Page 55 of Time Loops & Meet Cutes
“And I’ve had my period,” she says, “for, like, four months straight.”
“Yeah, that sucks. Nobody should have a four-month-long period.”
“Yet here I am, and I’ve just… had it. With everything.” Her voice is flat. “I can’t live in this time loop any longer. I considered going to an overpass and—”
“Avery—”
“But I doubt that would even work. I’d just lose the rest of the day, then wake up on the morning of June twentieth again.”
“We don’t know that for sure,” I say. “It’s likely, yes, but maybe that’s the one thing that would be permanent.”
“It sounds better than being trapped.” She shakes her head. “You don’t seem to care as much as me. You’re calm, and I don’t understand it.” Her voice is still flat, but a trace of bitterness has crept into it.
Yeah, a part of me was enjoying the break from work, and I’ve been having fun first dates with Cam, though it no longer feels like enough.
I don’t know how to make this better. What can I say?
I glance around the room. My gaze lands on a plant by the windowsill. Avery told me that it’s supposed to be watered every week, but she hasn’t watered it since June 18, which feels like a lifetime ago. Yet the plant is still perfectly healthy.
What Avery needs, I assume, is hope—and to spend as little time with Joe as possible.
“From now on,” I say, “every morning, when you wake up, just leave. Come to my apartment. Spend all day there.”
She nods.
“We’ll figure this out. We’ll redouble our efforts.”
“But how?” she asks. “We’ve tried so many things.”
“There has to be more. There’s always something to try.” I feel like I’m talking out of my ass, but it’s the best I can do. “We’ll devote all our time to getting out of this.”
“What if we’re stuck here for eternity?”
“I can’t believe that’s the case. Not yet.” I pause. “Your day is worse than mine, but I want to get out too. Everyone in my family is frozen in time. My niece has been fourteen months old formonths. My sister-in-law is pregnant, and at this rate, I’ll never get to meet my new niece or nephew. And it’s getting really frustrating that Cam doesn’t remember who I am.” I pull up the notes app on my phone. “So, what haven’t we tried?”
“We haven’t tried dying. What if that actually gets us out of the loop alive?”
“Err, let’s save that for later, since it could have serious consequences,” I say. “We could travel farther, somewhere outside of this time zone. Seems like a long shot, but we’re going to try it regardless.” I type it into my phone. “What about our jobs?”
“Our jobs?”
“You know, those things we haven’t done in a long time.Maybe we’re supposed to fix them somehow. I don’t know much about your job, but I could, I don’t know, refuse to keep doing the work of two people. Lodge a proper complaint about Tyler.”
I still feel like I’m talking out of my ass. Just saying whatever comes to mind, in the hopes that something will resonate with Avery so she doesn’t test death.
I’m all she has. Therapy won’t help when it’s unlikely she’d be able to make an appointment for today—and no therapist will remember what she said last session.
Unless…
“We need to look harder for other people who are stuck in a time loop—or who have been stuck in one before and gotten out. I’ve posted about it in lots of places online, but we can look in person.” I shoot her a smile that expresses more confidence than I feel. “Does that sound like a plan?”
When she nods, I exhale in relief.
In an effort to cheer Avery up, I suggest we go to New York the next day and see something on Broadway. If someone is truly depressed, they might be unable to get pleasure from anything, but I figure it’s worth a shot. The thought that she considered jumping off a bridge, even in our weird reality, makes me desperate to improve her life.
Before I leave for the airport the next morning, I text Cam, as I promised, and I soon get a response:
CAM: Sorry, you’ve got the wrong number.
