by Rowan Maness
He slid the phone out of my hand—I tensed, almost slapped him. Forced myself to relax, let him have it.
The screen still read CALL WITH MAX ENDED 10:43:11 PM.
“Max,” Kit said, matter-of-fact. He started typing, holding the phone close, so I couldn’t see.
“Boyfriend?” he asked.
“No,” I said, uncomfortable, unsure what to do.
“Okay,” Kit said, handing the phone back.
I snatched it away from him.
“I have to go.”
“Oh,” I said, betraying my disappointment.
Kit stood, towering over me, something kind of otherworldly about him, like he should be levitating. A lazy grace. Beneath his gaze, I felt like a peasant being scrutinized by a royal.
“Joss,” he said, a statement.
“Kittredge?”
He nodded and walked away.
My hands were clammy. I felt faint. I felt like reciting the Lord’s Prayer for some reason. I felt sick and ecstatic.
I was scrolling through my contacts list, searching desperately for whatever Kit had typed, when Mary-Kate finally walked up.
“Well, this is terrible,” she said, looking around.
“It’s brilliant. I love it. Everything is perfect.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“So much,” I said.
No new entries under K. I kept looking.
“Can we leave?”
“Rhiannon’s talking to a Justin,” I mumbled.
There he is. Under I.
INSTAGRAM BEANBAG (KIT)
His phone number. Like he’d etched it into a tree.
CHAPTER 4
Rosie: poly roommate. Ex-boyf asks her to go to Chile with him as just friends (use Dylan’s pics)
Thora: ex-fiancé Mormon cop slightly threatening, family cut her off because he made something up
Anna: gets sick in Ibiza . . . shady photographer
“Who’s this?” Shane’s voice.
Joss: went from the party to Mill Avenue, because Rhiannon didn’t want to go home yet. Remembered Shane said something about Yellow Submarine playing at midnight. He was there, with Leah Leary. Watched movie, felt nostalgic, wondered if I’d feel nostalgic for this moment someday. Now the movie’s over, and Rhiannon and the Justin, whose name isn’t really Justin—what was it? Travis?—are making out in her car. Mary-Kate’s talking to Leah Leary, and Shane just walked up. He probably has that new look on his face, all earnestness and disappointment.
“Uh,” I fumbled, saving the draft with my notes, looking up at Shane. He was holding his phone out, showing the picture I’d taken of Kit at the party.
“This guy Kit. He’s in Guin’s band.”
Joss: got Kit Behr’s phone number
Shane was watching the horizon, staring at the purple outline of the mountains in the early-morning dark, at the eastern place where, in a few hours, the sun would rise.
I hopped up to sit on the hood of Leah Leary’s car. It was still warm with the day’s heat, searing though my jeans at the backs of my thighs. A small silver cross dangled from the rearview mirror.
Along Mill Avenue, the college bars were just beginning to close, but the parking lot behind the theater was deserted except for Rhiannon and Leah’s cars, separated by a clutch of gnarled cacti living on a traffic island beneath a fluorescent streetlamp.
“I did like it, by the way,” I said.
“What?” Shane asked, turning around to check on Mary-Kate and Leah Leary. “The party?”
“No, the movie.”
Shane kept watching—Mary-Kate was looking at something on Leah’s phone.
“Shane,” I said loudly. “Focus.”
“Sorry,” he said, facing me again. “Yeah. It’s great, right? Just like I remember.”
“Except now you don’t have to hide behind a pillow and have your mom fast-forward past the Blue Meanie parts.”
More silence, new silence, where there never used to be any.
“Bet you can’t guess my favorite part,” I said.
“Probably not.”
A police helicopter crossed the sky overhead, rumbling out of the desert and back into it, searchlight trailing aimlessly.
“Uh-oh,” I whispered. “They’re coming for us.”
“It was only a matter of time,” Shane whispered back.
I knew he was remembering our game—we used to play that the helicopters were after us, two little kids pretending to be spies or assassins or newly sentient robots leading a rebellion.
