“Hey!” Wynezra protested. “I said it’s badass, didn’t I?”
Holden chuckled. “I agree, Willow. It’s very badass.”
“Would it be weird if I said I want to touch it?” said Imogen.
That comment earned laughs from just about everyone.
“I’m serious!” said Imogen. “There’s just so much texture and…and girth! I just want to stick all of my fingers in it and wiggle them around.”
We were dying. We were already dead.
Everyone was dropped off in the same order as last time. First Holden, then Imogen. Once we dropped Imogen off, Willow offered me shotgun—which I took, gratefully. Mostly, I hoped that it would give me some sort of communicative advantage with Wynezra.
It didn’t.
Wynonna and I hadn’t swapped back yet, and things were probably about to get weird.
Once we pulled up to the front curb of the Lakes, I fidgeted in the passenger seat.
“Welp,” said Wynezra. “Don’t tell Carol I said hi.”
“It was nice meeting you,” Willow chimed in from the back seat.
“Oh. Yeah.” I said, flustered. “You too.”
“We should hang out sometime,” said Willow.
She seemed to immediately regret saying that.
“I mean, if you’re ever not busy doing…you know…whatever—”
“I’d love to hang out,” I said.
Willow lit up. “Oh! Great! Here, lemme get your number.”
“You two are too cute,” said Wynezra, and pretended to gag.
I flipped Wynezra off with one hand and pulled out Wynonna’s phone with the other. Willow and I exchanged numbers. Finally, I was forced to unceremoniously exit the vehicle and go home to a place that was basically an alien planet to me.
I crossed the lobby, took the elevator, and treaded lightly down the hall with a special sort of dread—like I expected to round the corner and discover a pair of dead ghost twins in matching blue dresses blocking my path, offering to play with me forever and ever and ever.
The good news was that I reached Wynonna’s condo door with nary an ectoplasmic trace of dead ghost twins.
The bad news was that, just as I was reaching for the doorknob, the door opened and Carol exited.
She had her purse on her shoulder, a scarf around her neck, and a pair of sunglasses that—at this late hour—would have made Corey Hart proud.
“Well, well, well,” said Carol. “Look what the cat dragged in. Coming in a little late now, aren’t we?”
My mouth stammered for words. Finally, I uttered a feeble “Sorry.”
“Dare I ask where you’ve been? Off gallivanting with Ponyboy and Sodapop and the rest of your poor, misunderstood street urchin friends from the wrong side of the tracks?”
“I was at Shakespeare practice.”
“Ha! Of course, you were! Let me guess: Beatrice of Much Ado? The great battler of wits and words? No, no—Lady Macbeth. Yes. That’s it. You two seem to have similar temperaments.”
Wow. I think I was starting to understand Wynonna’s dislike for Carol.
“Actually,” I said, “we’re doing Twelfth Night. And I’m Viola.”
“Oh, of course, of course!” said Carol. She clearly didn’t believe a word coming out of my mouth. “The great cross-dresser. Oh, I should have guessed Viola from the start—”
“Make me a willow cabin at your gate,” I said, “and call upon my soul within the house. Write loyal cantons of contemned love and sing them loud even in the dead of night; halloo your name to the reverberate hills and make the babbling gossip of the air cry out ‘Olivia!’ O! you should not rest between the elements of air and earth, but you should pity me.”
Carol’s mouth had slipped open in increments until she was completely slack-jawed.
“But how did you—” she said. “I thought you couldn’t—”
How did Wynonna memorize the lines? You thought she couldn’t read? Fair questions. However, Carol had made one extremely flawed assumption about Shakespeare.
“Shakespeare’s plays weren’t meant to be read,” I said. “They were meant to be seen.” I then did an awkward, made-up gang sign with both hands and said, “YouTube, muthafuckas.”
Carol was speechless. Finally, she removed her sunglasses and looked at me—looked at Wynonna—like she was seeing her for the first time.
Eventually, she blinked, and her mind seemed to settle into this new reality.
