It Gets Even Better

by Isabela Oliveira

  “I like girls,” she blurted out halfway through a makeout session and at the end of the version of herself that she thought might actually stick — a version of herself that actually went to parties on Friday nights and talked to strangers and seemed to manage to convince others that she didn’t care what they thought of her.

  Amanda, whose lap she was currently nestled in and whose lips she had just smeared lip gloss all over and whose sweatered breast she had just dared to brush with one sweaty palm — and who was, relevantly, a girl — laughed at her, but a good laugh. A charmed laugh. “I kind of figured,” Amanda said, and leaned in again.

  Jessica leaned out and said in a rush, “Also I make extradimensional portals at my dad’s drive-in.”

  Amanda laughed again, but this time it was a punchline kind of laugh. “You’re so funny.”

  Jessica liked Amanda, she really did. And she liked this version of herself, a version that didn’t require explanation, so she lied. “Yeah. Funny,” she said, and her stomach started to hurt.

  The ache lasted from that moment until she filed the withdrawal paperwork and moved out less than a week later. She didn’t need a degree to work at the drive-in; Claire had proven that. In spite of some big talk around her junior year of high school, Claire hadn’t ended up going to culinary school to “elevate the cuisine” at home. Instead she firmly but gently relegated their dad to the business side with their mother and took over the menu in earnest.

  So Jessica came home, back to her portals, colder and lonelier than any Scottish heath.

  * * *

  A few months after she came back, one of the TVs in the dining area showed a press conference announcing the arrival into orbit of a Europa probe. In the back of the group of assembled scientists stood one who had her mouth scrunched to one side, dimpled at the corner with concentration. She looked taken out of herself, occupied by thoughts so abstract she’d been entirely separated from her body, because nobody would make a face like that on purpose.

  Jessica wanted that feeling so badly that a new portal nearly popped into existence right then and there.

  She thought of the Old Scotland portal, though — that was another one that Jessica made to chase a feeling, and it worked, but that feeling was all it had. Time didn’t move, even the topography looped back on itself, and it was just that one thing, that one moment, forever.

  Jessica didn’t want a moment. She wanted to know what that scientist — Dr. Leung, according to the caption when it was her turn to give remarks — was thinking about. A portal couldn’t give her that, no matter how badly she needed it. So instead she did some quick searching and sent a quick email with the subject “Magical portal to Europa ocean (no, I’m not messing with you)” and four days later Dr. Leung and a backbreakingly heavy backpack were in booth 6.

  Now Jessica got to watch every time Dr. Leung came out of the former men’s restroom with a ridiculous lift in her knees to accommodate the flippers of her wetsuit and a scuba mouthpiece dangling from the fastener at her shoulder — and, of course, that scrunched-up mouth.

  Whatever lab Dr. Leung had at NASA was probably boring anyway.

  * * *

  No, seriously, where did these portals come from?

  Okay, fine, here’s my best shot at an answer. Everyone in the family has theories. Frank Jr. thinks it was Frank Sr.’s ghostly gift, a guarantee of income and interest that would keep Frank’s Late-Nite Starlite Drive-In open for business. Marian thinks it’s because it was built on a Native American burial ground, despite being told repeatedly and at length that it’s a racist stereotype. Claire went through a hippie woo-woo phase where she wouldn’t shut up about it being a conjunction of ley lines or some crap. Jessica…

  Okay, look. I just wonder if it’s really that weird. We still don’t even know what gravity is, our brains made up magenta because it doesn’t exist as light, and in Australia there’s a cloud that appears almost every day six months out of the year, did you know that? The same cloud. They named it Hector. So there are some portals with shrimp or Scotland or my sister in a poodle skirt. So what?

  We put humans on top of bombs pointed at the ground to shoot them into space, and it’s considered routine. Our car engines burn millennia-old dinosaurs so we can go to McDonald’s. We can nearly instantaneously contact people on the other side of our planet and we’ve decided some of those messages are spam and don’t actually count. And that’s not even getting into, like, the ocean. Ever seen a narwhal?

