The Future of Another Timeline

^THIRTEEN BETH

Irvine, Alta California (1992 C.E.)… East Los Angeles, Alta California (1992 C.E.)

Now we were murderers for sure. What happened with our teacher Mr. Rasmann wasn’t like with Scott. We hadn’t been surprised or attacked. We’d killed him to get revenge for something he hadn’t even done to us. I don’t think any of us could forget the way we left his body on the floor, ripped up and battered like an old sleeping bag after a summer at Girl Scout camp.

Four days after that night at Mr. Rasmann’s apartment, we met at Lizzy’s house to listen to records. That was the pretext, anyway. All we could talk about was what we’d done.

“I mean, the guy did deserve it. You saw those pictures in his shitty, fucked-up look book—he was molesting girls at our school.” Lizzy was plucking invisible things out of the shag rug on her bedroom floor as she talked. Soojin, Heather, and I drank peach wine coolers we’d stolen from the fridge. Lizzy’s parents were on a trip to Jordan again—some kind of academic conference. Lizzy’s mom had given me an extra-long hug when they left earlier in the evening, and made both of us promise to clean up any “riot grrl ragers” in the works. I couldn’t decide whether it was more embarrassing that she knew the term “riot grrl,” or that she’d used the word “rager” non-ironically.

“I guess, but…” I kept thinking of that strange woman, telling me I didn’t have to do something I’d regret. Then I thought about Mr. Rasmann’s eyeballs and wanted to barf.

Soojin broke in hotly. “He was raping a ton of girls. We had to do something.”

“It’s not like he wasn’t going to do something creepy to us. He probably put Valiums in that booze.” Heather screwed up her face as she contemplated it. “Plus, think of all the other girls we saved. Maybe we even saved their lives. Guys like that start with rape but they become serial killers.” Heather had been obsessed with serial killers ever since the Night Stalker murdered some people in Orange County when we were kids.

“What if we get caught?” I asked. “I don’t think we can say it was self-defense.” I looked expectantly at Lizzy, our decider.

“We’ve got to get our stories straight. We can say he tried to get us drunk and told us to take off our clothes. Which, basically, that was going to happen.”

“But then why didn’t we run away and call the police?” I was dubious.

“I dunno… maybe we reacted in the moment? Or, like, he grabbed one of us?”

“I think maybe… he grabbed me and you guys jumped him to protect me?” Soojin extemporized as she played with one of her barrettes, opening and closing it with a click. I felt like I’d stumbled into an awful after-school improv theater class project. Just a bunch of girls, doing an enrichment exercise, using our creativity to invent an alibi for why we killed our teacher.

“I still think that… technically… this was murder. It wasn’t like with Scott.” As I said it, I glanced at Heather, who knew better than any of us what it was like with Scott.

She looked back and shrugged. “Do you want to go to jail for life because we killed a guy who was going to kill us, or kill some other girls in the future? For all we know, he’s killed girls before.”

“Look, I’m not saying he wasn’t heinous and evil and obviously… I’m the one…” I trailed off. I wasn’t actually sure who among us had delivered the killing blow. It was a blur of glass shards and globby viscera in my memory. But I was the one jamming thumbs into his eye sockets. I was the one holding him down.

“So just in case…” Lizzy’s tone held a burr of annoyance. “Let’s settle on a story. Setting aside all this other stuff. Because I think we all agree that we shouldn’t go to jail over some fucking assface molester.”

“Okay.”

“The story is that he invited us to his house, tried to get us drunk, and said we had to take off our clothes. Then he grabbed Soojin, and we attacked him without thinking.”

“And we didn’t go to the police because we were so scared.”

“We didn’t realize he was dead when we left.”

“Oh yeah, that’s good. We thought we’d only beaten him up.”

“Are you okay with that, Beth?” Everybody looked at me.

“Sure.” I nodded vigorously, but some unnamable feeling compressed my chest so hard that black dots fizzed at the edges of my vision.

Our homicidal improv exercise turned out to be overkill in the end. A week later, the story hit the papers everywhere. It wasn’t a snippet in The Orange County Register like when Scott died. The cops claimed they’d discovered the mastermind of a child porn ring, right at Irvine High School. They suspected that Mr. Rasmann had been murdered by some of his co-conspirators. We all got letters on official Irvine High letterhead, explaining that nobody had reported any wrongdoing at the school, but they were doing a “thorough investigation” anyway. They helpfully included a list of churches we could call for counseling.

