Greek mythology is chockablock full of monsters.
Some of them were born. Typhon, with the torso of a man but a hundred dragon heads; Echidna, half woman and half snake; Cetus, with its slimy face and giant tentacles. Some of the monsters were made: Medusa, who was once a beautiful woman but was raped by Poseidon and transformed into a gorgon; Scylla, once a sea nymph but gifted by Circe with shark teeth and dog heads attached to her body. And some of them stayed human but slowly changed—often with good reason—until everyone simply saw them as monsters, like Medea or Clytemnestra.
As I sit on my swivel chair and search for the emotions I’m supposed to feel now but cannot seem to find, I can’t help wondering: Am I a monster?
And—if so—was I born or was I made?
“What about you?” Artemis kicks at my chair. “Are you seeing anyone, Cass? I hope they’re nice. I hope they’re as nice as Will.”
I shake my head. “No. I’m mostly on my own.”
And the complete truth of this statement shocks me, because I am mostly on my own. I am so permanently alone that I can feel it in my bones, in my eyeballs, in the roots of my hair. I feel loneliness like a physical presence, as if someone heavy is sitting on my chest. I feel it when I wake up and I feel it when I walk down the street. I feel it when I eat and when I dance; I feel it when I’m with people, and I feel it when I’m not. I feel loneliness inside me, all of the time, but I also like to be alone and I don’t really like other humans much either, so where the hell does that leave me?
No wonder I spent so much time and effort trying to make Will stay with me, just so I could breathe.
“Artemis?” I exhale abruptly. “I can time travel.”
“Cool!” She gets a stolen red jelly bean out of her pocket. “I love that for you.”
“No.” I clear my throat. “I mean it. I can time travel. I don’t have a clue how, but I just sort of...can. It just happened, a couple of weeks ago, so that’s...a thing I can do now, I guess. Which makes me a time traveler. A shit one, admittedly, but a time traveler nonetheless.”
Artemis stares at me for a few seconds and I close my eyes.
Not to time travel; just so I can’t see her.
“Okay,” she says after a few seconds. “So walk me through it.”
I open my eyes. “Huh?”
“More details, please. You can’t just lob time travel out there and then not give me the juicy bits. I want to know literally everything.”
I stare at my sister. “You believe me?”
“Of course I believe you, Cassandra. You’re the most honest person I’ve ever known. Also, I don’t even know how time works generally, so I’m not going to argue with you about the technicalities. Although—” Artemis gets a green jelly bean out this time “—I did lose quite a lot of brain cells in South America and Asia, so you’re not exactly talking to a physicist here.”
My brain is now rotating.
I did it.
I broke the Cassandra curse: my sister broke it, just by believing me.
“Well.” The relief is so great I feel a little queasy. “I can’t go back very far. Only to a specific day and time a couple of weeks ago. I tried to go back to, you know, undo Mum and Dad...” I pause and Art nods, so I crash on. “But I couldn’t, I wasn’t strong enough, so I’ve mostly been using it to...not get dumped by my ex-boyfriend.”
Artemis stares at me. “Say that again?”
“It didn’t work,” I explain quickly, embarrassed. “Even with endless time on my side, it turns out I’m still extremely dumpable.”
My sister continues to stare at me, no longer chewing.
“Not just that, though,” I add again, slightly desperate now. “I did other things too. I avoided getting fired at work. My flatmates don’t seem to hate me so much, so maybe I won’t end up moving house again. I went to a museum on a weekday, which was so cool. But...mainly I used it in tiny amounts to undo things I didn’t like and redo the things I did. You know, kind of like a cosmic remote control.”
Artemis spits her jelly bean into the bin.
“Cassandra Penelope Dankworth,” she says in an appalled voice, “are you telling me that you have been given the epic, extraordinary, magical ability to commandeer the rules of time and space and see into the future, and you’ve been using it to get a boy back and avoid awkward social situations?”
I look at the floor. “Yes.”
“Oh my God, you could have won the lottery.” She jumps off the desk and stands in front of me. “You could have bet on all the right horses, forever. You could have started up your own television show where you predict things that will happen. Called it The Cassandra Conundrum or something. Become famous and rich in, like, thirty days.”
“But that would be cheating,” I object, cheeks flaring.
“That would be cheating?” My sister’s eyes open wide. “You could have saved so many lives, Cassie. How cinematic and dramatic would that story have been? Imagine. You, diving in front of buses and pulling people out of rivers. Please tell me you saved at least one life?”
“But...” I frown. “How, though?”
“I don’t know, you could have checked the internet or local newspapers for tragic accidents over the last few weeks and gone round making sure they didn’t happen.” She holds her hands up. “That’s just your basic time-travel narrative. Then there are all the other ones. Stopping wars and saving the world or whatever. Are you seriously telling me you did none of this?”
“No.” I scratch my head. “It seemed a bit complicated.”
“This is brilliant.” Artemis is squealing with laughter now. “Cass, you are the worst time traveler ever.”
“Also the worst prophet.” I nod sheepishly. “I know. Although I did stop someone from losing some important computer files, so...”
Okay, I’m starting to feel ashamed of myself now. Art is totally right: I could have approached all of this on a much bigger, more cinematic scale. It just didn’t really occur to me. All I can say in my defense is that if you give the power of time travel to a woman who eats banana muffins every day for three decades, you can’t go expecting her to be someone else with it.
“Wait.” Art stops laughing. “Have you time traveled me?”
“Yes,” I admit sheepishly. “Not today. I gave it up for good recently. But yeah. We’ve had several run-ins over the last couple of weeks and I deleted them. A few fights. A bit of me running away. Once I did it right in front of you. Sorry about that.”
“Shit.” My sister shakes her head. “That’s so crazy. What are all the alternative-universe versions of me like?”
“Exactly the same. Not much happens in that kind of time.”
“Disappointing.”
“Right?”
We sit in sobering silence for a few minutes, and I think about the day her letter arrived and the time our postman tends to deliver our mail, just after lunch. About 1:02 p.m., as it happens. And I think about how maybe it’s less about where a story starts—or even the sand it’s drawn in—and more about the person who’s telling it.
“I’m sorry it didn’t work out with the boy,” Artemis says finally.
“That’s okay,” I say, standing up. “I don’t think that was the relationship the universe was telling me to fix anyway.”
34
I spend the rest of my time off with my sister.
It’s only three days, so we don’t get carried away: I suggest the British Museum again, but Artemis insists that it isn’t a holiday if you’re still in London, doing all the same things you always do, so we get on a train to Cornwall and spend it eating chips, drinking cider and arguing about going in the sea. I don’t want to get my trousers wet; Art walks in fully clothed.
Which is probably the essential difference between us.
Together, we take long strolls along the coastline—watching the turquoise-and-green seas break alabaster, white houses cling like Lego, birds swoop down and steal lunches, little children squeak, wrapped in red towels, tiny as fire ants—and energetically debate the difference between a “walk,” a “hike” and a “trek” and exactly what it is we think we’re doing. I say trekking—given the exercise levels required—and Artemis says walking, given that we keep sitting down on the edge to look at the sea, so we argue again and I stomp off for a bit to watch the waves on my own.
She sits down next to me and we debate how far France probably is and argue about that until I google it and win.
We dispute places to eat, every single time we need to eat.
I get angry that she’s made a mess of our last-minute rented studio apartment within thirty seconds of arriving and construct a line down the middle of the room with paraphernalia out of the kitchen: cups, cushions, plates.
Artemis keeps moving the line, shifting it slowly until I’m barricaded in.