“They are both too old for you. Even grown-up you. But fine! Fine. Okay, I know I said I wasn’t going to, but in the future, there’s this thing called Google, and you just type something in and it spits back thousands of answers. And there’s this website called Wikipedia that does the same thing, basically. And I really wish that I could just type in ‘time travel help please’ and get some answers.”
“So you just type in anything? And it tells you everything you need to know? Does anyone do their homework?” Sam asked.
“I don’t think so,” Alice said. She ran her finger around the instructions for how to operate the booth and the dollar slot. She stood up, pried her wallet out of her back pocket, and yanked out a crinkly dollar bill. She slid it into the slot, and the light started to flash. Alice and Sam posed once, twice, three times, four times, and then the whirring of the internal mechanisms began, and they slid out.
While they waited for the pictures to develop, Alice walked the perimeter of both rooms, feeling along the tacky walls, looking behind pictures that hadn’t been moved in decades. There was nothing weird, or at the very least, nothing weirder than seeing a nighttime place during the day, the bizarro version of being in a school after hours. The machine finally spit out the photos and Sam and Alice hurried back over, holding the still-wet strip by its edges.
“Classic,” Sam said approvingly. Kissy faces, tongues out, eyes open, eyes closed.
“I love it,” Alice said. She could see herself in them—her sixteen-year-old face, of course, but the rest of her, too. It was something in her irises, in the tension in her mouth. It wasn’t the exact same photo Sam had given her for her fortieth birthday, but it was close, like the difference between fraternal twins.
“You keep it,” Sam said. “A birthday present, from me to you.”
Alice felt slightly defeated. “Let’s just go back to Pomander. I want to spend as much time as possible with my dad.”
“Okay,” Sam said. They waved goodbye to the confused bartender and went back through the turnstiles, flashing their school passes. They slid to the end of a row of empty seats.
“Tell me something else,” Sam said. “Something good.”
“You move to New Jersey,” Alice said, and smiled.
Sam threw a fake punch. “You’re just playing with me.”
Alice nodded. Sometimes the truth was hard to hear.
26
Leonard wasn’t home when they got to Pomander, but Ursula crisscrossed through their legs as Sam and Alice walked through the house and back to Alice’s room. There was a Post-it note stuck to her door that said Back soon —Dad.
“So what’s the plan?” Sam asked, curling up on Alice’s bed. She leaned over and picked up a copy of Seventeen magazine. “I can’t believe you subscribe to this garbage.”
“For tonight? Or for my life?” Alice sat next to her.
“Isn’t that kind of the same thing, maybe?”
“I guess, if I think about it, tonight, I want to have a better time at this party than I did the first time. I want to figure out how to get back to my life. To my other life. I want to hang out with my dad.” It felt shameful to admit it so plainly. Kids at Belvedere were now open wounds of self-conscious vulnerability. They changed sexual orientations and genders, they experimented with pronouns. They were so evolved that they knew they were still evolving. When Alice was a teenager, the entire point of life had been to pretend that absolutely nothing had an effect on her. Technically, she still couldn’t quite bring herself to tell Sam the truth—that if she could, Alice wanted to make sure that Leonard didn’t end up where she’d left him. She wanted to save his life, simple as that. Just then, Alice heard the front door open and close, and Ursula leap off of some high-up place—the bookshelf, maybe, or the top of the refrigerator—to run to the door.
“Al? You home?” Leonard called out.
“Yeah! I’m here! With Sam!” Alice shouted back. She watched Sam flip pages in the magazine—all the pastel-colored ads for Maybelline Great Lash mascara and Swatch watches and Bonne Bell Lip Smackers and Caboodles jewelry boxes. Alice had truly believed that magazines were preparing her for the future, that Beverly Hills, 90210 was a mirror, only with shorter dresses and more hats worn at school. Everything that she consumed told her that she was grown. She wanted to shake Sam by the shoulders and tell her that they were both still children and no one around them knew, like they were standing on each other’s shoulders in a trench coat and everyone believed it. But Sam already knew, because Sam got in trouble when she stayed out late. Sam got grounded when her mother found the roach of a joint in her room. Sam got her beeper taken away for two weeks after Lorraine got a call from Belvedere saying that Sam had been caught kissing a boy—Noah Carmello—in the back stairs during class. One of the worst parts about being a teenager was realizing that life wasn’t the same for everyone—Alice knew that at the time. What had taken decades was realizing that so many things that she had thought were advantages to her own life were the opposite.