Switch

by Tish Cohen

  We ride along Brea Boulevard, where the boys from school sometimes have orange fights in the oil fields on Saturday nights. Along Bastunchury, where a girl I once knew used to keep her horse. Not that she ever invited me to ride it but I used to see her trotting by when I took some of the little kids to Craig Park.

  And I took them to Craig Park because my neighborhood, my house, is just ahead.

  To the right.

  As we get closer to the bottom of the hill, I say as casually as I can, “Let’s turn here. I’ve always liked this area.”

  He looks at the backs of some of the sprawling ranch bungalows, barely visible behind big drippy trees and a zigzaggy sound barrier of a wall that travels down the steepish slope. “This area? Bloody tract homes, just like ours.”

  “You don’t like them?”

  “Like them? They all look the same.”

  “So, you’ve got money. Why don’t you move?”

  He shakes his head. “Better things to do with your money than custom kitchens and baths, Jujyfruit. Always remember that.”

  So that’s the deal. He’d rather give to charity than wallow in his own wealth. I respect this guy more and more each day. The car speeds up, threatening to pass by my neighborhood. “Still!” I say quickly. “The streets in here are twisted with all these cute cul-de-sacs. It’ll just take a sec and we’ll loop back around here again.”

  He hits the blinker. “Okay. What my princess wants, my princess gets.”

  We turn in on Mountain Ridge Drive and wind back up the hill. My heart pounds harder as we approach Highcliffe Court. “This one,” I say, pointing to the left. “Let’s take a look.”

  He doesn’t argue. Just turns left and slows the old Ford to veer around a few parked cars in front of the Hendersons’. Up ahead, there, on the right, is my house. It’s only been, what, nine hours since I’ve been here? But it feels like years. The sight of the garage doors that once closed on my foot thumps me in the ribs. As we get close enough that I can see in through the living room window, I whisper, “Stop.”

  He does. “What?”

  The light’s on inside. I can see the foyer Mom insisted on painting powder blue because it was “calming for the kids when they first come in.” The ugly painting above the sofa, the one that shows farmers so tired from their plowing that they can’t straighten their spines. The tasseled pillow Brayden tried to unravel the day Michaela arrived. Impossible that it was just last night.

  I’m hoping to see someone. Mom. Dad. Cici or Sam. The Ks will already be in bed, but—I can’t believe I’m feeling this—but I’d love to see Bray, even. His flashy braces, his bouncy hair.

  No one seems to be around. Dad’s probably in the back room in his Uggs, monitoring the weather, calling out to Mom every few minutes about expected rainfall or jet streams or low-pressure systems. And he’s asking the kids to shut all the windows tight and wondering aloud if all the bikes have been brought inside. It’s a real treat for him when he gets to tell us all to “batten down the hatches.” I feel a gush of joy for Dad. He deserves this rain more than anybody. It’ll give him something to talk about for a few days.

  Mom’s probably at the kitchen table coaxing Bray not to give up on his Geography homework. Saying “Be all you can be” and “You are not limited by what has come before you.” Telling him he is the shaper of his own future. He’s probably calling her Mom and she’s probably not minding one bit.

  Know what? Even I wouldn’t mind it tonight.

  I want to run inside and call to them. Hug them all and reach into the fridge for organic mango juice. Check the twins’ breathing and see if Michaela might like my stuffed cat with the Xs for eyes tonight.

  “I’ll never understand builders,” Nige says, bringing me out of my fantasy. He looks around at the cookiecutter houses. “Would it kill them to change up the design a little? Give the neighborhood a bit of interest, less sameness? Would that cost them so much money?”

  The car lurches forward and champagne splashes onto my hand. He turns the car around and I watch my house pass by. “I don’t mind the sameness so much,” I say quietly. “Not today.”

  He sips from his glass, and heads back down the hill.

