Someday

First published in the USA in 2018

by Alfred A Knopf,

an imprint of Random House Children’s Books,

a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

First published in Great Britain in 2018

by Electric Monkey, an imprint of Egmont UK Limited

The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN

Text copyright © 2018 David Levithan

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

First e-book edition 2018

ISBN 978 1 4052 8388 5

Ebook ISBN 978 1 7803 1788 5

www.egmont.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

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Egmont takes its responsibility to the planet and its inhabitants very seriously. We aim to use papers from well-managed forests run by responsible suppliers.

For Hailey

(May you find happiness every day)

Electric Monkey books by David Levithan

Every Day

Another Day

How They Met and Other Stories

Marly’s Ghost

Two Boys Kissing

Written with Rachel Cohn

Naomi and Ely’s No Kiss List

Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist

The Twelve Days of Dash and Lily

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

RHIANNON

NATHAN

X

A: Day 6065

A: Day 6076

X

NATHAN

RHIANNON

A: Day 6082

RHIANNON

X

A: Day 6088

A: Day 6089

NATHAN

X

RHIANNON

A: Day 6099

A: Day 6100

X

A: Day 6101

NATHAN

A: Day 6102

A: Day 6103

A: Day 6104

X

A: Day 6106

RHIANNON

X

A: Day 6107

MONA, AGE 98

HELMUT, AGE 64

MORRIS, AGE 5

X

AEMON, AGE 18

A: Day 6132

RHIANNON

A: Day 6133

RHIANNON

A: Day 6133 (continued)

RHIANNON

DAWN, AGE 45

A: Day 6133 (continued)

RHIANNON

A: Day 6133 (continued)

RHIANNON

A: Day 6133 (continued)

RHIANNON

A: Day 6133 (continued)

RHIANNON

A: Day 6133 (continued)

RHIANNON

X

NATHAN

A: Day 6133 (continued)

RHIANNON

NATHAN

X

A: Day 6134

RHIANNON

A: Day 6135

X

RHIANNON

A: Day 6138

A: Day 6139

RHIANNON

A: Day 6139 (continued)

NATHAN

X

A: Day 6140

RHIANNON

A: Day 6141

A: Day 6142

WYATT

A: Day 6142 (continued)

RHIANNON

LIAM, AGE 18

NATHAN

RHIANNON

A: Day 6359

Acknowledgments

RHIANNON

Every time the doorbell rings, I think it might be A. Every time someone looks at me for a beat too long. Every time a message arrives in my inbox. Every time the phone displays a number I don’t know. For a second or two, I fool myself into believing.

It’s hard to remember someone when you don’t know what they look like. Because A changes from day to day, it’s impossible to choose a memory and have it mean more than that single day. No matter how I picture A, it’s not going to be what A looks like now. I remember A as a boy and as a girl, as tall and short, skin and hair all different colors. A blur. But the blur takes the shape of how A made me feel, and that may be the most accurate shape of all.

A has been gone a month. I should be used to it. But how can there be any separation when A is in so many of my thoughts? Isn’t that as close as you can get to another person, to have them constantly inside your head?

As I’m thinking all these things, feeling all these things, I can’t let any of them show. Look at me and you will see: A girl who has finally buried the remains of her last bad relationship. A girl with a great new boyfriend. A girl with friends who support her and a family that isn’t more annoying than any other family. You will not see anything missing—you will not sense the part of her that’s been left inside someone else. Maybe if you look into her eyes long enough and know what to look for. But the point is: The person who knew how to look at me like that is gone.

My boyfriend, Alexander, knows there’s something I’m not telling him, but he’s not the kind of guy who wants to know everything. He gives me space. He tells me it’s fine to take things slow. I can tell that he’s fallen for me, that he really wants this to work. I want it to work, too.

But I also want A.

Even if we can’t be together. Even if we’re no longer near each other. Even if all I get is a hello, and not even a how are you?—I want to know where A is, and that A thinks of me at least some of the time. Even if it means nothing now, I want to know it meant something once.

The doorbell rings. I am the only one home. My thoughts race to A—I allow myself to picture the stranger at the door who isn’t really a stranger. I imagine the light in his eyes, or maybe her eyes. I imagine A saying a solution has been found, a way has been devised to stay in the same body for longer than a single day without hurting anyone.

“Coming!” I yell out. I’m stupidly nervous as I get to the door and throw it open.

The boy I find there is familiar, but at first I don’t recognize him.

