Where I End and You Begin

by Preston Norton

  “Okay,” said Wynezra. “I don’t have an argument for that. I’m not trying to argue with you. I still have the same feelings for my mom. I was just sharing an observation, that’s all.”

  God, arguing with Wynezra was the worst. She had become logical to a fault, arguing with such objectivity, it felt like she was emotionally removed from the conversation, which made me want to punch her in the face. I’d like to see her emotionally remove herself from that! It was like arguing with…with…

  I felt the air vacuum softly out of my lungs.

  It was like arguing with Ezra Slevin.

  • •

  The hardest thing about Wynonna being so nice to me was that the one nice thing I was attempting to do for her had inadvertently turned into a humongous, backstabbing sort of secret.

  After school, I met up with Roscoe.

  At Sonic.

  For slushies.

  Sonic and slushies had kind of become our thing. So much so that Roscoe stopped asking me what I wanted. I always ordered the same thing, and he always beat me there anyway. He’d usually call to confirm I was on my way, and by the time I arrived, my Strawberry Real Fruit Slush was waiting for me.

  For himself, he ordered the Green Apple Slush with rainbow candy. The man was a child.

  On weekdays, Roscoe usually worked evenings. He was a chef, after all, and a damn good one. Too good to be wasted on the lunch menu. So, this tiny hour between school and work was an ideal time to work on Operation: Reunite Roscoe with Wynonna.

  Except Wynonna and I weren’t swapping back.

  And maybe we were turning into each other.

  I pulled up beside Roscoe’s Malibu in the adjacent drive-in stall. Abandoned the Saturn and hopped into his passenger seat. My Strawberry Slush was waiting for me in the cup holder.

  “Philosophical discussion,” I announced, casually. “You swap bodies with someone, Freaky Friday–style. You want to swap back. Screw waiting it out. You want to expedite the process. Tackle this shit with strategy and perspective. So: Does this have something to do with unfinished business or what?”

  This wasn’t the first time we’d had a “philosophical discussion” about the Freaky Friday Effect. It was actually the third. The first time, we discussed how something like this could happen from a scientific or mythological perspective. This turned into a meandering conversation about astral projection. Easily the most useless conversation of my life. The second time, we discussed why something like this would happen. It usually had to do with moral life lessons. A little more effective. But it still wasn’t helping me swap back.

  Now I was in manic brainstorming mode. I needed to figure this shit out.

  Roscoe just assumed I really liked Freaky Friday. And he was always down for critical analysis of absurd theories.

  “Unfinished…business?” Roscoe repeated. The gears were churning.

  “Like, Jamie Lee Curtis and I failed to do something as ourselves? So now we need to do it as each other before the universe will let us swap back?”

  Roscoe inhaled a long, contemplative slurp as he processed this. Swallowed.

  “Isn’t that more of a ghost thing?” he said.

  “Well, yeah, but…” I started to say, and then faded off.

  He was right. It was totally a ghost thing.

  “Yeah, it’s like the movie Ghost with Patrick Swayze,” said Roscoe.

  I groaned.

  “Swayze is murdered,” he continued, undeterred, “but he can’t pass on until he learns that his friend betrayed him, and he saves the love of his life, Demi Moore. Or something. Unfinished business.”

  I had seen Ghost once with the Durdens. Principal Durden had somehow convinced Holden and me that it was a “horror movie.” And that’s how we ended up sitting through two hours of Patrick Swayze taking his shirt off, Demi Moore spinning clay pottery as some sort of sexual metaphor, and slow dances.

  Principal Durden was in tears by the end, practically disemboweling a box of tissues. Horror movie, my ass.

  “You can keep your mouth shut,” said Roscoe. “Ghost is a classic.”

  “Whoa, hey! I didn’t even say anything!”

  “You were gonna. I can see it in your eyes. Those judge-y little eyes of yours. I don’t wanna hear it. Ghost is a masterpiece.”

  I laughed. Rolled my “judge-y little eyes.” Slurped my slushie.

  Finally, I could contain myself no longer.

  “Okay, come on,” I said. “A masterpiece?”

