“Well for one, they used to be George, Maxine, and Patrick. And Nora . . . well, I don’t even want to go there.”

Katie laughed. “Very funny.” But then she registered the look on my face. “You’re not kidding, are you?”

I took a long look at her, hoping she would remember who I had been, but it wasn’t there. And then something else struck me that I hadn’t considered before. “Katie . . . if I was a cheerleader in this world, then how do you remember the other shifts? It’s not like I got tackled on the sidelines every week . . .”

And suddenly her pupils constricted—just like Hunter’s did when he almost remembered me being a lineman. “I . . . don’t know. I just know that they did. Isn’t that strange?”

But it was more than strange. Ed said that the world was losing coherence. Reality was struggling to make sense of itself. When it could no longer do that, it would correct, and solve the problem by erasing it.

“You were . . . taller before, weren’t you?”

“Yeah, I was.”

“And you weren’t dating Layton.”

“No . . . you were,” I told her.

She backed up and shook her head, as if trying to get out a bug that had lodged in her hair. “No. You’re making that up. I’d never be with him.”

But I knew better. Because however sure you think your footing is, now I knew there were trapdoors in everyone’s fun house.

“You know, if you change your mind about him and break up,” Katie said, “I’ll support you one hundred percent.”

“I know,” I told her. Then, before she could launch into a speech about how wrong Layton was for me, I changed the subject. “Katie, I’d like you to come with me this afternoon. I want to go see Leo.” And I told her where he was—still in jail, because bail had still not been set, and there was no telling when, or if, it would.

Katie was horrified by what happened to him, but apprehensive about going to see him in jail. At first, I thought she was echoing the racism that permeated these last few worlds—but then I realized that wasn’t it. We’d be two teenage girls going alone to the county jailhouse. Granted, we were kick-ass girls, but even as a guy it had been intimidating. But that wasn’t the source of Katie’s concern either.

“If Layton finds out where you went, you’ll have to have a good story.”

So it was back to Layton again. I began to get angry—although I knew it wasn’t Katie I should be angry at. “Just stop, all right? Layton doesn’t need to know where I am every minute of every day.”

“Does he know that?” Katie asked. “Because I don’t think he got the memo.”