Chapter Twenty
CHAPTER TWENTY
Cillian and I fall asleep in a tangle, and I only wake in the morning when I hear him quietly shutting the front door.
I curl up in the scent of our extremely hot sex, and sleep for another few hours.
Then the next thirty-six hours go by in a haze.
We rehearse from early in the morning until the wee hours.
We eat cheese and crackers and protein bars and drink endless water as we sweat beneath the stage lights, running scene after scene, again and again.
The set is complete, the starry sky functional, the fake grass covers the stage, all the props are ready.
It now looks so much like Aimee’s childhood backyard that my heartbeat flutters when I first see the bizarre reproduction.
It’s both unnerving and strangely comforting.
Another memory, long buried, comes to mind as I look at the set.
Suddenly I can smell the charcoal of the grill and citronella in the air.
The rattling and chirping of spring peepers and cicadas in the boggy trees and the sound of a James Taylor CD playing from the kitchen.
My parents sitting at the table drinking red wine and snacking on Tostitos chips with queso and salsa; Aimee’s dad drinking beer from a green bottle, wearing an apron that said Never Trust a Skinny Cook , and her mom refilling her own glass of wine and enthusiastically telling a story about the time she got stuck overnight in the Atlanta airport and wound up talking all night to a nice man who—she didn’t realize until later—was George Lucas.
Aimee and I were drinking pink lemonade out of unbreakable stemless wineglasses and sitting with bare legs in the grass, tugging at blades and talking about people at school, scratching absently at mosquito bites.
Young enough and comfortable enough with discomfort not to care about the way the grass and bites made us itchy or the way our scratching might leave scars on our ankles one day.
Aimee leaned over to me, pointed at our parents, and said, Do you think that’ll be us?
To which I remember replying, Married?
Which sent us both into hysterics.
We were twelve years old, preoccupied mostly by the impending birthday that would give our age a teen at the end, the boys in our English classes who seemed to finally know we were alive, and the fact that Halloween was only a few weeks away and we still hadn’t decided what to be yet.
We didn’t make a proclamation about our futures like sage children in a Steinbeck novel.
I think we knew, without doubt, that it would be us one day.
We’d grow up, we’d know other grown-ups, and we’d eat snacks, we’d like wine, and know everything.
The memory is interrupted by the intense collision of another one.
The first and last time I went into Aimee’s backyard after she died.
It was dark and quiet, almost like the frogs themselves knew to be reverent.
It was empty and vacant, the smell of charcoal and the sound of the radio long gone.
Aimee, gone.
My reverie is halted by Aimee coming in to start rehearsal, having no idea that the set is so unsettling to me.
To her, it’s probably a funny little thing to have it look like her parents’ house.
To me, it’s time travel.
A gravedigger in my repressed memories.
We’re wrapping up dress rehearsal when I say something I’ve been avoiding for two straight days.
“I have to point this out,” I say, interrupting the second act.
Aimee gestures with irritation for me to go on.
“What is it?”
“Do—I mean, I’m not trying to blow up the whole—”
“Go ahead.”
“I think it doesn’t work to have Hailey tell Lola that she’s been dead the whole time. It’s a rip-off for the audience if they end up feeling fooled by Hailey. She comes off like a punishing ghost. And it doesn’t make any sense, because how would Lola not know—”
“Are you kidding right now? We can’t rewrite the whole ending, Meg!”
“I know, but it isn’t right.”
“Meg, what the hell are you suggesting? We’ve got twenty-four hours. This is actually wild.”
“It doesn’t have to be anything substantial; it’s a few lines that need to be changed. Lola should be the one to tell Ai—Hailey.” I flush at the mistake.
“Lola should tell her. Because at the end of the day—”
My throat tightens.
“What?” she asks, still firm and professional.
“At the end of the day, isn’t Hailey a figment of Lola’s imagination? Hailey doesn’t know that she’s… you know, she doesn’t know. The whole thing is a metaphor for Lola to work through the fact that she hasn’t accepted her friend’s… death.”
The meta-upon-meta nature of what I’m saying is definitely not lost on me.
I blink away the tears, refusing to allow them to fall.
It’s not lost on Aimee either.
“That’s awfully Lola-centric, isn’t it? I mean, the whole world doesn’t revolve around Lola.”
“It makes more sense to me,” I say.
“Narratively.”
