Change Places with Me(40)
“I understand perfectly.” Dr. Star looked satisfied. She got up, opened the door, and gestured for Evelyn to come inside.
Evelyn reached out for her, but she stepped back.
“Oh, she’ll settle down!” Dr. Star said. “The blue light—it can be like taking an ocean voyage. A bit of seasickness might set in.”
Seasick? More like thrown overboard and drowning. But—there was a life raft to cling to. It had letters on the side: Saturday two p.m. She just had to hold on until then.
Dr. Star and Evelyn spoke for a few minutes about the return visit. “No charge,” Dr. Star said, but Evelyn did not look pleased about coming back for the refresher. “We’ll need you to bring her in and take her home.”
“Of course,” Evelyn said, “if that’s what you really want, Rose. Or is it Clara?”
“Best if you continue to go by Rose.” Dr. Star turned to her. “Clara belongs to the past. But you, Rose—you have a future.”
CHAPTER 26
Outside, the girl—which was how she couldn’t help thinking of herself—felt even more unsteady. Who was she now, no-longer-Clara, not-yet-Rose? She was too full of blanks, like an unsolved crossword puzzle. The biggest blank of all—
Her name. She didn’t even know how many letters it was supposed to have.
It didn’t help that the sidewalk had the most enormous, treacherous-looking cracks, like something left by an earthquake—how could Rose not have noticed them? If the girl wasn’t careful, she could come crashing down.
Evelyn kept pace with her, even when the girl walked slower or sped up.
She’s practically breathing down my neck.
“You must be hungry,” Evelyn said.
True, the girl had to eat. This was something that needed to be done between now and Saturday, two p.m. Rose would want something new and exciting, something to make her taste buds dance. Clara, on the other hand, would’ve been fine with stale bread.
“How does pasta primavera sound?” Evelyn put a hand on the girl’s shoulder, trying to get her to stop. The girl kept going. “Listen, I just want to say, if you’d like to talk about it—”
“I’ll eat in my room, if it’s all the same to you,” the girl said evenly.
Evelyn said, “I understand.”
She wasn’t asking for understanding, especially not from Evelyn.
At home she went straight to her room and grabbed the bald elephant. She looked at it carefully, trying to imagine her mother doing the same thing. But she couldn’t. Her dad used to read to her in this room. She rummaged around inside herself, wanting to feel what Clara had felt, and not felt, all that time in the glass coffin, after suddenly losing her dad, and not having Kim, either, and living with Evil Lynn all those years. She had Clara’s memories, of course, but because of the Memory Enhancement, so much of Clara was gone forever. The girl felt a pang for this previous self she would never really know—a pang Rose hadn’t felt, it occurred to her. Well, maybe Rose hadn’t gotten around to it yet.
But Rose reached out to people who seemed alone. Shouldn’t the girl somehow try to feel closer to Clara, a lost soul if ever there was one?
That, as Rose would say, was as worthy a project as any.
In the meantime, she picked up her phone. An ad came on for antiaging skin care. Poor Clara, there wasn’t an antiaging ingredient in the world strong enough to penetrate her inner self. The girl swiped the ad away and tapped the calculator. It was seven p.m., so there were five hours until midnight, then five twenty-four-hour days until midnight Friday, and add twelve to get to noon on Saturday, plus two more final hours until two p.m. Total: 139 hours. Then of course each hour had sixty minutes, so there were 8,340 minutes, or 500,400 seconds before the red light would get turned on. She kept recalculating and watching the numbers, emerging and disappearing, in a cold, detached sequence.
The girl ate two full plates of pasta at the desk in her room. She slept through the night—with the light on.
Monday morning the girl woke to the hoo-hoo-ing of birds on Mrs. Moore’s windowsill. They sounded genuinely heartbroken. Memory Enhancement for birds—it was something Dr. Lola could start offering. The tagline was obvious—birds hoo-hoo-ing before and ha-ha-ing after.
Then she realized—the red light was gone. No blue light, either.
The girl had to get ready for school.
In the shower, which soap to use? Clara would’ve chosen the unscented soap; Rose had used Evelyn’s. Or should there be a third bar of soap? This was ridiculous, facing paralysis over soap. She closed her eyes and reached for a bar—which turned out to be Evelyn’s. Fine. The same thing with clothes—just grab a few things without looking and put them on. She ended up in blue pants and an old sweatshirt. She didn’t wear lipstick. She tucked some hair behind one ear and not the other.
At school, the halls felt small and stuffed with jostling, bellowing kids. One of them was talking about how Dylan Beck got in trouble last year on Halloween—“showing up in his underwear as the Invisible Man who didn’t know he wasn’t invisible.” But she noticed a girl with the most gorgeous purple hair. She couldn’t help stopping her, putting a hand on her arm, and saying, “Your hair is fantastic—it’s like the scent of lavender got captured in a hair color.” Oh God, should she have said that? But the purple-haired girl looked thrilled, which gave the girl a thrill, too.