Body Jumping

by Brenda Lowder

  She laughs. “Yes, of course. Always good things. In fact, I started to wonder if you were even real.”

  “Oh, he’s real,” I say.

  Laurel nods and shoots me a strange look as if the question of Aiden’s being real should be obvious. Reality is not so obvious for everyone, Laurel. Don’t be so superior.

  “Do you—” Laurel starts, but I interrupt her before this conversation goes south in a big way.

  “Laurel, I’m sorry, we have to go.” I take Aiden by his arm in a friendly way, careful not to give Laurel any reason to think I’m appropriating her sister’s boyfriend for myself, and edge us toward the door.

  “Oh. You came together?” She cocks her head at us.

  “Yeah, saves gas. And the environment. See ya later!”

  I propel Aiden forward until we’re out of the room and walking down the hallway. When the elevators are in sight, I let go of his arm.

  “She seems nice,” he says.

  “She is,” I say, thinking that it’s probably true. Laurel is a nice person. A nice, dedicated, loving sister too. Have I never given my sister enough credit? Would God take away her cancer if I gave Him my life?

  “She’s worried, though,” I say absently.

  Aiden pushes the button to go down. “Who wouldn’t be?”

  “Yeah, she’s gotta take her off life support in a few days.”

  “What?” Aiden explodes, and I’m startled at the force behind this word. His eyes are large with horror.

  “What?” I ask.

  “She’s taking her sister off life support in a few days?”

  “She has to,” I say. “The doctors don’t think she’s going to wake up.” I steel myself against feeling anything about what I’ve just said.

  He turns from the elevator doors just as they open for us. “I’ve got to go talk to her.”

  I follow him, tugging on his arm to get him to slow down and look at me. “What would you do?”

  “What would I do? I’d help. I will. I’ll help.” He runs his hand through his hair. “Whatever they need. To keep her going.”

  “Are you kidding? Why would you do that? For some ugly girl you don’t even know, just because she smiled at you in the morning?”

  His mouth drops open, and he looks at me like I’ve just smacked him with a two by four. “Why the hell would you say that?” His dead-serious tone makes my ribs constrict.

  “Is that what you think? Of your friend?” he presses. I don’t think I’m imagining the disgust in his expression.

  “Well, I—”

  He doesn’t wait for me to finish. “You’re wrong. She’s beautiful. I thought she was beautiful the first time I saw her. She smiled at me with that big, open grin and her eyes sparkled like she had a secret she wasn’t going to tell me.” He shakes his head. “We never talked about anything real, but I thought sometime, when I wasn’t so busy, after the restaurant was open, and I wasn’t so worried about Jacob, I’d ask her out.”

  The air has been sucked out of me. I can barely breathe. I grab his arm. “Aiden, I’m sorry—”

  He shakes me off. “I don’t want to see you again, Evie.”

  “But I—”

  “I’m serious. Please go.” He turns his back on me and strides down the hall toward Laurel and the old me. I worry about what they’ll say, what they’ll figure out without me around running interference. The lies they could unravel. That as Julianne I lied about Aiden being my boyfriend. That as Evie, I’ve lied about everything else. But I can’t go down there. I can’t follow him. He doesn’t want Evie with him.

  I’m in the wrong body again.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  I start touching people again.

  Intentionally. Indiscriminately. Inadvisably.

  At the grocery store, I touch the checkout girl’s hand when giving her my cash. I touch the bag boy’s arm when I let him take the groceries out of the store for me, even though I don’t have a car for him to put them in. I touch a homeless guy’s hand after he tucks away my twenty-dollar donation, telling him I wish him well and that he has a really, really bright future ahead of him.

  I don’t want to be this me anymore.

  The bus I take to get to Thrifty Fabulous is packed, but I squeeze on and touch everyone I can. Nothing happens. I don’t whoosh and move on to another body. I don’t go anywhere. I’m still me.

  And maybe that’s the point. Wherever I go, there I am.

