“You know it’s not easy to confuse me, right?”
If Josiah replied, his words were drowned out by the organ’s first monstrous notes. Freddy saw both Mel and Josiah whip around to look at the house; then Josiah was running for the front door.
Freddy watched her sister stand in the yard, staring at the house. After a moment, she turned and walked past the hedge and out of sight. Mel really did snoop. She made up mysteries out of nothing. In this case, however, she was right about the mystery, and Josiah was right about the tadpoles.
The organ continued to scream out into the afternoon. Josiah 2 bounced into the yard, his hands over his ears. A moment later, Mel and Freddy 2 came into sight and stood watching the front door until the combined efforts of the two Josiahs shut Cuerva Lachance up.
Freddy’s ears were still ringing, and she missed most of what Freddy 2 and Mel said to each other then. The first words she caught were Mel’s: “Then Josiah can be in two places at once.”
At this point, Mel looked straight at Freddy’s bedroom window.
Freddy stepped rapidly back into the room, her heart pounding. She hardly heard Mel telling Freddy 2 about the long-haired girl at the window. Stupid, she thought. You knew she was going to see someone. How didn’t you know it was you? It was, as usual, dizzying to try to reconcile events she remembered happening a year and a half ago with events that were happening right now.
Josiah came into the bedroom without knocking. “Your sister is being annoyingly nosy again,” he said. “I said something about frogs.”
“I heard,” said Freddy. “We’re out there discussing the laws of physics right now.”
He rubbed his eyes. “I see her making it all into a mystery, and I think she might be Three. But I can’t be sure. It could still be any of you. Why doesn’t one of you just say something illuminating and put us all out of our misery? Don’t you know who it is yet?”
“No,” said Freddy, “sorry,” though she wasn’t. She added, “You may want to keep your voice down.”
“Next Tuesday cannot come soon enough,” said Josiah.
They watched, peeking out the window as subtly as they could, as Josiah 2 and Roland arrived in the yard at the same time, and everybody stood under the tree and argued. They watched as Cuerva Lachance spoke from the tree. It was funny how strange it had originally seemed that Cuerva Lachance had been able to get into that tree. Now that didn’t even register on the general scale of weirdness.
When Cuerva Lachance materialised in the bedroom immediately afterwards, Freddy barely twitched. She felt an odd sense of loss. Sure, she had once reasoned away a marble rolling uphill, but at least then she had thought of impossible things as, well, impossible. With Cuerva Lachance, the impossible happened all the time. It made it hard to see anything as fundamentally real.
*
The weekend crept by. Nothing changed … or everything changed constantly, but not in a very constructive way. That was, Freddy decided, the problem with Cuerva Lachance. There was change but no growth. Josiah didn’t grow, either, because he didn’t change. Roland was right that there was something wrong with them, though he was wrong about what it was. The thought made Freddy shake her head at herself. Even her ideas about the confusion were confusing.
And then it was September twenty-seventh.
Freddy started shaking almost as soon as she woke up that morning, and she didn’t stop all day. She was going home. But she was different. But she was going home. She hadn’t always missed it when she was travelling. She did miss it now, strongly, when it was almost within reach. The clueless former Freddy was at school, getting thrown into a wall. Had she ever really been that oblivious? Would everyone expect her to go back to being that oblivious? What if she didn’t fit?
“Stop shuddering,” said Josiah irritably as he tried to give her a haircut after lunch. “Do you know how hard it is to cut hair this curly? Why can’t you have nice lank, straight hair like your little sister?”
“I always like it when I have curly hair,” said Cuerva Lachance, leaning against the fridge. A spider plant’s tendril snaked over her shoulder.
“Thanks ever so for the information,” said Josiah.
“I’m sorry,” said Freddy, but she couldn’t stop trembling. She felt as if she were about to open in a lead role on Broadway, and she hadn’t bothered to learn her lines.
“You’ll be fine,” said Josiah, snipping away. “People will notice, but you’ll get through it. Tell them the head injury made your legs swell.”
Freddy had forgotten she would have to pretend to have a head injury. She felt the shaking get worse.
“Honestly,” said Josiah, “if you don’t stop that, these scissors are going to end up sticking through your eye. Take deep, calming breaths. Think of kittens frolicking in a field of daisies. Slap yourself upside the head a couple of times. You know … the usual.”
“I’m just scared,” said Freddy, “that’s all.”
She hadn’t meant to blurt it out like that. Cuerva Lachance beamed at her. “Good for you,” she said. “Lying to yourself would have been much easier. I would have chosen that option.”
Freddy looked in the mirror when Josiah was done. The shorter hair did make her look more like her old self, but it couldn’t disguise the height, the different body shape, or the changes in her face. The tan had faded a bit, though not as much as she had hoped. “Maybe if I slouch,” said Freddy. “Or kneel.”
“It will all be terrible,” said Cuerva Lachance, patting her on the shoulder, “but let’s pretend it won’t.”
*
From the window of the master bedroom, Freddy and Josiah watched Freddy 2 and Josiah 2 enter the backyard. Josiah had never told Josiah 2 exactly when on September twenty-seventh he would be encountering the time portal, but he was obviously expecting something soon; he peered edgily about him as they walked towards the door. Freddy 2 was looking straight ahead, stone-faced. They moved out of sight onto the doorstep.
“You’re going to want to apologise in an hour or so,” Freddy heard Josiah 2 say. “You know that, right?”
“No, I won’t,” said Freddy 2.
Then they were gone.
Freddy breathed out. There was only one of her now. Suddenly, she didn’t know what was going to happen. It was more frightening than she had thought it would be.
“Cuerva Lachance,” called Josiah, “is it possible you just turned the back door into a time portal?”
There was a pause. “Oh dear,” said Cuerva Lachance from somewhere down the hall, “did I?”
“Attention span of a diseased gnat,” said Josiah. “So when are you going back?”
Freddy hadn’t thought of much else for the past few days. “Right away. They won’t be expecting it. I can sneak into my room and make sure they first see me when I’m sitting down.”
“It won’t work,” said Josiah.