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Her sentence hung between them, across time and space and, according to her, heartache and misunderstandings. In this moment, he saw it clearly: two paths. One that would lead them down a possibly treacherous road that hadn’t been trod upon for quite a while, and another that was even and clear.

But Mabel chose for them both: “I’m sorry. You were saying?”

Was he disappointed? Relieved? “Just that, well, I have to get back. But if I fade away before I can find it, will I fade

into invisibility? Into the aether? What happens to me?”

“You’re afraid. And that’s all right. It’s human. No one knows what happens after they die, or where they were before they

were born.”

He considered telling her how the Overlays were keeping the fading at bay but didn’t want her to think him a terrible person,

even if she didn’t say it aloud. Even if he didn’t want to admit it to himself, he needed her to think him... good. Worthy.

He said, “Ruben has figured a way to force my memories to the surface. Or maybe it isn’t just him, maybe it’s the three of

us.”

“That is a good trick.”

“He’s tenacious. Won’t take no for an answer to anything.” He added, with a surprising bit of pride in his voice, “And he’s

more than decent at theorizing.”

“A road trip. Friends. You could do worse in life. Or death. But I know, I know. Your house. I’ll tell you this. I’d bet the

farm you don’t need to find a portal or try to create one, not a physical sort of one, anyway. Your way in? It’s more a place

of mind, or a place of emotion, I think.” She paused. “Don’t be afraid of the past. It can be ugly and it can hurt, but it

happened, and eventually you have to face it.”

“As long as I didn’t kill anybody, I’m fine with not reckoning with whatever.”

He was met with silence.

two something differents

the moment john left this world , I felt it the way cold air knocks the breath out of you.

But even in that moment, I felt a tiny ember of hope, because feeling that chill only proved we were real: our love and our

being two Something Differents hadn’t been a figment of my imagination, after all.

27

Persephone scrunched her nose; her nostrils were dry. She had the overwhelming sense that something was wrong. She opened

her eyes and squinted at the morning light bleeding through the cheap curtains. A flashing pain; her lower lip had cracked.

John, who had looked more solid last night than she’d ever seen him thanks to the repeated Overlays, wasn’t in the hotel room.

She pushed herself up and turned to glance at Ruben, sleeping in the next bed over, and it was like putting her brain in a

salad spinner. After a few minutes, she grabbed her phone and walked into the bathroom. Her eyes flitted to the mirror and

away again. She didn’t want to see herself, was frightened she’d see some alarming new development. But the glance wasn’t

so quick that she missed the dark circles under her eyes, ponytail askew, white stripe bold as ever.

As soon as she unlocked her phone she saw a text from Umed: Update on Janet role. Check your vm.

She sat the phone on the bathroom counter and took a long drag of air. The tone of the text was unclear. She picked up the

phone, placed it back down. Christine once mentioned a strange if not loopy thing about expectations; something about an experiment

in which a cat, or maybe it was a puppy, was locked in a box and you had to figure out if the animal inside was dead or alive,

but because you hadn’t opened the box yet, the cat or the dog was technically both. Dead and alive. So had she gotten the

role or not? Persephone couldn’t remember if wishing or praying or tricking your brain into believing an outcome made it so.

She picked up the phone and listened.

Umed said something in the beginning and then You’re a favorite something else, sighed, and then said the thing:

They've decided to go in a different direction.

A shock on her tongue, coppery and sharp.

Persephone listened a second time to make absolutely sure she heard correctly.

They've decided to go in a different direction.

She sank onto the edge of the tub. Apparently, the new director and the producers—and maybe someone at the studio—decided

to go with a name.

Corpus Christi. Overlays. White stripes in her hair. Old age. Desiccated dreams.

And then she realized there was another voicemail from Umed. Short, only a few seconds: Kingston. It was Lee Kingston.

28

It was supposed to have been a meeting.

First off, Persephone hadn’t a clue why Beau Barrett wanted to meet her; she knew only that the meeting was—if accepted—to

take place at Beau’s house in Bel Air and the participants were to be limited to herself and the director. Persephone had

been in town barely over a year, and she’d discovered it wasn’t customary that an actor’s agent or manager went to such meetings

with their client. Still, she couldn’t help thinking it was strange, meeting Beau at his house of all places. (And she never

did find out how he’d tracked her down; she could only guess that he’d seen her at Little Izakaya or maybe a party she’d attended

with Christine.)

