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Jennifer pinched bridge of her nose and looked down again at the page she’d been pretending to read for the last five minutes. Benzene rings and valence structures sat in neat pencil copies across her notebook, but the words had gone soft on her. She could still follow them if she had to. She’d gotten good at that here, at making herself sit still and learn, (really learn, not just fake her way through tests the way she used to), under the warm cone of a metal desk lamp. The radiator ticked quietly behind her and the smell of paper and pencil shavings surrounded her.
Judith was ironing down the hall - the clean smell of starch crept under the door and reminded Jennifer that she had to take over the adjusted dress patterns for Home Economics. Judith was the best seamstress in their class, but she was hopeless with alterations. No one was more surprised than Jennifer herself when she sat down with the confusing mishmash of pattern pieces and notes and jotted down measurements and realized that… it was all just math.
Freaking math. And also that she was good at it.
So now they had a system. Judith made sure that Jennifer’s wardrobe was crisp and perfect (because none of that happened on its’ own anymore – they were stuck doing it all the hard way like her grandmother had told stories about when they were little) and Jennifer took care of all the math parts of the classes they shared.
It had started out just as a kind of trade – this for that – but within a month she realized that they were actually… friends? She’d had friends (real friends) back in grade school, before they moved – but that had been a long time ago, back in Pennsylvania. Moving to California had been one of mom’s “brilliant” ideas – boyfriend number two got a job in San Jose, so off they went.
The job hadn’t lasted, and neither had the boyfriend. A year after that she stopped even numbering them – mostly because mom stopped bringing them home for the most part.
She turned her pen between her fingers, then reached for the top sheet of the small stack of envelopes tucked beneath her chemistry book, just enough to touch the edge and reassure herself they were still there. David’s last letter was two days old. Her last one to him had gone out the morning before that.
She sent one every week at least, usually more when something happened she thought only he would really understand, and somehow they kept getting delivered. Neither of them had any idea how it worked, but… well. What was one more impossible thing?
He was almost as steady about writing as she was. Not quite, but almost. That made her smile a little. David had always needed a push before he moved. Now he moved - he just still did it in his own careful way.
George and Betty though - they were different. Harder in some ways. Easier in others. She leaned back in the chair and let her eyes close for a second, seeing George’s face the last time she’d gone… home. Back to Pleasantville for the weekend. He’d paused in the kitchen doorway with a dish towel in his hand as if he still expected someone – anyone - to tell him what came next.
Betty was changing in the opposite direction. She moved as if she belonged inside her own skin now. She was happy – practically glowing in the way that Cosmo magazine had sometimes talked about and Jennifer had always believed to have been some sort of advertising bullshit.
They were both adapting to this weird new world. They just weren’t adapting at the same speed, and Jennifer felt the drag of that every time she stepped back into the house and saw how carefully they both tried not to hurt each other.
She still called them Mom and Dad. They still called her Mary Sue. Sometimes with a little hesitation at first, and sometimes not at all. They knew who she was, or had been. They knew she had been somebody else once, somewhere else. That she had come from a different world and had another name there. But Mary Sue Parker was still the name that this world understood. And it sounded good there - in Betty’s voice from the kitchen, and George’s gentler, more bewildered versions of sweetheart and pumpkin and kiddo.
Jennifer kept her own name inside her head, but she wondered if that was really who she was anymore. Jennifer Wagner. Even thinking it now, she could feel how little weight it carried compared to Mary Sue Parker.
She looked down at her own hand, the pen still resting across her fingers. She hadn’t liked herself much as Jennifer Wagner. Not really. That girl had been loud when loud was easy, mean when mean cost nothing, and hungry all the time for somebody… anybody to look at her like she mattered.
Mary Sue Parker had started as a joke, an ill fitting costume. A name she was forced to wear because of some magic doohicky. Nothing in Pleasantville had seemed real enough to matter. But then – that name had become attached to a person she actually wanted to be. Not sweeter. Not simpler. More honest. More alive.
And that stung, somehow. She should feel worse about that. Every once in a while she still expected guilt to come down hard enough to flatten everything else, some clean punishment for preferring this life to the one she’d been born into. Her mouth tightened. She thought of her father disappearing out of their lives. She thought of all the years after that - her mother drifting from one loser boyfriend to the next, each one leaving behind another mess that she and David would be expected to deal with.
