Chapter 11
Marlowe
Dallas isn’t in the costume room. Or his office. Or the dressing room.
“Those little fucking liars,” Cilla mutters.
“Don’t swear,” I remind her.
“What happens if I do?” she asks with her cat-that-got-the-cream grin. “I get detention? I bet Dallas will get me out of it the same way he used to back in the day.”
“That was true?”
“My talent couldn’t be wasted sitting in a random classroom for an hour when I was supposed to be rehearsing,” Cilla says. “Don’t worry, I still suffered. He made me do community service in the mornings instead. I actually planted flowers along the back of the school once. I did a great job.”
We walk the halls side by side, not working very hard to fly under the radar.
A few students pass us and do a double take, probably wondering when Ms. Covington-French made such a drastic transformation.
Or maybe recognizing me as famous? They do have the same gigantic posters here, but this time they’re all of Mars.
“Wow,” I say when we get close enough to view them in detail.
They bring the reality of this place into sharper focus.
We’re in the world where I made it in acting, and Cilla is the one assistant-directing Dallas’s shows at WRHS.
Even though a part of me feels vindicated to know another version of me created a successful career in acting, there’s also a part of me feeling stripped bare as I stare into my own eyes blown up to quadruple their size.
“They chose good pictures of you. Or excuse me, of Mars,” Cilla admits. “I’m sure Mars requested photo approval. Mars probably had her own team retouch them.”
Her repeated use of Famous Marlowe’s stage name is intentional. She wants to show me how strange it sounds. I’m not the me who picked it. And I didn’t pick her stage name either.
“Is that what you did for the posters of you up in our school?” I ask her. When she doesn’t answer, I nod in satisfaction. “I knew you didn’t look that good naturally.”
She coughs out a “Wow” that attempts to be casual, but even I can recognize I’ve gone too far. I can be harsh, but I’m rarely mean. Not intentionally, at least. Not like Famous Mars can be.
“No, no,” I say, confused by the way my long-standing boundaries with her have suddenly blurred.
I can’t remember how to do our usual rapport.
The loaded conversation we had with our doubles has done some kind of factory reset on my attitude, and I’m still waiting for my system to reboot and restore all of my usual annoyance and frustration with her.
“I just mean…you look so perfect on the posters,” I explain.
“And in everyday life, you’ve realized I’m hideous?” she asks.
“Oh, shut up. Fishing for compliments is beneath you. You know you look beautiful.”
It’s a simple word. One that gets used so often it hardly has meaning anymore. But I’ve never called her beautiful before, and it makes my whole body go tight, anticipating the teasing that’s sure to follow.
Instead, that familiar blotchy redness crawls up her neck.
I’ve affected her. I, Marlowe Jenkins, have made the famous Cilla Cove blush by calling her beautiful.
It’s not a revelatory thing to say, and not an original way to put it either.
If I went on her Instagram right now, I could find a hundred comments that praise her beauty in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French.
“Not to be too One Direction about this, but you don’t know you’re beautiful? That can’t be true,” I insist.
“Please be even more One Direction about this,” she replies gamely.
Her voice has gotten closer to the version of her I knew all those years ago.
There isn’t any of that self-satisfied flourish she does in her interviews.
There’s even a hint of a Midwestern accent waking up again, flattening her a’s and o’s.
“When I first cut off my hair, I went even shorter than it is right now, and my students started calling me Harriet Styles,” I admit, getting an immediate cackle from her.
“It was right after his album came out in 2022. They wouldn’t let up.
The way the current kids tease me about constantly wearing sweater-vests is nothing in comparison.
For the end-of-the-year assembly, I gathered four of my favorite coworkers and we did a performance to One Direction’s ‘Best Song Ever.’ ”
“Were you Harry Styles?” she asks.
“Is water wet? Of course I was,” I say. “The kids were all so shocked by my commitment that none of them knew if it was worth it to make fun of me anymore. Not that they were necessarily making fun of me then. It was right on the cusp. But with moves like this”—I do my best boy band–like dance move spin—“they were forced to give up Harriet Styles and return to Ms. Jenkins out of fear I might break into song again.”
Cilla cackles once more. “You’re dancing more than the actual members of One Direction did.”
“Oh, you mean this?” I go for a knee slide across the linoleum.
Cilla’s increased laughter hits like lemonade on a hot day.
