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Max chose the diner because it was near enough to the Holiday Inn that she could walk there and back. It was not a good walk but even in Oregon few towns are built with good walks in mind and she had to cross one highway but she did it well. There was no fear in her when she crossed the highway because she had the rewind, but even without the rewind she would have had no fear because she had survived Mark Jefferson and the storm and the torment of her fellow adolescents at Blackwell and compared to all of that the highway was not anything. It was only a walk and Max took it early so there was not much traffic anyway.
They did have the truck but Max preferred not to drive it. It was a manual transmission and Max had her license but she had no experience with manual transmissions. Chloe drove the truck easily and Max had wondered who had taught her to drive stick (she thought Chloe had manifested the skill through sheer determination) but Chloe had not taught Max yet although she said she planned to. Max had nothing but time and that was really the problem with her life and Arcadia Bay and the world and the universe and all of it. She would learn to drive the truck eventually but she had not learned yet and so she walked.
It was early still, the gold-orange light of the sunrise bathing the streets and reflecting off windows and bumpers and mirrors and making the world gorgeous but, in places, hard to look at because of the glare. Chloe was sleeping when Max left the Holiday Inn and she would have liked to take a picture of the golden dawnlight breaking beautifully through the cheap hotel blinds and painting rich lines across her pale and lovely body, her limbs sprawled here and there, the scratchy yellow comforter bunched around her calves and ankles, her blue hair tangled artfully; Max could see the composition and it would be perfect and intimate and distant and obscene and virginal. She thought those things and then she was sick because those were the thoughts he would have. So she put her camera on the nightstand with the lens facing the wall and then she drank bleached sinkwater from her cupped hands before leaving the room and riding the elevator to the hotel lobby. From there she found the diner.
The diner had white walls and tiled floor and Max was given a sticky menu when she sat in her red booth. For a moment while she held the menu all of the other concerns were gone, and she could focus on squinting past the grease-stained laminate and choosing her meal of limp bacon or tough sausage. She chose the bacon and she ordered fried eggs too although she knew they would be wet and greasy. The waitress brought her a cup of dark coffee and promised her food would be out shortly and then Max was alone again with her thoughts until the blonde woman came.
“How’s the coffee, hon?” the woman asked, and Max believed she was a waitress so she nodded slowly.
“It’s good.”
“It isn’t. It’s bad and the food will be bad too. You know that and you don’t know why you came here. But you couldn’t stay where you were, could you?”
The woman sat across from Max and then Max knew that she was not a waitress but was something else. She was an attractive woman of middle age and from the way she sat Max knew she had two faces. She knew this instinctively like a rabbit knows to hide from a hawk. Both faces had dark green eyes and a sharp nose and blonde hair that was turning gray, and she had a faded scar tracing up from the corner of her lip towards one ear. If Max were to shoot the woman she would take two pictures angled to display her sharp features prominently, both in profile, one from the left and the other from the right, and she would display them facing each other so that her scar was visible on one side but not the other.
“Hi,” Max said.
“Hi,” the woman said. “I’m Lisa. And you’re Max, the very interesting girl with the very interesting power.”
Max looked at the door to the diner and she thought that she was not so hungry after all, and that it was not too late to go back to the Holiday Inn with Chloe and pick up drive-thru when they left town. It frightened her to be discovered and the fear was thick in her throat, but more than fear she felt uncertainty because she had never expected that someone else would know what she could do.
“Hold on there. Don’t run for it,” Lisa said.
“Who are you?” Max asked.
“I told you. I’m Lisa.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know. Can I show you something?”
Lisa had a bag with her. She reached into it and removed a gray handgun that she set heavily onto the table between them, and when it hit the table there was a thump and Max’s cutlery jumped on her cheap thin napkin and one drop of coffee splashed out of her overfilled mug and dripped down the outside of the ceramic. Max watched the coffee spread on the formica surface of the table and she tried not to look at the gun. It was hard though and she could not stop looking at it or thinking about it.
“I’m not going to shoot you,” Lisa said. “What good would that do? I want you to know that I have it. I might shoot somebody. I might shoot the waitress, or the cook, or that father over there. Do you see him? He’s wearing a blue shirt. He’s alone and he doesn’t have a wedding ring, but he has two daughters at home. Their grandmother is watching them. He’s on his way to work. You’re thinking: it’s Saturday! Shouldn’t he have the day off? Well, he works two jobs to feed his kids. It would be a shame to shoot him, but I might do it. And then you’ll make it so I never did it, but I think that would be messy for everyone. I’d prefer not to shoot him in the first place.”
“I get it.”
“I thought you would.”
Max looked at the gun. It was placed evenly between them with the barrel pointed vaguely towards Max but also askew, so that if it were to fire spontaneously the bullet would go wide to her right and into the booth and probably out the other side. But it was placed equally between them and so Max looked at her coffee mug and raised her arm from under the booth and moved her hand towards her mug which was in the same direction as the gun. Lisa put her hand on the gun and dragged it back several inches towards herself.
