Whenever the House takes you someplace, the transition is always a little disorienting, even if you're the one deciding where to go. If you're traveling on someone else's house key, the effect can be gut-wrenching, like riding a roller coaster.
Even more so when you suddenly find yourself in a car going a hundred miles an hour in the middle of a sharp right turn.
Inez, in the driver's seat beside you, lets out a whoop.
"Stop!" you shout, trying to dig your fingers into the dashboard with one hand and clinging for dear life to your seatbelt with the other. "Stop stop stop stop stop!"
But Inez just laughs at you.
It's dark out – night, obviously – but darker still because you're way out in the middle of nowhere. You can't see what's beyond the shoulder of the road. Trees? Fields? Desert?
"Where the hell are we?" you shout – realizing too late that you don't need to. The roar you're trying to be heard over is just your blood pounding in your ears.
In the pale light of the dashboard display, you can just make out Inez's face. She's a teenager again. "City folk," she teases.
"Where are we?" you ask again.
"County roads. Middle of the night. Not another car for miles."
The stop sign appears and disappears again before your brain can register what it was. Inez just blew through an intersection without slowing down.
"Can we stop, please?" You're shouting again.
"Not much to do on a Tuesday night when you're fifteen, drunk, and living on a farm."
"Did you do this sort of thing often?"
"Not that my parents ever knew."
You let go of the dashboard long enough to grip her shoulder. "Can you stop the car please?"
Inez lets out a growl and throttles back. She never touches the brake, letting the vehicle – a pickup truck, you realize – coast to a stop. You end up sitting across the double yellow line, the engine churning and sputtering like a caged animal.
You turn to Inez. "A Taoist juvenile delinquent?"
"I was more of a nihilist at this age."
"I can tell."
"So," she says, turning halfway in her seat to face you, "where were we?"
"Middle of nowhere?"
"In our conversation, I mean."
"Branches, dead ends, rules."
"Right," Inez says. "Now imagine being forced to play a game where they don't tell you what the rules are. They don't even tell you how to score points – if you can score points – or what you have to do to win the game. There are branching paths all over the place, but whenever you take one you can never tell whether or not it was a dead end."
"That's simple. A game like that? I wouldn't play."
"You're already playing it," Inez says gently. Her face is suddenly serious, her eyes willing you to understand her.
"Life," you realize. "You're talking about life."
"Exactly." She finally sets the hand brake and shuts off the engine.
"Shouldn't we get out of the middle of the road first?"
"Way out here, you could take a nap on the asphalt and get a good night's sleep."
"I'll take your word for it."
"In life," Inez says, "there's no trial and error: if you take the wrong turn, you just have to deal with it." She gives a quick grin and then adds matter-of-factly: "Unless you live in the House."
"Unless you live in the House," you agree.
"I mean, that's the whole point of the house, isn't it? To hit a dead end and be able to turn back and try a different path? We can try out different options, learn from our mistakes, and even sometimes go back and change the conditions of the choice itself. So I decided to stop just stumbling my way through life, taking the time to explore the results of different options to figure out which one I liked best."
"So you stole a house key."
She nods. "The night after we moved in. You and your dad never realized it, but I've been second-guessing myself for a few months now." She squints one eye. "A few months your time. All told I figure I've clocked something like five years."
"Five . . . years?"
"Well, choices are never just A versus B, are they? And sometimes it took me a while to figure out I'd made the wrong choice. Remember the car I bought last month?"
"No."
She laughs, patting you on the arm familiarly. "Sorry – of course not. Well, the first one I bought was a flatbed like this one." She strokes the steering wheel fondly. "It took me a couple of weeks to realize I'm just not a country girl anymore. I tried a Ford and a Jeep and a Toyota before I finally settled on a Honda."
You nod, finally getting it. "That's why you've been talking about games and puzzles this whole time. You've been playing one."
"We're all playing one," she corrects you. "I'm just the only player who gets mulligans. And it made me feel sorry for everybody else. I mean, how unfair is it that people are forced to make some of the greatest decisions of their lives without having all of the information first. You wouldn't do that ordering dinner at a restaurant, so why do you have to do it when you're deciding what career to go after or who –" she stops herself, and then continues, more softly, ". . . who to marry."
You have so many mixed emotions about this comment that all you can do is nod.
"And, worse yet," Inez continues, "you have to make all of these life-changing decisions without knowing what the ultimate goal is. Does deciding to become a librarian score you points or lose you points?"
"Points?"
"And that's when I discovered something about the House I doubt even your dad knows. You guys are all good and fine about going back and forth, but have you ever tried going sideways?"
"What?"
Inez reaches out and touches you lightly on the arm and