The Switch Read online

  “Hello?” said a woman’s voice. Connor’s mom.

  “Uh, Mrs. Dunwittie?” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “This is Jacobus. Can I talk to Connor?”

  “Jacobus? Jacobus Rose?” she said and now I discovered why my heart was beating so fast.

  “Y-yes.”

  “Well, this is a surprise,” she said.

  “It is?”

  “You two boys haven’t talked in over a year.”

  My intestines moved around like snakes in my gut.

  “We just walked home from school together, Mrs. Dunwittie. Connor’s my best friend.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line before Connor’s mom sighed. “Are you all right, Jacobus? Is everything okay at home?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Things are fine. Could I just please talk to Connor?”

  “Well,” she said. “I’ll ask him, but—”

  There was muffled conversation on their end, and it didn’t sound encouraging.

  “I’m afraid he’s not ready, Jacobus. I’m sorry. But it’s nice of you to call.”

  “But Mrs. Dunwittie! I really need to talk to him.”

  “Now isn’t the time, Jacobus. We’ll discuss it with Connor over dinner. Give our best to your mom and dad.”

  And that was it. The nail in the coffin. Connor wasn’t the same either, only he didn’t seem to know it. What had my dad said? We were mortal enemies?

  How? When?

  The only thing I could imagine worse than going through what I was already going through was doing it alone. And it looked like that’s the way it was going to be. I had been thrown into some kind of limbo reality.

  That night was the longest night of my life. Believe it or not, the thought that I might be either crazy or brain-damaged actually gave me some relief. At least it would explain things.

  I sat through dinner saying nothing while my parents chattered away like the best of pals, occasionally casting a worried and slightly suspicious glance my way. For me, they were the aliens, but maybe for them, it was me who seemed as if he didn’t belong in the picture.

  “Aren’t you hungry, dum—er, Jacobus?” my faux-mom asked, seeing that I was piling my uneaten food into the shape of a volcanic island.

  “Not really,” I said. “I think maybe I’ll read for a while and then go to bed.”

  They shared another look of concern.

  “Sport,” began my dad. “I mean…Jake. Uh, Jacobus. Are you sure you’re feeling okay?”

  Bedtime was usually a big drama around my house. My mom thought it should be ten o’clock, like I was six years old or something. I thought it should be more like midnight, or at least late enough to get a good round of gaming in after my homework. My dad compromised at eleven, but even that caused fights because my mom would start bugging me about getting ready for bed by ten-forty. Her clock ran perpetually twenty minutes ahead.

  But never in the history of the Rose family had I willingly gone to bed before nine. My mom and dad just stared with their mouths sort of floppy, like they wanted to say something but couldn’t shape the words. Finally, I thought. A match between my old life and the new one. Then my Twilight Zone mom blew it. “That’s fine, Jacobus,” she said. “Things’ll be different in the morning.

  As I lay in bed, not at all tired and stuck somewhere between crying and screaming, I could hear through the wall that murmuring sound that parents make when they’re talking in a worried way about their kids, or the bills, or their marriage. Like a sad lullaby or the coo of a turtledove.

  All I could do was hope that when the sun came up the next day, my friends would be my friends, my enemies would be my enemies, and my parents would be my parents. If not, then I had made a terrible mistake. I had been detoured onto a lost highway.

  Sometime around three a.m., when the neighborhood dogs had quieted and the moon cast a shadow of the nearby church steeple on my wall, I finally fell asleep. What let me sleep was a single thought: whoever these people are, at least they seem to love me.

  never wake up before my parents. Never. But on this particular Tuesday morning, my eyes popped open while the sun was still low enough in the sky to make the world look like a movie fade-in. “Before the milkman comes.” That was an expression my dad used when he meant really early. Because there had been a time, he told me, when fresh milk was delivered to your door just like a FedEx. Still, the expression had frightened me when I was little. Who was this Milkman? I pictured a guy in a white uniform and matching hat, but with a blank oval in place of a face.