“Are you Rhiannon?” he asks.

As I nod, I’m realizing who he is.

“Nathan?” I say.

Now he’s surprised, too.

“I know you, don’t I?” he asks.

I answer honestly. “It depends on what you remember.”

I know this is dangerous ground. Nathan is not supposed to remember the day that A was in his body, borrowing his life. He is not supposed to remember the way he and I danced in a basement, or anything that happened after.

“It was your name,” he says. “I kept thinking your name. Like when you wake up from a dream and there’s only one part you can remember? That’s what your name was. So I went online and checked out all the Rhiannons who live near me. When I saw your picture . . . I felt like I’d seen you before. But I couldn’t remember where or when.” His hands are starting to shake. “What happened? If you have any idea what I’m talking about, can you please tell me what happened? I only have pieces. . . .”

What kind of rational person would ever believe the truth? Who wouldn’t laugh when someone tells them it’s possible to move from one body to another? That’s how I reacted at first.

The only reason I stopped being rational was because something irrational happened to me. And I knew it.

I can see that Nathan knows it, too. Still, I warn him, “You’re not going to believe me.”

“You’d be amazed at what I can believe at this point,” he replies.

I know I need to be careful. I know there’s no going back once the story is out. I know he might not be trustworthy.

But A is gone. A can’t be hurt by this. And I . . . I need to tell someone. I need to share this with someone who at least partly deserves to hear it.

So I let Nathan in. I sit him down.

I tell him as much of the truth as I can.

NATHAN

By my calculations, if you live to be eighty years old, you end up being alive for 29,220 days. And you’re likely to live much longer than those 29,220 days.

So one day shouldn’t matter.

Especially if it’s a day you can’t remember. I mean, I have plenty of days I can’t remember. Most days are days I can’t remember, once I get a month or two away from them.

What was I up to on October 29th? Or September 7th? Well, I guess I woke up at home. I went to school. I saw my friends. I imagine I ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner, though I couldn’t tell you any of the more intimate details.

Most of our memory is based on educated guesswork. And our memory loses days all the time.

But it’s weirder and scarier if it’s a day you lose as it’s happening. A day when you wake up the next morning and have no idea where you’ve been or what you’ve done. A day that’s a total blank.

When you have a day like that, it’s a hole in your life, and as much as you’re trying to pretend it’s not there, you can’t help but poke it, probe it. Because even though it’s empty, you can still feel something when you touch its sides.

I woke up on the side of the road.

Passed out, the police said.

Drunk, they thought. Then they tested and saw I wasn’t.

Out too late, they said. When they brought me home, they told my parents I needed to watch myself.

But I don’t drink. I don’t stay out late.

It didn’t make any sense.

It was like I’d been possessed. And soon that was the story.

The devil made me do it.

Only in this case, the devil had an email address. And when I emailed him, he swore he wasn’t the devil.

It got really weird. This reverend got involved. Talked to my parents about killing my demons. I wanted to believe him, because it’s easier to believe that an empty space is an evil space. We don’t want to be helpless, so we create things to fight. Only my fight never got started. I stopped believing the reverend after he began to act like he was the evil one, luring this girl to my house and attacking her. He didn’t even explain himself after I helped her escape. He said he’d needed to talk to her. Then he was gone.

Meanwhile, the person who’d taken my life for a day—they said they bounced from body to body, day after day. I didn’t know how to believe that. I had more questions.

But then that person was gone, too. And I was left with this blank space where a day of my life used to be.

But blank is never really blank. Take a blank sheet of paper. Yeah, there’s no writing on it. Nothing for you to read. But then hold it really close. Stare at it for a long time. You’ll start to see patterns there. You’ll start to see shapes and gradations and distortions. Hold it up to the light and you’ll see even more. You’ll see a whole topography within the blankness. And sometimes, if you look really carefully, you’ll start to see a word.

For me, that word was Rhiannon.

I had no idea what it meant. I had no idea why I was remembering it. But it was there in the depth of the blank space.

The next part was easy. There were only three Rhiannons within a fifty-mile radius. One of them was near my age. And she looked familiar, though I couldn’t have explained why.

The hard part was figuring out what to do with this information. I had no idea what I would say to her. I remember you but I don’t understand why. That sounded weird. And I was tired of having everyone look at me like I was weird.

But now here I am. I’ve come over to her house, because not going over to her house was killing me. I ring her doorbell. And from the minute she sees me, she knows exactly who I am.

