This Time Tomorrow(24)

“Just high school, I guess,” Alice said. It wasn’t Time Brothers, whatever was happening to her, and it wasn’t Back to the Future. It was Peggy Sue Got Married. Alice tried to remember the plot. She’d fainted? No, that had been a dream, hadn’t it? Mostly? Kathleen Turner had woken up in the hospital, still married to Nicolas Cage.

The front door pushed open, and Alice watched as her boss, Melinda, attached the little metal hook to the side of the building so that the door would stay open. Alice’s breath caught in her throat, the same way it had when she saw her father at the kitchen table. She’d known Melinda for so long that she hadn’t thought of her as having changed—she looked the same, she wore the same clothes—but no: Melinda, like her father, had been young. Alice had just been too young herself to notice.

The other kids started to funnel in. Alice walked over to her father and leaned beside him.

“If you could go back in time, what would you do?” Alice asked. “Back to high school, I mean. Or college.”

“Oh, no, thank you. Wouldn’t want to change too much, because then I wouldn’t have you. And if you’re not going to change it, you don’t want to see it, trust me.” Leonard elbowed Alice gently.

“Mm-hmm.” Alice had to get back to Matryoshka. They probably didn’t open until at least five o’clock. She couldn’t think of anything she would ruin, anything she would lose, but she also did not want to live her entire life over again starting at sixteen. She had to figure out how she had ended up here, and how to shake herself out of it.

“Happy birthday, Al,” someone said behind her. Alice turned.

Tommy had his hands in his pockets. He was wearing a ringer T-shirt and had a plain brown cord tied around his neck, a homemade choker. Most of the boys at Belvedere had already moved on from the Jordan Catalano school of fashion, but not Tommy. His hair was long, and he tucked it behind his ears. He was a senior, still trying to get better SAT scores, even though his were almost perfect. Parents at Belvedere were still like this, willing to spend time and money focusing on almost instead of perfect. He looked better than she remembered, and what she remembered was heavenly. Her stomach squished in a way that it hadn’t when she’d seen him as an adult. It was like there were two of her, the teenage Alice and the grown-up Alice, sharing the same tiny patch of human real estate.

“Thanks,” Alice said. He wouldn’t touch her in front of her father.

“Hey, Tommy,” Leonard said. He nodded his head in greeting.

“Hi, Leonard,” Tommy said. “I read that book you told me about, the one with the monsters. Cthulhu.”

“And? What did you think?” Leonard dropped his cigarette and crushed it under his heel. He pushed himself off the car and took a few steps closer to Tommy, so that they were all standing in a little circle.

“Oh, it was tight,” Tommy said. “So tight.”

Alice laughed. Being at the mercy of one’s teenage slang was humiliating, and it made seeing Tommy in this state easier.

Tommy turned and started up the stairs. “See you later, Alice,” he said. “Tonight?”

It was the night of her party. Alice had forgotten. The picture from Sam, of the two of them, positively drunk on their own immortality. That was tonight.





22



It was ten before ten when a cab pulled up in front of school and Sam hopped out of the back seat, her mother behind her. Sam’s mother, Lorraine, taught in the Africana Studies department at Barnard, and always wore pearl earrings and elaborately tied scarves beneath her close-cropped hair.

“Happy birthday, happy birthday,” Sam was chanting, and before Alice could respond, Sam had wrapped her arms around Alice’s neck, tight. She was playing, like they were kids. Which Alice knew they were, but it certainly hadn’t felt like it at the time. Sam was wearing a giant polo shirt and baggy jeans, her tiny body swimming inside her clothes, and a cowrie shell necklace tight against her skin. Alice kissed Sam’s cheek, and then the other cheek, like they always did, who knows why. There were so many customs, so many codes, so many habits. Teenage girls’ skeletons were half bones and half secrets that only other teenage girls knew. Sam smoked weed out of a blown-glass bowl that she hid in a fake book on her bookshelf, a book that had been part of a magic kit that her parents had bought her for her tenth birthday.

“Hi there, Leonard, Alice—” Lorraine gestured toward the door. “Can you make sure she gets inside? I’m running to a meeting downtown.”

Leonard nodded and tossed his cigarette. Lorraine was a vegetarian and a yogi, a serious woman, but even she was not immune to Time Brothers, and she liked Leonard well enough. Well enough to let Sam sleep over as much as she wanted, even though she knew that he’d never once fed her child a vegetable. “Course.”

Lorraine folded herself back into the taxi and waved as it drove off. Sam jumped up and down, dancing.

“I’ll leave you to it, young scholars,” Leonard said. “Just come home after, okay, Al?”

“Sure, Dad,” Alice said. “I’ll come right back.”

“Lenny! Come on! It’s our girl’s birthday! Finally! I feel like I’ve been sixteen, like, forever.” Sam had turned sixteen five months ago, which had been at the tail end of the previous school year, on the other side of a whole summer, which did feel like forever ago. Leonard nodded and started to walk away. Alice lingered on the sidewalk, not wanting him to go, like in preschool when she had cried and clung to his legs until her teacher had to pry her off with a death grip.