Variation on a Theme, Book 7
Copyright© 2026 by Grey Wolf
Chapter 36: Joining The Club
Wednesday, October 1, 1986
I stayed focused through my exam. It was easy enough, I thought. The others agreed, thankfully. I really didn’t need to be stressing over this with tonight coming up.
Besides that, my day was pretty straightforward. Martial Arts worked to burn off some stress, but I was definitely nervous by late afternoon.
Instead of letting her walk home, I met Amy at Hullabaloo Cafe at the end of her shift. Hand in hand, we walked to The Flying Tomato Brothers, the site of another date. That one felt like it was so long ago now, but it was only ten months or so. Ten very significant months, to be sure, but still.
Once we’d gotten our pizza and settled into one of the more private little nooks, Amy said, “This is an appropriate choice, I think.”
“How so?” I asked, then nibbled a bit of pizza.
“When we first ate here, I observed that you look ‘normal,’ and you appear to be ‘normal.’ Yet, you are not. I suspect tonight will be an exploration of that.”
“Good point!”
“It’s also the place where you first offered me the chance to stay in your house. A decision that might well have led to tonight,” she said.
I nodded. “It was a concern from the start. Candice and Sherry live downstairs and see us only under controlled circumstances. Someone actually living in the house? No one was ready for tonight, then, but we had to be aware that ... things happen.”
“And do things happen?” she said, munching some of her own pizza.
“Depending on how you count it, I’ve told this story five times, or maybe seven. Of those, basically all of them have had some unexpected triggering event. One was just someone realizing ‘normal’ had its limitations. But they’re all ... well, circumstances happen. If we didn’t want them to happen, we would have had to keep our distance.”
She nodded. “You did say it’s been under discussion.”
“I had firmly planned to tell Jasmine. Just ... not when it happened. When it happened turned out to be the right time, but it was forced by circumstances. The same is true for you. We were discussing both ‘whether’ and ‘when.’ Until there’s a ‘when,’ there’s always a ‘whether,’ but we were leaning towards yes. Then ... circumstances.”
“Which, in my case, would be Angie’s unusually strong reaction to your new friend Lynn,” she said.
“It fairly obviously means something. We could stick with the ‘she looks like someone’ story. It’s technically true, but leaves so many significant things out that it’s really a lie. And lying to you for a substantial period of time is ... problematic.”
She nodded, then said, “Which must be why you told Jasmine. Whatever happened then would have put you in the position of actively lying to someone you loved, rather than simply passively avoiding ... something.”
“Which is where we’ve been,” I said, smiling.
“No matter what, I feel flattered. This seems ... essential. It says something that you’ve been thinking about this.”
I took her hand and said, “When we started dating, I had no idea what would happen. We got closer and ... unlike some people — Darla, for instance — there was nothing in the way of our building a longer-term relationship. Like we said, right now I’m not certain we can have a long-term intimate relationship with someone who doesn’t know. It feels unlikely, if you take intimacy as meaning more than just sex.”
“And you do, of course. As do I.”
“One of the many reasons we click.”
We finished our pizza, then threw our trash away. I took Amy’s hand again, and we walked to the house. We were mostly quiet. We’d done about as much of the prologue as we could.
Once we got to the house, Angie, Cammie, and Mel all hugged Amy, one by one. Jas and Paige were off working on their musical.
Mel said, “Welcome to the club, as the most recent inductee.”
“You’ll like it,” Angie said. “After you stop freaking out!”
“What she said,” Mel said.
Cammie chuckled and said, “She might not freak out. Too much, anyway.”
Angie said, “I freaked out. Freaking out is fine!”
Amy said, “Thank you, all of you. It means a lot to me.”
There were more hugs, and then we headed into my and Jas’s bedroom. Amy took one chair, and I took the other.
“I’ll ... level-set,” I said. “Tell me what you think so far. It might help.”
She nodded, then said, “I can’t guess what it is, but ... there is some secret you and Angie share that is huge. Basically, you said that. It explains Angie freaking out about Lynn, yet it’s your secret, too. But you did not meet Lynn until just before Angie did, nor did any of the others. What that tells me is that the story of Lynn looking like someone Angie knows is true — as you said — but that someone is ... inexplicable. There is no way to explain who Lynn looks like without saying something so huge that you are highly nervous about sharing it.”
