Chapter Twenty-Three

August 30

“I ’ m going to throw you a birthday party,” Mom says, as soon as I walk into the kitchen the next morning. “It’s your thirtieth.

You should have one.”

I rub my eyes. I feel like I barely spent any time asleep last night, and I’m definitely not awake enough for announcements

like this. “When? My birthday is in two days.”

“Tomorrow!” Mom beams at me. “I already reserved the rooftop deck at the condo. I thought maybe I’d have it be a surprise,

but that just seemed too logistically complicated, and anyway, I want you to help pick out a cake.”

I let my breath out. “I don’t need a birthday party.”

“Oh, hush. You’re here. It’s the perfect opportunity. I haven’t gotten to throw you a birthday party in years! Anyway, I’ve

already invited people.”

“Who?”

“Michael. His roommates. I don’t really know who all you were hanging out with at that party at his house or the football

game, so I just told him to invite whoever he wanted.”

Oh, god. After last night, I’m not sure Michael will even show up. “Mom, I really don’t... I don’t need a birthday party.

I mean, it’s nice of you, but...”

“Well, it’s not just for you.” She looks slightly self-conscious. “Plenty of my friends will be there too. I thought it could be a joint party. Birthday party for you, moving party for me! I’ve been wanting to try out the rooftop deck. We’ll have to be done by nine o’clock for quiet hours, but that’s my bedtime anyway.”

Oh. So that’s it. Mom wants a party—something special to mark her move to the condo—but she can’t just throw a party for herself.

That would be selfish. The second cardinal sin of the Midwest, right behind accepting an invitation you were clearly supposed

to turn down.

My birthday gives her the perfect cover.

I can live with that. “Okay. When do we need to pick out a cake?”

“As soon as you’ve had breakfast.” She picks up a pad of paper and a pen. “I’ll start a list right now. We’ll need snacks

and pop and paper cups and plates...”

My phone buzzes in my pocket, and my heart leaps straight up my throat. It’s Michael, texting to tell me he’s absolutely not

attending this party. Or maybe it’s Ian, wondering why the hell I’m ignoring him.

But it’s neither of them.

OLIVIA HENRY

Happy birthday week

My breath sticks in my lungs.

Happy birthday week is something Olivia started once we were all out of school. In college, Olivia and Ian and I always celebrated one another’s

birthdays on our actual birthdays. But once we were out of college, life happened and jobs happened, and sometimes I had evening

classes in my master’s program, and Olivia was fitting in stand-up, and Joan has weeks where she’s working all the time...

So Olivia invented Birthday Week. Parties and gifts could happen anywhere in the week and it all counted.

My Birthday Week technically started yesterday, on Monday. But I don’t care. She texted. It doesn’t have five million exclamation

points the way most of her texts do, but she texted.

And suddenly my mind isn’t on cake. It’s on sexy fries. And sexier fries. And beer. And Olivia and Joan and Ian all crammed into a booth at some weird bar that Olivia picked for me, because I don’t know the first thing about bars and I’ll never be cool enough to find the ones without signs. I’m picturing Olivia passing off her plastic-bling tiara like she’s passing off a royal crown. I’m picturing Ian giving me a free download of some game he designed, because that’s what he does for everyone as a present, every year. I never play them, because I don’t have the gear you need to play them, but it doesn’t matter, because we always end up at Ian’s apartment sooner or later and play the games there...

“You okay?”

I jerk out of my thoughts and look up from my phone. My mom is looking at me over her round red glasses, a slight frown on

her face.

“Yeah. Fine.” I turn back to the coffee maker and stuff my phone in my pocket, trying to ignore the strange hollowness opening

up in my chest.

Mom insists I go to Floyd’s with her to get party supplies. I almost try to come up with an excuse to go over to the bookstore.

It’s right there. I could walk in and see if the book I ordered has arrived, if it seems like anything’s changing for the

better...

But I’m too scared. Too scared of walking in only to find it’s still the bookstore of the present.

And anyway, I don’t feel any different. Nothing seems better in my present, either—so maybe that means Young Darby still feels

like a broken, messed-up weirdo.

So I just follow my mom around through the aisles of Floyd’s, holding the basket and offering an opinion when she insists

I give her one. We buy plates and cups and napkins and a paper tablecloth printed with party hats, and then we head to the

grocery store to pick out snacks. (Mom decides she’ll leave the cake until tomorrow so it doesn’t get stale.)

And somehow the whole day goes by. I feel like I’m in a daze. I think about texting Michael, and I don’t. I think about texting

Olivia, and I can’t figure out what to say.

After dinner, I end up in my room, trying to pack things up in my suitcase, because the movers are coming the day after tomorrow

and my clothes are everywhere.

God, I don’t even know what I’m doing. I have to return the rental car in a few days. And if I’m not returning it in New York, then I have to find a rental location here to return it. I’ve still got these boxes and trash bags—all this stuff I brought from New York, and I haven’t even really thought about whether the movers will be loading that up too. Whether all of this is going to end up in the second bedroom of my mom’s condo in two days because I still haven’t figured out what I’m doing.

