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Tressa Fay let her hair fall forward to conceal what was probably her flirt face, the one Guy teased her about because she went literally heart-eyed when pretty girls paid attention to her.

“But Tressa Fay talked to her,” Guy said. “She’s still talking to her.” Guy cleared their throat as Tressa Fay looked up guiltily. “And Gayle and James remember two versions of what happened. That makes it seem like we’re in the same world as Meryl. Let’s call it the world where Meryl talks to Tressa Fay.”

Linds smiled. “Yes. Schrodinger thought that once you opened the box and the cat was alive, then the world where the cat was dead collapsed. But other folks have decided that those other worlds don’t collapse. They carry on. So far, people haven’t traveled to another world, experienced it, and then returned to the world they started from. Some think we could. Wormholes. Dimensions between worlds. String theory has some ideas. Books and movies use magic or machines.”

Gayle stopped scratching Epinephrine, who had moved back into her lap. “Isn’t a phone a machine?”

“Yes. And there’s evidence that simple circuits, like the kind you make with potatoes and copper wire, can learn, entirely on their own. They have sentience. Maybe.”

“A smartphone is way more complicated than a potato clock,” James said. “And I know what I know, and I saw what I saw. I don’t like it, but that’s happening.” He jabbed the air in the direction of Tressa Fay’s phone, which buzzed again, though Tressa Fay didn’t dare look. “Events were set in motion, and my guess is they’ll stay in motion, so someone tell me how to get them moving in the direction of Meryl being right here.” James pointed to a spot on the floor in the center of their group. “ASAP.”

Mary had her honey-dark head bent. She looked up. “Okay. Here’s something.” She patted her palms against her knees a few times. “When I was a teenager, my mom and I were fighting constantly. Like, bad. The kind where I would take off to a friend’s house, and she would put up ‘my daughter is missing’ posts on Facebook. Lots of drama.”

“But you guys are close now,” Michael said.

“Yeah. Super close. The reason why we’re close now is actually something like this stuff we’re talking about.”

“Wait, really?” Tressa Fay had not heard this story, and Mary told a lot of stories.

“Yes. Kind of. So, one of the things that set us off were those kinds of arguments where one person is super fucking positive one thing happened, and the other person is sure that something else happened. You know what I’m talking about?”

Michael and Guy, both lawyers, looked at each other ruefully. Everyone else nodded.

“Yeah. So that kind of argument is treachery. There is no way to resolve it without one person just, like, either agreeing to put their own version of reality away or gaslighting themselves. I don’t know what it was, but it felt like this was always happening to me and my mom, and we couldn’t even work it out with this counselor who my grandma made us get, who I think was always trying to figure out which one of us was gaslighting the other one.” Mary took a deep breath. “Then everything changed.”

“Magic phone?” James asked.

Mary laughed. “No. My mom told me a story.”

“Give it,” Gayle said.

“Yeah. We were both crying at the kitchen table over one of these fights. Usually once we got to that point, I’d lock myself in my room, and my mom would take a water glass of box rosé to the sofa and turn on the TV. But this time, she told me about a time she had snuck out of the house. She’d had a big fight with her mom about this pool party she wanted to go to and a bikini she wanted to wear. My grandparents are kind of religious, so it was a no-go. The day of the party, she was grounded, but her parents were in Appleton at a church thing. She got herself downtown on her bike. This was back when the mall was where the riverfront stuff is now. Her plan was to buy the bikini at the mall, and then a friend would pick her up for the party.”

“We have all had this plan,” Guy said. “You’d think it would be more foolproof.”

“No lie. So she gets to the mall, and she’s on the sidewalk near one of the entrances, and then it happens.”

Tressa Fay held her breath.

“The entrance she was getting ready to use was in the wrong place. She thought she got turned around, but then she figured out the entrance wasn’t the entrance to the mall, but a glass door on a small shop next to other shops. The mall wasn’t there.”

“Oh, I think I know where this is going,” Linds said.

“She’s looking up and down the street, freaked, but also thinking she had been so nervous about sneaking out and going to the party and not being home if her parents called that she must have taken a turn down the wrong street, even though she’s never lived anywhere but Green Bay. Except the street name was right. The street sign was wrong.”

