Rumors across all cultures? Why?
Anything else overlapped across cultures and times?
Chapter 5
A Single Eye
Jo and Wayne stepped out of the Door and into a parking lot behind the back of a convenience store. Even outside of time, a biting cold nipped right through the jacket that never left her shoulders, prompting Jo to bury her hands as deep as possible into the front pockets.
“The mansion should’ve given me a thicker hoodie,” she grumbled.
“I was wondering why this appeared in my room, but I didn’t question.” Wayne shrugged on the coat.
“Glad to know it’s considerate toward someone.” Jo rolled her eyes. How Wayne of all people had garnered favor with the mansion would forever elude her.
“Don’t be bitter,” he chided (dare she think somewhat playfully?).
“The only thing that’s bitter is this cold.”
“Not used to the chill, doll?”
“I see your hands are in your pockets as well,” Jo said with an envious glance. A real gentleman would’ve already offered it to her.Snow would’ve offered it to her,her mind insisted, as if forgetting her growing agitation at his perpetual dodging.
“It’s nice to play pretend,” he murmured, as if he hadn’t realized he’d put them there. “I’m not clocked in, so it’s not like I can feel anything.”
“Yeah, right. . .” Jo checked her watch, confirming that she was, indeed, outside of time. Perhaps the cold she felt was purely psychosomatic at the mere sight of snow banks on the sides of the roads, like Wayne’s hands in his pockets, and the shivering was a result of stress.
Wayne tilted his head to the sky, took a deep breath, and exhaled. There was nothing. Jo watched, slowly turning into an icicle as Wayne tapped on his watch, and took a breath, exhaling a large plume of white. Satisfied, he tapped his watch again.
“We only have ten hours . . . Was that really necessary?” Jo fell into step with him, their shoulders almost touching. She felt him shrug and Jo took a half step away, trying to avoid being too close while she pulled up her hood—the last thing she needed was for him to see her shaking hands. She was out of time and yet it was still frigid. It was like the rules of magic were breaking down around her.
“It’s good to feel like I can still fog a mirror, now and then.”
She understood that. They existed somewhere between the living and the dead, not quite enough of either to be satisfied. Jo tilted her head to the sky as well, breathing deeply. Unlike Wayne a moment ago, there was nothing. The first bit of warmth she felt was relief at the absence of abnormality.
“You could clock in for it.”
“Obviously.” Jo shot him a dumb look. “But it doesn’t matter.”
“It doesn’t?”
“Something about the Society now. . . It’s begun to feel more like the real world than here, like it matters more.” Jo looked around, for the first time really since their arrival. It was an idyllic area, a few train stops outside of Boston. “I’ve only ever seen places like this in movies and television. These quintessential little towns that just scream ‘raise a family here.’ Suburbia to the max.”
“You lived in suburbia, I recall.” Wayne referenced their first-ever trip through the Door together, back to Jo’s home when she first joined the Society and was still coming to terms with it all. How long ago it all felt now . . . How fuzzy her memories were . . . Vaguely, she couldn’t help but wonder if they’d keep getting fuzzier, until they stopped existing at all.
“Texas is different.”
“How?”
“Warmer, for one.” Jo gave him a small smile. “And the houses are different . . . These are tall and pointy. Everyone has their neat hedges and manicured lawns.”
“I remember lawns in Texas.”
“You’re just being difficult,” she huffed, sinking further into her hoodie.
“I get you, dollface.” A large hand met the top of her head lightly, giving her hair a ruffle beneath the fabric. The gesture felt intimate, despite there being nothing to make it inherently so. “Boston and New York are both big cities, but even they’re different. Everywhere has its charms. The little things that no one else can recognize but you that make it home. Like walking into a house with a smell you’re familiar with, even though you’ve never been there before.”
“That’s a good way to describe it,” Jo mused softly. “I don’t even know if I could remember those smells if I tried,” she confessed as much to herself as to him.
