Switch

by Tish Cohen

  As quickly as it started, the rumbling stops. I can hear traffic again. Birds. The clash of a garbage truck and the roar of a bus.

  I open my eyes to find myself staring back. Which is absolutely not what I want to see. It means I’m still Joules and Joules is still me.

  chapter 7

  “Ohmygodthisisunbelievablelhateyousomuchforthisyou’re totallygoingtopay!” Joules lets herself fall backward.

  It didn’t work.

  The wish didn’t work.

  My breath comes so fast I might just pass out. “What do we do? I don’t know what else to try. We’re stuck. And we can’t even go home. I mean, we can go home to each other’s houses but not home home. Maybe, maybe we should go to the police. Or a surgeon, you know, one of those guys who separates Siamese twins …” My hand goes to my chest in a lame attempt to slow my heartbeat and I look down again. “I can’t believe you have boobs like this. They totally get in the way.”

  “Will you shut up about my boobs? We have to figure out what to do.”

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  “You said you did! You said you could switch us back, remember? That I shouldn’t panic because you had it all under control!”

  I stand up, pace around and try not to throw up. “All I had was the train. That was my big idea, and clearly it didn’t work.” When I glance down at her, her face is pale like the bleached Wonder Bread Mom won’t let us buy. “What? What is it?”

  She waves her hands on either side of her face like bird wings. “Nothing. It’s just that sometimes I panic. And I can’t breathe.” Her chest heaves up and down and she looks around as if a doctor might appear from the steel girders above our heads. “I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.” Her eyes are wild, fixed on me now.

  “What do I do?” She’d better not say give her mouth-to-mouth. Though it wouldn’t be as distasteful as it could be, since it would actually be my own mouth. Still, it’s occupied by Joules. “I don’t really remember CPR …”

  “I don’t know what to do. I’m panicking. Andrea, help me. I can’t breathe!”

  “Okay. Let’s calm down.” I bend over her and take her flapping hands in mine. I set a good example by taking in a slow breath and releasing it all relaxed. “Just settle down. Everything is fine, you’re fine, I’m fine, right?”

  “Are you freaking insane? Nothing is fine, you imbecile!”

  “I’m trying to help you, Joules. Just take a few deep breaths and get a hold of yourself. Passing out is not going to help!”

  She gulps in air as if drowning, makes sharp yelps with each swallow. “What do we do now? Tell me that. What? What?”

  “We have no choice. We live each other’s lives until we can switch back.”

  “If we can switch back. This is all based on one big fatty of an ‘if.’”

  “Of course we’ll switch back. I’m completely sure, almost nearly certain that we can probably switch back. Totally.”

  She makes a face like death, but at least her cheeks have color again. “Great. That’s reassuring.”

  “Well, what do you want from me? You think I like this?”

  “You like my boobs.”

  “I said they were in the way—I never said I like them. Anyway, none of that matters. We have to get each other’s lives straight so no one figures out what’s happened.”

  “How do we do that?”

  “I don’t know—we just play the roles. At school. At home. My mom is going to expect a few things from you. Help with the dishes and the kids. Don’t mix lights and darks when you do the laundry. Stuff like that. You have to be prepared or she’ll know something’s up.”

  Joules groans. “I do not do laundry.”

  “Too bad. Andrea Birch does.”

  “Fine, then you have to, um …” She looks away as she tries to come up with one negative thing about her life. “Oh God, you have to keep Will from finding out about me and Shane. Seriously.”

  “How’s he going to find out? He thinks it was me.”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure he really believes it. Last night he was acting all weird.”

  I roll my eyes. “Last night when you were yelling at him? Of course he was weird, he was being howled at.”

  “No, I mean in general. I got the feeling he was maybe going to break up with me. He was all distant and stuff.”

  Could that be why he called me? To question me about Shane and Joules and who, exactly, was in the bushes? “He’s crazy about you, Joules. I saw that kiss.”

  “Yeah, but later he seemed different. I don’t know, maybe Shane said something. Just promise you’ll keep him from dumping me.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Promise!”

