The Future of Another Timeline

^TWENTY-FOUR BETH

Los Angeles, Alta California (1993 C.E.)

After not speaking to Lizzy for so long, sitting in her car felt like returning to a childhood playground. It was familiar, but also somehow smaller and less colorful than I remembered. She drove up the I-5 while I pored over the LA Weekly listings, pausing to read a story about how geoscientists were reporting strange activity at the Machines. Unfortunately the bit about Ordovician algae was only two sentences long, lost in a boring discussion of whether the Chronology Academy was corrupt. I crumpled the paper under my seat and sighed.

It was too late to scrounge up an invite to a backyard party, and besides it was Tuesday. The legit venues were probably pretty dead too. We decided on an all-ages show at Starless, a café in Echo Park that was a regular hangout for some of the girls we’d met at backyard parties.

Sure enough, Flaca and Mitch were there when we arrived, sitting at one of the tiny circular tables that wobbled so much nobody used it to hold drinks. Tonight it served mostly as an ashtray pedestal.

“Hey, girlies!” Mitch waved us over excitedly, her heavy wallet chain clanging against a chair. A couple of other kids we didn’t know were there, and Flaca introduced them in a blur of names. All the girls from East L.A. had perfect eyebrows. They were in the middle of dissecting the latest details about some bullshit where Tower Records wouldn’t carry Fuck Your Diet albums.

“It’s racism!” Flaca folded her arms.

“They said it’s because they have fuck in their name.” Mitch shrugged.

“But everybody says fuck in their band names now. They can put little stars over it or something.” I scowled, but I was also relieved to be upset about something that wasn’t murder or my dad.

“Oh shit, it’s that dude from last week,” Flaca hissed and pointed at a guy who had arrived with a couple of friends. He looked like a Billy Idol impersonator, with spiky bleached hair and a pasted-on snarl.

“That poseur? What did he do?” Lizzy checked him out in an extremely non-covert way.

Mitch lit a cigarette and picked up the story. “He came here last week and started hitting on a bunch of girls, telling them he likes Chicanas because they know their place and understand that men are men. Usual white boy line—sorry, Marcus.” She nodded an apology to a ginger in the group and he shrugged. “But it got really fucking insane. What was that thing he said to you, Flaca?”

“He went off on how he’d treat me like a queen or some shit? He said he had a special room where I could have babies and never worry again. It was creepy as fuck. Like serial killer talk. The boy is crazy.”

Flaca’s mention of serial killers got everybody debating who was scarier—John Wayne Gacy or the Night Stalker? What about Jack the Ripper, who traveled through time to eat Victorian hookers? But Lizzy kept her eyes on the guy after the show started. In the mosh pit, she kept racing up to him then pulling back from a body slam with a little smile. He ate it up. Pretty soon he was chasing after her in the pit, delivering soft little swipes to her ass.

We were panting at the counter between acts when the serial killer decided to make his move. He leaned right up into our space and pulled the cigarette out of Lizzy’s hand.

“You’re a lot prettier when you’re not smoking and trying to push men around in the mosh pit.”

Ugh. Of course he was one of those guys who flirted with pseudo-insults.

Lizzy emitted a fake giggle and grabbed the cigarette back. “You think so? I bet that’s what you tell all the girls.”

His face became serious for a minute, and I realized his pale skin was impossibly smooth. Literally no pock marks or scabs anywhere, as if he were made of plastic. “I don’t talk to girls. I talk to queens. You could be my queen.” When he smiled, his teeth exhibited the same uncanny perfection.

“Wanna talk outside? Your queen requests an audience.”

I should have known Lizzy was lying when we were at the railroad tracks. This was exactly like that night at the horrible party with Richard. Was she still carrying a knife? There was an alley behind Starless where everybody went to do drugs and have sex. Etiquette dictated that nobody looked at anyone back there—you had your dark, private spot, and you let your neighbors have theirs. It was the perfect place to murder a scumbag.

The scumbag in question gave Lizzy an appraising look. “I’m Elliot.” He grabbed her hand and lifted it to his mouth for a kiss. She reached her other hand around to her back pocket and adjusted something that had the unmistakable shape of her knife sheath. I had to intervene.

“Hi, Elliot. Wow, it’s great to meet you. I bet you are a really fun guy, but my friend is unfortunately super busy right now. Super busy. Like until the end of time.” I yanked as hard as I could on Lizzy’s arm and unglued her from the counter.

