There was a water fountain on the second floor, down the hall from what Alice thought of as her office, though right now, of course, it wasn’t her office at all. Being in the school building on a Saturday always felt transgressive, even as an adult. Unlike the first floor, the second floor looked remarkably the same as it had the last time she’d left the office. The wood floor was exactly the same, and so were the ornate doorframes, the only part of the building that still resembled the brownstones that had once stood on the spot. Someone was chatting and laughing in one of the offices. Alice would have recognized Melinda’s big, throaty laugh anywhere—it sounded like a happy oak tree, full and broad and dappled with sunshine. Alice started down the hall and immediately tripped over a bench outside the college prep office.
“Shit,” Alice said, clutching her shin. “Shit shit shit.”
At the end of the hall, Melinda’s head poked out of the doorframe. “You okay out there?”
Alice straightened up and tucked her hair behind her ears. “Hi, yes,” she said. “Fine. Just walked into something.”
“Need a Band-Aid? Ice pack?” Melinda had a nice husband, grown children who didn’t seem like ax murderers, and adorable grandchildren who made her lumpy ceramic sculptures. In 1996, she wouldn’t yet have grandchildren, but her kids would already be older than Alice, maybe even out of college already, she wasn’t sure. What a very long time one had to be an adult, after rushing through childhood andadolescence. There should be several more distinctions: the idiocy of the young twenties, when one was suddenly expected to know how to do adult things; the panicked coupling of the mid- and late twenties, when marriages happened as quickly as a game of tag; the sitcom mom period, when you finally had enough food in your freezer to survive for a month if necessary; the school principal period, when you were no longer seen as a woman at all but just a vague nagging authority figure. If you were lucky, there was the late-in-life sexy Mrs. Robinson period, or an accomplished and powerful Meryl Streep period, followed, of course, by approximately two decades of old-crone-hood, like the woman at the end ofTitanic. Alice hadn’t ever thought about how Melinda might want to be around her and all the students in part because it was nice to be surrounded by young people. She felt it, at Belvedere. It wasn’t fair to call it a fountain of youth—nothing could make you feel ancient and crumbling faster than a cruel word from a teenager—but even so, being around young people kept the heart healthy and the mind open.
“No, I’m okay,” Alice said. She walked closer, unable to keep herself from the office that she thought of as her own, but which now belonged only to Melinda.
“Are you looking for something?” Melinda asked. She sat back down in her giant, cushioned rolling office chair in front of a desktop computer the size of a Fiat.
“Does that have email on it?” Alice asked. The computer looked, like, prehistoric. She didn’t know how to explain how she was feeling to Melinda, other than that she’d been brought to her door by muscle memory honed over years that hadn’t happened yet.
“You mean AOL?” Melinda looked around her desk and produced a CD. “I haven’t installed it yet. I have it at home. Do you want it?”
Alice closed her eyes and tried to imagine her life without a soul-crushing number of unread messages in her inbox. “No thanks,” shesaid. Alice couldn’t remember coming into this office as a student, not really—there was no reason she could manufacture for needing to be there, but she also knew that Melinda wouldn’t push if she couldn’t provide one. It was often impossible to get kids of any age to talk about something directly, and so all school administrators were used to a sort of backward dance into conversation. “I just mean, are you here to make sure that the kids—that we—don’t destroy everything?”
“Something like that. But I like coming in on Saturdays. Schools are noisy animals, and sometimes it’s nice to have the run of the place.” Melinda was wearing a necklace that Alice recognized, a fat string with dangling wooden fruit. There was a stack of paper on the long desk, and it felt nice to see Melinda’s familiar handwriting—strong, slanted generously to the right—on Post-it notes stuck to her computer monitor. Melinda pointed to the couch in her office, used by many students as a chattier nurses’ station, a place to crash. Alice scooted over, past the space where she usually sat, and where Emily sat, straight to the couch, where she gingerly lowered herself down.
Melinda crossed her legs at the ankle and let her knees splay out to the sides, creating a tent of mouse-colored corduroy. Alice rubbed her hands together and thought about how to put into words the fear that she was having a breakdown, the fear that she had time-traveled, and the fear that she might have to live her whole life again, starting now.
“I guess, downstairs...” she started. “I guess I just don’t really know what my plan is, you know? Like, my life path?” The light in the room was so familiar, the stripes of sunshine that would slice through the air and land on the computer screens, making them impossible to read. What Alice wanted to ask was:Is it crazy if I try to do my whole life differently, and my dad’s, too? Is it possible to make things better, starting now?
Melinda nodded. “You’re an artist, aren’t you?”