From the doorstep, she could see the pool. It was surrounded by crumbling stone lions and dirty pool chairs and the water

was spotted with brown and orange leaves, but she could imagine the kind of parties that happened there. Persephone stared

at the oxidized lion door knocker, trying not to be unnerved by the whisper of Old Hollywood glamour about the place.

Beau answered the door himself, and it wasn’t lost on her how weird this was, never speaking yet here she was and she didn’t even know why.

Three minutes in, after he offered her a glass of alkalized water, they were walking through his mansion as he showed her around—the grand sitting rooms, the home theatre, the massage room, the basement club, complete with stripper poles and neon lights—sharing little tidbits about the pictures on the walls, some of which contained famous people, some of which were drawn by or photographed by famous people.

And the entire time, all Persephone could do was wonder what they were doing there.

Was he working on something and had a role in mind for her?

Did he like her look and just want to keep her in mind in the event something came up?

She was turning over these theories while sitting with Beau in his breakfast nook drinking fresh-squeezed OJ, when she felt

a hand move onto her knee. She shot him a look but he kept drinking his orange juice, still going on about his last action

comedy. And then the hand started to move. She thought of it as The Hand because from the waist up, you’d never know anything

was happening at all; it was like he had no idea what his hand was doing, so much so that it took a few seconds to register

that she wasn’t imagining the whole thing. And then the Hand slid right up to her crotch—thank God she’d worn jeans and not

the knit dress she’d considered—and she grabbed the Hand, twisted it, and voilà! Suddenly Beau was attached to his hand again.

He yelped, but Persephone wasn’t finished. She leapt from the breakfast table and Beau did the same, having the nerve to look

wounded, which infuriated her even more. It was why she grabbed the huge crystal vase— Great-Grandma’s Baccarat —and dumped water and dozens of roses over the entire front of Beau’s Supreme t-shirt and Japanese denim. His great-grandmother’s

crystal vase, which just might have escaped being stolen by the Nazis, shattered spectacularly on the kitchen’s Italian travertine

floor.

“What the hell?”

Persephone turned to see Lee Kingston standing in the kitchen with a confused smile. Probably he’d been here the whole time,

but the house was huge.

Beau shouted, “The bitch is crazy!” to which Persephone shouted, “Your boy is a perv!”

Lee appeared, in retrospect, a bit unsurprised. But also sobered, which had the effect of making Persephone feel more calm.

Another sane mind in the room.

But then he raised his hands with a Let’s everybody relax , and the way he essentially equated Persephone and Beau, as if they’d both done something out of line, pissed her off even

more. Worse, it made her feel helpless, and in seconds, she was going back and forth with Lee as he tried to explain away

his friend’s behavior.

“Are you sure,” Lee said, “you aren’t misreading things? His hand was on your knee, right?”

“I didn’t tell him to put it there.”

“Yeah, but you guys are chillin’, drinking—”

“Orange juice.” It should be clear there was no alcohol involved.

“—sitting close...”

“Talking about work .”

“What work?”

What work. What had they been talking about? Not work. “Well,” Persephone said, “I came here to talk about work. He asked me here to...” It

was never stated why he’d asked her over. The email stated meeting . That was it.

“We were just talking,” Beau interjected, “getting to know each other. I put my hand on her knee and she looked at me and

I looked at her and so, what...? It’s like when you go to the movies and put your arm around your date—Who the fuck asks,

‘Can I put my fucking arm around your shoulder?’ You do it and if she doesn’t like it she moves it, if she’s cool she leaves

it. What the fuck! This bitch is nuts! This vase survived the Holocaust and look at it!”

And then they were arguing again and Lee was beginning to take the stance that the whole thing was an innocent mistake and

there were zero apologies and Lee suggested she leave and after escorting her to the door, felt impelled to add, “Don’t make

a big deal of this, OK? Don’t make trouble.”