Also, apparently, Soojin hadn’t been entirely wrong about the serial killer thing. Police were reopening the unsolved murder case of a girl who went to an L.A. high school where Mr. Rasmann had been a student teacher. Several of the evening news shows ran pictures of her and said the police had evidence that she was one of his victims. One of the girls in his look book, perhaps? I should have felt better, but instead it made me feel worse.

I couldn’t sleep, but I couldn’t open my eyes either. My mom knocked loudly on my door at noon on a Friday. “Lizzy’s on the phone! Do you want me to tell her to call back whenever you decide to get out of bed?”

Waking up was like swimming through reeking hydrocarbons. “I’ll get it. I’ll be down in a sec.”

Bleary and exhausted, I went downstairs and picked up the phone. “Meet at the usual place?” Lizzy sounded breezy. “Soojin and Heather are coming out too.”

“Sure. Can you pick me up?”

Lizzy and I met up with Soojin and Heather at the mall cookie shop across the street from UC Irvine. We shared sugar and cigarettes in our favorite spot at the top of an unnecessarily elaborate bridge leading to the quad where a scene from one of the Planet of the Apes movies was filmed in the ’70s.

Heather kept high-fiving us. “Heroes! We are goddamn heroes!”

Lizzy grinned and blew a smoke ring.

I still thought we should have done it differently. But I couldn’t say that out loud. It was getting hard for me to keep track of all the things I couldn’t talk about: the sex, the abortion, the murders, and my worry that we’d done something really, really wrong. Nothing felt real. The physical world was a blob of light at the end of a long, elastic tunnel that kept squeezing shut.

“Who’s our next target?” Heather rubbed her hands together and cackled.

I knew she was joking, but suddenly I couldn’t deal. “Hey, so… I promised my dad that I would get all my chores done this afternoon,” I said. “I think I’m gonna take off.”

“Are you sure? Do you need a ride?” Lizzy sounded genuinely concerned.

“Naw, I’ll take the bus.”

As I walked away, I heard Heather ask Lizzy if I was doing okay.

“Obviously she’s dealing with a lot of shit…,” Lizzy replied.

And then I was out of earshot. I really did need to do my chores, but first I wanted to sit in the middle of all the huge eucalyptus trees at the center of the UCI campus. The place was pretty deserted in summer, except for a few wandering college students who ignored me. If I concentrated hard enough, I could pretend I was one of the trees, eating light and sucking energy from soil.

“I thought I’d find you here.”

I almost jumped up and ran. It was the woman from the night of the murder, sitting on the other end of the bench. What was she doing here? Suddenly, I couldn’t stop feeling Mr. Rasmann’s eyeballs under my thumbs. My hands shook and ice clotted under my skin, but I couldn’t move. The woman wasn’t in that Gunne Sax outfit anymore. Now she looked relatively normal in jeans and a baggy sweatshirt. In the light, I could see her long hair was streaked with gray, and her tiny wireframe glasses looked like something out of a Merchant Ivory movie.

“It’s you again.” I was too freaked out to say anything else.

“We really need to talk.”

“Yeah, I think we do.”

She looked relieved. “Oh good. That wasn’t what I thought you’d say.”

“Who the fuck are you, and how do you know Lizzy and me?” It came out harsher than I intended, but I was too strung out to translate my feelings into words a grownup could handle.

“Beth, this is going to sound really strange, but bear with me.” The woman took a deep breath and resettled her glasses on her nose. When she spoke again, there was a tremor in her voice. “I’m you. From the future.”

My brain was doing the thing that happens when a PC crashes and the screen turns a blank, menacing blue. I couldn’t fully process anything. Finally I found my voice. “Isn’t that against the law?”

“Well, it’s not technically against the law unless I tell you something that would limit your agency or give you an unfair advantage? But yeah, it’s a gray area. I could get in a lot of trouble.”

I scrutinized her face, looking for traces of myself, but all I saw was a middle-aged stranger. Our conversation had gone from unnerving to seriously dangerous, and I considered the possibility that every fucked-up thing in my life had finally driven me insane. Given that, I might as well find out what this possibly imaginary person had to say. “So… what are you… am I… doing here?”

“I’m here to tell you to get away from Lizzy. She’s going to keep killing people and it’s… you know it’s wrong. Plus, she’s a toxic friend. She’s not good for you.”