She was so surprised that I had her halfway to the door before she protested. “What, Beth? What the hell?”

“We are leaving. Now.” I was so pumped with adrenaline that I thought maybe I was having one of those moments of super-strength where people lift cars to rescue trapped children. I dragged her to the alley where I was pretty sure she’d been planning to kill Elliot and pushed her against the graffiti-caked wall. “I thought you said you weren’t doing that shit anymore. Remember how like three hours ago you said that?”

“I wasn’t doing anything.”

I glared.

“I was just going to scare him.”

“No. I saw the knife in your pocket.”

“Fine. Maybe I was going to fuck with him. But you heard what Flaca said. You heard how he talked to me. That guy is a shitstain of epic proportions.”

The door to the café slammed and Elliot and his pals stumbled into the alley. One of them hooted drunkenly. “There’s your little feminazi cocktease.”

Elliot took a step in our direction then changed his mind. “Let’s go to a bar with some real women.”

“Yeah. I hate these cuck-making bitches.”

They wandered away, their insults growing fainter as the street swallowed them.

“Did he say ‘cock-making bitches’? Or… ‘duck-making’? What is that? I need to know for my research into neologisms of the asshole class.” Lizzy gave me a quizzical scientist look that used to crack me up. Now it made me tired.

“I can’t be your friend anymore.” Saying it out loud made it real at last. More real than months of pretend politeness. “I’m going to take the bus home.”

“Beth, you can’t take the bus. At least let me drive you.”

“I don’t ever want to get inside your car again.”

I didn’t care what she would say next. I didn’t want to see the expression on her face. I walked into the street and aimed myself in the exact opposite direction from the one Elliot and his friends had taken.

I wasn’t actually sure how I would take the bus home, but my mood was so big that I didn’t feel pragmatic about my situation for about five blocks. I was in a residential neighborhood with no bus stops, and I was starting to see a lot more chain link fences. Probably not a great place to be walking alone at midnight. Maybe I could use the pay phone at Starless to call a cab. I had my mom’s emergency credit card, and it’s not like I could possibly get in more trouble tonight anyway.

“Beth!” The voice came from behind me. Great. Now I was going to have another argument with Lizzy.

But when I turned around, it was Tess, in the Gunne Sax outfit she wore when I first met her. It knocked the wind out of me. “What the hell! Where did you come from?”

Before I could splutter anything else, she crushed me in a hug. “Oh my god, Beth, it’s you! You’re alive! Oh my god.” Her voice wavered and she pulled away awkwardly.

My stomach churned. Her face was so familiar, like her voice. As familiar as my own. But something had always been off.

“Why wouldn’t I be alive? You’re alive. I couldn’t possibly be dead if you are alive.” My voice sounded a lot more reasonable than I felt.

“Right, right.” Tess looked down, hair falling across her cheek. “Yeah, right.”

With a sense of dread, I realized that I already knew what was wrong. The times I’d met her before, it had been dark or I’d been so weirded out that I wasn’t thinking straight. Now I could see her clearly.

“Tess. You’re not me, are you?” I took in her skinny shoulders, and the way she flipped her hair to the side, briefly creating a mohawk-like shape over her forehead. “You’re Lizzy.”

When she met my eyes, it was the same expression she’d worn at the railroad tracks. Hours ago. Decades ago. I raised my hand to smack her but made a fist instead, bringing it down hard against my own thigh. “Why did you lie to me?”

“I’m sorry, Beth, I’m so sorry.” When she started to half cry as she talked, I couldn’t believe I’d ever mistaken her for anyone but Lizzy. She swallowed hard and composed herself. “I knew you wouldn’t listen to me. I was a bad person. Maybe evil. You taught me that. I wanted to get you away from me, before… before…”

“Before what?” It was louder than I’d ever yelled.

She whipped her head around, looking at the darkened houses. “Let’s talk somewhere private. I can drive you home.”

“You just literally tried to drive me home and I said no.”

Tess put a hand to her forehead and winced. “Yeah. I know. I mean, I am starting to remember. Fuck, it hurts. Please let me drive you.”

Something about her tone was suddenly so unlike Lizzy’s that I was jolted. She’d traveled through time to find me, more than once. This really might be more serious than murder. “Okay,” I conceded. “Where’s your car?”