“I was just off to visit your mother,” she said. “Care to join me?”
Ohhhhhhh boy. Okay. This was happening. Let’s think this one through. Weigh out the pros and cons.
The pros:
This was a valuable opportunity to build Wynonna’s relationship with her grandmother. (Which, I was sure, was in direct violation of Wynonna’s wishes. But c’mon, it was her grandma!)
After meeting Wynonna’s dad—stalker and possessor of criminal records—I was insanely curious to meet her mom.
The curiosity was literally killing me.
Okay, not literally, but you know what I mean. I had to know.
The cons:
Wynonna would literally kill me if she found out.
Literally.
“I understand if you don’t want to—” Carol started to say.
“I’ll go,” I said. “I’d like to go.”
• •
We drove to a cemetery.
It was at that moment—as we pulled off the main road and onto a gravel one weaving between the plots—that I realized the horrible extent to which I was violating Wynonna’s privacy.
I don’t know what I expected. Her dad had a criminal record. I guess I figured whatever her mom’s deal was, it couldn’t possibly be worse than that.
Oh boy, was I wrong.
Speaking of wrong, let me tell you about this cemetery. The perimeter fence was falling apart. The trees were knotted and haggard. The grass was choppy at best. (At worst, dead.) The tombstones themselves looked like ancient relics from a forgotten era. I was pretty sure people stopped burying their dead here after the North defeated the South.
Carol pulled over. There were no parking spaces. Only a soft fade between the gravel and grass.
“She bought her own plot here, you know,” said Carol. “She did it just to spite me.”
“To…spite you?” I said. I was trying hard to pretend I didn’t know this cemetery was absolute shit. At best. At worst, the tombstones probably formed an inverted pentagram and secretly opened up a gateway to hell.
“She bought it before she graduated high school.”
“WHAT?”
“Oh yes,” said Carol, nodding earnestly. “She was seventeen. Your age.”
“Why?!”
“She obviously thought she was being real clever. I swear, the girl went to one Marilyn Manson concert, and she was never the same.”
“Aren’t plots expensive?”
Carol extended her arms, gesturing elaborately. “She obviously got a good deal! I’m surprised she didn’t bargain for a Buy One, Get One Free. I could’ve filled one, I nearly died when I found out about this shithole.”
“And you still buried her here?”
Carol sighed. Pulled out a lighter and a pack of cigarettes. Popped one out and inserted it into the tight slit of her mouth.
“People don’t make good decisions when they’re mourning,” she said, and exited the car.
I exited after her.
We walked slowly as Carol lit up. Released stressful drags like sighs into the overcast air. Mostly, I was trying to follow her without looking like I was trying to follow her.
“Are you trying to inhale my secondhand smoke?” she asked. “Is that what the kids are doing these days?”
“Uh,” I said.
Think, Ezra, think. Ask a question.
“What did you think of my dad?” I said.
“Oh, well,” said Carol, rearing her head back slightly. “We’re having this conversation now, ar
e we?”
“I mean, you don’t have to answer if you don’t—”
“No, no, it’s fine. Roscoe Jones is the sort of man I’d call an ignorant cur. He was rugged, and masculine, and adventurous, and stupid, and he swept your mother away like a monsoon. I loathed him. Still do.”
We arrived at the tombstone. It was a simple affair—small, monument-style, galaxy-black granite. The words were carved and pale: JOSEPHINE “JOSIE” JONES.
The years were surprising.
Namely, the second year. I did the math in my head—just to make sure it was as suspicious as I thought it was.
Seven years ago.
She died seven years ago.
The year of the first eclipse.
“How did it happen?” I blurted out, tactlessly.
Carol looked at me curiously. “You know how it happened.”
“I’d like to hear it from you.”
Carol gave a beleaguered sigh. Dropped her cigarette and stomped it out. Pulled out another one.
“It’s simple, really,” she said, lighting up. “Your father was driving drunk. Both you and Josie were in the car. He blew past a stop sign and got T-boned by another vehicle. It hit the passenger side.”
