When the World was Flat (and we were in love)

by Ingrid Jonach

  In the memory, I closed my eyes against the icy wind. “You are such a scaredy-cat,” I had taunted, in return for him calling me a chicken. “A scaredy Tom-cat.” My voice had echoed across the lake and suddenly there was a crack, as the ice broke beneath my skates.

  “You saved my life,” I whispered and then shook my head. “You saved her life,” I corrected, reaching across the table to touch his hand. I traced the deep lines on his palm, as I remembered those hands grabbing me as I fell through the ice; the coldness had been like a clamp around my chest as I hit the water.

  The blade of one of my skates had clipped his chin, splashing blood across the ice, but he had held me tight and pulled me out, warming me with his body as we walked to Rose Hill. No, I corrected myself again. He had been warming Evacuee Lillie.

  “I should have let her drown,” he said bitterly.

  A stab of pain went through my chest and I withdrew my hand.

  How could he have made the decision to let her drown? How could he have known that they would both be evacuated from their dimension years later and that she would draw the short straw and slide from dimension to dimension on her own? That she would decide to merge with her other selves rather than go it alone? It would be like looking at a baby and knowing it was going to become the next Adolf Hitler or Charles Manson.

  Lillie from the Seventh Dimension, on the other hand, had drawn the long straw and landed in the lap of luxury, i.e. Tom. I was surprised when another pang of jealousy went through me as I thought of her climbing under the covers and into his arms each night. His bare chest was smooth and muscular under her hands and his breath was soft in her ear as he whispered goodnight. I closed my eyes, torn between blocking out the memories and watching them like old home movies.

  When I opened my eyes, Tom was poking his sandwich and shifting the chips around on his plate. A strange sensation settled in my stomach as I watched him, like–

  “Déjà vu,” I whispered.

  He looked up and a twinkle came into his eyes, like shards of glass sparkling in his pale blue irises. “Do you know want to know what causes déjà vu?” he asked.

  “They say it happens when one eye records a scene faster than the other,” I said. Told you I liked trivia.

  He shook his head. “It happens when you have the same experience in two dimensions,” he said.

  I guess I could understand how in a recently split dimension we could both be sitting at this table in another universe, like if I had ordered a ham sandwich instead of a salad sandwich. And how I could pick up my glass and take a sip of my juice at the same moment in both dimensions. I thought back to one of my last sensations of déjà vu in the quad. It seemed Sylv did flash her underwear too much if she was doing it in multiple dimensions.

  “Want more trivia?” Tom asked in a low voice.

  “Do I want more trivia?” I asked, as if it were a trick question. There were a thousand blank pages in my inner encyclopedia that needed to be filled.

  “OK,” Tom conceded with a smile. “What about ghosts?”

  “What about them?”

  “Do you know what they are?”

  I gave him a blank look.

  “Go on. Guess.”

  “Um.” I flicked through the pages of my mind. E… F… G… Ghetto… Gherkin… Ghosts… “Cats,” I announced.

  He gave me an amused smile. “Cats?”

  “Yep. Their eyes glow in the dark and they say when cats get up in the rafters or in the crawl space, they howl like banshees.”

  “Sorry, Lillie,” he said with a low chuckle, “but ghosts are not cats.”

  I pouted.

  “Ghosts,” he said, leaning in as if we were telling scary stories around a campfire, “are visions of other dimensions. They can seem like hallucinations.”

  Like Tom in the darkroom, I thought.

  He leaned back in his chair. “It can be a trip to get a glimpse of someone who lives in your house in another dimension or someone walking through a wall that exists in your dimension, but not in theirs. You can imagine too what people think when they see someone who is dead in their dimension, but alive in another.”

  I remembered Deb telling me how she was visited by her mother – my grandmother – a week after her death. Deb had walked into the kitchen and there was Gran, washing the dishes. I wondered if she would have been scrubbing dried vegetable lasagna from plates if she had known she had died in our dimension or if she would have been out spending the last of her social security. Of course, her only hint would have been a dream about dying or a cold shiver down her spine.

