Never Enough Time, page 2
I mean, I never go to a party. Or hardly ever go. Or rarely stay if I do go. Or feel at all comfortable while I’m there.
Was I kidnapped? Yeah, maybe that’s it. I’m a famous kidnap victim! I’ll read about myself on Twitter in a moment, as soon as I find my phone, which I can’t locate. Or my tablet, which has also disappeared. I’ve now looked all over this small room for them. Nowhere. They’re gone.
What am I talking about? These objects didn’t disappear—I disappeared.
I’m somewhere else and I’m not even me. Although I’m sort of me, and that guy, Laurence, my canceled quickie date, called me Del, so he seems to know me.
This is just the kind of thing that would happen in a dream. Oh my fucking transcended Buddha.
Of course! Fuck me! I’m dreaming!
That explains every goddamn thing that’s happened so far this morning.
What I mean is, in the morning I’m dreaming about. That morning. Not the real morning, the one where I’ll wake up, have hacked-away-at short hair, bad skin, and a project that I’ve got to start, like, today, because even last-minute me needs a few days to work on it. Hell, I need a day just to figure out what the fucking hell the project is.
Therefore, I’m going to get back in this bed, get back under the cute black and purple comforter—damn, my dreaming self has extra great taste in home, or should I say fantasy, décor—finish the dream, then get up and do what I always do.
Except for one small problem.
When I get up, like four minutes and thirteen seconds later, since I’m not tired at all and can’t even keep my eyes closed, I’m not back in my real room, my room at home, my actual, accustomed, usual place.
I’m still here in this odd strange stranger’s room.
What would an old-timey science fiction writer do about this? I wonder as I lie in bed with my eyes open and give the covers a couple of kicks, just to convince myself that I am actually awake.
Would they have me go outside now and get the first glimpse at the pods that are going to take over my very existence unless I can miraculously escape their inexorable, grasping advance?
Would they explain what the fuck happened to me so that the reader would know what happened even though I, the actual person (well, the fictional person, if it’s science fiction), wouldn’t have a clue?
Would they send me a wonderful message, maybe slip a note under my door—this door, I mean, because it’s hardly mine—which would help me out? Damn, I’d love a note under the door right about now.
Sadly for me, none of these things is happening. It’s just me, in this room, in these odd but quite nice pj’s, under a head of long, swingy black hair, about to have the mother of all panic attacks.
I mean, I must have left my home and come here, and I don’t remember doing any of it. Forget the part about my hair having grown a foot and a half and my face looking kinda significantly different. I shove all that aside. The important question is How the fuck did I get here?
Believe me, I’ve been racking my hippocampus and temporal lobe and anything else that I can rack, and as far as I know, I fell asleep reading about that bastard who’s leaving his girlfriend in the present because he likes the girl in the past better. And we’re supposed to be on his side! What is that he’s doing? It’s not trading up. I guess it’s trading back.
Me? I’ve traded over. That makes me giggle.
It doesn’t mean a fucking thing, but I’m giggling. I guess that’s part of the panic attack. Hysteria. Named after the uterus, because, fuck knows, a man would never be over-the-top emotional. Or have a uterus, for that matter. Or want one. Or know what to do with it if he did.
But I’ve lost the thread—every spun, measured, and cut portion of it. The whole shebang. The full monty. The a-to-z gamutity of it all.
But there is no thread, I remind myself. Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos are nowhere fucking in sight.
And me? I’m in a different place, I’m in a different me, and I have no idea who, what, where, why, or when.
I’d say that about sums it up.
To make matters worse, Laurence’s lab mate had to barge in on us just when I was about to have my first quickie ever.
Fuck me.
Chapter 4
Okay. I’m going to just admit it here, and you can do with it whatever you want. Criticize me, hate me, tell yourself that grand old you would never stoop to such a low thing and then feel justifiably superior about it, but, the thing is, after the giggling stopped, I sat on the bed and cried.