  It took a few minutes of lying there in bed to figure out what had awakened me. Yes, I was anxious to put things right with Connor. But that wasn’t it. At last, I put it together. I had awakened because of a sound that wasn’t there. Always before, on every spring morning for all the years we had lived in the townhouse on Hudson Street, my wake-up call had been the song of one lonely bird that lived in the big spruce tree in the grassy common area behind the buildings. It was a simple song, just two notes. But two notes with so much feeling in them, the first one sweeping up high and sweet and the second falling to a darker, more melancholy place.

  But today, it wasn’t there, and the empty feeling its not-there-ness left was bleaker than the thought that Connor might never be my friend again. Sure it could’ve been the whole lost month thing, except the bird had always hung around into the summer, so even if it really was May 1, it shouldn’t have mattered.

  Now that I look back, the bird that wasn’t there should have been a big clue that more than the cookie selection had changed.

  My mom had packed me macaroni and I had to remind her that I ate hot lunch in the canteen, a statement that made her screw up her eyes and look at me like, “Oh, yeah? Since when?”

  “Never mind,” I said. “Thanks for the care package.”

  She felt my forehead and announced, “Well, you don’t seem to have a fever. But if you start feeling bad, go to the nurse’s office, okay?”

  “Sure, Mo—” Something stuck in my throat. “I will, Mom.”

  That, I realized instantly, was the weirdest damn thing I had ever felt. For a second there, I couldn’t call my mom, “Mom.”

  But it was only the beginning.

  On the way to school, I took time to look closely at the buildings, the trees, the streets—all the stuff I’d passed a couple thousand times and seen without really looking. In the big picture, things were more or less the way they were supposed to be, but when you got down to details, other things weren’t. A front door that had been sky blue was now forest green. A brick wall that someone had once graffitied a dirty picture on was now covered with ivy. When I got to the six-cornered crossing just before the school, I almost missed the biggest change of all. For all the years I had been making this walk, there had been, right next to the Subway restaurant, a little store that sold a thick, smoothie-style drink called an Orange Julius. You might never have heard of an Orange Julius, but that little shop was a big deal for me. When I was small and I’d had either a really bad or a really good day at school, my mom would stop by here and treat us. Though I was now years beyond being walked home, she’d sometimes give me money for one, and the taste of it made me feel like all was right with the world.

  Just when I could have used it most, the Orange Julius place was gone.

  In its place was a…yoga studio. I had to walk over just to make sure it wasn’t some sort of optical illusion. As I stood there looking in the window at the neighborhood mothers twisted into pretzel positions, someone passed behind me and I caught her reflection in the glass. I turned and saw that it was Amy Greenspan, a girl I had known since fourth grade. We were friends, and had stayed friends even after people made fun of me for having a girl for a close friend. I called out:

  “Hey, Amy! What’s up?”

  The look she gave said it all. It was one of those, “What’s your problem, weirdo?” looks that girls automatically know how to make as soon as they turn eleven an
d keep making until they’re about seventeen. And the look was aimed right at me.

  At that moment, all my hopes that this whole thing was a dream fell like shards of broken glass on the sidewalk.

  I had left the apartment early in my eagerness to get to school and find Connor, so there were still ten minutes before the bell. I turned slowly and scanned the four crossings of the intersection. Kids of all ages were out in force, because Lincoln Park High and Casimir Pulaski Elementary were only a couple blocks apart. A lot of them I knew, at least to nod, but it felt like I was watching them from the outside of a glass bubble. I just stood there, trying to make sense of what you can’t make sense of. My dad had told me once about some famous Mexican Indian medicine man named Don Juan who’d said that you had to look at things from the corner of your eye to see the “other world,” the world where magic stuff happened. I tried to do that now, and what I saw were these fuzzy double-images trailing everyone, like the blur in a photograph when someone is moving too fast for the camera shutter to catch. It made them look as if they were halfway in and halfway out of this plane. I had no idea what that might mean, but it got my mental hard drive spinning.

