Chapter 3 #2
She winced, but Jess seemed to follow the heavily abridged story well enough.
“Good news,” they said. “We have blueberry bagels today. Sorry again we were out yesterday. Do you want that and a mint tea?”
Amie nodded emphatically, not trusting herself to speak. She’d already forgotten the line she’d been practicing but was pretty sure it was no longer applicable.
Oh! She knew something she could say.
“Do you know what’s going on with …?” Amie gestured to the door and the cop who stood on the other side of it.
Jess looked up as they finished tapping the screen. “Did you hear about Savannah?”
Amie knew exactly who they were referring to.
Savannah Harlow, the owner of the bookshop next door, had a habit of making baristas redo her drink and loudly complaining about the “slow service.” Amie had many times witnessed Savannah scolding Jess on September 17, which led to Jess knocking a drink off of the counter.
Savannah was also Amie’s neighbor. She lived in the apartment directly above with her husband, Andrew, whose heavy tread was more familiar to Amie than her own.
Savannah was infamous in their building for starting arguments, feeling personally attacked, and stealing packages.
Amie had once accompanied David for moral support as he demanded that Savannah return his package of balloons that had gone missing from the mail room.
Savannah returned the balloons, claiming that she thought the box had been addressed to her.
Amie had quickly steered David away before he could comment on Savannah’s poor reading skills or failing eyesight.
“No,” Amie answered. She was getting the hang of this “holding a conversation” thing. “What happened?”
Jess leaned in and in a low voice said, “She died.”
Amie frowned. “What? No. That can’t … how do you know?”
“Someone got it out of one of the cops when they started taping the sidewalk off.” Jess rested their forearms on the counter. “They found her dead this morning.”
“In the bookstore?”
“Apparently. Do you have your rewards card?”
Taking a beat to recover from the conversational whiplash, Amie remembered the card sitting on her kitchen counter. She’d stopped bringing it to the café during the time loop, for obvious reasons. “Oh, I … no, not on me.”
“I can look up your account if you’d like.”
“Ah … sure.” Amie gave the barista her email address.
“You’re eligible for a free beverage on your next visit,” Jess announced. “You can use that on tomorrow’s breakfast!”
Amie had a vague memory of Jess saying the same words to her at the start of the time loop, back when Amie still thought the points her visit accrued might last into the next day. Finally, the statement was true.
As she slid her card into the reader, her mind floated away from the counter.
She hadn’t become completely defamiliarized with the concept of death during the time loop, though it had lost its permanence, as did all other things.
Every evening, a mosquito would somehow manage to infiltrate her apartment, and Amie had eventually gotten the killing of it down to a science.
But each day it’d be back, blissfully unaware of its impending demise via flyswatter.
But Savannah was dead. Permanently. She wasn’t coming back.
“You can remove your card,” Jess said, breaking Amie out of her thoughts as she became aware of the shrill beeping coming from the card reader.
“Did she, um …” Amie’s brain raced to gather her thoughts enough to create a coherent sentence. “Savannah. Was it a medical thing, or …?”
“Not sure.” Jess printed out the receipt and handed it to her. “I think the cops are considering murder. You want your bagel toasted, right?”
Amie blinked at them. “Uh … yeah.”
“Great. It’ll be ready for you at the end of the counter.” Jess pointed at the pickup spot. “Have a great day!”
“Thanks, you too,” Amie replied automatically, drifting away.
Dead. Savannah is dead. Savannah might’ve been murdered.
She obviously hadn’t liked the woman. But she had a terrible feeling in her stomach, something akin to guilt. Amie had wanted so badly to be free of the time loop. And as soon as she was, this woman died. If the time loop had continued, Savannah would have still been alive.
Don’t be silly. She looked at the ceiling of the coffee shop, trying to regulate her thoughts. This isn’t your fault. Just because she would have continued living the same day on repeat doesn’t mean she would have lived any longer.
Her logical thoughts did little to appease the queasy feeling in her stomach. She hoped the bagel would do a better job.
The walk home started out easier than the walk to the café, and Amie felt a confidence returning to her stride.
That is, until she was faced with a quartet of joggers heading in her direction.
Amie stepped off the curb to get out of their way.
She leapt back onto the sidewalk as an ambulance barreled down the street, choosing that moment to turn the siren on.
Tea splashed onto her shirt, and she almost crashed into a man pushing a stroller.
“Sorry, sorry,” she apologized to the man, stumbling back as she kept a death grip on the paper bag in her hand. She might not make it back to her apartment in dry clothes, but she was determined to protect her long-awaited blueberry bagel.
As Amie stepped back, she felt her left sneaker hit the pavement softer than the right. She winced, slowly looking down.
Dog poop.
Amie sat at the kitchen table, damp hair wrapped in a towel. She gnawed on her bagel, which had gone chewy as it waited for Amie to shower. But absence makes the heart grow fonder, so despite the toughness, it was still a very good bagel.
Unfortunately, Amie was barely tasting anything as she absently ran her finger over the cover of her planner, which featured the green-and-pink waves of the aurora borealis.
