Forget This Ever Happened

by Cassandra Rose Clarke

  Julie speeds through Indianola. It’s like a maze she’s been walking through for the last seventeen years and still not found the exit. Even the moonlight can’t make these streets exciting.

  She pulls onto Lawrence’s street.

  It’s almost eleven o’clock, and her curfew on weekends isn’t until one. She doesn’t feel like going home, and Lawrence is the only person she knows who isn’t judgmental about stuff that doesn’t involve breaking the law. Out of all the people in Indianola, he’s the only one who Julie actually wants to see right now. She just hopes he’s not out with Audrey.

  Only one of the windows in his house is lit up, the big one in the living room. Julie parks in his driveway and goes around to the back door. She lifts the big flowerpot of Mexican heather up from its usual spot, plucks up the key, dusts off the dirt. But when she sticks the key in the keyhole the door swings open, unlatched, revealing the dark, humming kitchen. A TV mutters in the background. Julie eases the door shut and sets the key on the counter and follows the glow of the TV.

  Julie creeps into the living room. She knows she should have knocked at the front door like a civilized person, but right now she wants to feel like she belongs somewhere. The TV is switched to the news, droning on about President Clinton and denuclearization and NATO, and Aunt Rosa looks asleep, her head lolled at an angle. Lawrence sits in the other recliner, flipping through a textbook. Thank God Audrey didn’t drag him away tonight.

  “Boo,” Julie says.

  Lawrence jumps and the book slides off his lap and lands with a thud on the floor. Aunt Rosa jerks awake.

  “What is it, Lawrence?” she gasps.

  “It’s just me,” Julie says, and she sweeps in and kisses Aunt Rosa on the forehead.

  “Should you be out this late?” Aunt Rosa reaches for a remote and changes the station to some late-night show.

  “Curfew’s till one. Felt like saying hi to my dear cousin Lawrence.”

  Aunt Rosa shakes her head, but she’s smiling. She’s used to Julie.

  “What are you doing here?” Lawrence asks. “Is there a problem?”

  Julie looks over the TV. The audience laughs at something the celebrity guest says. “Not exactly,” she says.

  “Do you want something to eat?” Aunt Rosa asks.

  “Oh, no thanks.”

  Lawrence plucks his book off the floor and tosses it onto the coffee table. Introducing Psychology.

  “Studying on a Friday night, eh?” Julie asks.

  “Some of us are responsible. C’mon, let’s go out back. Mom’ll be going to bed soon.”

  Aunt Rosa waves her hand dismissively, her gaze fixed on the TV. Julie trails after Lawrence, feeling listless and unhappy. Normally Lawrence’s house is enough to cheer her up. Not today.

  Lawrence grabs the key off the counter as they go out the back door. The porch is narrow and crowded with Aunt Rosa’s planters, so Julie kicks off her shoes and walks out into the backyard, her toes sinking into the grass. It reminds her of being out on the beach with Claire.

  “Seriously,” Lawrence says, “what’s wrong? You haven’t been bugging me the last few days.”

  “Yeah, because you keep disappearing with Audrey.” Julie glances at him over her shoulder. “She okay with you studying on a Friday? Or did you two break up?”

  “No, we didn’t break up. She had plans.” He walks over to her and they stand in his backyard, looking out toward the woods. Most of the stars are blocked by the trees. It’d be a good time to go shoot at targets, if it wasn’t nighttime, if it wasn’t dark. Or maybe the darkness is what makes it perfect. Julie’s feeling reckless. That was the whole reason she suggested they go to the beach in the first place.

  “Well, good for you,” she says coldly.

  Lawrence is staring at her, waiting for her to tell him what’s wrong. God, he’s really got that authority figure thing down.

  “You’re going to be the best cop,” she tells him, finally. “I saw what you were studying in there. Psychology? You’ll be inside the bad guys’ minds.”

  “I’m already a cop,” he says. “I’ll be the best detective.”

  Julie smiles at that.

  “Now tell me what’s going on,” he says. “Is it something with the monsters?”

