My father cocked his head, eyes cloudless again, and seemed to realize for the first time that he was witnessing a horrifying death. “I guess that’s kind of scary for kids, now that I think about it.”
“I always thought it was cool.”
He continued to contemplate the mammoths, then hung his arm around my shoulders. “You are really smart, Beth.” His skin was rough where it touched the back of my neck, and hard with muscle. He gave me a grin I hadn’t seen in a long time. “But I hope you know it’s more than that. You’re talented. You’re not going to be some boring high school science teacher. You’re going to discover something amazing. I bet people will be visiting your museum in a hundred years.”
I felt proud and sad and suddenly very old. Older than my father, like Tess. I put my arm around his waist and hugged back. “Thanks, Dad.”
The baby mammoth was still screaming silently. Her father was still trapped. Nothing had changed except me. I no longer believed I could save my own father from whatever was sucking him under.
Soojin was getting really good at playing electric guitar. She screamed and howled on key, too, which meant she could do a reasonable facsimile of Grape Ape’s repertoire. Her parents wouldn’t let her practice at home, though, so we had a perfect excuse to spend lunch in the music room instead of with Lizzy and Heather. Admittedly, it wasn’t as if they were desperate to hang out with us either. We’d all adopted a policy of extreme avoidance. Saying hi in the hallway was fine, but there were no conversations. We were no longer phone friends.
I’ll never know how Lizzy cleaned up her homicidal mess at the world’s shittiest rock party, but it must have been pretty spectacular. Richard’s death made the L.A. Times, but only as a tiny notice. According to the paper, he’d produced a few albums for Epic, then died tragically after taking a ton of drugs and jumping off the roof of that house into an empty swimming pool. Soojin and I talked about the possibility that maybe the guy who owned the house had covered up the murder. Because how could Lizzy and Heather have dragged that guy up to the roof? And even then—how do you make stab wounds look like injuries from a fall?
“Rich white men get away with everything!” Soojin half sang, half spoke the words as she played a distorted chord. Then she paused, hanging both arms over the body of her instrument. “Seriously, though, I bet this shit happens all the time. Cops don’t care.”
“But when a rich white man dies, doesn’t that kind of invalidate the whole equation? Shouldn’t the cops try way too hard to solve his murder?” We’d discussed this a million times, and it had become a kind of ritual to mull it over again.
“Then it’s about who is richer. Dude who owns the house is super rich. Dude who dies in his house is like… junior rich. My mom says that back in Korea, you could get out of anything if you paid the cops a big enough bribe. I bet it’s the same here. Super rich defeats junior rich.” She smacked a fist into her palm, like she was squashing a bug.
“Have you talked to Heather or Lizzy at all?”
“Nooooo.” Soojin fiddled with the knobs on her Boss DS-1 effects pedal, stepped on it with her boot, and played an intensely fuzzed-out chunk of sound.
For a few weeks after the party, Lizzy called both of us almost every day. She was apologetic and weepy. She begged me to meet her and Heather at Bob’s Big Boy and talk it over. Every time I found myself about to give in, I remembered the expression on Tess’s face—my face—when she said Lizzy was a bad person. Tess had also said she wanted to save me from something worse than the murders. Which didn’t make sense, because what could be worse than that? I kept coming up with increasingly repulsive answers to that question, and none of them made me want to talk to Lizzy.
I listened to Soojin practice snatches of a Bratmobile song and pulled out my AP Geology textbook. Normally I wanted to learn everything I could about plate tectonics, but today that meeting with Tess was itching at the back of my mind. Had I averted the disaster she’d warned me about by dumping Lizzy as a friend? Why had Tess come back to warn me, instead of stopping Lizzy directly? Maybe she didn’t care about saving a bunch of skeevy guys? I hoped that wasn’t why. I mean, those guys were definitely giant bags of dicks, but they didn’t deserve to die.
How the hell had I gone from being a kid who liked rocks to a murderer who traveled through time?
Staring at my textbook, I tried to imagine what the history of my family would look like as a geological time scale illustration. Over on the far left of the page, there would be a colorful hail of arrows representing the geophysical forces that made my grandfather decide to light his store on fire. In the next panel, we would see how those forces affected an underwater volcanic province, an angry red blob beneath the surface the planet, oozing upward into my father’s brain like spreading lava. Then there would be an explanation of the chemistry involved. Nasty-looking clouds of greenhouse gases from the eruption bubbled up from the deep water, changing the composition of our atmosphere, raising temperatures, causing drought. My father’s eruption left the parched land prone to massive forest fires. And that’s where I lived. The world around me was still burning because of crustal formation on the Atlantic seabed millions of years ago. Maybe Tess was the person I would become because of what my father had done to me, somewhere between the boiling waters and the soot forests.
“Wake up, weirdo.” Soojin waved her hand in front of my eyes. The bell for fifth period was blatting from the loudspeakers.
I walked to AP Geology in a daze, wondering whether I’d ever see Tess again. Would I grow up into her, and have to come back in time to visit myself? From what I’d learned in our unit on time travel, that was fake movie pseudoscience. It was more like her visit had reshuffled the timeline, generating a new history and future in its wake. Only Tess would remember the timeline that existed before her edit.
I wished she would come back. I had so many questions.
TWENTY
TESS
Chicago, Illinois… Raqmu, Ottoman-occupied territory (1893 C.E.)
Sol was right about getting an injunction. None of the theaters had to shut their doors. As soon as Comstock and the Lady Managers filed their complaint, Sol was at the courthouse getting an order to stop it. The Midway was making good money, drawing more tourists to Chicago than ever before in its history. After the newspaper coverage of our protest, there was no way that local judges were going to let some fusty New Yorker try to ruin the city’s new status as an international attraction. Our edit was propagating outward, turning Comstock’s campaign into fruitless foolishness rather than the moral crackdown and mass closures of the villages that I remembered from history books.
“It worked! We won!” Salina raised a glass of imported pomegranate juice in the dressing room, while Soph poured champagne for those of us who drank alcohol.
Morehshin sighed heavily. “We won this battle. But we’ve made Comstock angry. He’s not going to let this go.”
I took a swig of sour bubbles and looked at her uneasily. We’d made an edit, but that didn’t mean we’d made a difference yet.
Aseel poured a little champagne into her juice. “At least he’s back in New York.”
That was hardly reassuring. Comstock had ways of turning New York into a monster whose tentacles reached everywhere in the nation. After all, he was a special agent with the U.S. Postal Service. As our friends celebrated, paranoia needled me. I wondered who else was listening at the door, or opening our mail.
After appearing in the pages of New York World, Soph achieved a new level of notoriety. The danse du ventre was becoming a national obsession, and her article was one of the only decent descriptions of it written in English. A local Chicago press printed up two hundred more copies, selling them as pamphlets with crisp covers. Her parlors were full of new acolytes seeking enlightenment.