Switch

by Tish Cohen

  “It’s just—”

  “Your mother made me wash someone’s bedding! I actually touched sheets soaked in another human’s urine.” She holds up her hands. “These totally need to be burned now.”

  “Don’t even think about it.”

  “I always thought I wanted a bunch of siblings, but now I’m not sure I see the appeal in children. They take too much work to raise—I mean, if I could raise one in a fish tank I could see having one someday. But the way they run around all sticky and loud—and they don’t even have fur to make them cute.”

  I stare at her, stunned. Fish tanks? Fur? I have to figure out how to switch back before she messes up big time with one of the fosters.

  “They have these foster kids in other countries. You know, the snail-mail kind. That’s the way to help a needy kid. Some cash, a nice letter, and boom, you’re done.”

  “It’s a good thing you weren’t part of the Vanity Fair interview this morning. You’d have single-handedly destroyed Nigel’s public image.”

  “How is my dad? I miss him so much.” She examines my fingernails, which she’s already painted with Cici’s black polish. I’m not sure she’s thinking about Nigel at all.

  “He is not like I thought he’d be. He’s a nice guy. Even made me croissants.”

  Joules groans and reaches for her cigarette. “I was forced to eat granola with unpasteurized honey. A person could get salmonella poisoning from your house. I should at least be allowed to smoke.”

  “No! No desecrating each other’s bodies. Promise?”

  A twisty sort of smile crumples her face and she starts to hum quietly.

  “What?” I sat. “It’s only been a few hours. What could you possibly have done to my body?”

  “We’d better get to English. I have to present your paper on King Lear. It’s very good, by the way. Surprisingly insightful for a girl who wishes away her life.”

  “Joules! What did you do to me?”

  “You have good legs, Birchie. Nice long calves, compact knees.” She examines them from different angles. “Nicer than mine, I think.” She points at my—her!—calves. “See? My legs are puny below the knee. It’s why I always wear boots.”

  I look down, but don’t notice much in the puny department.

  “What do you like best about my body?” Joules asks.

  Right away, I touch her lips and think of Will. “Your mouth, maybe, I don’t know.” Then I remember she’s destroyed some part of my physical being. “What did you do? Tell me now or I make out with Will.”

  “I just made a slight improvement to your ankle.” She twists her left foot to reveal the word “ANDIE.”

  “You had me tattooed? In the two hours since I woke you up?”

  I can’t feel my fingers. At all. Or my toes. And I can’t breathe. I’m hyperventilating. She’s ruined my leg. Ankle. Joules Freaking Adams is walking around in my body, able to ink it up with anything she wants. Wait—

  “My name is Andrea, not Andie. And anyway, when did you have time to do it, and why did you have to scream it out in all-caps like that?”

  “I like Andie better, and the all-caps was a typo. The tattoo artist was, like, a total loser.”

  “Nice. A permanent typo on my ankle.” I stew about this for a moment, then reach up and detach the nose ring from Joules’s—my—nose.

  “No,” she squawks, trying to wrestle the stud from my hand. “It’s too new. The hole will grow in.”

  “Tough!” She pries it away from me and I snatch it back again, losing my grip. The tiny gold ball flings itself across the ground and vanishes.

  “Great! It’s gone. This isn’t even a real tattoo. I inked it in with some drawing pen from your desk drawer.”

  Thank. God. “We have to have rules. No permanent changes to the other’s body. Including cigarettes.”

  Joules says nothing. Just sulks.

  “I’m serious. You want me to tell Will about what happened the other day?”

  “Deal. Fine. I’m good to your body, you’re good to mine. And no physical contact with my boyfriend.”

  “I’m not having physical contact—you are!”

  “Still. Promise.”

  “So I’m supposed to reel him back in for you but if he tries to kiss me—you—I am supposed to say no. Isn’t he going to get a bit suspicious? How is that going to fly?”

  “I don’t really care. Just make it happen.” She glares at me. “Or else.”