  “No. It’s nothing. Just—teenager trouble. You don’t want to hear about it.”

  Lawrence doesn’t say anything, although she can sense his disapproval in the darkness. She wraps her arms around herself and steps up to the edge of the trees. She keeps replaying the kiss in her mind. The soft dry brush of Claire’s lips against her own. The sweet fruity scent of Claire’s shampoo. The barest hint of pressure when Claire actually kissed back—

  That was Julie’s first kiss. First kiss with a girl, anyway. First kiss that matters.

  And Claire hated it.

  Julie’s eyes are wet, and she wipes at them like she can get the tears to evaporate before they fall. Lawrence’s shoes crinkle against the grass, but Julie walks farther into the woods, like she can avoid him. It’s stupid, going out here barefoot. She doesn’t care.

  “Julie!” Lawrence shouts, just as Julie hears a long, low hissing.

  She freezes. The hissing sounds mechanical, like steam releasing from a valve. It comes from everywhere. She whips her head around and sees nothing but dark underbrush.

  Another rush of hissing.

  And then, through the trees, a glint of silver eyes.

  “Can you talk?” she asks. It’s an automatic response, the first thing she was taught to say when she joined up with the exterminators.

  “Can you?” It’s not so much a voice as it is a modulation in the hissing. Julie glances over at Lawrence and finds him half crouched, as if he’s about to leap.

  Julie turns back to the eyes. They jerk to the right, then steady themselves, floating in the darkness.

  “It appears I can,” she says flatly.

  The monster moves into a fragment of moonlight. At first all Julie sees is oily gray skin, undulating like a giant slug. She takes a step back.

  “You’re not supposed to be out here,” she says.

  “I was looking for you.” The monster rears up. Branches snap and shredded leaves shower around it, this mass of gray skin offset only by those silver lamplight eyes.

  Lawrence bounds over to her side, holds his fists out in a fighting stance. The monster ignores him and looks straight at Julie.

  “Why?” Lawrence says in his cop voice. “Why were you looking for her? She’s an exterminator, it’s spelled out in the city codes—”

  “I’m not going to speak to him,” the monster says to Julie. “I’m going to speak to you.”

  Julie’s whole body is sick with fear. This monster is demanding, self-possessed, terrifying.

  God, why didn’t the committee listen?

  The monster lurches closer to her, oozing over the ground, revealing itself in patches of moonlight. She doesn’t dare look away as it slithers forward, its tail sluicing over dirt and dead fallen leaves. It fixes its glowing eyes on her and Julie takes a deep breath, trying to steady herself, to keep from passing out. If she can just make it through this, then her dad and the committee will have to listen. They’ll have to.

  The monster stops.

  “She’s been hidden from us,” the monster says.

  Julie blinks, trying to find a place on the monster’s flat, slimy face she can actually look. She settles on the spot between its eyes and the narrow slit of its mouth.

  “W-Who has?” she stammers out.

  “The Sudek,” the monster says.

  Julie’s heart jumps around inside her chest. “The Sudek? You mean Claire?” Saying her name feels painful, even with the monster bearing down on her. Stupid.

  “The one to save us from the astronaut. She’s been hidden away. We suspect the astronaut, the astronaut’s maze. The astronaut knows that we know, that we are getting too close.”

  “The astronaut!” Julie shrieks. “What
is with this freaking astronaut?”

  Her voice echoes around the trees, melting into silence. She’s rooted to the ground, her only movement the rise and fall of her chest. She cannot catch her breath. She’s not sure she ever will again.

  The monster shudders all over like an enormous, revolting Jell-O. “Da zsa ful zsu sho,” it says. “That is our word for it. Is that easier for you to understand?”

  “No,” Julie says. “And what do you mean Claire has been hidden away? I just—” She stops, her head swimming. “I just saw her. Did something happen—did you do something—”

  The monster’s mouth drops open and it lets out a long hiss. Julie jumps backward. The air takes on a stale, cold smell. Metallic.

  “She is still here,” the monster says. “That is good. But she’s been hidden from us. We can’t see her. Which means we can’t help her.”

