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After a few days passed, and by the time I was finally allowed to speak, I was ready to have things explained more thoroughly and able to promise them that I wouldn’t freak out and try to separate myself from my new body. You know, just your everyday sort of situation.

“The good news, Travis, is that you’re back,” Dr. Saranson began. “You’re completely healthy, and now you’ll get to live your life the way you were supposed to.”

“And the bad news?” My voice was scratchy, raspy even.

“It isn’t bad news, so much as it’s a little strange and will take some getting used to.”

“The body, you mean?”

“Yes.
Your
body, Travis. It belongs to you now.”

“Where’d it come from?”

“A donor. A sixteen-year-old young man, like yourself, who we couldn’t quite save.”

“What happened to him?”

“Brain tumor,” Dad said quietly.

“He knew this would happen. He wanted to save someone else’s life, and that’s why you’re here.”

“His family? Do they know about me?”

“They do. It’s up to them to make contact. You know, if that’s something they might want in the future. Nice people. Didn’t want what Jeremy did to be a secret. They were proud of him.”

“But you’ll decide if you ever want to meet them or not,” Dad added.

“Jeremy?” I asked.

“Yes. Jeremy Pratt,” Dr. Saranson said. “Good kid.”

“How long was I gone?”

“Five years last month,” Mom said.

“Five years?” I asked, stunned.

“Science moved a lot faster than we could’ve predicted,” Dr. Saranson said with a smile.

“Well, I knew you guys couldn’t have aged
that
well over twenty years or something,” I joked.

“Hey now,” Dad said. “Don’t be so sure about that.”

“Are . . . are there others?” I asked.

“There’s one other. A man named Lawrence Ramsey from Cleveland. We brought him back six months ago, and he is already enjoying his life again.”

“He was in a Ford truck commercial last week,” Dad said, rolling his eyes.

“And you know, Travis, there’s probably going to be a point when you’ll need someone to talk to—someone who knows a little bit about what you’re going through. I’d say Lawrence would be up for that when you’re ready.”

“Okay. I’m not sure I’m ready for anything right now, though.”

“Right. Of course. Your situation is a unique one, and it’s possible and very likely that things are going to be pretty weird for a while. But you’ll go back home and go back to life as normal.”

“The way it was before you got sick,” Mom said.

“Yes. You’ll get back home, you’ll go to school, you’ll
make new friends. It won’t be the easiest thing in the world, but you’ll prove it can be done, right?”

That’s when it hit me that Cate and Kyle wouldn’t be Cate and Kyle anymore. They’d be these older versions of themselves that I’d have to learn about and get used to. They’d have forgotten things about me by now, especially things about the healthy version of me. They watched me die and then kept on living. I wondered if they had it in them to try again.

And
new
friends? I didn’t want
new
friends. I had plenty of friends. I had a girlfriend. I had a best friend. Cate Conroy was probably sitting by the phone at her house on Twelve Oaks Road waiting to hear if I was okay or not, and Kyle Hagler was most likely on his way to her house so they could drive to the airport and get to me as soon as possible.

But they wouldn’t let me just call her. I kept asking when I could call her, when I’d be able to see her, when she’d be there, and my parents just kept looking at each other like they were in a contest to see which one could go the longest without being helpful. Then Mom finally tells me some bullshit about how Cate probably needs more time to “process” all that’s going on. Time to process? I mean, I was the one with the stranger’s legs and arms and, let me remind you, private parts. I figured if I could process things so quickly, then why couldn’t she?

“Can I just call her? I know she’s waiting for me to call her.”

“Travis,” Mom whispered, “I have to tell you something.”

“Okay.”

“It’s Cate, Travis.” She was speaking in this calm, almost weak voice, like she was on the verge of being completely speechless.

“Cate? Is there something wrong? Did something happen?”

“She’s engaged.” She immediately covered her face with her hands and started crying.

I wasn’t quite ready for that. This new body wouldn’t react the way it should have reacted. I could barely make myself do anything at all; instead I just sat there in the sad quiet of the room. I mustered just enough energy to slump down a little in the bed and let out a kind of whimper that made me sound less like a human and more like a dying animal.