I know, I know, I know. Girls don’t cry anymore. Women, I guess. I don’t seem to be such the girl anymore, at least not judging by what I saw in the mirror in the bathroom.
We don’t cry. We’re superheroes (superheroines?), we’re strong and tough and in-your-aura, we’re invincible, stolid, resourceful, right-on, right up front, maybe even somewhat mean or possibly incredibly mean, and we don’t cry. We wouldn’t cry. No fucking bloody way.
It’s unbecoming. It’s unstrong. It’s unnecessary. It’s not what anyone wants to emulate or know about or experience themselves.
I mean, you can cry at the climax of the Big Emotional Scene where you find out your superpowers were given to you by the little boy next door, who you always thought was a pest but as it turns out he’s your soul mate or your supertwin or your otherworldly benefactor and he was just playing at being the little boy next door and, well, just finding out about this is hugely overwhelming.
You could cry then. But not now. Not when you’ve just woken up in a strange place and you’ve got to find out who you are, where you are, and what the fucking hell happened to you.
I think all of this while I’m crying, so I’m guessing you’re thinking it too. I cry for quite a while, but since I don’t have my phone or my tablet, I can’t tell you how long it goes on for. And, as far as I know, wherever the hell it is that I’m at might have a completely different system of timekeeping than the one I’m familiar with.
But, you know, despite my lack of audacious superpowers, I do stop crying eventually.
Because I get a brilliant idea. Forget finding out where I am or when I am, if that’s even part of this situation, predicament, and/or circumstance. The important thing, the main thing, is to get back to my home.
Like Dorothy or something. Except, thank you very much, great Buddha, I don’t live in Kansas. Unless this is Kansas. But I don’t live here, and I don’t want to find out that it’s Kansas here. And I don’t want to find a wizard.
The trick is to get home. Back to the Westchester, New York, suburbs, where my home is. Was?
Dorothy was kind of like the guy in that science fiction story. She just thought herself back home. With some help from a killer pair of shoes and some glorious Technicolor. Come to think of it, the guy in the sci-fi book had an entire outfit, which outfit helped him think his way into the past.
From all this, I gather that clothing, or at least accessories, could be a big part of getting back to my actual real home.
But I’m just going to have to wing it, because, after looking through all the clothes here in this room, there’s hardly anything that’s even hemi-demi-semi-reminiscent of my usual wardrobe, yet everything—and I mean everything, because I tried it all on—does fit me as though it’s mine. And some of the stuff looks rather nice.
So I put on the least-different-looking clothes here: a pair of dark gray leggings and a chartreuse sweater. Looks great with my swingy long black hair brushing up against it, I notice in the mirror over my dresser.
Over the dresser. It’s not mine, and I don’t know why I keep referring to all this stuff that way. All I can say is, it’s hard not to.
Now comes the difficult part. I’m going to have to think myself back to my life. My real life, not this made-up life, this you-almost-had-a-quickie-with-Laurence-this-morning life. But the not-quite-graduated-from-high-school-yet suburban New York life. That life.
Should I stay in the room? Should I go out in the hallway? Should I go out, like, outside?
I’m actually kind of afraid to go outside.
I’m afraid I’ll see the pods or that Laurence will have turned into a zombie and will come after me to eat my flesh or that Laurence’s friend is a vampire and he’ll sink his fangs into my neck and I’ll have really pale skin for the next few millennia while I’m forced to give up being a vegetarian and suck the blood out of the unwilling and uninformed instead.
Or that there’ll be no one there, outside, kind of like that Twilight Zone with Burgess Meredith, except I don’t wear glasses, so at least I’d still be able to read. And, you know, he could’ve gotten a magnifying glass. Don’t you think?
Yeah, that’s the sort of shit that’s going through my crazed mind—everything from The Wizard of Oz to Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
When what I really need is some Philip K. Dick.
Because I don’t know what’s real—or if I’m real.