  Julie senses movement off to her side—Lawrence? But when she looks over at him, he’s frozen, watching them carefully. She whips her head back toward the monster. Its mouth has sealed back up again. Its eyes glow.

  “I don’t understand,” she says. “What do you want with Claire? Help her with what?”

  “She is the key.”

  And then the darkness moves. Something slimy and hot slaps against Julie’s bare leg and knocks her to her back. Her head slams hard against the ground and she stares up at the stars in a daze. They twinkle with the far-off light of other suns.

  “Let her go!” Lawrence shouts. “I’m a deputy with the sheriff’s—”

  “You don’t understand,” the monster tells her, “but I can show you.”

  “What?” Julie looks up just as she’s dragged forward over the ground. The monster’s tail is wrapped around her ankles, a thick, disgusting coil. Julie screams. She hears Lawrence shouting her name, but his voice is far away, on the other side of a wall. The stars blur together into lines.

  “I’ll show you,” the monster repeats.

  Julie blinks.

  Julie blinks, and she’s not in Lawrence’s backyard anymore.

  The stars are still overhead, still streaked into lines across the sky, tangled and twisted up like knotted yarn. But she’s lying on her back in thick mulchy soil, and the air is thick and humid and hot, the inside of a sauna.

  Something wriggles over her bare ankle.

  Julie shrieks and kicks it off. She sits up, her head spinning. Walls rise up on all sides, coated in thick, ropy vines, flashes of yellow and silver eyes blinking at her from the shadows.

  She’s in the power plant. The roof is gone, but she’s in the power plant.

  “What—How did you—” She struggles to her feet and immediately swoons, the strange air of the power plant going straight to her head. The monster stands a few paces away from her. It oozes over the soft ground, and its eyes flash, overly bright in the darkness.

  “Take me back!” Julie shouts. “You aren’t allowed to do this! It’s against the treaty!”

  “It’s against the treaty to harm you,” the monster says in its hissing-steam voice. “And I am not going to harm you. Only show you. Look up.”

  Julie doesn’t move. It’s her only act of defiance.

  The monster slumps down. It almost looks as if it’s sighing. “I had to bring you here,” it says. “I could not stay in the outside for long. The air isn’t right for me.” It pulls its head back, flesh rippling all the way down its body. Julie shudders. “But I can show you the timelines.”

  This time, Julie looks up, compelled by curiosity. The roof is still gone, and the stars streak across the sky.

  “Look,” the monster says.

  “I am!” Julie clutches at her stomach, trying to soothe her quaking fear.

  “Look at the timelines.”

  “The timelines,” Julie whispers. She squints up at the streaking stars. Timelines.

  Desperation tugs at the edges of her thoughts. “I don’t understand,” she says. “Just freaking explain it and let me go!”

  “Look.”

  “I’m looking!”

  And then Julie sees it. One of the lines of light brightens and jerks up, tracing a new path through the ink of the sky.

  “A change in the timeline,” the monster says. “In this room only, you can see them, shifting and eroding. A timeline brought us here, and it must remain stable, unchanged.”

  The brightened line drops back to its original position.

  “Like that,” the monster says. “It must stay like that.”

  The monster falls silent. The glow in the starline disappears, and then that line fades in with all the others. Timelines, Julie thinks, and she has a sudden image of her life and Claire’s life as two lines of light intersecting in the summer of 1993. A moment was changed that day she went to Mrs. Sudek’s to capture a monster. Julie has never thought of her life in those terms before—she always dreams of the future, not the present and certainly not the past. But now she understands that the future and the past are part of the same line. They cannot be separated.

  “The astronaut came here to re-create the past with cosmic magic,” the monster says. “And in so doing, the timelines will be knotted and confused. The past will become the present, the present the past. And both will change.”

  “What?” Julie says.

  “We do not know why the astronaut wishes to do this. We tried to warn the Sudek but we could never get close enough to her to show her all this.”

  Julie looks up at the sky again, the tangle of starlight. Timelines.

