The Future of Another Timeline

^TWENTY-NINE BETH

Los Angeles, Alta California (1994 C.E.)

I logged into my account from the dorm internet kiosk and opened Pine to read my e-mail. There were two messages: one from the campus lawyer, and one from Hamid. Looking around to make sure nobody could see the terminal, I opened Hamid’s right away:

My heart surged like a regular organ instead of an alien invader. I replied:

Then I read the e-mail from the lawyer, who said she’d done some research and I could make an appointment any time to discuss it. I tried to focus on my midterm for Anita’s class, but managed little more than a few paragraphs before falling asleep in a tight ball on my bunk.

I saw the lawyer the next day after class.

She patted a folder of papers on her desk. “This is a pretty unusual situation, but we do have something called a dependency override that allows a student under twenty-four to become eligible for financial aid without parental information.”

I nodded. “That sounds good.”

“I’m not going to soft-pedal this, Beth. It’s a difficult process, and it’s reserved for pretty dire circumstances. But I got the feeling, based on our previous conversation, that you are… estranged from your parents?”

It felt like somebody had punched me in the throat. “I don’t… I mean, I don’t know what that means.”

“Are your parents paying for your college now?”

“Yes, but I want them to stop.”

The lawyer gave me a hard look. “I need you to be honest with me, Beth. You told me before that your father is mentally ill. Your words. Is there some reason your parents can’t take care of you?”

I didn’t know what to say and I stared at my hands, digging into the wooden chair.

“Is your father abusing you?”

My ears burned as I thought about how my father acted at the La Brea Tar Pits. And then his rage over the shoes. Was it really abuse? The word sounded so extreme, like something that would leave scars all over my body.

The lawyer tried again, more gently. “Has he hit you? Or molested you?”

Feeling nauseated, I remembered that night—the one that Tess didn’t actually know about. Maybe it hadn’t been real. I shifted in my seat and watched an ant walk across the floor. My voice sounded very far away when I spoke again. “I don’t know.”

She pushed the folder toward me. “If your father is abusing you, I think we can make a case for dependency override. Especially if you get a job and show you are already working to support yourself. Why don’t you look over some of this paperwork and think about it, okay?” I hazarded a glance at her and she leaned forward. “I don’t know what your home situation is, but if you need help, I’ll do what I can. Don’t be afraid to stick up for yourself.”

“Okay, I’ll look at this and e-mail you.” I jammed the folder into my backpack and walked out into the impossibly beautiful afternoon, where wind attenuated clouds in the sky and eroded the surface of the planet the same way it had for millions of years.

Cyborg Cop was a good choice. It was terrible by any number of measures, and we had plenty of joke material afterward. We sat on a bench near the library and watched students strolling through cones of light from the streetlamps. I lit a cigarette and tried to count the number of times the movie ripped off RoboCop and Terminator.

“Also it’s set in the Caribbean, but there are no black people? Did they turn all the black people into white cyborgs?” I shook my head and Hamid laughed.

But then he turned somber. “I really thought you didn’t ever want to talk to me again after what happened last year.”

I exhaled a long stream of smoke and tried to put words together that I’d imagined saying to him for months. “I know. I shouldn’t have blown you off like that. I mean—you didn’t do anything bad.” Stubbing out my cigarette, I looked up at the moon rather than face him. “But you were about to go off to college, and I barely knew you, and I thought it made sense for us to make a clean break, you know?”

“You didn’t barely know me! We were… we’re friends. You said you liked me.”

“I do like you. A lot. That’s why we’re here, right?” I nudged his shoulder with mine. “But back then, I was doing a lot of really stupid things. I needed to figure shit out.”

“Like what? What kind of shit? You totally stopped speaking to me. Heather said you wanted to pretend I was dead or something.”

It’s true that I’d said something like that, in the weeks after we killed Mr. Rasmann. “I’m really sorry about that. I was…”

“Dealing with shit. Yeah.” Hamid was mumbling, and I realized that at some point his urgency had simmered down into defeat.

“I’m not going to do that again, okay? I’ve made a resolution to… to try to change the timeline for the better. Even though nobody knows how history works.” I put my hands on his shoulders and looked at him. “Can I kiss you?”

He nodded and waited for me to lean forward and find his lips. Only then did he put his arms around me. We walked back to my dorm hand in hand, not saying anything.

I kept thinking about the day he drove me to the abortion clinic, right after he got back from Disney World. Looking back on it now was strange, as if my memories were being reassembled from broken pieces. As I recalled the colors and sounds of that time, they seemed to suture closed over a different set of events. With a shudder, I wondered if this feeling was related to the suicide I didn’t remember.

We’d had to walk a gauntlet of Operation Rescue assholes lined up along the sidewalk outside Planned Parenthood. A woman in a “Jesus Saves” T-shirt held a canvas sack full of baby doll parts splattered with red paint. She threw severed plastic arms at me and the whole group chanted, “Murder! Murder! Murder!” I stared at the sidewalk, imagining the provenance of the clay and chalk that formed it. Then, without missing a beat, Hamid grabbed a bloody hand out of the air and pretended to chomp on it. “Tastes like chicken!”

I smothered a grin and opened the tinted glass door. He’d evoked a spirited rendition of “Amazing Grace” from the protesters, and suddenly I was seized with the spirit of punk rock. “ABORTION IS LEGAL, YOU KNOW!” I yelled. “YOU’RE STUCK IN THE 1950s!” It wasn’t a terribly cutting insult, but Hamid laughed. Then I slammed the door and walked to the waiting room, where a receptionist with a purple streak in her hair signed me in. The abortion itself was a haze of concerned, kindly faces, questions about whether I was comfortable, and mercifully effective painkillers. When I returned to the waiting room woozy, Hamid helped me to the car and drove me around until I felt good enough to go home.

