You had too much to drink last night.
Thinking back, you can’t remember exactly what day this is. You found yourself in this situation often enough in college that you have no idea which had-too-much-to-drink-last-night preceded this particular morning.
And, as one of the many injustices of living in the House, even though you yourself weren’t the one who got to enjoy being drunk the night before, you still have to suffer through the hangover that follows. It’s a mild one, though, by the standards you set in college: your head aches but your stomach is calm. For now.
Staring at the clock isn’t going to make time travel backwards. You consider using the key to zip back to an hour previous to wake up earlier – or even jumping back to the previous evening to stop yourself from going to whatever party you’d been to, but Father has warned you against that sort of thing. Using the House to make a whole bunch of little changes ends up involving a lot of work and a lot of back-tracking. It’s easy to get lost in the branching paths. And it never ends up working the way you expect it to. According to Father, the history of the House includes many instances of people trying to live their lives as if they were writing it on an Etch-A-Sketch: eventually the number of possible futures becomes overwhelming and you end up, ironically, paralyzed by your unlimited freedom.
And most important of all, if you don’t wake up with a hangover this morning, it might change history enough that you and Inez don’t end up meeting today. If you want things to happen again the way they did originally, you have a script to follow.
So you sit up in bed, blinking around the room until you catch enough details to identify it. That’s your old Jackson Pollock poster on the wall, telling you that this must be the room in the dorm – a single – where you lived your junior year.
You check your phone to find that it’s 10:15 on a Thursday. It’s mid-October, meaning that you’re halfway through fall semester. You scoot your way across your bed and grab your backpack from your desk chair. You dig around inside it until you find your class schedule crumpled at the bottom. Thursday morning means . . . you’re already half an hour late for Political Science class. Shit.
You grab a breath mint, skip the shower, and rush out the door, still wearing the clothes you passed out in the night before. You’re halfway down the hall before you realize you left your backpack behind. Shit.
There are a lot of students milling around campus as you rush through it, but you don’t spot Inez.
Fortunately, it’s a lecture not discussion day; no one notices when you slip in quietly and take a seat at the back of the auditorium.
It takes you nearly five minutes to catch your breath. Only then do you do a quick survey of the room. From the back row, all you can see are the backs of people’s heads, and there are over 150 of them. Inez could be any one of them.
College You may have done the reading for this class but Time-Traveling You has not, and showing up halfway through the lecture doesn’t help either. The best you can do is sit there pretending to take notes and hope that force majeuredoesn’t end up on the final exam. Or that you find Inez and get this whole thing resolved long before you have to worry about that.
Finally, mercifully, the lecture ends. A quick glance at your schedule show you have 10 minutes to get to your German class, which is in a whole other building. Your seat in the back of the auditorium means that you get out of the lecture hall first, but the hallway is already filled with other students rushing off to other classes. You finally fight your way through the crowd and out into the quads, realizing only a few seconds later that the person who just held the door open for you was Inez. You rush back into the building but she’s already been swallowed up by the flow of traffic.
And that was it?
Disappointed, angry, confused, you decide skip German and head to the student union for a coffee. Die Salamitaktik anwenden.
You really should have known better. Of course the first time that you and Inez ever met would end up being a non-event. You must meet dozens of new people each day, with no way of knowing when one of them will end up becoming an important part of your life.
You realize that you had been expecting your first meeting to be some sort of adorable and ironic rom-com misunderstanding, like a disastrous blind date or getting each other’s dry cleaning or something.
“I guess that’s just now how life works,” you mumble to yourself. Getting Inez back may end up taking longer than you thought.
* * *
The first step, you decide, is to figure out Inez’s schedule and then start bumping into her “by accident.” But you don’t even know where to start. You could always look her up online – “Inez” is an unusual enough name – but of course you never asked Father what her last name was. If she’s even a social-media kind of person in the first place.
For a week, the best you can do is just hang out at different locations across campus hoping that she’ll stroll by. Before you know it, you’ve blown off a whole week of homework assignments and missed the deadline for a research paper, without any chance meeting with Inez to make it worth your while.
You finally decide that the best way to find Inez is to just keep living your life the way you were supposed to. After all, that’s how the two of you ended up together in the first place.
Besides, Jim and Kathy have been leaving voicemails for you all week and they’re probably starting to get worried. The three of you were inseparable all through college, at least until Jim and Kathy broke up halfway through senior year. You tiptoed your way through staying friends with both of them that spring, but after graduation the three of you went your separate ways. A few years after that you fell out of the habit of calling one another. The only contact you’ve had with either of them in the last decade is the Christmas card Kathy and her husband send each year. It will be good to see them both again.
The Slice is exactly how you remember it: dark and grubby, walls covered with graffiti, serving cold beer and the Pizza of the Gods. Kathy and Jim are exactly the way you remember them too: Kathy with her straw-colored hair and pale skin, roses high up on her cheeks. Jim with his narrow shoulders and smoky green eyes, his hair thinning prematurely.
And it’s just like old times. Kathy complains about her calculus class and Jim complains about his roommate and you have to fight to stop yourself from thinking that you’re hanging about with a couple of kids half your age.
“Hey,” you ask, “does either of you know a student here named Inez?”
“Nope,” Kathy answers. Jim shakes his head.
“What about her?” Kathy asks.
“Oh,” you say vaguely, trying to look casual by watching your fingers slip across the edge of the table, “I ran into her on campus a couple of days ago. She was really cute.”
Kathy and Jim exchange glances. “Another one night stand?” Jim asks.
“Not likely,” Kathy tells him. Her eyes crinkle when she looks back at you. “It isn’t, is it? I mean, you’ve always been an opportunist. You go after whatever is right in front of you. In all the time I’ve known you, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you actually seek someone out. Or even give anyone a thought as a romantic prospect when they weren’t right in front of you.”
You nod. “I was quite the horn-dog in college,” you agree.
“Was?”
You pull your lips up into a smile. “I guess it’s time for a change.”
With that, Kathy starts to grill you – “What’s she look like?” “Did you talk to her?” “Is she in one of your classes?” – and you hurry to change the subject.
“Tell me something,” you say. “Do either of you remember how the three of us met?”
“Oh, that’s easy –” Kathy begins.
“I think it was –” offers Jim, but then they both stop and look at one another, waiting for the other to continue with their sentence. When it doesn’t come, they burst out laughing.
“It was first thing freshman year,” Jim offers.
Kathy nods. “I think I met you first,” she tells you. “Some kegger during orientation week.”
“How did you and I not end up sleeping together?” you ask, half-teasing.
“Oh, I’m way too hot for you,” Kathy shoots back.
“And then you and I had that English class together, remember?” Jim asks.
“That wasn’t until spring” you tell him. “You two were already dating by Thanksgiving.”
“Weren’t you the one who introduced us?” Kathy asks.
You stare at one another blankly for a few seconds and then all burst out laughing.
“Anyway,” Kathy says, reaching across the table and patting the back of your hand, “we’re all friends now.”
Yes – yes you are. You can’t stop smiling.
It isn’t until later that night, when you’re drifting off to sleep, that you realize that the friendships you’re remembering so fondly exist only in the current history – the one where you don’t end up with Inez. In the original history, did Inez and the others get along? Did you all end up double-dating or did the two couples go your separate ways? It happens that way sometimes.
The next morning, you’re digging through your backpack when something scratches your hand. You fish around until you find the offending object; it’s the rabbit’s foot.
Maybe it’s time to try one of the other strategies. Or, you think, your hand drifting up to the house key hanging around your neck, I could always go back to the very beginning and give it a second shot.
After a few moments of thought, you