Quickly, Grace tries to collect herself, wondering how many more moments of mortification this short-lived trip will provide. The bystanders, recognizing that she’s all right, inch backward, giving her space. Grace brushes off her knee, badly scraped as if she were a rambunctious child, and then stands.
“Wh-what happened?” she asks, half delirious.
“It was that girl!” A middle-aged father points to the street corner. “She smacked right into you! Didn’t even stop to apologize!” He peersat his own adolescent offspring beside him, gives them a warning look. “Kids these days,” he says by way of an explanation. “No respect!”
Grace twists her body. Her gaze drifts to the end of the block and the young girl with wild, unmistakable hair who glides on a longboard-style skateboard across the street.
“Oh, come on!” Grace shouts, throwing up her arms.
Then, before she can consider what she’s doing, Grace bolts, and for reasons she doesn’t fully understand, takes off, chasing some version of her past.
Eleven
The arcade is a sensory explosion. Flashing lights. Blaring music. Dinging bells. In every direction, sugar-fueled kids dart in frenetic zigzags. Even the carpet is loud, a geometric collision of primary colors masquerading as a pattern. In reality, like everything in here, it’s mayhem.
Grace stands at the entrance, breathless. Her pulse kicks her ribs, erratic and urgent. Her previously fresh T-shirt clings to her like wet gauze. She ran five blocks to get here, weaving around beach-ready families, the midmorning heat searing her neck. The whole time, she kept her sight locked on the girl—until she disappeared into this neon vortex.
Once her airways settle, Grace steps fully past the doorway. The noise swells around her, a jarring contrast to the faint sound of waves outside. She blinks, letting her eyes adjust to the artificial light, and scans the crowd, but fails to spot the one person she hopes to find.
“What are you doing, Grace?” she asks herself as she wanders by a wall of claw machines. “You just chased a teenager—a stranger—across the island.” A young boy races past, pausing long enough to shoot Grace—an adult, alone in a place meant for children, rambling to herself—a not-so-nice look. “You’re following a doppelgänger. A fabricated figment of your imagination.” She stops beside a giant Plinko game, her thoughts settling at last, like a snow globe someone stopped shaking long enough for anunobstructed view of the scene inside it to appear. “A strange, definitely questionable, probably diagnosable, response to too many forms of grief.”
Maybe she’ll call Dr. Anne. She’d have an explanation, some medical jargon to make sense of why Grace keeps convincing herself she’s seeing things that aren’t really there. She might have a mindfulness technique—a breathing exercise or visualization practice that will calm Grace and help her make sense of all these unexplainable things.
Grace shakes her head and pivots toward the arcade door, feeling foolish for so many reasons. For sprinting into the arcade. For thinking a weeklong return to her childhood vacation spot might heal her. For believing her marriage would last. For convincing herself her mother was immortal. For thinking her dream career might have some longevity.
But when she turns back toward the neon-lit entryway, her thoughts all fall away as one very specific sight stops her—physically, mentally, cardiovascularly—in her tracks.
The first thing Grace thinks is that she’s beautiful. Strikingly so. Like a piece of coveted art come to life. Sinewy arms. Mile-long legs. A dozen mismatched accessories that somehow, on her, seem just right. She stands beside a bank of Skee-Ball machines, longboard propped against a wall, her face tilted down as she holds a smoothie and digs through her Boho-style crossbody with her free hand while she looks for something she can’t seem to find.
Cece. In the flesh. Somehow, again. Only this time, younger, by at least a few years.
Grace proceeds cautiously, suddenly afraid to move too fast. She takes a step as everything inside the arcade slows. At first, Cece doesn’t notice her—all her attention is focused exclusively on her current task. When she finally looks up—her face so perfect, so noticeably lineless—and sees Grace, a total stranger, standing a touch too close, her expression twists in surprise, just as she releases an alarming, high-pitched scream.
