Page 31 of The Déjà Glitch

6

As it turnedout, a rideshare from Pasadena back to Silver Lake was not cheap. Gemma considered invoicing Jack for the inconvenience.

She had texted Carmen to tell her she was on her way to the studio after a quick stop to pick up her car, then spent the rest of the ride sorting out her thoughts about the morning. By the time she was knocking on Lila’s front door, she felt ready for a nap.

“Oh good, you’re alive,” Lila greeted her. She had changed out of her overalls and into a sundress. Her hair was twirled up in a towel and she wore a pair of half-moon stickers beneath her eyes. Gemma had always assumed they helped with puffiness, but she really had no idea what they did. “How did it go?”

Gemma pushed in the door and words came spilling out of her mouth as if someone had turned on a fire hose.

“That was a mistake. He took me to see a professor out at Caltech, this old theoretical physicist who was a friend ofhis dad’s, and he basically gave me a private lecture on our perception of time and reality and how everything in the universe is random and moving in different directions all at once, and sometimes things crash into each other and get stuck, and then you need some kind of jolt to unstick it all, and Jack thinks the jolt is that I have to reciprocate his feelings and fall in love with him! Today!”

Lila stood still and blinked at her as she paced the living room breathing hard and fast. “And you thought what Clara said was senseless?”

“Lila!” Gemma snapped, and stomped her foot.

“Okay! Okay, calm down. Here, have a seat. I’ll get you something to drink.” She gently pushed her onto the couch with her cool, well-moisturized hands.

Gemma obeyed and tried for a deep breath. She had been stewing in the car the whole way, but apparently her thoughts were not as organized as she had believed.

Lila returned with a brand of seltzer Gemma had never heard of with a straw bobbing in it. She held it to Gemma’s lips like a mother giving her kid ginger ale for a stomachache.

“Thank you.”

Lila patted her back. “Now, tell me again what happened?”

Gemma took a gulp of the bubbles and another deep breath. She started over, much more slowly. “Basically, he had a really smart scientist explain to me how a time loop might actually be possible, and said that we’ve relived this day, today, one hundred and forty-seven times. The scientist said I’ve started to remember Jack now, as of last night, because he kissed me, which was a jolt that made me tunein to what’s going on. Jack thinks that’s further evidence that...” She took another sip of her drink to buy herself some time because she knew Lila’s reaction to the next part was going to be nothing short of overdone. “He thinks that me falling in love with him, today, is what will break the cycle.”

Lila blinked big green eyes at her and, to Gemma’s surprise, did not jump up off the couch to sing in celebration. “That’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard.”

Gemma grumbled despite Lila’s relatively tame response. She’d had the same thought in the coffee shop, but now that she was experiencing the fallout, her opinion had changed regarding where this situation fell along the sanity-romance spectrum. “It’s the mostirrationalthing I’ve ever heard! Fall in love in a single day? That’s impossible!”

Lila reached for her flailing arms and removed the seltzer so that it didn’t spritz her sofa. “Gem, listen to yourself right now. This gorgeous, sweet, maybe-a-little-bit-weird-but-so-what guy tells you this wild, fantastic, impossibly romantic story about the two of you essentially stopping time, and the part you can’t believe is that you have to fall in love with him?”

Gemma scoffed and looked away. “You make it sound like I’m some heartless monster.”

“You’re not heartless.” Lila gently reached for her chin and turned her face back. She looked into her eyes with a level of understanding that only a best friend could possess. “You’ve had your heart broken, badly, and I know that has made it hard for you to open it up again.”

In true Lila fashion, she had gone straight for the truth.

A warm rush of pain surged up Gemma’s throat. Hereyes involuntarily washed over with tears. She sighed, embarrassed that the wound was still so vulnerable. “Sorry,” she said, and wiped her eyes. “I should be over this by now.”

Lila reached behind her for a tissue out of the box on her end table. “Don’t apologize. You can cry all you want in front of me. I just hate to see you so jaded.”

Gemma breathed a soggy laugh and dabbed her eyes. “I’m notthatjaded.”

“No?” Lila asked as she wiped a tear off Gemma’s cheek. “Here you are in this real-life fairy tale where you have to rescue someone—and maybe even save the whole universe, who knows—with true love, and your response is to run away screaming?”

Gemma rolled her eyes and laughed. “Again, you’re making me sound like a monster.”

Lila smiled and then grew serious. “Gemma, the reason I always push you toward dating is because I saw how much you loved Nick, and what that did for you, how it opened you up. I know the thought of doing that again is scary, given how badly that turned out, but doing it with therightperson, Gem? Someone who deserves you and will put you first? Just imagine.”

Gemma had imagined. Long before Nick, she imagined falling in love with the perfect guy and watching her world blossom into something new and beautiful. When she met Nick, she had felt that. She had even broken herno musiciansrule because she had fallen so hard for him. He was charming and talented, not to mention hot as hell. He had Kurt Cobain hair and played the guitar, for heaven’s sake. And that’s what he was in one go: heaven and hell. Hot and cold. A man who made her feel more than she ever had, andalso the kind of man who could take it all away without a look back. When it turned out that nothing in their relationship was sincere and he had been using her as a means to get to an end—her father and a record deal—she stopped imagining love was so great.

But now Jack had crashed into her world like a wrecking ball, spilled coffee all over her, confessed he loved her in so many words, and was making her start to imagine again.

She wiped her nose with an inelegant sniffle she would only perform in front of Lila, Patrick, or her mother. “And you think this nutty guy chasing after me is the right person?”

Lila shrugged. “He could be! He seems pretty stuck on you if he’s lived this day—what did you say? A hundred and forty-seven times?”

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