Chapter 1 This Is Not My Story
THIS IS NOT MY STORY
THE MORNING AFTER EVERYTHING WENT SIDEWAYS
Not the alarm—I’d turned that off hours ago, somewhere around the third glass of wine and the decision to eat an entire sleeve of Oreos while watching a documentary about cults.
No, this was the buzzing. The relentless, bone-deep, possibly-haunted buzzing that had started last night at Cassie’s house and hadn’t stopped since.
I cracked one eye open. Tequila—sixteen pounds of orange judgment wrapped in fur—sat on my chest, staring at me with the expression of a cat who had watched me make every bad decision of my adult life and was frankly unsurprised by this latest development.
“Don’t,” I told him.
He blinked slowly. You did this to yourself.
“I didn’t do ANYTHING. Cassie’s magic rock touched my phone. That’s not my fault.”
You went to Sunday dinner. You brought your phone. You sat next to the cursed crystal. You’re also out of the good wet food, by the way. I’ve been eating the salmon paté like a peasant.
“The salmon paté is six dollars a can.”
It tastes like compromise.
I loved my cat. I also sometimes wanted to punt him into the sun.
I reached for my phone, which was vibrating so hard it had migrated six inches across the nightstand and was now threatening to fall behind the bed, where it would join the graveyard of hair ties, chapsticks, and that book about mindfulness I’d been meaning to read for three years.
The screen glowed with notifications. I squinted at the number.
347 unread messages.
Three hundred and forty-seven.
I’d gone to bed with maybe 120 matches—already insane, already impossible, already the kind of thing that made me want to throw my phone into a lake and become a nun. Now the app had apparently decided that sleep was for people who didn’t have romantic destinies to fulfill.
I thumbed it open with the resignation of someone walking into a staff meeting they’d already mentally checked out of.
The matches scrolled. And scrolled. And kept scrolling.
Men I’d dated. Men I’d almost dated. Men I’d made eye contact with at a bar in 2007 and never seen again.
There was a guy I was pretty sure I’d only ever spoken to on AIM, back when that was a thing people did.
His profile said he was “looking for his soulmate” and his photo was definitely from the 90s.
“This isn’t happening.”
Tequila yawned, showing me every one of his teeth. It’s happening. Also, your breath is a war crime.
“Thank you for that.”
I’m here to help.
I tried to close the app. It reopened.
I tried to delete it. A cheerful popup appeared: Tinder cannot be removed at this time. Your matches are waiting!
“They can keep waiting.” I held down the power button. The screen went black. I exhaled.
Three seconds later, the phone turned itself back on. With a ding.
348 new matches.
I sat up so fast Tequila tumbled off my chest with an indignant yowl. “This is insane. This is—Cassie. I need to call Cassie.”
She’s probably asleep. Like normal people. At 6:47 in the morning.
“She has a talking cat and a Scottish handyman living in her house. She lost the right to ‘normal’ weeks ago.”
The phone buzzed. 349. 350.
I threw it across the room. It hit the wall, bounced off my laundry pile—the one I’d been meaning to fold since last Tuesday—and landed face-up on the carpet, screen glowing, still buzzing.
Tequila looked at the phone. Looked at me. Looked at the phone again.
That seems like a you problem.
“Everything is a me problem. That’s the problem.”
That’s the spirit. Now feed me.
I’d fallen asleep in yesterday’s clothes—the good jeans, the orange sweater that Diane at work said made me look like a “sexy traffic cone” (she’d meant it as a compliment, I think), and one sock. I didn’t know where the other sock had gone. I suspected it had joined a witness protection program.
The phone hit 360 matches while I was brushing my teeth.
375 by the time I’d made coffee.
389 when I finally worked up the nerve to actually look at it again.
The photos were still wrong. Still impossible.
Last night, when I’d fled Cassie’s house with a possessed phone and a growing sense of dread, Jimmy Kowalski had been staring at me from my screen looking exactly like his senior portrait—eighteen years old, frosted tips, that stupid earring he’d thought made him look edgy.
I’d told myself it was a glitch. That the app would reset overnight.
That I’d wake up and everything would be normal and I could go to work at the winery and argue with Valentina about the harvest festival schedule like a regular person.
Jimmy was still there. Still eighteen. Still “online now.”
And he wasn’t alone.
The impossible matches had multiplied while I slept—not just men from my past looking weirdly young, but men from pasts I didn’t even recognize.
A guy in a leisure suit with sideburns that belonged in a museum.
Someone whose profile photo was literally a Polaroid.
A man whose bio was written entirely in disco slang that I had to Google to understand.
Groovy lady, let’s boogie down to Lovetown. You bring the vibes, I’ll bring the 8-track.
What the actual hell.
