Fiction River Page 6

  The bridge door hissed, signaling that it was about to slide closed. I turned back, my heart pounding.

  I was just in time to see my mother moving her hands. One held against her lips, the other palm down with thumb and pinkie splayed, then swooped upward in an imitation of Karma Dancer pulling out of orbit. It was the first sign I’d ever invented.

  /Shanti./

  Ellen Double Prime

  Alexandra Brandt

  Alexandra Brandt sold her first professional short story to Fiction River: No Humans Allowed. It was a heck of a debut. Since then, Alex has published multiple short stories, including a collection featuring both her Edinburgh-based Urban Fantasy series, “Wyndside Stories,” and the Celtic-inspired contemporary fantasy novelette “They Stole My Love Last Night.” She writes nonfiction copy and does graphic design work, including freelance book cover design. You can find her online (and get a free short story) at alexandrajbrandt.com.

  She got the inspiration for this story in the shower, about a week before her invitation to contribute to Wishes. Perhaps, the anthology theme was a wish from her subconscious to ours...

  Oh god

  I don’t

  I don’t know where to even start. How the HELL am I supposed to know what to do with this? This isn’t real. This isn’t happening.

  I stopped being me at approximately 4:30 pm today.

  The words of a crazy person. That’s me, Ellen Wright. So crazy, so suddenly, that on my way out of Ye Goode Drop after my Saturday study session, I waved goodbye to Kenzie and turned to find myself—my long-fingered hands, my tanned arms—carrying a heavy tray loaded with dirty dishes. In a crowded, noisy hole-in-the-wall diner. In a long apron, in someone else’s too-big shirt that smelled like grease. With someone else’s

  Oh My God

  Someone else’s swollen belly straining against the fabric of my her shirt, apron, elastic pants.

  I think I screamed. I know I fainted.

  It only got worse from there.

  I can’t have been out for very long, because I came to with a heavy woman in a stained apron crouching at my side, surrounded by broken dishware, shouting for someone I assumed was the manager.

  Said manager—a big guy named Joe? Jack? Jerkwad? I wasn’t paying attention—looked like he was going to explode when he arrived on the scene. But the woman talked fast, and he seemed to content himself with just glaring at me for the inconvenience of fainting.

  Everything hurt. It was a nightmare, and I should have woken up from it already.

  I couldn’t think; I just stared. Luckily, Karen—that was the woman in the apron—helped me to the bathroom to wash the cut on my arm from one of the broken plates. She was also really concerned about the baby.

  Oh god, the baby.

  I almost vomited on the way to the bathroom.

  When I opened the door and looked over the sink, I did vomit.

  It was still my face in the mirror. My eyes looking back at me, flecked left iris and all. The dark, puffy circles underneath were new. Skin: not so great. Teeth: even worse. But it was still me.

  Me, 17-year-old me, bussing tables in a crappy diner. Me, with a baby. A baby growing inside me.

  I need to

  Everything is weird and nightmarish and I am just trying to make sense of it as fast as I can.

  My hand is cramping. I’m writing this on a Mead notebook on a horrible bed in what is apparently my room. Ellen Wright’s tiny room in Ellen Wright’s tiny apartment. I know, because I asked Karen if she was sure, multiple times, when she drove me up into the driveway and helped me up the stairs. When she started making noises about calling a hospital about my memory loss and confusion, I quickly backpedaled and told her I was just feeling really faint, etc., etc. I thanked her for the ride and tried the keys in the purse she’d handed me until one of them worked. Then I wandered through the empty, dim apartment until I thought I’d figured out which room was supposed to be mine.

  Now here I am, trying to write out a detailed description of everything, in case there is some important clue I am missing. Some reason why this happened. How this happened. How I can get out.

  I’m not doing a great job so far.

  It’s not a dream. At this point it can’t be, can it? Maybe it’s some sort of insane drug-fueled hallucination. Did someone kidnap and drug me as I left the coffeehouse, for...I don’t know...testing? Like, a “hilarious” prank, signing me up for drug testing without my knowledge.

