“But like, why?” My voice goes high on the last word, wobbling perilously. “Why is it such a big deal if I—I mean, my character—doesn’t just lie down and wait for the trolley to hit her? Why can’t she run away?”
I can hear a familiar creaking through the line, as if Dr. Bastille is leaning back in her office chair and pinching the bridge of her nose. She did this often in our advisee meetings. “In this novella, you’ve posited narratives as literal worlds. So stories are the organizing principle of the multiverse—which raises some serious world-building questions, by the way, like where these story-verses come from in the first place, since the existence of any story implies the existence of a storyteller.” She pauses to address her date: No, you go ahead, I’ll meet you there. “Anyway, you’ve created a universe that runs on plot, and a main character who smashes plots like a human wrecking ball. In refusing to complete her narrative arc, she is compromising the integrity of the universe.”
“Oh.” The smoke scorches my eyes, burns the inside of my nose. “Then this is it. It’s over.”
“It does seem a dissatisfying climax.”
“Yeah. Well.” My nose is running badly now. “Thanks for your time.”
“Sure.” The creak of her chair, the shush of arms sliding into coat sleeves. Dr. Bastille’s voice softens very slightly when she says, “I’d be happy to read it, when it’s done.”
“Read what?”
“The … never mind. Good luck, Zinnia.” She hangs up.
I set Charm’s phone back on the card table and sink slowly to my knees. My eyes are too full of tears to see much beyond fractal green, but I search the grass with my hands, crawling in circles. All I find are beer caps, a few waterlogged roaches, the sharp tops of acorns. There are no shards of magic mirror in Charm’s backyard. Which means Dr. Bastille was right. I’m screwed, and so is Eva.
* * *
I PACE THE yard for a while, inventing and dismissing a dozen unlikely schemes. It occurs to me eventually that I’m doing what my therapist would call bargaining, and that bargaining is a stage of grief.
Charm and Prim are in the kitchen, speaking in tense, low voices. They stop when the screen door shuts behind me. Charm gives me a searching stare, which I return blankly until she turns back to the dishes. Prim looks fretfully between the two of us for a moment, but there’s no real question which side she’ll pick. She unfolds a dish towel and dries a mixing bowl at Charm’s side.
I walk down the hall to the bedroom that is supposedly mine but which actually functions as a walk-in closet. I pick my way through yoga mats and wrapping paper, trash bags of winter clothes, a laundry basket filled with velvet gowns, pewter goblets, all the crap I hadn’t sold at the Ren faire before I disappeared. The futon is buried, so I sit on a box of unassembled furniture with THREE IN ONE! written across the side in bubbly, childish letters.
I stare at the wall and test the words on my tongue: The end. It’s not such a bad ending, I guess. It’s a sort of cosmic compromise with the universe. I don’t get to magically cure my disease and con my way out of my own plot, but at least I didn’t drop dead at twenty-one; Eva doesn’t get to live as a hero, but at least she didn’t die a villain.
It’s not exactly happily ever after, but that’s a pretty bullshit concept anyway. Honestly, I don’t even know why I’m crying.
Later, long after the clink of dishes has faded and the tears have left my cheeks stiff and dry, the door inches open. I assume it’s Charm coming back for round two, but it’s Prim. She steps easily through the detritus and clears a space on the futon. Neither of us say anything for a while. She just sits there with her perfect posture and her perfect hair, and I notice the fine lines at the corners of her mouth, the slight pucker of skin beneath her eyes.
She doesn’t look old or anything, just ordinary. Like any other girl who wakes up every morning and makes coffee a little stronger than she prefers because that’s how her wife likes it, who shops at the farmer’s market every Saturday, who will look in the mirror in ten years and start googling eye creams even though her wife insists she’s always had a thing for crow’s feet. Maybe happily ever after isn’t a totally bullshit concept, after all; maybe, if I can’t have my own, I can at least find the decency not to ruin this one.
I inhale. “I know I’ve been a shitty friend. And a lackwit, and all those other things Charm called me.”