I’m not prepared for that.

I’m also not prepared for everything she tells me, and how easily she says it. It’s almost like she’s grateful to tell me what she knows, like I’m the one doing her the favor. But I’m just as grateful. All along, we’ve been partners at the jigsaw, and it’s only now that we’re realizing how some of the pieces fit. She’s telling me the person who talked to me, the person who took that day from me and lived my life before leaving me at the side of the road, is named A. I tell her that, yeah, I met A two days in a row, when he/she was calling himself/herself Andrew and was in the bodies of two different girls, two days in a row. Rhiannon doesn’t seem surprised. But I’m damn surprised to be talking to someone who hears what I have to say and believes all of it. Rhiannon tells me A was really sorry about what happened with me—and from the way she apologizes on A’s behalf, I realize that, whoa, she is totally in love with this person who goes from body to body. The hole A’s left in her life is even bigger than the one in mine. I lost a day. She’s lost more than that.

“You must think I’m crazy,” she says to me when she’s done.

How can I convey to her that I’ve had the same thought about a million times over the past couple months? How can I get across that when weird things—when really weird things—happen to you, it suddenly opens you up into believing all these other really weird things could be true?

“I think what happened to us is crazy,” I tell her. “But that’s not us.”

I fill her in on the parts I know—about how Reverend Poole said I’d been possessed by the devil, and that there were other people who’d had the same thing happen to them all around the world. He told me I wasn’t alone, which was the thing I most wanted to hear. The whole time, though, he was using me—and when I finally figured that out, he turned on me. He said I had no idea what I was involved in. He told me I’d ruined my only chance of knowing what was wrong with me. I’d have no future, because part of me would always be stuck in the past.

I’m sixteen years old. Having an adult yell these things at me was hard, even as I also felt it was, you know, wrong. He was the only person who’d believed me, and because of that, I’d believed him in return. But now I couldn’t. Because what he was doing was cursing me.

I didn’t know what to say. I guess I thought I’d have another chance, that he’d come back and we’d talk it over. I thought he was getting something out of helping me. But as I said, he was just using me. Once he was gone, that was it.

I tell all this to Rhiannon as we sit at her kitchen table.

“You haven’t heard from him at all?” she asks.

I shake my head, then ask back, “And you haven’t heard from A?”

I can see how much it hurts her to say no. I’ll be honest—I’ve never had a girlfriend, and I’ve definitely never been in love. But I’ve been around enough people in love to know what one of them looks like. A’s disappeared, but her love hasn’t.

“A has to be out there somewhere,” I say.

“I’m sick of waiting,” she responds.

“Then let’s look,” I tell her.

There has to be a way.

X

To stay in a body, you must take that body over.

To take a body over, you must kill the person inside.

It is not an easy thing to do, to assert your own self over the self that exists in the body, to smother it until it is no longer there. But it can be done.

I stare down at the body in the bed. It is rare for me to have done so much damage, so I’m fascinated by the result. The regular response to a dead body is to close its eyes, but I prefer them open. That way I can study what’s missing.

Here is the face I have seen in the mirror for the past few months. Anderson Poole, age fifty-eight. When I look into his eyes, they are only eyes, no more expressive than his dead fingers or his dead nose. The first time this happened, I thought there would be an aftercurrent of life—some element to enable the feeble and the desperate to believe that the spirit that had once been inside was now somewhere else, instead of completely annihilated. But all I see is utter emptiness.

There is no reason for me to be here. At any moment, the hotel management will overrule the DO NOT DISTURB sign and come in to find the reverend in a state far beyond disturbance. He died of natural causes, the inquest will conclude. His mind failed. The rest of the body followed.

Nobody will know I was here. Nobody will know that the mind failed because I cut the wires.

It was time to move on. I was getting bored. Anderson Poole was no longer useful.

I am in a younger body now. A college student who will not be attending class much longer. I feel stronger in this body. More attractive. I like that. Nobody ever looked at Anderson Poole as he walked down the street. It was his position as a reverend that they revered. That was the reason they listened to him.

“You came so close,” I say to him, my new hand closing his left eye, then opening it again. “You almost had him. But you scared him away.”

Poole does not respond; I am not expecting him to.

The phone rings. No doubt the front desk, giving him one last chance.

I have to go soon. I cannot be here when the maid finds him. Screams. Prays. Calls the police.

