The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen

“Um. Sort of? Isn’t that, like, someone who hates using computers?” I ask, my fingers on the focus button. Zoom in, zoom out. In, and out. Annie’s curls go soft, and then sharpen.

“I don’t know,” she says, frowning. “I thought maybe you would know.” A fleeting look of disappointment crosses her face, and I have a sinking feeling that it’s me she’s disappointed in. I can’t stand the thought of disappointing her.

“Why’d you want to know what a Luddite is?” I ask, framing the shot tightly on Annie’s mouth. I’m getting better at getting people to talk, on camera. Sometimes if you just run it long enough, they say what they really mean without even realizing it.

“I . . .” Annie’s lips part in my viewfinder, on the point of answering me.

Just then, the pocket of my cargo shorts vibrates. I fish my phone out of my pocket and look down at the screen in my lap. It’s from Eastlin.

Not Abraham Mas.

I frown, not sure what he means.

What? I text back.

Something weird going on, he texts back.

What do U mean? I return quickly, eyes still in my lap.

Her dress is handmade, he returns. All of it. Lace, too.

So? I answer.

Checked design textbook. It’s prolly antique. Not vintage. Antique.

That doesn’t make any sense. Why would Eastlin be telling me this? The phone vibrates again.

STOLEN antique.

I glance up with alarm to where Annie’s sitting across from me. She’s not there. Her bacon sits uneaten, the spoon lying on the table in a smear of chili as if suddenly dropped.

“Hey!” I say.

I look around, but she’s nowhere in the diner.

The waitress passes our booth, flipping pages in her order book, and I reach over and take her arm without thinking. “Excuse me,” I say. “The girl who was with me. Do you know where she went?”

The waitress gives me a cold look and shakes my hand loose. “The hell you talking about?”

“What?” I say, uncertain. I get to my feet, looking at every face in the diner, faces upon faces upon faces, smiling, talking, chewing, despondent, closed. But none of them are her.

An idea is poking me in the back of my head, but it’s too insane for me to face it. I push it away. I push it away really, really hard.

“How the hell did you get into my room, Annie?” I whisper to the empty table.





CHAPTER 2


When I take my hands away from my eyes to look at Wes, I’m met with the figure of a snoring girl, her arms draped down on either side of a scarred wooden table. One of her shoulders peeks out from her dress, which has been loosened in the back. A tankard of beer has been knocked over, making a puddle that runs along the table, along her arm, and drips down her fingers to the floor.

I leap to my feet with a rumption, turning over the bench where I’m sitting. “But,” I say, looking to both sides of me in shock.

Wes is gone. The victualing house where we were sitting has vanished.

I’m in a small ground-floor room that’s been set up as a beer hall. Half a dozen tables and benches, lamplit, a few posters tacked up on the wall. Men and women hunched over tables, drinking beer, and some of them eating.

I stagger back from the table in confusion.

“Watch it!” cries a woman carrying mugs of beer. I’ve staggered into her, knocking her sideways, and she only just saved herself from pouring beer down the back of my day dress.

My day dress.

I look down at myself, at my tidy clothes and clean fingernails. No soot. The only smoke that I smell comes from oil lamps on the tables.

What’s just happened? I was in the victualing house, I was thinking about eating bacon, I was talking to Wes. Wes was looking at me through his funny looking-box. He asked me something. Something that made me struggle to remember. And I covered my face. And then . . .

“What day is it?” I demand of the room at large.

“Day?” the ruddy beer-hall mistress asks me, her head cocked sideways. “Why, Tuesday, I should think.”