  (That’s stupid)

  No, Ellen, EVERYTHING is stupid. Nothing is going to make sense.

  Maybe I’m dead and this is Hell

  I’ll try again.

  I finally realized I was going to have to hunt for clues instead of crying over that notebook. I was getting crazier by the second in there. Thinking terrible thoughts.

  Here’s what I’ve got now. This apartment is surprisingly tidy and clean, although its cinderblock walls remind me of my first dorm room at Eagle Prep, before I got the upgrade. It smells—confusing. It smells like some sort of cheap fake vanilla scent, probably the candles I’ve seen around. That scent covers something mustier. Old building, maybe?

  But one other smell, lingering in the kitchen, is painfully familiar: Greek cooking.

  I don’t know what that means.

  The furniture in here is even more confusing. Some pieces are just cheap IKEA types, like the table and chairs in the little kitchen and the futon couch. Some other pieces, some really nice ones, are mine. I mean, the same ones at my house, my real house.

  The oversized, buttery-smooth leather recliner that was supposed to be Dad’s when he bought it but which slowly got taken over by Mom, until he finally laughed and told her it was hers now. It takes up more space than the futon in this little living room.

  I couldn’t stop myself when I saw it, when I smelled the leather, ran my hands over its perfectly soft surface. I pushed the recliner back, curled up in the middle, and started crying.

  I cried for a long time.

  After that was when I noticed my desk, the white desk I had when I was between nine and twelve-ish, not the dormitory desk at Eagle Prep. As if I hadn’t been freaked out enough already...

  Is this an alternate reality I’m stuck in?

  Right. Sure. That’s what happens in movies and TV and complicated scientific theories. Not real life. (But vivid drug-fueled hallucinations, complete with smells of Greek food, make a more plausible theory?)

  I just need more answers, more information. This old desk has a laptop, thank God. The computer has seen better days, but typing on it beats handwriting. Also there is internet. Blessed, blessed internet. Horribly slow. But without my cell phone—the cell in this purse has no one in it that I know, of course—the web may be my ticket out.

  I tried to find Kenzie. None of my social media friends are the same here. I tried to find my school. Eagle Preparatory Boarding Academy is in another state.

  (Oh yeah, I’m not in Oregon anymore—I hadn’t even noticed until my computer told me. I’m back in California. In Modesto, the butt-crack of CA, to be precise.)

  Then I did a search on Dad, because he hadn’t been in the phone either.

  Oh God.

  I can’t do this.

  This isn’t me. This isn’t my life. This is an Ellen who’s been screwed by life. It sucks. And I don’t know why.

  I’m not an idiot, okay? I can read the signs and put two and two together. At this point, it has to be an alternate reality situation, as ridiculous as that sounds. An alternate universe straight out of a TV show. It would be fascinating if it wasn’t so, so terrible.

  Or maybe Mom was right, and hell is real.

  And personal.

  No.

  I can’t think like that.

  My whole body aches and my feet feel swollen and there is something alive in me and it kicks and it isn’t mine. None of this is mine, and I’m so tired.

  If I go to sleep now, maybe I will wake up as me again.

/>   So this happened: I didn’t wake up in my own reality. Instead, I woke up from a horrible position on the recliner, which was a mistake to try to sleep on, and then staggered into the bathroom and vomited. A lot.

  And then I got fired from a job I never had. Because I missed my shift. A shift, mind you, that I also never had. Manager Jerkwad is a confirmed asshole. He didn’t even make allowances for a clearly unwell employee! He was probably just waiting for an opportunity to fire Screwed!Ellen after she got pregnant.

  OK, calling her Screwed!Ellen is kind of tasteless. Also getting her fired was probably a really shitty thing to do. If she is a real person who actually exists. But then, that’s what I need to find out anyway. I just don’t know how.

  Although now that I’m fired, I guess I have the rest of the day to hunt for answers.