  “So you’re warning me,” Julie says. A shiver works up her spine. “Is Claire in danger? The Sudek?”

  “We do not know.” The monster inches forward over the thick ground. “We only know that things must happen as they did. If the timelines are disrupted this town will no longer exist. The astronaut must not understand that. But we do.”

  Julie shakes her head. “You want me to save the town? Why do you care?”

  “For us—if the town vanishes, our own history changes. We came here to escape annihilation and if the past is changed we will be annihilated for certain. And you will be annihilated too. Surely that distresses you.”

  “Of course it distresses me! I just don’t understand what you’re asking me to do!”

  “Stop the astronaut. You are cosmically linked, you and the Sudek.”

  “I don’t know what that means!” Julie cries. “Can I talk to Aldraa? Can he help?”

  “Aldraa is no expert,” the monster says. “He’s merely a politician.”

  “What?” Julie’s momentarily slammed by that particular revelation—they have politicians?

  “I’m sending you back now,” the monster says. “You’ve seen the timeline. You know it must stay unchanged, lest we die and you disappear.”

  “What? No!” Julie lunges toward the monster, ignoring her fear, her quiver of disgust. “You didn’t explain anything! I have no idea what’s going on—”

  The monster stares at her with its silver eyes.

  She trips on a slick patch on the ground, stumbles, catches herself before she falls. But when she looks up, she’s no longer in the swampy heat of the power plant. She’s in Lawrence’s backyard, the air cool against her skin, the trees rustling in the breeze.

  She looks up, and the stars are fixed points of light in the distance.

  “Julie?”

  It’s Lawrence. Julie whirls around to find him rushing toward her.

  “Are you all right?” He speaks in the brisk, even tones Julie’s always associated with TV cops, but she can see the wild light of fear in his eyes. “It looked like you disappeared. I thought—”

  “It took me to the power plant,” Julie says.

  “What!? Are you hurt? We need to call Uncle Victor right now—”

  “I’m fine. I was only there a few minutes. It just—talked to me. About nonsense.” Except Julie doesn’t think it’s nonsense. She thinks she just doesn’t understand it.

  And the town might be in troub
le. And Claire—Claire too—

  “That’s not even possible.” Lawrence pinches the bridge of his nose. “I only lost sight of you for a few seconds. There’s no way it could have dragged you all the way to the power plant.”

  “I don’t know. I’m just saying what happened. I’m fine, though.”

  “You still need to tell Uncle Victor,” Lawrence says. He’s back in his no-nonsense cop’s voice. “He should be back in town by now, right? And we’ll need to file a report about it, I’m sure.” He pauses. “With this happening, and me seeing it—I might be able to help you, like you were asking.”

  Julie nods. She shakes with leftover adrenaline. The memory of the timelines is starting to fade. It feels like a dream. Not a nightmare. The nightmare was the moment Claire pushed away from her.

  “I’m taking you home,” Lawrence says.

  “Dad’ll be in bed. I can tell him tomorrow. I was already planning on talking to him anyway.”

  “I realize that. But you don’t need to drive home by yourself so late. Come on.” He jerks his head back toward the house. Julie doesn’t protest. The monster’s dry hiss of a voice keeps going around in her head like a fragment of a melody. Whenever she closes her eyes she sees the trace of the timelines.

  She stays close to Lawrence as he hurries back into the house. They step into the yellow pool of the porch light, and she’s grateful she isn’t alone.

  Julie wakes up the next morning feeling blurred, as if she’s a painting someone spritzed with turpentine. Her alarm is clanging on her bedside table, and she turns it off and then rolls onto her side and shoves her pillow over her head. Pink light still filters through.

  She thinks of the timelines.

  She thinks of the monster dragging her to the power plant.

  She thinks of Claire, pulling away from their kiss, stuttering apologies, scrambling backward over the sand.

  Julie throws the pillow on the floor. Sunlight floods her room. She wonders if she ought to feel angry at Claire. She doesn’t. It’s just an intense, drowning sadness, the sort of thing that can’t be cured. Only the symptoms can be treated. Like the flu.