“What?” Casey said, but Rima interrupted, “I think there’s a difference between dead and gone. I know what we saw, but …” Rima’s fingers crept to a crocheted scarf wound in a loose cowl around her neck. “His whisper, in the scarf? And his mother’s? They just disappeared, as if they’d been erased, and that never happens. Taylor, for example.” Rima stroked an arm of her ratty parka. “She’s still here. Even when her whisper finally fades, there’ll still be the tiniest trace, like a watermark. That makes sense because she’s written into my story already. But there’s nothing in this scarf. Tony isn’t tangled up in my book, and if he was never a person but just the idea of one—the energy it takes to make a person come to life on a page—maybe that’s why. It’s like his chapter closed. Tony was never supposed to be here permanently.” Rima nodded at Now Done Darkness. “That’s the version of Tony we met, and he belongs there.”
Lizzie’s mouth worked. “I just said that.”
“But then how come he showed up to give Rima a ride?” Bode said. “That was still her … what? Book-world or something? And she and I met at the rest stop.”
“That’s because I was starting to pull you guys all together,” Lizzie said. “It’s hard, and I sometimes drop you where I don’t mean to. Things would’ve fallen apart if I hadn’t separated you all again. Right after that, all of you … you know, you think you drove here, but really, I dropped you into this Now.”
“How do you do that?” Casey asked, as Eric said, “So can you get Tony again?”
“No, I can’t,” Lizzie said, choosing Eric’s question. “Once you die in this Now, you can’t come back here. You can be in other Nows, just not this one, or any Now where you get killed.”
“Wait a minute.” Bode frowned. “So let me get this straight. Tony’s alive. So are Chad and Emma’s friend?”
“Yes, Chad is in his book-world and”—the little girl waved a hand through the air—“other Nows, but only one Chad is allowed in a Now, no matter if it’s a book-world or, like, you know,” Lizzie said, “a regular Now.”
So this wasn’t like The Matrix. Frowning, Emma worried the inside of her lip. Which would make sense, because the film was about a simulation: a Neo-avatar slotting into a computer program. In a regular Now—call it an alternative timeline—if she died, she was gone from that timeline, period. That didn’t mean there weren’t a lot of other Emmas and Bodes and Erics and on and on, like an infinite number of Xeroxed copies. But which was the original?
“Why do you call them that?” Bode frowned down at Lizzie. “Nows. I don’t get that.”
“Gosh, you guys … You’re thinking in straight lines too much. Look. Here’s the difference.” Sweeping up Echo Rats, she cracked open the covers and jabbed a page. “That’s a book-world Now.” She flipped two-thirds of the way through. “Here’s another Now.” She turned the page. “This is another book-world Now,” she said, stabbing the left-hand page and then the facing page, “and that’s another.” She riffled the pages in a fan. “All of these, the pages, they’re all book-world Nows. There’s no yesterday in a book-world. There’s no tomorrow. There is only the page where you start reading, and you can skip around back and forth and start wherever you want. Do you get it? You can read a book from what you think is the beginning to the end—go on, follow all the stupid numbers—and then start all over again, or in the middle; it doesn’t matter. You can decide where the beginning is, because the book-world is the book-world. It never changes. That’s not the same as a Now where there’s Christmas and stuff and people get older and things like that, but there are lots and lots of different Nows and you can visit them by going through the Dark Passages.”
“To visit different timelines,” Eric said, “or alternative universes.”
“Fine, whatever.” Sudden tears pooled in Lizzie’s eyes as her lower lip quivered. “What’s so hard about this?” Lizzie hurled Now Done Darkness across the room, the book doing an awkward cartwheel to crash against a wall. “For book-people who are all me, you’re so stupid!”
After a moment, Bode said, “All me? Say what?”
EMMA
Tangled
1
THE CRAZY QUILT was a rainbow riot: scraps from every bit of clothing Lizzie had ever worn, decorated not only with the Sign of Sure in its web but very special glass figures and alphabet beads Meredith McDermott had used to spell out Lizzie’s full name:
ELIZABETH LINDSAY MCDERMOTT
These same beads had been rearranged to form other names, too, and in various combinations:
There were more names, too: EARL and ANITA, LILY, even MARIANE. Emma picked out SAL waaaay off in one corner of a sliver of black velvet. There were still many others she didn’t know: BETTE. ZANE. DOYLE. BATTLE. All characters who existed in other book-worlds but had no part in her story.
But if I’m writing my own, and part of me is tangled up with Lizzie … Emma’s eyes crept back to the glass beads that spelled out ERIC. I can only imagine so far, and no further? No, no, wait a second, wait just a minute … that couldn’t be true. Her gaze swept across the quilt, and then she felt the air ease from her throat. Okay, no KRAMER. No JASPER either, not that she could see right away. The quilt was about half the size and length of a twin bed, and it would take time to pick over and parse out everything. But she knew on a deep, gut level: Jasper just wouldn’t be there.
There’s no J in Lizzie’s name, and she said I made Kramer myself. So, did I also make Jasper? That thought promoted another, something that had bothered her but which, at the time, she couldn’t afford to dwell on because she’d been running for her life: In that insane asylum, Kramer called him John, like that was Jasper’s first … She felt her heart kick start in her throat. No, no, that can’t be right.
At her sudden intake of breath, Eric threw her a small frown, but she only shook her head, not trusting in her voice. And I don’t even want to know what this means. Because she had finally put something together, a puzzle over which her mind must’ve been working, like a computer laboring, quietly, toward a solution at once inescapable and irrefutable.
2