“How?” Gayle’s voice was hoarse.

“It was the wrong color. Not a green street sign. Black with white letters. Then she noticed the cars. They were old fashioned. Some of them had the big fins on them. One of them was teal. That was the car a woman got out of, and she was wearing a hat. Not a ballcap or a sun hat, but a little white straw hat that was pinned into her hairstyle. It was an older lady, so my mom’s like, okay. It’s just a grandma who still wears her old clothes. Except there was also a girl walking down the sidewalk, about her age, wearing a dress, but not any kind of dress my mom had seen at the mall in, like, 1990. My mom was wearing a Bon Jovi T-shirt that she’d cut into a crop top and jean shorts, and she had one side of her hair shaved, and this girl looked at my mom and actually laughed out loud and crossed the street, yelling something at her about what she was wearing.”

“Rude,” James said.

“My mom got scared and panicked, didn’t know what to do, so she opened the door into the shop and walked in. She told me she didn’t know if she was going to ask for help or what. There were two ladies looking at a top that another lady was holding up for them. More old-fashioned clothes. Everywhere, this time, because it was some kind of clothing store. She told me the store smelled like perfume, and it was really quiet. The lady holding up the top gasped and dropped it, then started walking over to her, asking her who she was and what was wrong. If she was hurt, something like that.”

“Jesus,” Michael said.

“So then she started talking to the lady—she didn’t even know what she was saying—and the lady asked her, ‘Do you want the bikini or not?’?”

“What?” Gayle said. “What, what.”

“The lady isn’t a lady. It’s a college-aged girl in a Roxy T-shirt, with the bikini my mom wanted on the counter. My mom had her wallet open.”

“Was she—” Guy started.

“She swears she wasn’t daydreaming. And she’s never had some kind of medical problem, and nothing like that had ever happened to her before. The store in the mall she was in was pretty far from the entrance, and she went from talking to the lady in the clothes store to standing at the checkout with her wallet out.”

“Was there a…technology?” James asked. “A phone? Or, like, a watch? Magic boom box?”

Mary laughed. “No. She didn’t even buy the suit. She walked out of the mall, and her friend was there in the car to pick her up for the party. She threw her bike in the trunk and told her to take her home. Maybe none of it had happened—that’s what she was thinking. Except then her friend complained that she reeked of perfume, which my mom wasn’t even allowed to wear. When my mom smelled her own arm, it smelled like the clothing store in bizarro old-fashioned world.”

“That is weird,” Gayle said. “But.” She put her hand on Epinephrine’s back, resting it there. “I have a pop-up vintage goods business. I’m part of this women-in-business group in Green Bay, and we have presentations all the time, and there were little shops down by where the mall entrance used to be.” Gayle sighed. “Her mom, your grandma, would have known that. She probably told her.”

Mary shrugged. “I can’t make it any more believable than what my mom told me. When she told me, in the middle of a fight we were having, she said she’d never wavered about going to the party. She didn’t think anything could stop her, but this did. And what happened was as real as any of her other memories. Her friend still remembered the perfume smell years later. My mom never had anything like that happen again, except fighting with me and feeling certain about one version of how something happened, and my being certain about another. But it made her think that maybe everyone was living different versions of life all the time. It was a story that turned things around for us, because we could accept that there was more to living than what we think, and there are things that happen that no one can believe, or they think what they believe is true. Or more real.”

“And that was what fixed things with your mom?” James asked.

Mary smiled at him. “It’s more what made us realize that nothing was busted. I liked believing in her story. I liked her story. I felt like she trusted me with knowing something about her, especially something about her that wasn’t cut and dry.”

“Everything has gotten so messy since Meryl disappeared, it’s as if I’ve never thought in a straight line, ever,” Gayle said. “I don’t even know if I give the same answers to the cops when they ask me the same questions over and over.” She looked down at Epinephrine, who was purring so loud, he sounded like a mechanical cat. “I’m already not sure what answers I gave when Meryl was gone after that night at Speakeasy, versus what I said when we figured out she was gone from home. They’re both true. True here.” Gayle put her fist over her heart. “It’s awful.”