  I sipped my juice thoughtfully, wondering what Jo would give to see her mom, even if it was in another dimension. I could remember her once saying she could imagine watching musicals with her mom, which told me she had survived in at least one dimension. But my Jo was gone. She is an evacuee, I reminded myself.

  “Another piece of trivia,” I begged Tom, as a waitress cleared my plate.

  Tom thought for a moment, his eyes following the waitress until she was out of earshot. “Soulmates.”

  I looked at him and his eyes drew me in.

  “Soulmates,” he continued, “are two people who have loved each other in another dimension.”

  “Us,” I whispered.

  “Lillie.”

  I looked up at the sound of my name and saw Mr Green standing a couple of feet from our table, looking between the two of us with a bemused smile. He was nowhere near as thin as he had been the last time I had seen him and his cheeks had a healthy flush.

  “How are you?” he asked.

  “Good. And you?”

  “Great,” he said, his eyes returning to Tom.

  “This is Tom,” I explained. “Tom, this is Mr Green.”

  I thought he would remind me to call him Dave again, but his attention was elsewhere. “Nice to meet you, Tom,” he said, sticking out his hand.

  “Likewise,” Tom said, standing up and greeting him.

  “Have you been in town long?” Mr Green asked, holding onto the handshake.

  “A while.”

  The older man nodded and then dropped his hand. There was an awkward silence before Mr Green said, “See you around, Lillie. Tom.”

  I frowned, thinking it had been years since Mr Green had called me Lillie, instead of Pipsqueak. I lowered my voice and explained to Tom how Mr Green had months, maybe weeks to live.

  Tom shook his head. “That man will live a lot longer than a few months.”

  “But the doctors said it had spread…” I started, and then my mouth fell open as I realized Mr Green had merged, like his daughter. “How do you know?” I asked, not wanting to believe the last member of the Green family had become an evacuee.

  Tom turned his head and pointed to the tattoo behind his ear. I reached out and touched the black markings. “Ouch.”

  “Hot?” he asked with a grimace. “It can be a pain, literally. It heats up when evacuees are around, but it can be a bit hit and miss. I think the technology is breaking down.”

  “Maybe those two are the evacuees,” I said, nodding at the college guy and the Duck-In Diner girl, who were playing footsies under the table. I knew I was grasping at straws, but Mr Green was my last link to my Jo.

  Tom shook his head. “I saw your Mr Green on the street earlier. The tattoo heated up then as well.”

  I slumped in my seat, wondering why the evacuees were sliding into my dimension instead of the infinite other dimensions in the universe – Evacuee Lillie, Evacuee Tom, Evacuee Jo, and Evacuee Mr Green.

  “Entanglement,” Tom said when I asked. He told me the story of a girl who had saved the life of a boy by stemming the flow of blood after he was hit by a school bus. Ten years later the same boy saved the same girl from choking in a restaurant. They later married and had children. “It is quantum physics,” he explained.

  “Spooky,” I said.

  He smiled. “Einstein actually called it ‘spooky action at a distance.’”

>   I wondered whether I was also entangled with Evacuee Lillie. “Is she going to kill me? Evacuee Lillie?” I whispered, not wanting to be her fifth victim. It was like walking around with a bull’s-eye on my back.

  Tom put his hand on mine, his thumb stroking my skin. “No,” he said with a small smile. “You are safe, Lillie. She is gone. Thank God,” he added.

  “Where?” I asked.

  Tom looked at me with a furrowed brow.

  “Another dimension,” I realized. I should have been celebrating at the thought that she had left my dimension, but the thought that she could return put the cork firmly back in the champagne bottle. “For how long?” I pressed. “She could slide back in tomorrow.”

  Tom shook his head. “You are talking about another dimension. In this dimension she has been and gone.” He elaborated when he saw my blank look. “Evacuees slide into a dimension together on the date of the Evacuation, which means we can only visit a dimension one time and one time only. If we slide out, we slide out.” He made a cutting motion with his hand.

  “Really?”

  “Do you think I would have chased her out of eight dimensions otherwise?”

  I looked at him for a long time, our eyes connecting across the table. “I think you would have chased her out of a thousand dimensions over and over again to save my life,” I said.

