by Jen Brooks
“Oh my God,” she says. As if her knees have suddenly broken, she plops down onto the track. “Oh my God.”
“I’m so sorry, Kylie. I never thought things through to this conclusion. I just liked you so much, and I was so lonely. You’re the only good thing I’ve had in my life since the accident, and there’s no way I can explain how sorry I am. I’m so, so sorry.”
I fight not to wrap my arms around her again. If she needed space before, she certainly does now. I can’t stop here, anyway. There’s still the most important part.
“There’s one more thing. Kylie Simms still exists in the real world. I got confused one day and thought she was you, and ever since then you’ve been experiencing each other somehow. All that space you asked for is the distance the other Kylie has. All the love you had for me put pressure on her to like me. The poems, the dreams, all of it is you becoming part her and her part you. It can’t be undone. The only way to fix things is to merge both of you into one Kylie.”
Her mouth drops open, and she shakes her head. “What does that even mean?”
“It means I take you to the real world to see her, and the two of you become one.”
“There’s no way I can even begin to comprehend that. Two of us become one Kylie? I’m not even real?”
“Of course you’re real. You’re brilliant and athletic and beautiful and the best friend I could ever hope for. You’re real. It’s just that . . . you weren’t real until I made you a world.”
“But I have memories going all the way back to before you had the accident you say gave you this power.”
“I know.”
“They’re not real?”
“The memories are real, but they didn’t really happen. They couldn’t have.”
Her hands make agitated movements in the air. “I can’t believe what I’m hearing.”
I can’t stand it, I have to touch her. I kneel down on the track and still her wild hands. “I made this world in tenth grade. The first thing we did together was that horror movie party at Mandy’s house.”
“I remember that.”
“Because you were there.”
“But not before?”
“No.”
I think she’s about to wig out. Her breathing is quick and shallow, her skin pale in the darkness. She’s not crying. She’s worse than crying.
“So this is what’s been wrong with me lately? I was happy being in love with you right up until a few days ago. Then all of a sudden, bam, weird feelings around my boyfriend. I thought my stupid behavior is what we were going to talk about tonight, but this is the last thing I expected.”
She wrestles her hands from mine and stands, backs away from me, begins pacing. All I can do is stand and watch as her arms flail with her words. “I’ve had all these confused thoughts,” she says, “like when you’re near, I want to back away. I don’t want you to touch me. It’s not the opposite of love, exactly. It’s feeling uncomfortable around you, like you’re a stranger in my personal space. My own boyfriend! At the same time, all I want is you. It’s been killing me to try to understand why I want to be with you but can’t stand to be in the same room. I haven’t slept in three days for the worry, for the nightmares! For not wanting to hurt your feelings but scared that some part of me doesn’t care how you feel anymore.”
“You can stop feeling guilty about hurting the bastard who’s only hurting you.”
Her fingers dig into her eyes as she moves. “What’s the other Kylie like?” she asks.
It’s hard to answer because she won’t stop pacing. “Well, she likes science, for one thing, and winter, and wouldn’t have picked creative writing if it didn’t fit into her schedule. And her room is more girlie than yours.”
“You’ve been in her room?” I wouldn’t have told her that, but I’m coming as clean as I possibly can. Plus, that gets her to stand still and at least look at me.
“Yeah.”
“Have you two . . .”
“No. Not at all. She didn’t even know I was there.”
“Oh, you were spying on her?”
“I had to know what was going on with you and her. I couldn’t just ask.”
“Does she know about you? How you make worlds and all that?”
“No. I needed to tell you first.”
“Do you love her?”
“I hardly know her.”
For whatever reason, that’s what finally breaks her. She bursts into tears, big heartbreaking sobs that echo in the night.
“I’m sorry, Kylie.” I can’t say it enough. She lets me gather her up, and I bury my face in her shoulder while she cries into mine. We hold on tightly, as if an embrace is the only thing keeping us from falling off the edge of the earth. I don’t want to lose her. I can’t imagine facing the world without her.
CHAPTER 22
“IT’S HARD TO WRAP MY mind around not being real,” she says.
We haven’t recovered the strength to stand, so we’re sitting on the track, still holding each other. Kylie isn’t done crying, but the force of it has ebbed to something we can talk through. She’s still trembling, though.
“You’re as real as I am.”
“No, I’m a copy. You’re not.”
“One thing I’ve learned is that you’re anything but a copy. I told you, the other Kylie has different tastes, and has made different choices. You and I have been together so long, we have an awesome relationship that the other Kylie doesn’t have with anyone. I think being with me has made you develop some differences, but you’re right, in all the important ways you’re the same.”
“Like what important ways?”
“I made you to be her, so everything I loved about her is in you. For one thing, you’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.”
“Oh, please.” She shifts and mops some more tears with her sleeve.
“And you both do the same track events, and you do them just as well, with the same personal bests and everything.”
“That’s just . . . weird.”
