Chapter 83: Everything Has Its Place

Thursday, January 26, 1984

It turned out that Cammie and Mel also had letters from A&M, and also had full scholarships. Cal and Andy were still very quiet about things, but I felt like they were happy with these developments, even so.

Emily and the Wonder Twins were hoping for UT. I was going to have to find a way to warn them about the crisis in class availability. There was a way to be as safe as possible, after all: get in line early and make sure you got your classes before the unlucky or unmotivated people.

There was little other news on the college front. Most people were still waiting, so we didn’t make a big deal of our good news.

There was only one truly good place for the five of us to meet and talk about this stuff: the Chinese buffet at Northwest mall. Even if it had more customers than just us, the odds of privacy — and decent food — were high.

When we got there, the first surprise was that the place wasn’t empty. It was nearly full, though there were some open tables that would give us plenty of privacy.

The second surprise (though it probably shouldn’t have been a surprise) was that all of the other customers were Chinese (or at least Asian, but I’d have laid money on them being Chinese).

The proprietor did a double-take when we came in, and walked over to us.

“You see! We not always empty!”

“I see, Ms. Lin.”

She grinned. “You have my name correct, too. I appreciate that.”

The switch to proper English was abrupt, but less of a surprise than it might have been. She was probably playing up the Chinese accent for the gringos, after all.

“I try,” I said, smiling. “Ms. Lin, this is my friend Jessica, who you’ve met...”

“Happily, too,” Jess said.

“ ... my girlfriend Jasmine...”

Jasmine smiled. “Nice to meet you!”

I thought perhaps there was a trifle of surprise there. Nothing bad, perhaps good. I’m sure she’d guessed that Jess was my girlfriend, or at least a girl I wanted to be a girlfriend.

“ ... my sister Angie...”

“A pleasure,” Angie said, smiling.

“ ... and our friend Paige.”

“Hello, Ms. Lin,” Paige said. “Nice restaurant you have here.”

She sighed. “It is, but this mall is not. Still, you make the most of things. We do very well around the New Year when many people want to eat out. You should have seen the place on Sunday!”

“Year of the rat, I think?” Jess said. Somehow it figured she would know.

“Indeed. Too many of them around here, but everything has its place, even rats,” Ms. Lin said.

We smiled at that.

“You should go enjoy,” she said. Then she shook her head a bit, looked at Jessica, and said, “I meant what I said before. You’re too pretty to have bruises and be sad.”

She looked across the girls. “All of you are, but she is the only one I’ve seen like that.”

“Steve is my best friend,” Jessica said, “Things would be a lot worse if not for that.”

“Good. Friends, and family, are the most important part of life. Too many people forget that!”

“We completely agree,” Angie said.

With that, she smiled and turned away, heading into the kitchen and shouting something in Chinese. The five of us took a table in a corner, away from the nearest family. A Chinese girl, likely a teenager (and quite possibly part of Ms. Lin’s family) came over and took our drink order. All of us were drinking tea, but — being Texas — iced tea, not traditional Chinese tea. That said, half of the tables had soft drinks or iced tea, too.

Once we’d ordered drinks, we went and picked things out from the buffet. As often happened, I had the tiniest bit of amusement thinking of what first-life Steve would have picked — or, rather, how much of it he would have taken. Moderation in all things!

Yes, including (occasionally!) moderation itself.

We finally wound up back at the table, grabbing tasty things with chopsticks and nibbling at them.

“So,” Jess said, “We’re here because you all know, and now I know, too. Right?”

“Right,” Angie said.

Paige and Jas nodded.

“Most of my questions are answered, maybe. Most of them. I have a few. I have this feeling that more will turn up, though.”

“That’s how it’s been for me,” Angie said. “Some of the big ones I never even thought of.”

“Or me, either,” I said.

“I’ll bite,” Jess said.

“Well, one of them I caused,” Jas said. “I asked how Steve could have kids older than him when they won’t be born for many years, and the answer was...”

“Very complicated!” Paige said. “I wasn’t there for it, but I know the story now.”

“I’ll explain,” Jas said, and did, doing a very good job of it.

“Huh!” Jess said. “See, I missed that myself. Somewhere, in some other universe, Jess is doing her thing and Steve is doing his thing and we’ve never really even met. And that Steve can’t do anything but that, nor can that Jess — probably, anyway — but at the time they could have, I guess. That’s ... I think I’m glad that’s a theoretical problem and not a practical problem.”

