by L. E. DeLano
I get back to my feet, and there on the sink, directly below the mirror, is my journal, opened to a random blank page that isn’t so blank anymore. She left me a message:
Thanks for getting me out of karaoke night.
Sorry you have to walk home but Mario
made me come to Mugsy’s to do a correction.
He’s pissing me off lately.
I don’t think we’re making any headway and I’m so done with this.
I can feel her anger as she wrote it—not that it’s a stretch, because I feel it, too. Six weeks since Finn died and we’re no closer to knowing where Rudy is or Eversor is, and what’s Mario’s solution? Putting me in a position to come face-to-face with another Finn, without a word of warning. Dammit. I forgot to give the girl her Juicy Fruit gum. If Mario has the balls to confront me about that after what he just put me through …
I should head for home, but I know I can’t do it. I just can’t pretend I’m okay. I should have stayed where I was, taken another train back. I really need Liv. But I can probably never go back there—not now that things have been set in motion. That Jessa will find her Finn again, or he’ll find her.
I rub my chest, because I swear to God, it feels like there’s a knife in there right now. I can’t sit here in Mugsy’s all night, but the thought of walking home alone in the dark, sobbing, just adds to my misery.
I reach for my phone, punching in a number, and within seconds, the voice on the other end answers.
“St. Clair?”
“I need a friend.” It rushes out and I don’t care how it sounds. I need a shoulder. I need my friend.
Ben picks up on the tone of my tear-clogged voice immediately. “You at home?”
“Mugsy’s.” I can barely get the word out.
“I’ll be right over. Hang tight.”
“Thanks.”
I put the phone back in my pocket and I realize my hand is shaking. My mind plays over the scene again, the train platform, the sound of Finn’s voice, the look in those green eyes as the train pulled away.…
I look over at my reflection in the mirror, and I wonder how much time she’ll have with him.
4
Tired
Mario is waiting for me, and he ducks his head in a guilty gesture that makes me want to punch him. As it is, I stare at him soundlessly, with my hand curling into a fist.
“Jessa.”
“So you’re actually going to face me?”
“I’m the Dreamer who sent you there, and I’ll take full responsibility for it. I’m sure you realize it wasn’t an accident.”
“An accident?” I let out a choked laugh. “There are no ‘accidents’ with you people! You plan and manipulate and arrange everything, don’t you?”
“Jessa—”
“And who’s going to stop you? It’s no big deal, right? It’s just my heart! Just my life!” I turn my back on him, too furious to continue.
“You can’t avoid him forever.”
“Why can’t I? Who’s it hurting for me to avoid him?”
Mario folds his arms across his chest. “It’s hurting you,” he tells me, “though you probably can’t see it that way right now.”
“Oh, ya think?” The sarcasm is dripping off my words, and I lean back against his desk. “I’m tired, Mario. I’m traveling too much, my mom is getting really suspicious, and now you pull this on me. This was supposed to be a routine job.”
“You mean the job you didn’t complete? Again?” he asks pointedly.
“Don’t start with me.” My eyes flash a warning that he completely ignores as he studies me for a moment, stroking his chin thoughtfully.
“Come on,” he finally says. “I’ve got something to show you.”
He steps over to the red door and opens it, and I follow him through and into the dreamscape. We’re in someone’s backyard in what looks like an average suburban neighborhood. Mario now looks like a postal worker, complete with a bagful of letters slung over his shoulder.
“The girl you were supposed to offer the gum to was going to be reminded of an old family friend who happened to always carry Juicy Fruit gum,” he tells me, pointing the girl out as she walks past us. She doesn’t notice us because this is just a dream Mario is using to illustrate his point. We’re merely observers as he shows me the future that could have been.
“The friend is like a second mother to her,” he goes on, and the scene changes in front of us. It looks like we’re on a farm or something, and Mario is now in overalls and a John Deere hat.
“She’s going to make a point to visit the friend next month,” he tells me. “While she’s there, she’s going to remark about a suspicious mole on a neighbor’s arm.”
My forehead creases in confusion as I try to follow the chain of events. “She saves somebody from cancer?” I ask.
“No, it’s not just about that,” Mario says, waving a hand to change the scene again—this time to an older man sitting on a hospital bed, with a younger woman and a nurse in attendance.
“The cancer is there,” Mario says, pointing. “But it’s in the early stages. The neighbor will get the treatment he needs, and his daughter will drive him to his doctor appointments. The daughter will get to know the cute radiologist at the hospital, and they’ll begin a relationship. The radiologist has an ex-girlfriend who’ll be heartbroken to see him move on, and she’ll take nearly a year to recover from it. During that time, she starts playing guitar again—just like she needs to.”
“Why?”
“That’s another story that leads to a half dozen others,” Mario tells me, reaching for the knob on the red door that’s in the center of the hospital room wall. He opens it and I follow him back through into the classroom.
“So this guy might die of cancer and his daughter will never find true love because I screwed up—is that what you’re saying?” I wrap my arms around myself again, feeling twice as miserable as I did when I got here.