Chapter 5
This won’t surprise you—and, frankly, it didn’t surprise me—but closing my eyes, clicking the heels of my Chucks (classic black-and-whites, a nice choice) together, feeling, believing, and then thinking myself back into my real place, my real time, my real me—it didn’t fucking work. Not even a little.
I try it with my eyes closed, with my eyes open. I try it in what could’ve been a trance state if I’d been in my right mind, if I had a right mind, and I try it sitting, standing, and lying down.
Nothing works.
I’m still here, still in this room, and nothing at all has changed. No one is slipping me a note under the door, no great revelations are occurring to me, and Laurence hasn’t rushed back from his lab, realizing what’s most important in life, to have that quickie with me. None of that.
Instead . . .
“Delaney Archer! Are you awake yet?”
“Yes!” I say, so happy, so fucking thrilled, to hear a familiar voice I practically jump out of my skin.
Except, when I open the door, it’s not Becky, my almost-friend from Westchester. It’s a complete stranger. Well, really, I’m the complete stranger. But then, so is everyone else.
“My favorite sweater!” says the stranger, who’s an attractive dark-skinned woman with black, deep-set eyes and a perfect nose.
“Yeah, mine too,” I say, playing along. I’ve known about this sweater for all of like an hour, max, I’m guessing, yet I’m willing to own it as my favorite. What the hell.
“Last night was amazing!” says the unknown-to-me very friendly girl—excuse me, woman—in the doorway.
“If you say so,” I say.
“Did you get drunk again?” she says, putting her hands on her hips and looking all sternlike and judgmental.
“Maybe,” I say. “I can’t remember.”
“Jeezus Holy Ghost,” the doorway person says. “Get a grip, Delaney. Isn’t your thesis supposed to be finished by next week?”
“Thesis?” I say. What the fuck?
“Ha ha,” says the girl/woman/doorway person/stranger.
“Ha ha,” says I. “Well, you know me. President of the Last Minute Society.”
“Owner of the Last Minute Society,” says the person whose name I wish I knew.
“Listen,” I say, trying to keep the tone light while also doing some information gathering. “What’s your name again?”
Okay, so that isn’t too original or subtle, but, fuck, I don’t know her name and how else am I going to find out? Wait until she says it herself? That could be, like, I don’t know, decades from now. Although when now is—that’s another question.
“Delaney Fucking Archer,” says Madame X. “You are such a clown.”
“Humor the clown,” I say.
“Seriously? Delaney, is something wrong?” She looks at me with a lot of concern and niceness, like we’re besties or something.
“Everything’s wrong,” I say. I mean, I’ve got to tell somebody. Well, I don’t got to, but I fucking have to.
“Come on. You can tell me over breakfast. I’m starved,” she says, and I notice that I’m also starved, not just for information but for food.
So we leave this big building—a dorm, I’m guessing, since there are a lot of doors and every once in a while a door to a bathroom and every once in a while another person who looks to be about the same age as my reflection looked—walk across a big motherfucking field of greenery and shit, and make our way to this chillingly modern building where there’s a kind of a cross between a cafeteria and a café.
Stranger Girl and I sit down with our food—lots of vegetarian choices for me, and I take one of everything—and she says, “Spit it out, Delaney. What the hell is the matter? You don’t seem like yourself.”
“I guess,” I say as I polish off a creamy pastry and sink my teeth into a croissant, “that, uh, I’m kind of lost.”
“I know the feeling,” says my unknown-to-me bestie. “I feel that way a lot. We’re going to be finishing up soon and I don’t have a job lined up yet. But didn’t you tell me you had two offers? Three? And that you’d just about decided?”
Job? Offers? Decided? What the precipitous, plummeting hell is she talking about?
I spit out some wet, overmasticated croissant crumbs and choke a bit.
“Look, whatever your name is,” I say, frustrated as shit, even more scared, and through pretending anything otherwise, “I don’t know where I am, I don’t know who you are, and now you’re telling me I’m about to accept a job offer? This is all some colossal joke, right? Who put you up to this? It’s Becky, isn’t it?”
