Game changer, p.10
Game Changer, page 10
Angela was dead. She was dead. No! I wouldn’t accept that. I wouldn’t allow it to be true!
“Oh God, I’m sorry, Leo. I’m so, so sorry . . .”
“A lot of people are. You should pay now.”
And then I went out on a limb, because I had to. I just had to.
“What time do you get off?” I asked him. “There are things I need to talk to you about.”
“With all due respect, you and I got nothing to discuss.”
“It’s important!”
And then he held my gaze with such fire, it nearly made me stumble backward against the candy rack.
“You think I don’t know what you do? What you sell? And do you think I don’t know how guys like you treat girls like my sister? I want nothing to do with you, now or ever. Nothing!”
Now more and more people were taking notice. Not just shoppers but other cashiers. His manager was coming over and I worried that I might get him fired, and I thought, So what? This job sucks. He’ll get a better one. But what if he couldn’t? What if the things Leo had going for him didn’t mean a damn thing in this place?
“Please, Leo,” I said. Now I was begging. “Whatever you think I’m gonna say to you, you’re wrong.”
Maybe he finally read the sincerity in my voice. And maybe I was starting to tear up. Okay, not maybe, definitely. And he saw it. Tears for Angela, tears for him, tears for everything that had been lost. His glare softened. He was about to say something—but then I heard a voice behind me.
“C’mon,” the guy behind me in line said, “some of us have places to be!”
I could have taken him out at that moment. Just put all my emotions behind a fist, and knocked that guy halfway to next week’s specials. But who the hell knew what next week would be? Instead, I controlled myself. I wiped my eyes before the tears rolled down my face. I fumbled with my wallet and shoved my card into the reader.
Then Leo said, “I get off when I get off. If you’re still waiting outside when my shift is over, I’ll talk to you. Now leave.”
That was the best I was going to get, and it was good enough. I took my pointless groceries, and I went to my car. I waited there for hours. Long past sunset, listening to music I didn’t like, in a car I shouldn’t own.
I almost missed Leo when he came out. He certainly wasn’t looking for me. To Leo, I was just a weird blip in his day that probably got him a scolding from his manager. A nuisance best forgotten. He was halfway across the parking lot by the time I spotted him. It was dark now. I got out of my car and called to him. He turned, acknowledging that he heard me, but just kept on walking. I caught up with him at a bus stop. He was sitting, waiting for a bus, and actively ignoring me. I didn’t sit down—I felt like I needed to earn the right to intrude on his airspace—although, to be honest, I was already a pretty uninvited intrusion.
“So you stayed all day waiting for me to get off work?”
“I did,” I told him. “I would have waited longer. I would have waited all night if I had to.” I had hoped that would impress upon him how legitimate I was—how important this was to both of us. Instead it just came off as weird.
“Either you’re not right in the head, or there’s something seriously wrong with you,” he said. It made me laugh, because that was something Leo would say back in the world where we were friends.
“Sit down,” he invited. “You’re making me nervous.”
So I did. I sat next to him.
“Tell me why you’re here,” he said, “and if there’s anything I don’t like about it, I walk.”
“I thought you were taking a bus.”
Normally Leo would call me a smartass for that, but instead he just said, “Point taken.”
I drew a deep breath. For hours I had been running through my aching mind all the things I was going to say—but now none of them felt right. They all seemed like things that would literally make him walk—or more likely run—than wait for the bus. So I reached in and pulled something out of my brain that I didn’t even know was there.
“When you were a baby you burned your left hand on an oven door,” I said. I knew that burn had carried over into this world because I could see his scarred palm. “You always felt like it was a little gift from God, because it roughed up your palm just enough to make it a little bit easier to catch a pass.”
He was unimpressed. “There’s a thousand ways you coulda known that. You coulda talked to people who know me. Hell, you coulda read the interview a school reporter did. It’s old news,” he said. “Older still, because I dropped out before it could mean anything anyway.”
I tried to hide the pain I felt at hearing that. I knew that to reach him, I had to dig deeper.
“When you were eight,” I told him, noticing the small scar on his left cheek, “you got hit by a drunk driver while you were on your bike. Hit and run. You broke a few ribs, and it left you with that scar. The guy would have gotten away with it, but you remembered the last three digits of the license plate. For more than a year you would go out riding everywhere in town until you finally found the right car. The guy was convicted and went to jail for it.”
Leo tried to act unimpressed again, but I could tell that it was getting to him. I could tell by the way he rolled his shoulders, like he had a kink in his neck. It’s what he always did when trying to hide the fact that something was working on his nerves.
“You got that wrong,” he said. “I found the guy, but he never went to jail. He pleaded it out, and they gave him community service.” Leo spat out a breath. “Can you believe that? Community service for hitting a kid on a bike and taking off. I don’t know why I even bothered.”
“Well, he went to jail where I come from.”
That made him look at me. “Exactly where do you come from?”
I chose not to answer that. Not yet, anyway. I decided to try to reach him one more time. I had to come up with something I couldn’t find out elsewhere. Something he never spoke about to anyone. Anyone but me. It came to me in a flash, and I smiled as I remembered—I could only hope it happened in this world, too.
