Chapter 17
Marlowe
There’s nothing like a brand-new universe to place you back in your own body. Or maybe throw you so far out of it that everything you knew before arrival gets tossed into some kind of cosmic washing machine, and the only way to survive is to embrace the fact that you will always be spinning.
Paint-covered footprints mark every step I take across the stage.
Opening the back exit triggers the alarm, kicking off an ear-piercing beep, but I don’t have it in me to care.
Outside, it’s a muggy May afternoon. The air smells like freshly mowed lawn, and crickets are chirping in the open field beside the school.
“Where are you going? Don’t you want to see what makes this the best-case scenario?” Cilla yells out over the droning alarm.
“It can’t possibly be the best world ever, because judging by the set, they were doing a production of—”
“Grease,” we say in unison.
“Dallas has always said he’d rather be buried alive than stage a production of that show, so it’s a safe bet he’s not here,” I continue. “And we sure aren’t home either.”
Everything I’ve said is true, but I might as well be speaking gibberish. The only thing I’m actually thinking about is the fact that I started to kiss Cilla. Voluntarily. Of my own accord.
There’s no excusing it the way I’ve spent sixteen years excusing the sensations I experienced the last time our lips touched.
My enjoyment then was nothing more than a product of teenage horniness, I’ve assured myself many times.
This is something I did as a thirty-four-year-old woman who pays taxes and votes in elections and sometimes stays up late obsessing over the best air purifier for her apartment.
And I liked it.
No, I loved it.
I want more of it. And I need some space from her to remind myself why I shouldn’t, but we can’t take any space for fear of getting separated across the infinite expanse of the universe. Casual.
All I can do is leave this damn high school behind for once, hoping a change of environment brings me a miraculous change in perspective.
“I’m gonna call it out. It needs to be acknowledged,” Cilla says, trailing behind me as I run along the side of the building.
My chest clenches, but nevertheless, I do in fact persist.
“We would have torn up a production of Grease,” she concludes.
Expectation subversion is one of her specialties. It’s like she’s edging me, knowing exactly which buttons of mine to push to keep my mind on our almost-kiss.
“It would have been electric,” I agree. “Me as Danny Zuko. You as Sandy.”
“You see Sandy for me? I was thinking Rizzo. And then maybe more of a Kenickie space for you, personally. Which, by the way, is there something we need to unpack in your love of casting yourself as one of the guys?”
I throw her a look over my shoulder. She’s not asking me unkindly. In fact, there’s earnest interest on her paint-smudged face.
“Gender is a spectrum I like to play around inside,” I tell her.
It’s the first time I’ve ever said something even remotely close to this out loud, and it doesn’t even feel strange to admit.
It feels obvious, the same way it felt when I came out as a lesbian in high school, or when Lana told me she was a girl.
“Should I not be calling you she?” Cilla asks.
“I don’t mind it,” I tell her, which is also true. “If the universe has infinite iterations, who’s to say I don’t have the same within me? And she is one that still fits. I am she and she is me.”
God, I don’t sound like myself anymore. Or maybe this is the most myself I’ve sounded in years. Both alternatives scare me. All I want is to make it out of this experience unchanged. All I want is to make it out of this experience at all. But I can’t. The fucking universe won’t let me.
“It is boring that we live inside such small boxes,” Cilla replies. “Especially now that we know how many ways life can reimagine itself. We can really be anything.”
She’s right. And that’s hard, too. I used to want so many things, and one by one, I’ve eliminated each desire, leaving me with nothing but scraps of my past dreams littering the floor of my current life.
I’ve spent so long believing that’s the way it has to be.
But every single thing about me could be different, if only I let it.
“You know, I didn’t wear the right shoes for running,” Cilla says. “I’m going to get blisters.”
“Take them off, then,” I tell her. “I’m not slowing down.”
“That was a gorgeous lead-in for you to explain where we’re going, not an excuse to get me to show feet. I’m not doing that for free.”
“Cilla, please.”
“What?” she says in her favorite blameless tone. “Don’t act like I’m the one being weird. We both know you just tried to kiss me.”
There’s no bluff that Cilla Cove won’t call me on.
She is fearless, and I am guilty as charged.
Only I don’t know how to plead my case without kissing her again.
It’s the best motivation in the world to keep my eyes forward, my destination set.
If I can’t see her, I can’t kiss her. If I don’t kiss her, I don’t have to deal with whatever happens after that.
Because I don’t know what happens after that.
“I’m just trying to survive,” I tell her.
“And to survive, you need to kiss me?”
