I put my head in my hands, feeling my swollen face against my palms, and wondered why, if I didn’t get beaten up in this world, did I still bear the cuts and bruises?

“It’s like your memories,” Ed said, when I asked him about it. “Some things come with you.”

“The current world will find a rational explanation for it,” Teddy assured me.

But that didn’t erase what I had done. I had committed the perfect crime. Not only no evidence, but no victims.

“If I deleted every world where they could have existed,” I said, “what about the world I came from? My original world?”

I tried to remember if Ralston delivered stuff to my dad’s store in my original world. Then I remembered my dad didn’t even have a chain of vitamin stores in my original world—and just remembering that made my head hurt so badly, I couldn’t follow through on the thought.

“If you get back to your world,” Ed said, “it will be your world minus three people who you never met.”

Without Ralston in the world, it turns out I was no longer dealing drugs. Apparently, he was the one who approached me to deal—I wasn’t the one who sought it out. There was some comfort in knowing that I was only a drug dealer by opportunity and not by nature. But I still couldn’t get past the fact that I had deleted three people. Granted, it was in self-defense, but still . . . if I had a knife would I have stabbed them each through the heart? If I had a gun would I have shot all three of them dead? What actions are justified in self-defense? Is erasing them from all versions of existence fair punishment for being sleazy rat bastards? They were human beings with mothers who loved them. But now, since their mothers never had them, they didn’t even have that.

I felt those useless emotions again. Guilt and shame. Like somehow I had pissed in God’s teacup, and not even he knew.

17

Dots, Connected

The next morning I was caught completely unawares by something I should have anticipated but didn’t. I came to school, in spite of my bruises, black eye, and swollen lip. People stared at me, and I stared back, belligerent about it.

“Got a problem?”

“No, no, not at all.”

Then they would scurry off.

Paul came up to me at my locker. My infamous locker. People passing by probably thought they’d catch us kissing again. Not today. My lip hurt way too much.

“You want to talk about it?” he asked, looking at my face, and doing his best not to grimace.

“No,” I told him. “I got jumped out back of the store, that’s all.”