  “I can’t promise …”

  “Promisepromisepromisepromisepromise!”

  Okay, this girl is hugely annoying. “Fine. I promise to try.”

  Just then my mother’s station wagon pulls up and mom herself climbs out, sets her hands on her hips. “Andrea Jane Birch. Get yourself down here pronto.”

  Joules gets up. As she starts down the slope, she says, “And around my dad, just act normal. Kind of lazy, not too interested in school but keep my grades up and you work out every night at six on the elliptical in the back room. And don’t forget the flossing. I’m manic about my teeth.” She shoots me an aggrieved look and stomps down to the car. I watch her climb in all sulky and rude and wonder how Mom will punish her for it. Joules has no idea who she’s up against. Maybe she should be in the military coat, if only for protection.

  Which is when it hits me for real. Joules is in my life. I’m in hers.

  And Will Sherwood is my boyfriend.

  chapter 8

  Joules and Nigel living in a house like mine makes no sense. Her house is in a more expensive area, Skyline, with views across Orange County—but in terms of the actual house, it’s your average tract home. If it was the only one in the neighborhood, it would seem decent enough, but with dozens—maybe hundreds—that look nearly identical (including my own), it’s not remotely special enough for a guy like Nigel Adams to live in. Either rock gods don’t pull in as much money as people think or they don’t bother to put their money into their homes.

  The other thing that is strange, I realize, is that a burglar alarm didn’t chime when I left earlier. Even we have an alarm—shouldn’t Nigel Adams?

  I slip back into their house, which is every bit as quiet as it was when I left, and creep back toward Joules’s room. With any luck her father is still asleep, if he’s even home at all. You never know with rock gods—maybe they go out and prowl around Hollywood for days. I haven’t encountered a single sign of life in the place, and suddenly I realize I know almost nothing about Joules’s existence. As in, is there an evil stepmother? A crazy aunt locked in the attic? Okay, I guess I know the house pretty well—there is no attic. Still, it would be helpful to know who else lives here, whether they’re still asleep and if I can shower and get myself to school without having to see any of them at all.

  It has a smell, this house. Like that awful kind of cheese fondue I once had at a restaurant—all tangy and sharp, it’s as if whiskey has fermented beneath the floorboards. That odor is depressing as hell, let me tell you.

  My own house, well, it’s hard to say how it smells. You can’t really smell your own house. You’re in it all the time so your nasal membranes are dull to the scent and it’s easy to assume your place smells like nothing. But it smells like something, I guarantee it. The best you can hope for is that it doesn’t reek of fermented booze. No one’s going to tell you if it does, so that’s really all you can do. Hope.

  Anyway, it’s depressing how people’s houses have these smells. And the families never even know it. Not even the ones who are rock stars.

  There was once this foster child who came to live with us, her name was Tracy. The cool thing about Tracy was that she was the same age as me. That had never happened before. She moved in when we were both nine. I overh
eard Mom say she was from an abusive situation, which might have meant one of her parents abused the other, or that they abused the kids—Tracy had a brother who got sent to another house because he was nearly eighteen and didn’t need much care. Donnie. He wrote her all these letters but I never met him. Anyway, Tracy was obsessed with my dollhouse. Every day she wanted to play dollhouse, even though I thought we were getting too old for it.

  Mostly we played after school. Tracy always had to pull all the hand towels out of the hall closet and spread them out on the floor. Then we had to put all the dollhouse furniture on the towels as if they were rugs. We never actually used the dollhouse at all. It made the house seem more like a castle, Tracy said. That’s what we started to call it. Playing castle. Tracy only stayed a few months, then she got sent back to her folks. But I missed her. It’s no fun to play castle by yourself, not when you’re nearly ten. You feel like a baby. So I asked Mom one day if Tracy could visit. Mom didn’t answer me. She got up from the table and started doing the dishes. It wasn’t until she was putting them away in the cupboard that I could see her cheeks were wet from tears.