  A bunch of atoms arranged themselves to create cells and suddenly there was life, then those cells created bigger things, and a few million years later the universe arranged itself according to trillions-to-one odds so that you can exist and, somehow, instead of living in a perpetual state of wonder and gratitude, you get annoyed that we ran out of toilet paper.

  Basically, everything is weird. You’ve just decided that some things aren’t and put this drive-in on the “weird” side of that line. I’m not about to look an extradimensional portal gift horse in the mouth.

  An extradimensional portal horse just ate my onion rings.

  All onion rings at Frank’s are unlimited for just that reason, and they’re half-price on Wednesdays! Please also join us for Margarita Mondays and Transdimensional Shrimp Cocktail Tuesdays.

  * * *

  It’s a spring afternoon now, heat and humidity building up like a boiler, rendering the vinyl booth seats clingy and leaving lazy beads of unevaporated sanitizer on the tabletops.

  “You know,” Dr. Leung says as Jessica swipes a damp cloth across the next table over, “I noticed two things the other day.”

  “Yeah?” Jessica’s been wiping down tables all afternoon and the sanitizer’s wrinkled the pads of her fingers. Her back aches where her spine meets her tailbone, a rusty hinge of a feeling. She absently considers making a portal to a bed.

  “You never say in the FAQ what you think made the portals,” Dr. Leung says.

  “There are enough theories around town,” Jessica evades. She glances up at Dr. Leung, who gazes steadily back at her; no scrunched-up mouth now.

  “And the second thing,” Dr. Leung says. “How’d you know it was Europa?”

  “What?”

  “When you go through the portal, it’s just a dark ocean.” Dr. Leung leans forward a little bit. “So how’d you know it’s the subsurface ocean of Europa?”

  Jessica doesn’t say: Because she’d just learned about liquid water in the solar system and had a song from The Little Mermaid stuck in her head, and, at twelve, those two made sense together.

  This is, somehow, another question that she’s never been asked before. Like her parents, most people think that the portals just are — they don’t question Jessica’s explanations any more than they question gravity. It’s just known; it doesn’t need a cause. Not until she tries to tie it to her life, topple it from abstraction.

  She realizes that, for the first time, someone finds her worthy of curiosity.

  “What do you think, Doctor?” she deflects.

  “I think,” Dr. Leung says, and then stops. She’s — blushing? “I think you should call me May. And I’m really glad you emailed me.”

  Jessica’s heart fully skips a beat. She thought that was supposed to be a metaphor. Something in her says, maybe, here, you could belong. There’s no certainty, no bone-deep knowledge, just possibility. She hates the feeling. Or maybe she loves it. She can’t tell. She can’t talk. She just stands there.

  May blinks repeatedly, blush fading. Jessica hadn’t realized how May had been smiling until now, as her lips relax into disappointment.

  So Jessica doesn’t create a portal out of panic: she talks. Well. Babbles. “Do you want to discuss it over dinner? I know a — a great spot for a picnic. If you want to get out of here. And talk.”

  May exhales, smiling, and Jessica smiles back. It turns into a giddy giggle as she realizes that she can tell May she makes the portals, if she wants. She can choose to, just like she
chose to ask her out, just like she chose to suggest a picnic, just like she’s been choosing not to tell for so long even as she convinced herself it wasn’t a choice at all.

  “A picnic sounds great,” May says.

  Jessica flings chicken fingers and fries into to-go containers and takes May outside to the back, where there’s a slim gap between the big green electrical box and the back wall of the kitchen. She imagines a meadow, luminescent green grass maybe on a hillside, distant lavender or mums spotting the horizon with contrast; something really cliché and “the hills are alive.”

  What she gets instead, when she and May shimmy sideways through the gap, is a bald stand of rock overlooking a glacial lake, pine-perfumed air, and a bright blaze of snow tucked in a wrinkle of the mountains despite the mild air. It’s nothing like she expected, and for once the thought thrills her.

