Her next text is an image of a PowerPoint slide titled, So You Fucked Up and Got Lost in the Multiverse. The subtitle reads: Theory #1: narrative resonance, followed by a pretty unreasonable number of bullet points. How many jokey, stupid, helpful slideshows has she made me over the years? In junior year it was, So You Want to Disappear: Ninety-Nine Reasons to Stick Around, Asshole. In college she sent me, So You Want to Murder Your Roommate: Practical Suggestions for Making it Look Like an Accident.

I stare at the damp gray ceiling for a while before responding. i thought you grew out of trying to save me

jesus zin you’re so stupid sometimes. hot, but stupid.

She texts again before I can type anything more than hey—

why do you think I majored in biochem? why am I interning at goddamn pfizer??? why was my senior thesis on MAL-09?

I know why. Just like I know why Dad still stays up too late reading message boards and googling unlikely medical experiments, why Mom still attends Roseville’s Children meetings every month. Their love has hung above me like the sun, a burning brightness I could survive only if I never looked straight at it, never flew too close.

My phone buzzes again. i never stopped trying to save you. so don’t you fucking dare stop trying to save yourself.

I stare, unblinking, the words fractured and blurred through the sheen of tears, and she adds: you promised to come back.

I shove the phone back in my jeans pocket and press the heels of my hands into my eyes hard enough that tiny fireworks pop against my eyelids. At sixteen, I tried to run away from my story and couldn’t. So I put away my dreams of adventure and true love and happily ever afters, and settled in to play out the clock. I made my dying girl rules and followed them to the letter. I even wrote Charm a very serious three-page breakup letter and she informed me that (1) I was a dumbass, (2) you can’t break up with your best friend, legally, and (3) she preferred blonds anyway.

And she stuck around. Through every doctor’s appointment and prescription refill, every Gargoyles rewatch and whiny text about my roommate. I pity all those other Auroras and Briar Roses, the sleeping beauties who are alone in their little paint-bubble universes.

I wish I could bleed from my page to theirs, like ink. I wonder if that’s more or less what I did. I wonder what happens when you tell the same story again and again in a thousand overlapping realities, like a pen retracing the same words over and over on the page. I wonder precisely what Charm meant by narrative resonance.

And then I have my second big, stupid, excellent idea. I retrieve my phone (8%) and write back to Charm: ok.

Then: i’m gonna need your help.