  How nice.

  OK, here is what I know so far:

  The universe seems pretty normal, as far as the internet can tell me. The Kardashians are still a thing, sadly. Same talking heads on the media. Same terrible stuff happening in the Middle East. If there is anything else different in the world, it’s too subtle for me to see.

  It’s just Ellen Wright’s life that is all wrong.

  I dug through receipts, notes on the fridge, documents on the computer. I hacked into “my” email. From what I have found, I’ve figured out these things:

  Sad!Ellen (I’m going with that one for now) is 5 ½ months pregnant, which is why she’s showing. It also means that if she hasn’t had an abortion yet, she probably isn’t planning on one. (Of course I am not going to get one. This isn’t my body, and I will get out of here before I have to think about this. I will.)

  The baby daddy is some kid named Trevor Allen Ross and I don’t even know if he’s together with her anymore. I want to dig into all Sad!Ellen’s correspondence and figure out if she loves him, if she wanted this. I also want to find him and yell in his face for not using a freaking condom. But I don’t have time for that. I have to focus on what I need right now. Facts. Clues. Something.

  Mother is divorced. Or at least, she’s gone back to Nikola Karras on her official documents. And now I know why.

  Because it’s confirmed—I didn’t want to believe it, but I can’t pretend now that I’ve seen the proof:

  Dad’s in prison. Or at least he was.

  No, not Dad. Not my dad.

  Sad!Ellen’s dad. It was embezzlement. He was convicted when she was ten. He lost all the money in the process.

  That explains why I’m here in the butt-crack of California in low-income housing with Mom, who can barely support us with two jobs (I found her work schedules on the fridge—night shift sucks) because she never got an education in America because she married a rich man instead and now I assume she can’t find a posh job because of her accent and lack of experience and who knows what else.

  Oh yeah, and I am pretty sure she stayed here in the States, instead of going back to my grandparents in Greece, because of me.

  No, not me. Sad!Ellen. Who squandered Mom’s sacrifice by getting pregnant—and I still don’t know why or how; I would use protection—and getting bad grades. I should be happy she’s still in school. But I’ve never gotten a C in my life, and I found her latest report card, and she has two. God, I hate her right now.

  I have to get out of here.

  I just remembered something. An actual clue that I should have remembered right at the beginning, but was too scared and upset and uncomfortable to think about, I guess. I saw something, just before everything went wrong.

  I saw someone.

  A man was sitting at the table next to Kenzie and me while we were studying. He seemed normal enough, average—medium height I think, light skin, hair not quite as dark as mine—but it was only after I caught him watching me that I realized something was off. It was like if I squinted hard, I could see someone else sitting there at the same time. Someone much taller, in a white lab coat, of all things. But since that didn’t make any sense, I waved it off.

  The thing is, that man left in a hurry after I noticed him staring at me. And then it went straight out of my head when the thing happened right after.

  But this changes everything, because I just saw him again.

  It was right after I wrote that last entry. I was too pissed to keep researching anything, so I got dressed (Sad!Ellen’s “maternity” clothes are cheap and badly-fitted, by the way; at least she knows what colors look good) and stormed out of the house.

  And that’s when I saw him, standing in the street, looking at the apartment, and then at me. I recognized him, but I didn’t know why. He looked sad. Miserable, even. Then he turned and walked out of view so fast I didn’t have time to react. By the time I got to the foot of the stairs and turned the corner, he was gone.

  It was the same guy; it absolutely had to be. Lab coat and all, it was the same effect: first one thing, and then the other. The kind of weird that just screams he’s a part of this somehow.

  How am I going to find him again?

  Wait, someone is at the door.

  Mom came home.

  I lied earlier, you know. I said the cell phone I discovered had no one I knew in it. Not true. It had a phone number labeled “Mom,” and I was too afraid to dial it. Too afraid of what I’d discover. I knew I would have to face the truth eventually, whatever truth that was, but I was a coward.

