Chapter Six
First things first: I needed to get a handle on some of the basics. Not placing Barry the doorman within seconds was forgivable, despite Drew’s outsized reaction, but not knowing where I worked, or how to get there, or shit, my own address was definitely gonna raise some flags.
Unless…maybe I could just get back to my real life? I glanced around as though someone might have left a helpful sign on the wall: Stay in Right Lane for the World You’re Supposed to Live In.
Think, Laurel. You fell asleep next to Ollie…maybe if you fall asleep here you’ll wake up where you’re supposed to be?
I hurried back to the bedroom, flipping off all the lights and crawling back under the covers, eyes squeezed tight as I willed sleep to come.
Obviously that didn’t work. Mainly because I couldn’t get my thoughts—or the pulse throbbing in my neck—to slow enough for sleep to seem like even a remote possibility. I waited for five minutes, trying half-assedly to meditate my way to bodily calm, but no matter how many times I tried to just let the thoughts sail past, I couldn’t keep from whipping my head after them, trying to chart their progress on the foreign ocean I found myself bobbing along in. Finally, with a huff, I sat up and turned the lights back on. I never had been a good sleeper, I should have known forcing the issue wouldn’t work.
And of course I had no reasons other than hope and a million eighties movies to believe “just fall asleep again” would get me back anyway.
Maybe there was some sort of…switch to flip somewhere? My eyes darted around the room as though I might find it built into the wall, Whoops, left that in the “wrong life” position again, silly Laurel!
Okay, yes, I knew that was ridiculous. But what else could I try? Without any clue as to how I’d wound up here, how could I possibly hope to find my way back?
I curled up into a ball in the bed, letting the clammy, tingly wave of anxiety crash over me, buffeting me back and forth for a while until my breathing and heartbeat started to slow to something approaching normal. When I opened my eyes again, I was still stubbornly here, in this apartment I apparently shared with Drew, in a life where we’d gotten together and then so much more had changed. It wasn’t a “wear a red shirt, get attacked by a pissed-off bull” sort of difference, but a not-small part of me longed for the concreteness of a bovine attack.
But wishing myself back to my real life—or to a personal Pamplona—clearly wasn’t going to be any more effective than feigning sleep, and with the immediate rush of existential terror receding, a part of me was starting to get a little curious. What had changed after my personal bull charge? The metaphor felt more apt than a single stupid butterfly beating one gossamer wing.
Besides, if there was some hidden switch to flip—maybe at the Pixel offices?—I would need more information to find out how I could thrust it back into position.
The obvious place to start was the internet. I made myself coffee in the space-age machine hulking under the kitchen cabinets— muscle memory seemed to kick in when I faced its intricate array of touch screens and sleek stainless buttons—then flipped open my laptop at the kitchen island, a pristine, glittering white quartz waterfall. The low-backed brass and tan leather stools tucked beneath it were tasteful and obviously expensive, but physically uncomfortable, so I pushed mine back under and opted to stand.
Clearly the first task had to be food—I couldn’t let something as banal as hunger distract me from my goal. I started pulling open the sleek white cabinets in turn, their faces bare of any ornamentation, with slim cylindrical handles in a gold tone that matched the metal on the stools. Plain white dishware, elegantly featureless, sat in regimented stacks, even the mugs neatly nested, perfectly engineered for their purpose. I uncovered a high-end blender, a sous-vide machine with an ample stock of vacuum-sealable bags, a set of weighty stainless steel pans, and dozens of fancy kitchen utensils, neatly arranged in a drawer next to the stove. It was everything you could ever need for a chef-level cooking experience. Did Drew use all this stuff? When could he possibly have the time?
Eventually I opened the tall doors of the pantry and found a neat system of modular shelves subdividing the slide-out drawers, their promise of increased storage wasted on the half-empty space. The breakfast offerings were slim, and entirely of the “tastes a bit cardboardy so you know it’s healthy” variety. Hopefully that just meant Drew and I both tended to eat at the office? The idea that I chose a life exclusively filled with “no sweetener added” hempseed granolas and their ilk felt virtuous, but a little sad.
But at least it was some clue to the texture of my days here. I poured out a bowl, topped it with oat milk—the only variety in the fridge—and plopped down in the little breakfast nook, staring blankly at the sixties-era MBTA map, the brightly colored train lines spidering out from the nexus of downtown, hanging above the table.
As the fog cleared further with each flax-fortified bite, my curiosity increased. This was an actual different life I’d stepped into. Forget the factoids I’d need to dig up and study so that I had them fully internalized by the time I saw Drew next—I couldn’t have him sending me off for a battery of tests, there was no way the path back was through an MRI machine. Still, those data points were individual stars; I needed to zoom out far enough to recognize the shape of the galaxy I was in. And this room felt like a major constellation. Clearly we cooked, or at least one of us did, but it didn’t seem like the homey casseroles and butter-drenched starches Drew and I had both grown up with were on the menu. If the variety of high-end gadgetry was any indicator, we opted for the challenging, complex cooking that felt like a gold-star-kid version of the hobby. I had a sudden mental image of a Thanksgiving spread, all of the dishes incredible but none of them nostalgic, an assortment of the “elevate the classic ___” offerings that food magazines published every year, carefully arranged along the simple midcentury modern table I’d glimpsed in the dining area just off the kitchen. An echo of pride flitted through me as I imagined—remembered?—the edible work of art.
