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by Carol Snow

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  page. There was his sister in a graduation gown and hat. She was just normal-looking, not superhuman-gorgeous like her brother. There was Nate at the beach as a child (he bore a slight but nevertheless disturbing resemblance to Prescott) and Nate on a surfboard. I've never stolen anything in my life, but I had a sudden, overwhelming desire to sneak this photo out of the house.

  Footsteps sounded overhead, and then Nate clomped down the squeaky stairs holding something red: the junior lifeguard sweatshirt. I gasped and then laughed.

  "Is it okay?"

  "It's perfect." I wanted to tell him that I had a sweatshirt just like it at home. Instead, I pulled it over Larissa's tiny camisole and immediately felt comfortable, not just in the shirt, but in Larissa's skin.

  "Are you hungry?" he asked.

  "Starving."

  "How about some of my mother's famous home cooking, then?" He took my hand and led me into the kitchen, which was at least as messy as the living room, plus a little smelly. Time to take out the garbage?

  He opened the freezer and pulled out a plastic-encased pizza. "Just like Mom used to make."

  "My mom doesn't cook either."

  "Sucks, doesn't it?" Nate wrinkled his nose--noticing the garbage smell, probably.

  "Kind of. But now that I've learned to cook, we eat pretty well." I had a sudden urge to make him a meal.

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  "You cook?" His eyebrows shot up.

  "It's not hard. I could make you something." Oven-fried chicken, I thought. Macaroni and cheese.

  "Really?" He shoved the pizza box back into the freezer.

  "Let's just see what you've got in here." Not much, it turned out, just some milk, Gatorade, prepackaged lunches, a sad-looking apple, a couple of cartons of Chinese food.

  "You got any eggs?" I could make an omelet.

  He peered inside. "Nope."

  "Cheese?" Grilled-cheese sandwiches? Oh, yeah, we'd need bread.

  "Nope ..."

  "Chicken, fish, meat?"

  He straightened. "Does frozen Salisbury steak dinner count?"

  "Well ... no." I bit my lip. "You know what? Frozen pizza sounds awesome."

  "Forget the frozen pizza. Let's get out of here."

  By the time we got downtown, the sun was so low it cast a golden glow over everything. The walk had warmed me up, but I kept Nate's sweatshirt on. I never wanted to take it off. It was a size bigger than my own; the sleeves came all the way to my fingertips.

  "Have you eaten anywhere downtown?" Nate asked me. There are only a few restaurants in town, none of them fancy. I'd eaten at every one of them, even the bad ones, more times than I could count.

  "Nope," I said. "We mostly eat at the house."

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  We passed Romano's Pizza, which reeked of garlic; the Lobster Claw, which I've avoided ever since they served me a bad oyster a few years back; and Priscilla's Pancake House, which is only open for breakfast (duh); and then, the Burrito Bandito. My nose twitched. My mother brought home burritos at least once a week. I licked my lips. Larissa's tiny tummy needed a burrito, and it needed one now.

  Nate stopped in front of the door. "This place is my favorite." (It was so hard not to say, "Mine too!") "But we could go somewhere else if you want."

  "Oh, no--I love burritos!"

  He beamed at me: I was beautiful and I loved burritos. What more could a guy want?

  The Burrito Bandito is nothing great to look at: plastic yellow booths and a plain, white tile floor, but the food is killer. There was no one in line, so I walked right up to the counter. My tummy rumbling, I ordered my favorite thing without looking at the board. "I'll have a blackened chicken burrito, double rice, no beans, with roasted tomatillo salsa. Oh, and can you substitute fresh fruit for the salad?"

  The guy behind the counter was pretty cute--not like Nate, but better than average--with wide brown eyes and thick dark lashes. He flashed me a super-white smile.

  Nate gave me a weird look. I put a hand on his back to let him know that I was all his, that the counter guy meant nothing to me (though he'd do in a pinch).

  "I thought you'd never been here before," Nate said.

  Whoops. "I haven't. But ... they have one of these in my

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  town. I know the menu by heart."

  "Really? I thought this was the only one."

