Page 51 of In What World

Cilla swipes two granola bars from a bin on the counter on our way out. “You two are cute together,” she says to Alice and Jeannie.

We pass the part of the hallway where the posters of her, and then of me, have hung in other realities. Here, there is only a wide expanse of painted cinder blocks, all a bland yellowish white.

“If fixed points are real, I kind of thought you and I would be one,” I admit.

I don’t know what makes me say it. Maybe the absence of our presence in the school, and how it makes everything seem worse. I can physically feel the lack of us both, just two students of the countless thousands who graduated from here, off to live the rest of our lives somewhere else.

“I think we still are,” she tells me confidently. “The drama program did exist back then. Maybe without Dallas running it, neither of us wanted to make a career out of it. He has always been our glue. But I bet we saw each other in the hallway. We wondered who the other person was.”

“I’m just glad we know each other in our life,” I say.

16

Priscilla

We take thedrama hallway to the backstage entrance, leaving a trail of honey oat granola crumbs along the way. When we pass what should be Dallas’s office, we can see through the small pane of glass that the athletics department appears to be using the space for storage.

“Who needs the arts when you’ve got sports?” Marlowe asks.

“You asked for the worst version of reality, and we sure got it.”

Back on the stage, Marlowe doesn’t walk to the Memory Machine. Instead, she crosses the deck once again, using the pulley to open the curtains. “We need some light,” she tells me.

“For what?”

She disappears into the tech closet beyond the stage left wings. “Here,” she says when she returns, handing me a crusty paintbrush and an even crustier-looking gallon of paint.

“Are we…remodeling?”

“No. We’revandalizing.”

“I never thought I’d hear those words come out of your mouth.”

“This has been an exercise in impossibility, hasn’t it?” She goes and gets herself another gallon of paint and her own brush.

Both gallons have a thick layer of oil settled on top of the paint. It’s globby and weird, but still wet, which is all that matters. Marlowe swirls her brush through her can, her forearm muscles flexing as she works. She looks so good I forget myself, my leopard coat more suffocation than style, smothering me with even more warmth than the heat pooling low in my belly.

Finally, a bright blue paint reveals itself. Marlowe takes her overloaded brush and carries it to center stage, not bothering to cup the bottom to stop any drips from falling onto the deck.

With long, sloppy strokes, she writesFUND THE ARTS.

Though I agree with the sentiment, the delivery of the message is way too earnest for my taste, so I open the other can and mix it up until it produces a strange shade of green, and I paint the wordLosersat the bottom of Marlowe’s message.

Marlowe caterpillars her brows.

Judging by that look, I am fully expecting her to paint over my message, but instead she adds a single swipe—a comma.

“The sentence needed it, or it would read like we want them to fund the arts losers,” she explains.

“The arts losers deserve compensation,” I say. “I should know, I’m an award-losing artist myself.”

“I became an arts loser the second I willingly paid tens of thousands of dollars to go to acting college,” she replies.

“Cheers to the arts losers!”

Marlowe does not laugh. Instead, she gets that look again. The one that’s not theArsenicstare but is still a yard-long gazeinto some mysterious corner of her mind. “I’m going to tell you why I stole the costumes freshman year.”

This isn’t what I expect her to say, but I’d accept this story on my own deathbed. Hell, I’d accept it postmortem. I’d barter with the forces of the afterlife to give me front-row tickets to this long-standing mystery.