Music came from the cafe, acoustic guitars and voices raised in song. He heard it only vaguely, like elevator Muzak, too focused on the task ahead. But a few steps past Tallulah’s he heard the music grow louder as someone opened the door, and a voice called his name. Hope flickered and died within him as, for half a second, he thought it could be Jenny. But it wasn’t her voice.
The woman had lovely, anguished features and bright pink hair. Everything about her spoke of desperation, from her black clothing to the imploring look in her eyes. “Jim, please say you know me,” she whispered.
He blinked in surprise and studied her. “Trix?”
Something burst within her. She let out a sob and rushed to him, threw her arms around him, and held on tight. Trix Newcomb. Jenny’s best friend. Thinner than he remembered, her pink, jagged-cut hair such a radical departure from her usual look, she was barely recognizable at first. Now she wept into his shoulder, trying to talk but unable to get words out past the sobs.
“Trix,” he said again, in wonder. With some effort, he pried her away from him, staring into her face. “You remember.”
Eyes wide, she caught her breath. “I just…” She gestured at her clothes, then grabbed fistfuls of her hair. “I changed. In, like, a millisecond. I totally freaked. I didn’t know if someone had slipped me something or, shit, I just didn’t know. I went to call Jenny and her number wasn’t in my cell. Yours, either. I was already online, and I went to find it on her Facebook page, but it’s gone, so I looked for her blog, only that’s gone, too. So I called information and your number is unlisted and there’s nothing for her and then I started calling around and…”
Her voice stopped working. Her mouth opened and closed, but her lower lip quivered and fresh tears slid down her cheeks.
Jim hugged her again, so relieved to see her, to have her know him. He wasn’t alone. And if Trix remembered Jenny and Holly, then that meant that Jim wasn’t crazy. They had existed. Somehow they had vanished, and who- or whatever had taken them had managed to eliminate them from the minds of anyone who had known them, except for Jim. And now Trix.
“Holly’s gone, too,” he said. The hardest words he’d ever spoken.
“Where… where are they?” Trix pleaded with him.
Jim didn’t let her go. Trix had become his anchor. “I don’t know,” he said. “But we’ll find them. I swear we’ll find them both.”
You Won’t Make a Fool Out of Me
Once, Trix had dreamed that Jenny loved her. More than that, she had dreamed that they were in love, and so fiercely that when she had woken from that dream, it had broken her heart to realize it wasn’t real. It hardly seemed fair. She had loved Jenny since college, constantly fighting not to be the love-struck lesbian her friends had warned her she might become, mooning over the straight girl she could never have.
Over the years she had forged her love for Jenny into something sweet and mostly selfless. In the beginning, Trix had wanted to hate Jim, but she’d found herself unable to do it. They had too much in common. They had Jenny in common. And over time, Trix had come to realize that she cared for Jim nearly as much as she did Jenny, though in a very different way.
Then Holly had come along, and that had caused a metamorphosis in Trix. All the romance and lustful thoughts she had harbored for her best friend over the years had receded as her dedication to Jenny became a love for and loyalty to this family. Jenny, Holly, and even Jim… they were as much her family as anyone related to her by blood.
But sometimes she remembered that dream, and the love she felt so deeply that waking had broken her heart, and she let herself fantasize about making her way up to the apartment and entering to find Jenny alone. She toyed with the scenario in her mind, a conversation that would finally set fire to the spark between them. They would make love, Jenny discovering a part of herself she had never acknowledged. They would hold each other afterward, and it would feel so natural.
Trix never relayed these dreams to Jenny and Jim, not even in jest. After eight years of joyful marriage, Jenny might not understand.
Now Trix stood outside the door to Jim and Jenny’s apartment. She was shaking. Anticipation was part of it-she had found the one person who seemed to accept what had happened to her, and now was the time to see just how much he had changed as well-but the climb up the stairs had shaken her. She never took the elevator, always kept in shape, and three flights of stairs were more beneficial than standing in a moving box held up by a few wires. But since she’d changed, even the way she moved felt strange. She was thinner than before, more wiry, stronger, and the effort she needed to do things was different. Before, she would have walked up the stairs and been breathing a little heavy. Now she had run up and wasn’t even breathless. Her heart thumped in her chest, and she could see her T-shirt rippling beneath the leather jacket. When she closed her eyes the whole sense of herself was different-her awareness of limbs, the space her body occupied, and her personal space surrounding her. It was as if she had been removed and replaced, and the world around her refused to adapt.
It’s not the world, chick, she thought. It’s you who’s not adapting. There was an unbearable truth in that-the world was ambivalent, at best-but she couldn’t face it right now. She had to believe that she was still Trix Newcomb, and that perception of herself had changed because of quirks in the world around her. There was the pink hair and the sleeker body, yes… but inside, she was still her.
Remembering Jenny and Holly proved that. She and Jim couldn’t both be crazy, could they?
“Can we?” she whispered, and she slid Jim’s key into the lock.
He’d remained down in the parking lot, sitting in his locked, darkened car. No, she’d confirmed, she’d never seen him in the Mercedes, either. He drove a six-year-old Audi. He couldn’t face coming up here again, not right now, but he’d asked her to look for a few things.
Entering Jim and Jenny’s home, Trix thought of how much her own place might have changed. She hadn’t returned there yet. When she had felt this impossible change while out shopping, she had wanted the company of friends, not the silence of her lonely apartment.
Even the smells were different. She pushed the door closed behind her and heard it snick shut, then stood there with her eyes closed for a few seconds. The apartment felt different, smelled different, and when she opened her eyes and took a few steps into the hallway, it sounded wrong as well. She looked around. The large leather sofa looked the same as before, but it was newer, unscuffed, and not smothered with the usual mountain of scatter cushions. She was sure that the big flat-screen TV was a different make, and the Wii game console was gone, along with the slew of game boxes usually piled beneath it.
It could have been a different apartment entirely, but Trix didn’t believe that for a second. All the spaces were right, it was just what those spaces contained that seemed so wrong.
“What the fuck is this?” she said aloud, and the apartment swallowed her voice. She’d always been careful not to swear here in case Holly heard. She walked past the living room and gasped as something moved to her left. She stumbled back against the wall, bringing her fists up, shock surging through her until she realized it was herself. The mirror was a new addition to the hallway as well, perhaps there to make the space look larger. She stared into the mirror and only just recognized herself. Her sporty, urban chic style was gone. Her hair was more spiked and punky than she’d ever worn it, even as a rebellious teenager. Her face was thin and delicate, body hard and lithe instead of curvy. She knew her eyes-the pain and shock there, as well as the subtle green color that had always been her most distinctive feature.