  I wander into English with bile rising up the back of my throat once again. It’s nightmarish, this whole switch. Although I have to say, returning to school is kind of soothing. This is my place. English is my subject. I’m top of the class and always have been. Mrs. Leonard loves me, and her dangly star-spangled earrings that I usually find distracting because the stars clash together when she speaks and you don’t know where to look, today are as reassuring as Gran’s chicken soup. Should Gran ever decide to make any and, more important, should I ever have the guts to taste it. You never know with Gran. She could swap out the bits of chicken for zebra meat because a bushman in Sierra Leone gave her a good recipe.

  I plop down in my seat and try not to look at Will, who is a few seats up in the next row. He’s watching me, I can feel it. Right away I’m poked in the shoulder. Kirstie Parks, with her blue streak in her black hair, makes a face at me. “Birch sits there, did you kill off all your brain cells?”

  God. Is everyone so mean to Joules? I stand up and catch Will’s eye. He makes a confused face, as if to ask what I’m doing back here. “Right. I wasn’t thinking.” Joules sits beside Will. I make my way toward the front and plop down next to him just as he leans over to dig something out of his backpack. I hold my breath and wait for him to sit up again with no idea whether my botched attempt to keep him worked, or whether he’s still planning to dump me.

  Mrs. Leonard closes the door and starts taking attendance and I realize Joules is missing—or, rather, I am. We walked toward class together, where on earth could she have gone? Then I look out the window to see her standing on the grass between the buildings, twirling my hair and talking to Shane. She’s acting all giggly and stupid, and actually poking Will’s best friend in the chest as if she’d like to swallow him whole.

  I know what she’s up to. Joules is trying to reinforce her story—that it really was me in the bushes with this guy. A shocked sound escapes my mouth and Mrs. Leonard stops passing out papers to glare at me. No sign of the you’re-my-favorite-student look she usually sends my way. She shoots me an aggrieved, I-don’t-have-time-for-pampered-teenagers kind of stare, even as she moves closer to slap Joules’s report on the desk in front of me. Joules got a 97%.

  It means one of two things: Joules is a brainer or there’s a signed copy of Nige’s CD on the dashboard of Mrs. Leonard’s Toyota Corolla.

  “Nice job, Joules,” she says before moving on.

  Will finally turns around and looks at me. He flashes me an icy smile and turns away. It can only mean I’ve been set up for Mission Impossible in terms of saving this relationship.

  Outside the window, Joules puts her hand—my hand—on Shane’s neck and giggles. The sight of this is revolting, let me tell you. Shane is one of these guys you can see coming a mile away. Always with a lewd comment or a “when are ya gonna get busy with me?” for whichever girl happens to be nearby. Not that it’s ever been me. But still. It’s just as nauseating from a distance. No girl in her right mind would start up with such a player.

  Except, apparently, Andrea Birch.

  Joules glances up at me, then points toward Will, who’s looking down at his paper. She wants him to see Andrea Birch being the indiscriminate slut she isn’t.

  I’m torn.

  I mean, do I really want Will to see me as this trashy girl who cuts English to mess around with a boy no one in her right mind would mess with? It’s insane, I know, but I still hang on to this hope that one day Will might look at me differently.

  As someone who is actually
dateable.

  So if he sees me with Shane, will he ever see me as the right type of girl? The truth is he won’t. He’ll think I’m someone to stay far, far away from is what he’ll think.

  On the other hand, I could use this time as Joules to, um, bolster a certain girl in Will’s eyes. I can work like a puppet master, toil behind the scenes to make him see all that is good and decent in Andrea Birch. And Joules, unbeknownst to her, will help me by making me look halfway decent in my dorky clothes.

  Of course it would be underhanded.

  And unkind.

  A really crappy thing to do to her, but hey, it’s a cruel world, right?

  Besides, Joules is not my friend. She might know me better than anyone on earth right now, but she’s never once claimed to be my friend. And then there’s this. I don’t have to ruin things for Joules and Will. I can still do my best to hang on to him for her. But I don’t have to go out of my way to slaughter my own reputation in the meantime, do I? I mean, I’m not the one who lied, cheated.