She took a long drag.
“By the time the ambulance arrived, Josie was dead.”
I felt the puzzle pieces snapping into place in my head.
“And Roscoe was arrested,” I said softly.
I realized my mistake—saying Roscoe instead of Dad—and nearly cringed myself to death. But Carol didn’t even blink.
“Arrested and charged with reckless homicide,” she said. Every word was sharp and embroiled in justice. “Sentenced to five years in prison. No parole.”
God. Damn. It was all starting to make a devastating sort of sense. Why he was following Wynonna. Why she wanted nothing to do with Roscoe.
Because Wynonna was all that he had.
Because Roscoe killed her mom.
That was when the thought returned, stronger than ever: I shouldn’t be here.
“How long has it been?” I said nervously. “Since we did this last, I mean.”
Carol looked astronomically confused. “Did what?” A pause. “Visit your mother’s grave?”
I nodded timidly. Judging from Carol’s bewilderment, I could already tell I wouldn’t like the answer.
“You’ve never taken me up on my offer. Not that I can remember. Unless dementia is finally rearing its ugly head.” Carol studied me like a riddle. “In fact, I was under the impression that you hadn’t been here since the funeral.”
I really shouldn’t be here.
“What makes you say that?” I asked. As if I needed further proof.
“As I recall,” said Carol, “that’s what you told me. Right before you threw my coffee mug at my fine china. I’m still not sure which I’m more upset about. That mug was a Deviehl.”
Oh my god. We needed to leave here now. Before Wynonna and I—
Flash.
• •
I called Wynonna twelve times in a row. No answer. I called again—nearly an hour later—and she finally picked up on lucky number thirteen.
“What the fuck?” she said. Her voice was a choking sob. “What the fuck, Ezra?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Carol asked if I wanted to visit your mom, and I didn’t know what to say, and I obviously didn’t know about the situation, and—”
“You could have said no! You could have said, ‘Fuck you, Carol!’ You could have said anything! But no, you had to go stick your big fat nose in my…in my…”
Wynonna screamed. I could almost feel the impact of her phone as it was thrown across the room. Then, from a muffled distance, I heard several more objects being thrown, kicked, slammed, destroyed. At one point, I was pretty sure she ran her hands across the tops of her desk and dresser, flinging everything off in a mighty sweep.
Then I heard her collapse on the floor.
I heard her cry.
rule in the entire universe that governed my and Wynonna’s body-swapping. That was that the first swap of the day happened exactly at 3:14 a.m. every night.
Now that Wynonna had shed light on this mysterious detail, I paid special attention to it. I set my phone alarm for 3:10 in case I fell asleep—which I did, whoop-de-doo—and stared at the large, noisy analog clock in my living room. When it was 3:13, I was on the very literal edge of my La-Z-Boy reclining seat. It took a small eternity for that needle-like second hand to reach the fifties. And when it did, I couldn’t help but hold my breath.
Fifty-seven…fifty-eight…fifty-nine…
The minute hand shifted a notch.
I held my breath for several infinitesimal seconds. Then I glanced down at myself—which was still, notably, myself.
What the hell?
All this time (all twenty-ish hours of it), I had been taking Wynonna’s word for it—that the swapping happened exactly at 3:14 a.m. I guess she was off. That actually wasn’t terribly surprising, considering that she was recording these times after she was waking up in my sleep-inept, insomniac body.
And then I had an absurd, seemingly irrelevant thought: Pi wasn’t 3.14. It wasn’t even 3.14159265359, although that was a little bit closer. Pi couldn’t be perfectly defined by a written number because pi was infinite.
3.1415…
I glanced at the second hand on the clock.
Thirteen…fourteen…fif—
Flash.
• •
“It’s pi,” I said.
