," Nate said. "If you want to sit." She looked at him steadily for a moment and then--astonishingly--rolled her eyes and turned away.
"Cameron, Prescott--we're going," she said. "I want my fries!"
She handed the fry bag to Prescott and the shake to his older brother. She tossed the cardboard tray in the trash and
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took a long drag on her diet soda. Then she walked away, the boys following, Prescott leaving a trail of french fries like a modern-day Hansel.
Nate just stood there, abandoned on the sandy asphalt, his eyes wide and sad as he watched her leave.
I knew just how he felt.
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***
7
Beanie thinks we tell each other everything , and I wish that were true. Once she said, "Sometimes I feel like we're the same person," and I just stared at her until her smile fell and she said, "What?"
"Nothing," I said. "That's how I feel too."
But Beanie doesn't know about my body switching--and she certainly doesn't know that I've switched into hers. I'm afraid she'd think it was creepy. It is creepy.
Beanie's got enough body issues already; she doesn't need this. But every once in a while, she'll mention her "freaky dreams," in which she floats around my bedroom, looking down on me.
I'll say, "Oh, yeah--I've had that dream too!" And then, before she has too much time to think about the floating dream, I'll ask, "Have you ever dreamed that you got to school and there was a test that you didn't know about? Or that you got to school and realized you were still in your pajamas?"
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And she'll say, "Yes!"
And I'll say, "Weird how everybody has the same kinds of dreams."
I wasn't completely surprised when I switched with Beanie for the second time. I'd been in her body once before, after all. I thought she might live too far away--just under a mile--but the storm that came that night was especially violent.
I'd been in Beanie's house once for a birthday party in elementary school, but I'd never been in her room. Beanie was so sunny, so giggly, that I would have expected a bedroom decorated in rainbow colors, or maybe pink and purple.
Her room was white. I mean, really, really white: white furniture, white bedspread, white rug, white walls. When the lightning flashed, it felt like I was in an overexposed picture.
I turned on the bedside lamp, which gave the room a soft yellow glow. There was no clutter: no earrings left on the dresser, no magazines on the nightstand, no trophies or piggy banks lining the shelves. Everything was stored in plastic bins, under the bed and in the closet. I peeked into the hallway and saw more white carpet, more white walls. The entire place smelled vaguely of bleach.
Let's just say it was not the kind of house where you would eat Cheetos in bed.
The only photos in Beanie's room were taped to her dresser mirror. I crept over to get a closer look, startling a bit when I saw Beanie's face staring back from the mirror just as a huge clap of thunder shook the room. The face in the mirror startled too. I smiled. Beanie's face smiled back.
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This would never stop being weird.
The photographs on the mirror were all of Beanie, unsmiling, in a plain blue bathing suit. There she was, front, side, and back. A sheet of yellow notebook paper was taped under the photos. It listed days and weights, with smiley faces next to the lower numbers. I checked today's date: up a pound. Sad face.
There was a diary in Beanie's top dresser drawer, a thick book with worn corners. I knew it was wrong to read it, but I did anyway, opening to a random page.
June 10 --School was serving pizza today and it smelled so good but I just had diet cola and some carrots and celery from home. Stomach so empty in math class it made noises and everybody looked at me. Drank two bottles of water, which helped a little. Almost made it to dinner but I had those candy bars under my bed and it was like they were talking to me and after a while I couldn't think about anything else until I had one, couldn't do my homework, even. Ate three. Hate myself.
What I ate today: Rice Krispies with skim milk, 9 baby carrots, 4 pieces celery, 3 Snickers (full size), skinless chicken breast, broccoli, lemon water
June 11 --I grapefruit, Cheerios with skim milk, ½ tomato sandwich (on light bread), banana, hard-boiled egg, 2 tomato slices, 2 Milky Ways (full size)
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June 12 --Mom looked under my bed and found the candy bars. She says it is my own fault I am so fat. I started to cry and she said I am weak. I said I was going for a run. I started to but then I went to McDonald's instead.
What I ate today: Rice Krispies with skim milk, apple, nonfat yogurt, bowl of iceberg lettuce, Quarter Pounder with cheese, large fries, large chocolate shake, apple pie.
