The thing about drinking alone on a Tuesday is that nobody asks you to explain it. Monday drinking has an excuse—the week is fresh and already terrible. Friday drinking has momentum. Sunday drinking is practically a sport. But Tuesday? Tuesday drinking is just honest. Tuesday drinking says: I have looked at the full shape of my life and decided that consciousness is optional for the middle of it.
I was on my third whiskey—bottom-shelf, the kind that tastes like someone described whiskey to a chemistry set—and I was staring at the crack in my ceiling. The crack had been there since before I moved in. It started in the corner above the bathroom door and zagged diagonally toward the window, splitting into two branches near the light fixture like a river deciding it had places to be. I had memorized every inch of it the way some people memorize constellations. It was the most reliable thing in my apartment.
The apartment itself was… fine. That's the word you use when you don't want to describe something. Fine. It was four hundred square feet of life that had stopped trying. A kitchen counter with a permanent coffee ring stained into the laminate. A couch that sagged in the middle like it was trying to swallow me slowly. A window that faced a brick wall, which the landlord had described as "courtyard-adjacent." The bathroom light flickered in a pattern I'd started to think of as Morse code, and if it was saying anything, it was probably get out.
My sketchbooks were in the closet. Seven of them, stacked behind a box of shoes I never wore, arranged in a way that suggested they were hidden, because they were. I hadn't opened one in eight months. Before that, eleven months. Before that, two years. The gaps were getting longer. Not because I'd stopped wanting to draw, but because every time I opened one, I could see exactly how good I almost was, and "almost" is a word that gets heavier every year.
I was thirty. Not old. Definitely not young anymore. Thirty is the age where you stop being someone with potential and start being someone with a track record, and my track record looked like a receipt from a gas station at 2 AM: mostly empty, vaguely sad, telling a story no one asked to hear.
My phone sat on the arm of the couch, screen dark. No notifications. That wasn't unusual—I had the kind of social life that could be described as "technically extant." Jake texted sometimes, when he was between things. Between jobs. Between couches. Between whatever he was using that month to not think about the same thing I was using whiskey to not think about. We had a system: he'd send me something funny, I'd send back a single "lol," and neither of us would acknowledge that we were both alone in separate rooms pretending the screen light was company.
My mom called on Sundays. I usually picked up. She'd ask how work was, and I'd say fine, and she'd ask if I was eating, and I'd say yes, and she'd pause in that way that meant she knew I was lying about at least one of those things but loved me enough to let it go. She was good at that. Letting things go. She'd had practice.
The whiskey was doing its job, which was to make the edges of everything softer. The crack in the ceiling got blurry. The silence got louder, which sounds paradoxical but isn't—there's a specific kind of silence that only shows up when you're drunk enough to hear it. It's the sound of a room that knows no one is coming. The sound of an evening that has already peaked, and the peak was pouring a third drink.
I laughed.
Not at anything. There was nothing funny. That was what made it funny. The sheer mathematical completeness of how unremarkable everything was. I was thirty years old, drinking alone on a Tuesday, in an apartment that smelled like coffee grounds and old rain, and the highlight of my week was going to be a microwave burrito I'd eat standing over the sink at 11 PM. That was the shape of things. That was the topology of my entire existence, and I could see it clearly for the first time because I was exactly drunk enough to see clearly and exactly sober enough to know I was seeing clearly, and the combination was either hilarious or unbearable, and it turns out, at the right blood alcohol level, those are the same thing.
I laughed, and then I was crying, and I didn't notice the transition because there wasn't one. It was simultaneous. My chest was doing both at once, this broken accordion of sounds that I couldn't have produced sober because sober me had guardrails, sober me had the decency to feel things one at a time, but drunk-Tuesday me had apparently decided that efficiency was key and we were going to process thirty years of accumulated what the fuck happened in a single sitting.
"God," I said, to no one. To the crack. To the ceiling. To the apartment that had never been mine in any way that mattered. "God, I wish I was fifteen again."
I laughed harder, because that was the stupidest possible wish. Not rich. Not talented. Not loved. Fifteen. Like the problem was arithmetic and the solution was subtraction. Like if I could just go back to the beginning of the equation, back before every wrong answer and every blank space where an answer should have been, I could—what? Do it differently? Be differently? I couldn't even do my laundry consistently at thirty. What was fifteen-year-old me going to do with a second chance that thirty-year-old me couldn't do with a first one?
But I meant it.
