by Robin Palmer
“DV what? What happened to Discosize?
“What’s Discosize?”
Even without the lines that usually appeared on her forehead and in between her eyebrows when she was confused, something told me that it was better to not get into it and instead just act like I knew what she was talking about so she could leave and I could call Jonah and he could shed some light on why my life was not my life at the moment.
“Right. I forgot,” I replied. “The Holler Your Way—”
“Holla,” she corrected.
“Huh?”
“Not ‘holler’—holla.” She waved her arms above her head. “Holla!” she said before walking over and feeling my forehead. “Sweetie, do you feel okay?”
I put my hand up to feel it as well. I hoped I was burning up. That way I could chalk this all up to delirium. Unfortunately it was ice-cold. I reached over and pulled at her braids.
“What are you doing?!” she cried, pushing my hands away. “Do you know how long it took to do these?! Your father and I have the photo shoot with Nicki Minaj tomorrow for the new DVD!”
Who?
“I don’t know what’s going on here, but I don’t have time for this,” she huffed as she turned to leave. “I have to get ready for the conference call with Drake’s people to see if we can license ‘HYFR’ for the abs-and-butt sequence. Now get dressed.”
What was it with all these abbreviations? It was one thing for Ethan to try to mess with me, and that Rain lady, whoever she was—she seemed kooky enough to believe she was living in an alternate universe—but my mother was the most rational person I knew. The kind of person who when you made a joke, looked at you blankly until you said “It’s a joke, Mom” before she smiled and said “Oh. I see. Very funny, then.” If she was going along with this, something seriously weird was happening.
Could I be dreaming? I decided to pinch myself, like people always did in movies, to see if I was. “OWWW!” I yelped. Okay, then. Definitely not a dream. After I threw on the jeans and pink (pink? I hated pink) T-shirt from the tufted bench in front of my bed, I grabbed the silver thing. Jonah’s number may not have been in the contacts, but it didn’t matter because I obviously had it memorized. I punched the numbers in and waited. Nothing. “Why aren’t you ringing?!” I yelled at it, panicked, half expecting it to talk back to me. I saw a button that said Call and pushed it, which did the trick. “Come on, Jonah—pick up the phone!” I cried as it rang.
“Santa Palm Car Wash,” a voice barked over the hissing of what sounded like jets of water.
“Is Jonah there?” I asked as a car horn tooted daintily outside my window.
A symphony of vacuums started up. “Who?” he yelled over the noise.
I walked over to the window and saw a little car that reminded me of the ones you saw clowns come out of at the circus. It was the same ugly shade of blue as the BMW convertible Andrea Manson had gotten for her sweet sixteen.
“I think I have the wrong number,” I said before pushing a button that said End.
More like the wrong life.
As the car door opened and the driver stepped out, my mouth fell open. “No way. It can’t be,” I said, dazed as I watched her move up the walkway to our front door.
But when the door opened and I heard her say “Hi-i, Brenner family!” in the same nasally voice that Jonah and I had tried on numerous occasions to imitate but failed miserably because it really was one of a kind, I realized not only could it be, but it was.
“Hey, Andrea,” I heard my dad say.
Andrea Manson was in my house. Those were six words I never thought would be strung together in a sentence. It wasn’t just that Andrea and I just weren’t friends. We were archenemies. The only list of hers I’d be number one on would be “People I Can’t Stand.” I pinched myself again, just to make sure that the pinch before hadn’t been part of the dream.
Ow. Yeah, definitely not a dream.
“Loved that pic you tweeted yesterday of me and Kanye,” my dad went on. “It’s totally waack.”
Was that even English?
“Omigod, right?” Andrea agreed. “I couldn’t believe how nice he was! We’re totally friends on Facebook now.”
Who was this Kanye person? Did he go to Castle Heights?
“Right on, yo,” my dad replied.
What happened to dynamite? As corny as it was, I’d do anything to hear him say that right now.