Hamid was right: I did know him back then, and I’d definitely liked him. But I couldn’t bring myself to get together again after that day. My mind was too crowded with the gory weirdness of what was happening with Lizzy and my father’s ongoing threats. I wasn’t ready for another layer of emotions, especially not after we’d had to deal with the abortion together. Things had gotten too intense too fast. The more I thought about who I was back then, the less I could imagine a place for Hamid in my past.

But there was a place for him now. I stopped suddenly and kissed Hamid on the cheek. He grinned. “What was that for?”

“I was thinking that it would be perfect if we could have met now, instead of back then. Can we pretend that’s what happened? Like I ran into you at Stan’s Donuts and we decided that our destiny was to see Cyborg Cop together?”

Hamid gave me his serious look. “I think we can do that. As long as we see Short Cuts next week.”

“Does it have supersoldiers in it?”

“Probably. Or dinosaurs. Robert Altman is really into dinosaurs.” And he kissed me again, in a way that felt familiar and yet completely unlike anything else in the history of the planet.

I’d left my midterm essay until the last possible minute on Sunday night. No big deal. I’d stay up, turn it in first thing in the morning, then crash for the rest of the day. Most midterms were already over, and the dorm hallways were unusually quiet. Rosa was out, so I put on the new Xicanistas CD to fill the room with something more inspiring than the sound of my keyboard clacking.

I still felt a lingering frustration with the idea that nobody knows for sure how history works. This feeling, more than caffeine and cigarettes, buoyed me through the night and into the early morning. I realized that my perspective had changed since talking to Anita in office hours. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in great men anymore. But now I could see that every great man was actually a tiny piece of something much larger: a movement, an institution, or possibly a set of loosely interconnected people. Maybe the only real difference between the Great Man perspective and the Collective Action one was that great men had followers instead of communities.

Back when I was in high school, they taught us that changing history involves massive battles and heads of state. But by 7:30 A.M., I knew that was wrong. I reread the last line of my laser-printed midterm before I deposited it in the box outside Anita’s office:

Two weeks later, Hamid and I were cuddling in my bunk while Rosa studied in the lounge. We’d been spending a lot of time together, and I was starting to think that maybe he was my boyfriend. Were we supposed to have “the conversation” right around now? I looked at him and wondered how I would ask about our status without sounding like a cliché.

“Beth, I want to ask you something kind of intense, okay?”

Maybe I wasn’t going to have to figure out how to have “the conversation” after all. I kissed his chin and nodded. “Sure—what’s up?”

“Remember how you said you were going through some shit and that’s why you stopped talking to me last year?”

My shoulders tensed. “Yeah.”

“What happened to you? I know you and Heather stopped being friends too. You don’t have to tell me if it’s super personal, but… I really want to know about you. It affects me, too.”

I took a breath and started to say something ironic about my friends being serial killers. Then I started to say something dismissive about how parents are the worst. Finally, I found myself telling a story I’d only ever narrated inside my head.

“I was feeling, I guess, anti-social? Mostly because my dad was… well, he’s really strict. Both my parents are. Like we have a lot of rules in my house about how to act. Certain things I can’t say, and—I dunno, weird stuff like how I clean my room or where I set my cup down on the counter. And if I broke a rule, they would ground me for a really long time. Usually a couple of months. I mean, I could go out for school, but other than that I had to stay in my room.

“Actually, I guess they made those rules because of something that happened a long time ago, when I was in sixth grade. I got kind of rebellious, you know? My mom was in the hospital for a few days because she had this condition—and anyway, my dad got mad because I didn’t wash the dishes enough before putting them in the dishwasher. He said I was grounded for the next month. Because it was part of a pattern of me being disobedient or something. And I—I got really mad. I told him he was being unfair and crazy and I don’t know what. I remember I was screaming, and he—he grabbed my face really hard. Then he pulled my pants off and started spanking me with his belt, and—it was really bad. Like I was bleeding.

“And then he freaked out and started crying and saying he was sorry and he made me get in the shower with him to clean up. It was really fucked up and scary… I mean we were in the shower naked and he was rubbing me with soap which really stung and he kept putting his fingers inside… inside me… and saying he loved me more than he loved my mother…”

Hamid was hugging me really hard and I realized my voice was shaking.

“I know it doesn’t sound like that big of a deal. Parents are weird, right? It was a long time ago, and he never did that again. But he always acted like he was right about to do it, and he was definitely acting like that a lot last year. So I just couldn’t deal with anything. He kept making these threats…”

Hamid nodded, his expression unreadable. Suddenly I needed desperately to know something.

“Does that seem normal to you? I mean, kids get spanked all the time, and he only did it once… and lots of parents are strict…”

“No.” He whispered it into my hair, wrapping me tightly in his arms. My cheeks were wet. “It’s not normal, Beth. That is not normal. I am so sorry that was happening to you and I didn’t know.”

I mashed my face into his shirt, flooded with relief that someone did know. Someone knew all along. And she saved my life.

I visited the campus lawyer the next day.

She smiled when I sat down in the wooden chair across from her. “I’m glad to see you again. How’s it going?”

“I’ve thought about it and I want to get a dependency override. My father has been abusing me for a long time, and I need to get away from him.”

“You’re going to have to make a sworn statement to that effect. Are you ready for that?”

I swallowed hard. “Yes. I’m ready.”