Page 173 of Under Story

“I wouldn’t want to interrupt,” she replies, lifting a dELiA*s catalogue.

Laurel waves to Maisie weakly when the group leaves for the mall. Aside from Louis, who buys two Auntie Anne’s pretzels, everyone orders Panda Express for dinner. They debate next steps at a table in the food court. Zachary thinks that it’s time to pivot to dream analysis. Nita argues that they’ve only scratched the surface of free association. Charlie counters that they could expand Exquisite Corpse: if they fold a piece of paper six times instead of three, the entire group could make a single drawing. Behind them, a chair scrapes the floor. Its occupant—a redhead in a bucket hat—stalks out of the food court, toward the stores.

“Maisie?” Laurel calls.

The other person doesn’t respond. Laurel stands and follows her. They pass Gadzooks and Express before weaving through the kiosks. The redhead slows as she nears the fountain in the center of the mall. There she whips around, as if to end the chase on her terms.

“What the hell are you doing?” Maisie asks.

“What are you doing?” asks Laurel. “Have you been following us?”

“You wish,” hisses Maisie. “I’m not a stalker. I could tell that something weird was going on, and obviously I was right. I sit down, and you guys are talking about séances, and dreams, and a corpse—”

“That isn’t what it sounds like,” Laurel says.

“Are you in a cult?”

“It’s not a cult.” Laurel looks into Maisie’s face, freckled and dear. “Let’s sit down, okay? I’ll tell you everything.”

—

Laurel speaks for ten minutes without stopping. When she finishes, Maisie is trembling.

“Talk to me. What are you thinking?” Laurel says.

“I’m thinking I don’t know if I can trust you,” says Maisie.

“Because I’m not the person you thought I was?”

“Because what you’re saying sounds insane!”

“You think I’m delusional.”

“Shouldn’t I?”

Laurel may not be able to convince Maisie of her story. Now that she’s told it, though, she can finally stop acting. She gazes at Maisie Two as honestly as she once did Maisie One.

“Don’t do that. You aren’t looking at me,” Maisie says. “You’re looking at her—the other me. If what you’ve said is even true.”

“I’m not sure how separate you are.”

“We’re separate to me,” says Maisie, fiercely.

“You’re right,” says Laurel. “I’m sorry.”

It took decades for her to come to peace with the other Laurel. Maisie Two has only had minutes.

“Can you prove any of this?” Maisie asks.

Laurel thinks. “When I came back from McMurdo, I’d forgotten things, remember? And the Eli you knew—he was a physicist, too. He’d come up with something called the Duoverse, right?”

Maisie fiddles with her slap bracelet. “I guess. We didn’t really talk about it.”

“Or—there was the time we went ice-skating, when I was pregnant with Silas. I said that Eli was distant, and you asked whether he’d been that way in the past. I didn’t know what you meant,” Laurel says. “I hadn’t learned about Celeste.”

Maisie looks up. “You seemed so confused. It freaked me out. It was like you’d forgotten her.”

“It wasn’t that I’d forgotten her. More like I hadn’t remembered her yet.”