This was the very first thing I said to Wynezra when she picked me up. I know what you’re saying: “Why was she picking you up? I thought she hated you?” Well, I thought so, too. But for reasons beyond my understanding, she was in an inconceivably better mood now. She had called this morning, apologized for last night, and said she had good news on the prom-plan front, which—she admitted—she hadn’t done shit with so far, and she apologized for that, too. Also, she had an addendum to our agreement. That was actually the main thing she wanted to talk about. I appreciated her honesty. I told her she could offer all the addendums she wanted, but only after I told her about a very important discovery I had made. Then she picked me up, and I told her, “It’s pi.”
“Please tell me you’re talking about dessert,” she said, “and not fucking math.”
“Why would I be talking about dessert?”
Wynezra dropped her head on the steering wheel and sighed.
“I was watching the clock,” I said, “counting down the seconds, and we swapped at exactly three-fourteen and fifteen seconds. Wynonna, the next two digits in pi are one and five! I bet if I timed it with a clock that counted in measurements smaller than seconds—milliseconds and nanoseconds and…and…and yoctoseconds—”
“Yoctoseconds?”
“—I’m willing to bet it would measure the digits of pi right down to the nearest planck!”
“What the hell is a planck? Actually, scratch that. I don’t want to know. What makes you think your clock is even that accurate?”
“I check and adjust all the clocks in our house weekly to an online world clock. It’s one of my hobbies when everyone’s asleep. You’re just going to have to trust me when I say that I’m very anal about the time.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt that.”
“Anyway,” I said, “that’s the gist of my hypothesis. Although I don’t really know where to go with it from there. The sci-fi nerd in me wants to say it has something to do with the fourth dimension—time added to space—but that actually makes no sense. Our measurement of time is a human construct, and even then, there are time zones to account for. Why Central Time? I would hardly say that the space-time continuum is somehow bending to a construct that allows states like Texas to know when the Dallas Cowboys are gonna get their asses kicked.”
Wynezra looked at me like I was the dumbest thing on YouTube.
“God,” she said. “You make me sound like such a geek. You have a total h
ard-on for pi, don’t you?”
She wasn’t wrong. There was something just a little provocative about pi. By definition, pi was the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. This was significant because, no matter how big or small that circle was, the ratio remained the same. This was what you would call a mathematical constant. It indicated a certain infinitude to the nature of the circle. Pi was—in mathematical terms, no less—a transcendental number. It was non-algebraic. It wasn’t the root of any polynomial integer. Pi was an irrational number with an infinite number of digits in its decimal representation, never settling into a repeating pattern. Which was fascinating, and awesome, and—yes—even a little sexy.
But I refused to admit that out loud.
“Whatever,” I said. “You have a hard-on for the eighties. I bet you jerk off to John Hughes films.”
That caused Wynezra to snort and laugh in a hysterical sort of way. When she finally regained control of herself, she said, “I like that you can say I jerk off to anything, and it isn’t even anatomically incorrect. And, for the record, John Hughes films are the sexiest. Anyway, that’s not important. What’s important is the addendum.”
“Which is?”
“Carol visits my mom once a week. If you’re in my body when she does, I want you to go with her.”
I blinked. “Wait. You want me to visit your mother’s grave?”
“Carol was nice to me all evening. Like, I was a total bitch to her, and she was nice to me. I think she thought I was having a mental breakdown or something. I mean, I probably was, but…Anyway, you two seem to get along well, and I feel bad about everything, and, like…it’s not like I don’t want to visit my mom. It’s just…it’s hard, you know? It makes me feel terrible about myself and my life.”
Wynezra was fidgeting uncomfortably in the driver’s seat. This was clearly the last thing in the world that she wanted to talk about. It unearthed layers of herself that she would rather stay buried. But she pushed through it like a civic duty.
“Anyway, promise to do that,” she said, “and I’ll promise to help you fix your relationship with Willow—in addition to us getting each other our prom dates with Holden and Imogen. Is it a deal?”
“What makes you think my relationship with Willow needs to be fixed?” I said. This was sarcasm, of course, because Willow hated me as much as the Republican Party hated the environment.
Where I End and You Begin Page 16