“Naughty, naughty,” Lisa said.
“I wasn’t—”
“Wasn’t what? Going to take the gun? Going to threaten to shoot me? Oh—going to take the gun and then travel back to before I put it on the table, so that maybe I would think I left it in my other pants? That’s creative. You’re a very creative girl, Max.”
Max took a sip of her coffee. Her hands shook when she picked up the mug and another drip of coffee came over the lip and spilled down onto her thumb. She blotted her hand with the cheap paper napkin before it could turn sticky. Lisa smirked devilishly and picked up her gun and held it casually against her shoulder, barrel aimed up towards the ceiling.
There was a gasp and a loud clatter of faux-ceramic, and Max flinched from the volume, her hand reaching out instinctively towards the threads, ready to pull, ready to propel herself backwards, ready make undone what was done, but there was no violence and she was not in danger; it was only a broken plate. Her eggs were on the floor and on the waitress’ rubber-soled shoes, and the waitress herself stood frozen and nervous with her eyes fixed on Lisa’s gun.
“That’s my mistake. I got ahead of myself,” Lisa said. “Don’t worry, this isn’t Pulp Fiction. As if I’d ever be that tacky. Max. Hey, Max. Do your thing. It’s better for both of us if she doesn’t know this happened.”
“I—” the waitress began.
Max grabbed the threads and pulled. When she rewound it was unlike anything else, and there, in the first moment like always, she felt that she could go all the way back to the beginning. But then the pain came and she knew it would kill her to try. She rewound anyway and the world shook and shattered and twisted, and the plate of eggs floated up off the floor and into the waitress’ hand and she walked backwards out of sight. Max relaxed her grip on reality, and the world reformed. The pain of the rewind throbbed behind her eye.
“Naughty, naughty…” Lisa said. She trailed off and looked at Max. “You went back, didn’t you? You did. But it wasn’t because—oh, the waitress saw my gun. I asked you to. That’s alright.”
Lisa moved the gun out of sight beneath the table.
“How do you know?” Max asked.
“You don’t think you’re the only special girl in the whole wide world, do you? You do? No, you haven’t even thought about it. You’re adorable. But you’ve been busy, so I can give you a pass.”
“But—”
“Here comes your food,” Lisa said.
The waitress arrived. There was no gun on the table this time, and as she placed the food down on the table Max’s eggs wiggled uncomfortably on the plate and Max did not feel hungry even though she knew she was ravenous. Lisa sat across the table and smiled charmingly.
“I didn’t know you were meeting a friend,” the waitress said. “What can I get you, dear?”
“I was a last-minute addition,” Lisa explained to the waitress. “You have a very motherly aura, do you know that? I think you must have a daughter. You do? She dyed her hair recently, didn’t she? You don’t approve but you don’t disapprove either. That’s good. There’s too many judgmental mothers out there already. Max here has a friend with dyed hair, but she doesn’t get along with her mother. Didn’t get along. The friend’s mother was a waitress, like you, but she died in Arcadia Bay. Did you hear about that? The whole town gone. What a tragedy.”
“I’m sorry…” the waitress said uneasily. She looked at Max’s chin and then at the table. She did not look at Lisa.
“Does your daughter come to visit you at work?” Lisa asked. “She does? That’s sweet. I wish I had that kind of relationship with my own mother, but she was a real bitch and I suppose I can be one too. I’ll have one of whatever your daughter orders when she comes to visit you.”
As Lisa spoke her grin became less charming. Max could feel it and she could tell that the waitress felt it too. The waitress still did not look at Lisa; she shuffled uncertainly and mumbled something about eggs and then left. Max would have liked a water to go with her coffee but she did not think to ask, and she did not think the waitress would have heard her if she had. And then she was alone again with only Lisa sitting across the table and still smiling savagely.
“How do you know?” Max asked again.
“How do I know what?” Lisa asked.
“Everything.”
“Because that’s what I do. You go back. I know everything. You’re very special but you’re not the only one.”
Max rewound.
“How do I know what?” Lisa asked. Then she blinked and said: “You went back. I thought we agreed you weren’t going to do that.”
“I just wanted to see what would happen.”
She rewound again.
“—back. I thought we agreed—” Lisa shook her head. “Now you’re just trying to annoy me. You’re succeeding. But you’re giving us both headaches, too, and I’m the only one with ibuprofen in my purse.”
“My head is fine,” Max said. Her head felt like it had been squeezed in a juicer and sold for a dollar a cup out of a wooden stand on her driveway.
“Of course it is,” Lisa agreed. “The question you should ask isn’t how I know what I know. It’s Why am I here? What do I want from you?”
Max fought the pressure on her brain and rewound.