  I watch her twist herself from side to side and knock my sweater farther off her shoulder, and I try not to take offense at the fact that Shane has about zero interest in whatever this particular Andrea Birch is selling. I’m not that unappealing, am I?

  Joules hunches her shoulders at me as if to ask why Will isn’t looking down at her right now.

  I could nudge him, motion outside, whisper something like “See? I told you it was Andrea with Shane. I told you I didn’t cheat on you.”

  I could.

  I should.

  But I don’t. Instead, I turn away from the window and put up my hand to ask Mrs. Leonard a question about our next assignment.

  There’s no sign of Joules in the grassy area between the buildings when I bolt out of class. Which is a good thing that could be a bad thing. I’m discovering that with Joules you never know for sure. She could be on her way to Algebra to score an A+. Then again, she could be getting my navel pierced.

  Later today is my interview with Mortimer Wolf. In the mess of everything that’s happened, I almost forgot. Now Joules is going to show up instead of me and that’s seriously going to jeopardize my future.

  What I need to do is find her and coach her on exactly what to say: my whole speech about how I hope to become a better person at Stanford and how I’ve been doing volunteer work for Child Services in my spare time and all that. The volunteer work just happened to have been in my own house. I might even write out my resumé in point form on her palm because you can’t trust a girl like that to remember everything. You can’t.

  At the base of the stairwell is Shane. He watches me with a grin so revolting that I consider turning around and heading back upstairs, but there are too many kids coming down behind me. At the bottom I pretend I don’t notice him and let the crowd of bodies carry me along the hall toward Leighton Auditorium—not that I have any business heading there. Eventually, he catches up with me and whispers “Hey you” into my ear. Then he slips a note into my pocket.

  I half smile and follow the others into the auditorium to escape him. There seems to be an anti-smoking lecture about to get going for the ninth-graders. I try to head out the side door, but the house lights dim and the presentation begins with a lousy skit composed of two niners dressed like dinosaurs pretending what made them extinct wasn’t a meteor or an iceberg but a pack of Camel cigarettes.

  Mr. Mansouri is blocking my exit, and when I try to explain that I wound up in here by mistake, he tells me to sit down and be quiet. I search Joules’s bag for CDs but come up empty. Great, now I’m going to miss out on Joules’s spare—which I’d planned to use to prep her for the interview.

  After the assembly, Will is in the quad waiting for me. Or Joules. Whatever. He sits on a U-shaped cement bench with his legs crossed and watches me walk toward him. It’s exhilarating, knowing he’s staring at me. It’s not something I’ve experienced before, and certainly not from Will Sherwood. When I sit down beside him, he mutters something about a new English assignment; apparently Mrs. Leonard doled out some extra-credit homework after I left. I’m mildly disappointed that it’s all he has to say and have to remind myself I’m Joules. I don’t want him in love with me. I want him to fall in love with Andrea.

  I struggle with the zipper of Joules’s bag, hoping to find something to write on. “So, do you want to eat lunch together?”

  “I have soccer practice Wednesdays.”

  “Right. I always forget.”

  “If you don’t have paper, you can get the assignment from me later. I have to get going.”

  “No.” I tug on the zipper, which refuses to budge. “I’ll just be a sec.” Then a great idea pops into my head and I pause. “Or maybe I can get it from Joules.”

  “What?”

  “I mean Andrea. Birch.”

  He looks dubious. “The two of you are good friends now?”

  I shrug. “She’s a great girl.” When he doesn’t answer, I add, “Don’t you think?”

  “She’s nice, yeah. But you can’t get the assignment from her. She wasn’t in class.”

  I have to purse my lips together to stop myself from smiling. He noticed. Will Sherwood actually noticed that Andrea Birch was not in class. So I’m not completely invisible. This knowledge emboldens me. I want to know more.

  “Do you know her well?”

  He stares into the trees blankly, lazily. “Well enough to know she’s a good student. Good person.”

  Yes. Yes, she is. “Do you think she’s pretty?”

  I’ve gone too far. He squints at me, suspicious, and stands up. “Aww, I’m not going down that road again. Not after the other night when you got all squirrelly.”