  I’ve always thought I should have asked, but I just sat there like an idiot and said nothing. Sometimes you know the answer already. Sometimes silence is all you can handle in this rotten world.

  What made me think of her, Tracy, in the first place were all the rugs scattered in Joules’s house. Tracy would have taken one look, thought “castle” and started moving all the furniture around. For sure that’s what Tracy would have done.

  As I tiptoe toward the hallway that will take me back to Joules’s room, I hear a man clear his throat in the kitchen. Then he calls out, “Bit of a late night, isn’t it, Jujube?”

  I spin around to see Nigel Adams, the man himself, made of stringy black hair and a face that looks like a pile of unfolded laundry. Each eyebrow is as thick as the tail of a frightened cat, and his eyes are ringed with the remains of last week’s eyeliner. He’s much bigger than I thought he’d be—seeing Nigel Adams in a kitchen in the suburbs is like seeing a grizzly in a meerkat cage at the zoo. He’s all giant limbs and hunched shoulders peeking through the holes of a T-shirt that may or may not have survived a shark attack. The Plexiglas stool beneath him doesn’t look up to the job of supporting such a man, but he doesn’t appear concerned as he leans against the island, sips from his coffee and flips through the L.A. Times.

  “No,” I say, entering the kitchen. It’s an icy place with stainless-steel countertops that would come in handy should you wish to dissect a frog or, say, a Clydesdale. Same configuration as mine at home, but these cabinets are shiny like lacquered fingernails, and the fridge and stove appear big enough for restaurant use. A cigarette burns in a saucer beside him. I pull the dead soldier coat shut to hide my bare legs and smile sweetly. “I just popped over to a friend’s house before school to ask a question. You know, about homework.”

  Now he looks up. Stares at me a moment, then starts laughing his head off like I’ve told the greatest joke on earth. “That’s a good one, baby cakes,” he chokes out in an English accent. Funny, I didn’t realize he was British. Stupid of me, considering he’s dressed in Union Jack pants in Bray’s poster. When he settles down, he returns to his paper and cigarette. “You almost had me there.”

  I should be relieved. At least I don’t have to suffer this man’s wrath. But instead I’m mildly offended on behalf of Joules. Is it so uncool that she cares a tiny bit about her schoolwork?

  “Croissants are ready.” He nods toward the counter. “I made chocolate, your favorite.”

  It isn’t until now that I realize I’m starving. Normally I don’t eat breakfast, I can’t stomach any food before eleven in the morning. Either Joules has a faster metabolism or switching bodies with another person is seriously taxing on the system. Inside a glass cake stand, atop a decorative napkin, are five or six croissants all drizzled with chocolate and icing sugar. When I lift off the lid, the room is filled with a scent that nearly brings me to my knees. And when I pick one up, it’s soft and warm. I bite into it. So buttery, so sweet and light and soft. The little pastry is gastronomic perfection.

  “Turned out perfect this time,” he says. “The pastry rose up like air. I think I’ve finally nailed the butter–flour ratio.”

  Impossible to imagine this craggy rock star all aproned up and sifting icing sugar atop his baking. “Seriously? You made this yourself?”

  He laughs again and looks at me like I’m, well, me. “Are you mad, girlie? I make these for you nearly once a week.”

  I have to be more careful. Whatever Nigel does is normal—no matter how abnormal it may be—otherwise he’ll start to suspect something is up. “No, I just meant that this batch is so much better than usual. Way lighter and, um, flour-ier.”

  “Exactly what I said.”

  I take another bite. “You might have a decent future after all.”

  This seems to satisfy him. He smirks at my bad joke and returns to his paper.

  I need a glass of cold milk to go with the croissant, but where do they keep the glasses? A check of cupboard after cupboard reveals everything but, and I make a mental note to ask Joules for some sort of household map.

  “Looking for something, Jujube?”

  “I couldn’t find my, um, my special glass. You know, that one I love …”

  “All the glasses are the same. Don’t know what you’re on about.”

  Yes, but where are they? “Umm, Nigel?”