James leaned back, his hands over his eyes. “I could talk to Meryl right now with that phone. And I could make a plan with her to save her. It feels like I could. She’s smart. The smartest of anyone I’ve ever known. She’d get this stuff. We do what she says—that’s what my heart is thinking. We’ll build a fucking lightning tower, or we’ll break into a lab, or we’ll set off a nuclear weapon. Whatever it is that will let Meryl walk through the door.”

Tressa Fay looked at her phone, lit up with another text.

I should say that I’m not shy, but I’m usually a little more circumspect.

Circumspect. God. And all of this excellent grammar. Periods at the ends of her texts. If Meryl hit her with a literary allusion, Tressa Fay could not be held responsible for what happened between her legs.

“Dude!” James leaned forward in Tressa Fay’s direction. “Stay with us. I’m perfectly aware of the power of Meryl’s game, but we’re trying to science.”

Tressa Fay turned the phone over. “Sorry,” she whispered. Her phone buzzed again. She lifted the edge, just a tiny bit, so she could read as soon as James looked away.

But it felt good when I wrong-numbered you the other night. Better than good. Like it was supposed to happen. I’ve hated being blocked and knowing you must be hurt.

Tressa Fay put the phone back down, swallowing. This was so terrible in the best way possible.

“What about what Mary said?” Guy asked.

James raised his eyebrows. “What about it?”

“About there being more than one version, or more than one reality. If there isn’t a single truth, and also, we’re living, because we can’t not do that, then we’re going to make choices, and so is Meryl. And that’s going to start fucking with everything even more. What can our brains even deal with? How many versions of reality can we hold on to?” When Michael winced, Guy squeezed his shoulders in response. “Look, I’m a lawyer, so I have to consider a different version of the same reality every time I go to work. I can hold multiple things in my head at the same time. But each of us experiencing different realities as they happen because there’s a wormhole or a portal or a magic phone is different.”

“Maybe not, though,” Linds said. “It’s actually mathematically impossible that the first time we recognized the existence of another world, or even interacted with it or experienced it, is right now. More than one reality is always possible.”

“More than one reality is making me angry in exactly the way Mary said. It makes me angry to get into that argument with my husband about something we have different memories of how it happened,” Gayle said. “I want a grown-up to walk into this room and tell one of the realities it has no choice but to agree to disagree.”

“Yes.” Linds nodded. “But what I’m trying to say is that if science is right, and there’s communication with other worlds, other universes, that we commonly experience in many different ways, then our brains and our hearts already know how to experience it without letting it break us.”

“To be perfectly honest,” James broke in, “I’m having a hard time hanging on to what happened at the salon already. As if I’m having to repeat it inside my head like a number I need to memorize.”

“I don’t feel that way,” Gayle said. “Every time I think about it, I’m horrified all over again.”

Linds tapped her mouth with her fingertips. “Maybe because what happened is always true in your worlds. She’s your sister. In every one of your worlds, she has you and you have her in some way. Everything that happens at any time with Meryl is always connected to you, more connected than it is to James.”

Tressa Fay swallowed. She could remember exactly what happened in the salon. In high definition. She felt it all through her body.

What did that mean?

“We forget,” Michael said. “We know how to forget because this happens all the time. We possibly evolved to forget. We can only perceive everything happening at once until it gets to be too much, and something in there”—he tapped his head—“hits the kill switch and replaces it with an acceptable narrative.”

“Because we’re storytellers ,” Linds said. “We’ll make a story . We’re making one now. We have no choice but to live this, because these are the scientific laws that rule us, so we have to do what Mary and her mom decided to do. Put down arguing about reality and simply live whatever this is.”

“This is not special. This is something that happens all the time. We know how to do this.” Michael said it like he was repeating a new mantra.

“We’re just human,” Linds said. “It might be impossible to get Meryl in this room with us. It might be possible, but not yet. Or it might have already happened.”