Those were words I had not allowed myself to think and I desperately wanted to change the subject. “You’re a traveler? I thought we were going to study real geology…”

“A lot changed after you… after the murders. I can’t tell you much, but it was really awful. I wanted a totally different life. I changed our name, too. I go by Tess now.”

“Are you serious? I hate that name.”

“Remember how we used to hate dark chocolate in elementary school? Now it’s the best ever, right? Things change.”

“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.

I moved into the hallway, around the nook where we kept the Mac SE on a tiny table, its only companion a tidy plastic box of floppies. As the roar of the vacuum cleaner sank into me, it became a soothing overlay on everything that had happened this afternoon. I wondered if I should have stayed to talk with Tess for longer. Maybe she could have told me more about what was going on. Or maybe she would have kept insisting that I dump Lizzy as a friend. Which—it’s not like I hadn’t considered that on my own. But I loved Lizzy, and we’d been best friends since we were little. I couldn’t imagine my life without her. I wasn’t going to stop being friends with her just because some asshole from my future said so.

I was so deep in thought that I almost jumped when my father’s hand wrapped around my shoulder from behind. Thankfully I remained outwardly calm and switched off the motor. In the years since that night—the one Tess confirmed was real—I’d learned to make no sudden moves.

“Thanks for doing the vaccuming, Beth.” His pale blue eyes revealed nothing. I couldn’t tell what his mood might be, which meant the best tactic was to play along. Pretend I’d done the cleaning to be nice, rather than to avoid punishment.

“No problem.” I smiled brightly. Were we friends today?

He smiled back and I didn’t relax at all. “Let’s see how it looks.” He walked into my room and swept his fingers through the rug, leaving a jagged claw mark behind. One long hair was snarled between his fingers. “Huh.” He sounded perplexed, as if he couldn’t understand how the strand had gotten there. Then he looked meaningfully at me.

“I’m not really done yet. Almost, though!” I smiled again, his friendly daughter, having a perfectly normal conversation with her perfectly normal father.

He walked back downstairs without saying a word. I wasn’t in trouble, but I’d been warned.

A few hours later, the rug was clean enough that it was safe to call Lizzy. The answering machine was on, and I had to yell after the beep. “Hey, Lizzy! It’s Beth! Pick up, pick up, pick up! Are you there?”

A series of bumps and clicks. “Hey, Beth! Can you go out tonight? I found out about this awesome backyard party in L.A.! It’s a total lucky edit. Grape Ape is playing! It’s going to be fucking amazing. Can you come?”

I glanced over at my father, who was swirling a stir-fry together in the wok. The kitchen smelled like garlic and ginger. “Can I go out to the movies with Lizzy tonight?”

He smiled and nodded: I was in his good graces for now. I’d gotten pretty good at tiptoeing around his moods, but he could still be unpredictable. This time I got away without a scratch.

Lizzy picked me up around eight, and we headed up the I-5 into L.A., inhaling the fossil fuel stench of street and air, blasting a Screamin’ Sirens song. We sang along, and talked about how ska was more intersectional than punk, and then wondered what the modern equivalent of a band like the Sex Pistols would be. Maybe Green Day? Maybe Nirvana? We didn’t like either of those bands: they were definitely the slick, mainstream face of punk. As traffic thickened around us, brake lights occasionally flaring red like an ephemeral river of blood, I wondered whether there were any flecks of evidence left in the back of Lizzy’s station wagon. But I didn’t ask. It was nice to have a conversation that never once touched on the topics of men or murder.

I hadn’t been to a backyard party before, though I’d heard a lot about them from people we knew in the scene. Lizzy had scored a flyer from somebody at Peer Records. I touched its uneven edges and took in the sketchy, Xeroxed graphics of headless mannequins and skulls. Letters and words cut from magazines spelled out the evening lineup: GRAPE APE x CHE MART x XICANISTAS x BRAT PUNXXX. The address was on a narrow street off Whittier in East L.A. I glanced at the flyer again as we cruised for parking, and wondered if we’d need to show IDs to get in. I had a really shitty fake ID that I’d never used, tucked into the inner pocket of my craziest plaid pants. It was still warm outside, so we left our jackets in the trunk and did a final outfit check. Lizzy readjusted the skinny black suspenders over my Grape Ape T-shirt, the one with an aerial view of the Machine stamped with the word “STOLEN.” I held up a mirror so she could darken the mascara rings around her eyes. She had on a ripped-up, glittery ’60s dress and Docs.

