The Future of Another Timeline

^THIRTY-ONE BETH

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

I hadn’t spoken to my parents for two weeks. The loss of their voices over the phone was like those thirty minutes after a concert when I got out to the street and realized everything was muted, my eardrums thrumming with a missing, enormous sound.

On the fifteenth day, a Friday, Rosa said my father knocked on our door when I was in class, asking vaguely about his “friend” who lived in our room. “I said, ‘You mean Beth, your daughter?’ and he got really weird and said you needed to call home right away.”

There was no need to call, because he showed up again that night. We were in the lounge. Hamid was writing an essay for film studies, and Rosa and I were working with our study group on yet another nightmarish chem lab assignment. My father walked right in and said my name. He was using his “we’re friends” voice, his posture casual, a realistic smile on his face.

I shot a look at Hamid and walked with my dad into the hallway.

“Let’s go to your room and get your stuff together. We’re leaving right now.” My father had dropped the pretense and his voice was gravelly with menace.

“I’m not going.” I looked into his face and told myself not to cry.

“Your mother and I know about your little stunt. We got a notice from the tax board. I don’t know what kind of lies you have been telling, but this is obviously an excuse to avoid facing what you’ve done. The laziness, the lack of discipline…”

I realized I didn’t have to listen to those accusations anymore. I had an emergency loan from the university to tide me over until next quarter, when the financial aid officer assured me my big loan would come through. Suddenly, my father’s familiar litany sounded bizarre.

“I am going to pay for college myself.”

“No, you’re not. We’re in touch with the financial aid office. They will give you nothing unless we permit it.”

I stopped feeling the urge to cry. I couldn’t believe he would lie in such an overt way. Had he always lied to me like that? “They’ve already approved my loans.”

He narrowed his eyes. “You’ve been lying and sneaking behind our backs. You know you’ll wind up dropping out if you don’t have us there every step of the way. You’ve never completed anything on your own.”

I felt the scream coming from far away, like it had started in Irvine, or maybe six years ago, before reaching my chest and smashing against my ribcage to get out. But I held it in. It charged around my heart with a hatchet; it crammed a knife into my guts. I took a sliver of its rage into my mouth, rolled it around on my tongue, and spoke as quietly as I could.

“Get away from me.”

“I’m not done here.”

“Yes. You are.” I crossed my arms and leaned against the dorm bulletin board, flyers wrinkling under my back. A couple of students walked by, and I could hear Rosa’s high-pitched laugh as she made a terrible pun about covalent bonds. This was normal: people hanging out, doing work, helping each other. I tried to absorb all the safe feelings of normal around me as I stood my ground.

My father cocked his head the way he did when he was about to issue a punishment. And then he looked down, shuffling his feet, making a final stab. “You are delusional. I think you know that. We were wrong to trust you with all this independence, living away from home.” He gestured vaguely at the lounge. “I hope you never expect to get anything else from us.”

I kept silent because I was pretty sure that I had nothing left in me but that scream. My father turned around and left without another word. For an instant, I saw a massive fireball ignite behind him to fill the throat of the hallway with melting flesh and screams. And then he was gone, leaving a faint ringing in my ears.

Back in the lounge, I couldn’t think. “Rosa, can I bum a cigarette?”

“Sure. I think it’s time for a break anyway. I’ll go down with you.”

We worked on our smoke ring techniques and watched a raccoon raid one of the campus trash cans.

“Is everything okay with your dad?”

My eyes prickled and I took a long drag. “Just dealing with financial aid stuff.”

Rosa put a warm hand on my shoulder. “That’s always super stressful.”

“We worked it out, though.”

“That’s really good.”

Then we went back to talking about molecules, and class, and whether our midterm would be weighted the same as the final. Fleetingly, I thought about how I’d be graduating with almost fifty thousand dollars of debt. But that was so far away, and I didn’t have to start repaying it for at least a year after that. More immediate was my sense of relief, which was so intense that it was like being stoned. It filled me with a crazy rush of love for everything: the raccoon, covalent bonds, adulthood, UCLA, and all the humans who populated this place.

“Thanks for being an awesome study-buddy and nefarious cigarette smoker, Rosa. You are the best.”

She laughed in surprise. “You aren’t so bad yourself, Beth. Maybe you’ll come close to beating my score on the final. Maaaaaybe.” And she flicked the last ember of her cigarette in a perfect arc toward the sidewalk, where it winked out harmlessly.

“Let’s go finish that stupid lab.”

I took Anita’s advice and signed up for a class about time machines in the winter quarter. Hamid took an upper-division class in film theory, and we amused each other by coming up with imaginary names for new schools of thought. There were “The Great Man Gaze Theory” and “Subaltern Wormholes” and “Historical Amnesia for Beginners.” Nobody else understood our jokes, and we liked it that way. I still missed Lizzy sometimes, but I had new friends who didn’t think murder was awesome. I hoped that Tess had finally succeeded in her mission, whatever it was. Sometimes I thought about her out there, living with the memories of a different timeline where I’d killed myself. Was she the same person as the Lizzy I avoided in second-quarter chem? Probably not. The more I learned about how the timeline worked, the more convinced I was that Tess wouldn’t exist in my future. And nobody knew where she would be.