If she had gone back with David… she knew where that road led. She could see it too easily. More anger. More performance. More nights spent somewhere she didn’t want to be, acting like not caring was the same thing as being free. Turning into her mother, step by step – always chasing after some guy. Always the wrong guy, and never ever a guy who loved her back or was worth a damn.
Here, as strange as it still was, George Parker worried over whether she was eating enough. Betty looked at her the way a mother was supposed to look at her daughter, as if seeing her clearly was the most ordinary thing in the world.
Even Bill, with his quiet voice and those careful hands always stained a little now with paint or graphite, had made space for her without trying to use her for anything. Better parents, all three of them in their different ways, than the two people who had made her.
She let out a breath, closed the chemistry book, and flattened her palm over the cover for a moment. The dorm room went still around her. Across from her bed, the dark window held a dim version of the room in its glass: the lamp, the narrow dresser, the pinned notices on the wall, the shape of her own shoulder. Then another shape stood behind her - where there shouldn’t have been one.
The old TV repairman looked back at her from the reflection, faint as cigarette smoke trapped in glass. His face was tight with that same angry, pinched irritation he always seemed to carry now. Jennifer startled briefly, but ignored it. He couldn’t do anything to her here.
He could haunt polished windows and the backs of picture frames and any other surface shiny enough to catch a ghost of him. But there were no televisions in the dorms – nothing he could use for a voice. And even if she went into town to the Philco showroom and stood in front of a half dozen screens – what could he do to her? David had taken the remote control with him.
He could scold and pout like a little bitch is what he could do. And nothing else.
She pushed her chair back, rose, and crossed to the washstand as if she hadn’t seen him at all. The floorboards gave softly under her slippers. In the mirror above the basin his reflection had shifted to the far edge now, thin and furious. Jennifer reached for the pitcher, poured water into the bowl, and watched the surface break his face into ripples.
“Not tonight, asshole.” She said quietly, mostly to herself.
Then she took up her hairbrush, set the chemistry book aside for later, and left him there in the trembling water, angry as ever and powerless to do anything but watch.
---
The next afternoon came in soft and bright through the dorm windows, the kind of light that made everything look just a little dreamy. Jennifer had her books tucked against her side as she stepped out onto the quad. The air cool enough to wake her up but not enough to make her hurry.
A boy - she’d seen him at the beginning of term mixer - was waiting a few steps down, shifting his weight like he wasn’t sure whether to commit to standing there or pretend he’d just happened to stop. Neat hair, pressed jacket, a little too careful about the way he smiled when he saw her. When she saw that smile, she sighed internally.
“Hi,” he said. “Mary Sue, right?”
She paused, then nodded. “Yeah. Hi.”
“I was-” He stopped, recalibrated. “I was wondering if you might want to go into town this weekend. There’s a picture playing. Jimmy Stewart. I think you’d like it?”
No nerves, no excitement - not even the old reflexive flicker of this is what you’re supposed to do next. Just a quiet, steady absence where that used to be.
He seemed nice. Open, hopeful - and looking at her like she might say yes and make his whole week. She wanted to sit him down and tell him that she wasn’t his answer. She wasn’t anyone’s answer. But he wasn’t going to understand any of that. Hell, she barely understood any of it and it was the inside of her own head.
She shifted the books in her arms, not buying herself time so much as giving her hands something to do.
“That’s really nice,” she said, and meant it. “I just- I don’t think I’m going to be very good company for that right now.”
His smile faltered, but only a little. “Oh. I mean, it doesn’t have to be a whole… thing. Just a movie.”
“I know.” She met his eyes, gentle but not wavering. “I just don’t think I want to… start something I’m not actually interested in. That wouldn’t be fair to you.”
His shoulders slumped slightly. “Right,” he said. “Yeah. That makes sense.”
“I’m sorry,” she added, though it didn’t feel like the same kind of apology she used to make. Back… well, before. That would just have been a different kind of flirting. Push them away and see if they chase. This was not that kind of sorry. This was… well, too many things that he’d probably never understand, and if he did it wouldn’t be for a long time.
He shook his head quickly. “No, don’t be. I just… thought I’d ask.”
“I’m glad you did.” She smiled at him. It might have even reached her eyes.
That seemed to help a little. Not fix it, but give it somewhere to land.
“Okay,” he said. “Well. See you around, Mary Sue.”
“See you.”
He walked off toward the other side of the quad, disappointed but not crushed. Just disappointed. Normal.
Jennifer watched him go for a second, then shifted her books again and kept moving.
---
She could feel the shape of the moment sitting with her as she crossed the grass, not heavy, exactly, just… present.
