by Kate Norris
* * *
• • •
After school, Winnie met up with Dora a few blocks from her apartment as planned, and the two of them walked the rest of the way home together.
“How did your day go?” Dora asked. “Any luck at the library?”
“The librarian thought I was a German spy.”
Dora laughed.
“I’m serious.”
“Oh. That’s . . . not great.”
“Yeah,” Winnie said dryly. “It’s less than ideal.”
She didn’t say anything about what had happened in the park. She was still too rattled.
When they reached Dora’s building, the daytime doorman was on duty. This time, he was someone Winnie didn’t recognize. “Miss Dora,” he said, nodding courteously. “Miss Winnie.” Winnie felt consternation again at being recognized by someone she didn’t know. All the more reason to keep herself out of the public eye.
“We’re home!” Dora called out when they entered the penthouse.
Louisa came over and took Dora’s knapsack and coat. She immediately offered them a snack, just like Brunhilde always did, Winnie thought with a pang.
Was Brunhilde worried about her back home?
. . . Was Father?
She was so angry with him! But she still wanted him to miss her.
* * *
• • •
Dora wanted to change out of her school clothes before they headed to Scott’s, so Winnie followed her to her room. Winnie flopped down on Dora’s bed—an absurdly spacious “queen” size, larger than any other Winnie had ever seen—then quickly propped herself back up again. This wasn’t her best friend. Wasn’t it rude of Winnie to be so casual with her?
“Gosh, I hate wool!” Dora said, pulling at her pleated skirt.
It was odd to hear her say this—her Dora wore wool all the time and never complained. Did it bother her too?
Dora finished taking off her school clothes and pulled on some tan trousers and a blue button-up shirt. Winnie noticed that this world’s Dora didn’t bother with any sort of waist cincher.
“No girdle?” Winnie asked. The words just popped out of her mouth, much to her embarrassment.
She was certain she must have offended Dora, but the girl just gave her a curious, indulgent little look and said, “They squish your organs, you know.”
“I’m sorry—I didn’t mean—it’s just that the Dora I know wouldn’t be caught dead without one.”
Dora grimaced. “Poor girl.” She grabbed a little brown pocketbook. “Ready to go?”
“Sure.”
As she followed Dora out of the apartment, Winnie couldn’t help but think about how wrong her initial impression of this split-Dora had been the night before. She’d been alarmed by the absence of her Dora’s polished prettiness, but this girl seemed comfortable with herself in a way that made her own Dora’s flashy self-confidence seem, well . . . brittle. For the first time, she wondered why her Dora felt she had to try so hard.
And what kind of friend was she, that she had never wondered before?
* * *
• • •
Winnie didn’t know where Scott lived, but her double had given Dora directions to his apartment. It turned out that he lived in Harlem, convenient to the university but farther north, well into the area where things started looking run-down. The first floor was storefronts: a locksmith, a repair shop, and a shoe store with a dusty window display that looked like it hadn’t been changed since the Hoover administration.
The entrance for the apartments was sandwiched between two of the shops. Dora lifted the doormat and triumphantly retrieved a key. Winnie felt a twinge of guilt at the girl’s bright smile. To Dora, it must feel like she’d been swept up in a thrilling Nancy Drew mystery, but this wasn’t just a lark. When Winnie suggested staying with Dora, it hadn’t occurred to her that she might be putting the girl in any danger. Now she wondered. After all, she hadn’t thought Scott was in danger during Father’s experiment either, and look how wrong she’d been there.
“His apartment is on the fifth floor,” Dora said cheerfully.
There was no elevator, so the girls started climbing. Winnie was winded after the first two flights, but Dora didn’t seem to have any trouble with them. The fuller-figured girl probably played tennis at the club. Her Dora did.
Winnie wondered how often her double climbed these stairs to his apartment, and what she and Scott did there together when they were alone.
Of course it was none of her business, but there was no assuaging Winnie’s curiosity. She felt her cheeks grow hot, embarrassed to be thinking about the two of them together like that—but not embarrassed enough to stop.
She had fantasized, in a vague sort of way, about the kinds of things she might do with Scott, but it was nothing more than a scramble of images from the movies: the passionate kiss; his hands in her hair; them moving back toward the bed. After that it was just a fade to black, then a cut to the rosy afterglow: her smiling face and satin nightgown, him smoking a cigarette.
She knew what intercourse was, at least the basic mechanics of it. Father had her pediatrician explain the birds and bees to her after she’d had her first cycle. But that didn’t mean it was something she could actively picture, even with Scott. Her double was probably worldlier than she was—but how much more?
Winnie’s stomach lurched in embarrassment. Did it show? Could they all tell—that she was just a precocious child sitting at their grown-ups’ table? She’d just had her first kiss, and it had come from a boy who thought she was someone else.
She and Dora finally reached the fifth floor. As they walked down the hall, an intense nausea struck Winnie. She tried to take a few more steps, then stopped. Her hand flew to her mouth. She was suddenly afraid she might throw up.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m feeling kind of queasy.” She took a few shaky breaths and her stomach settled a bit. She shrugged uneasily. “Must be nerves.”