“We look amazing. We are total babes,” Lizzy said in her best Valley Girl accent. We giggled before joining the clot of kids waiting to pay the bouncer. The venue was on a nondescript row of single-story family homes, slightly faded and cracked around the edges. There was no way to know what kind of backyard lurked behind these facades, but I couldn’t imagine it was very big. Two dollars and we were inside, walking down a long cement passageway that smelled faintly like beer, until we emerged into an enormous open space. Nobody in my neighborhood had a backyard like this, with a sound system on one end and a perfectly modified gazebo for selling booze on the other. A few little kids peeked out the windows of neighbors’ houses and waved. If we’d been in Irvine, somebody would have definitely called the police by now. Here, the promoters had rigged up a huge bank of lights, their whirling beams visible from the street.

Some of the lights illuminated the stage, which was in a corner of the yard covered by a canvas shade structure. There was no formal bandstand; the musicians played on the same level as the audience, sometimes indistinguishable from it. Brat Punxxx thrashed and howled and shoved the hurtling bodies who swirled past in the mosh pit. That was the final shock for me, after the size of the yard and lack of cops. At Irvine Meadows, the mosh pit was a tiny spot near the front of the venue. Here, the mosh pit was the venue. There were chairs and spots to stand still around the edges of the action, but I could tell right away that nobody stayed there for long.

We went to the bar to get some beer, listening to the girls behind us move fluidly between Spanish and English, talking about how the Xicanistas had started their own zine. Finally I got up the nerve to say something.

“I’m so excited for the Xicanistas! I’ve never seen them.”

One of the girls gave me a weird look. “Where you from?”

Suddenly, I could hear my suburban white girl accent clearly. I’d come to this backyard party in East L.A. from my middle-class Jewish family in our freshly painted neighborhood and I felt like an interloper.

Lizzy jumped in quickly with a vague answer. “Down south?”

“Where… like Santa Ana? Long Beach?”

I didn’t see the point in lying. “Irvine.”

Now all three of the girls were looking at us dubiously. “Irvine? You got punk rockers down there?”

“Some. Not much. We came because we love Grape Ape. I have all their EPs.” I sounded so stupid. I thought about my dad scoffing at the goyim and wondered if I was like that to these girls, right now. Wasn’t gringo another way of saying goy?

Then one of the girls cracked a smile. “My cousin lives in Irvine. He says it’s totally dead down there.” Her eyeliner was as thick as Lizzy’s.

“It’s the worst.” I shook my head.

Another girl threaded thumbs through the belt loops on her jeans. “What did you think of ‘See the Bitches’?” She was talking about the newest Grape Ape song, which was only available on a compilation from this tiny riot grrl label called Fuck Your Diet.

“I love that song.” It was true. I had listened to it over and over again, rewinding the tape so much on my Walkman that I worried it would snap. “Also, the bass sounds really good now that they have Patty G. playing with them. I’m glad she’s doing something since Team Smash broke up.”

The girl whose cousin lived in Irvine nodded vigorously. “I know, right? I’m Flaca, and this is Elba and Mitch.”

“I like your dress.” Lizzy gestured at Flaca’s modified cocktail dress, as black as her eyeliner, covered in safety pins and patches. She’d added a bunch of studs to a cracked vinyl belt around her waist, and it did look objectively great. “I’m Lizzy, and this is Beth.”

I was about to ask Mitch if she knew whether Fuck Your Diet had any new albums coming out when a familiar voice boomed over the cement yard.

“HOLA CHICAS! LET’S SEE THE CUNTS IN THE FRONT! I DON’T GIVE A FUCK WHAT THE BOYS ARE DOING!”

We put our beers down and raced toward the mosh pit carousel, bouncing between each other, smashing and laughing. Glorious Garcia ripped into her first song, swinging one foot up on the amplifiers. When her voice rose, her face contorted with ecstasy and rage. My scream almost shredded my throat because it was the new song, the one I had been yelling in my head and out loud for the past two weeks.

We were all singing along, chasing each other in a thickening circle. It was like Glorious Garcia’s voice turned my heart into a fist that could punch through my ribcage and smash everything wrong in the world. I ran toward the biggest guy I could see and rammed my shoulder into his chest. He pushed back, and I stumbled into Flaca, who shoved me into another guy. His arm was thick and bare and covered in tattoos; when he thumped it into my side, the pain shot like sunlight through my bones. I ran hard into two bodies of indeterminate gender, going blind with the chaos of our movement, each hit reminding me that I was alive. I could survive anything. The harder I charged, the more certain I was that I would not fall.