  “Did —” May stutters, eyes wide and fixed on Jessica. “Did you just —”

  “Yeah,” Jessica says, and smiles out over the unexpected landscape. “What do you want to know?”

  Kristen Koopman is a graduate student, writer, and nerd. Her interests include blatant escapism, overanalyzing anything and everything, playing with her dog, and consuming enough garlic to kill vampires at twenty paces. Other stories of hers can be found at Kaleidotrope, Toasted Cake, and We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction 2020. She is definitely not two smaller Kristen Koopmans in a trenchcoat.

  Content notes can be found at the end of the book.

  The Perseverance of Angela’s Past Life

  by Zen Cho

  Angela was stalking herself.

  She was packing for Japan and she had better things to worry about than doppelgangers, so she was trying to pretend her self wasn’t there.

  She thought she would probably need one pair of formal shoes, but she couldn’t decide whether she should pack the new fancy shoes — which were beautiful and appropriate, but untried — or the old stalwart black peeptoes. They were a little manky, but they had seen her through May Balls and medsoc dinners alike.

  “Bring both,” said her old self.

  Her old self could not enter the room without Angela’s permission. She hovered at the window, peering in.

  Angela was not going to invite her in. It was a cold night, but the dead don’t feel the cold.

  “I’m travelling light,” said Angela. She set the new shoes down and picked up the old pair. What did it matter if they were scuffed? They had never let her down before. “I’m not bringing you also. All the more I shouldn’t be bringing extra shoes.”

  “What lah, not bringing me,” said her old self. “I’m part of you what.”

  The thaumaturge had confirmed this.

  The problem was that Angela’s best friend was dating a dragon. Initially Angela hadn’t noticed any side-effects. Just the usual sort of thing. Outrage that her best friend was no longer as available as she used to be, that Angela was no longer the first person she called when she wanted to watch a musical or go to the park.

  But these were ordinary incidents of the readjustment of a best friendship. Angela had got over it in time.

  She was having difficulty getting over being split into two people, though.

  “Considering you’re in constant contact with a dragon, it’s no surprise that your blood magic levels are so high,” the thaumaturge had said. “But they’re not at a level where I would usually be concerned about the impact on your health. You’d be surprised at the human body’s tolerance for atmospheric magic. You hear of people living on the border of Fairyland all their lives and never coming to any harm of it. Their children are all engineers and accountants.”

  Angela cast a sideways glance at the girl who had followed her to the clinic.

  “What about her, then?” she said.

  “Eh, I have a name, OK,” said the girl. “Pik Mun.”

  “That’s my name,” said Angela to the thaumaturge. “That’s my self, actually. She’s me. That’s not normal, is it?”

  “Yes, well,” said the thaumaturge. “As I said, your blood magic levels are in the normal range, but I’m afraid you seem abnormally susceptible to thaumaturgical influence. Have you noticed any other symptoms of disproportionate magic uptake?”

  “Besides suddenly having an evil twin, you mean?”

  “I’m not evil,” said Pik Mun belligerently. “I’m just you.”

  The thaumaturge politely ignored their bickering.

  “Waking up several feet above your bed, for example,” she said. “Sleep flying is a very common symptom. Or transmutations of ordinary household objects into magical creatures, or vice versa.”

  “Vice versa?”

  “I had a patient with a similar complaint, whose main symptom was the ability to see pixies in her garden,” said the thaumaturge. “Unfortunately her other symptom was the ability to turn pixies into spoons. She found it very distressing. She had to sell up and move when the pixies declared war. You could hardly blame them, of course.”

  “No,” said Angela. “This is the only symptom I’ve noticed. How come my best friend isn’t showing any signs of magic absorption? She’s the one who’s going out with the magical dragon.”

  “From what you’ve told me, it sounds like she’s immune to magic,” said the thaumaturge. “That’s probably why you were drawn to each other. Magic often likes to work that way.”

