A PIE CHART FOR MY AWFULNESS

With me alone in the bedroom, I was graced with fatigue, which later evolved to annoyance. Pretending to speak French in the moment was, without a doubt, thrilling, but that didn't change the fact that this was stupid.

I took good care of Clarke, so why wasn't I him? Why was I being bounced around to another body like a pinball?

Today wasn't going the way I planned, (though to be fair, yesterday and the day before weren't either) and when found I myself in such situations, I just wanted to go back to bed. The thing stopping me, however, was the fact that sleep was the one to do this to me in the first place.

Who was I? Where was I?

"Sacrebleu!" someone shouted from the streets outside, as if they were trying to immerse me into French culture. However, I wasn't someone on a foreign exchange trip, nor did I speak the language. That left nothing more for me to do than to stop and stare at my surroundings.

Considering this was France, I happily obliged.

From the bedroom, the rest of the house (or apartment, I'm still not quite sure) was gorgeous. A floor to ceiling window greeted me as I walked out into the combined living and dining space.

My face pressed to the glass as I searched for any famous landmarks. The Eiffel Tower was nowhere in sight, and neither was Notre Dame. My heart sunk a little, and a fear creeped inside of me that this wasn't France after all.

"Amelie?"

I turned my head to see the man from earlier. He was behind the kitchen counter, rummaging through one of the cabinets. Part of me wanted to take this opportunity to ask him what was going on with me; maybe he knew something. Anything would be helpful to me at the moment, though there was a pesky language barrier in the way.

Using whatever he had just said to me as a guide, I deduced that "Amelie" meant...I didn't know what it meant. TV never told me that much. And so I wondered what was going through that man's head right then. My best guess was that it was something along the lines of: hon, hon, hon, ratatouille.

I sat myself at a bar stool on the other side of the counter, but I didn't know what to do after that. Then, I spotted a television on the opposite wall. Quickly, I grabbed the remote and flipped through the channels, hoping for something. Answers preferably, though any entertainment would be appreciated too.

Then I landed on a basketball game. It wasn't exactly what I was looking for, but the squeakiness of the players' shoes was like music to my ears. I played basketball myself, and if I was remembering right, I was at my game the day before I suddenly found myself as Tegan.

Did that have something to do with my conundrum? Right now, all options were on the table.

I sat perched on a bar stool, watching the players in awe mixed with confusion. The latter developed because of my situation, that was bizarrely not a dream, and also because of the jumble of French words swimming around the air. The basketball commentary was just noise, as was the next question the French man asked me.

I did my best to ignore him, choosing to nod and mutter out "uh-huh" a bunch of times, but that didn't count as a two sided discussion. The sole fear I had was that he was questioning if I was a serial killer and nodding my head was just falsely confirming it.

Hopefully me muttering "oui, oui" over and over again didn't make me sound  like some little kid that had to go to the bathroom.

However, the man ignored me and instead served me a plate with a chocolate crepe on it. It looked yummy and I wanted to thank him, but I couldn't remember how to do that in French.

"Uh, bon appetite," I guessed and looked over to the man for his approval.

I couldn't read his face to see if that was the right thing to say, but he did chuckle, so there was that. Though between bites he asked me something else that I didn't catch, causing me to I groan internally.

Was that going to be a pattern for this body? Where he'd say something and I'd say something with a weak French accent? If so, it was going to be a long day.

• • • •

Alright, maybe I spoke too soon. Even with the language barrier, I actually had fun in France. I had spent the day in whatever city I was in exploring, getting a regrettable tattoo, and gulping down exotic food that I'd never find in Iowa. It was my first time out of the country, and most likely my last. All of those happy, French memories I had made were precious; I just wish I had a camera to remember my time there.

Oh right, you might wondering about the tattoo thing. I'll get to that, but first let me tell you, it wasn't entirely my fault.

'Twas that same afternoon, an unknown time because in France they use military time, and I could never get the hang of that.

After spending the morning in that teeny yet breathtaking apartment, me and the French guy walked around town outside. At first, I loved it; it was always a dream of mine to go to Paris, but then I realized that I was freezing cold without any expensive French designer jacket to protect me.

But then I refocused myself on the idea that I was in France, and that was when I lost any restraint of mine to avoid looking like a tourist. My eyes darted from place to place and couldn't stop looking around me. Even the trees fascinated me in their foreignness.

"Tu veux faire du velo, Amelie?" the French man asked me as we walked.

Before I could open my mouth and start another round of insulting every French speaking person on the planet, I stopped. He had said "Amelie" a few times throughout the day, which was enough to classify it as a speech pattern. But what I couldn't decide was whether that was my name or if it was just a very common French word.

Either way, it got annoying pretty fast. It was "Amelie this" and "Amelie that", nothing I wanted to hear. I only half listened to him on the off chance that he would mention something I was familiar with, like The Pink Panther or mimes, neither of which he did.

"I'm not Amelie! My name is Sadie!" I shouted out to him.

A few bystanders turned their heads at me and my wonderful outburst. I couldn't help but wonder if they could speak English.

"I need some help," I said to one lady sitting at an outdoor cafe. "Do you speak English?"

She nodded her head and so I stopped walking. However, French man walked inside said cafe to go get himself a table.

I wondered if he thought that I wanted to eat here.

The lady at the table answered me with a very thick accent. "What do you need?" she asked, taking her time to enunciate each word.

