The Future of Another Timeline

^TWENTY-ONE BETH

Irvine, Alta California (1993 C.E.)

I knew it was going to happen eventually. I came downstairs to dinner barefoot, and my father reached up from his chair to grab my arm so hard I gasped.

“Get back upstairs and put your shoes on! We always wear shoes downstairs!”

It was useless to protest. Still, I couldn’t help looking over at my mother—I was always hoping that one day she’d notice that something seriously weird was going on. She was reading a book about intersectional education and completely ignored us. As my father glared, I wondered if anyone but me would ever question the blissful domesticity of this scene. I could smell something peppery cooking on the stove, and the table was set. Early evening sunlight tumbled through the orange tree in our backyard, and a cat walked furtively across the cinderblock fence that divided our property from our neighbors’. Everything was relentlessly normal, right down to the hum of the air conditioner.

Maybe I was crazy to think anything was wrong. But my arm stung and my dad was pretending that we had always worn shoes downstairs and I couldn’t believe that my mom didn’t know or care. I thought of saying something casual to her, like, “Remember how yesterday dad said our shoes would contaminate the rug?” Then I thought about screaming until every piece of glass in the kitchen was reduced to shards.

I stood for a few seconds longer, wishing she would at least look up and acknowledge me. Nothing. Either she was genuinely engrossed in her book, or she didn’t want to deal. I wasn’t sure which was worse.

“Well? Where are your goddamn shoes, Beth?” My father crossed his arms.

I walked to the foyer and grabbed my sandals. But then I didn’t feel like stopping. Without thinking, I opened the door and left the house. I walked quickly out of our cul-de-sac, rounding a corner onto the path that led to the community pool several blocks away. I wanted to be long gone by the time my parents realized I’d left. It’s not that I hadn’t broken rules before, but usually I was secretive about it. I never openly left the house without their permission. Especially not when my father had just yelled at me.

It felt like I’d passed into another reality where rules no longer existed. My sandals slapped the sidewalk in a satisfying rhythm and I could hear distant splashes and shouts from the pool. A group of middle school kids yelped and shoved each other in the water. It was the same thing I would have done the summer I was twelve, waiting through the long weeks that divided my elementary school kid self from what I was certain would be my completely grown-up middle school self. I had been such a conformist back then. I filed my nails into perfect parabolas and wore tiny bathing suits, and squeezed lemon juice onto my head in the hot sun to bring out the blond streaks in my hair. I wore pearls with my preppy blouses and was absolutely convinced that if I could lose five pounds, I would finally be pretty. But then Lizzy and I discovered punk rock.

The girls in the pool were squealing and despite the distance I could see that they’d all used the same cherry red nail polish on their fingers and toes. I used to share nail polish with Lizzy too. My nostalgia sublimed into generalized melancholy as a train howled by outside the neighborhood boundary wall. It occurred to me that this might be the last time I’d have a chance to walk by the train tracks before I went to college and became an actual adult.

I turned my back on the pool and scaled the wall, curling my bare toes into the crumbling stucco footholds before launching myself over the top. I hit the dusty ground with a shock that traveled up my legs to my lungs. I could still see the diminishing train in the distance. It was one of those freighters full of endless rectangular cars that might contain anything: produce, animals, toxic chemicals, stowaways. There wouldn’t be another train for a long time, so I crunched over the rock bed beneath the tracks and sat down on a thick, sun-warmed rail. Idly, I wondered where the rocks came from, and turned one over in my hands, studying reddish streaks on slate gray. Probably basalt, a volcanic rock packed with minerals that oxidized into a pinkish rust. I tossed it back among its rough-cut brethren. Some volcano spewed hot, gelatinous blobs millions of years ago, and humans eventually brought the results to this anonymous stretch of railroad track in Irvine, Alta California.

The clatter of footsteps brought me out of my reverie, and I looked up to see Lizzy walking on the tracks toward me. She stopped about twenty yards away, Walkman clutched in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other. Of course she was here. It was where we always went. She exhaled a long plume of smoke and waved tentatively.

My heart was vibrating so hard it was like I was standing next to an amp during a drum solo. Were my teeth chattering? I bit down hard and stood up. More than anything, I wanted to talk to Lizzy—the old Lizzy, before the murders, when we identified rocks and swapped mixtapes. It had been months since I’d seen her, and longer since we’d said more than hi in the halls. I was about to leave Irvine forever. Maybe we could talk this one time. Maybe everything could be normal again—not normal like in my dad’s house, but truly normal, like in a Judy Blume book about how it’s really hard to go through puberty but we survive it and then everything’s fine.

I raised my hand and waved back. Lizzy pulled her headphones down until they circled her neck and we walked awkwardly toward each other over the solidified remains of a great eruption.