“Well, I better go see how Zoe’s doing on the wardrobe front,” Andrea said.
“I hope for your sake she’s narrowed it down to five different outfit choices.” My dad laughed.
“Oh, even if she hasn’t, that’s okay,” Andrea replied as I heard her start to come up the stairs. “I mean, what are best friends for if not to cosign your fabulous fashion sense.”
Best friends?!
“Hola, mi BFF!” she trilled as she waltzed into my room.
Hola, I got, but the B thing was a mystery. I was so shocked, I looked over my shoulder to see if she was talking to someone else. Before peering at her hand to see if she had some sort of weapon in there.
She thrust a cup that said Starbucks toward me. “Your mochaccino awaits you, your majesty.”
I wasn’t even going to ask what that was. Obviously there was some . . . glitch that had happened overnight where when I woke up, I was me, but not really. The sooner I could get out of here and in touch with Jonah, the faster we could figure out what was going on. I don’t know why I thought he’d be able to figure this out. It wasn’t like he was all that much smarter than me, but as my best friend, we had an unspoken agreement that we were in everything together.
I took the cup from her and sniffed it. Did poison have a smell? The minute it hit my mouth I spit it out. Right on my T-shirt. So much for the no-stain thing.
“What’s the matter?” she cried.
“This is—”
“—exactly the way you like it,” she finished. “Not only did I tell them to use exactly one third of a Splenda and just a splash of soy milk, but I then watched as they did it.
“Zoe, what is up with you?” she asked.
From the look on her face, I knew that I needed to get it together. “And it’s delicious!” I quickly said. “It’s so deliciously perfect that it just surprised me with its . . . delicious perfection!” Actually, it tasted the way I thought motor oil probably did. “We should get going, don’t you think?”
She looked up from her own little computer thing, which had a pink case with a picture of Hello Kitty on the back. “Well, yeah. As soon as you change.”
I grabbed a tissue, dipped it into a glass of water on my nightstand, and started dabbing at the stain. “No need for that.” Once I was done I flashed a smile. “Good as new.”
Andrea looked horrified. “You can’t wear that!”
“We have a twenty-minute drive to school,” I said. “It’ll be dry by then.”
“No, I mean, you wore that yesterday. Not to school, but when we were FaceTiming last night.”
“Right. I forgot about the FaceTiming thing,” I replied. What did that mean? You timed how long you could go without blinking or something? It was obvious from the look on Andrea’s face that the idea of me wearing something for longer than twelve hours in a row was not something I did on a regular basis. I walked over to my closet. The one that, once I opened the door, would have Andrea even more horrified than the idea of me wearing the same T-shirt from last night. Organization wasn’t one of my strong suits. In fact, it wasn’t one of my suits, period. Jonah liked to say that was because I was a left, versus a right, brain, which had something to do with the fact that I was creative rather than into math.
But when I opened the door, I was the one who was horrified. Not only was everything perfectly organized, in neat rows that went from light to dark, but it seemed that this version of
me was a big fan of pink.
“What the—?!” Talk about organized. There wasn’t an ounce of left brain to be found in these rows and shelves. I bet if I had gotten a ruler and measured, there’d be the same amount of space between each hanger on the rod.
Andrea joined me and smiled. “You have the best closet. Susie Shapiro was so smart to feature it on her Closets We Love Tumblr.”
I was so freaked-out, I didn’t even have it in me to ask what a tumbler was. I started to rip through the pale pink skirts, the carnation-colored cardigans, and the fuchsia sundresses. It was like a Pepto-Bismol explosion in my closet. “Where’s my black New Order T-shirt with the white letters?!” I cried. “And my lime-green Lycra skirt?!”
Beside me, Andrea tried to catch the various garments as they flew off the rack. “Lycra what?” she asked. “And what new order? Omigod—did you do some online shopping without me? BFFs never let BFFs shop alone!”
“All this pink. It’s like the dressing room of a ballet recital in here!”