  The counter guy said, "I don't think that--" But I shot him a wide-eyed, pleading (and super-pretty) look, and he stopped before blowing my cover. Instead, he flashed his bright, white smile and said, "I don't think the other Burrito Banditos are as good as this one."

  "You may be right," I said, beaming back.

  He ruined the moment by winking. Fortunately, Nate was looking at the menu. After he ordered his burrito (chili Colorado with chicken), I reached into my pocket for some money, but Nate said no. "I can't let you pay on our first real date."

  Wow. Yesterday I had my first kiss, and now I was having my first date. I decided that it counted, no matter whose body I was in.

  After he paid, we stepped to the side to wait for our food. A bell jingled as the front door opened. I almost screamed when my mother walked through the front door. She looked really harried, her long gray-and-brown hair slipping out of her braid. She wore khaki slacks, a pale blue blouse, and brown loafers. My mother needed a makeover even more than I did.

  She blinked at me. "Larissa? Hi! How are you feeling?"

  "Good," I said. "Fine."

  My mother smiled at Nate. "You look familiar. From the summer program, maybe? I'm Claire Martin's mother."

  "Right," Nate said, standing a little taller. "Hi, Dr. Martin."

  I'd always wondered whether Nate was one of my mother's patients; now I knew that he wasn't. Just as well: The thought of my mother looking down Nate's throat, giving him his immunizations

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  and--oh, God--seeing him naked was just too weird.

  My mother ordered a taco salad for herself. "And for my daughter, I'll also have a blackened chicken burrito with roasted tomatillo salsa, double rice, no beans, and fruit salad."

  Nate squinted. "Isn't that what you ... ?"

  "Yeah," I said. "Weird. No wonder Claire and I get along so well."

  "How'd you meet her, anyway?" he asked.

  "Who, Claire? Just, you know. On the beach." I waited for him to say something, but he just nodded. "She seems really nice," I added.

  "She is."

  My mother paid for the food and went to sit at a yellow booth to wait. She caught my eye. I smiled and looked away.

  I felt jittery all of a sudden, like I wanted to either sit down with my mother or flee onto the street. Being in the same room with her and pretending to be an almost-stranger was just too weird. What was Evelyn up to? I wondered for the first time in hours. She'd better be taking good care of my body.

  "Is Claire's butterfly really as good as you said?" I asked Nate.

  "Oh, yeah. Claire's the best. She swims better than most of the guys on the team."

  I felt a sudden flash of pride in my old body--my real body-- which was built for speed and strength.

  "Plus, she's cool," he added.

  (Me! Cool!)

  "So, do you ... like her?" My heart was pounding, my breathing shallow.

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  "Sure I like her." He shrugged. Then understanding passed over his face. "Oh, you mean do I like like her?" He laughed. "I like you. I thought that was kind of obvious."

  "Well, yeah, it is." I looked down and scuffed the tile with my sneaker. "But if I weren't here, I mean, if you'd never met me, do you think you might like Claire?"

  Nate bit his lip, searching for words. "Claire's a really nice girl. I just don't see her as, well--I guess I kind of see her as a guy." He laughed. When I didn't respond, didn't even smile, he tried to explain. "I mean, she's a girl, obviously, but she's the kind of girl you shoot baskets with, not the kind of girl you take out for a burrito." He reached over to touch my fair hair a
nd I did my best to smile.

  What did I expect--that he would confess peddling past my house, gazing at my yearbook picture, whispering about me with his best friend? Nate was a Golden Boy. Only a Golden Girl would do. It wasn't his fault; it was just the way things were. Right now I was lucky to be a Golden Girl, if only for a few days.

  Still, it hurt. I looked around so I wouldn't have to meet his gaze. My mother was pushing buttons on her cell phone. She held the phone to her ear and bit her lip.

  When our food came, Nate took the bag and walked to a booth. I followed him, my eyes flicking back and forth between my mother and Nate. She frowned at the cell phone and hit another button. She spoke for a bit and then closed the phone. Then she stood up and walked over to our table.