I give up. Finally, sitting in the middle of this mess, surrounded by clothes, I do the thing that’s been poking at the back

of my mind all day. I open a browser window on my phone and google time travel again.

All the same hits as last time. I scan them, looking for anything about portals and singularities. Looking for some answer

about why time travel might break down. But there’s nothing, because time travel, especially backward, is impossible.

I try a different search. Wormhole breaking down.

This just gets me a bunch of hits explaining what wormholes are. Not helpful.

Singularity breaking down .

Stuff about black holes and Stephen Hawking.

Time travel portal breaking down.

Pseudo-science websites and tabloid articles.

I drop my phone on the floor and pull off my glasses, pressing my fists into my eyes. Fuck .

I’m losing my mind. Maybe that’s really the answer. My first thought, from that first day I walked into the bookstore, was

right after all. I’m having some sort of massive existential crisis that tipped me right over into the deep end and now I’m

losing my grip on reality and googling singularities like I even know what that word means.

No. I can’t quite believe that. It’s too real—it’s all been too real.

I put my glasses back on and grab up my phone. It’s 7:45.

Shit.

The bookstore closes at 8:00.

Some tiny part of my brain tries to suggest that I could wait until tomorrow morning. That there’s no way I can really get

there before the store closes.

But every other part of me insists I have to go now . I have to go and make sure I’m not losing my mind, that it’s real, that it’s not gone and I can still reach my younger self.

I push myself up, tripping over a pile of shirts, and head for the hall. “Mom?”

“Yeah, Darby?” She’s in the kitchen, packing away the few remaining pots and pans, the toaster, cooking utensils.

“I’m, uh... I’m going over to Michael’s,” I say.

Her eyebrows go up. “Oh. I was going to pack some more stuff into the Jeep to take over to the condo tomorrow—”

“I’ll take my rental car.”

“Okay.” She frowns at me. “Everything all right?”

“Yeah. I, um... I just need a break.” I don’t even wait for her response. Just go back to my room, unearth the rental car

keys from the pile of crap on the bedside table, and leave the house.

The rental car dings pleasantly when I start it up. I’ve gotten so used to the old Jeep that the lights on the dashboard seem

too shiny and bright and the driver’s seat feels awkwardly stiff and bouncy.

It’s 7:58 when I park the car on Main Street. I don’t even bother locking it, just slam the door and run for In Between Books...

The sign on the door is flipped to closed . Inside, the store is dark.

But when I worked at the bookstore, I stayed late all the time if I was on the last shift. Even after the store was technically

closed, I was unpacking books or cleaning up in that half-light I liked so much. I never locked the door until I actually

left. So maybe I can still get in. Maybe if the door hasn’t been locked in 2009...

I grab the knob and pull, but the door won’t open. I rattle the knob. I pull again, with everything I’ve got, but the door

doesn’t budge.

“Come on, come on, come on...” I’m muttering under my breath, shallow, shaky panic-whispers while my heart pounds against

my ribs. I rattle the knob again and again, but it’s useless. It won’t turn.

I can’t get in.

My eyes sting. I lean my forehead against the door.

I can’t get in.

A car engine rumbles down the street behind me and brakes squeak. “Darby?”

I jerk, letting go of the doorknob and whirling around like I’ve been caught stealing.

A white pickup truck is pulled up to the curb, passenger window rolled down. Leaning down to look at me from the driver’s

seat is Michael.

Everything inside me crumbles. I’m relieved to see him and embarrassed at the same time. Embarrassed that I’m here, trying to get into a closed bookstore. Embarrassed by everything I hurled at him last night. Too aware, suddenly, of my shirt sticking to my back and my hair sticking to my forehead and the raw and ragged feeling in my throat.

“Hi,” I say.

He glances past me to the bookstore. “What are you doing?”

Falling apart. Coming undone. Losing my mind.

“Nothing. I just...” My eyes burn. I pull off my glasses so I can rub them. My hands are shaking. “I don’t know.”

“Can I give you a ride home?”

I point, half-heartedly, up the street to the white hatchback. “My car’s right there.”

He turns, glancing at it through his back windshield. Then he chews his lip and looks back at me. “Want to come to my place

for a bit?”

I take a shuddering breath, perilously close to folding up right there on the sidewalk and starting to cry. “Sure.”

He leans over and opens the door for me. I climb into the passenger seat of his truck, and we rumble away down Main Street,

leaving the bookstore and the rental car behind. The breeze streaming through the window is almost chilly. It cools my face

until I don’t feel quite so hot and puffy and panicked. And eventually, I realize something in the truck smells salty and

spicy and amazing. I glance down—there’s a white plastic bag on the bench between us that says cannova’s . The Italian restaurant on Main Street.

Michael notices me looking at it. “Takeout,” he says self-consciously. “Amanda and Liz are out on a date night and I couldn’t

get it together to cook, so... takeout.”

