Chapter Six
SIX
In the morning, I’m awakened by Cassie poking her head into my bedroom. “Hey, Elle, I’m heading ou—wowww … What happened in here?”
I jerk up my head and look around. I’m sitting on the floor with my arms draped over the edge of my mattress, my fingers resting on the keyboard of my loaner laptop, which is sitting in the middle of my rumpled bed.
My room looks like it’s been tossed by cops looking for illegal drugs.
The Millions-o-Books website is open on the computer—man, this thing really holds a charge—and I see my sleeping fingers have typed ausdfhpfppppppppppp into the search bar.
I reach up to close the laptop lid and wince at the stretch.
My God, everything hurts, including my head, which feels like I drank way too much last night.
But I don’t remember having a drop.
I do remember sitting at the table, hunched over the laptop, trying search after search until my eyes felt like someone had rubbed them full of sand.
I remember getting up and going to my room to look for my paperback copy of Pride and Prejudice, which I’d carried to Professor Pedersen’s class just last week.
I remember not finding that, either.
I remember pawing through my dresser, my closet, my piles of dirty laundry looking for my “Talk Darcy to me” t-shirt. Could I have left it at my parents’ house the last time I visited?
And I remember emptying out my desk drawer trying to find the pin I got at a Jane Austen convention last year, proclaiming me to be a proud member of the Society of Obstinate Headstrong Girls (est. 1813). But it too seems to have vanished without a trace.
“I, um—” I give my muddled head a sharp shake, trying to drive off sleep and jolt myself back to reality. “I thought I heard a mouse,” I tell Cassie to explain away the mess. “I tried to catch it, but no luck.”
She draws back her chin and makes a face. “Ew!”
As if he heard the word mouse, the cat saunters into my room, rubbing Cassie’s legs in passing and greeting me with a tilt of his orange head and a curious sounding “Merwp?”
“Oh, now you come to help,” I pretend to scold him, reaching out to scratch behind his ears. When I nudge his collar with my fingertips, the little fish-shaped ID tag jingles. Tiger, it reads.
Not Charlie.
I fight down the sudden urge to be sick.
“Sorry I can’t stay and help you square all this,” Cassie says with an expression that’s apologetic but not exactly sorry, if you know what I mean. I can tell she’s still thinking about the mouse. “I’ve got to get to class.”
“No problem,” I say, finally managing to drag myself up from the floor. How can I possibly explain my fears to her—to anyone? “I made the mess. I’ll clean it up.”
Cassie doesn’t close the door behind her, but I do. And I stand leaning against it until I hear the outer door of the apartment shut too.
Only then do I let the tears come.
And if you want the truth? I’m not really crying over the loss of Jane Austen and Pride and Prejudice.
I’m crying because I’m pretty sure I’ve lost my mind.
I don’t cry for long, though. Mostly because my eyes burn so much it feels like the only thing that might help is plucking them out of my head.
Seems drastic, so I set about straightening up instead, my movements stiff and automatic as I stuff books back on shelves and clothes back into drawers and behind closet doors.
I’d listen to my favorite Austen podcast while I work, except … well, you know.
My room isn’t neat when I’m done, but then, it never is.
I feel numb, and I don’t just mean the tingly sensation in my hands and arms because of the weird position I fell asleep in.
Eventually, I drag myself to the other room, lugging my laptop with me so I can plug it in again.
I discover I left my phone on the table all night; the battery is at 8 percent.
I swipe it open and see I’ve got a bunch of notifications. Ignoring them all, I text Cassie.
Hey, you know who Darcy is, don’t you?
It only takes a moment to get a reply.
Um … duh?
I barely have time to heave a sigh of relief, when the Cassie is typing … bubble appears again.
You mean the new girl in the psych dept, right?
But I’m pretty sure her name is Darby
I lay my phone back on the table.
I suppose Cassie could be joking with me again, like with the Hallmark Channel, but deep down, I know—based on the roughly one thousand futile searches I conducted last night—she’s not.
Is Jane Austen a figment of my imagination, a delusion no one else shares?
Is this situation crazy, or am I?
It’s like a movie in which I’ve been pushed onto another timeline where everything is virtually the same, but now I’m the only one of eight billion people on the planet who’s ever heard of Pride and Prejudice.
I try to think back to the last time things felt totally normal. Last week? Yes. On Friday, I went to class like usual. Geoff and I met with Professor Pedersen. Then I went to the AUSTEN-C workroom, and—
Shit.
The geomagnetic storm—could it somehow have caused this?
We’re talking about the sun, Elle. It has the power to rewrite our universe.
Even though I intended to swear off thinking about him, I haven’t forgotten Fisher’s words, and now they rattle around ominously inside my mind.
But of course he didn’t mean anything like this.
I’m being absurd. Obviously there’s some malfunction with the search engine on this borrowed laptop.