There’s applause, too, but immediately I know it’s not hers. It’s a clap I’d recognize even with amnesia—sharp, staccato smacks, executed with precision, never given away for free.
Dallas Winthrop.
He’s once again dressed in the Spring Awakening costume he made for himself. Somehow, with only one look, I already know it’s not our Dallas, the same way I know this world isn’t the world I’m from.
“Haven’t seen you dance since we did Anything Goes your junior year,” this Dallas says, proving me right. Our Dallas helped me choreograph the One Direction number. And we never did Anything Goes. “Did you two switch your clothes? And your hair?”
“You just missed our performance of ‘I Don’t Dance’ from High School Musical 2,” Cilla tells him.
“We had to bring the number full justice by culminating in an outfit swap designed to make the audience question the true nature of our relationship,” I add. “The history books might call us friends, but anyone who knows how to read between the lines will understand the truth.”
This makes Cilla laugh so hard she has to hold me to keep steady.
“You’re not yourselves,” this Dallas says.
It has a sobering effect, snapping me out of whatever weird goodwill has taken my body hostage. I wouldn’t normally be caught dead boy-band-dancing for Cilla Cove in the hallway of my work or making jokes about Disney Channel Original Movies with her. Yet here I am.
“We used the Memory Machine,” I tell him. “You’re missing in our reality.”
“We just had a very interesting conversation with the alternate versions of ourselves who live here,” Cilla says.
“We would have loved to gab with those gals for hours—they’re so much fun—but you’re the one we need to talk to.
And look at our luck! Here you are! We’re hoping to find our Dallas, and we need you to tell us how. ”
“No, we’re hoping to get back to our reality,” I remind her.
Cilla eyes me for a moment, then turns back to this Dallas. “We’re hoping to find Dallas, maybe go to a few other realities with him and see what’s going on in the multiverse, then get back home.”
“No,” I say, a warning edge in my tone. “He left us without a trace, and we very misguidedly followed him into the darkness. We need to reverse course before our entire town discovers we are also missing. We will not be going to even more realities.”
“Easy, Death Cab for Cutie,” Cilla says. “Let’s not bring down the mood! I doubt anyone’s even realized we’re gone yet.”
“It’s very likely that time works differently between realities,” this Dallas says. “In the world where you come from, you may be gone for an hour, or a day, or a week. Hard to say.”
“A week?” My throat goes dry. “I told my mom not to worry about me.”
“Could also be a minute,” he offers.
“I don’t know if that’s better,” I say.
“Well, you were never supposed to exist alongside other versions of yourself,” this Dallas replies, launching into a variation of the same speech we heard from the first Dallas we met, about how his intention was to replace himself in an alternate reality, not exist alongside himself.
I grit my teeth, fighting the urge to tell him we know all of this already.
He finishes by saying, “There are infinite versions of our lives, and the machine is meant to find a very specific version of reality for me.”
“Which one?”
Dallas’s expression switches from friendly to cold—the kind of stark, bone-chilling shift that makes his performances in our student shows memorable, no matter how small the role. It’s not as impressive when it’s directed at me.
“Your Dallas did it wrong, so forgive me, but I won’t be opening up about where he’s trying to go, or anything else pertaining to the precarious nature of the technology, since I’m also trying to get there,” he says.
“Putting the machine together requires very advanced knowledge of physics, but there’s also something unexplainable that makes it all work.
Something beyond words. Something as incorporeal as time.
Talking about it only makes it harder to grab. ”
“Dallas, my dearest, this isn’t the moment for your superstitions,” Cilla replies. “We are stuck right now, with no way to save our Dallas or ourselves. We need words.”
“Maybe there’s a reason you’re stuck…” This Dallas perfumes the sentence with his favorite brand of lingering mystery. “Isn’t there always, in situations like this? It’s just a door. But it’s also your entire life.”
I almost scream. As if there would ever be a reason that Cilla Cove and I would need to be flung out of space together. As if we have time for his metaphorical riddles.
“I’ll tell you this much,” this Dallas says, leaning in.
Finally, I think. Something useful.
“Intention counts.”
“Intention in what?” I ask desperately. The pressure of everything has started building behind my eyes—the responsibilities I left behind, the people waiting for me back home. I’ve accidentally done exactly what my Dallas did. I’ve left without a trace. And here I am, knee-sliding across the floor.