  He looks up. “What do we say about calling me by my first name?”

  “That you don’t like it?”

  “Got that right. You know your dad prefers the society-dictated alternative that makes him sound as old as he really is.” He turns the page. “You calling me Nigel bursts the love bubble your dad lives in. And I don’t like it outside the bubble. It’s cold and cruel out there. No place for a sweetheart like me.”

  “You’re weird.” I smile a bit. Finally, I find the glasses. “Dad.”

  He looks up, alarmed, and for a moment I fear I’ve gotten it wrong again. But he stands, stretches and lumbers across the room. “Sorry, Missy. I forgot your coffee.”

  Nigel allows Joules to drink coffee? When I tried to sip from my mom’s cup last summer, she snatched it away and informed me I could indulge in caffeine (from responsible farming co-ops only) when I grew my first chin hair, not a minute sooner. Not wanting to rush that process, I’ve actually been pretty patient.

  “Thanks.” I take a sip and nearly spit it out when I realize it’s spiked with some sort of alcohol. I shoot him a weak smile. “Yummy.”

  Just then I notice the headline on the paper’s front page: “No Leads in Disney Hit-and-Run.”

  It’s about Michaela’s parents. They were tourists, walking across the road on their way into Disneyland for a day of magic and fun with their child, when an SUV hit them both and took off. The photo shows the spot where it happened—a stretch of road all cordoned off with yellow police tape, where investigators are on their knees collecting evidence. Around them, everywhere, is shattered glass. All I can picture is Michaela, there on the road with her injured parents. No wonder she doesn’t speak! At the side of the road is a small sunhat, obviously Michaela’s, lying at the curb as if dead. No sign of the black SUV, of course.

  “God, that’s horrible,” I feel sick as I think about Michaela hiding under the covers in my room. “That poor girl.”

  “What poor girl is this?” He looks up from the sports.

  “From that hit-and-run yesterday. It’s so awful.”

  He’s silent a moment, then grunts. “Probably jaywalking. That’s usually the case when pedestrians get hit. Usually their own fault.”

  I stare at him a moment. It’s like the ladies in the office yesterday morning. It’s like maybe every person who doesn’t have the lady in the flowered pants bringing yet another damaged kid for safekeeping. To all of them, news like this is barely real. I turn back to the article. “It says
to be on the lookout for a black SUV with damage to the front end and windshield.”

  “Only about a hundred thousand of those in California.” He gets up and cracks a few eggs into a pan, then tosses in a blend of spices too pungent for a girl who has spent the night becoming someone else. He looks at the clock. “Getting late. Unless you want to wait for a super-spiced omelette, you’d better go get ready.”

  So Nigel Adams does care about Joules getting to school on time. Even on days he thinks she’s stayed out all night. The spicy smell is so overwhelming I almost gag. “Yeah. I’ll go shower.” I jump up and hurry to Joules’s bathroom—the same bathroom that in my house is shared by seven of us.

  “Remember the rule,” he calls after me. “Not too long, not too hot.” As I head into Joules’s room, he adds, “There are people dying in Africa!”

  Okay. So he might not get too worked up about pedestrian injuries, but Nigel Adams isn’t the self-centered rock star you might think he would be. He actually has a heart. I wonder what happened to his daughter’s. In her completely mirrored bathroom, I see zillions of Joules’s reflected back at me.

  It’s too much.

  Everything is too much—the switch, the omelette smell, the cigarette smoke, the article, the mirrors. I lean over the chrome toilet seat and throw up my croissant.

  Later, having showered and tried (and failed) to style Joules’s hair into the messy waves she manages to create each day, I wander into her closet. It’s not much bigger than my closet at home but hers is not lit up by an ugly brass fixture that looks like a nippled breast that Mom refuses to change because “you don’t discard that which works just fine.” Joules’s closet light is a small chandelier made of zillions of spidery arms, and each one has a sweet note from Nigel clipped onto the end.

  “Jujube, you’re my girl. Love, Dad.”