Switch (2 page)

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center of the room. On one side, I was stuck holding hands with this doughy, dopey kid. His name was Brandon, but everyone called him Pillsbury. He had sweaty hands. I couldn't wait for the experiment to be over.

A girl named Beanie was directly across from me. Beanie and I would become best friends, but I didn't know that yet. Back then my best friend was this girl called Avon, but she was in a different science class.

After making sure that we were all holding hands, Mr. P skittered over with a little wooden box with a switch on one side and different-colored wires sticking out of the top. Mr. P took one kid by the hand and then put his other hand on the box. "As soon as I flip this switch, I will take Marina's hand, which will make an unbroken chain! Remember, electricity always takes the easiest path!"

A few kids looked nervous. I wasn't scared. Mr. P would never hurt anyone.

He flipped the switch, and one girl yelped. The boy next to her giggled. Mr. P took the hand of the kid on his other side, creating a closed circle. The electricity traveled down the line, clicking through wrists, shooting through fingers.

It all happened so fast.

When the current reached me, I didn't yelp. I didn't giggle. I didn't say anything at all--because the force didn't simply pass through me with a pinch in one wrist and then the other. For a flash, I felt like I was floating near the ceiling, looking down at the classroom, the way they say you do when you die.

Then the current reached Beanie, and I wasn't watching from

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above anymore. I was watching from the other side of the circle. I was staring at myself. I was staring back.

The current went around another time, and I blinked. I was back where I should be, next to Pillsbury. Beanie looked at me a little funny; I looked at her a little funny too. We said nothing.

I tried to forget about it. Just a little too much electricity. A dizzy spell. Water conducts electricity; everybody knows that. And Pillsbury's hands were so sweaty, they were practically dripping.

When I got home, Evelyn was in the kitchen, sitting at my mother's computer. Because she emits such a strong electrical force, she can make it work without even touching the keys; she just waves her hand over the keyboard and concentrates really hard. Evelyn says that MySpace has given her a whole new lease on life, which is quite an endorsement when you consider that Evelyn is actually dead.

"How was school?" she asked, as she did every day, logging off the computer. Since she died when my mother was four, Evelyn never got to do the welcome-home-from-school routine in real life, so she's trying to make up for it. Besides, it's not like she's got someplace better to be. As soon as she walks out the door, she gets lost in a fog.

Without looking at her, I opened the fridge and shrugged. My orange-and-white cat, Fluffernutter, ran into the room and began twining himself around my legs. Fluff can't see Evelyn. Or, if he can, he knows she can't feed him or let him outside, so he chooses to ignore her.

I pulled a can of cat food and a jug of milk out of the fridge.

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Evelyn would get me an after-school snack if she could--which is to say, if she had a body.

"Is something wrong?" she asked, alarmed. "Did something happen?"

"Nothing's wrong," I said a little too sharply. "I've just got a lot of homework, is all." It didn't even occur to me to tell her what had happened. It never crossed my mind that she'd understand.

She frowned and checked my face. Then her expression softened with relief. "Hormones." She tapped her nose. "What?"

"You've got a little pimple, sweetie. Right on the end of your nose. It's the hormones. They can affect your mood, too." If only it were that simple.

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***

5

Evelyn assures me am not a witch . She assured me of that three weeks later, after I ended up in a strange cottage, in a body I did not know.

Thunderstorms had never scared me. I'd lived my whole life in Sandyland, after all. We have no video arcades here, no miniature golf, no mall. But we have noisy, flashy storms, and you take your thrills where you can get them.

It was the first big storm of the summer, and I was sitting up in bed, admiring the way the lightning lit the old maple tree in our yard like the beam from a lighthouse. I remember the storm coming closer: five-Mississippi, then four-Mississipi, then three. I hoped it would pass over my house with a giant flash-boom, an electrical explosion, an adrenaline rush.

It never made it to my house; or, if it did, I had already gone. At two-Mississippi, I was flooded with heat, like when you stand too close to a bonfire and the wood suddenly tumbles down,

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releasing an eruption of sparks. The lightning flashed, and it was like I became part of the light, the power, the surge.

I blacked out, only for a few minutes, I think, though it may have been longer.

I woke up in a room I had never seen before, the storm still raging outside. I leaped out of bed and came face-to-face with a mirror--but the brown eyes staring back at me were not my own.

I screamed. There was a shuffling sound in the hallway, and a woman came in, her eyebrows arched with concern, her light eyes wide with love.

"Kimmy, baby, are you okay?"

I shook my head no, my throat too tight with fear to speak. I kept staring at the mirror. Every time the lightning flashed, I'd get a quick, overlit view of the girl's face, like a camera bulb going off over and over.

Kimmy's mother took me in her soft arms. Her hair was black, like her daughter's, only without the thick white streak. She smelled like the yellow moisturizer you put on after you've been in the sun all day. I clutched her, sobbing wildly, the wailing sound unfamiliar to me, so much higher and squeakier than my own cries.

"It's just a thunderstorm," Kimmy's mother cooed. "You haven't been scared of thunder since you were a little girl."

I buried my head in her shoulder and nodded as if I believed her. She led me back to the bed, which was narrow, hard, and covered with a nubby white bedspread. I lay down, quivering as she sang the mockingbird song over and over. I squeezed my eyes shut. Maybe if I didn't see this unfamiliar woman, this unfamiliar

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room, they would stop being real. Kimmy's mother sang until I finally drifted off into a dreamless sleep.

When I woke up the next morning, I was back in my own bed, Evelyn lounging at the end with her usual cigarette. "It's time we had a talk," she said.

