by Carol Snow
When she’d finished purging the closet, the pile of give-away clothes was so high it toppled over. There was plenty of room left in the closet—maybe too much room.
“You’re sure all that stuff looks good on me?” Angel asked.
Freesia paused. “Of course. But here’s what you need to understand about fashion. It’s not about how you look. It’s about how the clothes make you feel about yourself.” She considered. “Okay, maybe it’s a little bit about how you look.”
Freesia moved on to the dresser. As she yanked open a drawer, her gaze fell on the photo of the two little girls tacked to Angel’s bulletin board.
“These little girls—are they us?” Her index finger grazed the edge of the picture. She didn’t dare turn around. As nice—or at least apathetic—as Angel was being, she couldn’t count on her to hold back a biting remark.
“Oh—that. Yeah, Mom gave me that picture a long time ago. I don’t even know why I put it up there.”
“We were cute,” Freesia said.
“Whatever. Are you going to go through my dresser, or what?”
Her back still turned, Freesia smiled and pulled out a white T-shirt with a kitten decal. “Odious,” she proclaimed, chucking the shirt over to the toppled pile.
Within an hour, Freesia was using the camera on Angel’s phone to create an outfit catalogue of potential ensembles, fully accessorized.
“I won’t be around forever to help you pick out clothes,” Freesia said optimistically, holding the camera phone up to record Angel wearing the filmy black shirt for a second time, now with a lacy tank top, white jeans, and black ballet flats.
“You promise?” Angel said, holding a pose.
Freesia grinned at her sister’s presumed joke and snapped the picture. Angel did not grin back, which kind of ruined the sisterly bonding moment.
Angel’s phone vibrated in Freesia’s hand. Words appeared on the screen:
Tyler <3
Skype?
“Who’s Tyler?”
“Give me that.” Angel snatched the phone and began tapping.
“Is he your boyfriend? The one you’re always talking to at night?”
“None of your business.” Angel’s eyes flicked over Freesia. “Yes, he is. Okay, we’re done. You can leave. Thanks for … you know.”
“We haven’t even done your makeup yet. Or your hair.”
“Later. I want you to go.”
“Fine. Sure.” Freesia retrieved a couple of larger-size items she’d uncovered in the closet blitz: a plain white top and a long black jacket, along with a plaid scarf that Angel thought was ugly because Angel had no taste.
Out in the hallway, Freesia thought, It’s not just about looking good or feeling good. It’s also, in some small way—or maybe not so small—about being good on the inside.
What a flippy idea.
24
Adam’s car was small and orange and looked nothing like the big boxy vehicles that always blew up in Bubble World movies. No—cars as small as Adam’s typically flipped off freeway overpasses or bounced down rocky canyons. Erin sat up front. Freesia belted herself into the middle back seat, which would be safest in the event of a rollover.
Erin’s house was maybe ten minutes from the school, down a route Freesia had never traveled before.
And yet.
There is a McDonald’s on the next corner, Freesia thought, an instant before the arches came into view. She’d barely recovered from the shock of premonition when another thing popped into her mind. We’re coming up to the little park with the twisty green slides and a tire swing.
There it was!
She peered out the car window with increased intensity. She knew that crosswalk. That stoplight. That clump of bushes. That house … and the next. Freesia remembered this place, every last bit of it. Had she spent that much time at Erin’s?
At Erin’s direction, Adam turned the car onto a narrow tree-lined street with long, low houses set far apart. An adobe-style house covered with pink and peach bougainvillea came into view. Immediately, Freesia recognized the stone walkway, the old mesquite tree with low-hanging branches, the towering saguaro cactus. A towering playhouse and a swimming pool dominated the backyard. She couldn’t see them, but she knew they were there.
“That’s my house!” Freesia blurted.
“Um, yeah,” Erin said. “I mean, it was.”
“But … do you live there now?” Freesia was even more confused than usual.
“In your house? No, of course not. I live where I’ve always lived. There.”
