Parallel

by Lauren Miller

  “You really have no idea?” she asks.

  “I really have no idea.”

  “Wow! So reality changed again!” she exclaims. “That’s—”

  “Where’s Tyler?” I ask, annoyed that she’s not whispering. “And Muriel?” Muriel, Caitlin’s roommate, rarely leaves their room.

  “Tyler’s asleep on our futon, and Muriel’s in Pennsylvania for the weekend,” she replies. “So what else is different? And how’d you figure out you were supposed to be at the boathouse?”

  “Marissa told me. She was worried I’d be late.” I glance out the window and see a sign for Gilder Boathouse, two miles away. “We’re almost to the boathouse,” I tell her. “Please just tell me what’s there.”

  “You should try to figure it out,” Caitlin says. “What’s your latest alternate memory? That should tell you—”

  “Caitlin! I don’t have time for this!” This isn’t a freaking science experiment, Caitlin. It’s my life.

  “Fine. You’re a coxswain on the crew team.”

  My shoes hit the floor with a loud thud. “A what?”

  “A coxswain,” she repeats. “The person who sits in the stern of the boat and steers it.”

  I press my forehead against the window, trying to process this. “Since when?”

  “Since Yale recruited you,” Caitlin says matter-of-factly. “Well, you’d already been accepted, so maybe ‘recruited’ is the wrong word. But, yeah. A scout saw you at a regatta last spring.”

  “Last spring? I was a coxswain at Brookside?”

  “Well, yeah. When you couldn’t run cross-country, you panicked that you didn’t have anything sports-related for your college applications,” she says. “The crew team needed a coxswain.”

  When you couldn’t run cross-country. My breath catches in my throat.

  “The nails,” I breathe as the memories come flooding back. So my parallel is smart enough to get into Yale but dumb enough to walk around a construction site barefoot. Awesome. “Well, I guess that explains the sneakers,” I mutter. I bought my running shoes after our first meet last year, when I decided my cross trainers were too heavy. The ones I’m wearing suddenly feel like lead.

  “That’s what’s different?” Caitlin asks. “Your foot?”

  “Yeah,” I say distractedly, running through a highlight reel of cross-country memories in my mind. I ran an 18:36, my best time ever, at the state meet last fall. And now it’s as if it never happened. It seems so unfair that she could’ve erased such a hard-won accomplishment. Did someone else from Brookside take my place at the meet?

  “Hey, Abby!” a voice calls. A girl I’ve never seen before is waving at me from a few seats up. She’s wearing sweatpants and a maroon Andover Crew sweatshirt, her auburn curls tucked into a baseball hat. A teammate. I smile and wave back, grateful for the phone to my ear.

  “So are you going to practice?” I hear Caitlin ask.

  I slide back down in my seat, out of view.

  “Yeah, that’s a great idea,” I say sarcastically. “Who cares that I have absolutely no idea how to do whatever a coxswain does? I should just wing it.”

  “But maybe you do.”

  “Do what?”

  “Know how to cox.”

  “But I don’t,” I say, confused. “I didn’t even know what a coxswain was until you told me.”

  “Just go to practice,” she urges. “Act like you know what you’re doing and get into the boat.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because I think there’s a decent chance that the moment you get out there, you’ll realize that you do know what to do. But since you don’t remember learning how to do it, the only way to know for sure is to put you in a circumstance where your procedural memory will be forced to kick in.”

  “My what?”

  “Procedural memory. The type of memory that lets you do something without consciously thinking about it, like swimming or driving a car,” she explains. “Which is different from declarative memory, which lets you consciously recall facts and events. Don’t you remember AP Psych?”

  “You’re seriously asking me that right now?”

  “The point is, by the time your parallel gets to where you are right now, she’ll have both an unconscious, procedural memory of how to cox a boat—well enough to be on a Division I team, no less—and a set of conscious, declarative memories associated with doing it. We know you don’t have the conscious memories yet, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have the unconscious ones.”

  “Are you getting off or not?” a gruff voice barks. I jerk up. The bus driver is turned around, looking at me expectantly. I’m the only one still on the bus, which is now stopped in front of a sprawling wooden complex. I nod distractedly and stand up.