  Roscoe shook his head and chuckled. “Don’t go there. Don’t even go there.”

  “Did the nineties have a different standard for measuring good movies? I mean, this was the decade of Furbies, so something was obviously going terribly wrong.”

  “Really, it all comes down to the possession scene,” said Roscoe, ignoring me. “It’s maybe the best scene in any movie, ever.”

  “Oh boy. Here we go.”

  Calling it “the possession scene” was misleading. That made it sound like a cool movie, which it wasn’t. It was more accurate to call it the “dance scene.” I mean, it was a Patrick Swayze movie, c’mon.

  “Swayze just wants to touch Demi Moore one last time. Demi believes he’s there, in the room, with her. Whoopi Goldberg lets Swayze possess her—wear her body—as a means of touching Demi. And when they do, Demi can f—”

  “Fill the mandatory dance scene quota in a Patrick Swayze movie?”

  “—feel him! She can see him! Even with her eyes closed, even while she’s dancing with this woman she barely even knows, she knows his touch. She knows it’s him. She can see him with her heart. And even though death has torn them apart, they can share this moment together.”

  Roscoe was rapidly disintegrating.

  “All because Demi can…she can see him,” he said. “She can see him with her hh…with her hhh…”

  With her heart.

  Roscoe cleared his throat. Hastily wiped his eyes with his sleeve.

  “Anyway,” he said, “Whoopi Goldberg was fucking fantastic, and don’t you dare tell me otherwise.”

  I forced a feeble smile. “She was good.”

  I knew I shouldn’t ask the question I wanted to ask.

  But I asked it anyway.

  “How did it happen?” I said. “The accident, I mean.”

  Roscoe bit his lip. His whole face became fragile all over again.

  “Unless you don’t want to—”

  “No, it’s fine,” he said. Cleared his throat. “Um. We were at a party at a friend’s house. Low-key, family-style stuff. I mean, everyone was bringing their kids, so…But there was alcohol. And I was drinking, and Josie was drinking, and—”

  “Josie was drinking?”

  “Well, yeah. Otherwise she would’ve driven.”

  I was kind of shocked. This was the first I’d heard of it.

  “But it’s not like we planned it that way,” he said. “I was in one part of the house with my friends, and she was in another part with her friends, and when we were finally wrapping up and getting ready to go, well…Josie was sloshed. And I’m kind of a heavyweight when it comes to drinking. I thought I was fine, and we only lived a couple minutes away. If Josie was sober—if she had a clear mind—she would have told me no. She would have stopped me. We would’ve gotten a ride, or taken an Uber, or literally done anything else. But she wasn’t. So, I drove.”

  Silence filled the delicate space between us.

  “I hope you know,” he said, finally, “that prison was never punishment for me. Losing your mom was my punishment. Losing you was my punishment. Nothing could ever measure up to losing the two of you. Prison was just time to think about what I’d already lost.”

  It was moments like this when I knew I had waded too far into Wynonna’s personal life. Now I was neck-deep in it, and the current was pulling me in farther and farther. What could I do?

  What could I say?

  “I’m here now,” I said.

  I smiled to mask the
lie.

  in a hazy blur—mostly due to the Two Very Big Things that would be happening the following weekend. This coming Friday, we would finally be presenting our legendary delinquent production of Twelfth Night, performing in the Piles Fork High School auditorium. (We were having it at school and not the Amityvale because—in Ziggy’s actual words to Principal Durden—Amityvale was an “irreparable shithole.”) Afterward, the PFHS Activities Committee would be spending the next twenty-four hours setting up for an even bigger event happening the very next evening.

  Prom.

  Not that I gave a shit about prom. It was mostly a haunting, surreal reminder. A cautionary tale of how an ambitious goal to ask out the girl of your dreams can lead to abandonment, isolation, and a crippling identity crisis.

  That was maybe an oversimplification, but you get what I mean. Fuck prom.

  Our Twelfth Night production, however, I was totally stoked for. Viola was my one and only escape from reality, and we had reached the stage of dress rehearsals. It was both daunting and exhilarating. Scripts were a thing of the past. We were reciting everything from memory, in full costume and makeup, and performing the whole thing in one fell, uninterrupted swoop.

