Page 81 of In What World

“I met you yesterday,” I say. “Friday. Well, we spent Thursday here, too.”

They look at each other.

“What?” I ask, desperate.

“Today is Wednesday, May 6,” Psychic Marlowe says.

Of fucking course it is.

“Maybe Priscilla will be here tomorrow,” she continues.

“She will be,” I say, my frustration growing. “But that’s the wrong Priscilla. Well, it’s the right one, but the wrong time.Fuck!” I yell so loud it startles a few birds out of the nearest tree.

“That’s right!” Psychic Priscilla says. “Release it! It does you no good to harbor frustration!”

Her encouragement only embarrasses me—my Priscilla would hate this level of earnestness—so instead I harness my emotions enough to fill in the backstory they need. It’s weird to tell this without Priscilla at my side. It feels like I’m getting details wrong, missing the emphases she’s always so good at hitting. Still, I manage to get them all the way to my present, ending with how my Priscilla and I left everything.

They say nothing of my Priscilla and me, instead nodding through the parts about my Dallas, who I also left back in 1995.

“We’re not surprised your Dallas is stuck inside his grief,” Psychic Priscilla says. “Our Dallas has done his best to work through his, but I know he still struggles.”

“Even if he stays there, he will never get to really live,” Psychic Marlowe contributes. “But you can’t make someone else understand that. It’s his lesson to learn.”

“It applies to me, too,” I tell them. “I’ve been punishing myself for years, thinking that’s the price I’ve had to pay for failing myself and others. I have to stop thinking of it as a failure in the first place. It’s okay that things didn’t go the way I imagined. Nothing in life ever does. My goals have changed, and the only person I’m really failing is my current self by refusing to acknowledge that. My past needs to stop defining me.”

“Exactly,” Psychic Marlowe says. “Go on.”

“Priscilla was never as hard on me as I was on myself,” I say.

It feels revelatory. Obvious to me now. The perfect hindsight that only comes when the road you’ve walked is long behind you.

“For so many years, I’ve been making her the enemy, because it’s easier to pin it on her than it is to admit it’s always been me,” I continue. “I gave up acting because I didn’t like how uncomfortable I felt not being the favorite. I didn’t know how to be the small fish in the big pond and still keep swimming. I needed constant validation, so I went where I knew I could get it. Back to high school with Dallas. Back to my hometown, where my parents can dote on me and everybody remembers me as someone talented and worthy. I went to what was comfortable. But I realize now that I thrive on excitement. On curiosity. On a challenge.”

I think of my heatless fights with Alice. The hills where we thrive that neither of us ever wanted to climb for each other.

And then I think of Priscilla. The way just seeing her eyes can spark a flame of passion inside me. Her every word makes me want to sharpen my own. Everything she’s ever done has interested me despite all of my best attempts to stop myself from caring.

“For the last year, I’ve been convincing myself that I want to take over Dallas’s job,” I continue. “There is no one else in Garden Meadows, or maybe even the world, who cares enough about theater to do it. But I don’t want it. It was never my dream. And it wasn’t even his either. We’ve both been soldiering along, fulfilling an obligation we created for ourselves. But I want more. I want a real challenge.”

And I know where I can get one.

“I’m so sorry I can’t stay,” I say. “I have to find Priscilla.”

I give them both hugs.

“Everything you’re going to do tomorrow is perfect. Don’tworry about messing it up now that you’ve seen me,” I tell them, smirking a bit when I think about how much the me of tomorrow will first resist what the psychics tell her, knowing now that everything they share has come directlyfromme. “You can’t break the universe, no matter how you try. I’ll end up where I need to be. We all will.”

30

Priscilla

The rain ofSeptember 2, 1995, begins. It soaks through the dress Psychic Priscilla lent me. I can’t see. Can’t hear. Can barely think of anything other than the fact that somewhere nearby, Teddy is getting into his accident. How cruel it is, that life can take things from us without any warning, and nothing can change it.

If Marlowe and Dallas have already gotten into the Memory Machine together to find another September 2, I have no way to follow them. I could be stuck inside different versions of Dallas’s worst day until this day becomes my worst moment, too. My best bet is to use my two feet and run. I can’t save Dallas, that much is clear. But more importantly, I can’t lose Marlowe.

Time could run out. Time could disappear.

Even though I know full well I’m existing inside a time before cell phones had internet—before most people had cell phones at all—I still want to take mine out of my bag, wishing so badly to call her, or to look at her social media page andfigure out what spots in Garden Meadows she loves the most so I can post up there, spending all my energy to convince her to come back to the real world and live in it with me.