Yeah, I pulled her name out of a near-empty hat. I don’t know any practical jokers—although there’s nothing practical or even somewhat jokey about the situation I’m in right now—but, I mean, maybe, just maybe, Becky could’ve done something like this. With a year to plan it and a crew of people to help her out.
She did plan a rather elaborate party once. And direct that school play, which must’ve involved quite a bit of strategic thinking . . . and doing.
“This isn’t even funny,” says the stranger. “I’m your best friend and you don’t know my name?”
“No, I don’t,” I say.
“You really did have too much to drink last night. Barry said I should stop you, but I wasn’t really paying attention.”
“Just tell me your name. Please,” I say. As though finding out the name of a complete stranger is going to solve my big huge gigantic insurmountable unthinkable problem for me.
“I’ve never seen you this bad off, Delaney. It must be the pressure of the thesis. I told you like a thousand times to just sit down and do it.”
I mop up the spewed-out croissant bits into a paper napkin and consider tossing it at my torturer. One of my torturers. The rest of them are sitting all around me in the café/cafeteria, staring at us.
“Sara Perry,” she says finally as she shakes her head, and I heave a melodramatic sigh.
“Thank you, Sara,” I say. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
“Now you’re going to tell me what the problem really is,” she says, so I oblige her.
Chapter 6
At first, Sara’s looking at me with that concern-and-care-bestie thing going on, then she starts squinting and making faces at me and at the world, and then she just fucking laughs.
“It’s not funny!” I say. It’s not funny.
“It is so funny,” Sara says. I’m beginning to think I liked her better when I didn’t know her name. At least, back then, she wasn’t laughing at me.
“Oh my God, Delaney, is that what you’ve been doing?”
“What? What have I been doing? Please tell me!” Finally, some facts!
“Writing a movie script or a novel or something instead of working on your thesis?”
“What do you mean?”
“Come on. That story is just preposterous. But it’d make a great movie. You are working on a movie script, aren’t you? You always said you wanted to do something like that. And now you’re trying out the plot on me.”
“It’s not a movie script, Sara. I wish it were,” I say. I wish to bloody hellish fucked hell it were.
“I know it’s more interesting than your thesis, Delaney, but, Christ, you’ve got a deadline. This isn’t the minor leagues anymore. This is life. But it’s like you’ve regressed or something.”
“Maybe I have,” I say, “but it’s true. Yesterday I was in high school—I hadn’t even graduated yet!—and today I’m here, wherever here is. And I don’t know anybody. Not even you.”
“You either need a shrink or a drink,” Sara says, and we both giggle at the unintentional rhyme. “Or both.”
“I don’t even drink,” I say while I’m still giggling, and this statement sends Sara into paroxysms of snorting, sloppy laughter.
“I’m too young,” I say in protest, although because she’s laughing so hard, so am I. It’s contagious, I guess.
“Well, you are younger than me, but you’re almost twenty-four,” says Sara, who can’t stop laughing. My predicament has turned into a great source of amusement for her.
Almost twenty-four. That’s just wrong. I stop laughing.
“I’m not even seventeen yet,” I say, at which saying Sara, who’s laughing so hard there are tears in her eyes, points at me and says, “Yeah, right. And I’m the queen of Alpha Centauri.”
Just then, just as I’m thinking that perhaps Sara Perry is the queen of Alpha Centauri and I’ve arrived in some alternate reality, I’m saved—or perhaps further ruinated—by the arrival of a guy so good-looking that I immediately forget about my canceled quickie with Laurence and fall deeply, inexorably, devastatedly in love.
Unfortunately for moi, this incredible human specimen with golden locks and bright green eyes sits down next to Sara, puts his manly, muscular arms around her, and gives her the kind of sloppy, openmouthed kiss that I wish he’d give me.
“Ryan,” Sara says, saving me the trouble of having to ask yet someone else I’m supposed to know what the fuck their name is, “you won’t believe the story that Delaney’s been telling me.”