Across the street from the adobe was a bright white house with heavy wood beams. Erin’s house. Of course.
Adam parked his little orange car next to the curb. Freesia longed to dash across the street, to burst into her old house and run to the hall where the bedrooms were. The first room on the left was hers. There were books on the shelves, dolls and stuffed animals in baskets, and a computer on the desk. Oh, she had loved her computer.
She couldn’t let Erin and Adam see her reaction. As far as they knew, she had spent the last few years enrolled in an online high school, fully aware of her new beige house and all the beige things that were happening in and around it. She took a deep breath and followed Adam and Erin out of the car and into the hot afternoon.
“FRANCINE!” Mrs. Reilly stood in Erin’s eerily familiar kitchen. She looked the same as always, pink-faced and pleasantly chubby, with hands in constant motion as she talked. “It is SO good to see you after all this time. How ARE your parents?”
Mrs. Reilly used to make slice-and-bake cookies that she’d set out on the kitchen counter so they could help themselves. The Reillys’ plates were white with a flower design around the rim. Erin had an older brother nicknamed Buddy (real name Sean) and a golden retriever/poodle nicknamed Peanut (real name Chief Inspector Doodle).
Erin gave her a Princess Grace Barbie for her eighth birthday. Erin’s favorite ice cream flavor was mint chip. Her mother made really good meat loaf but tended to burn the cookies.
She remembered everything.
“My parents are fine” was all Freesia could manage to reply to Mrs. Reilly.
“When Erin TOLD me you were back in school and in her English class, I said you MUST have her over! I said, I haven’t seen Francine Somers since I don’t know when.”
“It’s Freesia now,” Erin said. “That’s what she likes to be called.”
“Freesia?” Mrs. Reilly said.
Freesia nodded.
“OKAY, then!”
Sounds came from farther back in the house: Gunfire. Shouting. A great big boom. They turned down a hallway, and the sounds got louder. They stopped outside a darkened bedroom. A husky teenage boy with a blond crew cut and shiny eyes sat hunched on the room’s only bed, clutching game controls. Soldiers and explosions flickered on a bulky television set.
“Hey, Buddy. It’s Francine from across the street. She came over to work on our Ralph Waldo Emerson project.”
Buddy grunted.
“You remember Francine?”
“Hey,” Buddy said, his eyes never leaving the screen.
In Erin’s room, they unloaded books, notebooks, pens, and pencils. Plus phones, of course. Immediately, Erin began texting someone and then Adam did, too. How strange to be together and yet not.
Freesia didn’t mind, though, because it gave her a chance to examine Erin’s room. A double bed with a cloud-patterned comforter had replaced her old bunk beds. Freesia longed to throw open Erin’s closet and hunt for the doll with the ponytail that changed length—at least, until Freesia and Erin played hairdresser and chopped the ponytail off.
More than dolls, Erin had adored mice, of the cartoon variety, that is. She wore mouse T-shirts, covered her walls with mouse pictures, and collected mouse Beanie Babies.
One Halloween when they were older, sixth grade, maybe, Francine and Erin had dressed as the three blind mice. But there was another girl—the third blind mouse. Something had
happened. Something about that girl …
“Have you guys thought about the project?” Adam asked.
“Huh?”
Erin said, “We’re supposed to work as a group to create something that demonstrates Emerson’s principles of self-reliance and independent thought. Didn’t you read the handout?”
“Oh. The handout. Sure.”
Adam said, “We could do a film.”
“I was thinking a poster,” Erin said.
Without knowing why, Freesia sided with Adam, though of course her only real opinion about Ralph Waldo Emerson was that he would have benefited from a choose-your-own-name option.
But there was something about that third blind mouse girl. And Erin. Something had happened.…
* * *
“How long did you live across the street?” Adam unlocked the orange car and opened the passenger door for her: gentlemanly, yes, but for safety reasons she wished she could sit in the back.