Alice didn’t want to roll her eyes, but she couldn’t help it. “I mean, I don’t know. Yeah?”
“What kind of art are you interested in?” Melinda knit her fingers together. She looked just the way she did when she was talking to five-year-olds—open, patient, and kind. Alice had seen this happen before, Melinda talking down an angsty teen. Eventually she would send the child back to class, but first, she listened.
“Who even knows anymore. I used to be into painting. I guess I still am.” Alice frowned. She couldn’t ask what she wanted to ask, which was what the hell was happening, and why. Anyone who had ever read a book or seen a movie about time travel knew that it was never pointless. Sometimes it was to fall in love with someone born in a different century, and sometimes it was to do your history homework. Alice had no idea why she’d woken up on Pomander, or what she was supposed to do now. “I guess my real question is how do you know which choices matter, and which ones are just dumb?”
“Alas,” Melinda said, “that can be hard. But a decision like which college to go to, and what to study, those matter to an extent, but they’re not face tattoos. You can always change your mind. Transfer schools. Start over. I studied art, too,” she said, which Alice hadn’t known. Melinda’s hair was thick and dark, held back in a French braid. She and Leonard were the same age, more or less, but Melinda had always looked so much older, so much softer than Alice’s father. “I studied painting and drawing. And after I graduated from college, I moved to New York and worked for some galleries, but then I needed a job that gave me health insurance, and that’s when I started working here. And it made me happier than anything else, and I could still make art, and I could make art with kids. And I didn’t have to pay for my two C-sections.”
“So college does matter.”
“Everything matters,” Melinda said. “But you can change your mind. Almost always.”
Alice nodded. She looked around the office, searching for a reason to linger. “I should get back to the class. But thank you.”
“Of course,” Melinda said. “Anytime.”
On her way out, Alice ran her hand over the desk, half-heartedly hoping for a secret button to push. When she didn’t find one, she stood in the open doorframe. “Can I come back another time?”
“I already told you! Yes! Winter, spring, summer, or fall,” Melinda said, another one of her favorite phrases. “But I will tell you, in terms of a life plan, you don’t need one. That’s my advice. It’s real life. It’syourreal life. Plans don’t work. Just go with it.”
Alice wanted to stay, to give Melinda a hug, to tell her what was happening, but the more people she told, the crazier she would sound. Melinda would (rightly) call Leonard and tell him what she’d said. In real life, in real time, Melinda was her friend, but right now, Melinda was an adult and Alice was sixteen. Someone squeaked on the wooden floor outside, and Alice turned to look. Sam had come to fetch her, and stood at the end of the hall, beckoning. “Okay,” Alice said. “I’ll be back.”
24
The test prep class was endless—Sam was hunched over her paper, scribbling as if it would make any difference. Alice ducked back into her chair and looked around. Tommy caught her eye and did his patented single chin raise, a move that never failed to make Alice’s heart rate double. The sheet was a page of multiple-choice math problems—trigonometry. Alice had barely passed trig in high school, and now the concepts of sines and cosines were as far away from her consciousness as Pluto. Which wasn’t a planet anymore. Except maybe it was now, again? Alice reached into her pocket for her phone, which of course wasn’t there, and then checked the watch on her wrist. The class was only half over. She tried to listen, but Jane’s voice was so monotonous and the gymnasium was so warm that Alice felt herself just getting sleepy. She rested her cheek on her palm and felt her eyelids begin to droop. Alice shook herself awake, worried that if she did fall asleep, she would vanish out of Belvedere in a puff of smoke and wake up forty again. It was what she wanted, she thought, but not like this—she needed to get back to her dad. She wanted to have Gray’s Papayawith him for dinner and make him quit smoking. She wanted to make him learn how to cook vegetables—she knew how! She could show him! Alice started making a list of things she knew how to cook on the back of her worksheet and before she knew it, chairs began to squeak against the floor and people were stuffing papers into their bags and Tommy was standing in front of her.
“Wanna smoke?” Tommy asked. He ran a hand through his hair and it all immediately bounced back into place. Everything in Alice’s brain was telling her to say no, to grab Sam and head back home as she’d told her dad she would, but the word that came out of her mouth was “Yeah.” Sam looked annoyed but Alice couldn’t stop herself. “I’ll beep you,” Alice called out as she and Tommy pushed open the door and stepped into the sunlight.
They ran across Central Park West, crossing against the light, Tommy reaching for Alice’s hand to pull her out of harm’s way. They walked up the path that led to a small playground, one with only a few dinky swings. Because it was a Saturday, there were parents with small children all around and a line of strollers parked just outside the heavy iron gate of the playground.
“Here,” Tommy said, pointing with his head farther down the path.