  “About what?”

  “About what I said.”

  What he said? What did he say? The backpack isn’t going to open so I fish around in my pocket for a scrap of paper. “Remind me again what you said?”

  He laughs. “Yeah, right. Do you have any paper or what?”

  I do. I pull a folded paper out and open it to see—too late—Shane’s name scrawled across the bottom. Will takes the note and right away his face reddens. He looks at me with disgust.

  “I didn’t even read it, I swear. He just stuck it in my pocket after class.”

  “So it’s true. You and Shane.”

  “No,” I say quickly. “It’s not.”

  “How long, Joules? Huh? How long has it been going on?”

  “I don’t know. But it was stupid and it’s over. It’s been over for a while now …”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yes. Totally. Done.”

  He stands up and rubs his jaw. Then, without looking at me, he says, “Well guess what? So are we.” He crumples the note and throws it on the ground, then looks across the quad to where Shane is goofing around with some other guys. He stomps toward them, pulls Shane back by one shoulder and shoves him against the locker. Then, with Shane sputtering and denying and following him, Will marches off campus.

  Joules Adams is going to freak.

  A few moments later, she sashays out of a hallway, plops herself down on the bench beside me and takes a bite out of an apple. “How’d it go with Will? Is everything cool now?”

  I. Am. Dead.

  chapter 10

  There’s a thing that happens to my face when I’m mad. I’ve never seen it before because I’ve never actually stood across from myself like I’m doing now, and I’ve never been as mad as Joules is at this particular moment. It’s weird—almost like my hair gets darker. It doesn’t sound possible but it’s totally true. Maybe it’s an optical illusion caused by my face going white or something, but right now, with Joules’s anger practically bubbling out of her ears, Andrea Birch’s hair is almost black.

  She doesn’t take her eyes off me. “You got me dumped?”

  “It’s not like I did anything, I swear. Shane stuffed this note in my pocket and I forgot all about it because of the smoking dinosaur skit in the auditorium. And then with W
ill, suddenly the note was in my hand when I needed a scrap of paper.”

  “Suddenly? Just like that?”

  “Yes.”

  She crosses her arms and studies me. “Well, now you have to get him back.”

  “It’s your thing with Shane that ended this, not me!”

  “Hmm, let’s see. Yesterday I was myself and everything was fine with Will. Today you’re me and now I’m single.”

  “You guys have broken up before—how did you get him back?”

  Joules thinks about it, smiles for a second, then gets all disturbed. “No way. There’s no way you’re going to do what I did.”

  “What’s the difference? He thinks I’m you.”

  “We need to get even.” She gets up and stomps away. “Come with me.”

  I rush along behind her. “Joules, we need to get you ready for my interview with Mortimer Wolf. It’s in an hour.”

  “I know when it is.” She marches through a breeze-way, stops at my locker, and asks me to repeat my combination. When I do, she opens it and starts unloading books and jackets and food bags onto the ground.

  “So can we just take a few minutes to talk about it?”

  “Can you promise me you’ll get Will back?”

  “I can try. That’s all I can do. I swear I’ll try to get him back but I honestly don’t know if it’s possible. You really blew it with him.”

  “You didn’t make him look out the window in English. What was that all about?”

  “You want him to think I’m a slut?”

  Joules seems shockingly calm.

  “Seriously,” I say. “I refuse to damage my own reputation.”

  Still, no comment from Joules.

  “I mean, we will switch back eventually. I’d like to return to some sort of a life. I don’t want him—or Shane—telling people I’m sleazy.”

  Using a piece of cardboard, she sweeps grit from the floor of the locker.

  “Joules? Can we agree on that at least? That we do our best for each other?”

  In total silence, she passes me some trash and motions toward the garbage can behind us. She sorts through my binders and removes old work I no longer need, then sends me to the recycling bin. Every once in a while she checks her watch, but otherwise she refuses to speak. This goes on until all the binders are placed neatly on the top shelf, and both hoodies have been shaken out and are now hanging from the two hooks beneath the shelf.