“Hey.” She fiddled with the headphone jack, not meeting my eyes.

“What’s up?” I tried to sound casual.

“Taking a walk. Listening to Grape Ape.” She snuck a glance at me.

“That’s cool.”

We continued in this vein for a while, balancing on the rail, talking about summer vacation and college plans. We had both gotten into the dorms at UCLA, but different ones. There was a chemistry class that we both had to take first quarter, and we debated whether it would be easy or hard.

At some point the conversation stopped feeling strange and started to feel the way it used to. There was nobody else who wanted to talk to me about science, and I missed it.

“You seem really good.” Lizzy screwed up her face as she said it, like she wasn’t sure.

I thought about my parents, no doubt seething at home, planning how they would punish me. “Yeah, I’m good. Is everything okay with you?”

Lizzy looked down, hair falling into her face. “I mean, yeah. I miss you. I wish we could hang out again. I know you’re still mad and stuff.”

“I’m not mad. I’m like…” I tried to put it into words. “I feel like we did something evil.”

“What?” Lizzy let out a laugh. “Those guys were evil. We did the world a favor.”

“You can’t just kill people. It doesn’t change anything. It’s like how you can’t go back in time and kill Hitler or whatever, because he’s replaced by Bitler or Zitler. Another person takes his place and World War II happens anyway. Like we learned in geology about time travel.”

“Well, when we killed those guys they went away permanently. They can’t fucking molest other girls.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, because it was true.

Lizzy continued, her cheeks flushed. “I don’t get why you are so upset. I mean, I was there when you had that abortion. Why should that be illegal? Guys like those shitty assholes we killed made it illegal. Because they want us to be helpless and scared of them.”

“I can’t believe you are making that comparison. Murder is wrong, Lizzy.”

“Oh yeah? Is rape wrong? Is it wrong to take naked pictures of girls for a ‘look book’? Who is stopping those guys? The cops don’t care. We have to do it.”

“No, we don’t!” I yelled it right into her face, and felt my arms flailing in the air like random punctuation marks.

“Heather was raped right in front of you, Beth!” Lizzy’s voice rose in fury. “How can you ignore reality and act like nothing is wrong?”

I remembered my father’s hand on my arm and my mother’s silence. This was too much. I whirled around and started back along the tracks. “Fuck you!” I yelled over my shoulder, meaning it and not meaning it at the same time.

“Beth! I’m sorry!” Lizzy ran up to me from behind, sobs jagged between her words. “I know I’m fucked up but I promise I’m not going to kill anyone else. I miss you so much. Can’t we act like none of this shit ever happened and… I dunno… go to a show or something?”

I turned around and looked at her, my best friend since elementary school, her face torn up by something I felt too. Without thinking, I grabbed her hard in a hug. We sobbed on each other’s shoulders and it felt sweet but also poisonous, like drinking blackberry liqueur to get wasted. But what the hell was I supposed to do? Go home to my parents? At least Lizzy wasn’t pretending to be something she wasn’t. Plus, it was true that she’d stopped killing people. I hoped.

“I’m so sorry, Beth. So sorry. Please don’t be mad at me anymore.” Lizzy was mumbling wetly into my shirt and I still couldn’t say anything. Finally I let go of our hug because my nose was running and it was getting gross.

“I’m not mad. I really want to believe that you won’t do it again, but I still don’t totally trust you. Do you understand?” I untied the flannel shirt from around my waist and wiped my face with it.

She kicked the rubble listlessly. “Yeah, I get it. But do you get… my side of this? Do you understand how bad those men are?”

I put my damp hands on her skinny upper arms, now covered in goosebumps. “Yes. I really do. But we don’t need to kill anyone.”

She nodded, her mouth quirking into a wicked grin. “Maybe we could go smash the shit out of some dudes in the mosh pit.”

I had to smile back. “That sounds like a plan.”

“I have the car. Wanna go now?” She hooked her thumb vaguely in the direction of the place where the tracks crossed Culver Drive. I paused, considering. I didn’t want to go home. We could go out tonight, and see how it went.

“Sure. Let’s get a paper and see who’s playing.”

“Yes!” Lizzy jumped up and down and hugged me again. Then she turned serious as we started walking toward Culver, balancing on the rails. “You really are my best friend, Beth. I don’t want to lose you.”

“Yeah.” Even as I said it, skepticism was sharp in my gut. Maybe she meant it, but Lizzy was also using her decider powers on me. She knew what I wanted to hear.

For the first time in my life, I wished I could use a Machine. I wanted to skip over everything in my life between this moment and the day I would become a real geologist, studying deep time. Of course that’s not how the Machines work, but that didn’t stop me from fantasizing about it.