It would have been so easy, before.
Say yes. Smile the right way. Let him buy the tickets, maybe dinner afterwards. If he offered. Laugh when she was supposed to laugh. Lean in when the movie got quiet. Let it turn into… whatever it was going to turn into. Maybe sex. Maybe just a blowjob.
That had been the whole deal, back home. Boys looked at you, or they didn’t. They wanted you, or they didn’t. And if they did, that meant you were doing something right.
That meant you were real.
She could see her mother in that, suddenly and clearly - like a reflection she hadn’t realized was in front of her. The way every new boyfriend had come in like proof of something. The way it never really turned into anything that lasted. The way every one took a little piece of her with them, and didn’t even care.
Her grandmother’s voice cut across that memory, sharp and tired: She’s wasting herself.
Jennifer had never known exactly what that meant when she was younger. Mom always said grandma was a pain in her ass, but Jennifer thought her mom was a pain in her ass, so she just assumed that was the normal way for mothers and daughters to exist. She’d been too young to realize that grandma’d been trying to warn her.
She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding.
“I’m not doing that,” she said under her breath, not loud enough for anyone else to hear.
And she wasn’t. That was the strange, solid thing under everything else. Not just refusing this one boy, or that one date. Dating, boys – she didn’t have to do any of it, did she?
She wasn’t even sure she’d ever really wanted it. Not the way she’d acted like she did. It had been… performance, mostly. A way to prove something she didn’t quite understand, to people who weren’t paying attention anyway.
Here, it didn’t buy her anything.
She had other things now. Classes she actually had to think about. People who needed things she could actually do. Conversations that didn’t revolve around being looked at.
She didn’t miss it.
That realization settled in her chest with a quiet kind of relief that felt almost like space opening up. Then, just as quickly, something else moved in to fill it.
Skip.
She slowed without meaning to, her steps dragging just a little against the path as the thought caught up with her.
She’d liked him. In her way. Liked how easy he was, how uncomplicated, how he looked at her like she was already the answer to a question he hadn’t quite figured out how to ask.
Jennifer winced slightly, her grip tightening on the edge of her book.
She’d been pushing it- pushing them forward because sex what you did with a boy. Because that was what made you worth something. Because if you didn’t, then what were you even doing?
She hadn’t thought of it as using him.
She hadn’t thought of it as anything, really, beyond the next step in a sequence she’d learned by watching someone else fail at it over and over again. But with hindsight, with everything else stripped away, she’d used him. The same way the boys in San Jose used her.
She’d tried to apologize, the last time she’d been back.
“I’m sorry,” she’d said then, more awkwardly than she’d meant to. “For- I think I kind of… pushed things. With us.”
Skip had blinked at her like she’d just told him the sky was the wrong color.
“Pushed?” he’d said. “What do you mean, Mary Sue?”
And she’d tried to explain, or at least gesture at it. The way she hadn’t been thinking about what he wanted, not beyond the fact that he wanted her. The way she’d been… directing things.
He’d just smiled, soft and a little confused, like she was overcomplicating something simple.
“Mary Sue,” he’d said, “that’s not- I mean, that’s what got me my colors.”
Like that settled it. Like that made it good.
“I wouldn’t change any of it,” he’d added, almost apologetically, as if he were the one trying to reassure her.
Jennifer had stood there, caught between relief and something that felt a little too close to being let off the hook.
She was glad he was happy. That part was easy.
She was glad he’d found someone else, too. Someone nice. Nicer than she’d ever really been to him, if she was being honest with herself. He deserved that. Someone who saw him as more than a step in a sequence.
Whatever she was turning into, it wasn’t that version of her. Not anymore. She wasn’t entirely sure what it was, yet - but it felt like moving forward.
That was enough, for now.
---
The road ended without ending.
On one side, Pleasantville kept going in clean, bright lines: a white fence, a trimmed hedge, a row of maples in soft spring leaf, all of it lit by the mellow gold of late afternoon. On the other, the same road narrowed into a stretch of blacktop under a darker sky, where the horizon hung in a permanent state of maybe-storm. The telephone poles leaned at slightly wrong angles, their wires humming a note too low to belong to any ordinary current. Between them sat the border itself: a narrow service station with one gas pump still bright from 1958, and one from no year at all. A flickering sign that read GAS in red enamel hung on one side, mirrored by a green and flickering VACANCY on the other.
A television set stood in the open doorway where a soda machine might have belonged. Its screen was dark.