She pauses, then says, “We’re leaving it. Guys, I think we’re done here.”
She goes over to her binder and grabs it off the ground.
The small tech crew move slowly toward shutting the rehearsal down.
I watch Aimee go down into the seats and collect her stuff.
A wave of something hot rises in me.
A deep, unseated anger is dislodged.
In the last several years, I’ve stopped speaking up.
It’s why my assistant controls my life and runs rampant over me.
It’s why I do all the paid ads I hate doing so much.
It’s why I have a PR-arranged relationship, live in a house that doesn’t feel like my own; why I’ve gotten so much work done and lost so much weight.
Because I haven’t felt like I deserved to say no or to admit when something doesn’t feel right.
I’ve stopped trusting myself.
She’s about to leave when I call after her.
I might not have forever to have this fight.
“Hey!”
My voice echoes around the place.
Visibly startled, she turns to me.
“What?”
“Don’t what me,” I say.
“We need to talk.”
She laughs.
“What are you going to do, break up with me?”
“I need to know why you’re so mad at me. Because you’re my best fucking friend, and I don’t understand what happened between us. I deserve to figure it out. Even if you don’t feel like it.”
“Meg.” She looks exhausted.
“No, don’t do that. You may not believe what I told you, but it doesn’t even matter. We aren’t talking, and we swore that we would always be friends.” I hold up my pinky, gesturing for the promise we’d made.
I let my hand fall at my side and stare at her in the darkness of the theater.
“Fine.”
She tosses her bag down, letting her binder and books clatter on the ground as she stomps toward me.
She gets right up onstage and then crosses her arms.
“I’m here, you happy?”
“Yes.”
She seems to steel herself.
“What were we fighting about the night—the night it happened?”
I hesitate, surprised by her question.
“You weren’t telling me something. I was pretty sure it had to do with Theo. I couldn’t get it out of you. You were being really weird at the party and then said you wanted to go home. I was afraid you were pregnant or something, but in the aut—” We both go a shade paler at the near mention of the word autopsy .
My stomach flips.
“You weren’t. I’ll never know what you didn’t want to tell me.”
She goes paler still, and then says, “I think I might know. Actually.”
My chest runs cold and I feel my body harden, bracing for impact.
“What?”
What would this Aimee know that my Aimee also knew?
What secret could transcend this much time and space?
“I did get into Avalon. When you did.”
I’m confused, but furious understanding starts to creep into my bones before my mind can catch up.
“What are you talking about?”
“We both got in.”
“Then why did you tell me you didn’t?”
“I knew you’d go anyway.”
It’s too much to comprehend.
“Wait, wait, wait. Okay, first of all, no I wouldn’t, I didn’t , in fact, I did stay at that terrible school and live in a shithole dorm with you. In my world, which you don’t believe anymore.”
She bites her bottom lip in a way I forgot she used to do.
“I do believe you. I was mad and being mean.”
I pause.
“Why didn’t you go to Avalon with me?”
“Because I didn’t want to!” she says, her voice now the one bouncing off the empty seats and through the sky-high rafters.
“I didn’t want to.”
“What do you mean, you didn’t want to? It’s literally all we talked about for like two years!”
“No, Meg, it’s all you talked about for two years.”
I shake my head.
This is bullshit.
“We stayed up every night talking about it.”
She doesn’t say anything because we both know what she’d say.
Which is that I was the one who stayed up every night talking about it.
“Okay…” I relent.
“So why didn’t you tell me?”
“I knew you’d blame it on Theo. Because, yeah, I wanted to stay with him. I loved him, Meg, I’ve always loved him so much. Even when he was a loser idiot teenager, and now that he’s not, I love him the same. I knew that you’d think I was being a dumb girl staying home to be with her townie boyfriend. I never wanted a big life like you.” The way she says big life , I can tell she’s quoting me.
“You could never understand why or how anyone could ever want anything less than to become an icon. To become immortal.” She gives a laugh joylessly.
I seethe.
“This is crazy.”
She nods slowly.
It makes sense.
It makes so much stupid, stupid sense.
I can hardly believe it, because if this is true, and if the timelines diverged when I think they did, then it means she lied in my world too.
And in my world, it’s even worse, because she let me stay home without telling me the truth.
I think of how I’m always trying to get my mom to move out of Florida.
How she’s always telling me that she and Dad like their life there.
How I’m often angry when I get off the phone with her.