“We’ve agreed to disagree, pretty much,” I said. “I can’t think of my kids as not born, because I raised them and watched them grow up, or at least I remember doing those things. Our brains suck a bit at dealing with the idea that we’re remembering things that haven’t happened yet and will also never happen in this universe.”

“English sucks for a lot of this!” Paige said. “So do human brains! But that’s okay. It all makes sense if you get crazy enough.”

Jess chuckled. “We’ll have to talk more about that. About a lot of things. I actually ... well ... fine,” she said, blushing a bit. “I had a lot, but the first is ... what do you plan to do? You must be planning something!”

“Yes and no,” Angie said. “More yes than no, but — like everything else — it’s complicated.”

“What do you mean? Not that I doubt you.”

“It’s ... Steve’s from one universe. I’m from another. Laura is from a third. We know they all differ.”

“Steve explained that,” Jess said, nodding.

“So, suppose we plan to take advantage of something that we think is going to happen. Maybe it won’t happen. Or, maybe, we decide to stop something, but that thing was never going to happen. Or we do something we think is good, and in so doing we prevent something that was better.”

Jess kept nodding. “I see all of that, but if you let that take over, you do nothing.”

“Exactly,” Jas said. “Paige and I are the designated voices of ‘This looks good, we should do it.’ If they know why we shouldn’t, or should do something else, then that’s different.”

“To set a grandiose goal,” I said, “we want to make the world better. It’s not like we have a road map, and there’ll be mistakes, but our kids are going to live here, and their kids, and so on, and ... some things really sucked. Maybe we can make them suck less.”

“Which takes money and power, but ... you probably know ways to get money. I know there was the accident settlement, but you’d never have done that intentionally!” Jess said.

We all shook our heads.

“That was completely out of the blue,” I said. “No amount of money is worth risking our safety like that.”

“Yeah, well, at one point I would’ve said no girl is worth risking your safety, boyfriend,” Jas said, “but in hindsight I’m glad you did, but only because you’re ridiculously lucky!”

“I didn’t mean to put him at risk...” Jess said, blushing

“Not you! Marshall was there, and Steve can fight. I meant throwing himself in front of a truck!” Jas said.

“Oh, that!” Jess said. “I wish I’d seen that!”

Paige shook her head. “No, you don’t. I mean, even with it turning out just fine, it’s so not a favorite memory.”

“It’s a really sucky memory,” Jas said.

“Awful,” Angie said.

“But letting Laura die would’ve been awful, too,” Jas said. “You had to stop it.”

“So...” Jess said, “Like you said, Laura’s from a third universe. I know she hated you at first, which makes no sense to me. Obviously, when you approached her, you didn’t expect her to hate you.”

“Different Lauras, different Steves. My Laura was an unrequited crush. Her Steve was a requited self-centered jerk with a self-centered bitch cousin,” I said.

Angie waved her hand. “That would be me! Well ... another me.”

“That makes sense, then. She hated some other you, and ... ran away?” Jess said.

“Yes,” I said. “In her defense, I’d just basically confirmed I was ... well, that I remembered 1989. She yelled at me, then ran into the street, stopped, and yelled at me some more. Unfortunately, she stopped with her back to a truck, and froze when she realized it was bearing down on her.”

“And you saved her, of course. That’s how we get here.”

I nodded, then shrugged. “Someone had to. I wasn’t going to let her die, or be seriously injured, just because she was yelling at me.”

“It was terribly scary!” Jas said. “I knew the truck had hit Steve, and I just...”

“We all imagined the worst,” Angie said.

“Someone else — some random guy, no one I knew — in Austin, in the 2010s, got hit by a bus that was going about 30 and came out of it with just a few scrapes,” I said. “There were people there with video cameras, and it wound up being one of those things everyone saw.”

“On the news?” Jess said.

“Okay. Going off-topic to talk about my view of the future. If you think about those huge computers in the 1950s, the ones that took up large rooms, now they’re shrunk down to fit on a desk. Shrink them down again so they fit in a pocket, put video cameras on them, and that’s what most people carried around in the 2010s. There were ways people could share videos. It was both more complicated and simpler than what I’m saying, but that gets you the general idea.”

Jess blinked. “Good God, what that would do to high school gossip!”

“You have no idea,” I said, shaking my head. “Even worse than you can imagine.”

