Unhappenings (5 page)

So many things went through my head at that moment. “I don’t know what that means,” I said. She pursed her lips, in an expression I read to mean no simple explanation was forthcoming. But it didn’t matter. She knew what it meant, and that was enough to sustain me for the time being. “Who are you?” I asked.

At that, she finally smiled, and it was delightful. “You can’t ask me that one,” she said. “Not yet.” And suddenly, I did know who she was. I had been fixating on the beret. I should have been picturing her in a denim jacket.

“Are you…” I began, and then realized I hardly knew how to form the question. This was the woman who had appeared when a paper I wrote in physics class was nearly published, and then nearly got me expelled, all in one horrific unhappening. I saw her twice, and then never again. But that woman was easily five years older than I was, and this girl was quite a bit younger. “Did you intervene with my physics teacher when I was in high school?” I asked awkwardly.

She grinned at that. “Huh,” she said. “I honestly have no idea.”

And then it gelled. None of that had happened to her yet. This young girl would grow up to be—on at least one occasion—my time traveling savior. But not now. Now, she was just a girl, whose life had been riddled with inconsistencies, just as mine had been. I had already deduced time travel was my eventual destiny. Clearly, some day, it would be hers as well.

And she already knew it.

skipped the rest of my classes that day. We got a pizza. For the first time in six years, I had found someone with whom I could be honest about what my life had become. She didn’t think I was a nut job, she didn’t find me confusing, and she understood exactly how it felt to be me. It was so invigorating that none of the restrictions she put on what she was willing to share in return bothered me—and those restrictions were intense.

“If you don’t give me some kind of name to work with, I’m just going to call you Blondie.”

“No you’re not,” she said.

I took a bite. The pepperoni didn’t bite back quite hard enough, so I added some pepper flakes. “No,” I agreed. “I’m not. I’m going to call you Gray Beret. Or Hey You.”

She slurped the bottom of her soda. Rattled the ice. “Nope,” she said, standing. “You’re going to find my name on your own, and it’s going to be a good one, but not today.” She went to refill her drink, giving me a moment to reflect on her oblique prophesy. I wondered how much she already knew of her own future, and mine, and how much of this name mystery was real. My honest impression at that moment was she was just using it as an excuse to seem more exotic. When she returned, she pulled another slice onto her plate without comment, and then looked at me patiently instead of eating.

“All right, Susan,” I said. She smiled faintly, shook her head ever so slightly, but did not interrupt. “Why does my life keep unhappening?”

She thought about this for a moment, then around a mouthful of pizza, she said, “You think I’m your fairy godmother, or your guardian angel or something. I’m not. I’m just a fellow traveler. You and I exist on the same level, and a lot of your questions are my questions too.”

“But you know things I don’t.”

She nodded. “Mm hmm. Not as much as you think, but yeah. And more than I can tell you,” she added with a slight pout.

“I’m getting that. I don’t suppose you can tell me why that is.”

“I wish I could. It’s nothing bad, if that’s what you’re thinking. You’re not in any kind of weird danger or anything. It’s just…” She fidgeted with a plastic fork, spearing a pepperoni and twirling it into a small gob of cheese. “Some stuff will make more sense to you if you work it out on your own.”

“That’s a dodge,” I said.

“You betcha.”

I laughed. Calling her out wasn’t going to get me anywhere. “All right, let’s take it from the top. What can you tell me?”

She shrugged. “What do you want to know? Ask me little things. Yes or no.”

I drummed my fingers on the table. “Is this a real thing? Is the world really changing all the time, and nobody notices but me?”

“You’re not nuts, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“That’s what I’m asking. Is there anyone else? Anyone besides you and me?”

She considered this, and I tried to read whether she was considering the answer, or just deciding if she was going to tell me. “Yeah,” she said.

“Lots of people?”

“That I don’t know,” she said.

“Are you a student here?” Her eyebrows went up, indicating the question had its desired effect; it threw her.

“No,” she said.

“You don’t look old enough.”

“That’s not why,” she said quickly. “Um, that’s… Don’t ask me stuff about me, okay?”

I leaned back in my seat and sighed. “Throw me a bone here, Penelope. You’re the first person I’ve really been able to talk to for a very long time, and you’re not saying anything.”

“Penelope,” she said. “I like that one. Call me that.”

“Did I find your name?” I asked. “That seems too easy.”

“No, but I like it. It’ll do for a while.” She took another bite, and continued to talk while chewing. “You don’t want to know about me, anyway. You want to know about the other thing. And I can tell you about that; I just have to be sure to tell it right. You know?”

“Not really.”

“Try this: You say I’m the first person you can talk to, so talk. You go first. Tell me about yourself. Tell me about what changes, and what you do when it happens.”

I thought about this. Apart from my aborted psycho-therapy sessions, I had never opened up about the most important part of what it meant to be me. “It’s usually little stuff,” I began. “Conversations that I know I had but no one else did. Stuff I’m supposed to do but don’t know about. Objects that appear, or disappear, or turn into other things. When it’s that kind of unhappening, it’s just embarrassing. People think I’m a flake, that I forget everything, that I’m unreliable. That’s why I don’t socialize much.”

“That’s an easy fix.”

I perked up. “I’m sorry, what did you just say?”

She sipped her drink. “I said you can fix that.” She waved away what must have been obvious on my face. “I don’t mean you can stop it from happening; I mean you don’t have to be embarrassed. There are tricks I can teach you.”

“Is that why you’re here?” I asked.

“Partly,” she admitted. “From now on, you’re on the attention deficit spectrum.”

I shook my head. “Is that a real thing?”

“Oh yeah,” she said. “It’s very real. You don’t have it, but it’s real. It’s a disorder. Um,” she added, “I hope that’s okay.”

“Tell me how this helps me.”

“Right. Well, it’s basically an underactive frontal lobe issue. The diagnosis is about a hundred years old, and they used to treat it with stimulants. In 2087 it’s treated mostly as a low-grade perceptual dissociation, and they don’t always medicate for it, depending on where you fall on the spectrum. So, no pills, don’t worry about that. I can teach you the management tools deficit spectrum people use. Basically, you’re going to mimic what a person does who has clinically chronic and severe issues remembering things and staying organized. You’re going to use these tricks in an obvious way, and work it into conversations over and over again. You will be making a show of how much work it is for you to remember all the stuff that you don’t actually have any trouble remembering. Everyone will come to know you as an extremely high-functioning ADD. When your life does unhappen, the little stuff I mean, it will look like you slipped. Your friends will step up with reminders and favors because they think they’re helping you catch up.”

“I don’t have any friends.”

“You will,” she said, and for the first time since Carrie Wolfe, I remembered what optimism feels like.

“It sounds manipulative.”

She slurped the bottom of her drink again. “It totally is. And it works like a charm.”

“My God,” I said quietly. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Well, you should probably say thank you, but wait until I train you and it works first. Welcome to survival, Nigel.” Then her smile faded to something more contemplative. “Now,” she said, “tell me about the bad ones.”

he first time I used one of the tricks Penelope taught me and made me practice until I got it right, I couldn’t help but wonder what circle of Hell was reserved for people who pretended to have disabilities. To be fair, I rationalized it with the secret understanding that I did have a disability, just not one that was diagnosable, or even remotely explainable.