They asked the semiconscious quarterback to move his hands, then his feet. They asked him a few questions I couldn’t hear, then they finally helped him up and off the field to the obligatory applause.

The coach motioned for me to leave the field, too. “Go see the trainer,” he said. “Have him check you out. Concussion protocol. You know the drill.” The coach had promised me one play, and that’s what I got. The Storks put in their second-string quarterback, and the game resumed.

On the sidelines, the trainer deemed me fit, but told me to take it easy over the weekend and look for signs of concussion. Like the headache I didn’t tell him about. Once he left, I tried to ignore my pulsing head and look for the changes. The inconsistencies. But everything looked exactly the same as it did before. There was still a sea of white faces in the stands. Damn! If something was different, I couldn’t see it, but I knew for a fact that something had changed.

I knew because when I looked at the Edwards sitting in the stands, there weren’t three of them. Now there were four.

Who we are is defined by a whole lot of things. Our family, our friends, our genetics, all the good things that have happened to us, as well as the traumatic things. And although we’re always redefining ourselves, some things are constants. They are part of who we are and don’t change. Unless, of course, you’re shifting between universes.

I was wary after the game, looking at everyone, trying to decipher what the change was, and relying on what little power of observation I had to pick out the inconsistencies. There was still not a single thing I could see, hear, taste, or smell that was any different from the previous world.

But I could feel something was different.

I knew this was not like the other reality shifts. In those I fell into each new world, rather than it falling into me. My trip through Elsewhere left me feeling fried, and my thoughts were sluggish. It was hard to think, hard to reason, and whenever I tried, I got dizzy. I wouldn’t tell the coach about it, or my parents, because it wasn’t the kind of concussion that anyone could do anything about. My brain was now crammed with yet another set of latent memories I had not unpacked. I would take it slow, I decided. I’d let the world present itself to me in its own time.