Trade Me (Cyclone #1)(8)

I switch the apple back to my left hand. Five. That’s the rule. I have to switch the fruit from hand to hand five times, slowly, before I eat it. By the time I’ve done that, the apple will have reached body temperature and I can decide if I want to eat it and make it a part of me.

But my hands are flushed and hot. The apple’s too warm now, as if it’s absorbed all the heat of my emotions. If I eat it, that conversation will become a part of me, and I’ll never escape it.

So I do the same thing I did after Peter’s funeral: I go for a run instead.

I eschew sweatpants in favor of running shorts and a T-shirt. The weather monitor on my watch informs me that it’s fifty-two and raining, but I feel hot. I feel the illusory weight of a hundred stares on me as I jaunt outside and fall into a warm-up jog. At first, my muscles are sluggish and the rain is frigid against my bare thighs.

I run harder. I’m a little hungry; maybe I should have eaten that apple after all. But here’s a trick of physiology, one that I learned in high school even though the teachers didn’t put it this way. The fight or flight response shuts down the parasympathetic nervous system. It’s complicated, and physiology is not my bag of tricks, but it all comes down to the same thing: Your body can’t digest food while you’re running. If I could run all the time, I’d never get hungry.

I can’t run all the time, but I can try. I run until the ache slips from my quads, until all sense of hunger dissipates. With every step, I imagine my body searching for energy, needing to find it somewhere. There is nowhere it can draw that energy from, nowhere except my body itself. I run, and with every step I get smaller. If I run hard enough, I tell myself, maybe one day I can run myself into someone else altogether.

Deep down, I know it doesn’t matter how fast I run. I’m f*cked up at any speed. Deep down, I know I have to get out. But I don’t know which direction is out any longer. I wish I could outrun myself. I wish I could trade this stupid problem for anything else.

Running is a double-edged sword. It’s a huge part of the problem that has me so badly tangled. But it also rewinds my day, leaving the worst of it on the trail behind me. It takes me back through my conversation with my dad, leaching the emotion away. It takes me back through a lunch I barely ate, back through this morning.

God, this morning.

Sometimes, you build someone up in your mind. Yes, I noticed Tina’s legs first. And her hair second—I’m a sucker for long hair, and hers, when she lets it down, falls halfway down her back, thick and straight and dark, catching light and releasing it in little glints. But she’s also smart, focused, and determined. Tina seemed exactly the kind of girl I’d go for if I had my shit together. There’s something that’s sexy as f*ck about a woman who knows what she wants. She seemed like the kind of girl who would see through my bullshit in a hot minute.

Look at that. I was right.

I go over her words, again and again, letting the truth in them hurt me as much as the ache in my lungs.

You do know what it’s like to get something in exchange for nothing. You’re an expert at it.

Nobody here would care about a word you said if your family was on food stamps. Try trading lives with me. You couldn’t manage it, not for two weeks.

She has no idea how right she is. Hell, I can’t even manage being myself.

Try trading lives with me. You couldn’t manage it, not for two weeks.

Try trading lives with me.

It starts as a stupid, wistful idea, based only on the fact that I want to get out and I can’t. Try trading lives with me.

Fuck. I totally would. I want what she has. I want that certainty. That determination. Me? I’m just a pair of legs and lungs, moving, moving, moving, for fear that if I stop I’ll vanish. But this idea doesn’t go away.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s not a solution. I don’t have solutions, not anymore. But some of my best ideas, my most brilliant answers, have come to me when I mixed things up and got out of my head. Maybe all I need is a different perspective. A radically different one.

Try trading lives with me.

I want, I want, I want. And maybe what I want, most of all, is someone who will finally see through my bullshit. Someone who will kick me in the ass and tell me to stop f*cking around like this. I have a problem and I don’t want it.

Try trading lives with me.

I would in three seconds. Any way I could.

3.

TINA

By the time I get home at seven, the rest of the day has eroded the worst of my morning memories. Another hour of classes, five hours at the library…my mind only has so much emotional space. The events of the morning are impossibly far away when I open my laptop. The hinge catches; I adjust it and idly check my email.

From: Maria Lopez

Subject: Something you’re not telling me?

For a second, I have no idea what she could mean. Maria is my best friend and roommate. She knows everything about me—or at least, as much as any one person can know. Then the events of the morning come rushing back: me opening my big mouth, the class, Blake Reynolds.

I thought I was safe from the prospect of Facebook blowing up—but then, Blake did know my name. I open a new tab, check my notifications…

Mabel beat my score in an online game. Jen from high school tagged me in a three-year-old photo. There’s a half-dozen likes on my post this morning about wearing my lucky sweater. Other than that? Nothing.