Change Places with Me(45)

No wonder it was such a huge business.

By the time she went to sleep, she realized there were only about sixty hours to go. Saturday, two p.m. was getting much, much closer. So why did it feel like it was moving further away?





CHAPTER 29


Thursday afternoon she sat at the bus stop and imagined the conversation she would have with the girl in the jean jacket. Maybe they’d get along so well they’d want to talk again, about deeper things, hopes and dreams. They’d exchange phone numbers and—

Wait. There was that ID pic on her phone. Something needed to be done about that, right away.

A few minutes later she pressed the buzzer in the lobby of Belle Heights Tower.

“Yeah?” Kim said over the intercom.

“It’s me,” the girl said.

“It’s you, all right. But it’s not next week yet.”

The girl faced the camera. “This is kinda important. Can I come up?”

Kim buzzed her in. The girl got on the elevator and pressed fourteen. A gray-haired man got on with her, pressed nine, and said pleasantly, “It’s cold, it’s muggy, it’s sunny, it’s raining . . . when will the weather make up its mind?”

Small talk. Clara would’ve kept her head down, bangs over her eyes, silent. Rose would’ve engaged the man in lively conversation. The girl glanced over at him and said, “It’s really weird when there’s no weather at all.”

He gave her kind of a look before getting out on his floor.

Outside the elevator she was greeted by Kim, her hair unbraided and covering her shoulders like a thick, glossy blanket. The girl had forgotten that Kim had fantastic hair. Everyone thought Astrid had the best hair in the grade, but clearly she didn’t.

The girl followed Kim down the hall, through the living room, and past the bathroom with the fuzzy blue toilet-seat cover. This time they went to Kim’s room, which was an utter mess. Piles of books and papers and clothes were everywhere, along with scattered notes and slapdash but surprisingly vivid sketches of people with green skin, white cows with large brown spots, and furry gray wolves.

“Great drawings.”

“They’re possible ideas for Into the Woods. I’m having so much fun with it.” Kim plopped down on her bed, on top of a mass of T-shirts, and gestured for the girl to sit in the straight-backed wooden chair at her desk, which only had a few sweaters draped over it.

The girl folded the sweaters neatly and put them on top of Kim’s dresser. She’d always been good at this. Kim’s window looked down on a parking lot. The whoosh of traffic and honking cars on Belle Heights Expressway was actually louder here than in the girl’s apartment. “So, why I’m here.” The girl sat on the wooden chair. “Can I trust you, Kim, as a cross-my-heart friend?”

“Of course,” Kim said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

“I’m going to tell you something, and you have to promise not to tell anybody. People who’ve done this—no one can ever know about it, not husbands or wives or children or coworkers.”

Kim threw a pillow at her. It arced and landed softly on her lap. “I promise not to tell your children.”

“Kim. It’s not funny. There’s one person you must especially never, ever tell.”

“And who’s that?”

The girl threw the pillow directly back with a little force. “Me.”

The girl told Kim everything; Kim had never heard of Memory Enhancement.

“Dr. Star said I had extraordinary resistance,” the girl said. “My dad thought I was strong willed. My stepmother called it a stubborn streak. A rose by any other name, you know?” She’d had no intention of saying anything to anyone else, either blurting it out like she did with Mr. Slocum, or deliberately, as she was doing now. But she wanted Kim’s help. “I have to go back for a refresher, this Saturday at two p.m. Rose mustn’t remember my second visit to Forget-Me-Not. So you can’t say anything to trigger it. It’s my last chance—I don’t think they’d let her back another time.”

“You’re talking about yourself in the third person, you know,” Kim said.

“Huh? I’m a third person?”

“No, I mean you’re using the he/she voice about yourself, Rose.”

“Oh.” But it stuck in her craw a little, as her dad used to say, this idea of someone else entirely. Wasn’t she crowded enough already? “Kim, there’s something else I need to ask. Please take my picture again. I know it sounds kinda crazy, but I have to find this girl. She wears a jean jacket with a large embroidered rose on the back. She’s got dark hair, chin length, and really red lipstick. Have you seen her around?”

“Well,” Kim said, “I see someone who looks a lot like her.”

The girl straightened her back. “Anyway. I sit at the bus stop and look around. It’s the best place to see lots of people.”

“You sit at the bus stop—like the beat-up old woman I created when I put makeup on you?”

“This is completely different. I’m waiting for the girl in the jean jacket, so I can talk to her a little. What if she wants to call me sometime? I can’t have that ID pic popping up.”

Kim got out her phone. “Sure, I’ll take your picture.”