“You’re both honest and have this way of getting right to the point. You’re both great at writing poetry and analyzing my poetry. You’re both funny and can do a good wisecrack. You’re both so kind that you can see through a person’s scars right to the person underneath.”
“Yeah. You and your scars. You worry too much about them.”
“And you hardly notice them. It’s the thing I love most about you, and the one thing I didn’t know about the original Kylie when I made this world.”
“You didn’t add traits to me on purpose? To make me better in your eyes?”
“There couldn’t be anything better. I just wanted you to want to be with me.”
Her trembling is less obvious now, and the desperation of earlier has fallen out of her voice. Her jacket sleeves are wet from wiping her face, but she doesn’t reach for her face again. I hope the tears have stopped.
“I’m thinking,” she says, “about what you said. About merging.”
“You don’t have to do it, Kylie. Not if you don’t want to. But I’m afraid you’ll just keep losing sleep. Or worse.”
She slackens her hold on me so she can look me in the face. “You want me to volunteer.”
My silence gives her her answer.
“Will I die?”
“The whole point is to make you better so you can live.”
“Will it hurt?”
I think of that strange experiment merging with Tess. She said it wouldn’t be quite like that for Kylie, but I didn’t get the impression it would involve pain. “I don’t think so.”
“What will happen to my parents?”
“I’ll close this world and everything in it. Your parents are alive and well in the real world, an identical world. Nothing will change.” Of course everything will change, and she�
�s too smart to believe my overly optimistic answer.
She takes a deep breath and blows it out. “How much longer do I have?”
There’s no deadline I know of besides how long I can stand seeing them separately suffering. “It would probably be better, now that you know, to do the merging soon. Otherwise you’ll just dwell on it. You have to be together with the other Kylie when it happens, but I can take you there now just to see her and bring you back here first, if you want.”
She thinks about it. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be her right now.
“No, I want to go home first. Then we’ll go see her.”
She looks away from me, up at the sky. I find it difficult to raise my eyes to the heavens, so I stare at the lines of the track. “Will we still love each other?” she asks.
It’s the most important question in the universe.
“I don’t know.”
* * *
I help her up, and we walk back to the car. Kylie leans her head against the window to stare at the passing world for the whole ride. I want to say something that will make the next few hours easier, but there’s no greeting card category that covers merging. My imagination plants me in a grocery store picking out just such a card, and the absurdity of the thought ties my tongue even tighter. The most comfort I can give is a hand on her knee.
When we get to her house, I cut the ignition. Kylie’s house is welcoming with its neat landscaping and bright lights at the front door and garage. “Do you mind waiting here?” she asks.
“That’s fine,” I say, trying to squeeze as much reassurance as I can into two syllables and a soft look.
She gets out and wanders to the front door, straightening her jacket as she goes. And I wait. I imagine her inside, greeting her parents, saying a subtle good-bye, maybe chatting with them in the kitchen or settling with them on the couch for a few minutes of family TV watching.
After a while the light goes on in her bedroom, and I know she won’t be much longer. She got all shaken up at the track, but she agreed to everything. Everything. And although I wouldn’t say she’s happy about it, the what-to-do-next part got decided surprisingly easily. I don’t know if she figured her torture was too much to bear for the rest of her life, or if the world parameter that makes her love me is still functioning, still making her compliant when it comes to what I need. My self-loathing surges, but at least it won’t be much longer until she’s released from my prison of a world.
“Tess,” I call.
She appears immediately, standing in the glare of my headlights, which I’ve forgotten to dim. I do so now, and she stands backlit by Kylie’s garage light. She makes no move to get into the car, so I open the door and get out. “We’re going to switch over to the real world when Kylie comes out.”
“Yeah, I know.” She’s wearing all black, from her fitted turtleneck to her boots. She’s even wearing black gloves. Her hair, unnaturally black, hangs long and loose around her shoulders. The only part of her that doesn’t swallow light is her face.
I say, “I guess we’ll take my car back to Uncle Joey’s and go from there.”
“Should I come with you or meet you?”
“I guess it would be better to meet there.” It sounds too much like we’re planning a casual dinner.
“She’s still asleep, you know. Real Kylie. You can take the other one straight into her room.”
“Okay.”
Tess shifts so her weight rests on one foot. She regards me for a moment. “It’ll be fine, you know.”
“Okay.”
I’m dangerously close to postponing things because I’m terrified, but Kylie emerges just as Tess winks away. “Who was that?” she asks.
I sigh before telling the last of the truth. “That was the girl I chased in the mall.”
“The one you recognized from the crash?”
“Yeah, but what I never said, but should have, is that she’s Tess.”
“Tess, as in, your sister Tess?”
“She’s been helping me, and she’s the one who knows how to merge. She’s meeting us at the other Kylie’s.”
Kylie still doesn’t argue, despite the pathetic inadequacy of my explanations. I’ve already thought of a dozen follow-up questions I would have fired, but she just stands there, willing to take on faith that I know what I’m doing. That sickens me more than anything else. She trusts me despite the twenty feet of physical distance she’s left as a barrier between us.