“What are you talking about? You love pink. Pink is your thing.”
Ew. I hated girls for whom pink was their thing. As far as I was concerned, they belonged on a desert island with boys like Brad Bundy, who wore sherbet-colored Izods with upturned collars.
Andrea grabbed my arm. “Okay, Zoe? You’re scaring me. Do you think it was the fact that you got a large instead of medium at Red Mango at the Dell yesterday? Who knows what that extra dose of fake sugar did to your brain—”
“Huh? I’m allergic to mangoes,” I replied.
She looked at the clock on the Hello Kitty thing. “We’re totally going to be late for the meeting with the Go Green Biracial Gay and Lesbians group.”
“The who?”
“Those dorks who asked to meet with you to talk about fining anyone who doesn’t recycle.”
“Oh. You mean the Recyclers.”
“No. The Go Green Biracial Gay and Lesbians.”
“Why would they want to talk to me?”
“Because you’re class president, silly!”
“I’m what?!” I yelled.
Andrea looked scared. “Maybe you’re having some sort of weird reaction to that new ADD medicine.”
“Right. The Go Yellow Bicycle—”
“Go Green Biracial,” Andrea corrected.
“—club. Them. I have to talk to them,” I said, dazed.
Andrea looked at me funny. “I’m just going to chalk this up to lack of caffeine on your part,” she said. She looked at the Hello Kitty thing. “If you hurry up and change, we’ll be able to stop and get you a Red Bull.”
I plucked out the least offensive thing I could find from my closet: a pale pink minidress. I had hoped to pair it with my Doc Martens boots, but they were nowhere to be found. Apparently this version of me preferred heels. High heels, kitten heels, wedge heels—if it had a heel, I owned it. The problem was, I couldn’t walk in them to save my life. After I barricaded myself in the bathroom, I threw the dress on. “Okay, calm down,” I said to my reflection in a very uncalm whisper as I twisted my now-long hair into a very messy French twist, “you can do this. You’re going to find Jonah as soon as you get to school, and he’ll help you figure out what happened and how to get back to your regularly scheduled life.”
And then it hit me: not only was I popular but I was class president.
Maybe I shouldn’t be in such a hurry to get back to my regular life. Maybe I could—and should—use the power that went along with being popular and class president to make some of the changes I wanted to make before going back to where I belonged. I owed it to my fellow students. All I had to do in the meantime was somehow play it off that it wasn’t the slightest bit strange that I owned only pink clothes and that my archenemy was now my best friend.
“Zoe?”
I opened the door and walked out. “All set.” For an Easter egg hunt, that was.
Andrea smiled. “You look great. How much do you want to bet Anthropologie sells out of that dress by the end of the day because of you?”
“I’m sure you’re right,” I agreed. “All because I’m me.”
Whoever that was.
“WOW. WHO WOULD’VE THOUGHT THAT someone would come up with the idea to make an energy drink that was like having seven cups of coffee but with a delicious cherry taste?” I asked as we drove up Mulholland after stopping at 7-Eleven so we could get one of those Red Bull things. At first I didn’t know what the big deal was—it tasted like cherry soda to me—but soon enough, as I started drumming my fingers on the seat to keep the beat with my escalating heart rate, I got it. I guess some people would find the feeling uncomfortable, but I kind of liked it.
“I know. Can you believe that they didn’t have them back in the eighties when our parents were in school? I mean, how did they study back in the old days?” She shook her head. “I wonder if they knew it would be like this in 2016.”
I choked on my drink—2016?! I put my hand over my heart to keep it from leaping out of my chest. How was it 2016?! That was impossible. It was one thing to wake up a completely different person, but a completely different person in a different century?!
I needed to stay calm. I couldn’t let Andrea know that I wasn’t really me. I couldn’t confide in my worst-enemy-slash-best-friend that, actually, it was 1986, at least in my world. If I did that, she’d probably take me straight to the nurse, who would give me an aspirin before she called my mom and suggested she take me to some psych hospital. I ducked down and put my head between my legs and started breathing deeply, like I saw people do on TV.
