I nod and let those words resonate in my mind. Publishing house, home, fantastic, reality crash. They describe a completely different world from mine, but they’re close, as if we were two books that happen to be next to each other on a bookshelf when a fire breaks out, and the covers melt and our letters get mixed up. I’ve no idea what Scott would make of this. He’d probably make a comment like: “Marty McFly meets Elizabeth Bennet?”

The big hospital lift arrives, and the door slides open. Eddie blocks it with one foot and waits. If I go down with her, she’ll insist on keeping me company until my mother arrives. But my mother isn’t coming to pick me up because she doesn’t know I’m here. She mustn’t find out either. Not yet anyway.

The door begins to close, but Eddie forces it open again with her elbow.

“Why didn’t your mother come with you today, Sam?”

“She had to take my brother, Malcolm, to the dentist.” My voice is white, lit up by this barefaced lie. “He gets scared on his own, and I—”

“You don’t.”

I nod. How I wish the ground would open up and swallow me! “I need to go and wash my hands,” I mumble.

Eddie shoots me a quizzical look, then steps into the lift at last. She raises her hand as the door slides shut and parts her fingers between the ring and middle fingers. Mr. Spock’s Vulcan salute. I instinctively return the greeting. I stand there as the lift travels downward, still holding up my hand as if I’m the last Trekkie, forgotten in the galactic mists—and only after what feels like a thousand years do I press the button to call the other lift.

SHE’S SITTING DOWN, hunched over a book in which she’s calmly making notes with a pen. She hasn’t spotted me yet, and I could slip past her. That would probably be the best thing to do, but as Scott le Brainman would say, “You can’t ignore the fact that there are many other lives you could be living. And they’re only thirty seconds and one expulsion away.”

She glances up as I knock gently on the window of the nurses’ common room.

“Oh, hello there, young stranger!”

“Hello, Mrs. . . .” Quickly I read the name embroidered on the breast pocket of her nurse’s uniform. “Hello, Nurse Marion.” She puts a bookmark in the book she’s reading and shuts it. The words Madelyn Zeidler are written on the page marker. “And who might you be?”

“Samuel Valentiner, Nurse Marion.”

“Valentiner, eh? I don’t believe that we have a Valentiner up here for you to visit, do we?”

I shake my head.

“So what can I do for you, Samuel?”