Sighing, she flipped the book open. Tasks from earlier in the week were crossed out with straight, crisp lines.
Plans for the rest of the week that she’d written over two years ago were penned in neat, careful letters.
The ink was too fresh. She felt like she should have been blowing dust off of the thing. The planner had sat untouched on her desk for ages, all of its boxes for the different days rendered purposeless in a life that was the same date on repeat.
An empty box at the top of the page was titled “My Goals for the Week.” A few times, early in the loop, Amie had opened her planner and scribbled phrases into the box like “WHO CARES” and “WHATEVER I DID YESTERDAY I GUESS.” One time she wrote so hard the pen ripped through the paper, and the planner ended up in the trash can.
Now it was sitting open on the kitchen table, showing no signs of past scribbles or rips, much more vulnerable to a lasting impact from either.
“ ‘Mammogram piece due,’ ” Amie muttered to herself, reading the notes in the September 18 box.
She’d planned on finishing that article the day before, then looking it over the next day before filing it.
Obviously, that didn’t happen, seeing as the day before she had no idea whether or not September 18 was ever going to come.
Amie was employed by a lighthearted online magazine, writing about health and science trends targeted at women over the age of forty.
Many of the articles were listicles, and most were shared by people who didn’t read past the catchy title, but Amie worked hard at the job.
She’d never missed a deadline before, but she had a good relationship with her editor.
After adding Email Vivian for extension to the September 18 box, she looked to see what else she had originally planned to get done that day.
Pitch vitamin C piece. Water plants. Test lotions.
The corner of her mouth quirked up as she recalled how she’d been planning on trying out a variety of “de-aging” facial lotions for an article. She could picture the final paragraph:
While the Celina Facial Cream had the best results of all these lotions, the most effective way of ensuring your face doesn’t age for two years is getting stuck in a time loop! Tried and tested!
She moved the pitch to the 19th, watering the plants to the 18th, and crossed out the lotion test.
At the bottom of the 17th she’d written: Ziya friend date @ Fork and Egg (8pm).
She suddenly remembered the text she’d received that morning. The first indication that she was free from the loop. Ziya.
Amie jumped up so quickly her left knee slammed into the underside of the table.
“AGHHH. Ow.”
Limping, she crossed the apartment and retrieved her purse from its hook near the front door. After fishing out her phone, she returned the bag to its hook and hobbled back to the kitchen table to reread the texts from her ex-girlfriend:
Ziya: Hiya, feeling better this morning?
Ziya: Lmk when you’re free to reschedule our dinner
Ziya: Unless you’re not ready. Totally fine!!
Amie stared at the texts as she tried to formulate a reply, thumbs twitching with anticipation before she began tapping at the screen.
Good morning! she typed. I’m feeling much better, thanks for ask—
She deleted the message. Boring, basic. And it was perpetuating a lie, which she’d rather avoid, especially since her actions now had consequences.
I’m totally ready for this.
Amie stared at the message. Added a smiley emoji. Deleted the whole thing.
Shit, she thought. What if she sees me typing?
She swiped out of her messages and opened her notes app, then spent the next ten minutes of her newly linear life composing the perfect response.
Amie: Hey, good morning!
“Good” was a stretch, considering how she spent fifteen minutes of her morning scrubbing dog poop off of her sneaker, but she felt confident with that opener.
Amie: Thanks for checking in, I’m feeling great
Also a bit of a half-truth, but she could live with that. Time to bring it home.
Amie: Definitely down to reschedule. Free any time
Amie set down her phone with an exhale, mentally patting herself on the back.
This was going well. Everything was getting back on track.
Soon the time loop would be a distant memory, something she’d think back to at eighty and wonder if it had just been a bad mushroom trip (if she ever decided to try mushrooms).
She was finishing up planning the rest of her week when the phone lit up with a reply from Ziya:
Ziya: How’s tonight?
The ticking from the clock that hung over her stove seemed to grow very loud, as if someone had cranked up its volume. Amie looked away from the text and down at her planner.
Tonight … tonight …
Amie had expected Ziya to suggest a date a week away, maybe more.
Her ex-girlfriend liked to pack her schedule as much as humanly possible.
It wasn’t like her to have a free evening the day of.
Granted, when they were dating, many of those evenings had been reserved for Amie, but Amie had assumed that a byproduct of being broken up was that Ziya would find other activities to occupy that time.
Amie was free that night. Technically. But was she ready to go out again so soon? Despite successfully completing her quest to acquire her first blueberry bagel in over two years, the journey to and from the coffee shop had been more treacherous than she’d expected.
“Reacclimation,” she said out loud, looking down at the goals box in her planner. Amie picked up her pen to write down the word. It took her about thirty seconds, as the pen was running out of ink and she didn’t want to take the time to track down another one.
With some difficulty (and a lot of scribbling in the margins to get the ink going), the word “Reacclimation” filled the goals box. It was time to get back to normal.
But as she closed the planner, her hand drifted over the cover again. An ominous feeling swept over Amie as she reached for the phone to confirm with Ziya. She paused, hand hovering over the device.
I need a second opinion, she thought.