Chapter 14: Picking Up Where We Left Off

Wednesday, July 13, 1983

Today was much like yesterday. I was back to — mostly — being a normal Debate student.

Mostly.

Someone, somewhere, had let it slip that I’d been interviewed by several major publications, so I got another small wave of celebrity. It’d get worse if and when anything appeared in print, of course.

It seemed very unlikely, but I might wind up a source in some Debate rounds.

But, then, thinking about it ... maybe not so unlikely? My words had become Reagan’s words, and Reagan was very much a quotable source. Someone running a case on making the legal system more sympathetic to people outside the norm could trot out my words to claim Reagan would support it. Not only that, but they might be right.

Somehow I’d have to get that quote into a round at some point, now that I’d thought about it. Odds were, only Cammie would know it was me quoting myself, but ... how could I possibly ignore such an opportunity?

I talked to Aunt Monica briefly. They’d agreed that we could go. Technically speaking, Uncle Robert was supposed to pick us up and take us down there, then bring us back, but he’d agreed that they would instead pick us up and drop us at the L station. From that point on, we’d be on our own. If something did go wrong, they’d blame it on miscommunication. The odds were good that we’d be fine.

I also called Professor Berman to set up a lunch. We decided that one o’clock on Sunday the 17th would work for us. He picked the same sandwich place that we already knew and liked in Evanston. I told him that the girls would likely be there, including Cammie. He was looking forward to meeting her. The retirement community had a shuttle, so getting there wouldn’t be a problem.

If the timing worked out, we might have some newspaper articles to discuss. Who knew?

Jas and I took a trip to the apartment after dinner. At least that was something the others would completely understand. No paranoia!

For the first part of the walk, we just caught each other up on what was going on with our programs. There was some chance of being overheard, though most likely it would just be someone sending us scurrying back to the dorms (or, worse, to someone’s office).

I suspected that I was now immune, which might mean my friends were, too. Would Northwestern really want to own up to having sent their celebrity summer student home if someone asked (given that the odds were that someone would ask, after all)? Hopefully, we’d never need to test that theory.

Once we got into Mikayla’s apartment, Jas and I kissed. She was in quite a mood, so this was quite a kiss.

Once we broke the kiss, she gave me a playful shove towards the couch, then slipped into my lap.

“Okay,” she said. “Spill!”

I spilled. Jasmine’s jaw dropped when I got into just how bad my bad-boy alter ego had been.

“Good lord! I ... you could ... but I can’t imagine...”

“He’s just not me, not really.”

She nodded. “The farthest I could’ve imagined you going off the rails is more like chasing Jess, and even that’s off the list now. And, if you had chased her, and caught her, you’d have let her go once you confirmed it wouldn’t work.”

“And my asshole version wouldn’t have cared a whit, it seems like. Didn’t care a whit, in the case of Jessica, assuming that version of Jessica was the same person, or close enough.”

She sighed. “This is weird. Not bad, just weird. It’s more ... what are the other Jasmines like?”

“A question we can’t answer. Even if we could get insight into some of them...”

“I get it. There could be an endless number of variations. So ... what do you think about Laura causing this?”

“I think we can’t say that. It’s consistent, somewhat, but ... well. She’s not a witch or the like.”

Jas giggled at that. “I might have said she was a couple of weeks ago!”

“Well...”

“I get it. She doesn’t have the power to do anything like this.”

“Yeah. She might have triggered it, and that kinda has to be the guess. Why her? Who knows? And while she mentioned me and Angie, it was the other me, the other Angie. Why the two of us instead? Plus, assuming we got sucked into her wish, who else? She said something about horrible friends. We haven’t discussed those, but...”

“Not Jess, I think.”

“Me, too. I mean ... she could be like us. That’s plausible. Ang and I considered it. But ... well. She’s too sharp to not see it in us if she knew it was possible, and I can’t see what the downside would be to acknowledging it.”

“Perhaps it’s ‘What if I’m wrong?’ I mean, she’d have to use some future reference, and what if it went over like a lead balloon? Then, years later, suddenly you’d know.”

“That’s a point. I had the same issue with Laura, but...”

