“Yeah,” I say, “it was great to meet you, too.”

I thank her about five different ways. Then Justin drives over and honks.

Our time is up.

Amy Tran’s parents haven’t called the police. They haven’t even gotten home yet. I check the house phone’s voicemail, but the school hasn’t called.

It’s the one lucky thing that’s happened all day.

Day 5998

Something is wrong the minute I wake up the next morning. Something chemical.

It’s barely even morning. This body has slept until noon. Because this body was up late, getting high. And now it wants to be high again. Right away.

I’ve been in the body of a pothead before. I’ve woken up still drunk from the night before. But this is worse. Much worse.

There will be no school for me today. There will be no parents waking me up. I am on my own, in a dirty room, sprawled on a dirty mattress with a blanket that looks like it was stolen from a child. I can hear other people yelling in other rooms of the house.

There comes a time when the body takes over the life. There comes a time when the body’s urges, the body’s needs, dictate the life. You have no idea you are giving the body the key. But you hand it over. And then it’s in control. You mess with the wiring and the wiring takes charge.

I have only had glimpses of this before. Now I really feel it. I can feel my mind immediately combating the body. But it’s not easy. I cannot sense pleasure. I have to cling to the memory of it. I have to cling to the knowledge that I am only here for one day, and I have to make it through.

I try to go back to sleep, but the body won’t let me. The body is awake now, and it knows what it wants.

I know what I have to do, even though I don’t really know what’s going on. Even though I have not been in this situation before, I have been in situations before where it’s been me against the body. I have been ill, seriously ill, and the only thing to do is to power through the day. At first I thought there was something I could do within a single day that could make everything better. But very soon I learned my own limitations. Bodies cannot be changed in a day, especially not when the real mind isn’t in charge.

I don’t want to leave the room. If I leave the room, anything and anyone can happen. Desperately, I look around for something to help me through. There is a decrepit bookshelf, and on it is a selection of old paperbacks. These will save me, I decide. I open up an old thriller and focus on the first line. Darkness had descended on Manassas, Virginia.…

The body does not want to read. The body is alive with electric barbed wire. The body is telling me there is only one way to fix this, only one way to end the pain, only one way to feel better. The body will kill me if I don’t listen to it. The body is screaming. The body demands its own form of logic.

I read the next sentence.

I lock the door.

I read the third sentence.

The body fights back. My hand shakes. My vision blurs.

I am not sure I have the strength to resist this.

I have to convince myself that Rhiannon is on the other side. I have to convince myself that this isn’t a pointless life, even though the body is telling me it is.

The body has obliterated its memories in order to hone its argument. There isn’t much for me to access. I must rely on my own memories, the ones that are separate from this.

I must remain separate from this.

I read the next sentence, then the next sentence. I don’t even care about the story. I am moving from word to word, fighting the body from word to word.

It’s not working. The body makes me feel like it wants to defecate and vomit. First in the usual way. Then I feel I want to defecate through my mouth and vomit through the other end. Everything is being mangled. I want to claw at the walls. I want to scream. I want to punch myself repeatedly.

I have to imagine my mind as something physical, something that can control the body. I have to picture my mind holding the body down.

I read another sentence.

Then another.

There is pounding on the door. I scream that I’m reading.

They leave me alone.

I don’t have what they want in this room.

They have what I want outside this room.

I must not leave this room.

I must not let the body out of this room.

I imagine her walking the hallways. I imagine her sitting next to me. I imagine her eyes meeting mine.

Then I imagine her getting in his car, and I stop.

The body is infecting me. I am getting angry. Angry that I am here. Angry that this is my life. Angry that so many things are impossible.

Angry at myself.

Don’t you want it to stop? the body asks.

I must push myself as far away from the body as I can.

Even as I’m in it.

I have to go to the bathroom. I really have to go to the bathroom.

Finally, I pee in a soda bottle. It splashes all over.

But it’s better than leaving this room.

If I leave the room, I will not be able to stop the body from getting what it wants.

I am ninety pages into the book. I can’t remember any of it.

Word by word.

The fight is exhausting the body.

I am winning.

It is a mistake to think of the body as a vessel. It is as active as any mind, as any soul. And the more you give yourself to it, the harder your life will be. I have been in the bodies of starvers and purgers, gluttons and addicts. They all think their actions make their lives more desirable. But the body always defeats them in the end.

I just need to make sure the defeat doesn’t take while I’m inside.

I make it to sundown. Two hundred sixty-five pages gone. I am shivering under the filthy blanket. I don’t know if it’s the temperature in the room or if it’s me.

Almost there, I tell myself.

There is only one way out of this, the body tells me.

At this point, I don’t know if it means drugs or death.

The body might not even care, at this point.

Finally, the body wants to sleep.

I let it.