  As we rattle and bump our way past the rental apartments on Associated, the brown and yellow ones filled with rowdy students from Cal State Fullerton, a few raindrops start to fall. Perfect. This is perfect. A right at the light, straight through the intersection at State College and we’re weaving our way back to Skyline. I can run all the way to the bridge from the house, get myself good and soaked and finally undo this crazy wish with Joules.

  I feel a gush of appreciation for the man sitting beside me. No matter what happens, it’s an evening I’ll never forget.

  And then it happens.

  Nigel doesn’t turn right at the light at all. He turns left. About three seconds later, we’re coasting along the on-ramp of the 91 Freeway and the rain is really getting started. A rickety windshield wiper jerks across the tiny windshield, but only on the driver’s side.

  “Nige—Dad. What are you doing? Shouldn’t we be getting home?”

  “Nah.” He switches into the left lane. “I thought we’d head over to Newport. Weather’s turning a bit nasty but we can have dinner at that little Italian bistro on Balboa Island. Remember it used to have candles in wicker wine bottles and those checkered tablecloths? You loved the pizza, remember?”

  No. I don’t remember, and I cannot possibly sit by the ocean and swallow pizza when I could be missing the perfect chance to get my life back. No matter how nice Nigel is, no matter what this means to him—I cannot do it.

  “I don’t know. I think we should go back. We didn’t even lock the front door, it’s irresponsible. We could get robbed.”

  He looks at me, confused. Then hoots with laughter. When he calms down he says, “No one can take what matters. All I really need is inside this car with me right now.” He raises what’s left of his champagne in a toast to his daughter and drinks.

  Cars whiz past us, spraying water against the tinny sides of the car as we lumber along. I can actually feel rainwater splash up at the floor beneath my feet. The streetlights start to go wavy and teary in the darkness and I crack my window to help unfog the windows. It isn’t until raindrops hit my arm that I realize the swimminess isn’t just on the glass, it’s in my eyes, which are filling up fast.

  As the lights of Fullerton roll past and the little car hurtles us slowly toward the coast, which is a good half hour away in a vehicle that does normal speed, I wipe the tear that’s inching down my cheek.

  It won’t help anyone for me to ruin Nigel’s special night.

  chapter 12

  It’s well after ten before I am able to slip out Joules’s bedroom window and race toward the bridge. It’s been raining hard for hours now. Nigel even made sounds about crashing in a hotel near the beach to avoid the drive home with the sticky wiper blade, but after he mentioned at dinner that he has this nightmarish distrust of cats, I managed to convince him that I might have left the back door wide open and that there’d been a pretty mangy cat prowling around the property in the last few weeks. Anyway, it turned out to be a good thing we came back because a bunch of people he knows started coming in carrying bottles of wine and cases of beer to celebrate “Rockabye” going platinum. And the impromptu party meant I could slip away undetected.

  By the time I reach the bridge, I’m fully soaked. I mean through the bra to the skin soaked and, believe me, it is none too warm out for Southern California.

  At first it looks like Joules has left. But as I get closer, I see her huddled up at the base. As I get closer still, I see she’s fuming mad.

  “Nice of you to finally show, you little witch,” she says as I scrabble up the slope. “Do you know how long I’ve been sitting here? Two hours! I told your mom—she’s, like, crazy bossy, by the way—I was going to take a shower, then went out your window. Your dad came driving by looking for me. I had to lie down fl
at. In the dark. In the gravel!”

  “I had no choice.”

  “I have rocks in my shirt.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Please tell me you were fixing things with Will and that’s the reason you left me here to rot.”

  “I was with your dad. ‘Rockabye’ went platinum, did you hear?”

  She lets out a long sigh. “Shut up and make the stupid wish. I want to sleep in my own bed tonight.”

  I stare at her, revolted. Does she have no respect whatsoever for her father? I mean, the guy adores her. His mission in life, I’m convinced, is not to be loved by the world but to be loved by Joules. His neediness is devastatingly sad. It’s not so much to ask, being loved by your own flesh and blood. It’s not so much to hope for.

  “It wouldn’t kill you to care.”

  “Care about what?”

  “About your dad. I just don’t get you. Why you work so hard at not giving a crap about him.”