June 13 --Did experiment with electricity in science class. Felt really weird and dizzy and like I left my body. Like I was dead or something. I think it is because I hadn't eaten anything all day but a grapefruit and three crackers. Low blood sugar?
I closed the book and slid it back into its spot in Beanie's drawer. My heart--Beanie's heart--was thudding. I looked in the mirror, expecting to see someone fleshy and grotesque, but all I saw was Beanie: sweet, friendly Beanie, her face a little round, her edges a little soft, her brown hair curling daintily around her cheeks. Her tiny nose was sprinkled with freckles. She had tears in her blue eyes.
I switched with Beanie one other time that summer, during a storm so wild it knocked out everyone's electricity. That time, I was prepared. I loosened the tape around the yellow weight chart until it peeled away from the mirror and dropped it behind the dresser. I looked in the mirror, right at the spot where the chart had been, and waited for the lightning to flash.
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"You're beautiful," I told Beanie's soft face. "You have lovely blue eyes and a great smile and elegant long fingers."
And then I crawled between her rough white sheets and went to sleep.
I've been in Beanie's room lots of times since then, of course, but only in my own body. She still has a picture of herself wearing a bathing suit, but now the suit is red and the photo is framed. I'm standing next to her in a matching red tank, our arms around each other's powerful shoulders. We are laughing.
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***
8
When I was little , I thought we were rich. It wasn't that my mother drove a flashy car or wore nice clothes or took me on big vacations. She did none of that. It was because other kids would say, "Your mother is a doctor, so you must be rich." And: "You live close to the beach, so you must be rich."
Then one day I told my mother that Avon's family was going to Hawaii, and I thought it would be nice if we went too. Avon said the hotel's pool had a waterfall, a cave, and two waterslides. They were going to take a helicopter ride over a volcano. Avon's father is also a doctor, a plastic surgeon. He drives an hour and a half to his office, where he charges big bucks to make boobs bigger and noses smaller.
When I was little, Avon and I used to pretend we were sisters. That was my idea. She thought I came up with it because I liked her so much and because I was an only child. And that was part of it. Mostly, though, I figured, if Avon were my sister, then
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Dr. Stanley would be my father. With his heavy workload and long commute, Dr. Stanley was never around much, and when he was home, he tended to watch TV or work on his computer. But to my mind, a distant father was better than no father at all.
At any rate, when I told my mother about the Stanleys' vacation, she smiled--sort of. "Hawaii would be nice."
"Why don't we go, then?"
"Honey, we can't afford it."
"But you're a doctor! We're rich!"
That was when she broke the news that family doctors don't make the kind of money that surgeons do and that the only reason we live so close to the water is that she inherited the house from her father. Later I learned that it was more than that. She lets a lot of her patients ju
st pay what they can afford. Some of them don't pay at all. Others are on long-term, interest-free payment plans. "It's not right to profit from another person's suffering," she told me.
That seemed like a ridiculous thing for a doctor to say--like a mechanic saying it is wrong to profit from another person's leaky transmission or a barber saying it is wrong to profit from another person's hair growth.
"So are we ... poor?" I asked her, worried.
"Of course not," she said. "I've got money saved for your college and for my retirement. We have everything we need and most of what we want." She took my hand and looked me in the eye. "We're very lucky."
I nodded as if I believed her, even as I thought, Lucky people fly helicopters over volcanoes. Lucky people have fathers.
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Still, every year in late August, my mother and I act like lucky people. She takes a day off of work. She wears her nicest pair of slacks and even a little lipstick. (Since my mother wears a white coat over her clothes five days a week, she doesn't normally pay much attention to her clothes.) She wears her straight, shoulder-length hair down even though it parts like curtains around her ears. (Evelyn is right, I think disloyally. My mother's hair is getting too gray. She really should start coloring it.)
And then, the big event: We go to the mall.
The mall is nothing special. But since it is forty-five minutes away, it is the only place we ever go where my mother doesn't run into any of her patients. In Sandyland, we'll pop into the Rite Aid for a quick tube of toothpaste, and within three minutes some lady with a shopping cart full of mucus-covered kids will be screeching, "Dr. Martin! I was just going to call you about Terrence! I think he has pinkeye--it's all red and oozing, and now his sister's eye is starting to look a little funny. Terrence and Taylor, look at Dr. Martin--right at her, hold your chins up. See?"