  "Larissa? Nate? Have you seen Claire this evening?"

  Nate shook his head. "Sorry."

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  "She isn't home?" Oh, crap.

  "No. And she's not at her friend Beanie's house either. Swim practice wouldn't go this late, would it?"

  "Uh-uh." Nate shook his head. "It ended over an hour ago. And Claire wasn't there anyway."

  My mother's eyes widened. "She missed swim practice? That's not like her."

  "She wasn't feeling well," I said. "Maybe she went home to lie down. Or out for some Tylenol or something." Or maybe she was drag racing or doing vodka shots or robbing convenience stores, or whatever those creepy kids did. I was going to kill Evelyn!

  "Maybe," my mother said, though she obviously wasn't buying it. "If you see Claire, can you ask her to call me?" She hurried out the door with her food.

  Nate left his burrito in its wrapper. "God. I hope Claire's okay."

  "She's probably fine." I was doing my best to keep my voice steady.

  "She seemed sort of ... not herself today," he said.

  Wow, he'd noticed me! He knew something was different! Maybe Evelyn's makeover wasn't so terrible after all.

  "What did you think of Claire's dress?" I blurted.

  "What dress?" So much for standing out in a crowd.

  But right now, fashion was the least of my problems. I had to find Evelyn, and I had to find her now. "You know those kids Claire was hanging out with at school?"

  "Huh? No."

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  "Those kids by the Dumpsters. I think one was named Jessamine?"

  "Oh, I know who you mean."

  I nodded. "Do you have any idea where they go after school?"

  It would be tough to pick the prettiest place in Sandyland. There's the spot where the rock wall juts out into the ocean, standing tall against the battering white waves. There's the tiny harbor where the fishing boats moor, the water calm enough to reflect the sunset. There's the old downtown with its shingled buildings painted blue and yellow and peach.

  Pinpointing the ugliest spot in Sandyland is easy.

  "Why would they hang out at the mini-mart?" I asked Nate as we approached the asphalt parking lot.

  He shrugged, one hand holding mine and the other clutching the bag of our unfinished burritos. "Because nobody else goes there?"

  The mini-mart was built in the nineteen sixties, before the real-estate boom, back when Sandyland was just a sleepy town that happened to be on the ocean. The building was blah from the beginning, just a big, glass-fronted box in the middle of a treeless parking lot. It hasn't exactly improved with age. There's an auto repair shop on one side, a freeway ramp on the other.

  We walked over to the side by the auto repair shop, and there they were, smoking by the Dumpsters. What was it with this crowd and Dumpsters? It was shadowy and kind of stinky: garbage mixed with cigarette smoke. The kids' voices bounced off the building's hard, gray wall. I squeezed Nate's hand,

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  relieved to have him here with me.

  "I don't see Claire," I whispered, panic growing "Wait, isn't that her?"

  It took a moment before I recognized myself. Evelyn had changed out of the black dress, thank God. Now she wore low-slung jeans and a tiny black shirt that exposed a strip of belly flesh. I'd always assumed I'd look stupid in clothes like that. As it turned out, I was right. (But then, tummy shirts look dumb on anyone. The jeans, I had to admit, showed off my butt nicely.)

  The clothes were the least of it, however. As she crept out of the shadows, I stifled a gasp. I asked Nate to give us a minute alone and hurried toward her. A cigarette dangled from her fingers.

  "Oops!" she said, dropping the cigarette on the pavement and grinding it out with her platform shoe. "Last one, I swear."

  "What? Did you do? With my hair?" I said, once I'd dragged her away from the crowd.

  It was red--orange, really. And not a nice shade of orange either--assuming there is a nice shade.

  Evelyn patted her head. "It looks good, don't you think? You once said that you wished you'd gotten my hair, remember? Now you have!"

  Her hair was loose, falling just below her shoulders. "You look like a different person," I said. I thought about waking up in my own body the next morning and having to go to school with that crazy hair. Beyond the swim lanes, I'd always tried to stay under the radar: Better to go unnoticed than to risk having people laugh at you.

