by Jen Brooks
“I just merged with you, Jonathan, to show you what has to be done.”
“You’re not listening. There’s no way I’m letting that happen to Kylie.”
“Well, sorry to be the bringer of bad news, but you don’t have a choice.”
“Like hell I don’t.”
“You sure need everything spelled out for you.” She rolls her eyes and sighs mightily. “This is what’s wrong with Kylie and Kylie. You mixed up your worlds and the Kylies have started to merge. If you don’t help them finish, it won’t be pretty.”
CHAPTER 14
TESS SITS CROSS-LEGGED ON the other side of my bed, all smug in the extra knowledge she has that I don’t. Her hands rest on her knees in a meditation pose. Her face, though, is anything but meditative. The scowl there speaks volumes about what she thinks of me at this moment.
I’m not quite sure how to act around her. I don’t feel like the big brother in this scenario. She knows how to do all this stuff I don’t, like merge people and flit around through my worlds. I suppose we once had a sibling rivalry, which could be hostile sometimes, but that’s what children do. Tess’s teenage antagonism is over-the-top, and kind of mean, and really intimidating, and makes me wonder if the crash messed her up as much as it messed up me. I may have gotten all the physical scars, but inside I changed only into a self-pitying loser, while she might have changed into an actual monster.
“You’re so full of it,” I say, because I’m so upset, it’s all I can say. She scares me. Plus, what if she’s right about merging Kylie?
“You know, I’m getting pretty close to letting you deal with this on your own.”
I squint my eyes at her, and she squints back. It’s the kind of thing we might have done when we were six and eight years old back in the day. “If you really want to help me, you need to back up and explain a few things.”
She rounds her fingers and her thumbs to make Os on the tops of her knees, and she replaces her scowl with a creepy smirk that makes my blood shudder. “Okay, shoot,” she says.
I’m tempted to do that little-kid thing where you mimic someone you want to drive up a wall—Okay, shoot—but I don’t, because it’s possible she’ll be straight with me if I behave.
It’s a mighty effort to project composure with my voice. “First of all, what exactly is merging?”
She inhales impatiently and looks to the ceiling as if summoning help from the Almighty to deal with this stupid question, but when she looks back down at me, it’s with the same restraint I’m exercising too. “Merging is exactly what it sounds like. Two different bodies merge into one.”
“And the result is one person.”
“Yes.”
“But whatever you just did to me, we’re still two people.”
“Well, that’s because I don’t want to be half me, half you, forever. I was just giving you a taste of what it would be like.”
“But . . . I felt like I was wearing your clothes. I was thinking thoughts that didn’t come from me.”
“We were close to being merged, you and I, but I unmerged us.”
“Well, why can’t you ‘unmerge’ Kylie?”
“I can’t unmerge someone else any more than I can merge them. I can control only what happens to me.”
“Then teach Kylie how to unmerge herself.”
“I can’t.”
“Can’t? Or won’t?”
“She’s not a world-maker, Brother Jonathan. Both Kylies have lived blissful, tragedy-free existences.”
“So, it’s definite.” Though, until now I didn’t realize I’d had any doubt. “We both got our powers from the plane crash?”
“Duh,” she says, but her face darkens. Just a split-second cloud, but that lost beat tells me she’s not saying something she should.
Now I’m curious as hell.
She must sense her slip, because she shifts out of her meditational pose and crosses her arms, firmly entrenching herself in a You can’t touch me with a ten-foot pole attitude so surly, I wonder why she even came here in the first place. I decide to chip away in a slightly different direction. “How can you show up in my made-up worlds?”
“I can be in any world I want. It goes with the merging ability.”
“Does that mean I can go into your worlds too?”
“Someday we’ll test that theory.”
“This seems like a great day for a test. How about a field trip to the beach? That was your world, wasn’t it? Back at the mall?”
“We have far more important errands tonight than visiting my little worlds.”
“You still haven’t told me what world you come from, exactly.”
She drops her arms and whips on an offended expression. “Your world, silly.”
“Then why is this the first time you’ve ever come to talk to me? Where do you get off knowing oh so much more about all this than I do? Why am I under the impression you’re buried in a grave with Mom and Dad?”
“You’ve never actually seen that plot, have you? Never been to visit the graves of your dearly departed family you profess to miss so much.”
She’s got me there, and I can’t stand it that my fear is the only reason I can’t say for sure if her name is on a gravestone.
She scoots off the bed and stands in front of me, hands on hips. “I bet your girlfriend’s done with her paper by now.”
“So?”
“We could go fix your problem.”
“You mean now?”
“Will there be a better time?”
“You still haven’t answered my questions.”
“I’m tactfully changing the subject.”
All her knowing and not telling makes it hard not to loathe her with a fiery passion. “I still don’t understand how merging Kylie will make anything better.”
“For one thing, you won’t have to go world-hopping all the time. You’ll have your girlfriend with you in your real world, and you can finish the year earning back credit in your classes.”
