“You just want me for my map-reading skills,” I joked.
Jo rolled her eyes and explained to Jackson, “When I first got my license, Lillie got us lost in the National Park. I spent three and a half hours driving in circles. Sylv was ready to drink her own urine.”
“Those trails were unmarked,” I protested with a laugh and then stood up from her open window. “Go. Have fun.”
The engine of the hatchback whined as Jackson reversed down the drive. I wondered if they would make it to Arizona without breaking down and hoped they had packed a few bottles of water, otherwise they would have to pull a Sylv.
I raised my hand in farewell as they drove up the road. Jo pressed her hand against the window and mouthed a goodbye, and Jackson leaned on the horn until they turned the corner.
I suddenly felt like my life was a play and I had stayed long after the curtains had closed and the actors had exited stage left.
Sylv stayed for the encore too. And for the after-party.
She was stuck in Green Grove for the summer because of work, not that you would catch her complaining. She loved working at the hair salon, even though they had her sweeping the floor and washing hair for minimum wage.
I think it was the gossip she loved.
“Humpback Harding comes in every month for a blue rinse and a perm,” she told me conspiratorially, as we hung out in front of the shop. “And Melissa came in the other day for an appointment. It turns out those long locks are hair extensions.”
I had to admit it was good gossip.
“Her hair ends at her shoulders,” Sylv continued with a laugh. “And guess what? Kimmy said she will teach me to mix colors tomorrow. She thinks I could be their next colorist.”
I eyed her purple streaks. “Is she blind?”
Sylv laughed and leaned against the hot brick wall, closing her eyes and soaking up the sunlight.
I watched a couple of kids zoom by on their scooters.
“I forgive you, Lillie,” Sylv suddenly said.
My eyes widened. “Forgive me? For what?” I ran through a list in my mind, scanning the years. Was she talking about when I had pushed her off the swing when we were seven? Hang on. It had been Sylv who had pushed me off the swing. I remember I had stubbed my toe and it had bled through my sandal. Hmmm. Maybe it was when I told her mom she had skipped school in fifth grade. Wait. Had I told on her for skipping school or for smoking at the reservoir?
I shook my head. My memories were mixed in with those of other Lillies. Who knew where one dimension ended and another started? I had hundreds of memories of my father, for example. Like the one from my first day of school. I could see him bending down to tie up my shoelace at the front gate, but as he stood he turned into Deb. She kissed me and wiped away a tear from my cheek. “Have a good day, sweetheart. I’ll be here waiting at lunch.” I knew the latter was my own memory and the former was a memory from a dimension where my father was actually listed on my birth certificate. It was kind of like having the opposite of amnesia.
“I forgive you,” Sylv continued, “for losing your shit this past year. You know, you were kind of the lynchpin that held us together.” She sighed, opening her eyes and rolling her head on the bricks to look at me. “We had sixteen good years though, right?” She was clearly not counting the last twelve months. I think there were some candles and a cake when I had turned seventeen in March. “You and me and Jo.”
I was the lynchpin? I resisted the urge to laugh. I could barely hold myself together. Jo was the lynchpin. Or at least she had been my lynchpin, until she became Evacuee Jo. I stared at Sylv, suddenly realizing that I was to her as Jo was to me. A guide. A ball of twine.
“Sorry,” I said, placing a hand on my chest until I located my heartbeat. It had become a habit, checking my heart for a beat like others checked their voicemail for messages.
Sylv shrugged and made a “meh” sound. “What are you going to do?” she asked rhetorically. “If we could choose our path I would be wearing Versace on a catwalk in Milan.”
And I would be in another dimension with Tom, I thought.
Sylv stood up from the wall and smoothed the back of her skirt. “I have to love you and leave you. My dustpan and broom are calling.” She paused, tilting her head on the side and surveying my hair in its ponytail.
“What?”
“Come with me,” she said, taking my hand. I allowed myself to be led like a child by its mother.
Who knew hair could be so heavy? Like a fur coat draped over your head, I thought as I stepped out of the salon an hour later.