Cate was engaged. My girlfriend had a boyfriend. More than that, she was going to marry someone I’d never met. Maybe he was better than I was. I bet he even had his own body. I’d told her I’d come back for her, and even though I hadn’t really believed it myself, I’d thought surely she’d believed me. I’d thought she’d wait. Why hadn’t she waited for me? Why couldn’t it be that I came back to life and now every little piece could fall perfectly back into its place?

But neither Kyle nor Cate ever showed up. I kept expecting it, though, every single day. I couldn’t
figure it out. Nothing about them not being there made any sense to me. They had
just
been there. They had
just
seen me. I had
just
seen them. I had said good-bye to them and I had closed my eyes. I had opened them and nothing. No word from either of the two people I wanted to be seeing more than anyone. Were they so different now? If it was really five years into the future, could that be all it took to change them? I mean, what’s the point of getting another chance at life if everything’s going to be so different that I can’t stand it?

Then one night after I’d begged my parents to go to the hotel and get some rest, this nurse came in and asked if I needed anything. She was kind, and you could see that in her face and hear it in her voice.

“No, thanks,” I said.

“This all must be very strange for you, huh?”

“You have no idea.”

“I was there, you know.”

“Where?”

“Here, I mean.” She sat down in the chair by the window and looked over toward me. “When you were here before.”

“You can say it,” I said. “Go on. You were here when they took my head off.”

“Yes. You had this little smile. It was the most surprising thing. There we were, the entire staff, watching this surgery that none of us could believe was happening. And you were so young. It was different with the other
ones. You were just so young that I held my breath the whole time.”

“Did you think it would work? Did you really think it was even a possibility?”

“I stayed,” she said, standing up. “Some of the others transferred out after that, after what we did to you.”

“Why’d you stay?”

“I needed to see it,” she said. “I didn’t know if it would work, but I knew if it did, then I had to be here for it, if I could.”

“Ta-da.” I raised my new arms slowly into the air.

“I know you’re sad. Confused and probably in shock. But you don’t get to come back for no reason.”

“Sorry?”

“You’ve just been handed the keys to the kingdom, Travis. Don’t waste a second of it feeling sorry for yourself.”

The next day I asked to see the nurse again, and they told me she’d quit a few weeks before, that she’d resigned and moved away somewhere. Then I wondered if I’d just dreamed the whole thing up. They say you can only dream about people you’ve seen—either in real life or on television—that we don’t have the power to create new faces in our minds, but that we recycle the thousands and thousands of faces subconsciously stored in our memories. So maybe I’d seen her five years before, in that operating room, just as they’d put me under. Maybe I’d seen her and seen her kindness, and that was all my brain had needed
from her. Maybe I was remembering her now to bridge the gap. Maybe the past me and present me could find a way to coexist, keys to the kingdom in hand.

•  •  •

Kansas City looked pretty much the same overall, save for these strange electronic billboards all over and a new gigantic building downtown that looked like two side-by-side shiny metallic spaceships half submerged into the earth and slanted upward.

“Kaufman Center for the Performing Arts,” Dad explained on our drive home from the airport. “They have concerts, plays, you know, that sort of thing.”

“It looks so strange there.”

“A few people got all in an uproar about it looking so modern, but they eventually settled down.”

“It looks like it came from outer space.”

“Yeah,” he said. “It is pretty alien, I guess. But I love it. I think it’s interesting.”

Our house was the same in all the obvious ways, same curtains in the living room, same couch, same dining table, though it had a new centerpiece. The television was much larger and flatter than the one I remembered, no doubt something my dad had waited in a ridiculously long line for on some Thanksgiving weekend since I’d left. My first thought upon seeing it was the hope that maybe they’d put the old, still rather large TV in my bedroom.

I couldn’t help noticing how walking up the stairs felt different. All the same family photos still hung on the wall, ascending up to the top. But it used to be that I couldn’t see my whole face in the frames. They were just high enough so I’d see the top of my head. Now, with Jeremy Pratt’s body holding me up, I was taller and I could see all the way down to the scar on my neck in every single reflection. It’d been a while since I’d taken this walk. I’d been carried up a few times after I got sick, until they decided that moving me down to the guest room made more sense, right around the time we all concluded that this thing wasn’t going to go away. The hallway bathroom was terribly white and shiny clean, like it had always been, but with new towels and an automatic hand soap dispenser by the sink. I immediately stopped to use it, my parents looking on from the doorway.