Wait…was I the home chef? That was just…I mean, it’s not like I’d have the time for it, either…right?
Still, if I was being honest, the idea was enticing. A huge part of me had always aspired to a life like the one that, to all appearances, Drew and I had built together. Something clean and classy, filled with bright points of understated luxury: the too-expensive napkins in colors guaranteed to stain, flatware that doubled as abstract art, centerpieces that gestured elegantly to the season without ever doing something so déclassê as actively telegraphing it. I’d only ever seen that in catalogs growing up, usually the ones that slid through the mail slot addressed to Mom, even years after she’d left, a painstakingly tasteful reminder of everything we’d lost.
In this world, it seemed that I’d fulfilled that dream. But how? What formula had I unlocked in this life that was seemingly beyond my grasp in my life with Ollie, our weekends spent scouring flea markets for something interesting he could fix up, not perfecting my cassoulet technique, our apartment brimming with warmly eclectic hand-me-downs when apparently, all along, we could have chosen… anything . We could have actually committed to a style, saved up for the version we wanted instead of impulse-buying something goofy and sweet that appealed in the moment, could have created all this. Sure, I couldn’t imagine the sophisticated, perfectly matched dishware having a particularly interesting story behind it—almost everything in my life with Ollie had a story, down to each of our dozen or more mismatched coffee mugs—but did you really need all that when you could live in such an aesthetically pleasing, clutter-free, mildly money-scented retreat?
Though maybe Drew and I just made much, much more money than Ollie and I did. Which brought me back around to the biggest mystery of my morning (well, second-biggest, but “What the fuck happened with the program that it was able to suddenly port me into another life ” probably wasn’t something I could google my way out of in a couple hours): What did I do ?
I wandered around the apartment, so pristine it was hard to know where to start looking, but luckily, a basket on a table just inside the front door held a thin stack of recent mail. Promotional flyers, a cellphone bill for me—so clearly I lived here full-time, that was something—and at the bottom, a letter from Lakeside Mortgage Services.
Mortgage. So we—or he—must own this place. Impressive. Boston real estate was notoriously expensive, and we were in the kind of building that not only had views all the way to the Charles, it had a doorman. That couldn’t come cheap.
But I wasn’t at Pixel anymore in this life. So where was I making all the bank you’d need to underwrite this, my catalog dreams fully come to life?
I grabbed my laptop again. I’d have to find something on there that told me who I worked for. I made myself another cup of coffee—apparently brewing an entire pot was an inefficiency I eschewed here, since my fingers didn’t seem to know how to make that happen—flipped the TV on and navigated to a news channel, then settled into the burnt-orange velvet sofa for a deep dive.
“Despite hours of late-night negotiation, the majority leader wasn’t able to strike a deal that satisfied all wings of the party. If an interim budget deal isn’t voted through by the weekend, a government shutdown…”
I couldn’t remember the name of the woman on the TV, but her bronze skin and impossibly straight dark brown hair were familiar, as were the general parameters of the latest Washington shitshow.
“At least some things were spared by the rampaging bull,” I muttered as I clicked the Mute button, the closed captions lagging a few seconds behind the images unfolding on the screen.
I started poking around my digital life, beginning with my archived emails (nothing from work that I could find, barring Pixel correspondence officially terminating my employment about eighteen months back) and bookmarked webpages (I couldn’t discern a pattern in the smattering of design blogs, recipe sites, subreddits, and random Wikipedia pages I’d decided I couldn’t bear to lose track of).
I scanned all the icons on my desktop, which was unnervingly spare, just a handful of shortcuts to important programs and, huddling in a corner of the screen, my catchall “personal” file, crammed with everything from photos to tax returns.
Tax returns . That would have to tell me my job! I opened up the finder, fingers shaking slightly as I typed “tax return” into the search bar, hoping that doppellaurel favored similar labeling protocols.
Bingo. An entire folder full of subfolders helpfully divided by year. All I had to do was open the return for last year and find… Drew Bevins ?
We filed taxes together? Panic bubbling up from my stomach, I closed my eyes, raising my left hand slowly, too scared to open them and confirm my suspicions—if we were actually married, clearly this life was better—how else could Drew have succeeded where the man I’d always thought was the love of my life had scared me into a literal alternate universe with the mere prospect ? Which meant I’d have to either find a way to never leave this world, or somehow work up the nerve to end things with Ollie when I got back and pray Drew was still interested. My stomach twisted painfully at the thought.