“So far, so good,” I said, smiling.
“My suspicion is that it also explains both why you’re ‘normal’ and why you’re not. Why you’re sanguine about being in a position most people would envy. Money, house, travel, a spot on a corporate board, stable long-term relationships — all of that. You’re calm about it. It’s a step, not a goal.”
“Also good.”
“The last thing I have, so far, is that there is some reason why you’ve thought about sharing this with me. Yes, we’re intimate, in multiple senses of the word, but I think it’s more than that. Something specific to me.”
“A very insightful answer,” I said. “There is. And ... that probably reinforces what I was thinking to say first. I’ve approached this with analogies and other things, but for you ... we might just dive in.”
“I am terribly curious.”
“What I was going to say first might seem out of left field. Or ... maybe not at all.”
She nodded, remaining quiet.
“When we talked about your friend Cindy ... after a bit, I said...”
She cut in and said, “You said you had ‘not really’ been around death. I found that curious, but not yet meaningful. Or, perhaps, I lost it in your agreeing that life after death seems likely.”
“Yes. All of that.”
She blinked and said, “You had a near-death experience. So did Angie. I ... perhaps ... you became aware of things? Instead of your life flashing before your eyes, something future-looking? Angie ... sees Lynn as who she could be, not who she is. You see opportunities. Me?”
She hesitated, but before I could speak, said, “No. Not me. That was genuine. You can hide things, but I believe I would know if you were hiding that.”
“Very astute,” I said. “And close. Not right, but close. Let me explain.”
She smiled and nodded.
“I do see a version of the future. Angie sees a version. Neither of them is the future.”
She blinked. “That is ... how? You see alternate universes?”
“Angie and I each lived in alternate universes. That’s where this gets ... not necessarily confusing, but hard to credit. Our other lives are very unlike the ones we’re living now. And both of us got here by dying there.”
She blinked slowly a couple of times. “You ... you have died? Yourself?”
“To the best of my knowledge, yes. A car accident. A truck plowed into a cab I was riding in.”
She paused, then said, “When?”
I smiled softly and said, “June 21st of the year 2021.”
She blinked again. “You were ... fifty-five, then? You lived a life to fifty-five?”
“I did,” I said. “One I’ll describe, in a bit.”
“A guess, then. You came back when that near-death experience happened. And the same thing happened to Angie.”
I nodded. “It kinda sucks, honestly. We have theories, but we guess that whoever was in these bodies then, died. We moved in. I like to believe the ‘me’ before I got here was some sort of placeholder. Him being ‘doomed to die’ is maybe second-best.”
She nodded quickly. “That is clearly potentially horrifying! Yet you cannot blame yourselves, surely.”
“We don’t. Jumping ahead, maybe, we have essentially no idea how this happened, and only a very vague, and quite possibly incorrect, reason why. There are some commonalities, but ... it’s all very unclear. We didn’t meet God or anything. Angie and I both sometimes say, ‘God, or the Gods, or the Universe, or whatever.’ Because we just don’t know.”
“I would have asked that, so jumping ahead is good. In a way, it’s reassuring,” she said. Then she added, “What was it like? And how did you manage? It must have been extremely startling. Traumatic, even.”
“When I came to, I had a concussion, was dizzy, all of that. I fell immediately into being the ‘me’ I was. I could remember being fifty-five. I could remember the truck hitting me. All of that. But my reaction was to seek out an adult, call my parents for help, accept their authority unquestioningly — all of that. I knew who I was, meaning my old self. I figured out that I was fourteen, what the year was, things like that. I remembered who my parents were. Honestly ... things I would have remembered at fifty-five, for the most part. Anything I wouldn’t? ‘Amnesia’ was the easy answer, and it was also essentially true.”
“At least that would let you fit in easily.”
I smiled and said, “Somewhat easily. One problem is that neither Angie’s first life nor my first life was in this universe. There are differences. And those differences started hitting me immediately.”
“Oh? I’m very curious.”
