Chapter 33 #2
I cup my hand over my mouth, because she’s right.
I’ve gotten so used to feeling free. All of my old habits would be easy to pick back up again.
Familiar. But if jumping through space and time taught me anything, it’s that I don’t have to be the person I was last week, last month, or even the last hour.
That Marlowe will always live inside me.
That doesn’t mean she gets to control my every action.
“Yes, I fucking am,” I say. “And I mean it. They suck, and you deserve better. You are too talented to give up. So don’t you dare do it. You fucking hear me? We’ll find you another fucking agent, all right?”
“You sound like a character in The Godfather,” she says.
“Good. So long as ya hear me, all right, kid? We ain’t givin’ up yet. Now come on,” I say, reaching for Priscilla’s hand. “Let’s go fucking see everybody.”
When we get to the English hallway, my class is being taught by a substitute teacher I don’t recognize.
They hire them from an outside company now, so we don’t always know who it will be.
I peek through the window enough to see her standing at the front of my room, being careful to stay hidden from the view of the students.
“That’s Jessica Downing,” Priscilla whispers. “The one who had your job in the strangers’ reality.”
I do a double take.
She’s right. We’d looked her up on the computer while we were researching, and here she is, in my room, in my world. It makes sense that she’d be around in some capacity, but it’s even stranger to see the proof of how different every single person’s life could be.
“We literally contain so much,” I whisper to Priscilla.
“I bet you said the same thing that time you got stoned at seventeen,” she whispers back.
“And I would have been right.”
Across the hall, Alice sits alone in her classroom. It’s her break hour, and she’s eating the salad she makes herself every day—a routine I wish I asked every other Alice about, just to know all the ways it could be different.
It’s so nice to know it’s my Alice, even if the my means something a lot different now. Alice Yeung would do anything to help me. She proved that time and time again, and she doesn’t even know it.
I do one light knock on her door, and when her eyes meet mine, several different emotions cross her face—shock, relief, fear, excitement. She runs up, about to shout, but I press my finger to my lips first.
“I don’t want the kids to know yet,” I explain.
“Come in, come in,” she beckons. Inside her classroom, she pulls me into such a tight hug I can hardly breathe. “Where have you been? We’ve all been so scared.”
I linger in the hug for a while, enjoying the smell of her shampoo and the general comfort of her. My Alice.
“We went looking for Dallas,” I say, pulling Priscilla into the conversation. “We found him.”
Priscilla gives a small wave. “Hello, Alice. It’s great to see you.”
“Hi, Cilla,” Alice says, unsure.
“I forgot this Alice didn’t know you were here,” I say to Priscilla.
“This Alice?” Alice questions. “And I did know. She signed in at the front, and Beth was really worked up about her not taking a visitor’s badge.”
“Classic Beth,” Priscilla says.
“Where did you two go?” Alice asks. “Where is Dallas?”
We haven’t prepared for this. How do I tell anyone here that Dallas doesn’t want to come back? How will I sit in front of our students and let them know his grief is too big to overcome?
I go with “It’s a very long story” right as Priscilla decides to come out and say, “We entered the multiverse together.”
“Okay,” Alice says, forcing herself to be amenable despite her obvious discomfort.
It’s her fear of Priscilla, that long-past gym-class history still very much alive and well for this version of her.
A beat passes, and her forced smile dissolves.
“Wait, no. What the hell do you mean you entered the multiverse together?”
“Look at this! She’s swearing, too,” Priscilla says.
This makes me laugh, but it confuses Alice in a way I know makes her feel excluded, so I put a hand on her shoulder. “It means exactly what you think it means, but you won’t be able to trust that it’s true until I tell you this.”
“Tell me what?” she implores.
“Jeannie Gratto has a crush on you,” I say.
“Big-time,” Priscilla confirms before Alice can protest. “She wants her pink lipstick all over your face. Messy kisser. Or perhaps really into, like, face play? Didn’t get a full read on it. But she’s hot hot hot for her fellow teacher, I can assure you that.”
Alice’s face turns the shade of Jeannie’s lipstick, burning with so much embarrassment I’m almost catching it secondhand. “What?” she asks in exaggerated outrage. “That’s so inappropriate. That’s…” She peters off. Then, lower, she whispers, “Did she tell you that herself?”
“Even better. We saw you and her making out,” Priscilla says.
Alice misreads this, thinking Priscilla means her current reality, and she flies across the room. “We did not make out. She just…we hugged for a long while. It wasn’t…it wasn’t explicitly intimate…She knew I was really scared about where you’d gone, and I told her about the breakup, and…”
“Alice,” I say. “It’s okay. We are firmly broken up. And you were very right to break up with me, just as I was right to break up with you the next day.”
She smiles.
“We really don’t fit,” I continue. “And you deserve someone who fits you perfectly. Jeannie looks like she’d hate niche ceramics.”
This brings on a wave of tears from Alice.
“Oh no,” I say. “Please don’t cry like this over me.”
“It’s not you,” she insists. “Well, it is. It’s just that, when you were missing, too…It’s all been so chaotic. I haven’t been able to sleep. I’ve been out of my mind. And I didn’t know what to do or where to go, and, well, Jeannie showed up at my condo with a hot meal.”
“You and Jeannie Gratto,” I say, playfully scandalized.
“I know.” She looks at the ground. And I see in her face something I never once brought out before—a thrill. “In what world?”
“You’re telling me.”
“Wait. What are you going to do about Spring Awakening?” she asks.
I don’t even have to think before I respond, “I’m going to play Dallas’s part.”
“The show must go on,” Priscilla says proudly.
“For Dallas,” I say.
“For Dallas,” she replies.