“What are you doing?” Andrea asked.
I popped up and put on the most nonchalant look I could muster. “I was just looking for . . .” I reached down and snatched the first thing my hand landed on and held it up. “This.”
“My dirty sock?” Andrea asked, confused.
I looked at it. “Yes. I didn’t know if you had seen it here, and I didn’t want you to lose it,” I said as I quickly dropped it. I looked at my watch. Jonah would be on the air by now.
That is if Jonah still existed in 2016.
I reached toward the radio and turned it on and began to frantically push the buttons.
“What are you doing?” Andrea asked.
“Looking for a radio station.”
“Just put Spotify on.”
At least I no longer had to feel bad that I didn’t know what any of these words meant. I began to turn the knob until I got to 88.1. Please let Jonah be here, I said to myself. Because if he’s not, I don’t know—
“And to start the morning off, we’ve got a classic from the Avett Brothers and their Four Thieves Gone album . . .” said the voice I knew as well as my own. Actually, better than my own because your own voice, when you actually heard it on a tape recorder, never sounded like you.
“Oh thank God,” I breathed. “You’re still here.”
“Of course I’m here,” Andrea said. “I’m driving.”
“. . . ‘Famous Flower of Manhattan,’” Jonah continued. “Going out to Montana.”
What was an Avett brother, and why was he dedicating a song to an entire state?
I waited for the familiar sounds of some techno organ, or a synthesizer—the hallmarks of New Wave music—but instead the airwaves were filled with the soft, slow twang of a single guitar followed by an American guy singing a folk song. Folk music? We made fun of folk music.
But at least he still existed in 2016. Once we were together I could get on him about his choice of music.
“What’s the deal with all this traffic?” I said impatiently. And why were there so many giant cars that looked like small trucks?
Andrea turned the radio up. “Ooh—Katy Perry’s new song.”
A bouncy pop tune filled my ears. I hated bouncy pop tunes almost as much as I hated fol
k music.
“I totally think that when it comes time for college applications, you should submit that English paper you wrote about how she’s a much better poet than that Robert Frost dude,” she went on.
I cringed. The 2016 version of me considered bouncy pop tunes poetry? My silver thingy made that weird beeping noise again. I looked down to see a little cartoon character–looking thing blowing a kiss.
Andrea looked over. “You’re so lucky to have a boyfriend who’s man enough to use emoticons,” she sighed.
I cringed at the word boyfriend. Apparently Jonah had been right when he said that Brad had a crush on me. But there was no way this version of me was so shallow that she would date someone like him. What could we have to talk about? Unless . . . we didn’t talk and instead spent all our time making out! I shook my head as hard as I could to remove that horrible image from my mind as I made a mental note of emoticon so I could look it up in a dictionary later on. “Right?” I replied. “So lucky.” I tried not to gag on the words.
And then it hit me: in this version of my life I was Andrea! And Andrea was Cheryl! I shuddered. This was definitely not good. It was, however, my chance to do some fishing. “Can you believe how long he and I have been together?”
“Omigod, I know. Two and a half years is like forever!”
At that I choked. How was it possible that I could stand being with him for two days, let alone two and a half years?
Luckily, Andrea was the kind of person who liked to talk. And talk. And talk. Which meant that I could keep quiet for the rest of the ride and not give away that when she talked about things like Tumblrs and Facebooks and Googles and Twitter followers, I was completely lost. When we pulled into the parking lot and I saw Jonah’s blue Buick that I knew so well (a little more dinged than usual) in front of the casita that housed the radio station, I took it as a sign that everything was going to be okay.
I already had the door open before the car had come to a complete stop. “Okay, well, thanks for the ride, see ya!” I said as I prepared to jump out.
“Where are you going?” Andrea asked.