“I don’t need to make things better for me. I meant for Kylie.”
“Oh, you mean the I’m-obsessing-over-you-and-it’s-freaking-me-out thing?” She flutters her eyelashes in a bad imitation of a flirty Kylie. “You know you like it.”
“Shut up, Tess.”
“Would you still want to change things if she were obsessing over you and she liked it?”
“What part of ‘shut up’ was tricky for you?”
She takes a breath and shifts her weight to her other foot. Her shoulders drop and give her a less hostile posture, which sort of resets the conversation. She sits down next to me again. I cringe when she lays her heat gun fingers on my leg, a peace offering of sorts. “In all seriousness,” she says, “if you don’t help Kylie, her obsession will get crazy worse. Your girlfriend Kylie is already starting to wonder what she ever saw in you, but her world is still forcing her to love you, and that’s an internal conflict you don’t want escalating. They’ll merge a little more and a little more each day but never be able to finish because they can’t touch.
“But if they do touch, once merging is complete, they’ll be one totally normal person, maybe even a better person. That’s because merging is an opportunity. When you merge, you feel like you just remembered a bunch of things you’d forgotten. You get to use extra brain space that normally goes unused, but you don’t have extra leg space or lung space, so you keep what’s healthier. Like if real Kylie has a weak ankle from a sprain, merging will give her your girlfriend’s ankle ’cause it’s healthier.
“She’ll have to reconcile conflicting memories, like how she spent the last few years with or without you, but I’m betting the memories with you win out since they’re pretty happy ones.”
I hope that’s true, but it’s not the only thing that will have to go one way or the other. “Will she want to
be a journalist or a medical researcher?”
“I don’t know.”
“Won’t her parents mind when she comes home with a totally new set of life goals and a boyfriend she claims she’s been seeing for all of high school that they know nothing about? When they start questioning her sanity, won’t that make her question it too?”
“Eh.” She waves a casual hand in the air. “She’s going to college in a few months. No one there will question her.”
“But what about those few months she’s home?”
“You could merge her parents, too.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Then Kylie will just have to deal with it. It might suck for her till she leaves for school, but it will suck for the rest of her life if you don’t help her.”
“Okay. If I choose to do this, what do I do?”
“You pick which world you want Kylie to live in, and you take the other Kylie to her. Then they touch.”
“What do you mean, ‘they touch’?” I do not want to think about the back rubbing scenario and two Kylies, but the image forms anyway.
“I mean this.” She points a finger and pokes me in the forearm. A burning hot jolt goes up to my shoulder.
“And then what happens?”
“Two become one and you’re done.”
“And she’s happy again?”
“Happier.”
“And there’s no aftereffects?”
“Nope, except for the teeny possibility of homesickness for her other world, but that won’t be a problem if you close it.”
“Close it? I can’t close a world.”
“Sure you can.”
This is news to me. I have only ever been a world-maker. I have never ended a world. “Okay, smartie. How do you close a world?”
“Same way you open one.”
That makes no sense. To make a world I squeeze my eyes shut and think real hard on what I want to open them on.
“You will it closed,” she says. “That’s all. You just convince yourself that you want it closed, and it will close. Plus a little destructive imagery.”
“That’s not how I make a world.”
“Sure it is. You just think the squeezey-eye move has something to do with it. What opens a world is your will to have it be and your images of creation.”
“And Jonathan said, ‘Let there be a Kylie who loves me,’ and there she was.”
Tess cocks her head and gives me a sideways glance. “Yeah. Kinda like that.”
“But if I can close a world, why do I even have to merge the Kylies? Can’t I just close Kylie-Simms-is-my-girlfriend and let the real Kylie live in peace?”
“That would be the worst possible thing, if you’re trying to save her.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s already partly merged with your girlfriend. If you kill off the girlfriend, it’ll kill off the parts of real Kylie that have merged already.”
“But they haven’t touched.”
“Their thoughts have. Their emotions have. You’ve seen that for yourself.”
“Enough.” I feel like my guts are coming out of my head. “I have to think about this. I need you to leave me alone for a while.”
“Fine.” She rolls away from me and climbs off the bed. “But the longer you wait, the worse it gets.”
“I get it, okay? Just go.”
I expect a sharp comeback, but she disappoints me. “I’ll come back tomorrow night. I have some things to teach you that you’ll need to know in order to do this right.” It’s the least sarcastic her tone has been since she appeared down the hall. I’m almost thankful for her help. Almost. I don’t feel even one percent right about any of this, and I don’t know whether it’s because I don’t trust Tess to be giving me good advice or I don’t trust me to take it.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” I say.
Without an actual “Good-bye,” she blinks out of existence, and I burn to know where she went. Another world? Another place in this world? The afterworld? The grave? Speculation will drive me mad, so I do the only thing I can do. Lace up my sneakers and go for a run.
* * *
I don’t want to run to Kylie’s house, but my feet start moving in that direction. When I get there, I’ll just look at her through the window. Or I can run by without stopping at her house at all. I don’t have the heart to ruin her peaceful night’s sleep just because I’m not sleeping.
