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by Michelle Madow


  “Yeah.” I played with my napkin, tearing it into tiny pieces. “We were together for months—you said that you loved me—and you never told me about you and Marisa. Why would you keep something so huge from me?”

  “I did tell you.” He leaned forward, his eyes locked on mine, and I could tell he was desperate for me to believe him.

  “You might have told Annabelle,” I said. “But my Jake never told me.”

  He took another bite of cheesecake, chewing thoughtfully. “I know that the Jake from your world is me, but he’s also not,” he finally said. “Because I would never keep something like that from you.”

  “What exactly happened in this world?” I asked. “How did Annabelle find out?”

  He leaned back into the booth and ran his fingers through his hair. “Where do you want me to start?” he asked.

  “Spring break.” I didn’t need to think twice about it.

  “Okay,” he said. “Spring break. You were out West skiing with your family. Marisa and I were here. With you gone, of course we spent time together. I thought we were just hanging out as friends. But then she kissed me—”

  “She kissed you?”

  “It was unexpected,” he said. “We were at my house playing video games, and then she said she was bored, and she kissed me.”

  “And you kissed her back?”

  “I didn’t have time to think about it,” he said. “It just happened.”

  “So that’s a yes.”

  “Yeah.” Guilt crossed over his face. “Marisa’s nice, she’s pretty, and she likes me. There was no reason for me not to kiss her back.”

  “But you said you’ve been interested in me since freshman year,” I reminded him. “Me, you, and Marisa were best friends. Didn’t you think about how kissing her would affect that?”

  “It all happened pretty fast,” he said. “In the moment, I figured that you weren’t into me, and Marisa was. It wasn’t fair of me not to give her a chance.”

  I ran my fingers through my hair. This was so twisted, I didn’t know where to start. “By that point, you hadn’t given me any signs that you were interested in me,” I said. “Why were you so sure that I wouldn’t return your feelings?”

  “Because you’ve always been out of my league.” He held my gaze, his eyes full of fire. “Sure, you hung out with me and Marisa, but you’re also on the dance team, and you have all your jock friends. You’re part of their world. I’m not.”

  “Seriously?” I leaned forward, not sure where all this was coming from. “You of all people know that I’m on the dance team because I love to dance—not because of that whole social scene. Claire was the only one of them I ever considered a true friend.”

  “But you went to their parties,” he said.

  “Because they’re my team.” I blew out a long breath. “Of course I was going to see them outside of dance stuff. And I never stayed at those parties for long. They got boring once everyone got too wasted to hold an actual conversation.”

  “You were still there,” he said. “I wasn’t. Neither was Marisa. And over spring break, you were gone. She was here.”

  “So you just kissed her back?” I asked. “Even though you didn’t feel anything?”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  “Really?” I raised an eyebrow. “Then what was it like?”

  “It wasn’t bad,” he said. “But it wasn’t amazing either. I figured she felt the same way, and that it would be a one time thing that neither of us would talk about again.”

  “But it did happen again,” I said. “She told me it did.”

  “We didn’t talk for a few days,” he said. “I thought it meant she felt as weird about it as I did. Then she texted me telling me that her cousin was in town, and asked if I wanted to go to the beach with them.”

  My stomach twisted, because I’d seen the spring break pictures of him and Marisa and Marisa’s cousin on the beach. It looked like the sort of thing that friends did, and I hadn’t thought anything of it.

  How much of a fool was I to have missed it? To have not even wondered?

  “And you went,” I said flatly, since I knew it was true.

  “I thought that inviting me was her way of letting me know that she didn’t want things to be weird between us,” he said. “It seemed harmless, because her cousin would be there too.”

  “But that didn’t stop her from kissing you again,” I said. “Or this time, were you the one who kissed her?”

  “She kissed me,” he said. “Her cousin went to get food, and then she kissed me and told me about how badly she’d been wanting to do it again.”

  “And you said… what?”

  “I froze,” he admitted. “Here was this nice girl who was one of my closest friends, who was apparently crazy for me. I wasn’t crazy for her, but I still cared about her. I didn’t want to hurt her. So I thanked her for inviting me, then told her that it was late, and that I had to get home.”

  I watched him like I didn’t recognize him. How could all of this have happened and I never knew about it?

  “What day was that?” I asked. “That you went to the beach with Marisa and her cousin?”

  “Sunday,” he said. “The next day at school was weird.”

  I stuck my fork in the cheesecake, but my appetite was gone, so I placed it back on my plate. Because in my world, that Monday had been when I was pulled out of class during first period and told about my mom’s accident. Noticing any weirdness between Marisa and Jake had been the last thing on my mind.

  “When did you guys tell me?” I asked, not wanting to talk or think about that particular Monday for any longer than I had to.

  “That weekend,” he said. “That week I told Marisa that I thought we should slow down, because I didn’t want to risk messing up our friendship. But she said that even if that’s what I thought, you were our best friend too, and that we had to tell you about what happened between us while you were away. I think she thought you would be happy for us.”