That's the thing. I meant it completely, in the way you can only mean something when you're too drunk to protect yourself from it. Not the wish for youth—I didn't give a shit about youth. The wish to go back. To stand at the fork again and feel what it felt like before I knew which path led here. To be the version of me that still thought the sketchbooks might matter. That still thought showing up might be worth the risk of being seen.
"Fifteen," I said again, like a prayer. Like a joke. Like a last line of dialogue before the credits roll on a movie nobody watched. "Just let me be fifteen again. I'll figure it out this time. I swear to god, I'll figure it out."
The ceiling didn't answer. The crack didn't move. The whiskey sat in my stomach like a warm, bad decision.
I closed my eyes.
And here's the part where I'm supposed to say I felt something. A tingling. A pull. A cinematic whoosh of light and time folding in on itself. I've thought about this moment a lot since then, and the honest answer is: I felt nothing. I was drunk on a Tuesday and I closed my eyes and the next thing I experienced was—
Sunlight.
Not the anemic grey light that leaked through my courtyard-adjacent window. Real sunlight. Aggressive, unapologetic, the kind of sunlight that exists specifically to remind you that the world has been awake for hours and you haven't.
I opened my eyes.
The ceiling was wrong.
It was white. Smooth. No crack. No water stain, no river delta, no familiar geography. Just a flat, clean, aggressively normal ceiling with a light fixture I hadn't seen in—
Fifteen years.
I sat up so fast I almost fell off the bed, which was also wrong. It was small. A twin bed with a blue comforter I recognized the way you recognize a song from a car commercial—immediately, viscerally, without being able to name it. The comforter had a pattern. Thin white stripes. I'd picked it out when I was thirteen because it was the least embarrassing option at Target and I'd already been mortified enough by the idea of my mom helping me shop for bedding.
I was in my bedroom. My old bedroom. The one in my mom's house, the one with the window that faced the oak tree, the one with the desk I'd carved my initials into during a particularly boring summer.
I looked at my hands.
They were small.
Not subtly small. Not trick-of-the-light small. Small. Smooth. Unlined. The knuckles weren't cracked from dry winter air and the nails weren't bitten down to the quick and there was no scar on the left index finger from the time I'd sliced it open on a tuna can at twenty-three. These were the hands of someone who had not yet been cut by anything.
I got out of bed. My feet hit carpet—soft, clean carpet, not the sticky hardwood of the apartment—and I stood up and my centre of gravity was wrong. Everything was wrong. I was shorter. Lighter. My body felt like a rental car in a foreign country: technically functional, but all the controls were in slightly different places.
The mirror was on the back of the door.
I looked.
A fifteen-year-old boy looked back.
My face. My actual face, the original version, before the jawline filled out and the shadows settled under the eyes and the forehead lines started their slow editorial commentary on my life choices. Clear skin—mostly. Hair that still did things. That specific fifteenth-year quality of being assembled from parts that hadn't fully agreed on a final design yet: too much nose, not enough chin, eyes that were simultaneously too earnest and too scared to commit to being earnest.
I touched my face. The boy in the mirror touched his face. We stared at each other with mutual horror.
"What," I said.
My voice cracked on the word. Cracked. Like a boy going through puberty, because I was, apparently, a boy going through puberty.
"WHAT."
"Alex, breakfast!" My mom's voice. From downstairs. Younger. Clearer. No tiredness in it, no careful-Sunday-phone-call gentleness. Just a woman in her late thirties yelling at her kid to come eat before school.
Before school.
I sat on the edge of the bed and put my fifteen-year-old face in my fifteen-year-old hands and breathed.
OK. OK. Options. Let's think about this logically, like an adult, like a thirty-year-old adult who pays taxes and has a retirement account he hasn't checked in six years.
Option one: I was still drunk and this was a dream. A very detailed, very tactile, very persuasive dream. I would wake up on my couch with a headache and a whiskey-stained shirt and the crack in the ceiling would be right where I left it. This was the most rational option. I liked this option. I was choosing to believe this option until further notice.
Option two: I had died. The whiskey had finally conspired with the microwave burritos and the existential dread to produce a cardiac event, and this was the afterlife, and the afterlife was high school, which meant that every religion had been wrong and the truth was much, much worse.
Option three: the wish had worked.
I stood up again. Walked to the window. Opened it. Cold air—real cold air, with the smell of cut grass and a distant lawn mower, and this was not the smell of my apartment complex, this was the smell of the suburb I grew up in, and the oak tree was there, exactly as tall as it should be for—
I looked at the desk. There was a planner on it. One of those school planners they hand out at the beginning of the year. I opened it.