Evelyn told me the universe is filled with electrical fields none of us can see--invisible highways and paths that swerve and veer and join us in ways most people would never imagine. According to Evelyn, she and I have unusually strong electrical and magnetic fields that jump and pull against our will. Normally, the pulls are not strong enough to take us out of our bodies. The danger comes when the electrical forces around us become so powerful that the electricity within us darts out to join them. When that happens, our spirits look for a body to land in, much the same way that lightning seeks the quickest path to the ground. That's when we switch.

"Can I land in
any
body?" I asked, my eyes widening at the thought of looking into a mirror and seeing Pillsbury or Mr. P staring back at me.

She shook her head. "When you were born, the moon set your magnetic signature. You can only switch with a close match, someone who was born under the same moon as you." I checked the moon cycles for the year I was born: I can switch with someone born a week before or three weeks after me. Because males and females emit different magnetic fields, I only switch with girls.

"How do you know all of this?" I asked Evelyn once the shock

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of what she had told me had sort of sunk in. "Did someone tell you? Someone from ... beyond?"

She looked up at the ceiling. "No one told me anything. I just figured it out."

I stared at her. "So, do you
know
this? Or are you just making it up?"

She scowled at me and pulled herself up tall. "You got a better explanation?"

So far, Evelyn has been right. I only switch with girls my own age who have birthdays in March. I only switch during an electrical "event"--a thunderstorm, usually. Afterward, when the outside forces dissipate, and I fall asleep, I return to my own body.

Now, when a storm approaches, I close my eyes and breathe deeply. Switching doesn't hurt, really. I just can't breathe for a moment, like when you get the wind knocked out of you. When I arrive--wherever I arrive--I keep my eyes closed for a few moments and take a deep breath. Sometimes I try to guess where I've landed, though in the summer it's almost impossible because there are so many strangers around.

Storms tend to hit Sandyland at night, which works well. I don't mind sleeping in strange beds, at least not too much. One time I ended up in a tent off the beach. That was a rough night, and I barely slept, but the next morning, as always, I wound up back in my own bed, my body feeling oddly relaxed and refreshed. One stormy day I switched during the afternoon and found myself in a roomful of people watching a slasher movie on DVD. The family all looked so bored with one another and so annoyed to be stuck missing a beach day because of the rain that nobody said a

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thing, but just stared and stared at the little television set. I leaned back into the scratchy couch (which smelled of mildew) and closed my eyes. When I opened them again, I was home.

And what of my own body? What happens when someone else looks in the mirror and sees me looking back?

"I won't let that happen," Evelyn said softly. "Whenever you leave your body, I'll jump in and hold your place." Finally she looked me in the eye. "What happened to me ... I won't let it happen to you."

"What happened to you?" I asked, unsure whether I really wanted to hear the answer.

"You are a gift to me," she said, ignoring the question. "Before you were born, I felt myself fading away. It was like I was looking at your mother and grandfather through a dense fog. Your birth let me see again."

If I am a gift to Evelyn, her gift to me is this: Whenever she sees my spirit leaving my body, she jumps in it to hold my place.

We weren't sure if it would work, at first. Evelyn wasn't born under the same moon as I. Heck, when I was born, she wasn't even
alive.
But she's been floating around for so long and has absorbed so much random energy that she's become a kind of universal donor of switching.

"Think of it as musical chairs," she told me. "We've got three spirits and two bodies. If your body is suddenly vacant and I'm right there, I should be able to slip in first."

I thought of a hotel with a "Vacancy" sign one minute, a "No Vacancy" the next. I liked the chair idea better. But however you

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want to look at it, Evelyn was right: As long as she's nearby, she can switch into my body the instant I leave it.

As for the third spirit, the one without a chair (which sounds much better than "without a body"), it's left to hover in a kind of unconscious in-between state that resembles neither life nor death. Evelyn says I should think of it as a kind of deep, peaceful sleep. I try to.

The next (and last) time I switched with the girl named Kimmy, I snuck into the yard to see where her rented cottage was: a block from my own house, closer to the ocean. I sniffed the sea air and then tiptoed back inside, slipping under Kimmy's nubby white bedspread.

In the morning I awoke in my own bed, with a stomachache.

"It worked!" Evelyn crowed from the end of my bed. While I'd been tiptoeing around Kimmy's cottage, Evelyn had been raiding the freezer. She'd been craving ice cream for forty years. It was just as good as she remembered, though maybe she should have passed on that third bowl.

Now I'm no longer shocked when I look in the mirror and see someone else's face peering back. I tell myself that it's not so bad, that it will only happen when lightning gets too close, and mostly in the summer, when Sandyland's population doubles. I tell myself that ultimately I'm in control: To return to my body, all I have to do is sleep.

I told myself all of this for two years. And I believed myself. That was my mistake.

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***

6

The first time I saw the girl, I was walking along the beach with Beanie. We had left the wide public stretch and were strolling along a narrow strip of sand that disappeared at high tide. A wall of boulders parallel to the beach kept the ocean from washing away the expensive houses that rose above it. Each house had a set of concrete steps leading to the beach. Each set of steps had a sign that read, private property: keep Off steps. Other signs told us to keep Off rocks. Walking on the beach was allowed, if reluctantly.

We went all the way to the water's edge, the chilly sea licking our feet. An occasional seashell glinted through the froth before slipping back into the surf,

Beanie and I wore our red lifeguard swimsuits--hers a one piece, mine a two, both with racing backs. It was the last day of sea-guard camp, and my muscles felt floppy from a morning spent battling the waves, paddling on a surfboard, and hauling a succession