My phone buzzed. 396. A new message notification:
Jimmy K: Hey! I’m in the neighborhood. Thought I’d stop by. Cool?
I stared at the message. In the neighborhood.
Jimmy Kowalski. Who lived three states away.
Who I hadn’t spoken to since we’d awkwardly slow-danced to “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” at prom and then never spoke again because we had absolutely nothing in common besides a shared zip code and a mutual appreciation for Aerosmith.
“What the f—”
The doorbell rang.
I froze. Tequila’s ears swiveled toward the sound.
The doorbell rang again. Insistently. The way someone rings when they’re SURE you’re home and they’re not leaving until you answer.
You should probably get that.
“I should probably hide in the closet until I die.”
That seems excessive.
The doorbell rang a third time. Then a fourth.
Then someone started knocking—a cheerful, rhythmic knock that I recognized somewhere deep in my lizard brain, in the part of me that still remembered leg warmers and Bon Jovi and the specific terror of a teenage boy showing up at your door with a corsage.
No.
No, no, no.
I walked to the door like a woman approaching her own execution. Looked through the peephole.
And there, standing on my porch in the late-October morning light, was Jimmy Kowalski.
Eighteen years old. Frosted tips. Powder-blue polo with the collar popped. Holding a corsage—white roses, baby’s breath, exactly like the one he’d brought me to prom.
He smiled at the door like he could see me through it.
“Diane? I know you’re in there. I got your message!”
I did not open the door. I pressed my back against it and slid down to the floor, heart hammering.
“Diane?” His voice was exactly the same. Sweet. Eager. The voice of a boy who thought he had his whole life ahead of him because, for him, he did. “Come on, don’t leave me hanging. My mom’s gonna kill me if I’m late for curfew.”
Curfew. He had a curfew.
Tequila padded over and sat next to me, tail curled around his paws.
So. That’s new.
“That’s my prom date. From 1996.”
He seems… young.
“He IS young. He’s eighteen. He’s—” I pressed my palms against my eyes. “This is a hallucination. I’m having a stress-induced breakdown. I work too many hours and I drink too much wine and now I’m seeing teenage boys on my porch.”
That sounds like something you should not say out loud.
“Di? You okay in there?”
“GO AWAY.”
A pause. Then, sounding genuinely hurt: “I thought you’d be happy to see me. You’re the one who matched with me.”
“I didn’t match with ANYONE. The app is POSSESSED.”
“What’s an app?”
Oh god. Oh god oh god oh god.
I scrambled for my phone, which was now sitting at 412 matches and showing no signs of slowing down. Found Cassie’s number. Hit call.
She answered on the second ring, sounding groggy. “Di? What’s wrong? It’s not even seven.”
“GET OVER HERE. NOW.”
“What happened? Are you okay?”
“MY PROM DATE IS ON MY PORCH.”
Silence. Then, more alert: “…Todd?”
“Not TODD. Why does everyone think Todd was my prom date? Todd didn’t even go to my high school. JIMMY. Jimmy Kowalski. From 1996.”
“Di, that doesn’t make any—”
“HE THINKS IT’S PROM NIGHT, CASSIE. HE brOUGHT A CORSAGE. HE’S WORRIED ABOUT HIS CURFEW.”
A longer silence. I could hear Liam’s voice in the background, asking what was wrong. His Scottish accent was thicker when he was half-asleep, which under other circumstances might have been charming.
“We’re on our way,” Cassie said. “Don’t let him in.”
“I WASN’T PLANNING TO.”
“And don’t—” she hesitated. “Don’t panic.”
“TOO LATE.”
I hung up. Pressed my forehead against my knees. On the other side of the door, Jimmy knocked again.
“Diane? Did I do something wrong? Is this about the thing with Stacy Morrison? Because I told you, she was just helping me with algebra—”
“JIMMY, I NEED YOU TO GO WAIT ON THE SIDEWALK.”
“But it’s cold.”
“IT’S OCTOBER. YOU’LL SURVIVE.”
A wounded pause. “Okay. But I’m not leaving. I came all this way to see you.”
All this way. From 1996. Through whatever tear in the fabric of space-time my possessed phone had apparently created.
I was going to kill Cassie. After she fixed this, I was going to kill her.
My phone buzzed. 428 matches. A new message from someone named Greg, whose profile photo appeared to be from the mid-seventies based on the leisure suit and aggressive sideburns.
Hey groovy lady. The vibes are telling me we’re cosmically aligned. Coffee?
I threw the phone across the room again. Tequila watched it skid across the floor.
You’re going to break that.
“Good. Maybe if I break it, this will stop.”
Has breaking things ever solved your problems before?
“There’s a first time for everything.”
That’s the spirit.