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My mom grabs a spatula, flicking blond hair out of her face as she brandishes it like a weapon. “We show no mercy. Not to anyone who double-crosses the Blooms.”
Jocelyn follows suit, swiping up a wooden ladle and thwacking her palm with it. “No mercy. Not from the kitchen utensil gang,” she says in this darkly evil voice that makes my mom break character, dissolving into laughter.
Please, I send out into the universe. Please let me find out what happens. Please let Lucie rush a sorority. Please let me have September 22.
I used to take a lot of pride in my room. Oh, it’s a complete mess, a hazard zone, but there’s a hominess that I’m not sure I’d be able to replicate in a dorm. Far too many throw pillows, Nav articles pinned to the bulletin board, an arc of greeting cards clipped to a clothesline.
I am a stationery hoarder: I save them because I can’t bear to part with them. Stickers and washi tape and cards and notebooks. I own at least a dozen floral journals, all of them blank. It’s a side effect of my mother owning a stationery shop, but they’re also very, very cute.
Then there’s the HOW DO I LOVE THEE? cross-stich, the one my mom made when I was a baby, hanging above my bed. It’s imperfect, stray threads scattered throughout, but I’ve always loved it. And yet tonight there’s something about it that makes my heart ache.
For the past few months it’s been painful, keeping prom from her. It was easy to say yes when Cole asked me. He’d sat beside me in AP US Government all year, and he seemed smart and kind and generally well liked. Then it was easy to say yes to the hotel room he reserved for us, and yes again when he asked if I was sure, after I told him I’d never done this before. Someone wanted me, and maybe it wasn’t the way I’d imagined being wanted, but it was happening. Three years as an outcast, and the sudden attention was almost overwhelming.
Then came the flowers in my locker. The hashtag. The too-late revelation that Cole’s brother had been on the tennis team. How stupid and powerless and small I felt when after four days of roses and tulips, I went to see the principal. “You’re upset because someone put flowers in your locker?” he said with a laugh. “I know a lot of young ladies who’d love to be in your position.”
Over the summer, I told my mom I’d had sex, but not what happened afterward. She said I could tell her everything or I could tell her nothing—whatever I was comfortable with.
And for maybe the first time in my life, I told her nothing.
Someone knocks on my door.
“I’m having emotions, seeing you in here like this,” my mom says when she pushes it open. There’s a wistful thread in her voice I can’t remember hearing even when she dropped me off at UW.
“That screeching, vomiting baby is all grown up?”
She joins me on the bed, tucking a wayward curl behind my ear. As always, it doesn’t obey. “Something like that.”
I bring my legs up onto the bed, wincing when the crotch seam of my leggings rips a bit more. “Mom. If something were going on with me, you’d want to know, right?”
“I knew it!” she says. “I knew there was a reason you seemed off.” Then her mouth falls open. “Barrett Lorraine Bloom, do not tell me you’re pregnant.”
I lay a hand on my stomach and flash her my biggest grin. “It’s twins.”
“You are going to send me to an early death.”
“I am the light of your life!”
“Unfortunately.”
“I’m not pregnant.” A few deep breaths as I weigh what to say next. As disastrously as it ended, talking to Miles helped. Telling my mom would feel even better. In the sliver of a chance she believes me, maybe she’d know what to do. “I’m… a time traveler.”
I haven’t figured out the right words yet. Miles called it an anomaly, but time anomaly doesn’t have the same ring to it. I can’t help wondering what he’s doing this evening, how many books he’s buried his face in. If he’s made any breakthroughs without me.
“Oh, that’s it? We can deal with that,” she says, matter of fact. “Where are you traveling from? Did you come from the future to tell us we’re in grave danger? A meteor is about to hit Earth? No, wait, I don’t want to know.”
“Mom, I’m being serious.”
“So am I. I really don’t want to know.”
I could riff off her joke, a rhythm the two of us know well. And yet the truth comes tumbling out, desperate for her to hear it. “I—I’ve kind of lived this day before. Well, not this exact day—I haven’t seen you today yet. But, okay, so I had this really terrible first day. First first day.” I run through what happened, ending with Zeta Kappa, aware I sound like I’m explaining the plot of a movie and not something I actually experienced. “And I may have… set a frat house on fire.”
My mom springs to her feet, no longer playing along. “You what?”
I hold up my hands, urging her to sit back down. “No, no. It didn’t actually happen. Or it did, but in another timeline? I’m not exactly clear on how all of it works. Because when I woke up back in my room, it was September twenty-first again. And then it happened this morning too.”
Eighteen years, and I’ve finally found a way to render Mollie Bloom speechless. Some part of me thought that instinctually, as a result of us sharing a body for nine months and then the same small space for nearly two decades, she’d know this is real.
Instead, after a few silent, agonizing seconds, recognition crosses her face and she lets out a laugh. “Is this for your psych class? Some kind of experiment?”