Tressa Fay looked at her croton plant, the spotted leaves spreading out for light, its life as unmistakable as her own. Just like Gayle and James, she couldn’t make it feel real that Meryl was gone while her phone gently buzzed with texts from Meryl that she desperately wanted to read. What felt real was that Meryl was here. That she wasn’t gone.

She didn’t want to be reckless with herself or anyone else. Tressa Fay was a cautious person. She wasn’t one to leap into the unknown, but she also trusted herself. Opening her salon had been a gut decision she knew was real and right and would be amazing. Recognizing her queerness had felt the same way. And something about the way Meryl had talked to her that night—how it was easy and electric at the same time, even over text—felt like it was worth trusting. Something about the video clip from the news that Tressa Fay had shown Guy, and Gayle and James walking into her salon, and texts from Meryl popping back up on her phone as though she hadn’t stopped talking to Tressa Fay for even one minute, told her that this woman, this time, was different.

If that was simply Tressa Fay’s alive, human, animal self making a story, she found it hard to care.

“Okay. Okay. Okay.” Tressa Fay needed to make something happen. “I’m with Gayle. And James. And Mary’s mom. It isn’t acceptable that Meryl disappearing is a part of our story, so we have to prevent that. Also, James said Meryl is smart, and, as some of you know, I wouldn’t have left my place on a cold night with soup on the stove if I didn’t think that was true.”

Mary snorted. Tressa Fay’s sapiophilia was legend.

“There are ethics to think about,” Michael interjected. “If what is being suggested here is that we try to take actions that will, let’s say, reunite us with Meryl, then we also have to consider who could be harmed by those actions. It’s obviously a terrible harm that Meryl disappeared, and if we can repair it, we should. But not without thinking about what other harm we might do.”

“Extremely, very lawyer-y,” Mary said.

Michael sighed.

“That’s if we’re assuming that this Meryl”—Guy pointed at Tressa Fay’s phone—“is on one timeline with us. That she’s five months back from us, as opposed to the idea that we’re creating multiple Meryls every time we interact with this Meryl.”

“Oh my God.” Gayle covered her mouth with her hand.

“You know what?” Mary asked. “The only thing to do, for the sake of ethics and preventing harm and preserving our mental health, is to believe Meryl’s timeline is ours, five months back, and we’re five months ahead. There is a Meryl who is there, in May”—she nodded toward the phone—“who can talk to Tressa Fay here, in October. And in September, Meryl disappears. The end. The end .” Mary glared a warning at Michael and Linds, who both looked like they were about to say something. “Old school,” she said firmly. “That’s the only way we can do this. We have to believe that what we’ve seen, heard, and experienced is true. We have to believe in each other’s experiences. And we figure out how to make the most of what we know without causing more harm.”

That helped.

Gayle lifted her hand. “If I know my sister, she’s going to do all kinds of experiments, I bet.” She paused, then looked at Tressa Fay, her eyes a little narrowed. “How much did you guys get into over text, anyway?”

“I mean, more than I have in some time.” Tressa Fay looked at her phone, smiling. It gave her an idea. “My phone.” She held it up. “The phone can be a thing to do . I almost talked to her, remember? The bad connection? And she could only see my Instagram as far as she had got on her timeline, and hers stopped in April, but I think she just doesn’t post much, so I should be able to see them. Observe! Right? And act on that. I bet there are other things to try. Because my phone is more than a potato clock.”

As if to confirm that it was magic, her phone buzzed again. She absolutely had a hot engineer on the line. Facts.

Gayle pressed her lips together. “Until we all decide together, though, don’t let Meryl tell us —the us back then. We keep talking, and we watch out every minute, and we hope that one of us figures out what will keep Meryl out of danger and keep her here. Maybe it’s not going to be about making decisions so she stays safe. Maybe we’re going to actually have to rescue her. I want to be ready for anything.”

“Yeah. Also, I’m going to church on Sunday.” James stood up, then held his hand out to help Mary up from the beanbag. “I need something omnipresent to help me sort this out.”

“No one keeps anything to themselves.” Gayle looked at Tressa Fay. “Please tell her, too, that if there is any way she can try to talk to me?”