“You shaved your head in seventh grade,” I told him. “Because you thought it would make you look cool.”
Now he turned to me with suspicion, and maybe a little bit of fear. But I wasn’t done.
“You hated the way it looked, though, so for a month you wore a baseball cap until your hair started to grow back in.”
Now I could tell he was slightly freaked out—but I still wasn’t done. Now I went in for the kill.
“That’s when you found a lump on the back of your shaved head—a little off center. You didn’t tell your parents about it, but until it went away, you were convinced it was a brain tumor.”
Now Leo looked angry.
“How the hell do you know that?”
“Because you confided in your best friend, and your best friend told you that little lump wasn’t a tumor, it was your entire brain, and you punched him so hard it left a bruise on his arm for like a week.” My eyes were moist now. So were his.
“I never told anyone,” he insisted. “Not my friends, not anyone—and definitely not you!”
“But you remember it a little, don’t you? Like maybe you did—”
“I’m remembering a dream, that’s all. Maybe I dreamed I told someone.”
“How would I know something you dreamed?”
He had no answer to that. None at all.
“What the fuck are you?”
The fact that he said “what” instead of “who” was a good sign. It was a sign that he realized this was bigger than just him and me. That this was a thing. A thing that had to be reckoned with. So I went all in, and decided to answer his previous question.
“I’m from a place where you and I are best friends, and you don’t work as a cashier at Publix, and you still play football, with your eye on USC. Where I come from, your life is going places I could only dream mine would go.”
That made him disappear into himself for a long moment. A bus came. The door opened. The driver looked at Leo for a second, and Leo waved him off. The door closed, and the bus pulled out, the noisy drone of its engines fading into the normal buzz of late-night traffic and the rustling of leaves that were already starting to yellow.
“You don’t make any sense,” Leo said, wiping away what might have been a tear. It didn’t linger long enough for me to be sure. “USC might as well be the moon.”
“Guion Bluford—the first African American in space.” I wondered if it was true in this world. I wanted to believe it was, but doubted it. “Not quite the moon, but close.” And then I added, “You taught me that.”
Leo shook his head. “‘African American,’” he said. “Here, it’s just black, or negro, or s’equal, or worse.”
I wanted to tell him I was sorry about that. About everything—all the shitty cards he got dealt, and the fact that his entire deck was now stacked with shitty cards. But the other Leo would remind me that the cards in my world weren’t all that much better. That segregation and stolen opportunities still happened in sneaky, and not-so-sneaky, ways.
“This is all crazy, you know that, right?” Leo said.
I shrugged. “But you’re still listening.”
“Maybe because I’m just as crazy as you.”
Then he bit his lip. “And in this place you say you come from . . . What happened to my sister?”
I chose my words carefully. Spoke slowly. “She’s still here, Leo,” I told him. “She had meningitis but survived it. Better doctors, I guess. She’s a junior at Tibbetsville High—made varsity volleyball.”
His tears flowed freely now; he didn’t even try to hide them, but through them he still let out a rueful laugh. “T-ville High? Now I know you’re making shit up.”
“It’s integrated, Leo. All schools are. Or at least they’re supposed to be.”
He took a moment, then dismissed it as too much to swallow. “Right, and we got a black president, and everyone’s got their own pet dragons.”
“We did have a Black president,” I told him. “For eight years. No dragons, though.”
Leo let it all brew for a bit, and then he surprised me. “You know what?” he said. “As crazy as you sound, it’s just late enough, and I’m just tired enough, that I believe you.”
But I knew it was a little more than that. I knew from how Katie and Hunter had reacted around me. There was still the memory of memories there. I thought about an old cassette tape my dad played for me. A “mix tape” from the ’80s, long before playlists were a thing. In between songs you could hear the hint of older music—music that had been recorded over. I had turned up the volume all the way to see if I could recognize the song underneath, but never could.
“So if everything you’re saying is true,” Leo asked, “what are we supposed to do about it?”
“I don’t know, Leo. I just don’t know.”
“Then why the hell did you come here?” he said, getting angry. “Why the hell are you giving me useless stories about a world I can’t be a part of?”
“Because maybe you could help me make it real again.”
And that hung heavy in the air between us for a long time.
We didn’t talk much after that. He didn’t ask me any more questions. In the end I gave him my phone number—and he guessed the last two digits before I said them. More proof for him. More hidden tones in the silence between songs.
When the next bus came, he got up.
“Don’t expect me to call you,” he said. “Ever.”
But I knew he would. Because I knew Leo. I’d know him in any world.
I said I’d get back to the skaters. Here’s where they reenter in their strange elliptical orbit. As I was walking back to my car in the Publix parking lot, which was mostly empty now, I heard the unmistakable high rumble of polyurethane wheels on asphalt. Turns out I didn’t have to go looking for the skaters; instead, they found me.
