Georgie wanted to go home.
She wanted to cry all the way there, thinking about Neal’s sideways symmetrical mouth and the way he could freehand a perfectly straight line.
She wanted to find Seth.
CHAPTER 16
Georgie’s cell phone chimed. She picked it up.
“Earth to Georgie.”
She looked up from the text message to Seth, who was sitting across from her at the writers’ table.
He met her eyes, then looked down at his phone and typed something.
Chime. She looked at her phone.
“We’re running out of time.”
Georgie thought for a second, then thumbed in a reply—
“I know, I’m sorry.”
When Seth looked back up at her, his eyebrows were crowded together over his brown eyes.
She felt herself tearing up.
He tilted his head, then scrunched his nose unhappily. Seth hated it when Georgie cried. He went back to the phone again, typing rapidly.
“Talk to me.”
“I can’t. I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“I don’t care where you start.”
She wiped her eyes on her shoulder.
Seth sighed.
“Georgie, whatever it is—we’ll get through it.”
She stared down at her phone. After a few seconds, AN EMERGENCY CONTACT popped up on the screen, and it started to ring. It was just the standard ring—Marimba—Georgie never had time to figure out special ringtones.
She grabbed her laptop and stood up, answering the call and walking toward the door, careful not to close the computer or unplug the phone. “Hello?”
“Meow!”
Georgie felt a cold surge of disappointment. Then felt guilty about it. You’re not supposed to feel a cold surge of disappointment at the sound of your four-year-old daughter’s voice.
“Meow,” Georgie said, leaning against the wall outside the writers’ room.
“Grandma said I could call you,” Noomi said.
“You can always call me. How are you, sweetie? Did you make me some cookies?”
“No.”
“Oh. That’s okay.”
“Maybe Grandma did. I made some for Santa and some for me.”
“That was smart. I’ll bet they’re delicious.”
“Meow,” Noomi said. “I’m a green kitty.”
“I know.” Georgie tried to focus. “You’re the best green kitty in the world. I love you so much, Noomi.”
“You’re the best mommy in the world, and I love you more than milk and fishbones and . . . what else do kitties like?”
“Yarn,” Georgie said.
“Yarn,” Noomi giggled. “That’s crazy.”
Georgie took a calming breath. “Noomi, is Daddy there?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Can I talk to him?”
“No.”
Georgie knocked her head back against the wall. “Why not?”
“He’s sleeping. He said we can’t even go upstairs to pee.”
Georgie should tell Noomi to do it anyway. Neal was her husband. And she hadn’t talked to him for three days. (Or thirteen hours.) (Or fifteen years.)
Georgie sighed. “Okay. Can I talk to Alice?”
“Alice is playing Monopoly with Grandma.”
“Right.”
“I have to go. My hot chocolate is cold now.”
“Meow,” Georgie said. “Meow-meow, love you, green kitty.”
“Meow-meow, Mommy, I love you even more than yarn.”
Noomi hung up.
There’s a magic phone in my childhood bedroom. I can use it to call my husband in the past. (My husband who isn’t my husband yet. My husband who maybe shouldn’t be my husband at all.)
There’s a magic phone in my childhood bedroom. I unplugged it this morning and hid it in the closet.
Maybe all the phones in the house are magic.
Or maybe I’m magic. Temporarily magic. (Ha! Time travel pun!)
Does it count as time travel? If it’s just my voice traveling?
There’s a magic phone hidden in my closet. And I think it’s connected to the past. And I think I’m supposed to fix something. I think I’m supposed to make something right.
When Georgie got back to the writers’ room, Seth looked like he was at the end of his rope. He’d unbuttoned his shirt an extra button, and his hair was sticking up around his ears and at the back of his neck.
She stood at the whiteboard and took charge of the outline.
It wasn’t that hard—they’d been talking about these characters for years. They just needed to get their ideas into writing. Wrestle them into a few workable scripts. Georgie could do this in her sleep. Sometimes she did do it in her sleep. She’d wake up in the middle of the night and hang off the side of her bed, scrounging around for a piece of paper. (She never remembered to put a notebook by the bed when she was lucid.)
Neal would stir in his sleep and reach for her hips, pulling her back onto the bed. “What’re you looking for?”
“Paper,” she’d say, leaning off the bed again. “I have an idea I don’t want to forget.”
She’d feel his mouth at the base of her spine. “Tell me. I’ll remember.”
“You’re asleep, too.”
He’d bite her. “Tell me.”
“It’s a dance,” she’d say. “There’s a dance. And Chloe, the main character, will end up with one of her mom’s old prom dresses. And she’ll try to fix it to make it cool, like in Pretty in Pink, but it won’t be cool; it’ll be awful. And something embarrassing will happen at the dance to ‘Try a Little Tenderness.’”
“Got it.” Then Neal would pull her back into bed, into him, holding her in place. “Dance. Dress. ‘Try a Little Tenderness.’ Now go back to sleep.”
And then he’d push up Georgie’s pajama shirt, biting her back until neither of them could go back to sleep.
And then, eventually, she’d drift off with his hand on her hip and his forehead pressed into her shoulder.
She’d get out of the shower the next morning, and it would be written in the steam on the mirror:
Dance. Dress. Try a little tenderness.
Georgie shook her head and looked up at the whiteboard and tried to remember where she’d left off.
The night that Neal told her about his girlfriend (fucking of course he had a girlfriend), Seth took Georgie home, then went back to the Halloween party. Georgie stayed up listening to her mom’s Carole King albums and wrote a really angsty monologue for one of her theater classes.