“No, I need to get the hell out of my high school.” We make it to the parking lot on the other side, where I pause to scan for vehicles that look familiar. “I don’t think I work here. Or I’m already home for the day. My car isn’t in the lot.”
Cilla puts her hands on her knees. “This is a fun thought exercise,” she says, breathing heavy. “If I work here, which car is mine? Let’s spend ten to fifteen minutes standing completely still and guessing.”
“What do you drive in LA?” I ask, heaving a little myself. I’m not much of a runner. But my body has to do something, or I’m going to pin Cilla Cove against the chain-link fence that surrounds the parking lot and make out with her.
“I can already feel you rolling your eyes at me.”
“Is it a Prius?” I guess. “Why would I judge you for having an eco-conscious car? That’s what I drive.”
“When I got my first big paycheck, I bought myself a cherry-red Camaro,” she tells me.
It takes great effort, but I make sure not to roll my eyes. “A Camaro? Do they even still make them?”
“I don’t know. I got an older one.”
“Why?”
I start moving again, this time a comfortable power walk, leading us to the exit gate and onto the sidewalk beyond it. We’re only a block away from my target. I can travel side by side with Cilla for that long and not try something.
I think.
“When I was young, there was a guy in my neighborhood who had one in his garage,” she tells me.
“He worked on it almost every day. Polishing it. Coveting it. Not driving it, though. Never that. I thought it was so fascinating how he could love something so much but never use it. So I told myself if I ever had the money to get myself a car, I’d get a cherry-red Camaro just like his, only I’d drive it everywhere. ”
“That’s nice,” I say.
“I know it’s not a very practical car,” she replies, assuming my comment to be sarcastic, when if anything, it’s too earnest. “But I love it. And I love even more that I drive it, and it gets scrapes and scuffs from the mean streets of LA, and that doesn’t change my love for it one bit. I think it makes me love it more.”
When we take the first left turn off the main road, the familiarity of my surroundings is almost dizzying.
The crack in the sidewalk that butts up into a tiny hill, easy to trip on if you’re not paying attention.
The oak tree in Mr. Patterson’s lawn with the tire swing tied to the thickest branch.
The sweet smell of spring-blooming perennials, lovingly tended to by Miss Mary.
“We’re going to your parents’ house,” Cilla realizes.
“Correct,” I say. “It’s close, it’s different, and, I don’t know, maybe my parents are there to help us. My dad used to be an electrician.”
“Do electricians have a knack for multiverses?”
“Only one way to find out.”
The house is at the end of the block—a split-level made of brick and beige siding that’s seen better days. It’s the place that raised Lana and me, where we figured ourselves out. It’s always been my tether, the image I see when I close my eyes and think of home.
There’s a sign in the front yard. It looks permanent, bricked into the ground with shrubbery designed to surround it. It almost looks like a sign for a business.
It is a sign for a business.
Psychic Readings Here
I back up, startled. My parents have been talking for a while now about the possibility of selling the place and moving somewhere warmer, but in all of my imagined versions of who would get my parents’ house after that, I never pictured a psychic.
Cilla grabs my arm before I can scramble back to the high school and offer up my own searing rendition of “Sandy” to escape this madness.
“Hold on! Let’s just knock.” She doesn’t give me an opportunity to protest, because she jogs up the pathway and rings the bell. “Hello! We’re here for a psychic reading!”
It takes barely ten seconds for the front door to open.
And we haven’t seen it all. We haven’t even come close.
“Would you look at that?” Cilla says to me. “I bought your parents’ house!”
Standing in the doorway of my home is, in fact, another Priscilla, dressed in a layered ensemble that could best be described as something Ms. Darbus would’ve worn in one of the High School Musical movies.
Psychic Priscilla handles the sight of us better than any of the other alternate versions we’ve met.
She doesn’t even look surprised. Not about the paint splatters all over us, or the fact that she and Cilla share, you know, the exact same DNA sequence.
She certainly seems far better off than me, who cannot believe I’m living in a world where a Priscilla Covington-French variant bought my childhood home.
“Who is it, honey?” someone calls from inside the house.
It’s a woman, which should not excite me half as much as it does. Hearing her voice, my first thought is, Oh wow. Cilla Cove has a partner in this life. Who is it?
My own Cilla hasn’t mentioned seeing anyone in all the time I’ve spent with her. How have I let that slide when she keeps pressing me about Alice?
Who does Cilla Cove love?
“Oh, hello! You’re here!” says the voice.
It’s me.
I’m the partner.