“In my first life, Angie was my cousin. I should perhaps say ‘my troubled cousin,’ since that’s how I mostly thought of her. I only met her a few times. I never saw her after 1982 or so. In total, I likely spent fewer than five or six hours around her.”
“That is a considerable difference!” she said.
“Imagine my surprise when, in the hospital, my parents told me I had a sister.”
She snorted. “That must have been a shock.”
“I fainted when I saw her. I knew who she was, but nothing about her. They’d explained the adoption, but even then, it was a shock. And, for her ... there was a Steve in her first life. But she didn’t move to Texas until 1983, and that Steve was a massive introvert with lousy social skills.”
“Hard to imagine!” she said, smiling.
“It’ll get harder,” I said, chuckling. “But you can see how ... off-track ... things already were. There was no ‘Angie and Steve’ in 1980 in either of our first lives. No matter what we did, we couldn’t possibly have gone off to high school and not changed things. Even if, by some miracle, I could have remembered every single thing I’d done, I couldn’t repeat myself.”
“This reminds me of time-travel stories where people change history.”
“That’s us, yeah. Or maybe. Well ... definitely? I dunno. We’ll get there. Everything is nuanced,” I said, smiling. “Anyway ... the other thing matters. And that’s that I didn’t want to repeat things. Nor, as it turned out, did Angie. Remember, at this point, I had no idea she was like me, and she had no idea I was like her. Anyway, my first life was...”
I hugged Amy, then continued, saying, “I was overweight all my life. Not ugly, but overweight. Social enough, and I had female friends, but I barely dated one woman in college, sort-of dated one woman in graduate school — that one’s quite complicated — and then met and married a really problematic woman a few years after getting my Master’s Degree. It was a troubled marriage. She was abusive, mean, argumentative ... a lot of things. And I loved her, because...”
“Because that is who you are,” she said. “When you love, you love. That, I know.”
“Exactly. She divorced me roughly a year before I died. My dad died in the same period, so I tried to pick up the pieces of my life while putting his affairs to rest, then found a job in New Jersey. It was my first trip there, and I never even got from the airport to the hotel I was going to.”
She looked thoughtful. “Again, that is not the Steve I know. But if I consider it, perhaps I can find a reflection of that person in you.”
“Which is how it should be. One of my first decisions, while in the hospital, was that I could, and should, change nearly everything about my first life. Not debate, which I did then. Not my relationship with my parents. But the rest? Burn it down and start over. Angie was much the same.”
“That sounds both wise and sad, I think,” she said.
“A bit of both. We agree strongly, though: this would have been painful if we hadn’t felt that way. Trying to hold on to things you had no idea how to make happen? We both think this experience — this second chance — should only happen for people who have little to preserve but a lot of experience to build on.”
“That does make sense, the more I think about it,” she said, nodding. “You made other decisions?”
I nodded. “I did. To focus on self-improvement first, and things like money and power second. To resist the temptation to take someone else’s idea and claim it was mine. Inventions, books, songs ... whatever. Things like that.”
“That is the Steve I know,” she said, smiling. “I had not fully thought that through. You must know so much! It should be easy to use that.”
“We have things we feel we can legitimately use. But not that. Not stealing someone’s work, and particularly not stealing it in a way where they wouldn’t even know they’d been victimized.”
She just nodded.
“I’ll fast-forward. Angie and I had a rough patch in the spring of 1981. She dated a wildly out-of-character guy. He made no sense at the time and a ton of sense later. I did my best to accept her choices until he started hitting her. Everything piled up just before Spring Break. I intervened enough to chase him off, Angie got angry that I had, accused me of some stuff I hadn’t done — that’s a story in itself — and then blurted out a phrase from a movie that was many years in the future. It’s the sort of phrase you can’t possibly come up with without knowing that movie, believe me! And it’s a movie I really believe you’ll love, assuming it happens.”
She blinked a bit at that last part, then said, “I’ll ask. What did she accuse you of?”