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  But there was no time to make a stink. "Mom's on her way home. She's got dinner. You need to get out of here!" My mother. The hair. Oh, God.

  She cocked her head to one side and tucked a gaudy strand behind her ear. "What's for dinner?"

  "Burritos."

  She scrunched her nose and shook her head. "I hate burritos."

  "Have you ever even tried burritos?"

  "I don't like foreign food."

  "You love burritos," I said. "You especially love the kind of burrito she's brought home for you." I thought of Evelyn dying so young, of how my mother must have longed for her the way I longed for the father I'd never known.

  "I'd think you'd be excited to spend an evening with your daughter," I said. "You said you didn't get to talk much this morning."

  Evelyn pulled another cigarette out of her handbag and then, remembering her promise, dropped it back in. "I'm nervous," she said finally.

  "Why?"

  She bit her red lip. "I'm shy."

  "You are not shy!"

  "What if she doesn't like me?"

  "Of course she likes you. You're me, remember?"

  "I want her to love me for myself. All these years, I've been watching her, imagining the conversations we would have had, the things we would have done together. Shopping for shoes, getting our nails done, going out to lunch. Meeting her like

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  this--as you--it's just not the same."

  I closed my eyes, too annoyed to respond. "She's going to ask about the hair," I said finally. "And the cigarettes. Make something up. Say it's a social studies experiment." It was a lame cover story, but it was all I could think of.

  "I'm not going to smoke in front of her."

  "It doesn't matter. You smell!"

  Her brow wrinkled. "That was cruel."

  I covered my face with my hands. "Aargh!" I took a few deep breaths and tried again. "Evelyn. You have to go home. Now."

  "I don't feel ready to meet her." Her mouth quivered. "Besides, I've been stuck in that house for forty-two years. Do you really begrudge me a brief change of scenery?"

  I gestured at the Dumpster. "Some scenery. Couldn't you find someplace a little nicer?"

  She shrugged. "I was craving licorice. Besides, I had to buy another phone card, anyway."

  "No more marathon phone sessions with Roger," I warned.

  She smiled like an angel. "I'll be asleep by ten o'clock. I promise."

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  ***

  20

  Evelyn is pissing me off, but there was no way she was going to ruin this evening for me. Tomorrow I'd be back to my old body and my boring life. Until then, I was going to make every second count.

  "Maybe we should go with Claire," Nate said as we watched her wave good-bye to her Dumpster p
als.

  "She'll be fine." I waved my hand dismissively.

  "We should probably make sure she gets home all right."

  "What are you worried about? No one is going to hurt her." I swallowed. "Claire is big and strong. Remember? She's like a guy." And now, thanks to Evelyn, I looked like a guy in drag.

  "I shouldn't have said that."

  No, I thought. You shouldn't have.

  "What I meant, I guess, is that hanging out with Claire is like hanging out with my guy friends. Easy, you know?" He took my hand and pulled me in the direction of Evelyn's--well, my--

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  retreating back. "How about if we follow behind? Just till she gets to her house."

  I tried to turn off at the public beach, but Nate tugged me toward my street. Of course, I wanted to make sure Evelyn got home safely, but time with Nate was running out, and she'd already wasted too much of the evening.

  I didn't think Evelyn knew we were following her, but when she reached the front door, she turned and blew us a kiss. "You kids have a swell time tonight!"

  "Unbelievable," I muttered.

  Nate waved back. When she'd disappeared inside the house, he asked, "Do you want to see my favorite place?"

  I looked into his blue eyes and smiled. "I bet I know what it is."

  "You think it's the beach."

  I shook my head. "I went for a walk the other day and found this cove. There were fishing boats there. And a pier. Buoys and gulls. It was just really peaceful."

  "Kimberley Cove--that's it!" Nate's eyes sparkled. "You're amazing."

  (Disclosure: a couple of months earlier, I'd run into Nate on the pier, and he'd mentioned that the cove was his favorite spot in town. I went back every day for a week, but he never showed.)

  "Sometimes I feel like ..." He took a deep breath. "I feel like I've known you forever, like, maybe in a different life or something."