As Hunter had said, they weren’t twins, they were triplets. Identical triplets. The instance of identical triplets is one in 60,000 births. I know this because it was a Jeopardy! answer that got stuck in my head like a piece of toilet paper on my shoe. Random useless facts plague me.
I have to admit I was relieved to see them. I didn’t know what their connection to these reality shifts was, but I knew they were connected. After all, they remembered the Tsunamis, which meant that maybe they could give me some answers.
The trio of identical skaters began to circle me—and I noticed pretty quickly that their boards were like perpetual motion machines. That is to say, they never had to put a foot down to push themselves. It was as if, no matter where they were, every direction was downhill. I never found out their names, so to make things easier, let’s just call them Ed, Edd, and Eddy, in honor of my misspent Cartoon Network childhood.
“You screwed up big this time, didn’t you, Ash?” Ed said.
“What do you know about it?” I asked—and I wasn’t just matching his attitude, it was a legitimate question.
“We know what we know,” said Edd.
“Which is a lot less than what we don’t know,” said Eddy.
They were moving around me fast enough to make me dizzy when I tried to focus on any one of them. “Why don’t you start by telling me who the hell you are.”
“Just your typical neighborhood skater bros,” said Ed, with a smirk.
“Ask anyone who knows us,” added Edd.
“Oh, wait, no one knows us,” concluded Eddy.
I was starting to understand their dynamic. Ed was the alpha sibling, as he always seemed to answer first. Edd followed with a snide comment, and Eddy was the closer. “Are you here just to mess with me, or are you going to help me?”
And then they started talking in a very literal round-robin that made me even more dizzy.
“We haven’t been ‘messing with you.’”
“We were testing you.”
“To see how quick you were.”
“Not very.”
“But he caught on quicker than some.”
“True, but I’m not impressed.”
“Me neither.”
“It could be worse.”
I wanted to grab one of them, pull him off his skateboard, and shake something helpful out of him, but I knew that would be counterproductive. Impulse control was key here. Instead I took a deep breath and tried to find my happy place. Or at least my less-miserable place.
“Look, I know something’s broken, and I know I broke it. If you can help me fix it, then I’m all ears.”
Then the three stopped circling. They hopped off their boards in unison, kicking them up into their arms, and stood there. Somehow, though, it still seemed like the world was spinning around me. Optical illusion. I’ll go with that.
“All ears,” Edd said without the slightest bit of irony. “If you’re not careful, you might be.”
I released a shuddering breath. He was dead serious.
“What the hell is going on?” I asked, trying to meet each of their identical gazes. “Don’t you think I deserve to know?”
They were silent for a moment, studying me. Two of them looked to the leader, who stepped forward. Ed held my gaze a moment more, and sighed. “The best way to explain your circumstance is probably the worst thing we could tell a human being.”
“Understood,” I said, bracing myself. “Tell me anyway.”
Ed looked to the other two, to make sure they were all in agreement. They seemed to be, although reluctantly. Then Ed turned to me, and said:
“You, Ashley Bowman, have become the center of the universe.”
9
All the Things That Never Happened
The center of the universe. I suppose we all imagine ourselves in that position. Even though most of us know we’re not, we can’t help but feel, on some subconscious level, that we are. When we’re babies, we can’t tell the difference between the world and ourselves. The whole of creation is just a part of us; just another uncooperative appendage to go along with our legs that can’t walk, and hands that can barely grasp. Then, as we’re learning to walk and talk, we recognize the foreignness of things outside of our bodies, but still feel that we’re at the center of it all. Some of us never grow past that, but most of us do move on to adulthood. Once we’re adults, we’ve learned to pretend that we don’t think we’re the center of the universe. But deep down, a part of us will always believe that we are. If you need proof, look at all the people who buy lottery tickets, enter sweepstakes, or go to Las Vegas. People who believe fortunes will fall their way in spite of all logic and proven mathematical odds, because when you secretly think you’re the center of the universe, you feel outrageously lucky.
And now I was told that I was, indeed, the center of the universe. So why didn’t I feel like I won the lottery?
Maybe because being the center of the universe is like being an only child in a family with extremely high expectations. Nothing you do will ever be good enough.
That’s where the skaters come in.
They’re not skaters, if you haven’t figured that much out. They told me, and I quote: “We are multidimensional beings that project into your world in this unobtrusive, camouflaged form.”
No one seems to have told them that being skater triplets is not exactly unobtrusive camouflage.
“Our purpose is to quell disturbances,” Ed told me.
“So you’re like God’s therapists?” I suggested.
“If there’s a God—and we’re not saying that there is,” said Edd, “he/she/they would not need therapy.”
“And if there is no God—and we’re not saying that there isn’t,” said Eddy, “then the universe would be an it rather than a he/she/they, and wouldn’t need therapy either.”
“We quell disturbances, let’s just leave it at that,” said Ed. “Now follow us and don’t get lost on the way.”
There was an abandoned Toys “R” Us up on Oldchurch Road that never got repurposed when the company went belly-up. It just sat there behind a chain-link fence, presiding over a weed-filled parking lot like a horror movie waiting to happen. This was where the Edwards led me.
