Chapter 5
836 Words
5
When Halli returned from her run, she found my mom sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee and reading the Sunday paper.
“Oh!” my mom said, looking up. “I thought you were still asleep. Were you...outside?”
Halli quickly put on the sweatshirt she wore tied around my waist. She didn’t need my mother to see how sweaty my T-shirt was.
“I felt so much better when I woke up,” Halli said, “I thought I’d go out and get some fresh air.”
“Oh.” Since that’s not the sort of thing I do normally—ever—my mother gave her a puzzled look.
And Halli decided right then and there that it was smarter to make up a longer-lasting excuse than to have to keep sneaking around.
“I was thinking about it the whole time I was sick,” she said. “I realized I need to start taking better care of myself.”
“Well, I agree with that,” my mom answered, as Halli suspected she would. “I always say you need more sleep. And honey, I know you don’t want to keep hearing this, but I really think you have to stop pushing yourself so hard about Columbia.”
“Hm.” Halli nodded without saying more.
“Are you hungry?” my mom asked. “I think there are still some waffles.”
My favorite Sunday morning breakfast—mainly because I can make them myself. Just pop them in the toaster and wait. That’s about the level of my cooking skills.
“Actually,” Halli said, “I was hoping we could go to the store this morning. There are some things I’d like to get. Now that I’m feeling better.”
“Okay, sure,” my mom said. “I need to get a few things, too. Let me just finish my coffee and we’ll go in a little while.”
“Good,” Halli said. “Thank you.” Then she smiled.
And right there, I’m surprised my mother didn’t catch it: the insincerity. A kind of forced smile that only involved Halli’s mouth—my mouth, technically—and never traveled all the way up to my eyes. The kind of smile you give a stranger who apologizes after accidentally bumping into you. “Sorry.” “No problem.” Fake smile.
When I asked Halli, during that short visit I was able to accomplish before being dragged off to the hospital, whether she talked to my mom, Halli’s answer was, “As much as I can.”
At the time I thought she meant she talked to my mom as often as she could—as in, she really wanted to be around her.
What I realize now is that she meant, “As much as I can stand.”
Because the truth is, Halli has never had a proper mother. And by this point in her life, I can’t blame her for not wanting one. Her real mother is awful: critical, shallow, materialistic, and mean. And her father isn’t much better. I spent a whole weekend with them, and it was clear from the start that neither of them likes her.
Plus it’s hard to get past the fact that they abandoned Halli as soon as she was born and let her be raised by her grandmother. Not that Halli wasn’t better off because of it, but something like that doesn’t exactly create the kind of close parent-daughter bond my own mom and I have.
So I understand that having to share a house with someone who looks just like her own mother must have been hard for Halli. And pretending that she loved her the way I really do love my own mother? Well, impossible.
But Halli tried—or at least she tried to do a good job of faking it. For my sake and for the sake of her own situation. And I appreciate that.
Halli left the kitchen and went to take a shower. She stood under the hot water for a long time. Thinking.
All during that first week, she had thought of my body as mine. As something she was temporarily stuck in until I could figure out the physics and take it back.
But now...
She drizzled shampoo into my hand and scrubbed it into my hair. She’d gotten used to feeling the shorter haircut as it slid through her fingers, the same way she had to adjust to all the other differences between our two bodies. We might be parallel versions of each other, but anyone looking at us side by side would be able to tell we weren’t the same person. Halli’s body—the one I was currently occupying—was strong and athletic. Mine was...not. But at least it hadn’t completely broken down during all those long runs Halli took it on. That gave her some hope.
There’s nothing special about the body, Halli could hear Ginny telling her in a memory from long ago. It was one of the worst conversations she ever had with her grandmother, but also one of the most important. It helped mold Halli into the kind of person she was now.
It had been Ginny’s way of telling Halli she should always be prepared, no matter what. But now Halli realized the lesson meant so much more.
She had been thinking about it for the past twenty-four hours—ever since she listened to the professor and me discussing whether or not her old body was gone. Ginny never could have predicted that one day her granddaughter would end up in the wrong universe, inhabiting some other girl’s life. But the lesson still applied—maybe more now than ever.
There’s nothing special about the body.
Halli hoped her grandmother was right.
- Writer