  “Wow.” I grimaced at how convoluted this all was. But then again, at that point I hadn’t mentioned my feelings for Jake to Marisa. I hadn’t actually been aware of those feelings until the summer.

  If I wasn’t aware of them then, why should anyone else have been?

  “I’m guessing that’s not what ended up happening?” I asked.

  “It’s weird telling you this,” he said. “When to me, you already lived through it.”

  “We crossed the line of ‘weird’ and ‘not weird’ when I was zapped here from a future alternate universe,” I said. “For all we know, I might be forced back there tomorrow night, and then I’ll never have the answers to any of this. So just tell me, okay? I deserve to know the truth.”

  “I know,” he said. “But remember—I only know what I saw. I don’t know Annabelle’s point of view in any of this.”

  I wanted to take his hand and tell him that it was okay and that all I cared about was that he told me what he knew. But I couldn’t, because that’s something the other version of me would have done—the version who thought that Jake could never lie to me.

  “Just do your best,” I said instead.

  “After we told you, you barely talked to me or Marisa for a week,” he started. “You said something about practicing for dance competitions and that you didn’t have time for anything else.”

  “Which was true,” I said. “It was a big reason why I stopped dancing in my world. After everything with my mom, I missed tons of practices and a major competition. The team told me to break for the rest of the year. They said I could start again this year, but I just… didn’t.”

  “You miss it.” He said it as a statement, not a question.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m behind on the routines—because it was Annabelle who knew them, not me—but Claire promised she would catch me up if I stay here past tomorrow night.”

  “You’ll stay here,” he said. “You have to.”

  “You don’t know that.�
�� I picked up my fork again, nibbling on the cheesecake even though I wasn’t really hungry. It just gave me something to do.

  “Maybe not,” he said. “But I’m hoping it’s true.”

  My heart warmed, and I wanted to smile, but I couldn’t. Not until I heard the rest of the story. “What happened next?” I asked. “Annabelle didn’t just fade out of your lives, did she?”

  “She ignored both of us for about a week.” He fiddled with his hands, and I had a feeling that whatever was coming next, I wasn’t going to like it. “Then she showed up at my house and told me that she didn’t like the thought of me and Marisa together because she was starting to wonder if she had feelings for me too.”

  “What?” My eyes widened, and I leaned my elbows on the table. Last spring, I hadn’t begun to think of Jake that way. I’d been too consumed by my grief. “Annabelle must have realized her feelings for you the moment she saw that she might lose you to Marisa,” I said, trying to piece it all together. “That’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  “I guess so,” he said.

  “But if she said that to you, and you already knew you had feelings for me… then why aren’t you and Annabelle together in this world?”

  “Because I didn’t believe her,” he said simply. “So I chose Marisa.”

  Thursday, October 30

  “You chose her?” I narrowed my eyes, feeling more and more like the Jake sitting across from me was a total stranger. “Why?”

  “Because Annabelle only said that she thought she might be interested in me. Marisa knew that she wanted to be with me. So I thought that Annabelle just didn’t want me and Marisa to be together.”

  “You thought she was jealous.”

  “Not jealous,” he said. “But the timing was too coincidental. As much as I wanted to, I didn’t believe that Annabelle’s feelings were real.”

  I wanted to say that I wouldn’t do that, but I stopped myself. Because Jake’s being there for me after my mom died was the first part on my road to realizing I loved him. Here, that hadn’t happened.

  Could Annabelle have been jealous enough of the possibility of Jake being with Marisa that she’d said she had feelings for him before she was ready?

  There were some moments when I could feel the similarities between Annabelle and me. This wasn’t one of them.

  “So you turned Annabelle down,” I said. The waitress came over to check on us, and I took another bite of cheesecake to show her we were still working on it.

  “It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do,” he said. “But yeah, I did.”

  “I’m guessing she didn’t take it well?”

  “I barely saw her after that,” he said. “Then she started hanging out with Zac, and she forgot about me. She seemed happy with him. I thought it was proof that her feelings for me weren’t real, and I made my relationship official with Marisa.”

  “It sounds like a huge mess.”

  “I guess it was,” he agreed. “At least compared to us in your world.”

  “No.” My voice caught. “Because in my world, you never told me about what happened between you and Marisa over spring break.”

  “I’m not the Jake from your world,” he reminded me, pushing his hair out of his eyes. “I don’t know why he did what he did.”

  “I need you to think about it.” I leaned forward, leveling my eyes with his. “You said that on Sunday, you went to the beach with Marisa. She kissed you, told you how much she’d been wanting to do it again, and then you froze and went home. Imagine that if the next day, I found out my mom had died in a car accident. What would you have done differently?”

  “I would have told Marisa that as your friends, we had to be there for you first,” he said. “I would have said that whatever had happened between us over spring break had to be put aside so we could be there for you.”

  “Do you think she would have let you go that easily?” I was testing him, because I knew Marisa well enough to know the answer. She wouldn’t have let him go without a fight.

  “Probably not,” he said. “But I would have insisted that she listen. I would have wanted to keep things as normal and as stable for you as possible.”