When we slid into the seats, Tess gulped some aspirin and took a winding route to the freeway. She didn’t say anything until we were on the I-5, heading south. I vacillated between rage and numbness, rewinding our previous conversations in my mind with different players in the roles. So it was Lizzy who had become the traveler, not me. I still didn’t know what I would become. It was a relief to know my future was uncharted, and I didn’t have to wonder anymore what would turn me into the kind of person who liked the name Tess.

Finally Tess glanced over, then back at the road. “I can’t talk to you about your future, but there aren’t any rules against telling people about their alternate present.” She sighed. “Look—I came back here because I remember a timeline where you killed yourself, Beth. Right before we went to college. You jumped off that bridge in Pasadena where we used to hang out. You know the Colorado Street bridge? We were standing there smoking and then you were gone. I couldn’t stop you, and it… it destroyed me.” She looked over again and I could see tears on her face. “I don’t know if you can understand because you’re not that person anymore. But I never killed anyone else after you… after that. My whole career has been about changing history without violence. It’s been hard. I still have the same urges. You’re one of the only people on Earth who knows what I’m struggling with.”

I wasn’t sure that was true, but it was my chance to ask something I’d been wanting to know for months. “Lizzy, why did you keep killing those guys? I mean, I understood when it was with Scott, but after that… what happened to you?”

I could see more tears making reflective tracks down her face, but she kept her eyes on the scatterplot of taillights ahead. “That first time was so easy. It felt—I don’t know. Like we’d really fixed something. Made a difference. But also it felt good. Natural.” She paused, thinking. “Remember that documentary we watched—jeez, I guess it was last summer for you. It was about how female lions hunt their prey, and we kept joking about how great our faces would look bathed in blood like that one lion who had fucking dipped her whole head inside an antelope’s guts? It was like that. Magnificent and honorable. But also… natural? Because we were doing it to protect all the baby lions and the big fluffy male lions who just wanted to sit under trees and look pretty. I don’t know if that makes sense.”

I shook my head. “I remember the documentary, yeah. But we aren’t lions, Lizzy. We’re people. We don’t need to eat rapists and creeps to survive.”

She snorted a soft laugh, sounding exactly like the pre-murder Lizzy I had lost. “Beth, I’m so glad to talk to you again. I am so glad you are alive and in the world.”

Lizzy’s lion story had momentarily diverted my attention from that alternate self, the one who committed suicide. Had Lizzy and I become best friends because we shared the urge to kill? Maybe we’d turned that urge in different directions, but it was still there, a fucked-up substrate to our love. Then the murders heightened everything. Each death took her closer to some kind of predatory ecstasy. But they took me deeper into the place my father wanted to lead me, where the solution to everything was a pure, self-destructive rage.

Still, my agony had eased after that day when Tess and I talked about what my dad had done when I was younger. That pulled me up short. How did she know that? Had my other self told Lizzy my secret?

“How did you know what happened with my dad? You said you knew what he did that one night.”

“Beth, your dad was mentally ill. He did a million terrible things to you. I knew that.” She touched my shoulder in the gentlest way possible and my eyes felt hot. “Yes, I was a shitty friend, but I wasn’t shitty in that way. I care a lot about you. I knew you didn’t want to talk about it, but I also knew it was… bad.”

“So… you know the thing that happened?”

“Which thing are you talking about? The time he made you shower twice before dinner because he thought you were too sweaty to be inside the house? The time he freaked out because we had our shoes on? The time he put you on restriction for three months because you got an A-minus in typing class? All the times he pretended he wasn’t your dad when he took us to the movies?”

My face hurt. “No. Not those times.”

“Okay. I guess I don’t know, then.”

“Do you think you really changed the timeline forever? What if I kill myself next year?” I was fearful in a way I had never been before. It was mixed with self-consciousness and melancholy and something else I couldn’t name.

Tess was silent for a long time. “It’s true you could do that. I always thought that if you didn’t have to see the murders…”

“I saw the murders.”

“No. You saw some of them. Not the worst ones.”

My body was thrumming with the uncanniness of everything. “You didn’t have to lie to me, you know. You could have said who you are. I would have believed you. Why are you always lying?”

“That wasn’t—I’m not. No. I had to say I was you because then you would know for sure you were going to survive. I wanted you to think suicide was not an option. I wanted to give you hope.”

“You always thought lying was easier than telling the truth.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Now you’re lying again.”

I stared at her profile, illuminated by a chaos of freeway lights, and willed her to say something else. But she wouldn’t. That’s one way she’d changed. Lizzy would have argued with me for weeks about her innocence, and how she was totally not lying and never would lie to me. Tess knew when to shut up.