“Oh, you know. From when I was little.”
She closed herself in and fiddled with the seat belt. The front seats were low and black. She felt as if she were sitting in a hole.
In front of Freesia’s old house, the giant saguaro held up its green arms as if worshipping the sky. In the distance, the jagged mountains, turning purple in the late afternoon light, seemed lit from within.
Adam got in and started the car. “The light in the desert is unreal. I can’t wait till the cactuses start blooming. I’m going to film a saguaro opening at night.”
“Do you really think it’s pretty here?” Freesia wrinkled her nose.
He considered. “When we first moved here, I thought that Arizona looked like the moon. But you have to get beyond this set idea that pretty means green and leafy. Once you start noticing all the shades of brown and gray, and you start seeing how intense the shadows get and the way the mountains change color—yeah, I actually think it’s really beautiful.”
He pulled out his phone. “What’s your address?”
She told him and was relieved when he plugged it into his phone rather than asking for directions. It might have seemed weird that she didn’t know how to get from her old house to her new one.
It was weird.
“When did you move?” he asked, pulling away from the cub.
“Um … three years ago?” It was as good a guess as any.
Adam turned on the radio. Some rap thing was on. He fiddled with the dial, pausing at a few different stations until—
“Wait! Go back!”
“Huh?”
They’d reached the end of the street. Adam’s phone told him to turn right.
Freesia said, “That last song—it was Chase Bennett.”
“Who?”
Freesia twisted the radio dial, and sure enough, the sounds of Chase Bennett filled the little car.
It’s another day.
On the island we say, Hey,
Hey, oh. Hey, oh. Hey, oh.
Don’t wanna see you frown,
Girl, turn it upside down.
Hey, oh. Yeah, turn it upside down.
Girl.
Hey.
“That’s my favorite song!” Freesia bounced in her seat.
“Seriously? Isn’t it, like, really old?”
“Not old-old. A few months, maybe. I used to listen to it every day back when I lived on—” Freesia stopped herself before she said too much.
“Let’s find out.” Adam turned right and then pulled over to the curb. He tapped the front of his phone a few times and held it up to the radio speakers. Chase Bennett crooned his final verse.
Adam checked the screen. “Yeah, I thought so. Ben Chase, 1986.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The song’s called ‘Island Girl.’ I’ve got this app, if you hold it up to the radio, it tells you what’s playing.” He handed Freesia the phone.
Sure enough there it was: “Island Girl,” Ben Chase, 1986. Freesia might have thought it was a technical glitch of some sort, but an album cover showed young, smiling Chase Bennett. He was sitting in a red rowboat in shallow water. His hair glowed like a halo.
“You okay?” Adam asked.
“What? Oh—yes. Utterly.” Hands trembling, she gave him back the phone.
Chase Bennett really did exist. Only he wasn’t named Chase Bennett. And his songs were old. Not just that—if he recorded that song in 1986, that meant that he was old. He might as well have been one of Todd Piloski’s inventions.
Adam pulled back into traffic, and the smooth confident female voice on his phone alerted him to his next turn. The voice wasn’t a real person, even though it sounded like one. And he didn’t think that was weird. No one did.
When they got to her house, Adam said, “So I guess we’ll all get together after school on Monday to work on the project.”
She hesitated. “That’s the plan.”
Mr. Janz had said that groups could be between two and four people. Erin and Adam would be fine if she went back to Agalinas before then.
He scribbled something on a strip of paper and handed it to her. It was a number. “Give me a call if you ever want to get together to do homework. Or, you know. Drive out to the desert or go see a movie or whatever.”
She shoved the paper into her overloaded book bag and opened the door. “Thanks, but I can’t call you. I don’t have a phone.”
She was halfway to her door before it hit her that Adam had just asked her out. And she had said no, rather rudely.
She wheeled around to apologize, but he was already pulling away.