Well, that’s not entirely a surprise. Despite my pursuit of a doctorate in digital humanities, technology and I have always had what you might call a complicated relationship.
I drag myself from the chair and into the shower, vowing that from this point forward, it’s going to be a perfectly normal day.
I cling to that sentiment until I get to Kirwin and see that the stupid signs are still up.
I’m still muttering an assortment of colorful curses beneath my breath as I grip the door handle, wait impatiently for the buzz-thunk of the lock, and yank open the door. If Geoff Winkworth is sitting at my desk …
He isn’t. My gaze bounces around the rest of the room, taking in the signs, the computer setup, my wine-stained hoodie. Everything just as I left it.
Somehow, that discovery isn’t as reassuring as I would like it to be.
Maybe what I should do is go talk to Professor Pedersen, find a way to gently ask about any database changes I probably should have known about but forgot because I wasn’t paying attention, explain why the database was down over the weekend, and make sure she’s not actually frustrated enough with me to have promoted Geoff early.
On the third floor of Arden Hall, I breeze into her office with just a rap of my knuckles on the door jamb; the door’s already standing open. But behind her desk, a middle-aged man is seated grading papers. “Oh, sorry,” I say.
He looks up and smiles. “Can I help you, Miss Bradshaw?”
I’m dumbfounded when he calls me by name. I’ve never seen this man in my life. And just as I’m about to tell him so, to ask what the hell he’s doing in this office, something catches my eye.
Above the desk, a framed diploma hangs on the wall. At first glance, it looks the same as it always has. University of Chicago blah blah recommendation of the faculty blah blah Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature blah blah awarded to Julian Pedersen.
Wait. Julian?!
Now I see that there have been other subtle changes to the room since I was last here. The rug is different; the tea set that used to sit by the window is gone. I back up so abruptly I smack my shoulder blade into the edge of the door.
“Um, no,” I say. “I, um, I’m sorry to bother you.” And then I ease backward into the hallway, while my mind screams what the fuck?
My first instinct is to check the office number, certain I just wandered into the wrong room. But no, this is definitely 319. Definitely Arden Hall.
I hurry down the stairwell, trying to convince myself this is all just a dream. Or more accurately, a nightmare. I mean, the guy was straight from central casting, right down to the tweed jacket with elbow patches. I’m surprised my subconscious didn’t conjure him smoking a pipe!
Suddenly I remember: I was thinking about that tired old stereotype of English professors last week, in class. Of course! My own anxieties about my career trajectory have conjured this bogeyman, and surely now that I’ve realized what’s going on, I’ll wake up, and everything will be—
Three steps from the bottom, I stumble, striking my elbow on the metal handrail. I pitch forward, on the way down scraping both knees on one of those textured strips on the tread, the kind intended (ironically) to help you keep your footing.
Trembling with shock, I eventually manage to rearrange my limbs so I can inspect the damage. My elbow throbs; a bruise has already started to form. Two gaping holes in my leggings reveal roughened patches of skin on my knees and as I watch, red streaks and speckles appear.
Blood. Pain. They’re real, and they make it much harder to deny that the other things I’m experiencing are real too. In which case …
Jane Austen never wrote.
Pride and Prejudice never existed.
And as a result, everything about my academic life—the database, my assistantship, my advisor, all of it—is now seriously out of square.
I’m still sitting there, trying to gather the fractured pieces of my universe—or at least, muster the will to pick myself up off the dirty floor—when the door at the bottom of the stairwell swings open and who should step inside but Geoff.
I wouldn’t say I’m relieved to see him, given my present humiliation, but considering everything else, it’s some comfort that he at least appears unchanged.
“Elle,” he says, hurrying forward, his blue eyes filled with concern. “Are you all right?”
“Oh, sure,” I insist with a weak laugh, though nothing has ever been further from the truth. “Just clumsy.”
“Listen, I was just on my way to an appointment with Pedersen, but if I can be of help, if you need me to walk with you—”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m fine.”
His brows knit together as his assessing gaze slides over me, clearly dubious. To reassure him, I force myself to stand and manage, somehow, to keep my legs from wobbling. I take two steps toward the door, the most I can manage without limping, and hope he’ll take the hint.
After the briefest hesitation, he does, nodding at me before trotting up half a dozen steps. Then he pauses and looks back over his shoulder. “Say, I don’t know if you got my text, but that little incident in the workroom didn’t cause any major problems, did it?”
My thoughts are a tangle. I desperately want to talk with someone about what’s happening. Maybe Geoff is exactly the right person? We’re working together now. He knows—knew?—Austen’s work well.
But of course I can’t tell anyone. I’d sound stark raving mad.
“Not that I’m aware of,” I say with what I hope is a smile but is probably more of a grimace as I push the door open, steeling myself against the blast of cold air that hits my scraped knees through my newly ventilated pants.
With respect to the apparent disappearance of one of the most famous love stories in the world, I’m on my own.