Someday. David Levithan

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NATHAN

      By my calculations, if you live to be eighty years old, you end up being alive for 29,220 days. And you’re likely to live much longer than those 29,220 days.

      So one day shouldn’t matter.

      Especially if it’s a day you can’t remember. I mean, I have plenty of days I can’t remember. Most days are days I can’t remember, once I get a month or two away from them.

       What was I up to on October 29th? Or September 7th? Well, I guess I woke up at home. I went to school. I saw my friends. I imagine I ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner, though I couldn’t tell you any of the more intimate details.

      Most of our memory is based on educated guesswork. And our memory loses days all the time.

      But it’s weirder and scarier if it’s a day you lose as it’s happening. A day when you wake up the next morning and have no idea where you’ve been or what you’ve done. A day that’s a total blank.

      When you have a day like that, it’s a hole in your life, and as much as you’re trying to pretend it’s not there, you can’t help but poke it, probe it. Because even though it’s empty, you can still feel something when you touch its sides.

      I woke up on the side of the road.

      Passed out, the police said.

      Drunk, they thought. Then they tested and saw I wasn’t.

      Out too late, they said. When they brought me home, they told my parents I needed to watch myself.

      But I don’t drink. I don’t stay out late.

      It didn’t make any sense.

      It was like I’d been possessed. And soon that was the story.

       The devil made me do it.

      Only in this case, the devil had an email address. And when I emailed him, he swore he wasn’t the devil.

      It got really weird. This reverend got involved. Talked to my parents about killing my demons. I wanted to believe him, because it’s easier to believe that an empty space is an evil space. We don’t want to be helpless, so we create things to fight. Only my fight never got started. I stopped believing the reverend after he began to act like he was the evil one, luring this girl to my house and attacking her. He didn’t even explain himself after I helped her escape. He said he’d needed to talk to her. Then he was gone.

      Meanwhile, the person who’d taken my life for a day—they said they bounced from body to body, day after day. I didn’t know how to believe that. I had more questions.

      But then that person was gone, too. And I was left with this blank space where a day of my life used to be.

      But blank is never really blank. Take a blank sheet of paper. Yeah, there’s no writing on it. Nothing for you to read. But then hold it really close. Stare at it for a long time. You’ll start to see patterns there. You’ll start to see shapes and gradations and distortions. Hold it up to the light and you’ll see even more. You’ll see a whole topography within the blankness. And sometimes, if you look really carefully, you’ll start to see a word.

      For me, that word was Rhiannon.

      I had no idea what it meant. I had no idea why I was remembering it. But it was there in the depth of the blank space.

      The next part was easy. There were only three Rhiannons within a fifty-mile radius. One of them was near my age. And she looked familiar, though I couldn’t have explained why.

      The hard part was figuring out what to do with this information. I had no idea what I would say to her. I remember you but I don’t understand why. That sounded weird. And I was tired of having everyone look at me like I was weird.

      But now here I am. I’ve come over to her house, because not going over to her house was killing me. I ring her doorbell. And from the minute she sees me, she knows exactly who I am.

      I’m not prepared for that.

      I’m also not prepared for everything she tells me, and how easily she says it. It’s almost like she’s grateful to tell me what she knows, like I’m the one doing her the favor. But I’m just as grateful. All along, we’ve been partners at the jigsaw, and it’s only now that we’re realizing how some of the pieces fit. She’s telling me the person who talked to me, the person who took that day from me and lived my life before leaving me at the side of the road, is named A. I tell her that, yeah, I met A two days in a row, when he/she was calling himself/herself Andrew and was in the bodies of two different girls, two days in a row. Rhiannon doesn’t seem surprised. But I’m damn surprised to be talking to someone who hears what I have to say and believes all of it. Rhiannon tells me A was really sorry about what happened with me—and from the way she apologizes on A’s behalf, I realize that, whoa, she is totally in love with this person who goes from body to body. The hole A’s left in her life is even bigger than the one in mine. I lost a day. She’s lost more than that.

      “You must think I’m crazy,” she says to me when she’s done.

      How can I convey to her that I’ve had the same thought about a million times over the past couple months? How can I get across that when weird things—when really weird things—happen to you, it suddenly opens you up into believing all these other really weird things could be true?

      “I think what happened to us is crazy,” I tell her. “But that’s not us.”

      I fill her in on the parts I know—about how Reverend Poole said I’d been possessed by the devil, and that there were other people who’d had the same thing happen to them all around the world. He told me I wasn’t alone, which was the thing I most wanted to hear. The whole time, though, he was using me—and when I finally figured that out, he turned on me. He said I had no idea what I was involved in. He told me I’d ruined my only chance of knowing what was wrong with me. I’d have no future, because part of me would always be stuck in the past.

      I’m sixteen years old. Having an adult yell these things at me was hard, even as I also felt it was, you know, wrong. He was the only person who’d believed me, and because of that, I’d believed him in return. But now I couldn’t. Because what he was doing was cursing me.

      I didn’t know what to say. I guess I thought I’d have another chance, that he’d come back and we’d talk it over. I thought he was getting something out of helping me. But as I said, he was just using me. Once he was gone, that was it.

      I tell all this to Rhiannon as we sit at her kitchen table.

      “You haven’t heard from him at all?” she asks.

      I shake my head, then ask back, “And you haven’t heard from A?”

      I can see how much it hurts her to say no. I’ll be honest—I’ve never had a girlfriend, and I’ve definitely never been in love. But I’ve been around enough people in love to know what one of them looks like. A’s disappeared, but her love hasn’t.

      “A СКАЧАТЬ