Day 5999

My mind is thoroughly wrung out, but I can tell Nathan Daldry has gotten a good night’s sleep.

Nathan is a good guy. Everything in his room is in order. Even though it’s only Saturday morning, he’s already done his homework for the weekend. He’s set his alarm for eight o’clock, not wanting the day to go to waste. He was probably in bed by ten.

I go on his computer and check my email, making sure to write myself some notes about the last few days, so I can remember them. Then I log in to Justin’s email and find out there’s a party tonight at Steve Mason’s house. Steve’s address is only a Google search away. When I map out the distance between Nathan’s house and Steve’s, I find it’s only a ninety-minute drive.

It looks like Nathan might be going to a party tonight.

First, I must convince his parents.

His mother interrupts me when I’m back on my own email, rereading what I wrote about the day with Rhiannon. I very quickly shut the window, and oblige when she tells me that today is not a computer day, and that I am to come down for breakfast.

I very quickly discover that Nathan’s parents are a very nice couple who make it very clear that their niceness shouldn’t be challenged or pressed.

“Can I borrow the car?” I ask. “The school musical is tonight, and I would like to go see it.”

“Have you done your homework?”

I nod.

“Your chores?”

“I will.”

“And you’ll be back by midnight?”

I nod. I decide not to mention to them that if I’m not back by midnight, I’ll be ripped from my current body. I don’t think they’d find that reassuring.

It’s clear to me that they won’t need the car tonight. They are the type of parents who don’t believe in having a social life. They have television instead.

I spend most of the day doing chores. After I’m done with them and have had a family dinner, I’m good to go.

The party’s supposed to start at seven, so I know I have to wait until nine to show up, so there will be enough people there to hide my presence. If I get there and it ends up being open to only a dozen kids, I’ll have to turn back around. But that doesn’t strike me as Justin’s kind of party.

Nathan’s kind of party, I’m guessing, involves board games and Dr Pepper. As I drive back to Rhiannon’s town, I access some of his memories. I am a firm believer that every person, young or old, has at least one good story to tell. Nathan’s, however, is pretty hard to find. The only tremor of emotion I can find in his life is when he was nine and his dog April died. Ever since then, nothing seems to have disturbed him too much. Most of his memories involve homework. He has friends, but they don’t do very much outside of school. When Little League was over, he gave up sports. He has never, from what I can tell, sipped anything stronger than a beer, and even that was during a Father’s Day barbecue, at his uncle’s prodding.

Normally, I would take these as parameters. Normally, I would stay within Nathan’s safe zone.

But not today. Not with a chance of seeing Rhiannon again.

I remember yesterday, and how the trail that got me through the darkness seemed to be attached in some way to her. It’s as if when you love someone, they become your reason. And maybe I’ve gotten it backward, maybe it’s just because I need a reason that I find myself falling in love with her. But I don’t think that’s it. I think I would have continued along, oblivious, if I hadn’t happened to meet her.

Now I’m letting my life hijack these other lives for a day. I am not staying within their parameters. Even if that’s dangerous.

I’m at Steve Mason’s house by eight, but Justin’s car is nowhere in sight. In fact, there aren’t that many cars out in front. So I wait and watch. After a while, people start arriving. Even though I’ve just spent a day and a half at their school, I don’t recognize any of them. They were all peripheral.

Finally, just after nine-thirty, Justin’s car pulls up. Rhiannon is with him, as I’d hoped she’d be. As they head in, he walks a little bit in front, with her a little behind. I get out of my car and follow them inside.

I’m worried there will be someone at the door, but the party’s already spiraled into its own form of chaos. The early guests are well past the point of drunkenness, and everyone else is quickly catching up. I know I look out of place—Nathan’s wardrobe is more suited to a debate tournament than a Saturday-night house party. But nobody really cares; they’re too caught up in each other or themselves to notice a random geek in their midst.

The lights are dim, the music is loud, and Rhiannon is hard to find. But just the fact that I am in the same place as her has me nervously exhilarated.

Justin is in the kitchen, talking with some guys. He looks at ease, in his element. He finishes one beer and immediately goes for another.

I push past him, push through the living room and find myself in the den. The instant I step in the room, I know she’s here. Even though the music’s blaring from a laptop connected to some speakers, she’s over by the CD collection, thumbing through cases. Two girls are talking nearby, and I have a sense that at one point she was a part of their conversation, then decided to drop out.

I walk over and see that one of the CDs she’s looking at has a song we listened to on our car ride.

“I really like them,” I say, gesturing to the CD. “Do you?”

She startles, as if this is a quiet room and I am a sudden noise. I notice you, I want to say. Even when no one else does, I do. I will.

“Yeah,” she says. “I like them, too.”

I start to sing the song, the one from the car. Then I say, “I like that one in particular.”

“Do I know you?” she asks.

“I’m Nathan,” I say, which isn’t a no or a yes.