  Speaking of costume and makeup, Willow’s Malvolio was easily the best. She had been made to look like a crabby old butler with fake wrinkles, a monocle, and white powder worked into her big emo hair, resulting in something very Ludwig van Beethoven. The only thing more convincing than her disguise was her performance. She was delightfully awful.

  Even as the conspiring members of Olivia’s household forged a love letter to Malvolio in Olivia’s handwriting, convincing him that she was in love with him.

  Even as Malvolio followed a list of silly, humiliating instructions outlined in the letter to “prove his love” to her.

  Even as he was locked in a dungeon because he was clearly either mad or possessed.

  I shit you not. This shit actually happened.

  There were three stories being told: the love triangle, the prank on Malvolio, and a third that was small but crucial to Twelfth Night’s conclusion—the story of Viola’s twin brother, Sebastian. After the shipwreck, Sebastian was rescued by a man named Antonio. Antonio nursed him to health, cared for him, and even agreed to accompany him to Illyria (despite being the sworn enemy of Duke Orsino), paying for all Sebastian’s expenses. He cared for Sebastian so damn much, it was almost certainly romantic in nature—although it was never explicitly stated in the play. During this trip, Sebastian accidentally met Olivia, who was convinced he was Cesario. Sebastian was like “Ooh, pretty girl!” and Olivia was like “Cesario loves me!” and they immediately got married before the wisdom of time could allow them to question their poor decision-making skills. Meanwhile, Antonio got arrested by Duke Orsino’s men. Poor bastard.

  I was only in makeup in the beginning shipwreck scene. From then on—in the employment of Duke Orsino—Viola wore a bright blue waistcoat with big gold buttons, a white shirt with parachutes for sleeves, a cravat (which—speaking of identity crises—was something between a tie and a scarf, but clearly not either), breeches, stockings, and brass-buckle shoes. I was just the cutest little gent you ever did see.

  Actually, I take that back. Holden was wearing a similar outfit, but with a darker waistcoat and cravat, and standing at five foot nothing, he was the cutest little gent you ever did see. Especially when Duke Orsino was angry.

  In act 5, shit hit the fan. Duke Orsino arrived at Olivia’s estate, learning of her marriage to a man she believed to be Cesario. Surely, his best bro had betrayed him hard-core. Meanwhile, Viola (the “real” Cesario) was caught in the cross fire.

  “O thou dissembling cub!” said Holden in furious lamentation. “What wilt thou be when time hath sow’d a grizzle on thy case? Or will not else thy craft so quickly grow that thine own trip shall be thine overthrow? Farewell, and take her; but direct thy feet where thou and I henceforth may never meet.”

  “My lord, I do protest—” I said.

  “O! do not swear!” said Imogen, touching my shoulder. “Hold little faith, though thou hast too much fear.”

  Imogen was wearing a froofy white dress, both elegant and kind of ridiculous. When she touched me, I didn’t freeze up or shudder like I might have a month ago. I was very much in my role: a girl, dressed as a boy, secretly in love with a really stupid duke.

  It was an odd thing, the way that Holden, Imogen, and I had such chemistry on the stage, and yet, the moment we were outside our roles, the walls were up, and we were back to not being friends. Back to not even talking to each other.

  Eventually Sebastian appeared, and the cast of characters swore to god they were looking at a pair of doppelgängers. But Viola, who thought her twin brother was dead, knew who he was.

  From there, things got awfully deus ex machinish. Olivia didn’t seem to mind that she was married to someone who merely looked like Cesario, and Orsino got over the marriage pretty fast, too, because, hey, his best bud was a girl! He told Viola to go put on some girl clothes and preemptively declared that they would get married.

  “Cesario, come,” said Holden. He extended his hand, and I took it. “For so you shall be, while you are a man. But when in other habits you are seen, Orsino’s mistress and his fancy’s queen.”

  The first thing I noticed was how soft and nice his hand was.

  The second thing I noticed was that my palm was sweating into his.

