Chapter 14
SEQUOIA FALLS, NEW YORK
JUNE 10, 2022
AGE: 35
ISAT UP ON THE LOVE SEAT AND GLANCED AROUND MY SURROUNDINGS. I was back in Desiree’s office, feeling more than a little groggy. It was as if I was experiencing the gnarliest hangover of my life. I raised my hand to the spot on my head that had hit Massimo’s floor, but there was no bump. Internally, though, I was a scrambled mess.
“Scone?” Desiree was over in the corner kitchenette. “We suspected that blitz-tracking would make a subject quite ravenous.” She said it as if I’d just driven up from Connecticut, not dived back in from the depths of a parallel universe. At any rate, she wasn’t wrong. I was starving.
“Thank you,” I said. The scone she proffered was a bit chewy—the secret to a crumbly scone is to handle the dough as little as possible—but I kept my opinion to myself. Now was not the time for baking advice.
The scone wasn’t the half of it, anyway. My Italian sex god was gone, as was my optimized self. Come to think of it, this was far worse than any hangover.
“How did I get back here?” I asked, wiping sweat from my forehead.
“You never really left.” Desiree sounded matter of fact. “Your consciousness went through the alternate pathway, where you reunited with your old self—your true self, in our opinion—and changed course. And then you fell off the hunk’s bed.” There was a note of amusement in her voice. “Don’t worry. Your klutziness will be coming in handy this week.”
Just then, my phone buzzed. I momentarily panicked, wondering who was looking for me, but saw it was a notification from my Memo app: an icon with a female firefighter emoji. Two words flashed on the screen.
“Level up?” I read the message aloud. “Who am I, Super Mario?”
“In a sense,” Desiree said and then proceeded to explain that my up-leveling had occurred in an entirely separate track, the alternate path I would be bolstering by making these incremental changes. “It will all stand you in good stead for your permanent leap,” Desiree said. “In the meantime, I’m glad you enjoyed yourself back in Pienza.”
I blushed at the memory of the way Massimo had taken off his gold chain and dangled it over the ticklish skin on my inner thighs. Desiree gave a knowing smile.
“You didn’t... see all of that stuff with Massimo, did you?”
“It is my job to know everything,” she replied. “I witnessed you erase disaster from your personal history. In its place was an evening night with Massimo. A pretty unforgettable one.”
I could feel myself blush. “Will I be seeing him again?”
“Jenny,” Desiree tut-tutted, lowering herself in the spot next to me. “A man in his thirties whose mother still irons his underwear?”
“She does?” I suddenly remembered the stack of folded waffle towels by his bedside, and the thimble of mouthwash by his bathroom sink, at the ready for bedtime ablutions.
Desiree leaned over to grab my phone and scrolled to November 9 of that same year, when I would have been back in New York.
She read the Memo aloud: Do not respond to Massimo’s emails—ever.
Desiree then raised her eyebrows at me. “Capiche? Your summer fling was just that. You must stay focused on the Memo, no distractions.”
“Fine,” I said, chastened. “So what else happens in Italy?”
“Happened,” she corrected me.
“Did Geeta still visit me?”
“Did you need her to? You didn’t send an SOS, like you did after your disastrous fire. In your optimized track, you were too busy focusing on your research—and having fun on your off time with that car mechanic. Geeta was busy climbing the corporate ladder. She met you at the airport when you returned in October. On the third, to be precise.”
I smiled. “So I really didn’t get kicked out of the program.”
“Of course not. You excelled. Your final paper about the bread and the exchange economy was a tour de force. Now we need to move on to your next big blunder. The one that landed you with Hopeless Hal.”
“That wasn’t until years later,” I told her. “I met him at Andrew’s wedding. My charming brother.” I didn’t bother to temper the sarcasm in my voice.
“I know who Andrew is,” Desiree said. “He got married in 2011. The Massimo adventure was in 2009. Don’t think I don’t know my stuff. Ready to blitz-track some more?”
“Wait! Slow down. Tell me more about that summer. I never moved back in with my parents?” This whole reconfiguration of my personal history was shocking.
“Jenny,” Desiree said with a sigh. “We can’t get bogged down. We only have a few days. We must move with purpose and intention.”
But if there was an alternative reality, one where I didn’t spend my early twenties boarding with my parents and attempting to process my trauma and rise above my shame—while earning minimum wage and answering the phone at the family accounting firm—I needed to experience it.
“Can I please go back to 2009? Just to get a tiny taste of how it all wraps up? It will be so healing.” Maybe I’d even be able to say goodbye to Massimo. In bed.
Desiree shook her head and rose to her feet. “I need a Diet Coke,” she muttered. “Why must you be so unstrategic? This kind of behavior is exactly what led you nowhere.”
She had a point. I needed to get away from myself, the one whose instincts took her nowhere. But the temptation was real. Too real. And so, when Desiree was halfway to her mini fridge, I discreetly opened the app and started feasting on images to trigger the feelings of regret and jealousy to power my next leap. I scrolled through some photos of Hal and Brie playing catch with her dog. I looked at an image of myself nodding off in a Monday morning work meeting at the radio station. The shame was overwhelming. “What are you doing?” Desiree cried out, sensing I was up to something. “Put down the phone! That’s enough!”
But I was loading up on bad juju, like a kid grabbing at the sugary contents of a pi?ata. I was already properly amped up, so I tapped Kinetic and scrolled to the precise date that I wanted—no, needed—to revisit.