Read More: A brief Q&A with Ian Baaske
I don’t remember how or why we started looking at my old yearbook that night. But we did. My neighbor Laurie was over. We’d already knocked off our first bottle of wine and were on to our second. We were laughing about something hard enough that my belly hurt when Laurie suddenly stopped me flipping through the pages.
“Wait! Go back!” she said, the dark red sloshing around in her glass.
“What?”
She leaned over and turned a few pages backwards. Her dark curls fell onto the book and she swept them back behind her ear. She licked her finger and turned another page. “There!” she said. “Who’s that?”
She’d found a picture from the Winter Dance. Me and a few old friends in our dorky sparkly dresses and sky-high hair. We were lined up posing, our hands on our hips, the basketball hoop behind us, flanked by the swirling lights they brought in for school dances.
“The girl on the end,” she said. “Who’s that?”
“On the end?” I turned the yearbook back around. Laurie left her lilac-painted fingernail beside the girl’s face. “That’s Amy Dav.”
The name came quickly and easily to me though I hadn’t thought about her in years. She’d been a friend–but not really a friend. More like someone who was just always around.
Laurie set her glass down on the end table, just missing Ivy’s Rainbow Dash pony I’d somehow missed picking up. She pulled out her phone and flipped through it.
“What are you–”
“Hold on,” she said, holding her non-scrolling finger up. “You have to see this.” Laurie was self-conscious about her smile–she thought she had too many teeth. But she was grinning now. She held up her phone. “Here.”
I squinted at an old picture taken at some sort of pep rally. Everyone wore black and red, and their shirts all said Marauders on them. Red Ms decorated their cheeks. Teenaged Laurie was the second from the left, you could tell right away. But I think I made a face when I saw Amy Dav on the far right.
“Right?” Laurie said.
“What’s she doing there? Did she move?” I said. “What year was that?”
“You think it’s your friend, right? Amy Dav?”
“Uh, yeah,” I said. It was a thousand percent a picture of Amy Dav. The sideways smile, the bulb-like shape of her nose, the way she’d wear her hair in a bristly brown ponytail.
“Nope,” Laurie said with a triumphant shake of her head. “That’s a girl named Molly Wisniewski.”
“That’s–” I didn’t know how to answer exactly. “Are you messing with me?”
Laurie laughed. “I swear! This girl went to my school. I was friends with her. Well, kinda. I mean, I knew her.”
I shook my head.
“Don’t they say everyone has a doppelgänger?” Laurie said.
I thought about Amy Dav as I went to sleep that night. She was always there but when did I ever talk to her? I could remember one day at school having this splotch on my face and we were in the bathroom and she told me, “You’re worrying about nothing. No one can even see it.” I was really grateful. I wanted to hug her.
Chris was snoring and it was hard to go to sleep. I was worried I’d be hungover in the morning. Ivy would be up at the crack of dawn.
I knew where Amy Dav lived, though I don’t think I ever was inside. I never called her; I don’t think she ever called me. Maybe once? Maybe not even that. When I wasn’t with Stef or Nicole, I didn’t see her very much. I tapped my phone. 12:46.
I walked home with Amy Dav from a party at Joe Fortini’s. I could remember that now. I could remember the high wooden fence that circled his backyard and that gate opened out onto the old elementary school they’d closed. Maybe this was eighth grade?
Amy and I stepped across the playground between the slides and the monkey bars. Tall lights shaped like teardrops lit the school yard but cast it in shadows too. We were tipsy from wine coolers and we were singing, The Humpty Dance is your chance to do the hump. The same line over and over and we laughed and laughed, and our voices echoed about the dark park and the houses surrounding it which didn’t have any lights on. The laughs died down into the occasional snort.
I said something like, “We should do this at the talent show!” and Amy Dav said, “So funny. I couldn’t be watched like that. I’m supposed to do the watching.”
My memory started mixing with dreams and I was falling asleep.
“I tried a little experiment,” Laurie told me. We were at the park then. Ivy and Mia were playing together really nicely: both skipping along the wood-planked rope bridge between slides in some esoteric game.
“An experiment?”