  I immediately tore my hand away as everyone exited the stage. Holden shot me a glance that was confused and—dare I say—hurt? But I refused to notice, instead forcing myself to be psychokinesis-focused on Feste the Fool (Tucker) as he took center stage and sang a song about wind and rain and marriage.

  • •

  “I love performing Shakespeare,” I said. “Really, I do. But the more I sit on this play, the more I realize it’s kind of fucked up.”

  Willow laughed. “Right? I mean, I get that Malvolio’s an asshole, but locking him up in a makeshift dungeon? That’s a bit extreme.”

  Of all the shitty things that had followed my and Wynonna’s body swap, one definitively good thing had come from it: my friendship with Willow. It started slowly, but she began texting me a lot. Most of it was small talk—hey or you ready for dress rehearsals? or do you watch The Magicians?—and evolved to heavier questions like how do you know if a boy likes you? or how do you know if you’re a good person? To which I responded—via Siri—with things like, He probably acts stupid whenever he’s around you or I don’t know. But I think you’re pretty good.

  At first, I figured she thought of me as some sort of “female role model”—which was kind of funny, given the circumstances. But slowly, over the course of that month, I realized the truth.

  She didn’t have any friends.

  I was literally her only friend—which was mind-blowing to me! I mean, she was smart, she was funny, and she was beautiful. What else, exactly, did a freshman girl need to have friends?

  Though class was over, a lot of us had begun lingering well afterward. Not to mention, Ziggy had set up a foldout table with drinks and cookies. He clearly wanted us to take our time leaving. It was working.

  “Why does everyone have to get married?” I said. “I mean, everyone! Even Sir Toby and Maria!”

  “Everyone except Antonio,” said Willow, shaking her head sadly. “Poor Antonio.”

  “I know. I secretly hope Fabian is gay, and they hook up in the after-credits scene.”

  “It would be kind of tragic to have a name like Fabian and not be gay.”

  “Everything about this play is kind of tragic. Duke Orsino’s been stalking Olivia forever, even after she’s said no a hundred times, and suddenly, she’s married, and he’s like, ‘That’s it. Put on your girl clothes, Cesario. We’re getting hitched.’”

  “Yeah, because he’s definitely not rebounding.”

  “Absolutely not.” I chuckled and gave a sad sigh. “I literally question everyone’s judgment in t
his play.”

  “Do you want to have a sleepover tonight?” said Willow.

  She blurted it out so fast—so sudden—I blinked and did a double take, just to make sure I hadn’t hallucinated the question.

  “Sorry,” she said. “That was random. Just…between this play and prom, I’m a bundle of nerves, and my parents are never home, and I thought it would be nice to…but I understand if you can’t. Sorry. You know what? Forget I—”

  “I’d love to,” I said.

  “Oh!” said Willow. Her entire crabby-old-butler face lit up. “Okay! Yeah! Great!”

  It had become impossible for her to speak in anything but one-word exclamations.

  “Lemme just tell Ezra,” Willow said finally when all the glowing seemed to be making her face hurt. She turned, and then jumped with a start.

  Wynezra was standing right behind us.

  “Whoa, hey!” said Willow, clutching her chest. “Didn’t see you there. Is it okay if Wynonna—”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Wynezra dismissively. And somewhat urgently. “Can I have a word with Wynonna?”

  Willow looked at me, as if to confirm that that was okay. I gave her a subtle nod.

  Wynezra put a hand in the center of my back and directed me to the far, far, far corner of the theater—well out of earshot of anyone.

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  “I’m going to show you something,” said Wynezra, “only because you would have already seen it if you were you, and I want you to know that it’s real, and it’s serious.”

  “Okay?”

  Wynezra handed me her—my—phone, opened to a picture.

  It was a nude of Willow.

  A very private—very intimate—nude. One that was clearly never meant to see the light of day.

  “JESUS FUCK,” I said, pushing the phone away. “What the fuck? Why the fuck?”

  “There’s more.”

  Before I could object, she swiped her finger across the screen and shoved the phone in my face. It was the top of Willow’s head. You could sort of see her face, but it was pressed against the pelvis of some dude. A long, surfer-tan arm with wristbands was gripping her hair, holding her in place.