Page 43 of In What World

Even with Cilla more than fifty feet away, a whole red ocean of seats between us, her eyes still find mine. She stands up from her chair and says, “Marlowe Jenkins never understood that I spent all four years of high school completely and totally in love with her.”

The shock hits my center hot and fast as a poker. I don’t care that we’re in another world. It doesn’t matter if all these students don’t know me as me. I still know them. I know their minds, their hearts, and their dreams for their life beyond high school. And I know this auditorium, too. It has always been my safe place, the one sacred room where things go right for me instead of wrong. Except when Cilla Cove is around.

Cilla might be the one who started this, but I’m going to finish it. If she thinks this has always been some kind of performancebetween us, then here I am, showing up to play my part as the villain.

“How fuckingdareyou,” I seethe as I charge the stage.

Her ankle gives out as she steps backward. She can barely recover before I’ve invaded her space, pressing us together until we’re chest to chest.

“Tell them how in the middle of our last show together as seniors, right over there in the wings, you thought it would behilariousto mess with me one last time.” I stare into her contracting pupils. “Tell them how you kissed me. Again. For the second time in twenty-four hours.”

“Marlowe, I—”

“Youwhat?” I ask. “You didn’t think I’d ever mention that part? You thought I’d let that slide in favor of your narrative, where you were silently pining for me? Fuck that. You said yourself that second kiss was a prank. You told me that to my face.”

“This is kinda messed up,” Billy Larsen offers from the audience.

“Hush,” Dallas says.

“Tell them how you thought it was kind of weird how seriously actors take their job and that you’d never do that, and yet you’re the one who made it a career, all because you knew it was the one thing I wanted most in life,” I continue. “You had to prove to me once and for all that you were the better one, didn’t you? You had to get in my head one last time.”

My voice drops into a dangerous warble that’s half anger, half grief. The audience is pin-drop quiet, and the awkward silence shows me how much I’ve lost the plot. They have no idea what point I’m trying to make, because none of the history I’m bringing up belongs in this world. I don’t know what point I’m trying to make anymore either. I came up here to get revenge on Cilla, and all I’m doing is sharing my own vulnerabilities.

I grab Cilla’s forearms and shove us stage right, pushing until we’re both inside the Memory Machine, rocking it back so hard it almost tips over. Wherever we’re going, at least it won’t be here, where they’ve all watched me make a mockery of myself.

When I close the door and press the button, nothing happens. The machine does not glow red. There’s no countdown, no strange lift.

“What the hell?” I ask, pressing the button until my index finger starts to ache from the impact.

It’s hard to breathe inside this dark box. Or maybe it’s my chest constricting, nostrils full of Cilla’s perfume, head hazy from the memories we’ve dredged up and the pain I’ve paraded out for an audience of confused teenagers.

We can’t be stuck.

There has to be another reality.

“No,” I say, pressing the button again and again. “Come on.”

“We’ll have to open the door eventually,” Cilla says.

Even here, she still has her composure. “No,” I tell her as beads of sweat fall from the tip of my nose.

“I don’t mean to make a bad thing worse, but wouldn’t it stand to reason that they’ll believe we’re having sex?” she asks me. “What else could we possibly be doing in here in their eyes?”

That feeling returns again. The one that reared up the second she appeared in Dallas’s office—pure, unfiltered hatred.

“I wish I never fucking met you,” I say, pressing the button again.

This time, the machine works.

14

Priscilla

Marlowe throws openthe door to a dark, empty stage. She scurries out like a caged animal set free, yanking her phone out of her pocket as she bounds across the open deck.

There isn’t a single thing on this stage to indicate a show has been performed recently. The whole place smells of musty attic, and it has the piles of dust to match.

“Hello?” I call out, hurrying to follow Marlowe as she splits the curtain and leaves. The mic pack from the last world is still in my hand. I grip it tight, enjoying the sturdiness in my palm. Proof that what we’re going through is real.