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“Olive Garden?” I say. I might be trembling. My heart has never worked this hard, not even when I ran that sixteen-minute mile.
Lucie softens only the slightest bit. “I love endless salad and breadsticks as much as the next person, but this is ridiculous. If we’re really going to be rooming together, even if it’s just until they move me somewhere else, then we’ll need some ground rules.”
“Ground rules. Right.” And this was the moment I made a dirty joke she didn’t appreciate. I’m half tempted to make it again, but now all I want is to pacify her. To finish this conversation so I can get some time alone and figure out why the hell the last twenty-four hours seem to have been erased when they’re still so clearly imprinted in my memory. “I’ll clean everything up. I’m sorry.”
My acquiescence seems to stun her. Like she wanted a fight. She did yesterday, after all. “Oh—okay, then. Good.”
Before she can unzip her suitcase and discover the sole outlets beneath my desk, I get out of bed and grab my shower caddy.
“I’m going to shower,” I say, and then I stumble down the hall.
I don’t find answers in the grout or grime. I’m not sure how much time I spend shampooing, conditioning, scrubbing every pore on my body, but when I get back to the room, Lucie’s gone.
With my hair in a towel, I pull my laptop onto my bed and prop myself against the wall. There has to be a rational explanation for what’s going on. I’m a journalist—I can figure this out.
I try a few searches: woke up on the same day, no one remembers yesterday, day repeating itself. Most of what comes up is pure fiction, movies and TV shows about time travel. Hypotheticals. A BuzzFeed listicle: “Seventeen Things to Do If You’re Stuck in a Time Loop.”
Time loop.
I choke on a laugh—the theory is that absurd. And yet a panicky lump settles into my throat as I scroll past a Reddit thread with the title Might be trapped in a time loop?
I shut my laptop.
No. It’s not possible. I am not in a fucking time loop.
All of this happening around me—it can’t be real. Maybe there was a gas leak in the building—surely some chemical can cause ultra-vivid dreams. Or maybe I’m in a coma, my brain working hard to get me back online. I could be disconnected from my real body, reliving this day inside the surreal-but-safe boundaries of my own head.
It’s absolutely batshit, but it’s the only thing that makes any amount of sense. I’ll just… let the dream play out.
When I open my closet, something stops me from reaching for the Britney Spears shirt I wore yesterday. If I keep doing the same things, I’m going to freak myself out even more. So I go for a long skirt and floral tee. Tassel earrings. Then, instead of waiting in line in the dining hall for the Olmsted Eggstravaganza, I buy a breakfast burrito from a food truck in Red Square.
In between bites, I call my mom.
“Hey,” she says, picking up after the first ring. “I was just about to text you.”
“Is everything okay?” I try to keep my voice from sounding frantic, but my words have a breathy edge to them. If there’s anyone who can reassure me, it’s my mom. She’s always been able to handle a scraped knee or a bruised ego with ease—with the exception of what I didn’t tell her about prom.
Granted, if this is a dream version of my mom, she won’t know anything I don’t know.
“Hi, Barrett!” Jocelyn calls in the background. “We miss you!”
“Miss you too,” I say, a chill running up my spine.
I imagine yesterday’s Mollie Bloom, not this fragment created by my subconscious, getting ready for work at Ink & Paper, the shop she runs in downtown Mercer Island, which features the work of local artists as well as cards and crafts and other tchotchkes from around the Pacific Northwest. She was probably listening to a pop-culture podcast with Jocelyn as she swapped her robe for jeans and a graphic tee. It soothes me, thinking of her spreading cream cheese onto a bagel and swearing to me that one day I will experience the pure joy of a New York City bagel, and then and only then will I understand my Jewish roots.
“Why wouldn’t everything be okay?” she says, and some part of me deflates. She sounds normal—like someone who hasn’t woken up on September 21 for the second time in a row. No, I tell myself. You’re dreaming, remember? “Is this your first-day nerves talking?”
“Probably.” I dart out of the way to avoid a pair of swing dancers spiraling across the square. “I guess I just… wanted to hear your voice. That’s corny, isn’t it?”
“It absolutely is, but I still like you. Let me know how it all goes today?”
“Yes. Of course.”
As I hang up, I stumble into a girl waving a stack of flyers. “Hi! We’re trying to raise awareness about the Mazama pocket gopher—”
Odd that my halluci-dream would bring her back. “Sorry, I can’t. But good luck!”
I take my time walking through campus, ensuring I won’t be sweaty when I arrive at the physics building. Even though none of this is real, some part of me is certain physics is where I’m supposed to be. There’s no one in the front row, and though I imagine that sitting in the front row of a several-hundred-person lecture hall carries some kind of nerd stigma, I grab a seat. The professor said this was a serious class, so here I am, taking it seriously.
