by Jen Brooks
Kylie waits her turn on the inside of the track at the third exchange. She’s looking around nervously and breaks into a sunrise smile when she sees me. I’m caught on the other side of the perimeter fence while the boys come around the turn for their race. Handoffs go smoothly, and our guys are in the lead. Kylie waits the few seconds it takes to watch our boys win, then crosses the track to see me.
“I thought you weren’t here.”
“I just got here.”
“In the nick of time.”
“How are things going?” I nod to the track.
“The boys are winning by a lot. I think our meet is close.”
I’m afraid to ask, but I must. “How’d you do in your other events?”
She looks down at her foot, which starts playing with a pebble. “I won both.”
“That’s great!” I have to force myself to sound happy, because the news only makes me more worried for the other Kylie.
“It was okay.”
We both turn when an official calls her back to position. “Oh! Gotta go!” She scurries over to her spot in the exchange zone and readies herself for the baton. The starting gun fires, and around the first turn spring Ginny Hamleigh and a girl from the other team. Ginny’s having a hard time making up the stagger, and I recognize the Dunford girl as the one who raced Kylie in the hundred in Kylie-Simms-is-my-girlfriend. The handoffs go smoothly for both teams, and the second leg from Pennington, who is usually Mandy but is someone else I can’t make out from here, holds her own down the back straight. There is a little warble in the handoff to the third leg, but the Pennington runner makes up the rest of the stagger. Around the corner they come as Kylie and her opponent flex their hands and crouch in anticipation of the baton. The girls approach, and Kylie starts running. Just inside the zone she reaches back her hand for the baton, and receives it perfectly. The Dunford girl doesn’t stand a chance. Even from here I can see the finish isn’t close.
The usual celebration erupts in pockets around the track. I wait here because Kylie will be back for the clothes and shoes she left at the exchange zone. Eventually she comes, all smiley triumphant, straight over to me instead of her stuff.
“That was fun,” I say. “Congratulations.”
“Thanks,” she says. Her face is flushed with exertion and celebration. “I’m so glad you came.”
“Me too.”
“Are you staying?”
I’d really, really like to, but I have to get back to Kylie-Simms-is-my-girlfriend.
“I can’t, but can I call you later?”
Her smile fades just a little. “Sure.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to stay.”
“I understand.”
I hope she doesn’t mean she “understands” that I don’t like her enough to stay, because that is so untrue. I reach for her hand, sensing she won’t mind, and do a quick check to make sure no one’s watching. I think we’re safe.
“I’m sorry. I’ll call you later.” I kiss her on the cheek, and she not only lets me, but she gives me a cheek kiss right back. Now I really don’t want to go.
“Thanks for coming.” She smiles and crosses over the track. She scoops up her clothes and waves at me before making her way across the field to join her teammates.
When I’m confident she’s not coming back, I go to the locker room. I strongly consider changing my mind and going out to the stands to wait for the meet to end. I know real Kylie would be happy if I did that.
Instead I switch worlds in the locker room and change back into my uniform as if I’ve been gone from the meet for only a bathroom break. When I emerge, the four-by-one-hundred for girls is just starting. Kylie stands on her spot already watching the starting line for movement. I hear a gun and run down to the fence to see the race.
Kylie doesn’t notice me. She just watches Ginny work on the stagger and pass off to the second leg, who this time actually is Mandy Breuger. The girls’ coach in this world isn’t taking any chances. I wish I could’ve told him he didn’t need to waste Mandy here.
Mandy passes the other runner easily and executes a perfect pass with her teammate in zone two. The Pennington girl has a ten-meter lead and the stagger to her advantage as she rounds the turn. Kylie wrings her hands and bounces up and down. The lead is so substantial, she gets off her line cautiously, which is better than chancing an early takeoff and a missed pass. Only, she waits so long that the girl passing to her clips her heel and trips. The hand with the baton flails wildly as the girl tries to keep from going down, but it’s no use. She lands on the track, and the baton clatters away. Kylie, who is recovering her own balance from the heel clip, hears the noise and turns. She runs back for the baton, but the Dunford team executes their pass perfectly and sails on by her. Kylie misses her first reach for the fallen baton because she’s so distracted watching the other team go by. She finally picks it up, but there’s too much ground to cover. She makes a valiant effort. She’s awesome enough that the crowd thinks she might do it, but the groan at the line tells the truth. It’s a disaster.
The mood on the track turns dark. I’m guessing that between the unexpected triple jump loss and this disastrous loss of five unanswered relay points, there’s a question now about whether the girls’ team can win. Both Kylie and Mandy Breuger were in the four-by-one-hundred, so they can’t run the four-by-four-hundred at the end.
Watching the rest of the meet is painful because I overhear a couple of girls talking about what points they need to score from here out to win. It’s not going to happen. Pennington will not win the conference title this year.
The girls do well enough to take it to the final event, the four-by-four-hundred relay, but with Kylie and Mandy used up, they have their second-best team competing. After the first leg they’re losing, and never catch up. Only halfhearted cheers encourage the anchor leg.