“Why are you here? What do you want from me?” Max asked.
“This must be karma. I forgot what it was like to be young and annoying. I’m here to talk, really. I might make an offer but that will come later. I’m a curious woman, and that’s the truth. I want to know more about you because the choice you made in Arcadia Bay is fascinating. And I wanted to see your power in action, and now I’ve seen it. I’m impressed, Maxie. You’ve got something special.”
Max had felt petty but the feeling was gone now. She was struck instead by shock and on top of that was the fear from before. Lisa knew about the choice. She knew the decision that Max had made, the horrible decision, the unthinkable one, the great dark sin of her life; Lisa knew it and it fascinated her.
“I don’t want to talk about Arcadia Bay,” Max said.
“I do. I think you’ll come around to it; I have a gift for changing people’s minds. But we can start with something else. How about a question for a question?”
“You’ll answer my questions?” Max asked, because she had not known Lisa for long but she could see that Lisa preferred to be an enigma.
“That’s what I said,” Lisa agreed.
“You have powers. How did you get them?”
Lisa looked Max in the eyes and Max did not look away. They watched each other in silence and Max wondered what Lisa knew. There was the clink of cutlery from the few other diners and the squeak of rubber soles on the linoleum floor and outside a big truck drove past, its engine loud and roaring. Max could smell sugar. It was in the syrup and the pancakes and the coffee and it was stuck, sticky and ancient and room-temperature, in every crack and crevice in the restaurant. The waitress arrived and set down a plate of two over-easy eggs and one slice of toast in front of Lisa. She placed a cup of ice water beside it.
Lisa picked it up and took a sip. Lip gloss stained the rim, and when she returned the cup to the table condensation dripped down its side in thick beads.
“How does anyone get powers? A very terrible thing happened to me. It’s considered rude to ask.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve never met anyone else like me before.”
“You wouldn’t have. You have a very empty world here.”
“An empty world?”
Lisa unrolled her cutlery from her napkin and laid the napkin over her lap fastidiously. From her purse she withdrew a plastic package of alcoholic wipes and cleaned her utensils. She poked one of the eggs with her fork, the creamy yellow yolk running out over the white, and with her knife she cut a careful corner off of the toast. She pierced it with her fork, dabbed it in the egg, and brought it up and through her pink lips and her very white teeth.
“The food isn’t very good,” Lisa declared.
“I wouldn’t expect it to be.”
“You should raise your standards. Yes, an empty world. There are other worlds. Surprise. Some are very different and some are very similar. Some have many people with powers and some have very few. But, in every world, there are extraordinary people. These extraordinary people perform extraordinary acts, and afterwards they’re often taken to a different world and left there with no way to return home.”
“That can’t be true.”
“It is true.”
“And you’ve done an extraordinary thing on another world?”
Lisa laughed. She took another bite of egg but she did not appear to enjoy it. She said: “No, I haven’t done anything extraordinary. Not of the kind I’m talking about, anyway. But I’ve been in the presence of extraordinary people as they perform extraordinary acts, and I guess you could say I left home to search for someone who was taken from me.”
“And you’re still looking for them?”
“I’m more of a nomad now. I go wherever sparks my interest—didn’t I say I was a curious woman?”
“So you’re here because I’m interesting.”
“I told you that already. Do you believe me now?”
Max took a bite of her own eggs. She hadn’t touched them; they were cold now, and as Lisa said they were not very good. But she was hungry and her fear had passed.
“I think I do,” Max said.
“So tell me this: you stood at the end of the world and made a choice. It was a selfish choice. It was not the choice that a hero would make. How did you make it?”
“I said I didn’t want to talk about Arcadia Bay.”
“I think you’re lying. I think you want to talk about it, you want it desperately, but you can’t because it’s just you and your friend and she feels guiltier than you do. So talk.”
“I had two awful choices,” Max said. Her hands shook and she drank her coffee. “I could save the town or I could save Chloe. I stood up on the hill and watched the storm and I thought about all the people the storm would kill, and suddenly it was so clear: I could live without them. I could live without Arcadia Bay.”
“But not without Chloe.”
“Never. How do you know so much about what happened? Is that your power?”
“My power is to know things but it doesn’t tell me everything. I’ve been watching you. I bought a plane ticket to Portland and drove into Arcadia Bay the day after the eclipse because I’m drawn to interesting things. Imagine my surprise when I found you.”
“The girl who made the selfish choice.”
“Yes. My friend wasn’t that girl. She was selfless—too selfless. She saved the world and it cost her everything. I didn’t know her for very long. Only two years, and really only for six months. But she made a mark on me, so much so that my whole life is divided into the time I spent with her and the time without…” Lisa trailed off and looked into the distance, and Max could see that she was caught in the past, trapped in another time as completely as Max was when she rewound.
“I know what that’s like,” Max said.