“Laura wasn’t close. If it missed, you could just shrug and move on. Even if she caught it later, what could she say?”

“Yeah.”

“So ... what next?”

“I need to get the four of us — you, me, Angie, Laura — in the same room. Getting to know each other will go a long way.”

She nodded. “It would help me. I’ve talked to her, but ... it was awkward.”

“Of course,” I said, nodding. “It’ll be awkward. I’m doing better, but sometimes she still shows little flares of reacting to the other me. That’s easy for me to understand.”

“Really? You’re so even-tempered.”

“I just imagine how I’d feel if a really nice, together, anger-issues-under-control version of my ex-wife crossed my path. I’d be waiting for the explosion.”

She shifted. “You have to tell me more about her.”

“I will, but ... there are reasons I don’t want to dig deeply into it.”

“If that version of your ex-wife turned up...?”

I smiled and hugged her a little tighter. “Jas, I’d wish her well and help her out, but that’s it.”

“Really? She obviously means a lot to you, even now.”

“Well ... so. First ... anyone like that wouldn’t be her. Or, at least, so far every one of us has been a different person than the one we knew. Someone who just looked like her but didn’t have those years together would just be ... a familiar stranger ... and that’s true even if she knew another me. Then, second, suppose it really was her, a version of her that had conquered her issues and was really all better. Could we fit? Maybe. I’d constantly be on guard, I think. She might be constantly on guard, too, or just set off because I was. Just ... well. Imagine last August, but ten times worse, and lasting the whole school year.”

“Ugh!”

“That’s just a start. Now, imagine you got over it, I forgave you, and you really and truly knew I did forgive you. Would you be comfortable, even so?”

“Sometimes I’m not entirely comfortable now! No. No, I couldn’t be, not knowing I’d hurt you that way.”

“A reformed version of her would have to feel the same way. If she didn’t, she couldn’t really be reformed.”

“That ... makes sense.”

“And then there’s the one big thing.”

“Huh?”

I squeezed her. “What we have is more than my ex-wife and I ever had, Jas. Bluntly, she was the first girl I could get, and I was the first guy that would put up with her craziness. Neither of those is a real basis for a relationship. I mean, I don’t want to overstate things. We had shared interests. We talked a lot, had the same tastes in a lot of things, and so forth. But ... there are so many little examples that I could use to prove that we might have loved each other — and I think we did — but we often didn’t like each other very much.”

“That sounds awful.”

“It was, and it wasn’t. It’s complicated. Anyway ... on the original point ... I can’t imagine getting together with her even if you and I weren’t together. Since we are together, that’s many times less likely. I wouldn’t even want sex, not even for old time’s sake or whatever. The sex was never that good, from the perspective of someone who’s had very good sex.”

She giggled. “Smooth change of subject!”

“Nah,” I said, grinning. “We’ll get there, but talking is more important.”

“Equally important?”

“I can go with that.”

“Back to Laura. Can we trust her?”

“In the words of a phrase that will be common in a year or two, or three, ‘trust, but verify.’”

“It’s weird when you do that,” she said, grinning.

“Reagan will use it. It’s actually an adaptation of an old Russian proverb. Anyway ... I think we can. She has no real motive to harm us. We can push back harder than she can at this point, and if she were to do something truly lousy — like rat us out to some nefarious agency who wants to study us or mine our knowledge of the future — she’d get scooped up in the same net.”

“So we team up?”

“Loosely, at least,” I said. “To me ... well, there are no easy answers. We can guess based on what we see, but those guesses might be wrong. Still, I can guess that something wanted us to meet. Hockaday, then Michigan, and then Northwestern? It’s hard to believe those are all just coincidences.”

She nodded. “That’s about where I was. It made sense that way.”

“She doesn’t want to team up too much, not yet, and I think that’s just fine. The other me really screwed her over. Trust issues are to be expected. In a decade, maybe business-mogul Laura and business-mogul Steve will be allies, but she has to get to business-mogul status without too much help from me. She deserves that.”

“So you’re going to be a captain of industry?” she said, then grinned. “Oh, Captain, my Captain!”