  She pulled a sympathetic face. She was really a very pretty woman, with pale brown skin, short hair in lots of springy curls and a charming sprinkle of freckles on her nose.

  She’d offered no remedies, however, save for suggesting that Angela remove herself from the source of exposure.

  Angela wasn’t going to stop hanging out with her best friend just because doing so literally split her in two. But a language camp in Japan had sounded like the ideal opportunity to reduce her blood magic levels and try to get some thinking space, away from her pestersome other self.

  She had to leave for Heathrow early the next morning. Angela finished packing, ignoring the heckling from the window, and got to bed by eleven. But it took her a long time to fall asleep.

  She shouldn’t have looked up her thaumaturge on Facebook. She’d done it because she was wondering about her name. Misola: such a pretty name. If she hadn’t looked her up she wouldn’t have found out that Misola was dating a woman.

  Particularly susceptible, indeed.

  “You’re so scared for what?” said the voice at the window.

  “Can you please go away or not?” said Angela. She rolled over and buried her face under a pillow.

  * * *

  In Japan they put her in a sleek grey building on top of a hill. Below it lay the city, nestled in the green cup of a valley which poured out a brilliant blue sea.

  It was summer and the air was as close and sticky as it would have been back home in Malaysia. The nearest convenience store was 45 minutes’ walk away, along a path winding past houses and rows of vending machines down the hill.

  The hostel was sonorously empty. Angela and the other English teachers were the only ones staying there. In the mornings they taught English lessons; in the afternoons they learnt Japanese. The day finished at four and after that Angela was free.

  There was something magical about that hill, but it was a magic that had nothing to do with dragons or pixies or doppelgangers. It breathed from the trees and the silence and the early-morning mist.

  Up here, Angela thought, she would escape herself.

  “Sometimes past selves come back to seek closure,” the thaumaturge had explained. “They’re not unlike real ghosts. They hang around because of unfinished business. Was there any trauma — any unanswered questions — associated with that time of your life?”

  Angela hadn’t been sure what to say.

  Like everyone else, she had improved beyond recognition after secondary school. She’d benefited from the usual remedies for unattractiveness: self-confidence, freedom from school uniforms, and a decent hai
rcut. She’d discovered that she was sociable, competent, and interested in other people. Her twenties had been a dream of pleasantness, and that was even though she’d spent most of it at clinical school.

  But her adolescence hadn’t been unhappy either. It had just been normal. Being 25 was a lot better than being 15, but wasn’t that true for everyone?

  The name change had been a purely pragmatic decision. She’d started going by Angela in her first year at uni, to make it easier on British tutors who stumbled over her real name. It had stuck. There was no denying “Angela” was more euphonious than “Pik Mun”.

  She wasn’t running away from anything in her past. She’d lived through her past, hadn’t she? She’d been Pik Mun already. What was wrong with being Angela now?

  * * *

  A sign outside the hostel asked you politely to close the gate after entering or leaving “so the wild boars will not enter”.

  If you walked around with food at night the wild boars came out. Despite their wildness they were not aggressive — one of the other teachers had managed to take a picture of one before it fled.

  Angela took to striding around the park with fragrant boxes of takeaway in plastic bags banging against her knee. She did it out of competitiveness as much as anything else. She was the only one of the teachers not to have seen a wild boar.

  She was eating chicken karaage in the park when it happened. She speared a piece of fried chicken with a chopstick and looked up. The boar was right in front of her.

  It was smaller than she’d expected, about the size of a collie, with longish dark fur and amber eyes.

  Moving slowly, Angela fumbled around in her bag until she felt her camera. She took a photo of the boar one-handed, the chicken wobbling on her chopstick.

  She’d forgotten to turn off the flash. It went off like a bolt of lightning. Angela started and dropped her chicken. The boar scooped it up neatly.

  “Wah, flash some more,” it said in a muffled voice. It swallowed. “You not scared meh? The zoo always say don’t use flash when you take photo.”