  He nodded soberly.

  “How do you make her slide?” I asked, unsure if I wanted to know.

  “I think your lunch break finished about ten minutes ago,” Tom said quietly.

  “Do you kill her?” I persisted.

  He leveled his eyes at me and I thought he was going to say we had to call it a day. “You cannot kill an evacuee,” he said.

  I blinked. “What?”

  “When we die we simply slide into another dimension.”

  “What if you have a heart attack?”

  “I would slide.”

  “What if you are hit by a truck?”

  “I would slide.”

  “Drown?”

  He looked at me as if asking if really wanted him to repeat himself and then he looked at his watch again. “We can talk about this tomorrow,” he said.

  “But Tree of Life is closed on Sundays,” I whined like a child, “which means I will be under house arrest again.”

  He lifted my hand and brushed his lips against my skin, sending a rush of adrenaline through my body. “I’ll be at the park at noon,” he murmured. “In case you get paroled.”

  And even though I knew we had spent hundreds of years together, I started counting the seconds until tomorrow anyway.

  23

  When the girls turned up for our Sunday session the next morning, Deb was like a levee at the front door. She sprung a leak though, under the weight of the reasoning from Jo and the sass from Sylv.

  “One visitor,” she told me.

  “Sylv.”

  “Jo?”

  “No. Sylv.” Of course Deb thought I would ask for my best friend – and I would have if I could have – but that girl on the porch, stamping her feet in the cold was an evacuee, like the Lillie in my nightmares.

  I pressed my hand against my bedroom window, my nose inches from the pane, as I watched Jo walk out the front gate and down the street. Her hair had been dyed brown again and the ends of her ragged bob had been trimmed. She turned, as if sensing my gaze, and I hid behind the curtain.

  “Good God,” Sylv said as she walked into my bedroom.

  I spun around. “What?”

  “Deb puts you in the hole for a couple of days and you turn into a nutcase, like that busybody Humpback Harding.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked indignantly, swiping at the curtain a few times, as if I were dusting the fabric, instead of using it to hide from my former best friend. “I’m like a hundred and ten percent sane,” I said, pushing thoughts of parallel dimensions and evacuees out of my mind.

  Sylv raised her eyebrows and ran a hand through her hair, which was now blond with bright blue and green streaks. “A hundred and ten percent? I rest my case.”

  I raised my own eyebrows in return. “A math lesson?” I laughed. “You think a hypotenuse is an animal in Africa.”

  Sylv rolled her eyes. “Hypotenuse. Hippopotamus.” She perched on the edge of my desk, looking like a macaw.

  “I like your hair,” I lied.

  Sylv grinned. “Turnip told me to get rid of it by tomorrow. Should I shave it and give him a heart attack?”

  “Only if you want to get suspended like me.”

  “That jerk said he would expel me.” She sighed dramatically and then brightened. “Jo let me dye her hair last night.”

  “I know,” I said, with a nod to the window.

  “Aha!” Sylv shouted, pointing an accusing finger. “You have totally turned into Humpback Harding.”

  I smiled. “OK. I might have turned into her for one second.”

  Sylv frowned. “Is everything OK with you and Jo?”

  “Why?”

  “Because you just kicked her in the guts, Lillie. She had one foot in the door before she realized Deb had said Sylv, instead of Jo.”

  I hesitated. Jo and I were as good as gold. It was evacuee Jo I hated. “I kind of need a hand with sneaking out,” I finally said. “You know Jo. She would give me a lecture.”

  “A jailbreak?” Sylv asked, her eyes glimmering like gemstones. “Woohoo! And here I was thinking I was going to go deaf before the day was out.” She tilted her head towards the sound of the bongos from the back room.

  “I kind of have to go on my own,” I said sheepishly.

  Her eyebrows shot up again. “Who are you meeting?”

  My flushed cheeks answered her question.

  “Tom!” she gasped. “Spill. I want the dirt.”

  “I saw him on Friday,” I said cautiously, not wanting to spill dimension secrets. “He took me to the sand hills.”