  Is there some expiration date on body jumping? Have I passed the sell-by date? Overstayed my welcome? Have I spent too long as Evie and now must be her forever? What happens to her then?

  How can I fix any of my lives?

  When I get to Barclay’s workplace, he’s busy being Barclay. I spot him through the large shop window before I even go in. He’s performing, or I guess he would call it talking, to a group of customers, outlining the advantages of a faux fur wrap with visible enthusiasm.

  I open the door and a tiny bell announces my arrival. Barclay looks over at me and waves with the fur tail. A few heads in his audience swivel to look at me then return their attention to Barclay, who hasn’t finished his performance.

  “This fur is perfect for when you want to be Auntie Mame, ‘Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death!’ or Holly Golightly, ‘Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell!’ or even my sister Tallulah, ‘I’m gonna cut you asshole, unless you put a ring on this here finger!’ End scene!” Barclay claps for himself then executes an elaborate bow before blowing kisses to his five-person audience with loud, smacking sounds.

  When his barely interested audience has disbanded to roam the store, Barclay comes over to where I’m standing in front of a rack of men’s high-heeled shoes.

  “Quite a crowd today!” Barclay mops invisible sweat from his brow.

  I nod. “Mmhmm.”

  “So what’s up, buttercup? Or did you just come for the matinée?”

  “Oh, Barclay.” I don’t mean to cry, but I do and pity-party tears roll down my cheeks.

  “Oh, there, there, sweet thing.” He takes my hand and pats it flappingly. “I’m going to lunch!” he yells near my ear, though it’s directed at a harried-looking young man stocking boxes near the changing rooms. He gives half a nod, but Barclay doesn’t stay to see it and instead whirls around and pulls me by the arm toward the exit.

  “Shouldn’t you leave that here?” I ask as he strolls from the store with the faux fur wrap still around him.

  He waves his hand at me like he’s batting a fly. “Oh, I talked myself into buying it just now. I’ll pay for it at the end of my shift.”

  No wonder he never has any money.

  He leads me to the gourmet burger joint across the street where all the employees greet him by name when we come through the door.

  “You’re a popular guy,” I tell him.

  “They know quality when they see it.”

  We put in our orders and take a seat near the back. I pour out the story of my morning while Barclay switches between interested looks, interested sounds, and ogling the fry cook.

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” Barclay says when I’ve finished my tale. “I don’t get a man who walks away from a hot body like the one you’re renting because you say something bad about some other bitch who’s in a coma. Total freak! It’s like he’s looking for more than just a hot body.”

  “Yeah. I know.” Although I don’t know whether Barclay is pretending his superficiality or if it really runs as deep—or as shallow—as he lets on. “What good is having a hot body if people only want to look past it?”

  My world has been turned upside down. I was so used to envying other women for their physical beauty and now that I felt like I objectively had what they had, it isn’t enough to get me what I want.

  An employee calls our order number. Barclay looks at me pointedly, and I roll my eyes and make the trip to the counter to pick it up. When I return he grabs his burger and talks through his munching.

/>   “There’s something off about that man. I mean, a man who doesn’t want Evie?” He squeals and puts his burger down. “Maybe he’s gay!”

  “I really don’t think so.”

  He sighs and picks up his burger again. “No, I don’t think he is, either. Else he would’ve gotten with this.” He makes a sweeping gesture indicating himself and continues. “But it’s like he’s emotionally unavailable. Like he wasn’t really open to loving Evie. Because he’s already interested in somebody else.” He gasps loudly and flaps his free hand.

  “Julianne, it’s you!”

  I put my burger down and wipe my mouth with a paper napkin. “What’s me?”

  “He’s already in love with pre-body-jumpin’ you! That’s why he’s all riding to the rescue wantin’ to do whatever he could so Laurel won’t pull the plug.”

  “It’s not a plug,” I mutter, thinking about what Barclay said. If he were suggesting Aiden was in love with anyone else, I might accept that as a plausible explanation. But the fact that it’s me that Barclay’s talking about, the real me, makes me doubt it.