There’s the usual flurry of putting equipment away—mats, hurdles, cones, throwing implements, etc. Then the boys’ team has the regular wrap-up meeting by the pole vault shed while the girls’ team meets dejectedly in the stands. The track crowd thins out pretty quickly after that.
I go up to the parking lot and wait by Kylie’s car. The lot empties before she finally emerges, head hung low, gym bag slung over her shoulder. She looks up to see me standing here, and hesitates. I can practically hear her thoughts—Should I talk to him? Should I run away? A decision propels her reluctantly forward. I meet her halfway, but she makes sure to leave enough space so I can’t reach out to her.
“I’m not in the best mood.” She hikes her gym bag a little higher on her shoulder. “I just want to go home.”
The dark circles under her eyes are puffy from crying. Her nose is red, and she hasn’t bothered to fix the hair that’s come loose from her ponytail. “Let me drive you home,” I offer.
“No. I can drive.”
“Please let me take you.”
“I said no, Jonathan. Just because I lost a track meet doesn’t mean I can’t operate a car.”
“The whole meet wasn’t your fault. There’s plenty of people who could’ve done better today too. It’s a team effort.”
“I’m not debating this with you.” She backs up a step and makes a wide circle around me to get to her car.
“Can I at least call you later?”
She opens her car door and throws the gym bag inside. She’s biting a quivering lip while fresh tears spill down her face, but she doesn’t get in yet. “Normally I’d want nothing more than to talk to you all night.”
It’s awkward to keep shouting from halfway across the parking lot, even if we’re the last two people in it, so I approach the car. “Then let me call you.”
“I don’t want to talk tonight.”
“Not even to me?”
“Especially not you.” She shakes her head, and more tears fall. “Give me some time
to put today in perspective. We can talk tomorrow night.”
“Not tomorrow after school?”
“It’s only a half day, remember? I might stay home to get some sleep. I promise I’ll call tomorrow night.” With a swipe of her runny nose on her sweatshirt sleeve, she falls into the driver’s seat and shuts the door. She doesn’t wave good-bye as she drives away, her car’s engine rattling all the way down the driveway.
I’m left burning in the empty lot. I want to hold her tight like she’s held me in my misery so many times. Maybe tomorrow night she’ll let me. I want to make everything better. I really, really do.
CHAPTER 18
I’VE BARELY BEGUN MY PROMISED phone call to real Kylie when there’s a knock on my bedroom door.
“Hold on a second,” I say into the phone.
If Uncle Joey is upstairs, this is an important moment. I carry the phone to the door and turn the knob. Tess stands before me in a shimmery blue blouse and white shorts. I bet our mother would have been shocked to see where her blouse’s neckline plunges.
Before she can speak, I press an annoyed finger to Tess’s lips so Kylie won’t know I have a girl in my room. Thankfully, Tess cooperates and glides silently inside to take up her usual perch on my bed. I go out into the hall and shut the door.
“I’m really sorry, Kylie, but that was my uncle. He wants me downstairs.”
“Oh.” The disappointment in her voice is unmistakable.
“How late can I call you back?”
“Try my cell whenever you’re done.”
“I will. I’ll leave a message if you’re asleep.” She must be wondering what my uncle could possibly want that could take so long on a school night, but she doesn’t say anything.
We hang up with good-byes, and I storm back into my room. “You knew I’d just started that conversation.”
Tess only shrugs. “We have a lot to finish up.” She leans forward to scootch off the bed, and I turn away to avoid seeing what her blouse reveals. “Tonight we learn how to close a world and how to move things between worlds. If you’re going to merge Kylie all the way, you’ll have to move her, and you’ll have to close her world.”
“What if I don’t want to close her world?”
She gives that same shrug. “Then everyone in it goes through the pain of mourning for her. Actually, it will be the pain of her disappearing into thin air. If you want that, keep the world open.”
Oh God. More to consider. She has parents and friends in her world.
“Just get on with the lesson.”
“First you need to create a world for the purpose of closing it. Think of one you’ve always wanted to make but didn’t.”
Tess has to know there’s only one world I’ve always wanted to make. The thought of doing it now turns my blood to ice water. But I can’t make any old world just for the hell of it. World-making takes a strong desire for creation, and I’ve never wanted any world more than the one I’ve been most scared to create.
“Why can’t we just work with one already open?”
“Because I said.”
“That’s not a reason.”
“It’s the only one you’re going to get.”
I think I might hate Tess.
I try to come up with an alternative to the world I most fear. One obviously strong desire of mine is to have a world with a normal, healthy Kylie. I want that world to be the real world, though, and I’m afraid that making yet another Kylie will only do more damage to the two who already exist. I’d like a world where my class credits aren’t an issue, but I have that in Kylie-Simms-is-my-girlfriend. I mentally flip through various worlds I’ve wanted in the past but failed to create—superhero fantasies from being young, an outer space thing, a world even more explicit than Jonathan’s-smokin’-hot-dance-club—but if I didn’t want these things enough then, I surely don’t want them now.