The grief in this request was palpable. “I could,” Tressa Fay said. “But I wonder if, while you’re here, shouldn’t it be you who tells her about…this reality?”

The color in Gayle’s face drained, leaving behind two hot spots burning on her cheekbones. “Now?”

Tressa Fay held out her phone. “You’re her sister.”

Gayle took the phone with trembling fingers. She looked at James.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Don’t worry about all the other stuff. Just talk to her how you really want to talk to her.”

Gayle sat down and started typing, tears on her face. Tressa Fay gathered up everyone’s coats and bags, packed up some cookies for Mary, and fussed with Guy’s hair.

Finally, Gayle stood up and cleared her throat. “Okay. She’s got it.” She looked like she would say more, but Tressa Fay was pretty sure she was trying not to cry.

James shoved his hands in his coat pockets. “What did she say, though?”

She laughed, a short, barky laugh that sent a few more tears down her face. She read from the screen of Tressa Fay’s phone. “?‘Tell me that you haven’t gone through anything at my house.’?” Gayle rolled her eyes. “Then she said, ‘It will be okay. Nothing can be as bad as the wind effect on the lake that flooded the entirety of the east side, with a giant rotting-fish clog in the Main Street storm drain to boot. If I can get through that, I can get through anything.’?”

“Mercy.” James looked at the ceiling. “Meryl.”

“Does she really understand?” Michael sounded worried. “Should Linds or somebody try to explain it again? Because it sounds like she’s maybe not worried enough.”

“Explaining problems to Meryl is easy,” James said. “Making her worry about them is hard.”

“Linds maybe can explain it better, but I explained worse,” Gayle said. “By which I mean, I explained it in the most catastrophic language possible and tried to make her feel guilty for how much she’s made me sick with fear. I told her to fix it, and I told her not to let some girl with long legs distract her from getting her ass up here. Alive.”

Michael rubbed his hand over his mouth. “So you’ve got it handled, then.”

Gayle held out Tressa Fay’s phone to her. “You were the first person she’s talked to me about in years, maybe.” When Tressa Fay reached for the phone, Gayle moved it away. “Don’t fuck it up.”

Tressa Fay couldn’t be sure if she meant the multiverse or Tressa Fay and Meryl’s infatuationship, but she could tell Gayle was serious. She gingerly took back her phone.

Linds shrugged into her coat. “I just have to say one more thing.” She pushed her hands through her pixie cut. “If you can, try to think about this extraordinary glimpse into how time operates as proof that you never really lose anyone. You don’t. All your love exists everywhere, all the time.”

“Okay,” Gayle said. She picked up her bag and went to the door. She didn’t say anything more, just shoved her way out as if she couldn’t get away fast enough.

Tressa Fay understood. It was hard to accept what Linds said. Tressa Fay’s mom had died before she’d even had a chance to remember her, and “lost” was the right word for how her absence felt. What they’d glimpsed tonight didn’t change that.

It was a while before everyone left. When Tressa Fay was alone again, her apartment felt chilly without all the people, even quieter than usual.

She swiped open her phone. She didn’t let herself read Gayle and Meryl’s conversation with each other. That wasn’t right. Instead, she swiped up to reveal the long string of messages from Meryl that she hadn’t been able to look at.

I just learned about your environmental allergies from your IG. You’ll have to tell me if I should change anything I use.

I don’t wear perfume or dye my hair, and I already use unscented deodorant and laundry detergent because I think it’s weird when those things have a smell, but but but I have such a weakness for lotion that smells like dessert. Right now, I smell like salted caramel, for example. It makes me happy, but not happy enough that I’d want you to have to stab an EpiPen in your thigh if we…

Those ellipses were fill-in-the-blank sexting. Choose your own adventure. Did you like those books? The ones where you could turn to a page for one thing to happen, or turn to another for something else to happen? I loved them more than any other kind of book.

Tressa Fay smiled.

hey there, caramelicious. everyone just left

Right here, right now, in the glow of these texts, it felt exactly like it should. Like passing notes with a pretty girl who you knew might like you, and you might like back. It was completely the same feeling as always.

Every single universe there was in the infinite infinite had this .