Page 76 of In What World

I poke my head out the door to search for any more clues that we’ve made it to our intended destination. There isn’t much to glean, other than it’s a warmer time of year. The air feels different from the May day we’ve visited so many times over, and nothing like the April we just left behind either. It’s heavy in the way my grandma used to say made her knees ache, which she said meant rain was coming. The sky shows no signs of it yet, but weather can change fast in Iowa.

In the front parking lot, there are only two cars. One is dark maroon, boxy, and blunt-looking, and the other is a white minivan.

“It’s definitely giving me 1995 out here,” I say.

Marlowe hangs up the phone and joins me at the door. “We don’t have any change to make the call anyway.” She takes in the mostly empty front parking lot. “It’s usually only quiet like this in the summer. Or on a holiday weekend. I definitely think it could be September 2. Let’s search for one more sign that we’ve made it. Maybe there’s some proof in the school. And now we know there are only two other people here, so we won’t run too high a risk of being seen.”

She offers me a small smile, but I see the sadness percolating beneath it.

“You wanted him to be on the stage,” I say.

“I was so sure we figured it out,” she admits.

“Who knows! We still need to check his office.”

She doesn’t look heartened.

“No matter what, this isn’t a failure,” I tell her. “We’ve got a better handle on the Memory Machine than ever before. We’re traveling backward instead of sideways. We just have to keep refining our intention, and we’ll get to him. I know we will.”

I brush one of the pay phones on our way back inside, feeling oddly nostalgic for a time that was never really mine. I was only three in 1995. But back then—backnow—everything was concrete. The phone was in a fixed place. The internet was on a computer you had to visit to use. You couldn’t be simultaneously streaming yourself to thousands of viewers across the world during a grocery trip or exchanging messages with someone in London while you sat in a coffee shop in Los Angeles. You were only right where you were.

But you also used to be able to lose people so much more easily than you can now. A friend you had in grade school could move away and you’d have no idea what their life looked like in that new place. That happened to me in second grade. Elizabeth Hawkins. Her family moved to Wisconsin, and I never saw her again. By the time we had the technology to reconnect, so much time had passed that it didn’t feel the same between us as I remembered. With Marlowe, all the years she ignored me still felt like conversation. She’s never been absent from my life in a meaningful way. I don’t know what I’d do if we’d lived in a time when I truly couldn’t find her.

We check Dallas’s office. Nothing. The entire drama hallway is dark. Slowly, we make our way around the school, finding no sign of Dallas or whoever owns the two cars in the lot.

Back on the WRHS stage, we sit on the lip of the deck, looking out at the empty seats.

“I wish Wilbur could see this,” I say.

“He’d love it,” Marlowe replies. “So many seats for arts losers.”

“I wonder what they thought of our kiss.”

“I think we changed the course of their lives forever,” she says. “I bet they’re all standing there trying to understand whether or not they shared an elaborate collective hallucination.”

“Imagine being one of the townspeople who missed it, and here comes Estelle Reed, telling you that two women showed up with visible nipples to perform a scene from a play no one knows, then they kissed each other and disappeared into a box,” I say.

“How do you ever go back to your regular life after that?” Marlowe asks.

The question kicks off a domino effect inside me. It’s not only the 1893 residents of Garden Meadows who have to return to their regular lives.

Eventually, Marlowe and I will have to do the same. In our regular lives, I am not a part of Marlowe’s everyday world. She is not a part of mine. Everything between us will end, and there will be no reason for Marlowe Jenkins and me to ever hang out again, especially if Dallas isn’t around to be our conduit.

At first, I start to laugh. I laugh and laugh until the laughter turns to tears, some kind of strange catharsis happening. A whole tidal wave of feelings, new and old, flows out of me at once.

“Hey,” Marlowe says softly. “What is it?” She starts gripping my face, pulling me to see her. “What’s going on?”

“I’m just happy you’re here with me right now,” I say through heaving sniffles.

Her frown melts into a confused kind of grimace. “And that makes you cry?” Her voice is filled with so much kindness, like all she wants to do is ease whatever’s hurting me, and it only makes the tears come faster.

“I’m thinking about our lives outside of here,” I attempt to explain, but the sobs complicate the process. “We’ll never have a reason to see each other when we get home.”

“Priscilla,” she coos. My real name sounds so nice from her mouth. “Every Marlowe in the universe might not be this way, but lucky for you, you got the Marlowe who still has a copy of every play you and I ever worked on. Who has our cast pictures preserved in a photo album in her room. Who keeps the blanket with the show shirts on her bed. Who watched every single episode ofHeartbeatsas soon as it was released.”

I’m crying so hard it takes a second to catch it. “Wait. You told me you didn’t watch my show.”

“I lied,” she says. “What was I going to do? Admit I’ve memorized your every movement?” She wipes the tears from my cheeks. “Like right now, you’re crying the exact same way you did in the final season, when Dr. Martin broke down sobbing in the janitor’s closet because she lost the kindergartener she’d bonded with over loving to put rainbow sprinkles on everything, which I took as symbolism for the way Dr. Martin tries to remain in touch with her childlike whimsy.”