Little by little I steel myself for what is about to come. For the first time in my world-making history, I will a world into being that I don’t actually want to be in. It builds itself inside me. I can’t bear to determine the details, so I let the world form, as Tess once explained, according to my needs. Parameters emerge like the frame of a house, a skeleton to construct places and events upon. The people simply arrive; the rooms of the house take shape. There is a familiar warmth being sucked from my stomach, and then my bedroom disappears, only to be replaced by . . . my bedroom. How quickly a world is born.
This bedroom is in a much smaller house. The floor, instead of being richly carpeted, is worn old hardwood with a small braided rug. My bed is draped with a thin quilt I recognize but haven’t seen in a long time. A computer screen cycles through a screen saver on the desk. The roll-down shades on the windows have rips in them. The clock reads six thirty a.m.
For ten years I’ve avoided this place, and now that I’m here, it’s darker and shabbier than I remember it.
No one is in the room except Tess and me. “Are you okay with this?” Tess asks.
“It’s a little late to be worrying about that.”
“Come on,” she says, and opens the door onto a short hallway. We step out and turn left toward the smell of coffee brewing. The hall ends at an empty living room open to a small kitchen. Mom and Dad sit at the table not six feet away. By reflex my body stiffens.
“Relax. They can’t see us or hear us,” Tess says unnaturally loudly in the coffee-scented morning.
But I want them to see me.
Even though our parents don’t turn at Tess’s voice, I’m not sure I believe her. “Why can’t they?”
“Didn’t we just have a lesson in manipulating worlds? It’s a good thing I think faster than you.”
Now I feel stupid. How often have I wished I could switch worlds without the stifling, terrifying pressure of being discovered? If Tess isn’t lying, I could have been traveling invisibly and soundlessly all along.
We watch my mother raise her mug and blow on the contents. My father writes something on a notepad. She appears to be waiting for him to finish. Her hair is long and black like Tess’s, her clothes businesslike and navy blue. When she sips her coffee, her lips purse at the rim, and I think about her flesh being alive, her eyes focused and animated, her hands able to grip the mug and raise and lower it. My father’s fingers waggle his pen as words spill out the tip. He has words. He has thoughts. They both are part of a living world.
I have been so used to thinking of them lying in coffins as the world passes them by. So used to pitying them all the experiences they were missing. Sipping coffee and writing words fill this moment with more meaning than any crucial graduation or marriage or grandchildren I pictured them longing to see.
They don’t know they’re supposed to be dead. I didn’t know how I would feel if I ever saw them like this, alive in one of my worlds. The truth is, I’m finally here and I still don’t know how I feel.
Dad punctuates his last sentence and slides what he’s written over to Mom. She reads it and raises an eyebrow with a nod that says, Not bad.
“Should I leave in that last line?” Dad asks.
“I would,” Mom says. “It’s nice, especially coming from you.” She rises and opens the refrigerator. At that moment I come down the hall. Not me, but The-crash-never-happened me, and I stumble backward a step in surprise. I’ve never made a copy of myself in a world before, and I didn’t consciously make this copy.
I’m wearing jeans and a short-sleeved shirt with a collar, more preppy than I normally dress. My hair is wet and I have a gym bag slung over one shoulder. Despite the slightly nicer clothes, everything about me looks the same except for my face. It is startlingly, disturbingly unmarred by an airplane crash. I guess there had to be an unbroken Jonathan to complete a world called The-crash-never-happened.
Perfect-faced me grabs a banana off the countertop and says, “See ya later,” to my
parents before walking out the door.
As it clicks shut behind the other me, I want to apologize to Mom and Dad for that thoughtless exit. A little affection, a kiss good-bye or something, seems essential on this day. Emotion swells suddenly in my throat, and I realize just how easy it must be for that other me to take for granted something so simple as leaving my parents’ house to go to school. Mom simply dumps the remainder of her coffee into the sink and leaves the kitchen.
The-crash-never-happened Tess barrels past Mom in the hallway. “Bye, Mom,” she says, and grabs her own banana. She’s dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt with “Pennington Tennis” written across a couple of crossed tennis rackets. Over her shoulder is also a gym bag.
When Tess goes out the door, I glimpse the other me sitting in a car in the driveway waiting. The car is no shiny red Uncle Joey car, but it’s a clean sedan. Very practical, very safe. For some reason I note that my seat belt is secure across my shoulder.
The door shuts behind tennis Tess, and the house empties of all sound but Dad mouthing the words to whatever he’s written on the notepad.
“I hate tennis,” Tess says.
“I didn’t know that.”
“You made me a tennis player on purpose.”
“No. I just willed you to be a little less . . .” Her blouse shows so much cleavage, I think she could lose a tennis racket in there. “A little less you.”
“Mom and Dad get to be the same.”
“Mom and Dad didn’t live long enough to turn into tramps.”
“You suck.”
“Just get on with it, Tess. What do you want me to do here?”
She scans the living room and kitchen while I wonder how accurately I’ve made this world. It’s some part memory and some part desire, but I don’t know if it’s equal parts each. I wonder if Tess has had more recent experience to know whether I got the details right. “You never told me if Mom and Dad are alive where you live.”