“Is this a common thing now?” I asked, pulling my hand back and then placing it underneath again, and then doing that again until green soap was almost pouring over the sides, completely covering my entire palm.

“It’s catching on,” Mom said. “It’s better for germs, I think.”

“I can get behind that,” I said, rinsing off my hands and wondering if this was it. Was this the furthest we’d come in five years? Where were the jetpacks? The hoverboards? If they could bring me back from the dead, why wasn’t a robot greeting me at every door and asking what I needed?

Then we got to my bedroom and nothing was the same. I should say that the old TV from the living room
was
there, but nothing else looked familiar at all. There was a bed I’d never slept in, there was a dresser that hadn’t held my clothes, and there was a desk where I’d never done my homework. Even the walls were different, not the green-and-white-and-maroon plaid wallpaper that had always made my friends so jealous. No, this was a light gray–colored IKEA nightmare, and I was expected to live with it.

“What happened?” I was barely able to ask.

“Travis, it’s been so long,” Mom said.

“Did you throw everything away?”

“It was just too hard to look at it every day. You understand?”

“We’ll go shopping this week,” Dad said. “We’ll get you whatever you want to make it feel like home again. Okay?”

“I’m so sorry, Travis.” Mom turned to walk down the hallway and into their bedroom, closing the door.

“Sorry,” I said, sitting on the edge of the bed.

“This is weird for all of us,” Dad said. “So weird but so amazing, too. She’s just sensitive. I know you haven’t forgotten that.” He chuckled a bit.

“It’s okay,” I said. “The room, I mean. I guess I understand.”

“We can make this work, huh?” he asked, looking around us at the empty, unwelcoming space.

“When did you guys know I was coming back?” I asked him.

“About two weeks before they did it,” he said. “Didn’t have too much time to prepare.”

“She gonna be okay?”

“She’ll be fine,” he said. “Let’s get you some dinner. You hungry?”

•  •  •

The kitchen smelled the same as always, like clean clothes and vanilla with just a little touch of something else—citrus, maybe—like someone was always standing around the corner peeling an orange and doing laundry.

“Eggs okay?” Dad opened the fridge.

“Sure. No cheese, though, please.”

“I remember.”

My dad’s hair had started to gray on the sides and around his temples, but his face didn’t look all that much older. He wore new glasses, black plastic frames, that looked surprisingly modern for him, I thought. I was taller than him now too, which was weird. Still is weird.

“How’s work?”

“Good. You wouldn’t believe how much stuff has happened since you’ve been away.”

My dad was an executive at the largest arcade chain in the country, Arnie’s Arcade, Inc. Which meant two things: 1) My dad had a job that is much cooler than all other dads’ and 2) I got to hang out at the arcade all the time,
even on school nights. If you’ve never been to Arnie’s, then you’re missing out. The whole idea of Arnie’s is for kids to feel like they’ve stepped back into what Dad calls the “golden age” of video arcades. Each Arnie’s looks like it’s been there since before anyone inside the place was ever born. And they’re full of all these classic games that can’t be found in any other arcades in the country. My dad’s boss, Arnold “Arnie” Tedeski, won a bunch of video game competitions back in the ’80s. He was pretty famous, or so my dad tells me. Kyle and I practically lived at the Arnie’s in Springside up until I got sick.

Ah, Springside. I should tell you about Springside. Springside is a neighborhood in the Country Club District of Kansas City. This district is the largest contiguous planned community in the United States, and if you’re black or Jewish, you weren’t allowed to live there until 1948. Also, you probably still don’t live there because you’re pissed off about it. Needless to say, there’s a lot of snobby white people in Springside. My mom refused to send me to private school not because we couldn’t afford it, but because she hated the one she’d attended as a child. It was fine, though. What my school lacked in snobbery and tacky striped ties, it more than made up for in people like Kyle and Cate. And neither of them would’ve ever survived in a place like Springside. But we’ve got shopping! Lots of shopping and parks and an Arnie’s Arcade right here in Whiteside. Sorry,
Spring
side. Mostly, though, I spent my time with Kyle or Cate, and
it didn’t really matter what neighborhood we were in or what any of the people there thought about anything or anyone.