“What, is that a burner for calling drug dealers?” I say dryly.
He gives me a mock-reproachful look. “Sort of,” he says. “It’s to call you. I bought it in your version, so when you called my number, it’d actually go through. The other night I wanted to see you. Thought you’d be at Schwartz’s Fourth of July party, so I went, but I couldn’t get to your version. Happens once in a while. Drank too much, and I still couldn’t get through. Still couldn’t the next day. Anyway, after I saw you today, I decided to try again.”
I pull anxiously at the carpet. “Alcohol really helps you pass between them?”
He shrugs one shoulder. “Maybe. I thought so, anyway.”
“Seems like a pretty convenient excuse for alcoholism. Takes the concept of social lubrication to a whole new level.”
When I look up, Beau gives me one of those heavy smiles: summer in mouth form. “Well, Natalie Cleary, how ’bout you figure out how to pass back and forth, and then I won’t have to drink to find you.”
I laugh. “If you stop drinking beer, then what are you going to pour over your cereal?”
“Beer doesn’t count as drinking.”
I laugh again. “Oh, another convenient view.”
“Fine,” he says. “I’ll cut out beer too, get into scrambled eggs or something. You just figure out how to get to my Union, okay?”
“Okay,” I say, fighting a smile. Then something important occurs to me. “I think I’m looking for someone in your version. Or maybe she’s in both versions, or in a third altogether. I’m not really sure. She’s an old woman with gray hair and dark skin, and she calls herself Grandmother. Have you seen anyone like that?”
He hesitates, pushing his hair back and down his neck. “Natalie.”
“What?”
“As far as I know, we have all the same people you have,” he says. “There’s two of everyone.”
“Everyone?” I say.
He holds my eyes for a long moment. “Except us.”
“Seriously?”
He nods. “I’d never seen you before that night in the school.”
“I saw you on the field that night,” I say. “I was at Senior Night, and right in the middle of everything, everyone disappeared. It was just us.”
He looks up at me, the corner of his mouth lifting. “Our Senior Night was the week before yours. I was there alone that night.” He looks at me until I can’t hold his gaze anymore. “Can I show you something?”
I nod, and he gets to his feet. “Stand up,” he says. “Give me your hands.”
I do and climb to my feet. We stand there, holding hands, heat spreading from his fingers down my arms to my stomach. He reaches over my shoulder to flick off the closet light and presses his forehead against mine. “Close your eyes for a second,” he whispers against my mouth, and I do, feeling him all around me, in all the spaces where we’re not quite touching.
There’s a drop in my stomach, like my center of gravity is sinking into wet sand, and light flickers against my eyelids—red, yellow, blue, purple—like a movie reel. “Now open them,” Beau whispers.
My eyes flutter open. The dim light spilling across Beau’s face is a silvery blue, but as I look into his eyes, the light beyond the window changes, rapidly intensifying through a hundred shades of pink into burning purple and then a blinding gold that slants through his irises like coppery spears. Within seconds the closet is lit up with daylight. Just as quickly, the daylight’s waning, the gold swarming back in to color Beau’s cheekbones and eyes and mouth as the sun falls down the western side of the house. Soon that turns to orange, then purple, deepening finally into a blue so dark it stretches out toward black.
The cycle repeats, the colors washing over us in new variations of the same shades, moving faster and faster until it’s like we’re standing in the center of the solar system, and it’s the sun that circles us. Rising east of us and setting west of us. But somehow it also feels like we’re moving, walking through chin-high water that pushes gently back against us.
The whole world is changing, and I gasp as another version of me moves between the closet and the room so fast I can barely see her. The closet empties, refilling with organized plastic bins I’ve never seen before, shadows of people I don’t know blurring past, moving right through us. Those boxes disappear too, replaced by racks of clothes, and all the time the sun is rising and setting and Beau’s hands are on mine.
Everything is changing, except Beau and me. We’re the same.
“It’s beautiful,” I whisper.
He nods, never looking away from me.