“He needs a lot of that,” Penn says. “He told me he ‘alphabetized’ the skates.”
I manage to avoid eye contact until I stop in the doorframe. Then, scanning Penn up and down, I tell him, “Careful when you wash that uniform, by the way. You’ll probably want to avoid any shrinkage.”
His jaw ticks. The indignation in his eyes will fuel me for days.
“Don’t worry,” Penn says. “That won’t be a problem.”
The Wynne-rs
Dad:hi from Alaska like my new hat
Mom:We’ve been here for two days, and your father wants to move.
Dad:can’t a man appreciate fall foliage
Ryan:I thought living in snow during retirement violated Dad’s moral code.
Mom:He’s in denial.
Mom:More important, do you two feel older?! The big 3-5!!
Ryan:Ruby did call me 14 times today, so she might be verging on senile.
Mom:What’s going on? Ruby, are you okay, honey??
Ruby:All good!
Ruby:And Dad, that hat’s a vibe. But not sure you need fur in September.
6
Angry-Blushing
It’s late afternoonwhen I get home, and I’m exhausted, but the clock is ticking—both here and possibly in the real world, too—so I don’t have a second to spare. I need to gather as much information as I can about MASH Ruby, The Disco Diner, plus any possible escape routes.
And I plan to leave no Lisa Frank notebook unturned.
I make a pantry pit stop to gather key supplies (two packets of Gushers), then park it in the tangerine-colored study, where I sit at the massive yellow desk to rifle through business plans, balance sheets, and all the notebooks stuffed into the drawers. Unfortunately, I don’t find any guidebooks for visitors from another dimension. And when I unroll the mansion blueprints, I’m disappointed there’s no hidden corner markedMagic Door Here.
Stalking myself on social media isn’t much better. Horrified, I scroll through an endless stream of cheesy selfies, roller-skating videos, and more latte vignettes than anyone should ever capture, let alone share. In real life, I don’t bother with social media.Meanwhile, here, I once posed with a burrito. On purpose. In a video set to Third Eye Blind’s “Never Let You Go.”
Properly humiliated, I turn my attention to the mother ship: my email.
I’ve tried and failed to come up with the password for my work email, but my personal email is already loaded on my laptop. And my inbox is really something.
On the one hand, it’s oddly comforting to learn that even here, where my tolerance for chaos is seemingly limitless, my inbox is still maintained with precision. Less comforting are all the bewildering messages that point to a person I’m not. MASH Me subscribes to an alarming number of newsletters, including an advice column for entrepreneurs, a daily astrology forecast, and four separate knitting publications. I’ve never, not once, willingly visited a craft store.
In a folder markedNotes, I discover one particularly disorienting exchange with Bridget five years ago in which my MASH self regales her with every graphic detail of a long weekend in New York with a man I’ve never met. Reading about a hot Italian man kissing me on the rainy streets of Manhattan is like reading fan fiction about myself. It’s maddening.
I text Bridget to say so:I’M LOSING MY MIND.
Her response isn’t helpful. She replies with kissing GIFs, sending one after another. FromSleeping Beauty,The Princess and the Frog, and even the Lindsay Lohan classicJust My Luck, beneath which she writes:PUCKER UP, BUTTERCUP. Time to fall in LOOOVE.
I hang my head in defeat, hopeless.
In the mere hours since I landed here, I’ve zipped through the denial and bargaining stages of grief and landed right smack-dabin the middle of anger. I pace along the bookshelves, wondering:Why me? Why him? Why couldn’t the MASH gods have left a list of rules on the fridge like Mom did when we were young?
When there’s a sound outside the door, I shout, shrill, “Not a good time!” One of the tall wooden double doors pushes open anyway. Sighing, I bark, “Penn, I’m serious. I—”