Rod Serling stood beside the pump with a cigarette held between two fingers. His coat was buttoned, his posture was exact in a way that mortality was generally loathe to allow. He looked at the seam running through the concrete beneath his shoes with mild interest. It was a hairline crack where bright Pleasantville sunlight met the cooler gray wash of the Zone. The seam had widened since morning. It had widened yesterday as well. This did not seem to trouble him.
The TV Repairman came striding up from that brighter side, toolbox swinging hard enough to knock his trouser leg. He had lost some of his old salesman brightness. His eyes were hot and tired, and the line of his mouth kept trying to turn mean underneath it.
“You see?” he said, before he had fully reached the pump. He set the toolbox down with a clang that shivered through the station floor. “You see what she’s done now?”
Once he had been a chipper little thing, all bright eyes and creative energy. Now though, his voice had gone harsh and querulous. Serling turned his head a fraction. Smoke rose between them in a thin, straight line.
“What she has done,” he said, “is remain.”
The TV Repairman threw out a hand toward Pleasantville, toward streets and houses beyond the that multiplied day after day. “That is exactly the problem.” He huffed.
The Repairman took two quick steps, stopped, and pressed his palm flat against the pump globe as if he needed something solid under it. “It was supposed to be temporary. A visit. A little excursion. A novelty. The boy goes home, the girl goes home, and the whole thing settles back into shape. Nice and orderly. Curtains where they belong. Dinner at six. Basketball at seven. Credits rolling on time.”
He looked past Serling into the Zone as if expecting the darkness there to offer sympathy and, finding none, turned sharp again. “I can’t reset Pleasantville while there is still a human inside it. That’s the rule. You know that as well as I do.”
“I do.”
“The boy had the good manners to go home.” His voice tightened. “Back where he belongs, with all his ugly appliances and his modern anxieties and his impossible little conscience. But the girl.” He stopped long enough to drag in a breath through his nose. “She won’t leave.”
The screen in the doorway flashed once with a burst of white static, then went dark again. The Repairman flinched toward it before controlling himself.
Serling regarded the dead screen, then the man beside it. “A curious inconvenience, isn’t it - when the locking mechanism develops opinions of its own.”
“That is not funny.”
“Perhaps not,” Serling said. “But it could be… educational.”
The TV Repairman snapped the toolbox open. Inside, under neatly fitted instruments and coils of wire, lay a remote the size of a brick, its chrome dulled by use. He put a hand over it possessively, then shut the lid again before he could seem to have shown too much.
“She is contaminating the structure by staying there,” he said. “Every day she stays, the town reaches further. Another road. Another school. Another set of desires nobody asked for. A university, for heaven’s sake.” He gave a small disbelieving laugh with no humor in it. “Do you know what that place looked like when I built it? Nothing. There was no need for it. Then she wants things, and they want things, and suddenly I have geography!”
Serling let the cigarette ash lengthen. “Pleasantville has discovered the oldest contagion.”
The Repairman stared at him.
“Choice,” Serling said.
The Repairman’s expression soured. “Choice. Freedom. Self-expression. All those lovely little words people use when they mean they would like to break the furniture and call it growth.” He bent, snatched up the toolbox, then set it down again as if the weight of it had surprised him. “I could still fix it, you know. If she were out. If the last human foot came off that stage, I could set the scenes back in order and close the doors and stop this ridiculous spillover.”
He jabbed a finger at the crack in the pavement between them. At once the neon VACANCY buzzed and one of the letters in GAS went dark.
“Instead I have this! Your fog on my sidewalks. My houses leaking into your little morality plays. It’s… it’s… untidy, that’s what it is. Untidy and unmannerly and rude.”
Serling drew once on the cigarette and let the smoke out slowly. His gaze moved over the split station, the mismatched pumps, the television in the doorway, the service road that belonged entirely to neither world now. “Untidy, perhaps. But not without character.”
The Repairman made a disgusted sound. “You would find character in a roof cave-in.”
“I have found it in less.”
For a moment only the wire-hum and the thin electrical clicking inside the sign filled the station. A breeze crossed from the Zone side carrying cool air and the smell of rain that had not yet happened. It reached the Pleasantville side and came back with cut grass and warm dust.
The Repairman shoved his hands into the pockets of his brown jumpsuit and rocked once on his heels. “You are taking this entirely too calmly.”
Serling turned enough to face him now. “Why should I not?”
“Because your border is being encroached! Eaten away by mortal fecundity!”