They arrived at an apartment whose tarnished bronze numbers declared it 513, but before either of them could knock, the door flew open. There stood Winnie’s double, white-faced and clutching her stomach.
“I could feel you coming,” she said. “The closer you got, the sicker I felt.”
Winnie frowned in dismay. It hadn’t been nerves after all. But what should they do about it?
“Should I go?” Winnie asked.
“Go where?” her double answered with an irritated shrug. “Just come in already.”
The girl didn’t offer her a smile, but Winnie didn’t take it personally. And this time, her double didn’t grab Winnie, either; Winnie understood why.
She was scared too.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Scott was pacing in front of a shabby, floral-patterned couch. It was hard to untangle the knotted mess of feelings Winnie felt when she saw him: relief that he hadn’t somehow vanished overnight, grief over the him she had lost, guilt over the trouble she’d brought into his life. And pulsing under all of that, excitement (mixed with nausea). She was happy to see him, just like she always was. There were new feelings layered over it, but underneath, that same bedrock. Even if she could admit, at least to herself, that it was probably wrong for her to feel that way about him now . . .
Her eyes began exploring his apartment—that was safer than continuing to look at him. The place was small but uncluttered. A kitchenette occupied one corner of the living space, and there were double doors on the far wall, but judging by the empty space left in front of them, they concealed a pull-down Murphy bed, not another room. Although the apartment was modest, it was tidy and warm, exactly what Winnie would have imagined Scott’s home to be: a clean, simple space for a busy student to sleep and eat.
“Have a seat,” Scott said, and gestured toward a beat-up armchair.
Winnie’s double went to take a seat on the couch, but Scott held up a hand to stop her.
“Not you,” he said. “Dora, I want you to take Winnie home. Having her double nearby is making her sick. The other one can stay here with me, and we’ll figure out what we’re going to do.”
Winnie winced at being referred to as “the other one,” but supposed there wasn’t really anything better for him to call her. It would be easier for them to talk once her double was gone.
But Split-Winnie made no move toward the door. “I’ll be fine,” she said, and sank down onto the sofa. “The nausea is going away already.”
“You want to get another bloody nose?” Scott asked. “I wish you’d actually mentioned that bit yesterday—I would have told you to stay home.”
“That’s why I didn’t tell you,” her double grumbled, and Winnie grinned at her sass. After a moment, the girl returned her smile.
“Fine. Stay. But if you start to feel sick again—”
“I know, I know.”
“I’m feeling better too,” Winnie said, although she felt embarrassed a beat later, because no one had actually asked. “I wonder what makes it stop and start?” she added quickly, and took a tentative seat in the battered leather wing chair in the corner, the spot farthest from her double.
Scott frowned, thinking. “Maybe it’s something like carsickness,” he said. “Motion sickness is caused when part of the body—the inner ear, for instance—understands you’re in motion, but another part—like your eyes—doesn’t. Maybe when you’re near your double, the parts of your body that orient you in space get confused—you’re here, but you’re there—and it makes you feel sick until your eyes catch up with your body.”
Winnie did feel disoriented, but it had more to do with Scott than with her double. She saw Scott in her memory, on the floor, limbs at odd angles like a dropped doll. She saw Scott right there in front of her, tantalizingly close.
If she couldn’t go back and save him . . . what would she do? What would she do without him? And how could she live with herself?
Scott caught Winnie staring.
They both quickly looked away, and Winnie noticed her double glancing back and forth between them uneasily.
What did she look like to Scott? Did the differences between her and her doppelgänger jump out at him? Or did he have to force himself to see them?
“Well,” her double said, “we already know her being here is wrong. Scott, what did you call it? ‘Violating the rules of space-time’? So, is it really such a surprise that it’s messing things up?”
What her double said was true, but her words still made Winnie feel like an unwelcome immigrant all over again.
“Why are we the only ones it’s hurting, though? Dora hugged me last night—she was fine. And when I got here—before we realized what was going on—Scott kissed me. Nothing weird happened to him either.”
“He what?”
Scott shot Winnie an irritated look.
“Honey, I thought she was you.”
“Really? Did you think I’d just come back from a shopping trip at the Salvation Army or something?”
“All right!” Dora interjected brightly. “You each got a dig in. Are you ready to stop being shitty?”
Winnie and her double each let out a sharp bark of identical surprised laughter.
It gave Winnie an idea.
“Quantum entanglement! Or something like it,” Winnie said. She looked at Scott. “Could that be causing it?”
“What’s that?” her double asked.
“Basically, some particles are—they’re linked,” Scott said. “So, if something happens to one, it affects the other, no matter how far apart they are.”
Winnie’s double frowned. She didn’t seem to like the idea. Suddenly, she gave her own arm a sharp pinch. “You don’t feel that, right?”
Winnie shook her head.
“See? We aren’t linked,” her double said. “We aren’t the same person.”
Winnie found her double’s unease extremely relatable. She was unsettled by the idea herself—but she still felt like she was on to something.