  If this new world was the real world for all these people: for Connor, my parents, Amy Greenspan, then it really was like I was standing outside a bubble looking in. Or wearing VR goggles. And if I tried too hard to convince anyone that they had it all wrong, they might really start to think I was losing my mind—and that could lead to trouble. Doctors, hospitals, drugs. lobotomy, even. So as freaked out as I was, I would have to play along—as if it were a virtual reality game and I was an avatar of myself. The one exception to this strategy, it seemed to me, was Connor. Connor had been with me when we flipped the switch. He was on my side of the bubble, or should be. I had to find a way to get to him, and we had to pull the switch. Together.

  I walked into the main hallway about three minutes before the bell. On my way to my locker, when I said hi to people I knew, I got lots of the same weird looks I’d gotten from Amy. I began to understand why when my ‘new best friend,’ Hartūn Karamadjian, ran over and tackled me in something between a bear hug and a quarterback sack. It was all I could do to stay on my feet.

  “Yo, Jakes. You see the new X-Men movie?” He actually had a smile on his face, and I realized that maybe I’d never seen his teeth. They were chipped and a little crooked.

  “No,” I said. “Why’d you try to knock me over?”

  Another weird look. I was getting used to this.

  “Whaddaya mean?” he asked, sounding almost hurt. “I do that every morning. For, like, maybe the last thousand years. It’s a buddy bump.”

  A buddy bump. Right. The Hartūn I knew didn’t have any buddies to bump. If he bumped anyone, it would be for one reason and one reason only: to annoy them. But this was different. In fact, this new Hartūn couldn’t seem to get close enough to me. Wherever I went, he went.

  With just a minute before the bell, I turned to him. “Hartūn. Now that we’re friends and all—” He squinted at me. “I wanted to ask you, has anything weird happened in the last twenty-four hours? Like, you noticed a change in your life? Or that people were different?”

  “Nope,” he said, still squinting.

  “You don’t remember things being…different?”

  “Different how?” he asked.

  “Different like everybody hating your guts.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Connor. He had that blurry fringe around him, too.

  “I gotta do something,” I said to Hartūn.

  He just stared after me as I ran over to Connor, like I was walking right up to the Frankenstein monster. Connor’s reaction wasn’t all that different.

  “Connor, listen—”

  He went all shifty-eyed, like he was trying to find an escape route.

  “Do you remember what we did yesterday? The red house on the truck? The switch?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He pulled away from me as if I had a disease and made to walk off.

  “Wait, wait!” I stuck by him. “Okay, we’re supposed to be enemies, right?”

  “Supposed to be?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Listen, I don’t know what happened to me. Maybe some kind of temporary amnesia. I got whacked on the head yesterday. But I can’t remember…how did we, like, get to be enemies?”

  He stopped. “Are you nuts?”

  I shrugged.

  He looked toward the classroom door where the kids were hanging out. Nobody goes in a second before they have to. “The bell’s gonna ring,” he said, cold as hell. “But just in case you really do have amnesia…you ratted me out for cheating off your math test in Carbuncle’s class. Got me suspended for two days. Worse, you lost me the Xbox my parents were set to buy me. Friends don’t do that.”

  “Jeez, Connor, I would never— And anyway, you’re better at math than me.”

  “You are crazy,” he said and stalked away.

  The bell rang, and just then, my faithful sidekick Hartūn jogged up. “What was that about?”

  “Hartūn. You got anything to do right after school?” He shook his head no. “Good,” I said. “You do now.”

  n what world, I asked myself, would I have snitched on my best friend for taking answers off my test? I’d never cheated myself. Well, maybe once I had glanced over at Jemma’s geography test to confirm my answer—she always knew the names of the rivers. If I thought someone was looking at my test, I might’ve tried to cover it up, but to raise my hand and tell the teacher? To bust somebody right out in the open? Never. That just wasn’t me.