She looks back at her house, toward the drawn curtains of the living room. “Let’s go.”
Even though I told Tess we’d drive back to Uncle Joey’s first, I leave my car in Kylie’s driveway. It won’t matter if her parents see it parked there. This world won’t exist in a few hours.
“Come here,” I say, and we step toward each other, raising our arms for an embrace. She feels limp, so unlike the vibrant hugger I’ve known for so long. I pull her close and move us out of Kylie-Simms-is-my-girlfriend for the last time. Around us rise the four walls of real Kylie’s bedroom. Her bedside clock says it’s a little after nine p.m., and Kylie herself is fast asleep under the covers. Her hair is tied in a knot at the top of her head, and the puffiness in her face from crying hasn’t receded fully. Movement in the corner draws our attention as Tess rises from a chair. “Hi, Kylie,” she says. “It’s nice to finally meet you.” She extends a hand.
It strikes me as weird to be introducing yourself to someone you’re about to annihilate by merging them into somebody else.
Kylie doesn’t flinch. Her hand goes straight to Tess’s. “And you.”
“I’m guessing you have some questions,” Tess says.
“Yes.”
“Okay, shoot.”
Kylie takes a moment to study her sleeping double. Except for the little residual puffiness, they are mirror images of each other. She turns and gives me an unreadable look. “I can see what she’s dreaming.” She turns to Tess. “How can I do that?”
“Well,” says Tess. “It’s because Jonathan created you to be her. The two of you in the same world is like two walls of the same canyon. Everything you feel or think echoes between you. If she were awake, she’d know what you’re thinking. Her dream might even reflect your thoughts right now.”
Kylie looks again at her counterpart bundled in the comforter, twitching an arm in her sleep. This whole procedure has been taken out of my hands, like I’ve become a spectator in the bleachers while Kylie takes the field. “You’re right. My thoughts are part of her dream.”
She watches sleeping Kylie some more, possibly eavesdropping on her with the echoing canyon phenomenon, before asking, “Will I still be me?”
“You’ll have all your memories and thoughts, but so will she. Think of it like updating to a newer version of a computer program. All the original information is there, but some of the bugs get removed and helpful new stuff gets added. The program and the update become one thing. There is only the one program. It might be a little disorienting at first, to have merged thoughts, but it’s not like you’ll go nuts or anything. Your head will clear and you’ll feel just like you again.
“Plus merged bodies don’t double in size or anything weird like that. They choose the best cells from each original. You’ll wake up physically stronger than you’ve ever felt before. It’s a huge perk, especially for an athlete.”
Tess’s voice is gentler than I would have thought possible from her. All the sibling-rivalry-esque hostility she’s been showing me has turned into kindness for Kylie. It’s like she’s become Kylie’s big sister explaining how the first day of school is going to go, and how it’s going to be okay.
Unexpectedly our heads turn as one to the door. Footsteps, more than one set, creak along the hall toward us. Girlfriend Kylie draws a breath, but otherwise we all go still.
A weak knock sounds on the wood. The knob rot
ates slowly before the door cracks open. A head peeks around the door—Kylie’s mom’s—and checks on the sleeper. Tess must have us in invisible mode, because Kylie’s mom doesn’t notice that the room is full of people. Mrs. Simms pulls her head back out and closes the door. Voices exchange hushed words, and the footsteps continue down the hall.
“My other mom and dad,” Kylie says.
“Everyone here has a double in your world,” Tess says. Except for Jonathan, she should add. There’s only one me for both worlds, but that one me is as close to being two different people as you can get. Here I’m nothing like the boyfriend she knew in Kylie-Simms-is-my-girlfriend. I’m not in all her classes. I’m not on the track team. I don’t have friends. I walk to school. I won’t be going to college with her next year. Too many things about me aren’t the me she knows, and there will be no world parameter saying she has to be my girlfriend anymore.
Kylie swipes her eyes with her sleeve and blinks back another round of tears. She comes to me and hugs me, a long, tight good-bye. “I love you,” I whisper.
She doesn’t say anything in return.
When she pulls out of the hug, Tess takes her gently by the arm over to the bed. Real Kylie hasn’t moved at all, but her face has smoothed. She looks more serene than she did when we first got here.
“The best thing to do,” Tess says, “is to think about what makes you happiest in your life. With you standing this close, the thoughts will fill her, so when you come together, you’ll be a little more at ease. Think of it as having your dorm room decorated with your familiar belongings before you arrive.”
Kylie nods and presumably beams down warm, fuzzy thoughts to the Kylie she’s about to become. I grow faint watching her, and realize I’m holding my breath. The room feels darker and smaller, like the lens of a camera has come focusing down on Kylie and Kylie, cutting everything else from the picture. I’m way out of the shot already, and Tess is disappearing fast. Kylie, by some instinct, reaches out her hand to her sleeping self. Tess catches her by the wrist. “Wait.”