The streets are full of solitude, a perfect setting for a restless mind. No cars pass me as I hop over tree roots that’ve grown up through the sidewalk. Very few windows are backlit through curtains. It’s cold enough that I can see my breath.
Tess has sprung to life after all these years, at the same time two Kylies begin haunting each other. Of course this can’t be coincidence. I trace the chain of events: a strange disturbance sent me running to girlfriend’ Kylie’s, I almost kissed real Kylie when I thought I was in Kylie-Simms-is-my-girlfriend, the Kylies started to merge, Tess appeared in order to help me fix it. Is Tess connected to that initial cosmic weirdness? Or has she been watching me all along and appeared only because I’m in trouble?
Tess wants me to merge two Kylies into one. Does that, essentially, mean they both die? Does that mean they both live? Will Kylie understand what’s happened to her? Will I lose her?
A critical part of me, one I’m trying real hard to relegate to the background of my fear, insists that this is what I get for messing in world-making. Maybe the power has finally caught up with me. I’m not strong enough or wise enough to use it properly, and now I’ve made a mistake only a better person can fix.
The exclamation point on all my thoughts is this: my world got turned inside out when I was eight. It’s not fair to have everything inside out again.
I need Kylie right now. There is no way I’m going to make it through what remains of the night without her. I know I said that I wouldn’t invade her peaceful sleep, but she won’t mind. She never minds, not in Kylie-Simms-is-my-girlfriend.
Tess said changing worlds is a matter of will, not eye-squeezing, so I try it. I keep my eyes as open as possible, which is necessary anyway, since I don’t intend to slow my pace and the tree roots are doing their best to send me sprawling. I will myself into my other world, but for the first time with eyes wide open, I see what I never saw before. Blackness stretches away from me in all directions. It’s scattered with spheres, hundreds and hundreds of spheres, visible only in the tiniest slivers, like very new moons. Dark corridors weave among the spheres, joining them, outlined by whatever obscure light forms the crescents. The scene is breathtaking in its vastness, cosmic in ambiance, like looking at a universe without stars or solar systems or galaxies, but rich with worlds. So many worlds. I try to linger, but it takes only a split second to slip through the corridor to Kylie-Simms-is-my-girlfriend, or rather, for the corridor to slip over me. The impossible distance between worlds shrinks like a stretched coil that has suddenly snapped back. One quick breath and a blink of the eye, and my journey’s over. I stand in the shadows between the bushes outside Kylie’s house, panting from the run and the anxiety of watching my own shift between worlds.
There is so much I don’t understand.
I catch my breath and let my heart rate return to normal, trying to convince myself that being here is a good idea, and that I should still worry about my small problems in the face of the vastness I just crossed. I open her window and crawl through without her even stirring.
I toe my shoes off and stand watching Kylie. Her back is to me, and her hair is spread over the pillow. Her feet, cozied in thick purple socks, stick out from the bottom of her covers. In the corner her fan whirs, a sign that she was having trouble sleeping, which normally would make me want to cuddle up and offer comfort, but tonight I have a feeling I’m the reason she needed the fan.
If t
hat’s the case, coming here was a huge mistake. I go to pick up my shoes so I can cross back to the real world, when Kylie stops me with a word. “Jonathan.”
She doesn’t roll over, and my name sounded like it was spoken into her comforter. She’s still asleep. Half-bent toward my shoes, I freeze to listen.
Her breathing is quick and shallow, like she’s running maybe, but nothing of her stirs beyond the rise and fall of her covers with her breath. “Jonathan,” she says again, and it sounds like she’s trying to scream it out.
I go to the bed and gently rouse her with a hand on her shoulder.
She rolls toward me and says my name again. “Shhhhh,” I say. “It’s okay.”
Her eyes open to my face, and it takes a moment before she apparently comprehends that she’s awake and I’m here in the flesh. She cringes back and cries out with enough volume that I hope her parents don’t hear. I listen for telltale signs of them running down the hall.
“You scared the crap out of me,” she whispers, more loudly than I would like.
“You were dreaming.”
“Yeah,” is all she says. I can’t tell if she’s forgotten her dream or if she knows she was calling my name. “What are you doing here?”
“I needed to see you.”
“In the middle of the night?”
“I guess it was a bad idea.” I hope this is the aftereffects of the dream, because she has never given me such a cold reception.
She rubs something out of the corner of her eye with a fingertip. “What time is it?”
“Three seventeen.”
She flops onto her back. She’s in the middle of the bed. There’s no room for me, so I continue standing awkwardly beside her.
“Is something wrong?” she asks.
Only everything. “No. I think I’d better go.” When I turn, she reaches over and grabs my arm.
“Don’t. I’m sorry. I was having a nightmare.”
“Yeah. About me.”
“Why would you think that?”
“I heard you say my name.”
She ruminates on that for a moment. “You were dragging me somewhere. I didn’t like it.”