But when I finally worked up the nerve to look, there was nothing on my ring finger. I exhaled, shaky with relief. Which maybe I shouldn’t be. Relieved, that is. Just because we weren’t married, or engaged, that didn’t mean that life with Drew wasn’t the better choice for me. I mean— Look around you, Laurel . Still, the idea that my fears about forever with Ollie were rooted entirely in, well… Ollie, not in me, made my throat swell, eyes prickling slightly. It felt like a horrible betrayal, not just of the man, but of all those mornings together scouring for bargains, the careful hours he put into giving new life to the things we found, the ridiculous songs he’d sing me, and the way he could turn a random Tuesday into an adventure. Sure, our dishes didn’t match, but that wasn’t the only thing that could make a good life.
But back to the task at hand—I opened up the tax file, scrolling to find our details. Drew Bevins and Laurel Everett, domestic partners—that explained it. His profession was, unsurprisingly, computer scientist. Mine was…
Writer?
I blinked at the screen, not fully comprehending what I was seeing. I’d dreamed of writing books since middle school, when my creative writing teacher’s comments on each assignment— Charming story! Such an interesting idea! Great metaphors! —felt like a promise of future success. I’d always been bookish, but after Mom left, I’d thrown myself into writing—and reading—almost frantically, haunting the school library, devouring shelves and shelves of books systematically, furiously spinning out my pale echo fanfics, the promise of the resolution I knew I’d find on the page—true love found, evil neutralized—like balm in the sudden chaos of a post-Mom world.
But by the time I finally made it into one of the massively competitive writing seminars in college, the dream I’d cherished as a teen was already starting to feel distinctly dulled. For one thing, my professor had summarily dismissed romance—the genre I’d always gravitated to most strongly—as pedestrian, but then all genre writing is a bit facile, isn’t it? Which left me scrambling to try to create the kind of glum No one is happy and no one grows or changes at the end short stories she always lavished praise on. I never excelled in the class, and worse, despite my best efforts with back issues of The New Yorker and various lauded anthologies, I’d never been able to shake my “pedestrian” taste for the romances I still read devotedly.
But more importantly, I wasn’t sure how one became a writer. As a kid, the genius-in-a-garret stereotype had seemed so romantic, aspirational in its own way, but after the horror of the apartment I’d lived in just after graduation—clearly I was the only one of the four roommates who had any personal experience with cleaning a bathroom—the idea of a hand-to-mouth life made my skin crawl a little (though that could have just been the mold in the shower). When I’d spotted the marketing job at Pixel, it had felt like a sign—Icould fulfill my creative destiny and pay my bills…in a better apartment, one that didn’t have a stove older than I was and a rotating revue of infestations. I told myself I’d still write, that this would be better, it would motivate me to use my mornings and weekends to draft my novel, in fact it would be a built-in hobby, and who didn’t need hobbies?
Suffice it to say that, nearly five years later, I was still in the “waiting for a really great idea” phase of my writing career. I tried to tell myself it was because I was too busy, that I’d get around to it once work settled down, that really, building up a nest egg before I leaned into writing was just smart . And that wasn’t untrue, exactly, but I knew deep down that it was all just excuses. I was too scared to start. Too scared to take an idea out of my head and only imperfectly transcribe it, and then possibly face the contempt of “real” writers like my professor, or worse, a string of rejections.
In that life. In this one…I was a writer. In a gorgeous condo where I used my spare time to not just have a hobby but excel at it—god, I must throw the most glamorous dinner parties—and that hobby was actually for enjoyment, not a career-in-training masquerading as fun. I laughed aloud, excitement fizzing through me.
“Holy shit, ” I murmured, lifting a hand to cover my idiotic grin. I wasn’t dreaming, but this—my life—was the embodiment of my actual dreams.
The doorbell rang and I padded over, pressing my eye to the peephole before opening it. The slim, narrow-faced man on the other side was somewhere in his early twenties, gripping a paper bag in one hand and a bouquet of white daisies in the other, just like the ones that had grown in my childhood backyard, which Mom taught me to weave into crowns.
“Laurel Everett?”
“That’s right.”
“Sign here, please.” He proffered an iPad and I dutifully traced my signature with a fingertip, then he thrust his cargo into my arms and hurried away.
I took my bounty into the kitchen, finding a vase for the flowers—we had real vases, not just mason jars—before opening the bag. Inside, a cellophane sack was fogged and dewy around a loaf of still warm challah, a quart container of what turned out to be chicken noodle soup nestled beside it. The delivery service receipt at the bottom had a note:
Thinking of you. Rest up and feel better! xx, Drew
I was a writer. In this ludicrously lovely condo. With a boyfriend who not only loved me, not only supported my pursuing my dream—literally, the staggering amount next to Drew’s name on the tax return proved it. My bottom line was…well “bottom” was apt. Which meant Drew’s Pixel money was floating the day-to-day for both of us while I launched a career I’d always known offered more by way of fulfillment than compensation. And on top of all that, he was thoughtful enough to send me sick day soups and flowers.
In this life, I really had it all.
How had I not known this was an option?