  “So you wouldn’t have told me.”

  “Definitely not that weekend.” He tore at his straw wrapper, shredding it into pieces. “And I would have made Marisa promise not to tell you either.”

  “So you wouldn’t have said anything at first,” I said. “And then it continued like that, and you decided to keep the truth from me forever?”

  “I don’t know.” His jaw tightened. “I wish I could give you answers, but I can’t. Because I’m not him. I can’t tell you the reasons for his decisions any more than you can tell me Annabelle’s reasons for hers.”

  “You’re right—you’re not him.” I sat back in my seat and sighed. “I guess that asking you is just a huge waste of time.”

  “No,” he said. “I’m glad you did. And I guess that if the two of you were getting closer in your world, there might be one reason why he might not have told you.”

  “Really?” I raised an eyebrow. “What’s that?”

  “Because he didn’t want to lose you.”

  “That’s not a reason.” A tear fell down my cheek, and I wiped it away, hating that I was crying again. “It’s an excuse.”

  Jake tried to join me on my side of the booth, but I got up before he had a chance. Because if I let him put his arm around me, and if I cried in his shoulder, it would be too easy to lose myself in what I thought we’d always been.

  But what we’d “always been” was a lie. I might never get the answers that I needed, but I couldn’t lie to myself anymore.

  “I have to get out of here,” I said, throwing money for the cheesecake onto the table. “I completely forgot that I have to drive Danny home from school today. He’s probably wondering where I am.”

  “Wait,” Jake said, and despite everything, I did. “We’re all still meeting at Zac’s tonight, right? To go over the plan for tomorrow?”

  “Of course,” I said, surprised by the coldness in my voice. “Tomorrow is the entire reason why I’m here.”

  I hurried out of the restaurant and forced myself not to look back at him, afraid that if I did, I would break. I’d thought he loved me. I thought that he—and Marisa—were my best friends.

  Now I just felt like an idiot. Especially because I was pretty sure that whatever had happened between him and Marisa hadn’t ended after spring break. It had continued for months. On Halloween night, when they were having that intense conversation in my room, they hadn’t been talking about Marisa’s ex-boyfriend from the summer. They were talking about the two of them—together.

  Marisa had feelings for Jake this entire time. Seeing him with me every day must have been torture for her.

  Not only had my boyfriend lied to me, but the girl who I’d thought was my best friend had most likely hated me. Both in that world and in this one.

  Had the jealously and anger built up in her so much that she’d snapped, brought a gun to the dance, and decided to stop us once and for all? I wanted to say no, but what did I know anymore?

  Annabelle definitely had one thing right—Claire was a real best friend, not Marisa.

  But maybe she was right about more than that.

  Could she have picked the right guy, too?

  Thursday, October 30

  After dropping Danny off at his house and apologizing for making him wait for so long, I drove through town, blasting my “sad songs” playlist to drown out the pain. There was something relaxing about driving around listening to sad music. Probably because you could cry without anyone bothering you. You were stuck in your car, other people were stuck in theirs, and they couldn’t walk up to you and ask what was wrong. The car was this capsule of enclosed space that was completely yours, and no one could intrude on it.

  Which was why with the sad music blaring, I let out all the emotions that I’d held in during my
conversation with Jake. Tears streamed down my face, and I let them pour out until there were no more left. I didn’t know what to do. I loved Jake, and I wanted to be with him. I wanted what we used to have—what last night, I thought we would have again. But I hated that he’d lied to me. And I couldn’t forget about it, no matter how much I wished I could.

  So I let the music surround me while the world rolled by. I didn’t give much thought to where I was going… until I arrived at the entrance to Zac’s neighborhood.

  Why had I come here? We were meeting tonight, but not for a while.

  Maybe because I was in Annabelle’s body, it was natural for her to come here. Or maybe, despite how impossible I would have thought this was a few days ago, Zac had become the person I trusted more than anyone else. He listened to me. He didn’t assume I was crazy when I told him things that did sound crazy. He gave me good advice. He was there for me.

  And I’d brushed him off, assuming he was only doing those things because I looked like Annabelle. Because he wanted to get Annabelle back.

  Which I couldn’t blame him for, because the entire time I was here, I’d wanted to get Jake back, too.

  I glanced at the clock—I’d been driving around for so long that sports practices had already let out. Zac would be home by now.

  At this point I had nothing to lose, so I parked in front of his house and walked up to the door. I had a brief what are you doing thought, but I pushed it away and knocked.

  Kara answered, and her eyes widened when she saw me. I must not have looked too great after my crying session in the car.

  “Hi Kara,” I said, glad that I knew not to call her Mrs. Michaels. “Is Zac home?”

  “He’s in his room.” She pointed to the stairs. “Are you okay…?”

  “Yeah.” I forced a smile and headed toward the hall. “I’m fine.”

  It was a lie, and we both knew it, but she let it slide. I walked up the stairs, trailing my fingers along the railing. Zac’s house was small but cozy, and I couldn’t believe that I’d felt like a stranger here only two days ago.

 

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