  She shrugs. “You’ve known him a day. Don’t make like you’re the big expert on Nigel Adams’s personal life.”

  “Everyone can see it, Joules. Except for you.”

  “Shut up, Birchie. Make the freaking wish.”

  If Joules got drenched on the way over, she’s dried off quite a bit since. Strands of hair blow across her face and she tucks them behind her ears. Soon to be my ears again.

  “Go down and get soaked first.” I lift my arms and watch raindrops dribble off my elbows. “I think it’s the way to go. You know, water’s a conductor and all.”

  “Yeah, for electricity, idiot. Not for body switching.”

  “You have a better idea?”

  She picks at the ground a little, then closes her eyes and makes a pained face. “I hate you for getting me into this. And how do I know I won’t be left with some hideous body part of yours—like your nose or your feet—that I’ll have to get surgically removed later? I swear, if I do, you’re paying for it. And how do we know this will even work? We should find some kind of expert. Maybe in L.A. or New York or something.”

  I swear, sometimes Joules’s thought patterns astound me. “Have you ever, once in your life, heard of an expert in L.A. that specializes in body switching? This isn’t a magic show, you know, where the tricks are smoke and mirrors. It’s real life.” I tug on her arm and motion toward the street. “It’ll be fun.”

  “I don’t want to get soaked now. I’m already freezing.” But she gets up and follows me. On the sidewalk, she stops, crosses her arms and stands under the cover of the bridge.

  “Come on.” I wait for a lone car to pass and step out into the rain, onto the road, and twirl in a slow circle, looking up at the sky. I open my mouth and let raindrops fall onto my tongue. “Come on, Joules. It’s like running under a sprinkler. Or standing in a shower.”

  “A shower is warm. At my house, anyway. What’s with yours? It takes, like, half an hour to heat up. Plus that Samantha and Cici are always picking the lock and bursting in to look for hair clips or whatever. I don’t know how you can stand living there.”

  “You want to shower in your bathroom tomorrow or mine?”

  “Seriously, has your mother ever heard of real foster children? The kind you see on TV commercials? Because she’d save so much money. Plus they’re from Third World countries. No one in America really needs the help.”

  I don’t have time to shake any logic into her busted rationale. “Are you done now? Can we make the wish and get back to our lives?”

  With a scowl, she steps into the rain and stands there, miserable, with her arms covering her torso.

  “You have to open yourself up to it,” I say, jogging in a circle, spinning and holding my arms up as I go. “Get really soaked.”

  Finally she does. She twirls and spins, waving her arms around as if she’s flying. “I feel like an idiot.”

  “No one’s around. Open your mouth. It feels wild.”

  She sticks out her tongue and starts twirling really fast in the middle of the road. I join her and we twirl around each other. Eventually, even Joules laughs and we both stagger as the dizziness sets in. She loses her balance and falls into me, knocking us both to the road, where a dip in the asphalt has created a big puddle. Without question, she’s soaked now. I prepare myself to suffer her wrath—surely the falling, the puddle will be my fault as well—but Joules is giddy, drunk with it all, and she helps me to my feet.

  “Okay, we’re good now. Let’s get up there and wish.”

  I follow her up. “We should still wait for a train.”

  “When will a train come?”

  “I don’t know the schedule, Joules. Soon, I hope.”

  We sit there throwing pebbles and shivering for a few minutes and then Joules does something I never would have expected. She shifts herself closer to me until our arms and hips are touching. She’s just trying to get warm, I’m not stupid enough to think this is anything resembling closeness, but still, it feels nice. I bump my shoulder against hers.

  “So what will you do first, once we’ve switched back?”

  “I was thinking about that while I was waiting. I’m going to go straight over to Will’s. His bedroom is a room built inside their garage and it has—”

  “That door on the side of the house, I know.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “We once did a group project. He showed me his room.”

  Her eyes narrow.

  “He showed the whole group, okay?”