“By December 1980, I felt like I had enough self-improvement done to allow ‘money’ to get into the mix. I scraped together every dollar I had and bet it on the Super Bowl, knowing who the winner was likely to be. It worked! Suddenly, I had a big pile of cash, which I hid in my closet. Angie’s bedroom adjoined mine, with the closets in between. She heard me moving around in there and figured I was hiding condoms. She wanted them, but found the money. She’d seen me go to where the bookie hung out. As it turns out, a drug dealer also hangs out there. I never met the guy, but Angie — reasonably, I think! — figured I was working with him. And big wads of money mean hard drugs. Angie hates people who push hard drugs on kids, for a bunch of personal reasons. So, she had reason to think I was a really lousy person.”
She nodded. “Very interesting. And ... I believe I would agree. Betting on sports feels like it would be an ethical way to use knowledge of the future.”
“We think so, too. Everyone who bets accepts the risk of losing. My streak wasn’t perfect, but I’d long since stopped betting it all. When my streak broke, it was a reminder that this is its own universe.”
“Interesting,” she said, smiling.
“One thing ... maybe jumping out of order, I don’t know...”
I shrugged, then said, “One thing that matters, I think, is that there are really only one, or maybe two, people I’ve approached because I knew things about them from my first life. One is Michael Dell, who founded P.C.’s Limited. That was a calculated risk. Angie and I talked extensively about it, and Jas and Paige joined in when they knew. We felt like our investment might increase his profits more than the equity we ‘took’ from him. It’s probably the closest we’ve been to doing something unethical, but I think we’re right.”
“And, again, I would say he made his own decision.”
“Still, it’s ... one thing worth pointing out at this point is that I didn’t know Jasmine, Paige, or you in my first life at all. Not even vaguely. Nor Cammie, and that’s a story. Mel, yes, but she was the quiet, studious sister of Mark and Morty, her wild jokester brothers. That was it. We weren’t friends, just fellow students. And I didn’t know Candice, either. Nor did Angie, and she’s the one who introduced me to Candice and who encouraged me to ask Jasmine out.”
She nodded slowly. “A good point. I do not think I would have worried. It might have been flattering, in its way, but ... the ethics would be questionable.”
“Highly!”
“You said ‘maybe two’ people,” she said.
“Heck, it might be three now,” I said. “The second is very important. Her name is Laura Waters. I dated — again, it’s complicated — a Laura Waters when I was in graduate school. I say it’s complicated because I never thought we were dating. Insecure, overweight nerd, remember?”
“I remember, though I still have trouble with it,” she said, chuckling.
“We went to musicals, dinners, things like that. Jas and the others have convinced me that we dated, so I say we did. Anyway ... in this life, I ran into Laura at a Debate tournament in 1981. She acted strangely, but not in a way that made it certain she knew me. And she was from Illinois — still is. That meant I was unlikely to see her again. But we wound up running into her in Michigan in 1982. Then, far more consequentially, at Northwestern’s summer program in 1983.”
“Consequentially?”
“When we were alone, I quoted a line from a TV show we’d both watched together. Her reaction was ... not what I expected. She screamed at me angrily, then ran into the road. Her back was to a truck. I wound up saving her, getting hit by the truck in the process. It didn’t harm me, fortunately. Maybe magic, but there was a widely-reported case where someone was hit by a bus going faster than that truck was and receiving only minor injuries somewhere in the late 2010s, so I know it’s possible, if you’re lucky,” I said.
“That distinction between ‘magic’ and the other case is an interesting thing to spell out, I think. It feels like it says something.”
“We’ll probably get there, but ... mostly, we don’t like the idea of the universe getting too pushy in favoring us.”
“Because it would rob you of your agency,” she said. “I understand.”
“That’s it, yeah. Anyway ... Laura and I were understandably skittish with each other for a bit, but it was absolutely clear we needed to talk. When we did, it was ... incredible. To me, she was a girl I kinda dated. To her, I was the guy she nearly married, and who — along with his awful, manipulative cousin — stole her life’s work, became a billionaire from it, and married a movie star — Jess — all while being an absolute jerk.”
She blinked again. “And, again, that sounds so unlike you it is hard to believe.”
“I’ve dug into it a lot. So has Angie. If you assume a universe where Angie is who she was in her first life, and I’m halfway to this one — the physical, confident parts — it fits. I would have to be really shallow to do that, but that Angie would encourage me to be really shallow. And ... money, power, women? A lot of guys would go for that. It made sense that Laura hated me.”