Nobody will mourn him. He has no family left. He had a few friends, but as I choked off his memories and made his decisions for him, the friends fell away. His death will cause no great disruption in anyone else’s life. I knew this from the start. I am not heartless, after all.

It is important for me to come back and see the body. I don’t have to, and sometimes I can’t. But I try. It’s not to pay respects. The body can’t accept any respects—it’s dead. By seeing what a body looks like without a life inside, I get a sense of what I am, what I bring.

I would like to compare notes on this with someone else like me. I want to sit down with him and discuss the act of being a life without being a body. I want to make my brethren understand the power we have, and how we can use that power. I want my history recorded in someone else’s thoughts.

Poor Anderson Poole. When I started with him, I learned everything there was to know about him. I used that. Then I dismantled it bit by bit. He no longer had his own memories—just the memories I had about him. Now that we are separate, I will make no effort to retain those memories. His life, for all practical purposes, will vanish.

Were I to thank him now, it would be for being so weak, so pliable. I take one last look in his eyes, witness their useless stare.

How vulnerable it makes you, to depend on a body.

How much better to never rely on any single one.

A

Day 6065

Life is harder when you have someone to miss.

I wake up in a suburb of Denver and feel like I am living in a suburb of my own life. The alarm goes off and I want to sleep.

But I have a responsibility. An obligation. So I get out of bed. I figure I am in the body and the life of a girl named Danielle. I get dressed. I try to avoid imagining what Rhiannon is doing. Two hours’ time difference. Two hours and a world away.

I have proven myself right, but in the wrong way. I always knew that connection was dangerous, that connection would drag me down, because connection is impossible for me in a lasting way. Yes, a line can be drawn between any two points . . . but not if one of the points disappears every day.

My only consolation is that it would have been worse if the connection had been given more time to take hold. It would have hurt more. I have to hope she’s happy, because if she’s happy, then my own unhappiness is worth it.

I never wanted to have these kinds of thoughts. I never wanted to look back in this way. Before, I was able to move on. Before, I did not feel that any part of me was left behind when the day was done. Before, I did not think of my life as being anywhere other than where I was at that given moment.

I try to focus on the lives I am in, the lives I am borrowing for a day. I try to lose myself in their to-do lists, their homework, their squabbles, their sleep.

It doesn’t work.

Danielle is taciturn today. She barely responds when her mother asks her questions on the way to school. She nods along to her friends, but if they were to stop and ask her what they’d just said, she’d be in trouble. Her best friend giggles when a certain boy passes, but Danielle (I) doesn’t (don’t) even bother to recall his name.

I walk through the halls. I try not to pay too much attention, try not to read the stories unfolding on the faces of the people around me, the poetry of their gestures and balladry of those who walk alone. It’s not that I find them boring. No, it’s the opposite—everyone is too interesting to me now, because I know more about how they feel, what it’s like to care about the life you’re in and the other people around you.

Two days ago, I stayed home and played a video game for most of the day. After about six hours, I had gotten to the top level. Once I reached the end of the game, I felt a momentary exhilaration. Then . . . a sadness. Because it was done now. I could go back to the start and try again. I could find things I’d missed the first time around. But it would still come to an end. I would still reach the point where I couldn’t go any further.

That is my life now. Replaying a game I feel I’ve already won, without any sense that it means anything anymore to get to the next levels. Killing time, so all I’m left with is time that’s dead.

I know Danielle does not deserve this. I am constantly apologizing to her as she stumbles through school, barely paying attention to what the teachers are saying. I rally in English class, when there’s a quiz on chapters seven through ten of Jane Eyre. I don’t want her to fail.

It’s hardest when I’m near a computer. Such a brutal portal. I know, if I wanted to, I could see Rhiannon at any time. I could reach Rhiannon at any time. Maybe not instantly, but eventually. I know the comfort I would take from her. But I also know that after a certain point, after I took and took and took, she wouldn’t have any comfort left. Any promise I made to her would be worthless, no matter how much of my own worth I put into it. Any attention she gave me would be a distraction from the reality of her life, not a reality in itself.

I can’t do that to her. I can’t string her along with hope. I will always change. I will always be impossible to love.

It’s not like there’s anyone I can talk to about this. It’s not like I can pull aside Danielle’s best friend—Hy, short for Hyacinth—and say, I’m not myself today . . . and this is why. I can’t pull back the curtain, because in terms of Danielle’s life, I am the curtain, the thing that is getting in the way.