September 2015. Tenth grade. Mr. Harland, Chemistry, Period 3.
The planner had my handwriting in it. Younger, messier, the handwriting of someone who hadn't yet learned that legibility was a form of respect. But mine.
I closed the planner. Held it against my chest. Stood in the middle of a bedroom I'd left half a lifetime ago and tried to feel the edges of the dream, the seams, the place where the hallucination would unravel and show me the real ceiling with the real crack and the real life I'd earned by never trying.
I couldn't find the seams.
"Alex! Eggs are getting cold!"
I went downstairs because I didn't know what else to do. I went downstairs because my mom had made eggs and my thirty-year-old self hadn't had a home-cooked breakfast in four years, and if this was a dying hallucination, it was at least a dying hallucination with scrambled eggs.
She was standing at the stove. Younger. God, so much younger. Her hair was darker and she moved faster and she was humming something—I couldn't place it, some pop song from 2015 that had been everywhere for a summer and then nowhere forever—and she turned and looked at me and smiled the way she used to smile, before the phone calls got careful, before the pauses got longer, before she learned to let things go.
"You look like you've seen a ghost," she said.
"Yeah," I said. "Something like that."
I sat at the kitchen table and ate eggs that tasted like 2015, which tasted like butter and normalcy and a world that hadn't happened yet, and my mom talked about something—a neighbour, a work thing, something about the garage door—and I nodded in all the right places because I was thirty years old and I knew how to perform the act of being present while being absolutely nowhere close to present.
The eggs were perfect. I almost cried again. I didn't, because I was fifteen and fifteen-year-olds don't cry at breakfast, even the ones who are secretly thirty and possibly losing their minds.
I walked to school.
I walked to school.
Every step was wrong and right simultaneously. The sidewalk was the same sidewalk. The houses were the same houses. But everything was fifteen years younger—the paint was brighter, the trees were shorter, the cars in the driveways were models I'd forgotten existed. A woman jogged past in those running shoes that everybody wore in 2015, the ones with the weird lattice pattern, and she was listening to something on earbuds that still had wires, and I almost stopped walking because wired earbuds. The world was so young. Everything was so young. I was so young.
The school appeared at the end of the block like a building-shaped memory made concrete. Westfield High. Two stories of institutional beige, American flag out front, marquee sign announcing a bake sale that I now remembered attending because Jake had bet me I couldn't eat four cupcakes in a row and I'd proved him wrong and then proved him right by throwing up in the parking lot.
I walked through the front doors and the smell hit me like a wall. Every school smells the same: floor wax and cafeteria ghosts and the specific desperation of two thousand teenagers pretending they know who they are. It hadn't changed. It would never change. Schools are embalmed in that smell.
People moved around me in the hallway and I knew some of them. Not their names—I'd lost most of those years ago—but their shapes. The geometry of high school. The clusters and the loners and the people who walked the exact centre of the hallway like they were daring you to exist in the same space.
And then there was Jake.
Jake Mercer, fifteen years old, backpack hanging off one shoulder, grinning at me from across the hall with the specific energy of someone who hadn't yet met the version of himself that would stop grinning. He was skinny. He was loud. He was wearing a T-shirt with some band logo I couldn't read from this distance, and he was alive in a way that I'd forgotten he'd ever been.
"Yo, Alex." He fell into step beside me. "Did you do the chem homework? Because I absolutely did not do the chem homework and Harland's gonna—"
"I didn't do it either," I said, which was true in the most technical possible sense.
"Sick. We die together." He punched my shoulder. Light. Casual. The way you touch someone when you assume they'll always be there.
I almost stopped walking.
Get it together. You are thirty years old. You have handled performance reviews and lease negotiations and that one time you had to talk a locksmith into believing you lived in your own apartment because you'd lost your ID. You can handle tenth-grade chemistry.
Chemistry. Period 3. Mr. Harland.
The classroom smelled like sulfur and dry-erase markers. Mr. Harland was already at the front when I walked in—tall, thin, the kind of man who looked like he'd been designed for the specific purpose of standing in front of a whiteboard. He had the careful posture of someone holding himself very straight, and the careful expression of someone who'd practised looking patient until it became indistinguishable from actually being patient. He was writing something on the board. An equation. I recognized it—basic stoichiometry, the kind of thing I'd forgotten on purpose after graduation and then accidentally re-learned at twenty-six when I'd gone down a Wikipedia rabbit hole at 3 AM because my life had that kind of structural integrity.
