Replay

Chapter 4

4

I don’t know about anyone else who’s died and come back to life, but all I want is cheese.

Smooth, tangy, creamy, soft, orange or white—it’s all I’ve been eating for the past week, despite my mother’s badgering. When I first got home from the hospital I sat down and ate half a package of longhorn cheddar. Oh my God, heaven.

Cheese and sleep. I must have slept eighteen hours yesterday. Mom says I don’t have to go back to school until I feel a hundred percent strong. They’re used to me gutting it out, all those injuries over the years—the torn ACL, the broken wrist, the sprains and dislocations, everything else—so if I’m sleeping this much, they must figure I need it. The doctor told them that after a trauma—even a short one like mine—the body can need a long time to recover. Fine. I’ll take it. I have other things to do.

Like this morning. I sat out on the porch with my leg propped up, drinking tea, staring at the aspens in front of our house and really trying to understand them. That pale cool bark. The perfect construction of the leaves with their spindly stems that let them twist and flutter in the wind like fans whipping back and forth. Who decided on aspens? There are enough trees in the world, so why those? Is it just because they’re beautiful? God or someone decided hey, I need something white and green here, with some shimmer to it, and so bam, we have the aspen, ladies and gentlemen, hope you enjoy it.

Same with the birds. So many unnecessary varieties of them. The colors, the beaks, the wing patterns, the calls and cries, the bug-eaters and the nut-crackers and all the rest. Why? Isn’t the world busy enough? Why do we need wrens and parrots and ostriches? It’s obscene, it’s so overdone.

So I sat there looking at the pines and the aspens and listening to all the competing species of birds, and meanwhile somewhere in a high school three miles from here hundreds of teenagers were walking around in their own particular varieties—with and without zits, with blue eyes and brown eyes, boobs and no boobs, brains and no brains, everyone so worried about how they look and how everyone else sees them, and WHAT’S THE POINT?

And here I was, boobs of my own, green eyes, blond hair, and who cares? Because they’re all disposable. They don’t mean anything. They’re all just a flip of the cards.

I can’t tell anyone these thoughts. There are too many of them and most are clearly crazy—“Why are there birds? Why does anyone love me? Did I ever matter in this world?”—and meanwhile I smile and say thank you for the grilled cheese (which I keep scraping off the bread—not ready for bread yet), and try to keep it together until I can go to sleep again.

And then on top of all that, I can’t stop thinking about David.

And tell me that’s not crazy. We’re talking David Mayer here—bad clothes, bad hair, the guy who always smells like garlic and paint. That specimen.

So why was his face the one that flashed across my brain just as I was coming back to life? Not my parents, not my sister, not my friends, but David flippin’ Mayer. A guy I’ve never spoken more than three words to in my life.

But it has to mean something, right? You don’t just see a face for no reason as you’re flying back into your body.

So what am I supposed to do about it? Call him up, say, “Hey, David, want to hear something funny?” And then what comes after that? Does he have some message for me? Some series of tasks I’m supposed to complete, like Hercules? “Bring me the head of Gargantua . . .”

Reincarnation for Amateurs—that’s what I need. Some sort of manual to tell me how I’m supposed to be and act and think anymore. It can’t be that when you survive your own death all you’re meant to do with your life is sleep, eat cheese, and stare at trees all day.

Maybe I should call David.

At some point.