Chapter 29
Marlowe
I throw open the door to the Memory Machine and hurry out the school’s back emergency exit, disabling the alarm and placing a small pebble in the door. It’s a gigantic risk to come back to a universe I barely escaped the first time, but it’s the only place I can think of to try.
When I get to the house, Psychic Marlowe and Psychic Priscilla are sitting on the front porch again, sharing tea.
“It’s…me,” Psychic Marlowe says. While it doesn’t ever get any less weird to see an alternate version of yourself, we’ve spent enough time together for this to not require quite so much reverence. I’m literally wearing her clothes.
“Hello,” I say, waving as I walk up. “And you thought you’d only see me in the mirror.”
Psychic Priscilla watches over the rim of her cup, her eyes tracking my face and then slowly flicking to her own Marlowe as she takes a delicate sip of tea. “Your best yet,” she murmurs in appreciation. Then, to me, she says, “Marlowe makes her own tea blends.”
“I know,” I say, confused. “I had some this morning.”
“Okay” is all she says, her lips tightening.
“I’m here because I can’t find my Priscilla,” I say. “We got into an argument, and she asked me to leave her alone, so I did. For just a minute. But then I realized what a bad idea that is when we’re dealing with the Memory Machine. I thought maybe this was where she’d want to go.”
“There’s only one Priscilla here,” Psychic Marlowe says. She squeezes a lemon and spoons some honey into her cup. Before she takes a sip, she looks at it, then hands it to me. “Tell us what happened.”
I run them through everything that’s transpired since we last saw each other. I only get halfway through before I realize neither of them has spoken. Every other story I’ve told them has come with incessant questions. It’s not like them to be this silent. Unless…
Have I gone to the wrong version of this reality? Is this yet another iteration of the universe, and it just so happens to very closely resemble the one I already know? There’s no way for me to be sure, is there?
Only I’ve asked all of this out loud, speaking my thoughts to process them.
“Be sure of what, exactly?” Psychic Marlowe asks.
“If you’re the versions of you I already met,” I say.
“We are not,” Psychic Priscilla tells me. “We don’t know you. Except, I guess, in the sense that she is you.”
“When did you meet us?” Psychic Marlowe asks.
“I met you yesterday,” I say. “Friday. Well, we spent Thursday here, too.”
They look at each other.
“What?” I ask, desperate.
“Today is Wednesday, May 6,” Psychic Marlowe says.
Of fucking course it is.
“Maybe Priscilla will be here tomorrow,” she continues.
“She will be,” I say, my frustration growing. “But that’s the wrong Priscilla. Well, it’s the right one, but the wrong time. Fuck!” I yell so loud it startles a few birds out of the nearest tree.
“That’s right!” Psychic Priscilla says. “Release it! It does you no good to harbor frustration!”
Her encouragement only embarrasses me—my Priscilla would hate this level of earnestness—so instead I harness my emotions enough to fill in the backstory they need.
It’s weird to tell this without Priscilla at my side.
It feels like I’m getting details wrong, missing the emphases she’s always so good at hitting.
Still, I manage to get them all the way to my present, ending with how my Priscilla and I left everything.
They say nothing of my Priscilla and me, instead nodding through the parts about my Dallas, who I also left back in 1995.
“We’re not surprised your Dallas is stuck inside his grief,” Psychic Priscilla says. “Our Dallas has done his best to work through his, but I know he still struggles.”
“Even if he stays there, he will never get to really live,” Psychic Marlowe contributes. “But you can’t make someone else understand that. It’s his lesson to learn.”
“It applies to me, too,” I tell them. “I’ve been punishing myself for years, thinking that’s the price I’ve had to pay for failing myself and others.
I have to stop thinking of it as a failure in the first place.
It’s okay that things didn’t go the way I imagined.
Nothing in life ever does. My goals have changed, and the only person I’m really failing is my current self by refusing to acknowledge that. My past needs to stop defining me.”
“Exactly,” Psychic Marlowe says. “Go on.”
“Priscilla was never as hard on me as I was on myself,” I say.
It feels revelatory. Obvious to me now. The perfect hindsight that only comes when the road you’ve walked is long behind you.
“For so many years, I’ve been making her the enemy, because it’s easier to pin it on her than it is to admit it’s always been me,” I continue.
“I gave up acting because I didn’t like how uncomfortable I felt not being the favorite.
I didn’t know how to be the small fish in the big pond and still keep swimming.
I needed constant validation, so I went where I knew I could get it.
Back to high school with Dallas. Back to my hometown, where my parents can dote on me and everybody remembers me as someone talented and worthy.
I went to what was comfortable. But I realize now that I thrive on excitement. On curiosity. On a challenge.”
I think of my heatless fights with Alice. The hills where we thrive that neither of us ever wanted to climb for each other.
And then I think of Priscilla. The way just seeing her eyes can spark a flame of passion inside me. Her every word makes me want to sharpen my own. Everything she’s ever done has interested me despite all of my best attempts to stop myself from caring.
“For the last year, I’ve been convincing myself that I want to take over Dallas’s job,” I continue.
“There is no one else in Garden Meadows, or maybe even the world, who cares enough about theater to do it. But I don’t want it.
It was never my dream. And it wasn’t even his either.
We’ve both been soldiering along, fulfilling an obligation we created for ourselves.
But I want more. I want a real challenge. ”
And I know where I can get one.
“I’m so sorry I can’t stay,” I say. “I have to find Priscilla.”
I give them both hugs.
“Everything you’re going to do tomorrow is perfect.
Don’t worry about messing it up now that you’ve seen me,” I tell them, smirking a bit when I think about how much the me of tomorrow will first resist what the psychics tell her, knowing now that everything they share has come directly from me.
“You can’t break the universe, no matter how you try.
I’ll end up where I need to be. We all will. ”