Tandem

there.

“If you’re not Grant, then who are you?”

“I already told you,” he said matter-of-factly.

“You told me your name is Thomas Mayhew,” I said. “Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

“If it did, I’d be surprised.” He lifted his eyes to mine. It was shocking, how familiar they were, and yet how foreign, like I’d never seen them before in my whole life.

A horrifying suspicion tugged at me: what if Grant was crazy? I’d been operating this whole time on the assumption that he was a reasonable, rational being—I’d even considered the possibility that this was all a misunderstanding, although that seemed like too much to hope for. But what if he was insane?

Because what he was proposing was ludicrous. Was he saying that Grant Davis had never existed, that since infancy he’d been someone else, this “Thomas Mayhew” that he claimed to be? Or was he telling me that he— whoever he thought he was—had replaced Grant, pretended to be him? Of the two options, I wasn’t sure which was the hardest to swallow, but the idea that there could be two unrelated people who looked exactly the same was so unlikely that it made my head hurt.

“So you’re … what? Grant’s evil twin?” That was the only possible explanation, if he was telling the truth, although it was very telenovela, and in no way easy to believe.

A short, harsh laugh escaped his throat. “Not exactly.”

“Then what are you?”

“Sasha,” he said deliberately, “what do you know about parallel universes?” 

SEVEN

Now I laughed. “Parallel universes? Is that supposed to be some kind of joke?”

“Your grandfather is a theoretical physicist,” Grant said. “You must have heard him talk about them at some point.”

“You’re not trying to tell me that you’re from a parallel universe!” I considered again my hypothesis about his mental stability. Parallel universes? That sealed it: Grant was officially bonkers.

“Actually,” he said, standing up, “I’m trying to tell you that you are.”

“That’s ridiculous!” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. He’d hit it on the head when he said that Granddad was a theoretical physicist, because that’s what parallel universes were— theoretical. No one had ever proven that they existed.

He shook his head. “I know it’s a shock. But you know that it’s not impossible.”

“You’re out of your mind,” I said, folding my arms obstinately across my chest.

He rubbed the back of his neck; he was trying not to get frustrated, a battle he was clearly losing. “I don’t have time for this to sink in gradually, so I’m going to be very frank with you. You’re from one universe and I’m from another. This one. We’re not in your world anymore—we’re in mine.”

“And what world would that be?” I struggled to suppress the wave of hysterical laughter that was rising up. “Oz?”

He was right about one thing: Granddad had told me about parallel universes. When I was young, inventing worlds was part of my nighttime ritual. I would climb into my bed while Granddad took a seat in a nearby chair and we’d spin all kinds of crazy stories about universes inhabited entirely by sentient Popsicle sticks, or talking flowers that ate cotton candy, or wizards who could only use their magic to conjure pancakes. But never this. Never universes so similar to ours that they contained doubles of people we actually knew. Because the implication of such worlds only made us remember, with sharp pangs of grief, what was missing in our own.

“That’s not an easy question to answer, but I guess you could call it Aurora,” he said. I took a few seconds to assess him as if I was just looking at him for the first time. There was nothing about him to suggest that he was crazy. He wasn’t acting shifty or unhinged. It was precisely the opposite, in fact; he seemed alarmingly serious.

“Grant—”

“My name’s not Grant,” he insisted, his voice tight and agitated. “It’s—”

“Thomas?” He nodded. “You want me to call you Thomas? Fine. That’s fine. I’ll call you whatever you want. I’ll call you Rumpelstiltskin if it means you’ll let me go.”

“I liked her better when she was unconscious,” Fillmore said.

“Fillmore!” Thomas snapped, throwing a glare over his shoulder at the older man. His jaw tensed as he gritted his teeth. He turned back to me with barely contained exasperation.

“My name is Thomas,” he said. “I know I look like Grant. I know I sound like Grant. I know that, briefly, I pretended to be Grant, but I’m not him. Grant is from your world. Earth. I’m not. I’m from here.”

“Aurora.”

“That’s right.”

I shook my head, drowning in disbelief. The insanity of this conversation had even managed to distract me from how badly I still wanted to throw up.

“Okay, well, if we’re in some parallel universe, Thomas, then how exactly did we get here? Even if parallel universes exist, there’s no way to move between them.”

“We found a way.”

“Oh yeah? What’s that?”

“You’re wearing it.” He pointed at the bracelet on my wrist. “It’s called an anchor; it helped transport you to Aurora and, as long as you have it on, it’ll keep you here.”

I stared at the bracelet. That awful, stomach-turning sense of doom I’d felt earlier came rushing in again. I put my hand to my forehead. I still felt faint, and was glad to be sitting.

“Are you okay?” Thomas asked.

“I feel sick,” I said softly, finding it difficult to draw breath. My chest was tight and my heart was racing; the sound of blood pumping through my temples exacerbated the pain that flashed behind my eyes. All my muscles had tightened to the point where I almost felt frozen, like I’d smash into pieces if I fell to the floor.

“That’s the tandem,” Thomas said by way of explanation, as if I had any idea what that meant. He hovered near me, even going so far as to reach out to steady my shoulders, which were shaking. I stiffened. “Going through is difficult the first few times. It puts a lot of stress on the body. You need to relax.”

“How am I supposed to relax?” I demanded. “I’m being held against my will in a dark basement by my prom date. What about this situation is supposed to be relaxing?”

Thomas had nothing to say to that. “Just keep breathing.”

“What the hell is the tandem?” I massaged my temples, but the headache just kept getting worse.

“It’s the veil that separates the universes.” I stared at him blankly. “Like a membrane, sort of, that you can pass through.” Thomas sighed. “It’s difficult to explain.”

“Clearly,” I managed to choke out. My mouth filled with bitter saliva, and I knew what was going to happen next. I leaned forward and vomited all over the cement floor, barely missing Thomas’s shiny black boots.

“Okay,” Thomas said, lifting me to my feet by my arm as if I weighed nothing. “Up.”

“If you think I’m cleaning that, Mayhew, you’re out of your mind,” Fillmore said from his corner. “I’m not a janitor!”

Thomas towed me to the bathroom; I tried to resist him, but I didn’t have the strength. I fell to my knees in front of the toilet and threw up again, wiping my face afterward with a towel he handed me. My skin was hot and clammy, but I was shivering all over; it felt like I had the flu. When I was ready, he helped me to stand again, stepping aside as I washed my mouth out with handfuls of tap water and handing me another towel that I wet and pressed against my face. He bent to retrieve something, but I didn’t see what it was; he slipped it into his pocket with a carnival magician’s deft sleight of hand.

I hunched over the sink, gripping the porcelain rim as the nausea ebbed. Thomas stood behind me, and I stared at his reflection in the mirror. I was starting to see the ways in which he wasn’t like the Grant I