I found my seat. Second row, third from the left. I knew this because my body walked there automatically—muscle memory from a body that still remembered the choreography of a life I'd already lived.
Mia Sorento was sitting two seats to my right.
My breath caught.
Mia Sorento at fifteen. Dark hair, dark eyes, that particular stillness she had, like she was always half-sketching something in her mind. She was doodling in the margin of her notebook—small, precise lines, a bird in mid-flight, rendered with the offhand confidence of someone who didn't know she was talented because no one had told her yet.
I stared for exactly one second too long and then looked away because I was thirty years old and staring at a fifteen-year-old girl was—
She's your age. She's the same age as you. You are both fifteen. You are both—
OK. OK, this was going to be a problem. The cognitive dissonance of being thirty in a fifteen-year-old body was not something any amount of whiskey or scrambled eggs had prepared me for. I was going to need rules. Boundaries. Some kind of operational framework for navigating a reality that had apparently decided the laws of physics were more like suggestions.
Mr. Harland turned from the board. "All right. Chapter four. Exothermic reactions. Who can tell me the difference between exothermic and endothermic?"
I knew the answer. Obviously I knew the answer. I was thirty. I'd also watched a documentary about thermodynamics once because I'd run out of things to stream and my life was a monument to settling.
I did not raise my hand.
Jake, next to me, slumped lower in his seat, performing the universal teenager pantomime of please don't call on me, I will literally decompose if you call on me.
Harland's eyes swept the room. They landed on me for half a second. Moved on. Landed on a girl in the back row.
"Kai?"
I turned.
She was in the back corner. I hadn't noticed her when I walked in, which felt like a design flaw on my part, because she was—
Kai Loh. Fifteen. Slight. Watching everything with an expression that was either boredom or extremely advanced surveillance. She had a notebook open in front of her, but she wasn't taking notes from the board—she was writing something else. Something in handwriting too small to read from two rows away.
"Exothermic reactions release energy," she said. Flat. Precise. Like she was reading the nutritional information off a cereal box. "Usually as heat. Endothermic reactions absorb energy from the surroundings. The system gains energy, the surroundings lose it." Pause. "You're about to say combustion is a common example. It is."
Harland blinked. "Thank you, Kai. That's… comprehensive."
She went back to her notebook. She didn't look up again.
Something in my thirty-year-old brain filed that moment away in a drawer labelled pay attention to this later and I didn't understand why yet.
"Right," Harland said, recovering with the practised ease of a man who had been upstaged by teenagers before and would be again. "So today we're going to see this in action. Lab exercise. Pairs. Simple dissolution reaction—ammonium nitrate in water. You'll measure the temperature change, record it, graph it. Nothing exciting."
He paused, and then added, with the weary optimism of a man who had said this before and been proven wrong every time: "Please don't break anything."
We moved to the lab stations. Jake was my partner, because Jake was always my partner, because the fundamental architecture of my tenth-grade life had been built on the assumption that Jake Mercer would always be standing next to me holding the wrong end of something.
The setup was simple. Beaker, water, ammonium nitrate, thermometer, timer. Measure the starting temperature. Add the compound. Measure the drop. Record. Graph. Don't break anything.
I knew, with thirty years of hindsight, exactly what was going to happen if you added too much ammonium nitrate too fast to too little water in a beaker that was already micro-fractured from two semesters of tenth-graders handling it like a sippy cup.
Nothing dangerous. Nothing that would make the news. But the thermal shock could crack the glass if the proportions were off, and the resulting splash of cold chemical water would be dramatic enough to ruin someone's day and generate a very specific kind of high school immortality—the kind where people called you Beaker Boy for six months and you had to pretend it didn't bother you.
I knew this because it had happened to me the first time.
The first time I was fifteen, I'd dumped the ammonium nitrate in too fast because Jake had made me laugh at the wrong moment, and the beaker had cracked, and the splash had hit Mia Sorento's notebook and ruined the bird she was drawing, and she'd looked at me with an expression of such precise, devastating disappointment that I'd carried it in my chest for fifteen years like a shard of glass I'd forgotten to remove.
Not this time.
I measured the water carefully. I checked the beaker for fractures—ran my thumb along the base, felt the glass, found the hairline stress point near the bottom where the previous user had set it down too hard.
