Ursula was perched in her favorite spot, the part of the windowsill directly above the heater vent, her black fur baking in the sun. She was the world’s most ancient cat—no one knew exactly how old she was, but if Alice had to guess, she would have said she was twenty-five, or immortal. She still looked just as vital as she ever had.
“Hey, good morning,” Alice said, turning the corner from the hallway into the kitchen. “Hope I didn’t scare you.”
“You’re not that scary,” said her dad. Leonard Stern was sitting in his spot at the kitchen table. There was a cup of coffee next to him, and an open can of Coca-Cola. Next to his drinks, Leonard had a plate with some toast and a few hard-boiled eggs. Alice thought she could see an Oreo, too. The clock on the wall behind the table said that it was seven in the morning. Leonard looked good—he looked healthy. Healthier, actually, than Alice could ever remember him looking. He looked like he could run around the block if he wanted to, just for fun, like the kind of dad who could play catch and teach his kid how to ice skate, even though he absolutely wasn’t. Leonard looked like a movie star, like a movie star version of himself—handsome, young, and quick. Even his hair looked bouncy, its waves full and the deep, rich brown they had been in her childhood. When had his hair started to gray? Alice didn’t know. Leonard looked up and made eye contact with her. He turned to look at the clock, turned back to Alice, and shook his head. “You are up early, though. A new leaf! I like it.” What was happening? Alice closed her eyes—maybe she was hallucinating! That was possible! Maybe she had gotten beyond drunk, so drunk that she was still, many hours later, more drunk than she had ever been in her entire life, and she was seeing things. Maybe her father had died, and this was his ghost. Alice started to cry, and rested her cheek against the cool wall.
Her father pushed his chair back from the table and slowly walked toward her. Alice didn’t take her eyes off him—she was afraid that if she looked away, he would disappear.
“What is happening, birthday girl?” Leonard smiled. His teeth looked so white and so straight. She could smell the coffee on his breath.
“It’s my birthday,” Alice said.
“I know it’s your birthday,” Leonard said. “You’ve made me watch Sixteen Candles enough times to ensure that I wouldn’t let this one slide. I did not buy you a boy with a sports car, though.”
“What?” she said. Where was her wallet? Where was her phone? Alice patted her body again, looking for anything that belonged to her, that made this make sense. She pushed her enormous T-shirt against her body and felt her flat stomach, her hip bones, her body.
“It’s your sixteenth birthday, Al-pal.” Leonard nudged her leg with his toe. Had he always been able to stretch like that? He hadn’t moved his body that easily in years. It felt exactly like when she saw her friends’ children for the first time in a few years and all of a sudden they were full-on humans who could skateboard and came up to her shoulders, but in reverse. She’d seen her father every day, then every week or so, for her entire life. There was never a gap, a time when she could see him with fresh eyes. She’d been there for every gray hair’s arrival, so of course she hadn’t noticed when the balance had shifted, when it was more salt than pepper. “Want an Oreo for breakfast?”
Part Two
17
Alice stood in her bedroom doorway. Her heart was doing things that hearts weren’t supposed to do, like beating in time to a Gloria Estefan song. She wanted to go and sit with her dad, but she also needed to understand if she was alive, if he was alive, if she was asleep, or if she was, in fact, sixteen years old instead of forty and standing in her bedroom in her father’s house. Alice wasn’t sure which option seemed the least appealing. If she was dead, then at least it hadn’t hurt. If she was asleep, she would wake up. If her father was dead, and this was her body’s response to the trauma, fair enough. The most likely option, other than this being the most lucid fucking dream of her life, was that Alice had had a mental health break, and that all of this was happening inside her own brain. If she had traveled back in time and her forty-year-old consciousness was once again inside her teenage body, and outside, it was 1996 and she was a junior in high school, that presented some major problems. It was unlikely that her bedroom would contain the answers to any of these questions, but teenage girls’ bedrooms were full of secrets, so anything was possible. Alice had grown up with two imaginary time-traveling brothers as her only siblings, after all.