BZZZT, went my phone, rattling against the car.
George: What’s up, girlie?
Oh yeah, George. Emma’s husband is so close to finding out about you. That won’t be good. Things will have to end.
It’s 2:11 a.m., so it’s just past 5 in Savannah. Emma’s asleep.
I slid off the car, scrolling through my contacts again, making sure Kit’s number was still there.
“Was that James?” Shane asked.
Hearing Shane say the name James so casually knocked the axis off-balance. I was worried that Shane’s knowledge of James’s existence might make bad things happen, move things that shouldn’t be moved.
BZZZT went the phone.
I already knew what it would say.
A crack, worlds colliding.
New message from BLOCKED NUMBER
Be anyone else, please.
But it wasn’t.
XXX: LIAR.
Another text, immediately—
XXX: I SEE YOU.
My hand stung. It was in pain, the phone a vibrating shock. Somewhere, someone was typing “LIAR,” typing “I SEE YOU.” That person knew my name, my phone number, and exactly what to say to make me freeze and wrench inward.
From the corner of the parking lot came an animal motion. A trembling of coarse brown fur. I looked—it was a flash, that’s all. The lamplight flickering.
Shane was looking at me, waiting for something. James, said my brain. Shane asked if that was James.
“No,” I went on, deleting the texts, dropping the phone into my bag. “That was nobody.”
“Aren’t they all nobodies?” Shane said.
If he’d been smiling when he said it, or if I hadn’t been picturing faceless monsters lurking in parking lots and whole worlds fracturing like glass shards, I probably would have let the comment slide. But I could tell he said it just to piss me off.
“Fuck off, Shane. You know they aren’t,” I said, glaring at him, lining my face up with his.
“Look—” he started, glancing back again at Leah and Mary-Kate. “Don’t freak out. I just want to say something without you freaking out.”
“You don’t get to tell me not to freak out,” I snapped.
I’d raised my voice; Shane lowered his.
“I should get some credit for waiting so long to confront you about it, considering everything that happened.”
“Credit?” I asked, outraged more by his martyr’s tone than by what he was going to say. I knew he’d been holding it back for a while. He was bad at hiding his judgment. What made it even worse was that I knew he wasn’t wrong.
“I know you didn’t stop after Peter. Like you told your mom and dad you did. And I haven’t said anything. I’ve wanted to, but I haven’t. But now—”
I crossed my arms, dared him to go on.
“I don’t know.” He sighed. “But you just got a text and looked terrified. I’ve seen that before.”
I grabbed his arm and pulled him into the dark at the edge of the parking lot.
“Since when are you the arbiter of health and good decisions? You’ve been hanging out with Leah Leary too much. Now you’re all holier-than-thou, judging evil Joss for stringing along unsuspecting innocents.”
There was that look, the disappointed look, clouded over with fresh anger.
“That isn’t how I see myself, and that’s not how I see you,” he said. “But you have a weird blind spot when it comes to the
se people’s actual, real-life feelings. You don’t get it. If you keep doing this, someone is going to find you again. Something like Peter is going to happen again.”
“I’m sick of your condescending shit,” I shout-whispered, loud enough to catch Mary-Kate’s attention.
Shane, you’re so stupid. You cracked it open. You let the texts come in. You invited a jinx.
I wanted to say something mean, but now Mary-Kate and Leah Leary were watching us.
“Forget this,” I said instead. “I don’t have to explain anything to you.”
“I’m sorry me worrying about you makes you so angry.” Shane sighed, watching the mountains again, like he was waiting for something.
I walked away from him, rubbing the base of my neck with both hands, turning my face up to the sky. From somewhere on the avenue, a drunken voice shouted, “Woo! Sun Devils rock, baby!”
“Ugh,” I groaned, to the stars and the streak-white Milky Way.
“What’s up?” asked Rhiannon, appearing before me, glancing toward Shane.
“Nothing,” I said as we walked over to Mary-Kate, Leah, and Shane. “Where’s the Justin? I want to leave.”