  And that last thought actually caused me to break out in a sweat as I waited by the lockers, wanting to be the last to file into Ms. Furbel’s room. What if I was a different person in this reality, too? A person I didn’t like. A rat who could bust his best friend. And if there was another me, how was I still able to think and feel from the perspective of the old one? You can’t be two people at once, can you? Or likewise, be one person in two different places.

  There was only one teacher at Lincoln High I could possibly ask about any of this, and that was my science teacher, Mr. Bohm. He was a deep thinker, and had once told us about wormholes to other dimensions and even to other universes, but he’d said the physics were way too complicated and dropped the whole thing. There was a risk that he’d send me to see the school shrink, but I had to do it. I’d go see Mr. Bohm after the last period; Hartūn could cool his heels for few minutes.

  After the last kid—a little guy named J.T. Slivowicz, with a high, squeaky voice that was still two years away from breaking—had entered Ms. Furbel’s room, I tried to slink in inconspicuously. And my luck, it was just as Ms. Furbel came out of the classroom next door with a big scowl on her face. Her scowl turned to a smile, and she made sure we walked in together. Someone in the back fake-sneezed and said, “Suck-up,” from behind his hand. A few students giggled.

  Please tell me, oh ye masters of this messed up cosmos, that I am not Ms. Furbel’s “pet.” My stomach churned.

  “Take your seat, Jacobus,” she said in her usual humorless way. That seemed like a good sign. “And clear your desks for the quiz,” she added, speaking to the whole class. I hadn’t known about any quiz, but at this point, nothing surprised me.

  My desk, which was, as it turned out, the only one left empty, was right next to Jemma’s. If my mouth hadn’t already been as dry as a desert; if my heart hadn’t already been beating like the end of a track meet, this would have done the trick. I tried to avoid eye contact as I sat down, but she caught me. And then, something really weird happened.

  Jemma gave me this sort of sly, “we’ve got a secret” smile, the sort that even fifteen-year-olds know you only get from someone who likes you. Someone who knows you. And the thing was, in my normal life, which seemed to be fading faster with every minute, not more than six or seven words had passed between us in the whole time we’d been in school together. But there
she was, with her head lowered and her hair kind of half-covering her face, and with her ‘good figure’ and all that, smiling at me like we’d just played hooky or something. The only thing I could do was smile back, though I’m sure it was one of those lame, nervous smiles that looks more like a twitch.

  Holy crap, I thought, with alarms going off like a fire drill in my brain: Jemma is my girlfriend.

  An even more alarming thought seared my mind: despite how much parents fret about the sex lives of teenagers, the fact is that about ninety-eight percent of high school freshmen have zero amorous experience. But there are exceptions. What if we were one of them?

  Ms. Furbel started handing out the quizzes. I had to process this new development instantly. Even if Jemma was my girlfriend, it didn’t mean we’d even French-kissed. At my age, you can have lunch with somebody in the school cafeteria and be their boyfriend, and everyone will gossip about it like you were the latest celebrity hookup. I relaxed a bit.

  Ms. Furbel handed me the quiz with a sort of evil look on her face. No, I wasn’t her pet, and that was a relief. The quiz was on “The Baltic Countries,” and I will be the first to admit it might as well have been the craters of Pluto. I couldn’t name a single Baltic country. Transylvania, maybe?

  For what seemed like forever, I just sat there, staring at the quiz in a dumb panic. The first question was one of those “fill in the map” things where you have to write in the names of the countries and their capitals. But the shapes of the countries were shapes I was sure I’d never seen before. Jemma must have felt my panic, because after about five minutes, she cleared her throat in a very delicate, girlie way, shook her hair out of her face, and sat up straight enough that it felt like an invitation to look at her test.

  And so I did.