  “The sand hills?” She clicked her tongue stud as she considered this location. “Is there a lookout?”

  I laughed. “I think you and Simon should stick to the reservoir.”

  “Brandon.”

  “Sorry. Brandon.”

  For a moment it looked like Sylv was blushing. “We did the deed,” she announced. “After the Masquerade Ball. Down at the reservoir.”

  I tilted my head, wondering whether, in spite of all her talk, Sylv had been a virgin like me and Jo. “And?” I asked, crossing my fingers she would spare me the details.

  “OK. I guess.” She shrugged, chewing her bottom lip with a small smile as she thought about it. “What about you and Tom? Did you–?”

  “We kissed,” I said quickly.

  Sylv clasped her hands to her chest and sighed dreamily. I frowned. What was with the swooning? Sylv was normally a bag them and tag them kind of girl. I walked up to her without a word, turning her head and brushing back her hair.

  “What the hell, Lillie?” she complained, as I checked behind her ear, but there was no tattoo.

  “Sorry,” I said, but I had no excuse. “I have to work out how to get around Deb,” I said, changing the subject.

  Sylv stared at me for a moment and then asked, “Has she put bars on your window or something?”

  I breathed a sigh of relief, wondering if the dimension had split and there was a Lillie who had to explain herself to Sylv. “Not yet,” I said dryly.

  Sylv smiled. “Well, I guess I could cover for you. If you get the TV in here and put on a decent DVD.” She put on a sugary-sweet voice. “Oh, hi Deb. Lillie just went to the kitchen to get popcorn like one second ago. You would have passed her in the hallway. No? She must be in the bathroom then.” She grinned, her nose crinkling, and I laughed, reveling in her lightened mood.

  “Now,” Sylv said. “We have to get you glammed up for your date.”

  It was my first opportunity to prepare for Tom. The past two times I had run into him on the hop, but this time I pulled on my good pair of jeans and a pale yellow knit S
ylv had nicked from Deb. Sylv blow-dried my hair so it had a bit of shape and clipped back my bangs with a gold-colored hair clip. She tried to pull it into a ponytail a couple of times, but I slapped at her hands until she gave up.

  “I wish I had proper make-up,” she said, appraising my dark circles.

  “You know what they say about a poor workman blaming his tools.”

  “What if his tools are a broken hammer and rusted nails?” Sylv complained, and then she perked up as she had a thought. “What about Deb? She must have make-up.”

  “First her top and now her make-up? Do you want me to be locked up for life?”

  “Oh ye of little faith,” Sylv said, which I thought was ironic, coming from an atheist.

  Sylv found Deb in the back room, in the middle of a bongo lesson with Blaze. I could hear Dawn singing along to the beat, a weird wailing sound. It made the pan pipe sound like Mozart. The noise stopped and I bit my lip, wondering if Sylv was going to blow my cover. I heard her say, “Me and Lillie are giving each other makeovers. Do you mind if we borrow your make-up? I think your blue eye shadow would really suit her. You know, like mother, like daughter.”

  A few minutes later, Sylv returned with an assortment of blush and eye shadow in a hand-woven basket.

  “The colors are all wrong,” I moaned, pawing through the bright greens and blues.

  “You think?” Sylv asked, applying bright orange eye shadow to her eyelids and batting them at me.

  I laughed.

  “Is that your mom?” Sylv suddenly asked.

  My eyes snapped to the doorway, but Sylv was reaching into the basket. She dug out a handful of photos, the edges of which were curled with age. I snatched them from her and held them to my chest. Photos of Deb? Really?

  There were three black and white shots. The first showed a small girl holding a bunny rabbit. Even in monochrome there was no mistaking those large emerald eyes. The next was of a teenage girl, perhaps a year or two younger than me, who was dressed in a cheerleading uniform. A cheerleading uniform? I laughed out loud. Maybe that was when she had bought the ice skates. The final photo showed a more familiar Deb. She was probably my age. Her hair was long and flowing. Her smile was wide. And she was straddling a motorbike. Yep. A motorbike. And on the front was a guy in leather, his face turned from the camera. It could have been my father for all I knew.