“Trevor,” Rhiannon said, emphasizing, “is in the car. I have to give him a ride to his grandma’s house.”
“His grandma—”
“I’ll drive your car,” Mary-Kate interrupted, looking disapprovingly at Rhiannon, who did seem to be weaving a bit, pupils as big as quarters. “But only if I can sleep over.”
“Cool,” Rhiannon said. “Joss, you in?”
Shane and Leah had separated from the group and were whispering together.
“Can you drop me off?” I asked, keeping my eyes on them, wondering what they were talking about. “I told my mom I’d come home.”
“Really?” Mary-Kate asked.
“But you live so far,” Rhiannon whined.
Across the parking lot, Trevor opened the car door and tumbled out of it.
“Fuck!” he yelled as he arranged himself on the asphalt, leaning against the rear tire. He took a drag on his vape and brushed the hair out of his eyes, noticing all five of us staring at him. He waved.
“Gotta go, go, go,” Rhiannon said. “Shane, take Joss home.”
“It’s not my car—” Shane protested, but it was too late.
And that’s how I ended up driving the fifteen minutes north to my house with my two most favorite people in the whole world.
Leah insisted I sit up front with her, and I watched the silver cross dangling all the way to my house as she chattered on about how much she loved the movie, and was that Ryan Gonzales’s brother Trevor who Rhiannon was with, and, most distressingly, how nice and cool Mary-Kate was.
“I feel like we’d never really talked before,” she was saying. “And I’ve known her since kindergarten.”
“She can be kind of quiet,” I said, taking out my phone, sending Mary-Kate a text.
Me: I miss you, Mary-K. Let’s do something tomorrow, xoxo
Leah drove and talked, Shane stayed silent, and I watched the silver cross. It caught the traffic lights in a way that made me remember driving home from parties with my parents when I was little, how I used to sit in the back and squint my eyes, turning my head from side to side to make the lights dance, red and green. One good thing about living your whole life in the same place is that you don’t have to go far to visit your memories. They just live around you, everywhere.
When we got to my house, Shane came out from the backseat to sit up front with Leah. For a moment we were outside the car, alone.
“I think I got it—your favorite part,” Shane said.
I smiled.
“The Beatles house, with all the doors leading to different worlds?”
“Yep.”
“I knew it,” Shane said, happy he’d guessed correctly. “All those mysterious possibilities.”
The motion-sensor lights in the driveway flicked on, casting a mask of brightness and shadow across Shane’s face. He looked older, tired.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know I suck.”
“You don’t suck,” Shane replied, automatic.
“What do you think it’ll feel like to be eighty?” I asked.
He thought for a moment. “Great?”
“I think it’ll be awful. Like all that time weighs your body down, fills it up, and you get heavier and heavier with it until you finally just die.”
“And on that note,” he said, opening the car door. When I leaned down to say good-bye, he was kissing Leah’s cheek.
So they touch.
“Thanks for the ride, Leah Leary,” I said.
I stood there for a while after they left, unable to go inside and face the three closed doors of my dead dad and missing-in-action brother and sad mom or the bright all-knowing stare of the cat who hates me. I wanted to walk into another dimension and inhabit the world of Rosie, Anna, Emma, or Thora for the rest of the night.
I must have been standing there a long time, because the driveway lights went off and I was left in darkness.
I hurried to the gate and let myself in, ignoring the scurrying footsteps behind me, the animal in the atmosphere, his cold eyes narrowing.
• • •
I told you we could do this.
James and I are in the Dream Palace, in Rosie’s room. It can be her dorm, the school library, the hillside where she smokes with her friends, but right now it’s her art studio. A version of my dad’s, a version of something I saw in a movie. Elements of my bedroom. Bueller the lizard is here, opalescent scales shining in the new dimension. When I was creating Rosie, I looked at pictures of freshman studios on the college website. I took the name Rose Dahlgren from the school blog, a post with photos from the incoming student show.
