“I guess.” I shook my head, trying to imagine a future where I traveled through time and called myself Tess. “I read that you can die or go insane if you meet yourself when you travel.”
“Yeah, I was worried about that. There is almost nothing in the geoscience journals about it. That’s because of legal issues, obviously. But there could be other problems, like an edit merging conflict where two versions of history overlap. That could cause… extremely negative cognitive effects. I’m taking a risk.”
As I listened, I realized that Tess’s eyes were the exact same color as mine. Of course they were. And her right ear was triple-pierced; I could remember getting that done last summer at the mall. For the first time, I considered that this was actually happening. This was real. I was having a conversation with my future self and I was murdering people… or maybe I was being fucked with on a grand scale. If this woman was not a hallucination, maybe she was some kind of con artist.
“How do I know you’re really me and not a scammer?”
“I know you had an abortion. Because of what happened with Hamid. I also know you only told Lizzy, Soojin, and Heather. And Lizzy’s mom.”
“You could have found that out from the doctor, or from any of my friends, or who knows what.”
“Your… our father. We never told anyone what happened that one night.”
I dug my fingers into the park bench so I could feel the splinters go in. Tess was right. I had never told anyone. Hearing someone talk about my secret—even if she was technically me—had an almost physical effect. A stagnant pool of feeling was evaporating out of my chest. Tess had confirmed that my memories of that night were real.
“Now do you believe me? Can we talk about Lizzy?”
“Is something bad going to happen to us? Are we going to get caught?”
Tess shook her head. “I’ve already said enough. I’m not going to tell you anything else about the future. Let’s focus on the present.”
I couldn’t reply. There was too much happening. I kept grinding my hands harder into the bench and thinking about how every time my father touched me it felt like drowning. I stared at Tess—at myself—and wondered what pronouns to use for her. It sounded weird to call her “me,” but scientifically inaccurate to say “her” or “you.” Still, if I really was me, I was an unknown me, or possibly a potential me. We were altering the timeline right now. I decided to go with “she” and “her” as pronouns, at least for the moment.
It didn’t seem like Tess was having the same lexical vertigo. “Lizzy has a lot of problems and she’s sucking you into them. Do you know what I mean?”
“I have problems too. I’m the one who killed Mr. Rasmann. I’m the one whose dad…” I stopped myself. There was no easy word, like murder, for what my father had done.
“Yeah, but Lizzy caused that. I mean, she caused the murder.” She shot me a nervous frown, and for the first time something looked vaguely familiar about her. Trying to find my features in her face was the inverse of hunting through my mother’s baby book, packed with snapshots of a tiny, puffy-faced stranger. I couldn’t believe either of them was me, separated only by years of cell division.
“Okay, so what do you want me to do about Lizzy?”
“Do about…? No, there’s nothing you can do. You have to get the hell away from her.”
“She’s my best friend. Our best friend! I can’t do that. Plus, what about Heather and Soojin? I can’t stop talking to them, too.”
Tess seemed pensive, as if she hadn’t really considered any of that. “You don’t have to stop talking to them. But you have to get away from Lizzy. If she tries to pull you into this murder thing again, you have to say no. You have to leave, no matter where you are. Do you understand?”
“Why aren’t you talking to Lizzy instead of me? Shouldn’t you be telling her to stop murdering people too?”
She sighed. “No. It’s about more than the murders. Lizzy is a bad person. At least, she is right now. She’s out of control. She gets people to do things and then doesn’t take responsibility for it. Do you understand what I mean?”
I thought about how Lizzy was always the decider. Then I remembered how she’d hugged me when I was scared. How she and her mom had rescued me from the worst possible thing I could imagine. I shook my head. “I don’t think Lizzy is like that. I mean, she’s not perfect, but… she wants to protect us.”
“She didn’t have to murder Scott to protect you. She didn’t have to murder Mr. Rasmann. And now all of you are implicated.”
“I mean, she’s angry sometimes… and I know we shouldn’t have killed anybody. I know that. But it’s not going to happen again.”
“It will.”
“But maybe we’ve already changed the timeline, right? Maybe I can stop Lizzy next time and then there won’t be more murders.”
“Travel can cause a lot of random effects, so I suppose that’s remotely possible. But typically edits of that magnitude are a lot more difficult than you might think.” She sounded like a professor, which I guess she was. At least she’d gone into geoscience like I planned.
Tess regarded me with her uncanny face, half-self, half-other. I knew she was right that we’d done something very wrong, and we had to stop. But I didn’t want to be on her side about dumping Lizzy, especially when she used her teacher voice. I stood up. “You don’t know for sure! I might be about to change the future right now!”
“You’re not. And besides, you don’t need to change the future. You need to deal with what’s happening today. This situation with Lizzy is going to get really dangerous. These murders have consequences.”
“You said before we’re not going to get caught. Do you think anyone believes that we could kill a serial killer? Or a rapist? No! They blame it on drifters and criminals! They say men did it!” My voice was jagged with rage, and I was saying everything that came into my head. “I don’t care if you are me—you aren’t me! I would never stop being friends with Lizzy! She’s a good person! So whatever fucked-up shit you did to become you, I’m not going to do it!”
I walked away fast, before Tess could reply. When finally I glanced back, she was hunched over, hands covering her face.
My mom was on the phone when I got home. She ignored me as I pulled the vacuum cleaner out of the hall closet and dragged it upstairs. My father’s shoe obsession had evolved into a more generalized obsession with preserving the cleansed state of the rug. I vacuumed upstairs twice a week, making sure to get every corner. Sometimes dirt and fluff would hide between the edge of the furniture and the wall. The worst was the hair, though. My mother and I both had long hair, and removing it from the rug was a key part of this chore ritual.
I began in my room, using the hose attachment with its bristly mouth to get beneath the narrow bed and around my dresser. I shook out the comforter covered in horses I’d gotten for Hanukkah seven years ago. Then I dusted my desk and bookshelves, all part of a fancy wooden wall unit my father had installed with maniacal precision, deploying rulers and specialized screwdrivers and a level full of golden liquid that caught the light as he worked. My books covered up the indentation where he’d punched the wall when one of the screws didn’t quite fit. I could still hear his voice from that day, rising to a high, birdlike pitch as he reached the peak of his rage. “You know why this doesn’t work? Because the people who put this kit together are goddamn lazy! There’s no reason why they can’t give you good materials! No reason other than… deliberately cutting corners!” And then the blur of his arm connecting with the wall as his words crashed together to make one, furious sound.