Parallel

cause it. Since her yesterday is a year behind mine in time, I need to remember what happened on September 26, 2008.
    A blue-and-white school bus turns from High Street onto Elm. I pick up my pace to catch it and am surprised at how quickly I’m winded from the effort.
    There are a handful of people on the bus, scattered among the first few rows. I go all the way to the back. Sliding down until only my chest is upright, I pull my knees up and press them against the scratched brown leather seat in front of me, the way I used to do in elementary school. Cell phone balanced carefully on my stomach in case Caitlin calls back, I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to summon the memories I need. The memories that will make this all make sense.
    Think, Abby. September 26, 2008. It would have been a Friday. That makes it easier. I only have three Friday memories so far, so this one would have to be—
    My phone rings. Thank God. I slide farther down in my seat, out of view.
    “Please don’t tell me I joined the sailing team,” I say, answering.
    “You didn’t join the sailing team.” I can hear Caitlin smiling.
    “Then why am I supposed to be at a boathouse at eight o’clock on a Sunday morning?”
    “You really have no idea?” she asks.
    “I really have no idea.”
    “Wow! So reality changed again!” she exclaims. “That’s—”
    “Where’s Tyler?” I ask, annoyed that she’s not whispering. “And Muriel?” Muriel, Caitlin’s roommate, rarely leaves their room.
    “Tyler’s asleep on our futon, and Muriel’s in Pennsylvania for the weekend,” she replies. “So what else is different? And how’d you figure out you were supposed to be at the boathouse?”
    “Marissa told me. She was worried I’d be late.” I glance out the window and see a sign for Gilder Boathouse, two miles away. “We’re almost to the boathouse,” I tell her. “Please just tell me what’s there.”
    “You should try to figure it out,” Caitlin says. “What’s your latest alternate memory? That should tell you—”
    “Caitlin! I don’t have time for this!” This isn’t a freaking science experiment, Caitlin. It’s my life.
    “Fine. You’re a coxswain on the crew team.”
    My shoes hit the floor with a loud thud. “A what ?”
    “A coxswain,” she repeats. “The person who sits in the stern of the boat and steers it.”
    I press my forehead against the window, trying to process this. “Since when?”
    “Since Yale recruited you,” Caitlin says matter-of-factly. “Well, you’d already been accepted, so maybe ‘recruited’ is the wrong word. But, yeah. A scout saw you at a regatta last spring.”
    “Last spring ? I was a coxswain at Brookside ?”
    “Well, yeah. When you couldn’t run cross-country, you panicked that you didn’t have anything sports-related for your college applications,” she says. “The crew team needed a coxswain.”
    When you couldn’t run cross-country. My breath catches in my throat.
    “The nails,” I breathe as the memories come flooding back. So my parallel is smart enough to get into Yale but dumb enough to walk around a construction site barefoot. Awesome. “Well, I guess that explains the sneakers,” I mutter. I bought my running shoes after our first meet last year, when I decided my cross trainers were too heavy. The ones I’m wearing suddenly feel like lead.
    “That’s what’s different?” Caitlin asks. “Your foot?”
    “Yeah,” I say distractedly, running through a highlight reel of cross-country memories in my mind. I ran an 18:36, my best time ever, at the state meet last fall. And now it’s as if it never happened. It seems so unfair that she could’ve erased such a hard-won accomplishment. Did someone else from Brookside take my place at the meet?
    “Hey, Abby!” a voice calls. A girl I’ve never seen before is waving at me from a few seats up. She’s wearing sweatpants and a maroon Andover Crew sweatshirt, her auburn curls tucked into a baseball hat. A teammate. I smile and wave back, grateful for the phone to my ear.
    “So are you going to practice?” I hear Caitlin ask.
    I slide back down in my seat, out of view.
    “Yeah, that’s a great idea,” I say sarcastically. “Who cares that I have absolutely no idea how to do whatever a coxswain does? I should just wing it.”
    “But maybe you do.”
    “Do what?”
    “Know how to cox.”
    “But I don’t,” I say, confused. “I didn’t even know what a coxswain was until you told