Page 46 of Parallel

She laughs. “Why are you asking me? You do it too. I saw you that day.”

I sink back into the booth. “That wasn’t time travel. It was just a dream.”

“Right,” she says, smirking again. “You just chose to go somewhere, then tumbled through darkness to get there, seeing me on the way, but you want to call it a dream.”

I cross my arms, my voice hard. “I’m not choosing to go anywhere.”

“Of course you are,” she says. “You just don’t know you’re choosing it. You’re attaching to a memory that exists. But maybe it’s not one you consciously remember.”

Nick buries his head in his hands. “I’m sorry, but I’m really struggling to believe this. I know Quinn saw you disappear, but it must have been some kind of trick.”

She sighs, appearing exasperated by us both. “Look, I could go back a year and meet you, and you’d suddenly remember me now, but I don’t really have time to prove it to you because it would take too much planning. But”—she turns to me—“in about twenty seconds, I’ll need you to bring my clothes to the bathroom.”

“Wha—” I haven’t even completed the word before she slides under the table. And seconds later, she is gone, leaving only a pile of clothes behind.

Nick looks like he’s seen a ghost. “What the fuck?” He pinches the bridge of his nose. “It’s a trick. It’s just a very, very good trick. We’ve apparently met the next David Blaine.”

I laugh weakly. “How? Did she build a tunnel beneath the restaurant? Her clothes are under the table, and I’m fairly certain we’d have seen a naked kid running across the room. Everyone would have.”

He rubs a hand over his eyes. “This isn’t happening.”

“Keep telling yourself that,” I reply, giving him a small smile as I grab her clothes. “I’m going to find our naked friend.”

I glimpse bare feet under the closed door of a stall and hand her clothes over the top of it.

“Told you,” she sings.

“The whole losing-your-clothes part must make all this jumping pretty difficult.”

“You just have to plan.”

She makes it all sound so easy, and so controllable, when I doubt it can be. “So the uniform you were wearing today…was that even yours?”

“My grandma lives near the school. I went to her house first, but she intentionally keeps the worst clothes to discourage us from jumping here, like housecoats and orange jumpsuits. So, I borrow from the school’s lost and found.”

She emerges from the stall with a wide smile and walks back to the table, where her Coke and cheeseburger now wait. “The one thing about jumping is that you’re starving when you get back, and sleepy if you’ve gone far. You’ll see.”

She digs into her food and Nick watches, looking deeply unsettled. In a different world, I’d lay my head on his shoulder and pull his hand into mine. It feels like the action I’m supposed to take. I twist my engagement ring on my finger again and again instead.

“Okay, how does this whole thing work, theoretically?” he asks. “How are you able to do it?”

She takes a polite sip of her drink and looks up at him. “Every time traveler has this thing we call the spark. Time traveling’s just part of it. Like, once we reach adulthood, the aging process slows for us as well. But, anyway, it’s a genetic mutation, I guess. The only reason I have it is because both of my parents carry it. So both of Quinn’s parents must have carried it too.”

I laugh. I can believe in many things, but not this. “My mother thinks going to Philly for the day is a major trip. She is not a time traveler.”

“You can be a carrier and never realize it. Or sometimes, for whatever reason, people refuse to use it,” she says, glancing at me. “Like you. You obviously can, but you’ve chosen not to.”

Nick rubs the back of his neck. “If Quinn is doing what you are, in theory, how come her body doesn’t disappear like yours just did? She’s not waking up naked anywhere.”

“Because she’s jumping into herself. It’s sort of a baby step. But it sucks because you have no control over your actions that way, so you’re just living something again. And it’s dangerous too, because you’re under the sway of the brain you had at that time. If you’re happy there, you might not come back. You might not even realize you want to come back.”

It’s easy enough to picture. I remember Nick kissing me against that tree outside the high school. If any voice but his had been calling me, I’m not sure I’d have returned.

“These aren’t memories, though,” I argue. “These are things that never happened. Like, I see myself living in London with Nick, or growing up with him in another state.”

She shakes her head. “All those things must have happened. You can’t travel to something that has never or will never exist. All I can think is that maybe someone changed your timeline.”

It’s exactly what Grosbaum said. And it would mean that my dreams about London, about Nick as a child and our high school romance…aren’t dreams at all. They actually occurred.