  “Are you listening to what I’m saying?” Caitlin asks.

  “Yes. Procedural and declarative memories. Got it.” I sling my bag over my shoulder and hurry toward the impatient bus driver. “Sorry,” I mumble on my way past him.

  Kids in sweats and Windbreakers mill around the boathouse, looking purposeful and busy. A group of guys in spandex carry a boat painted in Yale blue over their heads, while two middle-aged men wearing matching white visors—coaches?—consult wooden clipboards. Waves lap against the deck in a steady rhythm as people perform their various tasks. Things are orderly here. Organized. I breathe in the calm. My life may be chaotic, but this crew practice is not.

  “Abby!” The girl from the bus is standing at the boathouse door, which is framed on each side by a row of fiberglass oars. The entrance cuts through the building and opens onto an expansive deck overlooking the silver blue of the Housatonic River. “Want me to wait for you?” she calls.

  “No, that’s okay!” I yell back. “I’ll be in in a minute.” The girl nods and disappears inside. “So what am I supposed to do?” I ask Caitlin. “Just hop in the boat and hope it all comes back to me?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “And if it doesn’t? If I make a total fool of myself?”

  “Feign amnesia.”

  “Funny,” I retort. The deck is beginning to clear. “Okay, if I’m going to this practice, I need to go now.”

  “Go,” Caitlin urges. “Consider it research.”

  Despite the very real risk that this will result in my looking like a complete idiot in front of the entire crew team, I have to admit I’m curious.

  “Fine. I’ll go.”

  “Yay!”

  “Wish me luck,” I say, not optimistic that I’ll have any.

  “Who needs luck?” Caitlin replies. “You’re a freak of nature. You’re the definition of luck!”

  I hang up on her and head inside the boathouse.

  What happens on the water is beyond surreal. One minute, I’m sitting at the stern of a wobbly wooden boat, facing eight excessively tall female rowers (seriously, one of them is six foot two and the shortest is five foot ten), waiting for our stone-faced head coach to blow his whistle, praying that I’ll somehow be able to fake it when he does.

  Half a second later, autopilot kicks in, and I’m steering the boat and barking into my headset like a pro. For the first few minutes, I struggle to get the calls out fast enough. But once I’m in a rhythm on the water, my motions become instinctive, and it stops being so much work. It’s unnerving how natural it feels. Unnerving, but ridiculously cool. The cox is literally the boss of the boat—it’s my job to decide where we go and how quickly we get there. A task the planner in me was made for.

  As we’re running through our second warm-up drill, my mind wanders back to the night that got me here. Ilana’s party. The terrible music, the crowded living room, the mini barrel of artificially sweetened punch. Standing in the street in front of that unfinished house, willing that guy from my astronomy class to kiss me. Running inside barefoot to give him another shot. As if a guy like that would ever make the first move. How could my parallel not have seen that? Even I can see that, and I’ve only got a handful of memories of hi
m. I mean, c’mon. The boy wore pleats.

  “Ugh. You reek,” the gorilla of a girl sitting in the seat closest to me grunts between strokes. “Next time you decide to come to practice hungover, do us all a favor and take a shower first.”

  I stare at her. “Excuse me?”

  She ignores me. Rattled, I pull up on the little handle thingy and the boat jerks to the right. I yank the rope in the other direction, trying to correct the error. The boat rocks violently, prompting a string of profanity from a girl resembling a stalk of celery (no hips, greenish complexion, lots of unruly hair). The beast in front of her gives me a death stare.

  “Barnes!” Coach booms, shouting through his megaphone from the dock. “Is there someplace else you’d rather be? Get it together or get off the water!” he bellows.

  And there we go. The novelty of this little adventure has officially worn off.

  It’s cold. It’s wet. My legs and back feel like they’ve been stuffed in the overhead compartment of an airplane, and I’ve been staring at a girl’s camel toe for over an hour.

