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I write:
A,
I think I remember everything. Where are you today? Instead of writing a long email, I want to talk.
R
Almost immediately, I get a response.
R,
I am so relieved to hear from you. I am about two hours away, a boy named Dylan. But I will go wherever you want me to go.
A
I don’t want to wait. But I know I have to go to school to see if A did any damage without realizing it. So I tell A to meet me back at the bookstore, after school. We’ll have to wait until then.
His response is a simple
Thank you.
I don’t say anything back. I don’t need to. All I have to do is be there later on—and prepare to see what happened with everyone else on the yesterday I missed. I am expecting it to be a minefield—to have to account for something I said or didn’t say, someplace I went or didn’t go. I’m ready for the people in my life to be angry with me or upset with me or confused by me.
What happens instead is even worse:
Nobody seems to have noticed I was gone. Or wasn’t myself.
It starts with my mother, sitting in her usual chair. I ask her if I seemed off yesterday.
“No, you were perfectly pleasant,” she says. “We had a nice dinner.”
I don’t point out that a “nice dinner” should have seemed odd to her. Suspicious.
But she lives in her own world. I’m not surprised she didn’t notice.
My friends, though—I think they would have noticed something. Maybe not everything. But at least something.
I don’t feel them treating me any differently, though. I don’t feel any daylong gap in my friendship with them.
So I ask.
“Was I weird yesterday? Different?”
Rebecca tells me I was fine.
Preston says he didn’t really see me.
Ben pretends he didn’t hear the question.
Stephanie says, “Do you want to know who’s different? Steve’s different.”
And Justin—Justin says, “Yeah, you were weird, but that’s not exactly different.”
He’s joking. I can tell he’s joking. And I can tell from his joking that it was a good day, that we had a good time, that he didn’t mind me going to my mom’s doctor’s appointment instead of going home with him. A didn’t do anything to make things worse between us. If anything, A made it a little better.
I am relieved to have avoided being caught. And I’m pissed that no one noticed the difference.
—