My freshly washed and styled hair had been cut to my shoulders with sweeping bangs that tickled my eyelashes. I ran a hand through the strands, light and feathery between my fingers.
A few hundred feet up the street I stopped outside the Duck-In Diner and stared at my reflection. The cut flattered my face, widening my narrow features and making my eyes look larger than life. It also completely concealed the shorter section of hair from the accident. “A brand new Lillie,” Sylv had said as Kimmy finished my blow-dry. I laughed dryly and my reflection laughed as well. Like I needed another Lillie.
I looked beyond brand new Lillie at the booths, as if looking for a familiar face, or rather two familiar faces. They would see me and wave me in, and we would laugh at the duck bill visors and squabble over the last waffle fry like the old days.
A spoonful of grits hit the window in front of my face, sliding down the pane. A young boy was giggling at a nearby booth. His mother scolded him while shooting me apologetic looks. I nodded an acknowledgement, before turning and heading home.
And then I saw him. In the street. Like I would see anyone else. Like I would see Humpback Harding or Mr Green, or one of the girls. He was walking out of the Ezy-Buy with a newspaper under his arm and a set of keys in his hand. Tom.
It was like I had been hit by the train again and I thought I would wake up either in hospital or not at all. I dropped my camera and heard it clatter on the sidewalk, its lens shattering. But the sound was distant, as if it had fallen down a deep well or down a rabbit hole, like in Alice in Wonderland. The blare of music through the open doors of the record store became muted, as did the roar of cars up Main Street, full of college guys doing laps during their summer break. All I could hear was the rush of blood in my ears, like static from a TV.
Tom shielded his eyes against the sun as he stepped off the sidewalk. I managed to move forward too, putting one foot in front of the other like a sleepwalker, but I was wide awake.
I stopped dead, my shoe scuffing the concrete as I saw him walking towards a red sports car. The shiny paintwork stood out like a sore thumb against a backdrop of rusted station wagons and beat up SUVs.
“Tom!” a voice called out and I whipped my head around to see Melissa with her hair extensions in a dripping wet braid and her leopard print bikini visible through her white tank top. Becca was trotting behind her, looking like a poodle with her head of damp curls.
Tom turned and when he saw Melissa he leaned against his car, a slow smile spreading across his flawless features. But it was a smile of amusement, not of recognition and it picked up what the sports car had put down. This was not my Tom. This was the Tom from this dimension, who had been at a boarding school in Kent. I wondered what he was doing in Green Grove when he could be spending his summer on the beaches of Spain. Maybe he wanted to take a look at Rose Hill. It was going to be his inheritance after all.
As Melissa passed I had a sudden urge to push her under one of the lapping cars, but I bent down and scooped up my camera instead. Tom from the Thirty-Fifth Dimension would have no memory of Melissa – and, while I would have paid for front row tickets to this show, the thought that he had no memory of me either made me head for the nosebleed section.
It was like the volume had suddenly been turned up full-blast as I half-walked, half-ran down the alley between the bakery and the Ezy-Buy. My feet thudded in my ears as they hit the sidewalk with a Slap! Slap
! Slap! and my mind shouted, Tom! Tom! Tom! until I reached my house.
“You had a haircut,” Deb said, as I rushed through the kitchen. She was sitting at the table, beading: a hobby she seemed to have settled on. Her healing necklaces and peace bracelets were in high demand at Tree of Life – there was even a waiting list. Yep. She had found her niche.
“It looks lovely,” she called after me.
I grunted a response.
In my bedroom, I yanked open my drawers and dug through my clothes, looking for my favorite pair of jeans. I teamed them with a light pink billowy top with short sleeves and a dark pink ribbon threaded around the neckline. At the last minute I grabbed a jacket, despite the heat of the day. It was hard to know what to wear on the last day of your life.