  Well, obviously I figured out the facts pretty quickly once I started to look.

  But nothing makes the truth sink home more than seeing my mother walk in the door. Nikola’s face, Nikola’s rich dark hair. Part of my brain said, of course it wasn’t really her. Not my mom. She didn’t even look right; she was heavier, more tired-looking, and missing her designer clothes and handbags.

  The rest of me didn’t care about any of that.

  Which was why the moment she walked in the door, I crossed the room and flung my arms around her neck and started crying. To her credit, she dropped everything she was carrying and gave me the best hug of my life. No questions asked; she just wrapped her arms tightly around me and rocked back and forth and let me sob into her coat.

  Finally I stopped crying and backed off. She smiled tiredly, patted me, and picked up her things. She moved more slowly than I was used to seeing, and that feeling of wrongness came flooding back. As much as I wanted her to be, she wasn’t Nikola Wright.

  I’m not saying my mother, my real mother, was a saint. I loved her and Dad both, but I was always closer to Mom, right up until she started driving me crazy. The last time I was home from Eagle Prep, I yelled at her for being shallow and narrow-minded. She yelled right back at me about how I was learning bad morals at school and made her ashamed to be my mother.

  Then later she turned around and praised me for my scholastic achievements, and told me how proud she was.

  What if I never see her again?

  This one, Nikola Karras, makes my heart hurt. She seems so unhappy, but tries to hide it. She asked me if I had a bad day, and I had to admit to her that I had gotten fired. At least it was a handy excuse. But seeing the pain flash across her face made me feel like the shittiest daughter ever.

  I am sure Sad!Ellen took that job in the first place to help out with the finances. I saw the finances when I was digging through stuff. The combined income of this household was worse than the personal bank account my dad opened for “incidental school expenses” for me. Can you imagine? Three jobs plus government money (and to think we had all sneered at welfare!), and it was still less than a teenager’s spending money.

  I shouldn’t be feeling guilty. This isn’t even me. I’m not this woman’s daughter, I don’t owe her anything.

  I wish I could fix her life.

  I hate myself.

  We had to go shopping. Mom assumed I would go with her, and I couldn’t bring myself to say no. (I can’t believe we shop at big box stores now. I was very wise and said nothing about it to her, though. I was determined to keep my head down and not be “wei
rd” in any way.)

  That’s where this happened:

  A strange middle-aged woman I had never met came up to me, patted my belly without even asking permission (I certainly would not have granted it!) and said “Oh honey, you’re going to have such a beautiful baby! I think Mexican babies are just the cutest, don’t you?”

  Mother’s eyes widened, and my careful plans to lie low completely vanished. “Ma’am, first, please don’t touch me without asking. Second, I am not Mexican. My mother is European, I identify as white, and you don’t know anything about me.” It appalled me that she would assume we were that kind of low-class....

  And then, for the first time, I realized something I had never thought about. I hadn’t once thought about it, and it made me feel so ashamed I found myself just standing there, staring blindly while the lady gasped and stuttered. I was struck dumb with the realization that for the first time, I had just experienced the same kind of racism, the same kind of assumptions I’ve thought in my head hundreds of times.

  Every time I saw a teen girl who was pregnant, I figured she was either the stupid kind of religious, uneducated, and/or low-income. If she was a brown girl who was pregnant, I didn’t even assume that. I accepted the pregnancy as normal, because that’s what “those kinds of girls” do. In the back of my head, I must have thought that “religious, uneducated, and poor” applied to non-white kids automatically.

  Oh my God.

  Mother, apologizing profusely to the woman, dragged me away at that point. “Ellen, this is not like you! I can’t believe I just saw that with my own eyes. Heard that with my own ears. What is wrong with you?”

  Oh, Sad!Mother, if only you knew. “She was being racist, and I’m not sorry,” I muttered. But I was sorry. And angry. And sorry some more.

  Then Mom said, “But didn’t you recognize her? She’s the receptionist at Dr. Santos’s office.”