Prince Harold is panting lightly, his fingers still tight around Primrose’s arm. He casts a heroic glance in her direction, a curl of hair falling artfully across his forehead. “You are safe, princess, do not fear.”
Primrose doesn’t look frightened. She looks baffled and bleary, distantly annoyed. Harold doesn’t seem to notice. He raises his sword once more and points it directly at my chest. “Guards! Seize her!”
I have time for a single airless “what the shit” before my arms are wrenched behind me and my wrists are wrapped in cold iron. I writhe against the chains, but I can feel the weakness of my limbs, the stony strength of the men holding me.
Harold shakes his head at me, flicking that perfect curl from his forehead. “Did you think you could evade me twice, fairy?” He gestures imperiously to the tower steps. “To the dungeons.”
7
THE DUNGEON ISN’T so much a place as a collection of generic dungeon-ish elements: damp stone walls and iron bars; dangling chains stained with God knows what; brittle bones piled in the corners, cracked and yellow; a decayed sweetness in the air, like a root cellar with something rotting in it.
In all my twenty-one years of bad luck, I don’t think I’ve ever been this thoroughly, irredeemably fucked. I’m locked in a windowless cell in the wrong reality, wondering how long I can stay on my feet before I’m forced to sit on the stained stone floor. I’m hungry and thirsty and fatally ill. I have no way home. My only friend in this entire backwards-ass pre-Enlightenment world is about to be married off to a sentient cleft chin. Right now, the King is probably debating whether to drown me or burn me or make me dance in hot iron shoes.
I wanted to wrench my story off its tracks, to strike out toward some better ending, but all I’ve done is change my lines. I made myself the witch, and witches have even worse endings than princesses.
My therapist—who is corny and sincere, but usually right—says when things get overwhelming it can help to make a list of your assets. It’s a short list: a small pile of vertebrae in the corner; a tin pail of unsanitary drinking water; several protein-clogged organs; a phone with approximately 12% of its battery life remaining.
I turn it on and scroll through my missed texts, because why not? There’s no reason to hoard the charge now.
Charm’s sent me a few more wild theories and links to NASA pages that don’t load. I figure I have time to kill so I zoom in on the screenshots enough to read—well, skim—okay, glance at—the articles. All of them seem to subscribe to the (hypothetical, unprovable) concept of the multiverse, in which there are an infinite number of realities separated by nothing but a few quarks and cosmic dust bunnies. One dude describes them as bubbles in paint, endlessly spawning; somebody else asks me to envision a six-sided die that lands six different ways and spawns six alternate realities. My favorite is the one that describes the universe as “a vast book containing an infinity of pages.” I like the idea that I’m just a misplaced punctuation mark or a straying verb who somehow found herself on the wrong page. Beats being a dice roll or a paint bubble.
I wish Charm were here to mock my lack of basic scientific understanding (when you skip half of high school and major in liberal arts, there are certain inevitable holes in your education). I always sort of imagined her beside me at the end, weeping prettily at my bedside, perhaps catching the eye of the extremely hot nurse who works the day shift in the ICU. Maybe they see each other again at my graveside and go out for drinks. Maybe they wind up married with three rescue dogs and a Subaru, who knows?
I type and delete several messages to Charm before going with the painfully effortful: bad news babe. portkey’s busted.
that WOULD be bad news except—as I previously mentioned—portkeys are fiction
It takes less than ten seconds for me to send back a cropped version of one her own screenshots with the final line circled in red: “in a universe of infinite realities, there’s no such thing as fiction.”
She responds with a middle finger emoji, which is fair.
but like, real talk: the magic spinning wheel is broken. I think I might be stuck here forever. or for however long I have left. I’ve been trying not to feel the clogged-drain sensation in my chest or the shuddering weight of my own limbs, trying not to think of the X-rays that sent Mom straight out to her rose beds, her face cold and hard as a spade.
did you read the stuff I sent you?
of course, I lie.
There’s a pause, then: if you had, which you definitely have not, you’d know that alternate dimensional realities are unlikely to be connected by individual physical objects.
charm please. I’ve had a real long day.
there are no ruby slippers or rabbit holes. if there’s a way between universes, which there apparently is, it’s something weirder and more quantum-y than a magic fucking spinning wheel. allow me to present my top ten theories thus far. I can see her so clearly: cross-legged in bed in the crappy two-room apartment she rented for the summer, surrounded by a small ocean of printed-out articles and library books and Smarties wrappers. The whole place would smell like burned coffee and laundry and weed, because Charm is essentially a frat boy with brains and breasts.
Her next text is an image of a PowerPoint slide titled, So You Fucked Up and Got Lost in the Multiverse. The subtitle reads: Theory #1: narrative resonance, followed by a pretty unreasonable number of bullet points. How many jokey, stupid, helpful slideshows has she made me over the years? In junior year it was, So You Want to Disappear: Ninety-Nine Reasons to Stick Around, Asshole. In college she sent me, So You Want to Murder Your Roommate: Practical Suggestions for Making it Look Like an Accident.
I stare at the damp gray ceiling for a while before responding. i thought you grew out of trying to save me
jesus zin you’re so stupid sometimes. hot, but stupid.
She texts again before I can type anything more than hey—
why do you think I majored in biochem? why am I interning at goddamn pfizer??? why was my senior thesis on MAL-09?
I know why. Just like I know why Dad still stays up too late reading message boards and googling unlikely medical experiments, why Mom still attends Roseville’s Children meetings every month. Their love has hung above me like the sun, a burning brightness I could survive only if I never looked straight at it, never flew too close.
My phone buzzes again. i never stopped trying to save you. so don’t you fucking dare stop trying to save yourself.
I stare, unblinking, the words fractured and blurred through the sheen of tears, and she adds: you promised to come back.
I shove the phone back in my jeans pocket and press the heels of my hands into my eyes hard enough that tiny fireworks pop against my eyelids. At sixteen, I tried to run away from my story and couldn’t. So I put away my dreams of adventure and true love and happily ever afters, and settled in to play out the clock. I made my dying girl rules and followed them to the letter. I even wrote Charm a very serious three-page breakup letter and she informed me that (1) I was a dumbass, (2) you can’t break up with your best friend, legally, and (3) she preferred blonds anyway.
And she stuck around. Through every doctor’s appointment and prescription refill, every Gargoyles rewatch and whiny text about my roommate. I pity all those other Auroras and Briar Roses, the sleeping beauties who are alone in their little paint-bubble universes.