Chapter 31

I sat stunned!

Angela took my silence and stupid expression as a yes, and continued. "You aren't are you? I can tell by your look. You're here in the wrong place, at the wrong time, in the wrong body, just trying to stay out of a mental asylum, aren't you?" She was repeating my thoughts precisely from that first hijack into Brian's body.

"How could you possibly know that?" I spoke before I thought and couldn't take it back.

"When you stood up and turned towards me, as you got out of the car, something just told me that you were like me, and I had to know. I had to KNOW..." She was quiet for a few moments.

"I was thirty-one years old and living in New York City, when I fell asleep driving home from working twenty-four straight hours on a project at work. I woke up in the body of a ten year old girl. She was killed in an auto accident, because her mother was a lush, and her father is a bastard.

"When I woke up I wanted to scream bloody murder, so I did, and the nurses took it as shock and grief from the accident and doped me up. Her – me – you know – Angel's father (sperm donor is more like it) showed up the next afternoon pretending to care, full of 'I'm so sorry' and 'You'll be fine.'

"Everything I've ever known was taken from me, and in its place is that huge mansion and crazy people who think I'm this way because of losing my mother."

The reality was sinking in. Angela really was like me.

I interrupted her momentarily to interject some truth into her rant. "Angela, you realize that their reaction is the only thing that keeps you safe from being locked up as a mental case or taken away by the military and used as a lab rat, right? Let them think you're quiet and just a little odd. As long as they have a good explanation that suits them, they'll not think about you in any other way, which means you're safe."

She went on as if she hadn't heard. "I knew you the minute you stepped out of the car. You aren't Noah are you? You're stuck in Noah's body and trying to figure out how to survive minute by minute. I know because I am too.

"Look at me!!!" she shouted. "I'm going through puberty for the second time. I have no breasts and no figure, but I have every urge and need I ever had as Robin Wallace, without a body that can provide for it. Angela is a stick figure with a flat chest and peach fuzz. Robin had to have a Brazilian wax every few weeks, or it looked like Jungle Habitat down there.

"I don't even have the body of a normal fourteen year old. I look ten. My body is like ten, and I have boys who ride the school bus with me with larger breasts than mine.

"Who are you, and how did you get here?"

I looked at her with equal parts amazement and wonder. Angela was like me! There was another one who had been hijacked into someone else's body. "I died and woke up in this body" was all I said.

She gave me a hard look, and said, "I think I did too," and then she started to cry.

I pulled her in for a hug, and she came willingly, almost hungrily, and as she cried she told more of her story. "By the time I realized that it was all real, I knew that I had to play along, or they'd lock me up and forget where they put the key. Angela's father had no use for a daughter, and without a wife to dump his responsibilities on, he took me straight from the hospital to his father's house and left me with them. Paula and Elizabeth were strange but at least kind. Angela's grandfather was the nicest one of them all, and he tried to be a good father figure. He's the one I like the best.

"Every day I wake up and pretend to be Angela DeBusque of Jonesville, Virginia. I come from New York, where there were more people living on my floor than in this entire town. You can't get a good cup of coffee or an expresso, and if I could, it would set off alarm bells with the family.

"I can't watch programs that I liked because they don't fit with the lifestyle of a fourteen year old, slightly weird, motherless little girl. I have all these relatives that are far weirder than me, but I'm the WEIRD ONE? Paula and Elizabeth go through men as fast as I change my socks, and that's all the time. I don't think either one has any idea in the world how to be a friend, much less a lover, or a mother, or substitute mother, for that matter.

"They live for themselves, and they live for their father. He is so much larger than life around here, and everyone just assumes he knows everything, so they never question a thing he says.