“I’m reminding you that one little correction can reset the course of dozens, maybe even hundreds of lives. We need you—you need you,” he amends, “to be the absolute best you can be as a Traveler. It’s critical, especially in light of current events. Working around Finn is a handicap we can’t afford you to have.”
“If Rudy was going to come after me, he would have done it already. I haven’t encountered Eversor once—anywhere.”
“Yet,” Mario adds.
“At all! And I’m not the only one who’s tired of spinning my wheels with you. The other Jessas are tired of this, too. We’ve been leaving notes for each other complaining about all of this—and you.”
Mario looks surprised. “You’re ganging up on me?”
“We talk. And we’re all in agreement. We think you’re wasting our time.”
He sucks in a breath, as if to draw patience from it, and lets it out slowly. “We’ll talk about this later,” he says. “You need some time after this one. Take the weekend and we’ll revisit this on Sunday night. Besides, I want to hear all about your dance recital.” He gives me a fatherly smile and I curl my hand into a fist once more. I swear, I’m going to hit him right in that smiling mouth of his.
“I meant what I said,” I tell him through gritted teeth. “Either send me places without him, or I’m done traveling.”
Mario shakes his head. “He’s wherever you are in too many places, Jessa. He’s a fact of life—of your life. To keep you away from anywhere he might be would severely handicap your scope and definitely limit what I can do with you.”
“And that’s the only consideration, isn’t it?” I snarl. “Can I get the job done? Can I do it even if people are trying to kill me or I’m in the middle of a tsunami or a hurricane or if I see a ghost right in front of my eyes!”
“It’s not the only consideration,” Mario says calmly. “We can’t afford to always take the easy way around. The forecasts predict—”
“Forecasts can be wrong. Want to know how I know that? Because they don’t
see everything coming, do they?” I can feel my temper nearly consuming me, and my next words are a shout. “How about this? I quit!”
I storm over to the red door and yank it open.
“Good-bye, Mario.”
The words echo in my darkened bedroom, and I punch my pillow, wishing it was a certain Dreamer’s face.
5
Out of Hibernation
“You hungry, St. Clair?”
Ben’s voice startles me and I look away from my reflection in the window of the bus. It’s field trip day for the Spanish Club, and Ben is sitting next to me as we pull out of the school parking lot.
“Nah,” I tell him. “I’ll eat later.”
“You sure? I’ve got food in my bag.”
“I’m fine.”
“I have Twix in there,” he says.
“Seriously. I’m not hungry.”
“Who are you? And what have you done with Jessa St. Clair?” he quips. “It’s Twix. Twiiiiiix.” He’s waggling his brows and bug-eyed and it makes me laugh.
“It’s seven o’clock in the morning,” I point out.
“So? Twix is the breakfast of champions. Along with a fresh can of Monster.” He holds the can to his lips, draining it with a loud, gusty sigh of refreshment.
I raise my brows and look at him like the crazy person he is. “You do realize you’re going to be on a bus for a couple of hours? With no bathroom?”
“Sitting next to you,” he reminds me, with an overemphasized “Ha!” for punctuation.
Today we’ll be visiting the Instituto Cervantes in Manhattan and tomorrow we visit the Museum of Natural History because they have a special exhibit about indigenous cultures in Mexico and Central America. We’ve been raising money for this all year, and we’ll even have some time for sight-seeing while we’re in the city.
“Whatcha got there?” he asks, nosing his nosy nose over my shoulder as I pull my notebook out of my bag.
“Nothing. It’s stupid.”
“What?”
I hesitate for a moment but finally relent. Ben knows everything about me—including the fact that I am a Traveler. “One of my other selves left me a poem she’d been working on.”
“I should have known when you whipped out the notebook,” he says. “I haven’t seen you write a thing in weeks.”
“I’ve written two papers for English lit this month and one for history,” I remind him.
“You know what I mean. Writing writing.”
I do know what he means. Once I lost Finn, it was like I lost the spark. Finn had been the center of so many of my stories for so long. My dreams—which I now recognized as memories and glimpses of my other selves—fueled so much of what I wrote about. When Finn died, the urge to write just for pleasure died with him. I even changed my schedule for next semester to remove creative writing. I’m taking a photography class instead.
“Let’s see what the damage is,” I say, flipping open my notebook and reading.
I Am Darkness
The darkness calls me and I am it
It is me
Part of we
Interminably
They pull us into the light
Flip the switch
Demanding our attention
Not seeing the fist
We keep in the darkness
Clenched in our pocket
Ready to strike
“Great googly moogly,” Ben says, reading over my shoulder.
I close the notebook with a sound of disgust. “Yeah, I’m a little rebellious over there.”
“Is that why you told Justin Taylor he looked like walking mucus in that green shirt last night at Mugsy’s?”
“Who told you that?”
“He did, when I walked in. I didn’t even think you knew his name, St. Clair.”
I search back in my mind for the memories my other self generated while she was here. “No … that was her assignment.”
“To tell Justin he looks bad in green?”
I shrug slightly. “Yeah, believe it or not.”
“How is that reality-altering in any way?”
