And then I remember something one of the other Tylers said. About his motivation. About how beating me had become histhing, driving him forwards in his career. Perhaps in this world he didn’t have anyone he thought he needed to compete against and instead found another way to make his life fulfilling?
I spot the name of the school – Battersea ParkAcademy – written underneath a crest I knew back in my world. This is the first school Cesca worked at, one from which she stole an inordinate number of mugs emblazoned with the crest. My parents have been using them for years.
Tyler Adams has Cesca’s old job. What a funny small world.
I pull out my phone and start to compose the email. The one that tells this world’s Tyler all about my predicament and that he’s already met me in another world and I can prove it with my list of things about him I shouldn’t know but somehow do. The same email that has worked so many times before. After all, Tyler is one of the most consistent people I’ve met; never changing, never diverging in any of the worlds I’ve travelled through.
Until now. This Tyler is not the same.
I send the email anyway.
Every other Tyler has replied within minutes with a time and a place for us to meet. He has believed me unconditionally.
This Tyler also replies quickly; he must be on his lunch break. But he doesn’t offer to meet me.
I don’t know who you are and please do not contact me again.
Amina comes back to find me staring at my phone, my righteous indignation starting to fade into something else. She’s armed with coffee and croissants filled with cheese and ham, but even these don’t cheer me up.
‘He told me to fuck off,’ I tell her and then take the biggest bite of croissant I can fit in my mouth.
‘Show me,’ she replies, flapping her hand in my direction. I hand over my phone. ‘Ahem,’ she says a few times as shereads the email I sent and his reply, occasionally taking dainty nibbles on the edge of her own croissant.
She reaches out to give me back the phone. ‘Well, he doesn’t seem like he wants to help you.’
‘That’s an understatement. I mean, all of that stuff though. I know him. This proves I know him. Why can’t he see that I’m telling the truth?’
Amina takes a sip from her coffee cup. ‘You said he’s a teacher here, but not in your world?’
‘Not in any other world. He’s been a constant, every world, every version of him, they’re all the same.’
‘But here he’s different. So what if the ways that you know him, the other hims, don’t track over into this world. What if he looks at the version of him you paint in this email and he doesn’t recognize himself?’
‘Then he’d think I was a lunatic and …’ I falter as reality hits me. Amina is right. ‘And,’ I continue, ‘he’d tell me to leave him alone.’
‘Bingo,’ Amina says.
‘I need to go and talk to him. If I can see him in person I can find some way to make him believe me.’ I stand up, brushing crumbs from my lap onto the floor.
‘It’s almost three,’ Amina tells me with a hint of something that sounds like a warning in her tone.
‘So?’
‘It’s Tuesday.’ Amina is staring at me like that should mean something.
‘Right … you need to help me out here. I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘Oh, sorry, I keep forgetting.’ She shakes her head. ‘You’re not my Bethany.’ She gives me a wry smile. ‘Sometimes I look at you and I can tell you’re not her. But then you’ll do something and it’s like she’s back. It’s kind of disorientating.’
‘Yeah, tell me about it,’ I mutter.
‘On Tuesdays at four p.m. Nick picks you up so you can both go for early drinks with his mother at the Beaverbrook Hotel.’
I stare back at her. ‘Really? But that sounds …’ I try to find the right word.
Amina finishes the sentence for me. ‘Hideous.’
‘That’s exactly the word I was aiming for.’