I nod. I can’t seem to focus on anything, and I can’t think of anything to say, so I go back to staring out the window.

Michael turns the truck into his long driveway. I follow him up the porch steps and into the house.

“We could go upstairs,” he says. “Hang out in my room and watch something, or...”

He sounds tentative. Like he did in the bookstore—like his younger self did, asking if Young Darby wanted to rent a Buffy DVD from the video store. A little hopeful. A little like he thinks I might bite.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I shouldn’t have said all of that, last night. I got in my own head.”

He shifts. Uncomfortably. “You want some takeout?”

He doesn’t want to talk about it. Just like he doesn’t want to talk about why we fell apart.

The corners of my eyes prickle. “Yeah. Sure.”

He turns and climbs the stairs to the second floor, so I follow him, dimly realizing I’ve never been up here. I had no reason

to come up here when it was Michael’s grandma’s house.

There’s a small landing. A bathroom. A set of sliding doors that looks like a closet. At one end of the hall is a bedroom,

the door partly open. I see a bed with a striped comforter and a whole bunch of throw pillows.

Michael heads for the bedroom at the other end of the hall. His bedroom. It’s strange and intimate to see it. A neatly made

bed with a plain blue comforter. A desk covered in textbooks and notebooks, a laptop balanced precariously on top of the mess.

An old, worn dresser against another wall, with a familiar Pikachu plushie sitting on top of it. The plushie I gave him. A

remnant of the old Michael, and the old Darby.

Michael sets the takeout bag and the forks down on the nightstand, and opens up his laptop on the desk. “We could watch a

movie?”

“Sure.”

He glances back at me. “Any suggestions?”

I literally could not care less. I’m a mess of exhaustion and anxiety and a creeping sense of dread, and I can’t figure out

how to have an opinion about anything. “Whatever you want.”

He looks at me a moment longer and then goes back to his computer. He hunts around various streaming services for a couple

minutes, and then he starts playing Singin ’ in the Rain.

We sit on his bed, pillows behind our backs. He opens the takeout containers and hands me a fork. I could swear I’m not hungry,

but I end up eating anyway—stabbing bites of spaghetti and twisting them around the fork. It’s good.

Eventually, we’re done with the takeout and the containers end up back on the nightstand. Sometime while Debbie Reynolds is singing “Good Morning,” his arm goes around my shoulders, and I tuck myself against him. He’s warm and solid and grounding and comforting and here . And I desperately want to be here. I desperately want to be comforted. I desperately want to convince myself everything

is okay.

I turn my face up, and he looks at me, and I’m not sure which of us moves first, but our lips meet, and I’m kissing him. Or

he’s kissing me. The kiss is happening anyway, and then it’s turning deeper, his arm tightening around me, my hand venturing

up to cup his face.

And maybe it’s desperation or anxiety or panic or all three, but I feel like someone lit a match in my chest, a spark into

a flame. I turn toward him, my hand leaving his face and moving down his neck, over his chest. Before I think about it, I’m

climbing onto him, running my fingers through his rumpled hair. He finds the edge of my T-shirt and his hand slips underneath,

fingertips grazing my top surgery scars. And now my shirt just seems like it’s in the way, so I pull it off over my head.

And then that doesn’t seem fair, so I tug frustratedly on his T-shirt, and he pulls it off. I run my hands over his chest

and kiss him again, and then that’s not enough, so I unbutton his jeans.

He pulls away. “Darby...”

I stop, leaning back, fear rising up my throat. “Sorry. I’m... I can stop.”

He shakes his head. “No, I... I’m good. I just... are you?”

I manage a tiny shaky nod, suddenly too breathless to speak. My hands go back to his jeans, and he says, “Wait.”

I pull back again.

“Pants off?” he says.

I’m catching on fire. “Yeah.”

I climb off his lap and he sort of scoots his way out of his jeans, because there’s honestly no sexy way to take off pants.

The jeans drop on the floor and I’m about to slide back onto his lap when his hands come up, catching my hips, and he tugs

on my belt loop.

I swallow, the rawness back in my throat. But I shimmy my way out of my jeans too. My heart thuds, and I want, and I need,

and I’m terrified. “I, um...” My voice is raspy. “Have you...? I mean, with a trans guy? Because I’m...”

Michael’s face is already flushed, but he turns even pinker. “I have, actually. Once.”

That wasn’t what I was expecting. “Really?”

“In college.” He swallows, and I see his Adam’s apple move up and down.

The wanting rushes back. I kiss him, and he pulls me back onto him. At some point, even boxer briefs feel like too much between

us, and we get rid of those too. And then his hands are exploring me, and mine are exploring him, and it’s really a good thing

Amanda and Liz are out because I’m starting to make sounds...

We pause again, just long enough for him to unwrap a condom and me to slam the laptop shut and set my glasses on the bedside

table and turn off the light. And then his hands find me, and we’re both on the bed, and I let myself turn desperate until

everything is just us shutting out the world. Until my mind really is white noise, and I’m not just catching on fire, I’m

burning.