Page 48 of In What World

Her hands are now resting in my lap, right at the top of my thighs. The fabric of my pants does nothing to dull the sensation. If anything, it exacerbates the warmth. Sweat pools under my legs where my own hands are still pinned, forbidding me from moving.

I keep trying to erase the last reality, to make what she said on that stage into another one of her cruelties, but my heart, tender and always searching, wants to believe it was more than another performance.

It’s my mind, logical and unrelenting, that needs more proof. She can say she was in love with me all she wants, but I’m the one who lived through her actual actions, and they were not actions of love.

“And what are you up to?” I ask, knowing this will convince her to move her hands.

She searches her real name, finding next to nothing other than she once lived at her old address here in Garden Meadows. Not even those websites that mine people’s personal data have more information.

“What about searching for Cilla Cove?” I suggest.

She lets out a small grunt.

“What?” I ask, confused.

“I didn’t choose that name,” she says. “My first agent did.He thought my real name was too long and complicated. He said this was short and memorable. And since that’s the name I used to register with SAG, it’s the one I’m stuck with.”

For some reason, this leaves me gobsmacked. “Really? I thought for sure it was one of your creations.”

“Nope. But we can check anyway.”

The search for Cilla Cove returns nothing.

“So we just…never met?” she asks. “I have no idea who I am without you.”

Maybe it’s the casual delivery, said with a shrugging nonchalance as she continues plugging in search terms. Or it’s the fact that I’m thinking the exact same thing. I can accept that versions of myself turn out differently based on circumstances of nature and of nurture. But I can’t accept a version of me that didn’t spend four years duking it out with her on the WRHS stage.

We move on to searching about alternate universes in general. There’s a lot of information to comb through—elevated academic theses that are borderline unreadable, batshit conspiracy theories, and firsthand accounts of supposed multiverse hopping.

I log in Cilla on her computer, also using Alice’s credentials, aware that this means there will be no more hands in my lap. No more Cilla leaning a little too close to my shoulder as we read the screen together. It’s what has to be done if we ever want to get out of this place.

We don’t even have to discuss how we’ll split the workload. I read the academic articles while Cilla braves the strangest corners of Reddit and other random online forums.

There is a meditative quality to the process. It’s the closest to calm I’ve felt since Dallas went missing. I am doing something tangible. I am collecting information that will help meunderstand what’s happening. If I squint, it’s almost like I’m lesson-planning.

“Everything I’ve looked at so far seems to agree that time isn’t linear,” I offer after a long stretch of reading. “And to think of it that way is a disservice to the concept.”

“Hateto be a disservice to time.” Cilla presses her palms together in a prayer position. “Time, I very much want to be in your service and favor.” She drops to her knees on the floor. “Time, baby, whatever you need from me, I promise I’ll do it.”

“I don’t think you have to look up to the sky to address time,” I tell her. “According to what I’m reading right now, time goes in all directions. Which is probably how we are where we are. We’re kinda, like, sideways. Same time of day and year as where we’re from, but a different version of that life. Because everything is now. The past, the present, the future. It’s all happening at once.”

Cilla blows a kiss to the sky, a kiss to each corner of the library, and then a kiss down to her feet. “Time, you don’t look a day over infinite to me.”

We fall back into our rhythm of reading. From where we’re positioned, we can see the double-door entrance to the library and the full-length windows framing either side. Every so often, someone walks past, and occasionally, they pop their head in. Each time, Cilla waves at them like they know her, and the person waves back, confused—probably embarrassed to not recognize her when she’s greeting them like they’re good friends—then exits the library before coming any closer to us.

“You’re good at that,” I say after her latest target makes the expected one-eighty.

“Didn’t you just tell me there’s nothing a teenage girl fears more than friendliness?” she says. “I’m the ultimate weapon.” Even before I can judge her for it, she realizes we’re in a school,and that far worse things than Cilla Cove in her leopard coat can happen here. “Okay, sorry. I wasn’t really thinking that one through. I was actually thinking about our past.”

“What about our past?”

“How you got so hostile with me in the parking lot our freshman year.”

I give her a long, loaded look.

This is the part of her my brain really can’t accept—her need to keep pressing on our oldest fight. We have proven over and over that we aren’t good at airing out any of this. To keep asking that of us makes me believe she has an ulterior motive.

In high school, that motive was obvious. She wanted to be seen as the better actor of the two of us. The one Dallas loved more. To do that, she had to keep me humble and searching, never confident enough to really assert dominance over her. Since we’re adults who live in two different states with very different jobs, I don’t know what her motives are now.