More strange, disjointed memories start to pour over into my consciousness like an overflowing bathtub, the hot water seeping over the sides.
No wonder the atmosphere was so charged after we graduated high school.
Aimee acted so weird, especially once we got to college.
No wonder she encouraged me to move to the nicer building without her.
No wonder she got so visibly uncomfortable every time I joked about having stayed home for her.
Clearly, I had been veiling my own resentments, but I’d based them on what I thought was the truth.
Every time things sucked, they double-sucked for her because she felt guilty I was there, ostensibly, for her.
“But I saw the letter,” I say.
She shakes her head.
“No, you didn’t.”
I have an image in my head of the rejection letter she received.
I can see it.
But as quickly as it appears, the memory begins to go up in flames, as if I were holding a match to the edge of the letter itself.
“You never asked to see it,” she says.
“I think you knew. You must have, somewhere.”
I feel a strange tremor run through my skeleton and I wet my lips and clear my throat.
“No, that’s—no.”
“I kept thinking you’d ask to see it, but when you didn’t, I didn’t volunteer it. Obviously. Because it was a lie.”
A small waft of amusement goes between us and I can’t help but scoff.
“This changed my whole life, you know. That decision. That’s what this whole thing is about. I think. My being here at all. I had two lives. I picked one. The one where I stayed with you. And where I lost you.”
“You should have come,” she says to the ground.
“This is what should have happened. To me, it is what happened.”
“Why didn’t I? If I knew? Why would I stay in Florida with you if I secretly knew?”
She shrugs.
“I don’t know. I don’t know if you knew or didn’t.”
We look at each other now, and I feel like we’re two fairies trapped under a jar.
Both easily apprehended because we were paralyzed with fear, too afraid to take flight.
“So this is why we were fighting?”
“I mean, it started as an argument about Theo. Then I told you the truth about my acceptance. I was so mad. I wanted you to learn to like Theo and when you wouldn’t, after all this time, I snapped. Told you. I knew it would make you as angry as I was. I think my logic was that you’d see that you were selfish, you broke our deal and came without me. Which is stupid. I knew it was stupid.”
“And… how did you end up coming here? To Avalon? If you didn’t want to.”
She exhales heavily and says, “I changed my mind. I realized I was making a major life decision based on fear and decided that it was a worthier thing to follow your dream than to have no dream of my own. I couldn’t stay home for a guy, in the end. I figured if it was meant to be, then me leaving for an opportunity like this wouldn’t mean saying no to a life with him eventually. And he wasn’t really getting it together yet. The weed-smoking was a lot back then, and obviously it just was different then. Like a whole-ass lifestyle.”
It’s true.
When we were teenagers, you didn’t have to be a prude to think the stoners were lame.
Now, in California, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have gummies, a vape pen, a topical cream.
…
I could go on.
I hear her phone buzz on her stack of things in the aisle where she left them.
“That’ll be Theo,” she says.
“I usually put the kids to bed.”
“Okay.”
She pauses, then says, “It is annoying, you’d think he could do it one night without me. Maybe I should divorce him.”
She’s kidding of course, and I laugh gratefully.
“I love that guy, I think you should stay forever.”
We both laugh, then when the awkward silence hits, she inhales through her nose and says, “I’d better…”
“Yeah, for sure.”
She goes back out into the empty theater and picks up her phone, then gathers her things.
She holds up a hand to say goodbye, and I hold mine up.
“Turn the lights off, yeah?” she says.
She goes through the squeaky door to the outside, and I’m left by myself.
That night, I text Cillian and he tells me that he’s got a busy night at the pub.
I text Kiera, too, who says she’s busy but can’t wait to see the show tomorrow.
I get back to the cottage, absent of all the company I’ve had recently, and feel overwhelmed by the emptiness.
It’s not that I feel sorry for myself or panic at the idea that I have to face an entire evening alone.
No, it’s weirder than that.
More complicated.
In the last couple of days, I’ve been feeling more and more divided.
Tense but relaxed.
Happy but worried.
As if I’m slicing into two.
And I’ve seen enough movies, consumed enough stories, to fear what I think might be inevitable.
Tomorrow night, after the show, I have a flight from Dublin to LAX.
I have no intention of getting on that flight.
I would cancel it if I could, but of course my ticket doesn’t exist.
It’s from the other reality.
So why am I so afraid that the end will come and take me?