"Dude," Jake said. "It's water in a cup. You're not defusing a bomb."
"The beaker's compromised," I said, and then immediately wished I hadn't, because compromised was not a word fifteen-year-olds used about glassware. Fifteen-year-olds said cracked. Fifteen-year-olds said broken. "Compromised" was a word used by adults who watched too many procedural dramas alone on their couches.
"It's what?" Jake looked at the beaker. Then at me. Then back at the beaker with the expression of a person being asked to care about something he had no framework for caring about.
"It's cracked. At the base. See?" I pointed. There was, in fact, a hairline fracture. I knew because I'd caused the original explosion along this exact fault line in a life that either had or hadn't happened yet, depending on metaphysics I was not equipped to parse before noon.
"I don't see anything," Jake said.
"Mr. Harland." I raised my hand. "Our beaker has a stress fracture. Can we get a replacement?"
Harland walked over. Took the beaker. Held it up to the light. His eyebrows did something complicated.
"Good eye, Alex." He turned the glass slowly, finding the flaw. "How did you—" He looked at me. Really looked. "Have you worked with lab glass before?"
And there it was. The first moment. The first place where thirty years of knowledge that I should not possess pressed against the walls of a life that should not contain it.
"My mom has a chemistry set," I said, which was a lie so specific and so boring that it was functionally bulletproof.
Harland nodded slowly. Handed me a new beaker. Walked away.
But he looked back once. Over his shoulder. A half-second glance that I wouldn't have noticed at fifteen because fifteen-year-olds don't track adult micro-expressions—they haven't learned yet that the space between what someone says and what someone's face does is where all the real information lives. But I was thirty, and I saw it, and what it said was: That was unusual.
New beaker. Fresh start. I measured the water. I measured the ammonium nitrate. I poured slowly, controlled, watching the thermometer drop exactly the way it was supposed to—
And then Jake sneezed.
His elbow caught the edge of the beaker. Not a big hit. Just enough to jostle it. Just enough to send a shiver of motion through the water at exactly the wrong moment in the dissolution, and I reached for it—my hands knew what to do, my adult hands, hands that had caught falling coffee mugs and grabbed subway poles at the last second and steadied a drunk Jake Mercer on more sidewalks than I could count—but these weren't my adult hands. These hands were fifteen years old. They were faster than I expected and less precise than I needed and I overcorrected, and my fingers hit the beaker at an angle, and it didn't fall.
It launched.
The beaker tipped, skidded across the lab bench, and hit the rack of test tubes at the far end of the station with a sound like a small, localized apocalypse. Glass shattered. Chemical water went everywhere. Two test tubes rolled off the bench and exploded on the floor with the dramatic flair of objects that had been waiting their entire existence for this moment.
The room went silent.
Twenty-six teenagers and one chemistry teacher stared at me.
Jake, to his eternal credit, said: "I sneezed."
"Nobody move," Mr. Harland said, already heading for the cleanup kit with the calm authority of a man who had seen worse and was saving his real panic for later. "Alex, step back. Everyone at stations five through eight, shoes up—check for glass."
I stepped back. My hands were shaking. Not from the adrenaline—fifteen-year-old bodies have adrenaline to spare, it was practically leaking out of me—but from the specific, private horror of realizing that I had tried to prevent the exact disaster I'd caused the first time and had instead created a bigger, more spectacular version of it. The universe, apparently, had a sense of humour. The universe, apparently, thought I was hilarious.
There was glass on Mia Sorento's notebook. Again. Her bird was ruined. Again. She looked at me with the same expression—that same precise, devastating disappointment—and I felt the shard twist in my chest because apparently some things were load-bearing and could not be removed without the whole structure collapsing.
"Sorry," I said. "I'm really sorry."
She shook her head. Started brushing glass off the page with the back of her hand. "It's fine. It was just a doodle."
It wasn't. I knew it wasn't. In fifteen years she'd be an illustrator—could be, should be—if someone, if anyone, just told her it wasn't just a doodle. But I couldn't say that. I couldn't say any of the things I knew, because I wasn't supposed to know them, because I was fifteen years old and I was in chemistry class and I had just destroyed a rack of test tubes because a grown man's reflexes don't fit in a teenager's hands.
From the back corner, Kai Loh's pen stopped moving.
I didn't see it. I wouldn't learn about it until much later. But she had been watching the whole thing—not the explosion, which everyone watched, but the four seconds before the explosion. The way I'd checked the beaker. The word I'd used. The look on my face when Harland asked how I knew.