Adam had asked her out? How could that be possible? He was no Dare Fiesta, no Ricky Leisure, no Taser Lucas, even, but he was appealing in his tall, skinny, slightly gawky way. She, on the other hand, was so unattractive that she wouldn’t even have looked in the mirror if she could have gotten dressed and accessorized and made up without one.
The real world was a strange and confusing place—in more ways than she had imagined.
25
Mother was in her office, tapping at her computer keyboard.
“Why did we move?”
“What? Oh—Francine. Your father said you were going over to a classmate’s to work on a project.”
“I went to Erin’s house.”
Mother’s eyes widened and her lips pursed, but she remained quiet.
“I remembered it—her house. Our house. The street. I remembered it all.”
Mother nodded.
Freesia waited for her mother to say something. To explain. When she didn’t, Freesia asked, “Did we move to this house before I went to Bubble World? Or after?”
“After.”
“But our old house—it was pretty. Why would you leave it? I loved that house.” Freesia hadn’t even known that was true until she said it.
Mother took a deep breath. “The first time we brought you back, you got upset.”
“Brought me back from Bubble World, you mean?”
She nodded. “It was Angel’s birthday. Her eleventh. We knew it was too soon—recommendations were to wait at least two months before interrupting the virtual state, and it had only been a few weeks. But she missed you. We thought if you could join us for cake and ice cream, a half hour or so, it wouldn’t be too much.”
“What happened?” Freesia was almost afraid to find out.
Mother turned back to the computer and hit a few keys. Then she dropped her hands in her lap. “You didn’t recognize any of us, which upset Angel quite a bit. We told you who we were and what was going on, but instead of calming down, you started screaming. We tried to put you back in your bubblepod, but you fought us. Said you wanted to stay. But we’d watched you in Bubble World. We knew you were happier there. You had friends, you were doing well in school. You had a life.”
“Obviously, you did something to get me back there.”
“We gave you happy juice. And sleepy juice. A double dose. The doctor said that it would be fine under the circumstances. When yo
u woke up, you were back in Bubble World, as cheery as could be.”
“So when did we move?”
Mother cleared her throat. “A few months later. The situation with the neighbors … people kept asking where you were. We knew they wouldn’t understand or appreciate Bubble World’s educational philosophy. I needed extra space for my office, anyway. It was best to make a fresh start.”
“Was I awake during the move?”
“Oh, no. Given the severity of your reaction, the doctors recommended we wait at least six months before interrupting your virtual state. They prescribed a heavy sedative, and the movers dismantled your bubblepod. By the time you woke up, we were here.”
“Why pick such a plain house, though?” Freesia pictured her old house: the pink and peach bougainvillea, the stone walkway, the giant cactus.
“The other place was too much work,” Mother said. “Father and Angel are at school all day, and I’ve got my career. Who cares whether our house is pretty, as long as it meets our needs?”
Freesia’s house in Agalinas looked like a birthday cake. Every time she saw it, she smiled. She didn’t know why pretty mattered; she just knew that it did.
“What did you do with all my things?” Freesia asked.
“The furniture we sold or gave away. Same thing with your toys and clothes. You’d outgrown them, anyway.”
Freesia shivered. It was like her parents had deleted her from reality. Like she had disappeared. Poof.
“We saved a few mementos,” Mother said. “They’re in a box in your closet.” She rubbed her head. “Have you changed your mind? About going back?”
“No.”
“Because you can stay if you want. You’ve only got a year and a half of high school left anyway. When you started the program, Todd said that he’d have a virtual university set up by the time everyone turned eighteen, but progress has been slow, and I’m not convinced it’s going to happen.”
“I want to go back.”
Mother nodded. “I still haven’t heard anything from Todd, but I’ll keep trying.”
Upstairs in her room, Freesia pulled the cardboard box out of her closet and peeled off the tape. Mother had saved her Barbie dolls. She picked one up. It had auburn hair and green eyes. Vaguely, she remembered dressing this doll for make-believe parties. She remembered wishing she looked just like it.