“Ripples. Every decision has the possibility of making ripples that influence other decisions,” I explain. “He probably obsesses over my remarks and gets distracted and trips into a guy who drops his briefcase on the foot of an elderly woman who curses him out, and that will inspire him to invent a whole new line of antibacterial mouthwash that saves the world from a terrible plague.”
Ben lets out an explosive laugh. “That is wacked.”
“Tell me about it. But there’s a reason for every little thing, and it all snowballs to be something really important, somewhere down the line,” I say. “Or so my Dreamer assures me.”
“Is the dream guy in your head every night? ’Cause that sounds … not fun.”
“You have no idea.”
I lean back in the seat and close my eyes.
“Hey … Jessa.”
My head turns at the sound of my name on his lips. He only calls me by my first name when he has something heavy to say, and I brace myself for what’s coming next. I’ve heard it too many times these last weeks.
“I know I sound like a broken record here,” he says hesitantly, “but … I was really glad when you called me last night. Even if it was just for a ride home.”
“Thanks for coming through for me.”
“That’s what friends do,” he reminds me. “You can’t hide forever, St. Clair. You need to get back to your life, and you start with little things. Like coffee. Or just hanging out with someone.”
He reaches across the seat, and his hand closes over mine.
“I’m not hiding. Honest.” I give him a weak smile, but he’s not buying it.
“What about writing? When are you getting back to that?”
My jaw tightens and I am done talking. “When I’m ready. Okay? Get off it already.”
“Sorry.” He takes his hand from mine. “I just—I want to help you, and you’re shutting me out. I don’t know what’s going on with you and all this other … stuff. And I want to.”
“I know.”
The silence hangs heavy between us, and I play with the corner of my notebook, flicking at the paper with my fingers.
“I promise I’ll call you if I need you,” I mumble. “Stop worrying about me, okay? It’s just going to take some time.”
“Take all the time you need,” he says. “I’ll be here to read an official proclamation when you’re ready to come out and see your shadow.”
“Thanks.” I lean over and give him an impulsive hug. “You’re the best.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he says, waving dismissively. “That’s what they all say.”
Ben has been the perfect supportive best friend in the time since I dragged him into my paranormal drama. But I know he still thinks about the week I was replaced by another me—one who loved him in a way I’m not sure I ever can.
Being a Traveler gave me a life I could never have imagined, and not all of it has been good. Maybe Ben is right. It’s time for me to stop hiding and start living my life, beginning with this weekend. I’m going to be Jessa, high school student, writer, and ordinary person on an all-expenses-paid trip to the Big Apple.
It’s time for me to have some fun again. I deserve it.
6
Like the Perfect Romantic Comedy
I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the bus window, pulling me out of my drifting thoughts. I see him again in my mind’s eye—the way he looked, staring in the window on the train door as if he were trying to transfer through it to me.
He didn’t know me—just as I didn’t know him in that reality, until that moment. And now, thanks to Mario, things have been set in motion for that Finn and that Jessa. The price of that is another bleeding piece of my heart.
“Hey … you with me, St. Clair?”
I turn my face away from the glass. “Huh?”
“We’re almost there. What do you want to do first?”
We’d started our day in New York at the Instituto Cervantes, taking part in their immersive language workshop for Spanish, and then we had an early dinner at a tiny Mexican food place that could barely hold us all. Now we were headed to Times Square for three hours of free time before we have to meet up with the bus for the ride over to the hotel.
“Shopping, I guess,” I finally answer. “I need to get Christmas presents still.”
“For who?”
I shrug. “Everybody.”
“You haven’t done a lick of Christmas shopping?”
“Nobody up here does ‘a lick’ of anything, cowboy.”
“It’s two weeks to Christmas!”
My eyes shift away. “I’ve been a little preoccupied.”
I don’t need to look at him to sense that I’ve made him uncomfortable. “Sorry,” he mumbles. I feel his hand come out to lightly rub my back before he self-consciously pulls it away.
“It’s okay.”
“So, no Empire State Building?”
“Been there, done that,” I say. “With my parents when I was seven. Danny spit a piece of candy through the holes in the fence on the observation deck, and Dad told him not to do that or we’d get in trouble with security. Danny was freaked out and spent the rest of the day sure he was getting arrested.”
“I’ve been there, too, when we first moved here,” Ben says. “No biggie if I miss it. There’s a bunch of people walking over to Rockefeller Center to see the Christmas tree.”
“That sounds festive.”
“There’s bound to be shopping around there.”
“At least a lick or two.”
He playfully bumps my shoulder. “C’mon. They’re unloading.”
We leave the bus for the streets of New York, assuring Mr. Fielding that we’ll be back at the rendezvous point at nine p.m. sharp. The sounds and smells and lights of the city are all around us, drowning out the churning thoughts I have inside.
“This way,” Ben says, leading me by the hand. “Did you know that Rockefeller Center was one of the largest building projects in the United States to incorporate integrated public art? Rockefeller originally bought the land to build an opera house, but the stock market crash of ’29 forced him to change his plans for the complex.”