She wrote something in her notebook. One line. Then she went back to whatever she'd been writing before.
The rest of the period was cleanup. Mr. Harland was kind about it, because he was kind about everything—that was his gift and eventually his problem, the inability to be unkind even when unkindness might have saved him from a silence that was quietly eating his marriage from the inside. But I didn't know how to think about that yet. Not here. Not now. Not while I was on my knees picking up glass with a dustpan and trying to accept the possibility that I was actually, physically, temporally fifteen years old in September of 2015 and that everything I knew about the next fifteen years was sitting in my head like a loaded weapon I had no training to carry.
The bell rang. I gathered my things. Jake was already talking—about lunch, about some video he'd seen, about whatever was going to happen next in the endless, frictionless present tense of being fifteen—and I was nodding and performing the mechanical act of being his best friend while my internal monologue sounded like a man trying to file a police report for a crime that hadn't been committed yet.
OK. So. Hypothesis: I am in the past. I am fifteen. My body is fifteen. My brain—my consciousness, my memories, my knowledge that the 2016 election is going to be a very specific kind of bad and that nobody should invest in that one cryptocurrency Jake is going to mention in three years—all of that is here, in this body, right now. I got here by getting drunk on a Tuesday and wishing for it, which is either the most important thing that has ever happened to anyone or the most elaborate psychotic break in the history of bottom-shelf whiskey.
I walked through the hallway. Bodies moved around me. Locker doors slammed with the percussive confidence of people who still believed metal could express their feelings. Someone was laughing too loud about nothing. A teacher said something stern to someone who deserved it. The machinery of high school churned on, indifferent to the fact that one of its components had been replaced with a counterfeit version running on fifteen years of overtime.
Cole Briggs shoulder-checked me near the water fountain. Not hard—just enough to assert the physics of the hallway, to remind me and everyone watching that space was a resource and he controlled its distribution. He didn't look at me. Didn't need to. The gesture was so practised it was basically calligraphy.
I didn't react. Thirty-year-old me had been shoulder-checked by landlords and bosses and the entire abstract concept of adulthood for over a decade. A sixteen-year-old with a chip on his shoulder didn't even register on the scale.
But I looked at his face as he passed. Just for a second. And what I saw there—underneath the jaw-set aggression, underneath the posture that said I dare you—was a boy who was very tired and very angry and had no idea those were the same thing.
I filed that away too. The drawer was getting full.
And then—
The thought arrived like a wrong note in a familiar song. Not my thought. Not the thirty-year-old's inner monologue that had been running the show since I opened my eyes that morning. Something younger. Rawer. Sharper. Coming from a place inside my skull that I hadn't authorized, like a notification from an app I didn't remember installing.
Who the hell are you?
I stopped walking.
The thought was confused. It was offended—the particular offence of someone who has just discovered an uninvited guest in their house, standing in their kitchen, wearing their clothes, eating their eggs. Not scared. Not yet. Just—
That's my body. Those are my hands. Why do I feel like I'm sitting in the back seat of my own head? Why do I feel like I've been sitting here all day watching someone else drive and I only just now realized the steering wheel isn't in front of me anymore?
The hallway moved around me. Jake said something. I didn't hear it.
Because for one flickering, impossible second, I could feel him. Not as a memory. Not as the person I used to be. As a presence. Fifteen-year-old Alex, real and awake and watching from somewhere behind my eyes, like a passenger who'd just realized the driver wasn't who he thought it was.
The feeling lasted maybe three seconds. Then it receded—not vanished, exactly, but pulled back, like a wave retreating from shore. Still there. Still watching. Just… further away. Further inside.
What the fuck, the voice said, from very far away. Then, quieter, almost to itself: What the actual fuck.
And then silence. The kind that comes after someone has spoken and is waiting, bewildered and furious, for an answer they're not sure they want.
Jake punched my shoulder. "Dude. You OK? You look like you saw a ghost."
"Yeah," I said. For the second time that day. For what I suspected would not be the last. "Something like that."
I kept walking.
The hallway stretched out ahead of me, long and bright and full of people who didn't know their futures yet, and I walked through them carrying the weight of a wish I'd made on a drunk Tuesday and the impossible, terrifying, electrically alive certainty that somewhere inside this body I was borrowing—this body I'd worn once before and put down and never expected to pick up again—the original owner was still home.
And he wanted to know what I was doing in his house.