“Oh, I know we aren’t,” Winnie said. “I don’t mean it like that. I was thinking on a quantum level—maybe all doppelgängers have linked particles, since we start out as the same person.”
“So, it’s not how we move our arms, but the orbit of our electrons or something?”
“Exactly! And maybe those energy fields throw each other off when they get too close to each other, like identical poles of a magnet.”
Scott looked spooked.
“If that’s true—Winnie, I don’t think you understand how serious that is. If getting too close to each other puts pressure on your atomic bonds . . . well, you don’t want to know what happens when an atom splits. Let me tell you, the whole city would feel it.”
Winnie swallowed nervously. This talk sure made her and her double’s petty jealousy feel—well, petty. She knew she had to mention what had happened at the park earlier, even though just thinking about it filled her with a queasy guilt.
“This afternoon, at the park—I think something went wrong with gravity.”
“What!”
Winnie bit her lip—thinking back on it, it was as surreal as a dream. But no, it had happened. There was no denying that now, no matter how much she wished she had dreamt it.
“I got heavy—really heavy. It was hard to walk, and I sank into the ground. And it wasn’t just me. It happened to a little boy playing nearby too. It happened out of nowhere, and then—it couldn’t have even lasted a minute—then it stopped.”
They all sat in silence for a moment, trying to absorb the shock of what she’d said, Winnie assumed.
“Well, that’s . . . alarming,” Scott said. “But whatever’s going on, we need to focus on getting you back home as quickly as possible.”
“Alarming? It was terrifying! Everything went back to normal after and nobody was hurt, but what if next time—” Winnie took a deep breath and tried to calm herself. She looked at her double. “She wasn’t even there, so it isn’t only us being near each other that’s upsetting things. What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to get you home,” Scott said. He sounded calm, but Winnie noticed he had started bouncing his leg—one of his nervous habits. “That’s all we can do. And, Winnie,”—he gave her double a stern look—“I don’t want you involved after tonight. Whether this is quantum entanglement or who knows what, I don’t want us to find out how serious these physical symptoms can get.”
“I want to be involved, though! What am I supposed to do, just sit home alone and worry?”
Scott shook his head. “I’m sorry—I know it’s frustrating, but I won’t allow you to put yourself in danger.”
His voice went a bit husky with emotion at the end, and Winnie felt a knot form in her throat. She’d seen that kind of protectiveness from Scott before. It was what had made him stay with her in the lab. It was what had gotten him killed.
He wanted to protect his Winnie—but who was going to protect him?
She had already gotten one Scott killed. And now, just by being there, she was putting the whole city—maybe even their whole world—at risk.
You will not let Scott get hurt, she told herself sternly. You won’t let any harm come to any of them, she vowed.
But she already feared that wasn’t a promise she had the power to keep.
Scott swallowed and shook his head, and when he spoke again, his voice was once more matter-of-fact.
“Winnie,” he said briskly, now addressing her, “you can come here in the evenings, after I’ve finished my daily work with Professor Schulde. I told him I wasn’t feeling well so that we could all meet early today, but I’ll have to return to work tomorrow.”
This was the moment. And Scott had given
her the perfect opportunity to share what she’d been considering. “I was thinking,” Winnie began nervously, “that it might be easier if I stayed here with you. I could keep working while you’re away during the day, and there’s less opportunity for me to raise suspicions if I’m not out and about. And less opportunity for any more . . . mishaps.”
The safer she was from Nightingale, the safer they all were. And the fewer people she was around, the fewer people she could put in danger. Plain and simple. The thrill in her stomach was just the result of figuring out how she could stay safely hidden and find some answers at the same time, she told herself. Not because Winnie was eager to spend her nights with her double’s boyfriend.
But before Scott could answer, her double said, “Absolutely not!” She looked a little embarrassed by her vehemence, and quickly added, “I mean, she’ll be much more comfortable at Dora’s,” gesturing around the small space.
“I think it’s better for her to stay here too,” Dora said. “She has to leave the house with me in the morning, and—well, Winnie, tell them what happened at the library today.”
Winnie hadn’t intended to say anything about that. She’d been frightened in the moment, but now she wondered if she’d overreacted.
“Oh, it was just a silly thing,” she said, waving her hand. Hadn’t she given them enough to worry about? “I went to the library to do some research—”
Scott cringed and made a worried hiss.
“What?”
“Nightingale and the Manhattan Project have certain subjects at area libraries flagged. It’s part of our security agreement to protect against espionage as government contractors. Any time someone makes an inquiry or checks out materials about nuclear fission, uranium enrichment, multiverse theory, interdimensional travel, et cetera, we get a report we’re supposed to investigate.”
Winnie sighed. “Oh. I guess I wasn’t being paranoid, then.”
“I should have told you.”
“You couldn’t have known I would go to a library first thing.” Although, she was a bit surprised he hadn’t guessed as much—wouldn’t her double have done the same? “I didn’t give them my name,” she added. “Or anything like that. So at least there won’t be much to go on. Just my description.”