  Instantly, my mood sours. If my parallel wants to spend what little free time she has crouched in a tiny space, shouting commands at unnervingly tall women, then by all means, she should. I, however, can think of several ways I’d rather spend my Sunday mornings, and none of them involve a hoarse voice or frozen fingers.

  If she and I are so freaking similar, then how did she end up on a path I never would have taken? If I’d had a crush on the new kid, I wouldn’t have invited him to a party I didn’t want to go to just to spend time with him. And if I had, I certainly wouldn’t have suggested we tour a construction site barefoot. If she’s supposed to be my genetic equivalent, then shouldn’t she possess at least a modicum of my common sense?

  Okay, so there was that one incident a few years ago. Caitlin and I were in Florida with her parents for spring break, and we’d ditched them for a bonfire on the beach. A boy named Roy with buck teeth and a peach-fuzz mustache was handing out hot dogs. The “night hiking” was his idea, but going barefoot was mine. I didn’t see the broken bottle lying in the sand until after I’d stepped on it. The cut wasn’t very deep, but Redneck Roy disappeared when Caitlin’s parents showed up, leaving me with a bloody big toe and an overwhelming sense of relief.

  Fine. I may have had my own lapses in judgment when it comes to boys and bare feet. So perhaps it’s possible that I would’ve been as careless as my parallel was that night. But if I’d stepped on those nails, eight stitches and a tetanus shot wouldn’t have been a game changer for me. I busted my ass for three years, staying late after practice every single day, doing everything I could to prove to Coach P that I was captain material. How could she have given up so easily on the goal she’d worked so hard for? Didn’t she know better?

  Like you knew better than to pursue an acting career you didn’t even want?

  I don’t know if that voice belongs to me, or Caitlin, or God. Either way, I’m ignoring it.

  Back on dry land, Coach rattles through administrative details while we wipe down the boats. I stay busy, trying not to make eye contact with anyone.

  “Next week’s practice schedule,” Coach tells us, holding up a stack of papers. “Take one before you leave. Two-a-days start tomorrow, with a breather on Friday afternoon. Bus leaves at six for Providence.” He clips the papers to his clipboard and sets it on the wooden railing.

  “What’s in Providence?” I whisper to Celery Girl. She gives me a funny look.

  “Our regatta.”

  “Oh, he meant Providence, Rhode Island,” I say casually. “I thought he was using the word metaphorically.”

  Celery Girl narrows her eyes. “Are you on drugs?”

  “What? No!” I reply, forgetting to whisper. Everyone looks at me. “Sorry,” I mumble, to no one in particular.

  Coach shoots me a look and keeps talking. “I’ll make final boat assignments by Thursday morning. If you want me to consider you for the A boat, you better bring your A game to practice this week.” He pauses for dramatic effect, as though he’s just said something exceptionally clever. “Okay, people, that’s it. See you tomorrow morning, not a minute after five.”

  Is he kidding? Five in the morning?

  The group disperses. Most of the girls head for the locker room, while a few linger on the deck, enjoying the morning sun. I move toward the building, hoping for a stealthy exit.

  “Hey, Ab, wait up.”

  I turn. It’s the girl from the bus again. The hat is gone now, her curls loose, and her sweatshirt is stuffed into the bag slung over her tanned shoulder. “We still on for brunch?” she asks.

  “Oh. I, uh—” Mentioning my brunch with Caitlin and Tyler feels risky. Without knowing how close my parallel is with this girl, I can’t be sure how bailing on her for plans with someone else would go over. Would she be majorly offended? Would she invite herself to join us? I close my eyes and grimace. “Sorry. I’ve just had this headache all morning.” I wince and press my temples. “It’s so weird, every time I talk, it gets worse.”

  “Oh, no. Maybe we should scrap brunch?”

  “Yeah, maybe so,” I respond, my voice thick with disappointment. Dial it back, Barnes. It’s just brunch.