The Dream Palace is a dilapidated motel in the middle of an endless luminous desert—the astral plane. Each room in the motel belongs to a different girl. Some are closed forever, and some are waiting to be filled. In the cement courtyard, my fake personalities lounge around the empty pool like Barbie dolls. When I need one, she animates.
It started with Amelia. I was with my dad, dragged along on some obscure errand that I’ve forgotten, driving through the industrial badlands surrounding the Phoenix airport, when I saw a sign: THE DREAM PALACE. A GENTLEMAN’S CLUB. The “GENTLEMAN” underlined in pink neon. We were going to get the truck’s windows tinted, maybe? And I wrote Amelia’s backstory, bored in the waiting area.
She was the first one I could move into. I could bring her out, put her away, be her, leave myself whenever I wanted.
Somewhere in the Dream Palace, Amelia’s door is now locked. She is still there, glowing. But I can’t let her out. She is raging. I don’t control her anymore. She is angry about lost Peter.
Back to James.
I was in my bed with my body curled around my phone, watching his texts appear. He was wishing we were together, cursing a world that set us a continent apart.
Come here, I said. Come. At least try.
I went there first. I called to him. Thought of his face, skin, his warm breath. I pictured his teeth, each of them, and the beds of his fingernails. Then he walked in. Uncomfortable at first, then easing into it. The air thick so things could morph around. Power shooting through unpredictable points like jets in a hot tub. Our bodies pulsing moodily.
Are we dreaming? James asked.
No. It’s better than that.
I touched his arm, brought him close, and kissed him. Looking like Joss, feeling like Rosie. His warmth poured out, his happiness.
CHAPTER 5
“Before you leave, please make sure to write the names of everyone in your group on every page, and put your worksheets in the turn-in folder. And remember, on Thursday we move on to plant structure and photosynthesis.”
Mr. Lauren sat down at his desk as the early-dismissal bell rang and everyone rushed out the door, eager to head over to the gym at the boys’ school for a coeducational pep rally, that ho
rror of horrors. I waited until the last person was gone before handing in my assignment, walking slowly past the teacher’s desk at the front of the classroom, trying to sneak a peek at the notebook he was hunched over.
“Not in a hurry to get to the pep rally?” Mr. Lauren asked, without looking up. The way he said it implied air quotes around the words “pep” and “rally.”
He was drawing something, shielding it with his arm.
“I totally am,” I said. “I hope they hand out those little pro-life fetus-feet pins again.”
He laughed. “Still going on about that?”
“It made an impression. I’m scarred for life.”
“Pity.”
I’ve given a few fake personalities flings-with-teacher stories. It’s classic flirt bait. It says all the right things, like “I’m precocious, but not a prude,” and “I’m a little bit of a bad girl, but only if you’re in a position of authority.”
“Do you have my iPod?” I asked. “I think I left it here on Friday.”
“Oh yes, it’s here somewhere,” he said, dropping his pencil, brushing some papers over the open notebook.
“Did you see that Conor Oberst’s coming to the Marquee this weekend?” I asked.
“Really?” Mr. Lauren said, searching around on his messy desk.
“Yeah. I think I’m going to go,” I said.
Mr. Lauren moved his chair back and disappeared beneath the desk, banging around.
Carefully, I leaned over and pushed away the papers covering the notebook.
He’d drawn a woman—it was a nice sketch—and she was pretty.
“Found it!” he said, coming up. He unplugged the aux cable connecting my iPod to the classroom sound system. Our fingers touched as he handed it to me, and he let go immediately, straightening his glasses.
“Who’s she?” I asked, pointing at the drawing.
He blushed.
“Mr. Lauren,” I teased. “Do you have a girlfriend? Finally?”
I couldn’t wait to tell Rhiannon and Mary-Kate. When we all had him for freshman biology, he’d worn a wedding band. One day Rhiannon dared me to ask about his wife. He said he wasn’t married, and the next day the ring was gone.
He closed the notebook and stood up. I watched him shut down his computer and start to pack his bag. He tried to hide his grin.