She had spent years with Chloe as children and then five awful lonely years apart from her, and then abruptly they were together again. In the end they only had one week together, five days, five hard terrible painful terrifying bloody days, and it was the hardest week of Max’s life and the worst too but she would not give it up for anything because Chloe was with her through all of it. She had Chloe and she would not surrender her, not for Arcadia Bay and not for all the riches on earth.
“I’m sorry about your friend,” Max said. “But I’m no one special—”
“You’re right. If you were special you would have been moved to another world by those forces I still don’t understand. I suspect you nearly were. But you’re more like me, aren’t you? We have our people and we have our gold, and to hell with anyone else.”
“I don’t know…”
“Have you thought about what you’ll do now?” Lisa asked.
“Chloe and I are going to see my parents in Seattle. Then we’re going to drive around the country. Chloe wants to see an alligator.”
“That’s precious. No, I mean from now on. For the rest of your life, Maxie. You can do anything. You can go anywhere. You have the key to every lock and the code to every safe. You can know anyone’s mother’s maiden name and the street they grew up on. The world is your mollusk.”
“I don’t want to steal from people.”
“They’re not people if you pick your targets right. Look, I’ve been staying in Las Vegas. Come visit the city. It’s great—there’s shows, buffets, tigers, everything you could want. And there’s money to be made for powerful women like us.”
What would Chloe say? She was Max’s barometer in all things because she was braver and worldlier and more charming and because she did not care what strangers thought of her. Chloe would say that Lisa is full of shit, Max thought. Max had saved Kate. She had rescued Alyssa from falling in the pool, and she had comforted Courtney when she feared for her sick mother, and she had sat with Frank as he bled at the end of the world. They were all dead now but Max had helped them while they were alive. Max was not so selfish, was she? Or if she had been selfish then she would not be again.
Meanwhile Lisa sat judgementally, frightening waitresses, carrying a gun, speaking enthusiastically of robbing casinos and ATMs and probably homeless shelters too. Max could be Lisa. She could hang up her morals and become her and never help another soul. It would be very easy and she would go to bed every night on soft sheets with a full belly.
“You want my powers,” Max said. “You want to know if I can go back and save your friend.”
“Is that what all this is about?”
“Yes. You said it wasn’t, but it is.”
“I lied, sweetie. You should know more than anyone that the past is never really past. Come see me in Vegas. Don’t bother looking for me; I’ll know when you get into the city.”
Lisa stood up. She put two-hundred dollars on the table and left through the front door, the bell chiming lightly as the door opened and shut, and Max remained at the table and looked at the eggs Lisa had eaten two bites of and her own breakfast that she had hardly touched. Max counted to sixty twice and then stood and left the diner as well.
The sun was warm on her skin and Max looked up at the blue sky and thought about Lisa and Vegas and about Chloe, who still slept in the hotel room. Max dug in her bag and retrieved the polaroid of herself she had taken that morning. It was a basic selfie with no frills, no care for lighting, no composition—it was not taken to capture a moment or to immortalize a feeling, but for one purpose only. Max looked at the polaroid and the universe went white and then Max was back in her hotel room when she had taken the picture hours ago.
Max found a cheap hotel pen in one of the drawers and wrote in scratchy letters on the hotel door “DON’T GO 2 THE DINER” and then she thought about it and after a moment she wrote “EAT BRKFST ON THE ROAD.” She was satisfied with that and she went and sat on the bed next to Chloe. Max waited and she watched Chloe sleep and soon enough the room shook and turned white and Max moved forward through time again and the diner had never happened, she had never left the room, she had never ordered eggs and bacon, she had never met Lisa, there had been no talk of guns nor powers nor Las Vegas, and Max did not remember closing her eyes but they were shut.
She opened her eyes. She was sitting in the passenger seat of Chloe’s truck while they idled in a drive-thru.
“Whaddya want, Super-Max?” Chloe asked.
“I’ll have a sausage McGriddle,” Max said. “I’ll have two.”
“Excellent choice.”
The order was placed. Chloe paid. The teenager at the window gave them their food and Max unwrapped her breakfast.
“So where to?” Chloe asked. “Seattle, obviously. And then what?”
Max looked out past the windshield. The sky was dark and gray and full of clouds, and if she listened she could hear thunder rumble and she was certain that as the morning stretched out and faded and made way for noon the sky would grow darker and the lightning would come.
“What do you think about Las Vegas?” Max asked.
“The City of Brotherly Love? Awesomesauce. Let’s do it.”
Max laughed softly and said, “I don’t think that’s the same city.”
“We won’t know until we get there.”
Max rolled down her window. It was an old truck so the motor whirred and protested and the glass stuck a little, but in the end it rolled and she reached her hand out and held her palm up to the sky. A single drop of rain landed in the center of her palm and it felt warm like the sun.