Jess shook her head.

“How did we get on this topic?” Paige said. “I mean, it’s fascinating, but ... oh! Money! Right.”

“And, on the subject...” Angie said, “I paid very little attention to sports, but Steve knows just enough to be useful.”

Jess giggled. “Gambler Steve! See, I would never have imagined you going to bookies and placing bets!”

“I’m glad you didn’t try to find out, because it would’ve been hard to explain.”

“Very! Anything else?” Jess said.

I said, “Not so far, but we’re looking at investments and ways to make significant money. Along the way, we made a bunch of rules for ourselves. There’s far too much damage we could do.”

“Of course you could. You must know books and songs and movies and all sorts of things,” she said.

I nodded, then said, “I consider the idea of stealing someone’s idea, especially in such a way that they never knew it was their idea, to be one of the lowest things we could do.”

“Good!”

“Timing screwed up a really, really good line that I so wanted to use, though.”

“Oh? This should be good,” Jess said, looking curious.

“It is!” Angie said, grinning.

I smiled, then said, “When I found out your birthday and brought you the rose, and you asked how I knew it, I so desperately wanted to say ‘Many Bothans died to bring me this information.’”

Jess started laughing, then got hold of herself. “That would have been perfect! Except for the movie not being out yet, of course! How did you figure out my birthday, anyway?”

“Not telling. Not ever.”

“Us neither,” Jas said. “Whether we were involved or not!”

She glared. “I have ways...”

“And you won’t use them,” Angie said.

“Fine!”

“I believe I called you spider-girl that day,” I said.

“You did,” Jess said.

“In retrospect, it was supposed to be about you being the spider in the web, but I think the unintended Spiderman reference is more apt. You get it, and I have to get it, too.”

“We all have to get it,” Paige said.

Jas and Angie nodded along.

“Which ... is why you could tell me in the first place,” Jess said, smiling.

“One of them. Not the only one, but a big one,” I said.

She grinned, then said, “Name another.”

I smiled, saying, “I trust you, not just to be responsible with your great power, but also to just be a friend, which is different.”

She nodded. “That means a lot, really, especially considering where all of this started. I’ve been questioning my ability to be a friend. I mean, for years.”

“You’re a friend,” Jas said. “No doubt at all.”

“I am still a bit flabbergasted that we’re friends!” Paige said, “But I agree. You are. Completely.”

“Definitely!” Angie said. “I was really surprised, too, way back when. I had no idea what you were up to when you invited big brother on a date, and I worried, but since then ... very much friends.”

“Speaking of which,” Jess said, looking at Angie, “I have trouble believing in you as a self-centered bitch. Or you as a self-centered jerk,” she said, turning to look at me.

I shrugged. “Do you have trouble believing me as a fat nerd with moderate social skills, or a fat nerd with no social skills?”

Jas gave me a hug.

“Or me as a socialite party girl who spent most of high school getting drunk and high?” Angie said.

Paige reached over and squeezed Angie’s arm.

“Um ... well... fine! I can only accept those because I believe you both,” she said.

She paused, then shook her head. “No, I can believe it. Things go a bit differently and there are dozens of different Jessicas with dozens of different personalities. I mean, what if I’d fucked Bev’s dad? Or ... you know.”

“I know,” I said.

The others nodded.

She shuddered. “Now I believe those me’s are out there.”

“Probably,” I said.

“That actually helps, I think,” she said. “This me hasn’t come out that badly so far.”

“We don’t think so!” Jas said.

“Okay, so! Since we’re talking about me,” Jess said, grinning, “I wanted to ask about me. Steve is clear that he didn’t know me, and that you didn’t know me, Angie...”

Angie shook her head.

“But I think you still know something. Unless I’m missing something, that says Laura knows something,” Jess said.

“She does,” I said. “I want you to be sure, Jess, before we get into this. Knowing will change things. I know several people who will be ... newsworthy ... in this universe that weren’t in mine. Several of them were my fault, I think, or mine and Angie’s.”

She blushed. “Reading between the lines, you mean I will, too.”

Angie nodded. Jas did, too, and Paige grinned a bit.

“I think so, and...” I said, then paused. After a second, I continued, saying, “It’s like this. Suppose we tell you what we know, and you decide it’s a fait accompli and that makes you fail. Or suppose this universe is different, and it never happens, and it was never, ever going to happen. How do you respond?”