“My border,” Serling said, “has survived invasions by paranoia, vanity, loneliness, ambition, panic, nostalgia, technology, and the occasional visitor from a star system with poor manners. A town learning to feel more deeply than its designer intended does not strike me as cause for alarm.”
“It ought to.” The Repairman’s voice sharpened. “You know what happens if this keeps going. The seam gets wider. The laws get sloppy. Cause and effect stops respecting property lines. Nothing resolves. Nothing resets. We end up with some ugly mishmash where nothing works!”
Serling’s mouth moved almost toward a smile.
“A charming possibility,” he said.
The Repairman stared at him as if he had spoken in another language. “How can you stand there and call it charming?”
“Because there is, in this particular disorder, a trace of something rare.” Serling flicked ash neatly onto the concrete. “A constructed world that was intended to run on script has discovered appetite. It has begun to ask for more life than it was issued.”
The Repairman’s face hardened. “It’s theft is what it is, pure and simple.”
“Only if one believes that parents own their progeny.”
The Repairman stepped closer. He was shorter than Serling by a little, broader through the shoulders, more visibly physical in his irritation. His fingers opened and closed at his sides. “You always do this. You dress a disaster in philosophy.”
“And you,” Serling said, “mistake possession for order.”
The Repairman moved to the doorway, put one hand on the television cabinet, and rapped his knuckles once against the wood. The blank screen answered with a low phosphor bloom, then a dim picture struggled up through snow. For an instant Jennifer’s face appeared in the static, reflected from some dormitory mirror or window far inside Pleasantville, her mouth moving around words he could not hear. The image tore sideways and vanished.
“She’s a guest with no manners and she’s ruining my town!”
Serling glanced toward the dead image, quite unmoved by the Repairman’s hysterics. “No. She has crossed the threshold that turns guests into residents and residents into authors of consequence.”
The Repairman rounded on him. “She should have gone home.”
“She was handed the means to choose otherwise. By you.”
The Repairman’s eyes narrowed.
Serling did not move. “You provided the instrument. A small object, oddly shaped, with more promise than caution and rather more power than discretion. You placed it into human hands. You opened the door. If you did not wish them to play with your toys, you should not have handed them over so easily.”
The neon sign buzzed louder. Somewhere down the road on the Pleasantville side, a car horn gave a polite single honk and then another, as if a driver had encountered a stop sign where no intersection had existed the week before.
The Repairman stared at Serling, jaw working. “I was looking for appreciation,” he said at last. “For someone who knew what the thing was worth.”
“And you found two humans.”
“Yes.”
Serling inclined his head once. “There is your irony.”
The Repairman gave a brittle laugh. “That’s your answer to everything.”
“Often,” Serling said, “it is the correct one. Especially where humans are concerned.”
He dropped the cigarette, crushed it beneath his shoe, and looked past the station into Pleasantville. The sunlight there had shifted lower. Far off, just visible at the end of a road that should not have reached this far, a new building stood where there had been non-existence a week ago. Brick. White trim. Tall windows. A campus structure of some kind.
The border held - for the moment, at least.
The Repairman followed his gaze and saw it too. Another addition. Another fact. He made a small, furious sound in the back of his throat.
“I can still stop it,” he said, though he no longer sounded certain whether he was speaking to Serling or to himself. “Once she’s out.”
“Then the essential problem is not expansion,” Serling said. “It is consent.”
The Repairman did not answer.
Serling buttoned his coat with deliberate fingers. “You have built a world that now prefers an erstwhile intruder to its architect. That is judgment, of a sort.”
The TV in the doorway remained blank now. The pump on the Pleasantville side clicked softly as if counting gallons for no customer. On the other pump, the glass over the numbers had fogged from within.
At last the Repairman bent, shut the toolbox properly, and lifted it. “You’re enjoying this.”
Serling regarded him with mild, unreadable gravity. “I am observing it. Some border disputes are tragedies, some are warnings, and some are invitations. This one… has not yet decided which it intends to be.”
He turned then and began to walk into the gray road of the Zone, polished shoes making almost no sound on the blacktop.
The TV Repairman stood in the doorway of his impossible station with the toolbox hanging from one hand and a blank screen at his shoulder, looking toward Pleasantville with a pained grimace. He had lost control of his well-ordered machine. Once it had only held the semblance of a town, and obeyed his every desire. Now it refused to even acknowledge his presence.
The crack in the pavement widened by the width of a thumbnail.