Between Main Street and home, I had made up my mind. I was going to slide. OK, I might have to do myself in. And, there was a chance the reset button might be pushed. But there was no way, no how I could stay in this town, in this dimension with a Tom look-a-like haunting me, like the ghosts of Tom past, present and future. I wondered whether this was what I had been to Tom when he came to Green Grove, a recurring nightmare. A constant reminder that the world was round and there was no way to make it flat again.
I went into the kitchen again.
“You hungry?” Deb asked, as I pulled apple chips and muesli bars out of the pantry, dumping them into my bag.
“Picnic,” I mumbled.
“Maybe I could come with you?”
I looked up from buckling the strap of the bag and let out a laugh.
Deb blinked at me and then set her lips into a thin line, before picking up her needle and threading a couple of clear beads onto the fishing line.
I hovered for a moment before dumping my bag and pulling out a chair, its back legs squealing on the linoleum. What were a couple of minutes when I was going to be gone for an eternity?
Deb paused in her beading when I sat down, like I was a prairie dog that would be startled by sudden movements. I picked up a strand of fishing line and started threading Rose Quartz onto its needle.
“I should have let you love him,” Deb suddenly said and I knew she was talking about Tom.
I picked up another crystal and watched it slide down the fishing line.
“Were you in love with his father?” I asked. “William?”
I heard a sharp intake of air and thought she was going to clam up, but instead she said, “Yes.”
I let the word hang in the air and she breathed it in like incense, a fond smile on her lips as she exhaled. “We were best friends growing up,” she explained. “He was there when I lost my first tooth and learnt to ice skate, and I was there when he rode his first motorbike, sitting on the back with my arms tight around his waist.”
Deb looked alarmed when I pushed back my chair and went to my bedroom, but I returned a moment later with the three black and white photos of Deb.
She bit her lip as she looked at them, pausing on the photo of the motorbike. “I thought we would be together forever,” she said.
I nodded, thinking of Evacuee Lillie.
“And then along came Annabelle Windsor-Smith.”
Like Lillie from the Seventh Dimension, I thought, resuming my beading.
“We had been friends, but they were soulmates.”
And now they were traveling the world taking photos together. No wonder Deb hated photography.
Deb shook her head, as if clearing out the last of her skeletons and looked down at my beading. “What a beautiful bracelet.”
I let her take it from me and tie silver clasps onto each end.
“Hold out your wrist,” she said.
I obeyed and she looped it around twice, before securing the clasp. She spun one of the crystals with her finger and I thought she was going to remind me that it was the crystal of love, but then she released a ragged sigh. “I would have gone to the ends of the Earth for William. And I should have.”
It was like she was giving me permission. “I love you, Mom,” I said, the words tumbling out of my mouth and surprising both of us.
“I love you too, sweetheart,” she said and then I was in her arms and she was rocking me like a baby.
I could have cried on her shoulder for a thousand lives.
The walk to Rose Hill was both too long and too short.
As I cut through the vineyards, heading in the direction of the mansion, I dug into the depths of my mind, looking for the solution to sliding. The Solution. A light bulb illuminated the word in my mind. It had been the name for the injection, but it was also the name for the series of equations of the theory of everything. The letters and numbers of my tattoo came to mind, as well as their meaning.
“Distance equals Speed multiplied by Time…” I whispered, climbing through a wire fence that separated two vineyards. And then the remainder of the equations followed, one-by-one, as I called them like long-lost friends, knowing their sound waves would cause a chemical reaction that would allow me to slide. “Energy equals Mass…” I continued on and on until I found myself in the formal gardens at Rose Hill. I had one last equation, but I wanted to be in the courtyard when I slid. If Mr Green had been telling the truth and I was lost in the slide I wanted it to be my final resting place, so to speak.
I thought my heart would be pounding as I walked up the flagstone path, but it was as slow as a funeral march. I stood in the courtyard, listening to its steady thud beneath the bubbling of the fountain and the trill of birds in the canopy. The dappled sunlight moved across my upturned face, tickling me with cool shadows. I held on tight to the straps of my bag and closed my eyes.
This. Is. It, I thought.
“Hello?”