  This seems to satisfy her. “Anyway, I’ll sneak in. Tell him it’s Shane he should cut out of his life, not me.” She lifts her eyebrows and digs the toe of my sneaker into the dust. “After that, who knows?”

  She thinks sex is going to get him back because it’s worked in the past. But that was before she cheated on him.

  “What about you?” she asks. “What will you do first?”

  I think about the foster kids, the bottles that likely need to be sterilized, the Diaper Genie that will need emptying. “I don’t know. Regular stuff.”

  Just then, the ground rumbles faintly. “Train!” Joules shouts. She turns toward me and sits cross-legged. “Get into position.”

  We join hands and stare at each other. It’s a strange sensation. I’m staring at my regular face but, unlike the last time, it doesn’t feel so much like the face in the mirror. I’ve started to get used to seeing Joules as me, seeing me as Joules in the mirror. I grasp her stronger hands and they no longer feel like my own.

  The train gets close enough to hear the chug-chug of the engine. A whistle blows.

  I think of my bed. The patchwork quilt Gran brought home from Ireland one year. I didn’t like it at first because it was covered in these old-fashioned ladies with parasols hiding their faces—all in different colors and patterns. But tonight I want nothing more than to wrap myself in it, maybe even count the parasols, count the colors.

  Finally the train roars overhead.

  I shout to Joules. “Was my dad in the back room?”

  “What?” Grit from above patters down on us.

  “My dad. Was he watching The Weather Show tonight?”

  “I don’t know. He kept saying stuff about low pressure or whatever. Who cares? Make the freaking wish.”

  I smile. I knew he’d be babbling about low pressure. I knew it. I shift closer to Joules. “Close your eyes.” I peek to make sure she does. “Turn your face up.”

  “There’s crap raining down on me,” she wails. “Rocks and sand and … it’s disgusting!”

  “Shut up and do it!” With my own face turned up, scrunching my nose as dirt falls onto my eyelids, I shout, “I wish—we wish to be back in our own bodies. We wish to return to our own lives.”

  “We wish it now!” Joules shouts. “Now!”

  More grit than ever showers over us and the wind picks up. I can feel Joules shudder through her fingers. We wait as the bridge grows quieter.

  I open my eyes to see Andrea Birch staring back at me the same as before
. Joules gets up on her knees, red-faced, furious. She fills her hands with gravel and sand and starts hurling it at me. It stings, way worse than the bridge grit.

  “You piece of total crap!”

  I reach up to shield my face. “Stop it, Joules. You’re hurting me!”

  “I hate you! I hate you, it’s all your fault. I’m never talking to you again—ever!”

  More stones. I have no choice. Andrea Birch’s body is stronger than Joules’s; I stand up and run through the rain, all the way back to Skyline Drive.

  chapter 13

  I’ve been cut off. Joules made it very clear. Not a big deal under normal circumstances, but as it stands, Joules is my only ticket to my family. Without her, I have no way of finding out how everyone is, no way to find out if Joules’s negligence is endangering the Ks, no way to find out what’s happened to Michaela, no way to wiggle my way back into my family’s life, where I belong.

  I get back to Skyline Drive to find the party’s in full swing. There are so many cars parked along the winding hilltop road that there’s barely enough room for oncoming traffic. I walk up the driveway, passing a couple of groupie types vomiting in the bushes. The scene inside is even more wild. People with cigarettes, drinks and joints fill the halls and rooms. There’s an old guy with his belly protruding from a leather jacket that no longer zips. Some girls not much older than me with raccoon-smudged makeup and ripped-on-purpose fishnets. Band members, model types, even a few guys in suits with slicked-back hair and big gold rings.

  They all seem to know me. I enter each room to a chorus of “Hey, it’s the girl herself,” or “Joules, baby,” or “Jujube, come tell Uncle Chaz your troubles.” I just nod and smile and pass them by. No sign of Nigel, but plenty of his friends are rifling through his liquor cabinet. I look in his room. It’s occupied all right, but by three girls going through his closet, trying on his raggedy T-shirts. I leave them to it.