  My fake headache works like a charm. I get out of brunch and avoid the risk of an awkward conversation on the ride back to campus. As a bonus, I get to listen while Britta (the girl from the bus) and Annika (Celery Girl) gossip about nearly everyone on the team. I now know that Ginger, another coxswain, doesn’t shave her legs, and that Bobbi, our team captain, is sleeping with her history TA. They ask about Michael, leading me to believe that I must be decently close with these girls, but other than that, they seem generally uninterested in the details of my life, perhaps because the other girls on the team provide more than enough fodder for discussion.

  As soon as I step off the bus, I head for Caitlin’s room.

  “I can’t live like this,” I announce when she opens the door.

  “So I guess this means I was wrong,” she says, stepping aside to let me in.

  “Oh, no, you were right. Turns out I rock the cox box.” I look around. “Where’s Tyler?”

  “In the shower. So, what was it like?” she asks excitedly. “Was it so super cool?” When I don’t react, her enthusiasm fades. “Why don’t you look happy?”

  “Because this isn’t my life,” I say simply. “She might want to spend her mornings—and her afternoons, by the way—freezing her ass off, not getting any real exercise, crouched in a space designed for small children. But, I, Abby, elect not to spend my free time staring at some girl’s camel toe.”

  Caitlin wrinkles her nose. “Spare me the visual, please.”

  “Whatever you’re picturing, it was worse in real life.” I toss my bag on the floor and fall back onto her bed, sinking into navy silk. The sheets were a gift from her mom, who’s convinced that cotton causes wrinkles. “Never again,” I vow. “The madness stops today.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “I’m getting my life back. My life.”

  “Abby, this is your life.”

  “How can you say that? Someone else is deciding what happens to me!”

  “Yes, but that ‘someone else’ is doing exactly what you would’ve done in the same situation.”

  “You’re acting like she and I are the same person,” I scoff, staring up at the ceiling.

  “That’s what makes her your parallel. She’s you, in different circumstances.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head so emphatically that my cheeks brush silk. “She and I may be sharing brain waves, but she’s not me.”

  “I know it freaks you out,” Caitlin says gently. “But Abby, that’s what our parallel selves are. By definition. You can’t keep separating ‘you’ from ‘her’ and ‘us’ from ‘them.’”

  “That’s not what Dr. Mann said.”

  Caitlin sighs. “Dr. Mann needs you to be distinct from your parallel in order to preserve free wi
ll.”

  “You don’t believe in free will?” I gape at her.

  “Free will is an illusion, Abby. Our actions are determined by our biological makeup. That’s what I’ve been trying to explain.”

  I refuse to accept this but know better than to debate with Caitlin about science. If you can even call this science. I put on a plastic smile. “So I guess that means my parallel self will quit crew next September. You know, if she’s just like me.”

  Caitlin sighs. “Abby. I get it. You feel powerless and it bugs you. But quitting the crew team won’t give you your old life back.”

  “I know that,” I snap. “But if I do something she would never do—like quitting a sport she loves, or at least, pretends to—then at least she won’t be calling the shots anymore.”

  “Oh, yeah? If you quit just to spite her, then what’s changed? Her actions are still dictating yours.” Caitlin’s voice is matter-of-fact, the way she gets when she’s convinced she’s right.

  As irritated as I am by her tone, her words give me pause. If I quit the team just to prove a point, then on some level, my parallel will still be running the show. But what’s the alternative? Letting my life be a carbon copy of hers? Unacceptable.

  “You might be right,” I tell her. “But if I stay on this path, my entire college experience will be affected by her decision to become a coxswain. My schedule, my time, my friends, my resume. All of it.” I shake my head, resolute. “No. This path ends today.”

  Caitlin sighs. “Fine. Quit the team. But don’t expect everything to change just because you do.”

  Just then, the door to Caitlin’s common room opens and Tyler appears, wearing nothing but boxers and holding a pink shower caddy.

  “Ah! My eyes are burning!” I shriek, quickly looking away.

  “I know. A body this hot should come with a warning label and some protective glasses.”

  “Pants! Please!” I yelp.

  “I didn’t realize you were such a prude, Barnes,” Tyler says, grabbing a pair of jeans from the open suitcase on the floor.

  “It’s you,” I say, making a face. “Ew.” Caitlin laughs out loud.