  Sure, at the hospital Aiden had been angry when I’d said my body was ugly, but he’s chivalrous. And that stuff he said about looking forward to seeing me at In the Cup every day? And maybe wanting to date me? It’s almost impossible to believe.

  How could Aiden be interested in who I was? As Julianne? Was I really not so bad? Was I capable of finding love, just as I was?

  Way to find out now.

  “Do you really think so?” I hate that my voice sounds so needy, but I am.

  Barclay wiggles his head back and forth as he considers my question. “You were not completely without charms. I’ll just say that.”

  “That’s not much to go on.” Or enough to understand.

  “Let me see.” He holds a greasy hand up and starts ticking off fingers. “As Julianne, you did have lovely large blue eyes, and many men go for that sort of thing. You also had this bland innocent look on your face that made you look like you could be a nice person.”

  My insides warm a little at Barclay’s grudging praise.

  “BUT.”

  I startle at the ‘but.’

  “But you had this stick up your ass.”

  “I did not.”

  “Yes, you did. You had this stick so far up your ass, you couldn’t move your neck. Could only prance along like a little marionette.”

  “I think marionettes’ necks move.”

  He glares at me.

  “Pinocchio’s did!”

  “See what I mean? Now what kind of boring-ass shit is that, trying to be right all the time when you know what I mean? You are in denial. Whatever you want to call it, you had some kind of chip on your shoulder, some kind of rock in your shoe, some kind of bee in your toaster, that kept you from connecting with people like you should have.”

  I slide the straw up and down in my cookies and cream shake until it makes the squeaking sound against the lid as I think about what Barclay is saying. Were all my problems—everything that kept me from talking to Aiden in the first place—of my own making? Could I have just gotten what I wanted all along if I’d been the better me I should have been?

  “But what about how much prettier than me Evie is?”

  “Evie is pretty. But Julianne was too. Sure, maybe she had a few pounds she could stand to lose and maybe the frizzy blonde hair could have used some attention from moi, and she could have dressed like she wasn’t an underwater librarian, but it’s not like the only thing that counts is who’s the prettiest.”

  “Oh, it’s not?” I ask archly. Hidden depths on this one, really.

  “People fall in love soul to soul. That’s what real love is. And you’re not going to get that until you are really and truly unafraid to be yourself. No matter what body you’re in.” He dips three French fries in ketchup and sticks them all in his mouth.

  “Oh, Barclay. I know. I know. It’s all the clichés everyone is always saying. Beauty is only skin deep. It’s what’s inside that matters. Don’t judge a book by its cover. But we do. We all do. We see a pretty book jacket and that’s the book we want to buy.”

  “It’s not what keeps us reading, though.” He looks me in the eye, and his usual levity is gone. “Sometimes we just gots to be the real story.”

  We finish our lunch, and I think about the things Barclay has said. I know them, intellectually, to be truths. They’re the stuff you learn in kindergarten. And I’m not so shallow to have thought that being beautiful—looking like Evie—would get me everything I want. Well, eventually, anyway, I feel like I figured that out. I mean, I know other people have problems too.

  But what I do think being in Evie’s body did for me is release me from being myself, which is a person I don’t like very much ever since my mother died.

  And maybe I have to deal with that.

  Chapter Thirty

  I go back to the hospital.

  I’m longing to see Laurel, but it’s not like I can show up at her house. “Evie” wouldn’t know her address. And it would be really creepy too.

  So I make a second trip to my almost-final resting place in the hopes of catching her mid-vigil. What did Aiden say to her? How much does she know? Does she know I’m a liar? Does she hate me like Aiden does?

  When I get to my room, she’s already there, sitting in her usual seat with her hands over her eyes. I see exhaustion sketched in the roundness of her shoulders. My heart sinks. I’ve been such a burden. She has a husband and two children and an enormous, scary burden of her own health problems and yet she’s here—practically all the time from what I can tell—at my bedside. Before I enter the room, I hear her talking to me.

