Someday Read online

  also by david levithan

  Boy Meets Boy

  The Realm of Possibility

  Are We There Yet?

  The Full Spectrum (edited with Billy Merrell)

  Marly’s Ghost (illustrated by Brian Selznick)

  Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist (written with Rachel Cohn)

  Wide Awake

  Naomi and Ely’s No Kiss List (written with Rachel Cohn)

  How They Met, and Other Stories

  The Likely Story series (written as David Van Etten, with David Ozanich and Chris Van Etten)

  Love Is the Higher Law

  Will Grayson, Will Grayson (written with John Green)

  Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares (written with Rachel Cohn)

  The Lover’s Dictionary

  Every You, Every Me (with photographs by Jonathan Farmer)

  Every Day

  Invisibility (written with Andrea Cremer)

  Two Boys Kissing

  Another Day

  Hold Me Closer: The Tiny Cooper Story

  You Know Me Well (written with Nina LaCour)

  The Twelve Days of Dash & Lily (written with Rachel Cohn)

  Sam & Ilsa’s Last Hurrah (written with Rachel Cohn)

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by David Levithan

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! GetUnderlined.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9780399553059 (trade) — ISBN 9780399553066 (lib. bdg.) — ebook ISBN 9780399553073

  Composite cover art used under license from Shutterstock.com

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v5.3.2

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  Contents

  Cover

  Also by David Levithan

  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

  About the Author

  For Hailey

  (May you find happiness every day)

  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 say
ing 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 o
ld. 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.