“Blue light glasses.”
“Seems like everything is a screen now. My fridge is even a screen! You’d think they’d have invented blue light contacts or blue light Lasik surgery at this point.”
When I came to accept that it had been seven years since I opened my eyes, I half expected to see flying cars outside my window, but nope. Everything is just a little newer, a little brighter, a littlelouder.
Drew shakes his head. “There’s a lot of new blue-light-blocking technology, but that’s not the point. These are from seven years ago.”
“I never saw you wear those around the apartment,” I say.
“That’s because,” he says ominously, “they’re from the goody bag I got at CeeCee’s wedding.”
Chapter Eighteen
Drew’s blue light glasses can read your mind.
If you put them on and look at a screen, it pulls up the image of whatever thought crosses through your head, not only eliminating blue light intake but cutting down on your overall screen time by not having to type, wait, or scroll to get your result.
At least that’s what Drew says. I decide I need to test them for myself.
Embarrassingly, the first time I glance at the computer screen, a long feed of photos of Drew and me together spanning from high school until CeeCee’s wedding day pop up in various overlapping windows. Reaching for the mouse, I exit them all out, but my mind, trickster that it is, thinks up more happy memories of the two of us. The rest appear in tinier and tinier frames until every screen in the room is overtaken.
Class trips. School plays. Queer clubs. Smiles for days.
Drew is seeing all this too.
I rip the glasses from my face. “Whoa.”
“Trippy, right?” he asks, a bit rosy-cheeked from the deluge of old photos.
“Majorly.” Turning the glasses over, I inspect the rims for cables, plugs, chips, sensors. There’s nothing telling except the Doop logo scrawled in a small font across the arms. They are as unassumingas the pair Dad used to wear as readers to peruse the Sunday paper before heading to the hardware store.
“I’ve looked a million times since I saw you in my shop,” he says. “There’s no reasonable explanation. The night of CeeCee’s wedding, I went through the bag and found these. After reading the directions on a tiny paper scroll, I tried them out. Glanced at my TV, up popped my favorite movie. Glanced at my phone, there was a dozen-year-old text thread from my dad on my birthday, apologizing for not showing up. I thought I was too drunk and I was seeing things. The next morning, I vowed I was going to try them again, except I got too scared and never did.”
“But you kept them?” I ask.
He nods sheepishly. “I was in a state of paralysis over it. On one hand, I wanted to regain my bearings and try them again to make sure I wasn’t losing my mind. On the other, I wanted nothing to do with them.” He swallows loud enough for me to hear across the room. “I remember wondering if maybe you were right about that Go to Sleep, Bitch candle.”
“Oh my God! I forgot about that.” A whirring kicks up in my brain. “I got that in the goody bag from CeeCee’s bachelorette party, and then later I stumbled down this retina-scan-only hallway in Doop while meeting CeeCee for a dress fitting. You don’t think…”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know what I think. All I can say is that if glasses like these exist, then crystals like the ones you described can exist too.” It sounds as if there is an apology laced into his speech. Reassurance races through my nervous system, calming me more than the whiskey. Having Drew believe me is a surefire step in the direction of figuring this out. At the very least, I don’t have to sort through this alone. “Can I see them?” Drew asks after a minute.
The reassurance stops dead in its tracks. “I can’t find them.” He canprovide proof of his experience, and all I have is the empty space under my pillow. How far can you suspend your belief before reason runs out?
“You lost them?” he asks, probably thinking the worst of me, assuming that in the last seven years my bad habits have only been exacerbated.
“They disappeared,” I tell him. “I searched this apartment top to bottom. Unless I have hidden chests or secret passageways, I think it’s safe to say they’re either back with my twenty-three-year-old self or they’re lost to the sands of time.”
Time has become such a meaningless expanse. It’s always been intangible, but now it’s almost completely irrelevant. Tomorrow is the faraway future. Yesterday was the very distant past. Drew, befuddlement etched across his brow line, is my only hope in the now. And I can’t risk losing him again.
“Guess that means you can’t just try the crystals again,” he says, tracing an image into the condensation on the sides of his glass. Half-melted ice cubes clink together as he thinks.
“No, and I can’t get ahold of CeeCee, Doop is done for, and the internet has been no help in sourcing the crystals because I can’t for the life of me remember their names.”
“What do you need their names for?”
“The scroll said thespecific combinationwas for manifesting your future. I don’t think any old crystals will do.” I rack my brain for as much information as possible. “I think the shapes of the crystals mattered, too, but everything is hazy right now.”
He worries his lip, picking up the bottle of cheap whiskey we’ve basically drained at this point. “I don’t think we’re going to find any answers at the bottom of a bottle.”