  “Please wake up, Julianne. You don’t know how much I need you right now. You were always the strong one. I don’t know how to do any of this without you.”

  As often as I come to the hospital, I’ve heard her say these kinds of things before. But today there’s a particular desperation to her plea, and I feel ill. I feel like I could throw up and sit on a cold tile floor and deserve it.

  I step into the room. Laurel must hear me because she wipes her eyes and nose and pulls herself together before turning to me with a half smile.

  “Hey, Evie.”

  “Hey. How’s it going?” I nod toward the bed.

  “She’s good.” She rolls her eyes at herself and shakes her head. “I don’t mean good. I mean, she’s the same.”

  I nod and try to look compassionate. I wonder how to ask what I want to ask delicately. I fail. “Are you still planning to discontinue life support on Saturday?”

  She blinks at me. I know my question is too bald, but I want the answer anyway. It’s my life, or lack of one, we’re talking about.

  “I…” she trails off as I study her for a clue. Her lips purse, and I can tell she’s uncomfortable with my intensity. But wouldn’t I be concerned? Extremely concerned? Even if Julianne was only my friend and not myself?

  “I haven’t made a decision yet.”

  “Has something changed?”

  “Aiden has offered to contribute to her hospital bills as long as needed even though the doctors don’t think she’ll ever be okay again.”

  “Really?” I really am still staggered by this. Despite the very real and odd feeling of being jealous of one’s self, I can’t believe he’d do this. It’s insane. “Can he afford it?”

  Her light blonde eyebrows knit together. “I doubt it. It seems like it would be a struggle for him.”

  I blow out a breath. “No kidding. I have no idea why he’d offer to do that.”

  Laurel straightens her shoulders. “He’s her boyfriend! Of course he’d want to help her.” She looks at me like I’m crazy, and I feel humbled for verbally doubting my own very made up relationship.

  “Of course,” I say. So Aiden didn’t tell her anything that refuted our couple-ness? “What did he say?”

  “He said he cared about her, and he wanted to help however he could. He di
dn’t seem to know she’d been in the accident. Or that she was comatose.” Laurel looks puzzled, and I can almost see her mind working on the riddle of Greg Applebaum and his saying Aiden was out of town and had been notified.

  “Strange. Maybe he never got the message.”

  “It is strange.” Laurel shrugs her shoulders. “But it’s not like he could have done anything. She’s been completely unresponsive. I have to tell you, Evie, I’ve really lost hope.” Even as she says this, a giant tear rolls down her right cheek, and I resist the urge to wipe it away.

  “It’s hard to hold on when there isn’t really anything to hold on to.” I clear my throat. “How are you doing? What does Brent say about your diagnosis?”

  She wraps her arms around her front. “I haven’t told him.”

  “You haven’t told him? Are you kidding?”

  She shakes her head slowly. “I don’t want to tell him. I don’t think it’s time to worry him yet.”

  “When is the time to worry him, huh? When you’re dead and he’s at your funeral?”

  She flinches. “Evie, please.”

  I can see the anger she’s holding back. She’d be letting me have it right now if she knew I was me. Nevertheless, I press further. “What are you doing? Waiting for Julianne to wake up and help you? She’s not waking up, Laurel. She’s dead. In every way that counts. And not when you take her off life support on Saturday, but right now.” A look of horror crosses her face, but I can’t stop myself now that I’m coming out with what I really want to say.

  “Julianne doesn’t want to live. She wants to forget the mistakes she’s made and that no one loves her. She wants to move on. You should just let her. Tell Aiden to save his money, and you go fix your own life.”

  Laurel’s jaw goes white, and her eyes are pure steel. “How dare you. That’s my sister you’re talking about. I don’t know anything about you because, quite frankly, my sister never mentioned you. But I can tell you you’re someone I’d have told her to stay away from. She’s a good person with a big, kind heart, and you’re a monster and no kind of friend.” She begins to walk away.