“On Facebook. Did you see it?” She interrupted herself to yell out, “Mia! No, honey. Don’t pick that up.”
“No, I didn’t see it,” I said–a little surprised since I spent my life refreshing Facebook those days.
“I took your picture from the yearbook,” Laurie. “Cropped it to just Amy Dav and posted it. And all I said was, ‘Name this girl.'” Her curls blew back behind her in the breeze.
“What did people say?”
“They said, ‘Molly Wisniewski.’ Every single one of them. No one said anything like, ‘Gee, I don’t know. Maybe Molly Wisniewski.’ No. Every single one was, like, militaristic. ‘Molly Wisniewski.'” She laughed.
I shrugged. “I mean, they look alike.”
Laurie’s phone buzzed.
“Oh my god,” she said as she read.
“What? What is it?”
“This chick,” she said. “Sara Davies. Do you know her?”
I shook my head.
“She works at the library. I met her at story time.”
“What about her, Laurie!”
“Guess who she thinks Amy Dav is?”
“Not Molly Wisniewski?”
A proud smile crossed Laurie’s face. “Erin May.” The smile dropped. “No, Mia! Ivy was playing with that first!”
“Erin May?” I said. “Who is Erin May?”
Laurie shrugged. One of her hoop earrings caught the sun.
We walked home. Ivy and Mia, quiet and content, sat secured, each in her respective stroller. Laurie rested her phone on the handles.
“Sara Davies is texting me,” Laurie said. “It’s the same as us. Listen to this. ‘She was in my friends’ group but not in my friends’ group.’ Right? That’s the perfect way to put it. That’s Molly. That’s Amy Dav. And now that’s Erin.”
I shook my head. I was so confused. My brain hurt. I had this feeling like someone would step in and explain it all to us and the explanation would all make sense. But I couldn’t think of how.
When we got home, I spaced out on the couch while Ivy watched Caillou. Caillou’s grandpa was taking him to the park to race toy boats. I thought again about walking home with Amy Dav. What did she mean “I’m supposed to do the watching.”? Who says that?
Ivy demanded a juice box and I dutifully rose and wandered into the kitchen. I forgot why I was there for a moment and stood by the refrigerator trying to remember anything else about Amy Dav.
Over the next couple weeks, Laurie found two more identical early 90’s girls. One in Colorado and another on Long Island in New York.
“What is going on?” I asked her. We were in my kitchen, sipping on a special metabolizing tea. The girls were running circles around us, both dressed as Black Widow.
“No idea,” Laurie said. “Seriously, no idea. But I can’t stop. I have to get to the bottom of it.” She brought her lips to her teacup. The steam floated up past her eyes. It would be the last time I ever saw her.
I used to sing Ivy to sleep. The same Irish lullabies my grandma used to sing me. Rock in the rocking chair. The only light: her magic turtle casting pinpricks on the dark ceiling. From the window, I could always see Laurie and Dan’s porch light glow.
But that night, a car I didn’t recognize sat in their driveway. I let my singing trail off and glanced at Ivy’s sleeping silhouette. I knew Dan had taken Mia to a birthday party somewhere in the west suburbs and Laurie was home alone. I had an awful feeling though I couldn’t have explained exactly why.
I hurried into my room and threw on sweatpants. Chris was in bed watching basketball. “Where are you going?” he asked.
“I’ll be right back.”
I rushed down the stairs and outside. Whatever car had been there was driving off down the dark suburban street: too far away to tell anything about it. I texted Laurie. I turned back towards her house. The front door was open. I pounded on the screen door.
“Laurie!”
I threw it open. I knew no one was home. I called her. Her phone buzzed on the counter. Her Pearl Jam ringtone echoed through the empty house.
By the time Dan’s car rolled up to the house, the aluminum siding was bathed in police lights. He walked up the drive with a frightened Mia tucked onto his shoulder, his face already haggard, his jaw set firm like a defiant skull. […]
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Ian Baaske’s work has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, North American Review’s Open Space, Bellevue Literary Review, and Baltimore Review, and is scheduled to appear in Analog. He lives in Chicago with his family and writes at night when everyone else is asleep. Read more at tantabus.org.
Read More: A brief Q&A with Ian Baaske