“Ahhh!” she shouts and leaps back, nearly dropping her cup but quickly recovering it.
“You’re okay.” Grace instantly jumps in and touches the young girl’s arm to console her. “I didn’t mean to scare you or—”
“Eww.Weird.” Cece shakes away Grace’s embrace. “Why are you touching me?”
“What?” Grace startles, suddenly aware of what she’s doing. “Oh. Sorry. You—you seemed frightened and I—I don’t know.” She recoils, as if pulling herself out of a lingering dream. “I felt bad,” she adds, half mortified that she just touched a stranger (Isshe a stranger?) and half babbling as she struggles to work out the details of what she assumes is a full-fledged nervous breakdown. “I-it was an instinct or something.”
Cece narrows her eyes—two sharp, judgy slivers. “Are you a mom?” she asks, too young to understand what questions she’s really posing.Are you happy? Has your life worked out the way you’ve wanted?Even so, the words stab at Grace’s chest like tiny phonetic knives.
“N-no,” Grace says, wishing this wasn’t her answer but not having the bandwidth right now to think too deeply about it. “I’m not. Wh-why do you—”
“Are you sure?” Cece adjusts the thick fabric strap of her bag—Grace’s old bag, the one she adored in middle school and has since forgotten ever existed, but now suddenly remembers quite well. “Because thatdefinitelyseems like something a mom would do or say.”
She pauses, eyeing Grace, who continues to stand awkwardly close, like someone who hasn’t yet been versed in the rules of personal space. Finally, Grace gets the memo, takes two big steps back, and stares. Her head tips sideways as she tries to determine if what she’s witnessing is magic or memory.
“I-is that really you?” Grace stammers, still erratically batting her lids as if there’s something in her cornea she’s desperate to blink away. Finding reasons to brush off her experience earlier on the beach felt borderline reasonable. The bright sun! The early hour! Who can seeanythingclearly that time of day? But having this experience happen twice, and in two completely different settings, feels harder to explain. “No, of course not.” She wags her head like a dog—hard and inelegant.“Or is it?” she asks, her focus falling on Cece again. “How? I mean, you’re not real, are you? Wh-what are you doing here?”
“Well, first off, really strange opener.” Cece clicks her tongue. “Also, I can totally be here. I’m not, like, a toddler, thanks.” She sips her smoothie. “The last few seasons, I’m pretty much allowed to go anywhere I want on this island.” Her chest—not yet curved with womanhood—shakes when she laughs. “Not that it’s any of your business,” she adds after another slurp.
Grace’s mouth is dry, as if she just spent the morning licking sand. “This doesn’t make sense.” She rubs her temples hard, like they’re stress balls—the kind a woman in her grief group sometimes brings to their meetings for all the members to knead—then notices one of the girl’s bracelets—a thick, colorful band of braided string, into which her name is stitched. “I think I’m having a spasm or something, so I’m going to casually walk outside, and when I come back in, you’re not going to be here, okay?”
“Do I know you?” Cece’s perfect face tilts. “Did Birdie send you here or something? I know she’s less than pleased with me right now because I bailed on the lighthouse to come here instead.” She expels a quiet, annoyed huff. “She thinks I’m moving too fast with this guy I like and that I should slow down and justbe a kid,” she volunteers under her breath, even though no one asked. “Which isridiculous, considering she married my dad—her high school sweetheart, might I add—when she was, like, twenty-five.” A pause as she counts off on her fingers. “That’s only, what, twelve years from now for me?”
Grace goes still, like someone has flipped an invisible switch in her body. Any doubts she’s carried with her today—after her encounter on the beach, upon her arrival here in the arcade, and every spare moment in between—vanish as fast as curtains yanked open on a stage. Grace didn’t know what to expect—not when she chased Cece into this arcade, not when she touched her uninvited. Did she think the teenager would announce she was a hologram? That Grace would wake up in her bed back home and realize the whole trip here had been a strange dream?
