Page 20 of In What World

No ground made on either side.

“Okay,” I relent. “What’s the first thing Dallas ever said to us about acting?”

“You have to think like the character to understand them,” she replies.

“Exactly. A-plus student, as always.”

She waves her hands, urging me toward the point.

“We need to think like Dallas to understand where he went,” I say.

She rolls her eyes, already walking away. “Brilliant. I’ll be sure to do just that.”

“Here’s what we know so far,” I continue, undeterred by her rejection. “Dallas told me he figured out how to walk through universes. The Memory Machine is a mysterious project he has never fully explained to anyone. His phone was found on top of it, which means this must be one of the last places he went before he disappeared. The door was closed when you checked it. So…what if he went inside?”

Marlowe embraces exactly zero percent of the revelatory emphasis I’ve sprinkled atop the last sentence, but she doesstop leaving, instead folding her arms across her chest as she says, “And did what?” Her words ooze skepticism. “Disappeared like a magician?”

“Maybe,” I say. “Perhaps there’s a trapdoor beneath our feet that will send us into the dark underbelly of the stage, where Dallas plans to haunt the auditorium like the Phantom of the Opera. I don’t know. Anytime I ever went into the machine as a teen, I never closed the door. But I wasn’t thinking like Dallas would. Now I am.”

Marlowe’s caterpillar brows can’t hold the tension of her glare. There must be a kernel of truth in my idea that she recognizes. Something just irritating enough that she can’t ignore it outright.

“And really, what do we have to lose?” I ask, hoping to sweeten the pot. Throw in some joie de vivre.

“Our dignity, our sanity, our reputation as upstanding adults in this community,” she fires back, like she’s been waiting for this very question, forever anti–joie de vivre.

“Do any of those things even matter if Dallas is gone?” I ask. It’s supposed to be a tennis ball thwacked back to her side of the court as hard as she hits them into mine, but it’s too sobering a thought for either of us to keep up the game.

Marlowe bites her bottom lip as she looks at the Memory Machine.

“If we get stuck inside this box and have to scream until someone lets us out, I will never forgive you,” she says, relenting in the way only she can, saying yes by finding a way to assure me I’ll still be at fault in the end.

“When have you ever forgiven me anyway?”

She glares. And glares. And glares.

“You first,” she tells me, opening the door wider.

The thrill of her agreement lights me up. Even better when I catch the faintest hint of interest on her face. Whether this is ridiculous or brilliant, it’s happening.

I climb inside, angling myself a little sideways so there’s room for her, too. Then I reach for her hand the same way I did during our final bow, as we walked downstage together for the last time. Her palm is warm and soft and not very willing, but she grabs on.

“Here goes nothing,” I say, pulling the door shut.

7

Marlowe

It’s pitch-black insidethe Memory Machine, and the way Cilla smells should be considered a crime against humanity. It’s so pleasant it threatens to imprint on my memories, like getting a whiff of freshly baked bread or the sweet pureness of the season’s first snow.

I’ll ask Alice to get back together. I can write out a list of theater conventions for her to memorize. She can give me protocols on how to navigate a healthy relationship. We can make a list of what each person gets to bring into our newly shared home, and we each have the power to veto one thing. Unless it’s a really good thing. Then the other person can override that veto. We were both emotional earlier. We weren’t thinking clearly. We can make it work.

“The button is somewhere over there,” Cilla says. Her hands start roaming in the darkness. She finds my boob instead, and a sick little thrill runs up my spine at her touch. I’ve had sixteen years to install an anti–Cilla Cove alarm, only to discover with one accidental graze that the system is faulty.

“You couldn’t secure the button location before we closed the door?” I ask.

“I didn’t think about it then.”

The button, as it turns out,isright beside my boob. It makes a clicking sound when she presses it, and the entire interior of the machine lights up in red, like we’re inside a photo development lab.