We didn’t talk much after that. He didn’t ask me any more questions. In the end I gave him my phone number—and he guessed the last two digits before I said them. More proof for him. More hidden tones in the silence between songs.

When the next bus came, he got up.

“Don’t expect me to call you,” he said. “Ever.”

But I knew he would. Because I knew Leo. I’d know him in any world.

I said I’d get back to the skaters. Here’s where they reenter in their strange elliptical orbit. As I was walking back to my car in the Publix parking lot, which was mostly empty now, I heard the unmistakable high rumble of polyurethane wheels on asphalt. Turns out I didn’t have to go looking for the skaters; instead, they found me.

As Hunter had said, they weren’t twins, they were triplets. Identical triplets. The instance of identical triplets is one in 60,000 births. I know this because it was a Jeopardy! answer that got stuck in my head like a piece of toilet paper on my shoe. Random useless facts plague me.

I have to admit I was relieved to see them. I didn’t know what their connection to these reality shifts was, but I knew they were connected. After all, they remembered the Tsunamis, which meant that maybe they could give me some answers.

The trio of identical skaters began to circle me—and I noticed pretty quickly that their boards were like perpetual motion machines. That is to say, they never had to put a foot down to push themselves. It was as if, no matter where they were, every direction was downhill. I never found out their names, so to make things easier, let’s just call them Ed, Edd, and Eddy, in honor of my misspent Cartoon Network childhood.

“You screwed up big this time, didn’t you, Ash?” Ed said.

“What do you know about it?” I asked—and I wasn’t just matching his attitude, it was a legitimate question.

“We know what we know,” said Edd.

“Which is a lot less than what we don’t know,” said Eddy.

They were moving around me fast enough to make me dizzy when I tried to focus on any one of them. “Why don’t you start by telling me who the hell you are.”

“Just your typical neighborhood skater bros,” said Ed, with a smirk.

“Ask anyone who knows us,” added Edd.

“Oh, wait, no one knows us,” concluded Eddy.

I was starting to understand their dynamic. Ed was the alpha sibling, as he always seemed to answer first. Edd followed with a snide comment, and Eddy was the closer. “Are you here just to mess with me, or are you going to help me?”

And then they started talking in a very literal round-robin that made me even more dizzy.

“We haven’t been ‘messing with you.’”