Transversals

XII. Thriller

"Okay okay okay, now go back through," Mattie's excited voice lilted. Music was on in the background, Afton and Mattie in a heated round of Uno while I showed them my newly acquired skill.

Facing the mirror, I took a big breath and thought of something to piss me off, something maddening, angering...aha. Confederate flags.

I stepped through without a problem, into my own quiet room. Looking behind me, Mattie and Afton were cheering again. I smiled and thought of the same thing to go back, familiar warm feeling in the pit of my stomach allowing me to pass as I pleased. I realized it worked like ladder rungs: there was no in between to rest on. You couldn't get caught between dimensions. You either went through, or you smacked into glass (as I had done more times that week than I cared to admit).

Mattie's cute little laugh was infectious and his wide, pale eyes bright. "Oh wow, I would've never guessed alternate dimensions could be accessible." He set a yellow card on the pile. "Exist, yes. Reached, no."

See, Mattie was a reincarnation of the cutesy anime guy to a T. The curly blond hair, the wide pale eyes, the tiny stature. He was only fourteen and a junior, he explained. Skipped a couple grades when he was younger, got to high school early, still ahead of the learning curve however. I couldn't stop temporaily dying at his downright ambrosial, adorable nature and undying positivity.

Afton hit his hand. "You have Uno, you dork. Now you have to pick up the whole pile."

Mattie only smiled as he added twenty cards to his hand, eyes excitededly scanning. "I'm going to have a card for everything now," he whispered, positivity shining through.

He brought me to the realization that Afton and Mattie had no idea about Lana, Ben, and Jeremy's dimension hopping. At all. I had asked her if Ben was still going to her school and she said yes, adding that Lana had "transferred to a private school a few hours away, as a part of a leadership program". She would come back eventually, anywhere from a month to the end of the school year. Her leave was an undetermined amount of time.

That's what tipped me off that the entire thing was still a secret. Afton voiced her concerned, since Ben and Lana had never been so far from each other for so long. And, slightly suspicious about the "undetermined amount of time" bit. I agreed. That wasn't thought out very well on their part, but it must've been an on-the-spot lie they had to conjure up.

"Isn't that kind of weird?" I had asked her, taking a break from practicing my traveling one evening.

Afton then shrugged and continued her homework. "Maybe. They don't really have anyone else besides themselves and us, though. Ben's Mom and Dad abandoned them when they were fourteen, so they live with his grandmother in a little condo just outside the city now. Lana was given up at birth, adopted by Ben's parents. They traveled around a lot before then, went from school to school and house to house until finally being kicked out for whatever reason. Their grandmother's a little off her rocker, so no one's ever visited her. Alzheimer's, you know."

I remember sitting down, overwhelmed with the story. "Wow. Hard life."

"Yeah," Afton agreed, punching in a few numbers to her calculator. "So I get why they stay together a whole ton. Don't have anyone else to be dependant on, been together since diapers, etcetera. Ben doesn't like to talk a lot about it."

I nodded, and didn't ask any more questions.

Now it was Friday night and the flight team had the week off, so Afton invited me to her little get-together. Ben had been invited as well and Jeremy was coming later on, Lana regretfully too caught up in her new school life. So for the moment it was just us: a threesome of pleasant personalities and good music.