"I need help. How do I return to my former self? How do I be Sadie again?"

She took a moment to pause and give me a sideways glance.

"Is 'Sadie' special to you?" she asked me slowly.

Perhaps my words weren't translating accurately to her, and that she wasn't as proficient in English as I would've hoped. "Uh, Sadie's me. I'm Sadie, so yes, she's important."

The woman leaned in closer to me. "I have someone special too," she said, unrolling her sleeves and revealing a tattoo on her bicep that read "Pierre".

"Nice," I remarked, which I think was also a place in France. "Where did you get that?"

After wiping her mouth with her napkin, the woman pointed to the building just down the road.

"Uh, mercy?" I said, giving her a nod and a curtsy, which was a ballet move, and that meant it was associated with France in some way or another. 

She didn't correct me, so I caught up with my French father inside the cafe. The way there, something about getting a tattoo on this body appealed to me. My parents in Iowa would kill me if I even asked, so this was going to be my one chance to have that experience.

"Depuis quand peut tu parler anglais?" he asked me when I caught up to him at the table he just got.

I shrugged. "Can I get a tattoo?"

I guessed that the English word for "tattoo" sounded close enough to the French word, because French-Dad-Guy furrowed his brow.

"Tatouage," he repeated to himself.

I nodded my head. "Correcto."

• • • •

After our meal, I received my tattoo at the parlor the woman had pointed out to me. Though I was nervous and probably needed someone to deter me away from getting inked, the parlor delightfully accepted the idea of tattooing an underage teenage girl, but maybe that's more a problem with French laws than the tattoo parlor itself.

"S-A-D-I-E," I spelled out to them. "All capitals, right here." I pointed to my face.

"Non," French Dad intervened. "Pas sur ton visage."

"Here?" I guessed, this time pointing on my bicep, just like the girl at the cafe had hers.

He didn't oppose the idea, so there my tattoo went.

And it went well until I remembered that tattoos hurt. A lot.

"Zoo wee mama!" I yelped out a total of seventeen times during that experience. The French man looked a little disappointed in me the entire time.

The rest of the day in France was spent in pain, though I felt that what I got out of it was well worth it. I think I got the message across to the French man (and to the entire tattoo parlor) that I wasn't "Amelie". I was Sadie M. Arlo.

• • • •

Shit. My day was gone.

The sun was shining in my eyes, and my drool was pooling next to my cheek. I sat up in a millisecond, swatting away the grey sheets around me.

The place was a pigsty. Clothes covered the room, leaving what the floor looked like to the imagination. My head fell into my hands. I was no longer in France. I was in a new body, a new place. This nightmare was continuing.

I slid out of the bed, feeling...different. At least there was no seething pain from the tattoo on my arm. And on second thought, there wasn't even a tattoo on my arm.

Huh. In the real world, AKA Harmony, Iowa, I would've been killed the second my parents laid eyes upon any tattoo. Any sort of thing that threatened my parents' ideal midwestern Christian suburban lifestyle in the slightest made sirens go off in my mom's head, so even if celebrity on TV that seemed innocent was now sporting some ink, I would probably get annihilated on the spot with nukes or something.

Kind of a vibe killer, I'm well aware, but I didn't share the same beliefs. That was obvious since I had gotten the tattoo. And better yet, I wasn't reaping the consequences. I mean, would my parents even find out? Here I was, an unknown number of miles away from home, without any sort of backlash. In other words, this was great.

But then I discovered I had a...thing down there again. Yeah, I hadn't escaped the strife that was being a boy. I wanted to hawk a loogie. The whole situation just became shitty again.

So it was time to reverse the curse. I shut my eyes right then, harnessing the ancient magical powers that I knew I didn't possess. It turned out that I wasn't a Jedi, or any sort of bender of any sort of element. All attempts led to failure upon the realization that I was still stuck in this dumb, stupid, ugly body.

I sighed as I gawked at my reflection in the mirror. That was a little uncalled for, and now I felt bad.

I kept my voice low. "Hey, uh, owner of the body I'm in? Uh, sorry about that. You're not dumb, stupid, or ugly. Much apologies. Love, Sadie."

But when I was done speaking, nothing changed. Not even a massive bolt of thunder erupted from the sky. The room was still a mess, and there was still a...thing attached to my body. So trying to contact the bodies I was in this way was a bust.

However, no response also meant that the mysterious he I was never knew he was being insulted in the first place. So there was no need to apologize. The owner of this body would never find out about this.

Then suddenly the birds began to chirp again. The beauty had revealed itself once more. I could do whatever I wanted to these people, and I would never have to think about them again.

I cracked a smile. "Hey, I actually take it back. You are dumb, stupid, and ugly."

Okay, so maybe I didn't really think all those things, but it was the sheer idea that I could say them that made me want to say it.

This was my silver lining. It wasn't once upon a body, it was all the damn time. For as long as the body switching lasted.

So it was time to get devious.

Snatching a wallet off the top of a bedside table, I tore through it. After seizing hold of a perfectly crisp $50 bill, I got a wonderfully terrible idea.

I threw more drawers open, only to stumble upon a pack of envelopes. Oh, this was just too perfect. I wrote my address on the outside:

Sadie Arlo,
5910 Creekside Drive,
Harmony, Iowa.  97575

Sealing the bill into the envelope and licking it shut didn't make me feel guilty. Instead, I felt proud. Life was going to be sweeter from now on.