My eyes flew open at the sound of his voice, both rough and smooth. For a moment I thought I had slid and found Tom in my second dimension, but when I turned I saw it was London Tom. I flushed, like a child caught with my hand in the cookie jar.
He studied me with those piercing blue eyes. His hair was half an inch longer than my Tom, curling around his ears. He was wearing a bright red T-shirt that clung to his form and I resisted the urge to throw myself at him, tuck myself into his arms and lay my head on his chest.
He frowned, an expression that seemed as foreign to him as smiling was to my Tom. “Do I know you?” he asked.
I blinked back the tears, wondering whether to tell him we were soulmates. “No,” I whispered. A few dreams of other dimensions did not mean he knew me at all. He was looking at me through a peephole. It was like crossing paths with someone who had taught you in fifth grade in another dimension and spending five minutes wondering where you had met. Unless you were merged, none of this made sense. And even then… I thought of Jo.
“Lillie?” His tongue rolled across the double Ls with familiarity and my eyes widened.
Tom shook his head and laughed at himself. “Sorry. I know I sound like a stalker, but for the past – God, eight months? – I have been dreaming about you every night.” He winced, as if I was going to start screaming for help. “I know. I know. I need my head read. I mean, what was I thinking flying halfway around the world to meet the girl of my dreams?” He grinned apologetically. “Sorry. That sounded cheesy.”
I suddenly realized the space behind my ear was as hot as the sun. “Did you die?” I asked sharply. “In your dreams?” My heart was squeezing, squeezing, squeezing. No. No. No, I thought, clutching my chest as I remembered Tom saying he would rather merge than leave me.
He nodded, regarding me like I was clairvoyant. “In the first dream I was killed by…” he hesitated, giving a nervous laugh “…myself.”
My hand moved to my throat, as a small sob came out of my mouth. Tom had pipped me at the post. I was about to risk my life and limb to be with him, but it turned out he was ten steps – or eight months – ahead.
He had merged, risking killing either himself or the other Tom in a game of Russian Roulette. The prize was keeping his promise. “I will find you,” he had tol
d me, and here he was in the flesh, but not in spirit. The chamber had spun and the gun had gone off, leaving me with a Tom who thought the world was flat.
This was what Mr Green had meant when he said Tom was gone. The weight of his loss was like a thousand dimensions on my shoulders and I sunk to my knees, releasing my throat and allowing my sobs to echo through the courtyard.
“Are you OK?” the merged Tom asked nervously. He held up his hands, as if showing me he was unarmed and began talking rapidly. “I have this as well. I thought you might— I mean, I know it sounds silly, but…” He nodded towards his pocket, before reaching down as slow as you like and retrieving a necklace. My sobbing subsided as I watched the key spin on its broken chain, catching the sunlight like a mirror ball. “Do you know what this is? Is it yours? Because…”
I put out my hand and he lowered it into my palm without another word, the chain curling like a tiny snake. I climbed to my feet and turned towards the fountain. The mossy bricks were damp under my hand as I walked around its edge. I stopped when I reached the opposite side and bent down, scratching at the earth that clung to the clay until I could see an etching of a key, like a brick stamp.
I used my fingernails to prise the brick from its lodgings. It was two inches wide and in the gap behind was a wooden box. I used the key to unlock its lid. In the Seventh Dimension this box had contained an engagement ring. In the Thirty-Fifth Dimension it contained…
I opened the lid and saw a crumpled photo. It was the photo of us from the Seventh Dimension.
Tom leaned over my shoulder, making my skin tingle with his proximity. “Is that… us?” he asked, his smooth features crinkling as he searched his memory. There was a pause. I was holding my breath.
“Wait,” he said and his pale blue eyes seemed to shimmer in the afternoon light. “I think I remember…”
I exhaled.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank first and foremost my wonderful agent Meredith Kaffel. You have been the mentor in my monomyth. Thank you for leading me to the ultimate boon and ensuring WHEN THE WORLD WAS FLAT (AND WE WERE IN LOVE) did not end up as just another file on my computer.
When the World was Flat (and we were in love) Page 22
