Unhappenings (9 page)

fter learning that at some point in the future, her adult self was going to travel through time to see me, probably repeatedly, Penelope became curiously distant from me. She still met with me every few days, but it became less social, and more businesslike. It didn’t take much time—or advanced detective skills—to figure out the reason for the abrupt change in demeanor. Penelope was now living in fear of the possibility that her future version had told me things her present version did not want me to know.

Obviously, Penelope had been keeping things from me (her refusal to give me her real name was strong supporting evidence of this). For the most part, I had chalked that up to her maturity level and a need to feel important. I humored it because she was already giving me so much beneficial information I hardly saw the advantage to pushing my luck there. Her new reticence around me did little to change that perception. Future Penelope had told me almost nothing of value. That was one of the first things I told Young Penelope, but clearly she was either not convinced or not taking any chances.

Over coffee one day, her standoffishness took a particularly interesting turn. We were discussing my progress as a social being. It had been several months since Penelope first taught me simple tricks to blend in. My friendship with Pete had expanded to inclusion in his social circle. It was the first time in years I had felt truly comfortable around other people. It was also the first time I had spent long enough in anyone’s company to discover I didn’t like some of them, and that was as rewarding as any aspect of the experience. Learning how to manage myself around people I found irritating was a skill that had atrophied since high school, and it felt wonderful to put it back into practice.

Now that I was starting to trust other people, Penelope and I talked about the next steps, including how safe it would be to broach with my closer friends the true nature of my existence. The better I got to know Pete, the more I felt he might be both smart enough and stable enough to understand my plight for what it was. There was risk there, including the very real possibility that doing so might precede an unhappening that would retroactively collapse my entire social network. I still had no idea what the underlying cause of my problem was, and if Penelope did, she wasn’t saying. Instead, we simply mapped out a recovery plan, should I happen to need one.

While we organized how I would word my revelation, and what type of opportune moment I could contrive to drop it, I mentioned the possibility of telling another person as well. A woman named Sandy was in two of my classes, and I had gotten to know her pretty well around the same time I was being inducted into Pete’s clique. When I mentioned this to Penelope, her reaction was unexpected.

“Oh,” she said. “Um. Maybe.” She stopped there, and the awkwardness of the pause surprised me.

“Is that a bad idea?” I probed.

“I don’t… This isn’t because you’re attracted to her, is it?”

These words came out in such a rush I almost didn’t process them. This was a topic that had never come up in our talks, primarily because I was, by that point, so thoroughly convinced that any woman who got involved with me would pay for it with her life. In any case, the answer to Penelope’s question was no. Sandy and I had some things in common, and I had a great deal of respect for her, but there was never any sexual tension there. It would have been easy to dispel Penelope’s concern, but the fact of it intrigued me. It harkened back to Future Penelope’s revolted reaction to my question about whether we were in a relationship that hadn’t started yet. This new question made me wonder if there was a story connected to whatever she felt she needed to hide from me. I believed her when she said that we would never be a couple, besides which, Young Penelope couldn’t possibly know what lay in store for either of us, any more than I did. And yet, this now smacked of an unexpected loose thread, and I couldn’t help but tug it.

“Would that be a problem?” I asked, with an exaggeratedly feigned innocence.

“No,” she said quickly. Then, “Maybe. I don’t know.” She rubbed her face, clearly trying to regain her bearings. “Probably not,” she said finally. “But don’t tell her anyway. Let’s stick to the plan. We don’t even know what will happen when you talk to Pete. For now, let’s not complicate anything.” She waited a beat, then added, “Please?”

I nodded. “Yeah, that’s probably right,” I said, and while I was being honest about my intent to hold off on saying anything to Sandy, I filed away my certainty that something about this circumstance was the nerve Future Penelope had exposed in her younger self. There was something about my eventual relationship with a woman—perhaps Sandy, perhaps someone else, surely not Penelope—that she desperately wanted me not to know.

fter my third attempt to tell Pete about my problem, I gave up. The first time he was amazing about it. Asked me all kinds of questions, took everything I said at its face. We spent an entire afternoon talking, at the end of which he told me he had never felt more touched than he did to know that I trusted him with something that big and risky.

By the time I saw him that evening, the whole thing had unhappened. Thankfully, there was no awful moment of discovery that I would need to explain my way out of. I had become so accustomed to Penelope’s tricks for entering any conversation without exposing myself, and so used to people utterly transforming between times I saw them, all I needed was a quick probe to learn Pete knew nothing.

I tried twice more over the course of that week. The second time was a fiasco. He accused me of trying to play him for a fool, and wanted to know if I was on drugs. I had made the mistake of broaching the topic too quickly, because I already knew (or thought I did) what his reaction would be. He avoided me for two days, then reverted to a blank slate on the matter. Having learned from that, I was substantially more cautious on my third try. That one went very well, until I realized that he was humoring me, first out of amusement, and eventually out of compassion. He begged me to seek professional help. I backpedalled by informing him (honestly) that I had already tried that to no avail. When that final confession unhappened, I resigned.

Sandy was a different story, many times worse. It took me weeks to work up the courage to go to her, but I never got the chance. One day, to my profound surprise and discomfort, she confessed her feelings for me. Given that our friendship had always seemed entirely platonic from my end of it, my initial assumption was that this was some sort of super awkward unhappening of it. However, the more that story played out, the more details she revealed about events exactly as I recalled them. This crush had always been there, and I missed it. At first I tried to stay friends with her, with the clear understanding that I wanted nothing more. The longer we tried that, the more she began to fall apart. It finally got to the point where she would not leave me alone, her communications with me alternating between desperate pleas for a chance, and threats.

It is with no great pride that I admit when she ultimately, inevitably, retroactively vanished, I was not sorry to see her go. I hoped her unhappening was not some dire or dreadful fate, but not enough to investigate.

For the next two years, I settled into a comfortable social life. My friendship with Pete—all of my friendships, in fact—never progressed beyond surface camaraderie. Nothing else seemed worth the bother. I never again shared my tale with another peer. I never allowed anyone to get overly close and learn who and what I really was.

And I never, ever dated.

he second time—from my perspective—that Future Penelope visited me (or third, counting her mysterious appearance when I was in high school) was about six months after our Cumberland Farms outing. In our previous meeting she looked about thirty. This time I guessed her for mid twenties. Once again, we were to “run a fix.” She gave no indication of awareness that this sort of thing was new to me, and I gave her no reason to believe it was. We traveled back in time about four years, and visited a florist in a small city in New Hampshire. Our objective was to stall a woman who had come there to pick up flowers for a hospitalized friend. We only had to keep her there an additional seven minutes, which proved remarkably easy. We arrived just before she did, and Penelope had prepared a barrage of extensive and picayune questions to occupy the manager. My job was to engage the only other employee there, with an imaginary conflict regarding a previous purchase that never happened. She deferred to her boss, who then became tangled between our two distractions. The woman—the only real customer—patiently waited for us to resolve our issues. When the seven minutes were up, I stormed out, and Penelope bought an orchid that she left in the dumpster behind the store before we returned.