Archive of Our Own

The moment that she opens her eyes, Sophia can tell that something has gone terribly wrong. 

She’s too far off the ground, for one. And two, the ceiling has all these little glow-in-the-dark stars on it. She hasn’t seen these in years. About three years, to be exact. 

She sits up so fast that she nearly tumbles over the flimsy guardrail on the bed. She’s wearing this polka-dot matching set in a shade of purple she wouldn’t be caught dead in now. 

“Good morning,” someone says, and it’s Nayoung, Sophia realizes. Nayoung is standing beside the bed, folding a t-shirt into a neat square. This is strange because she hasn’t seen Nayoung in two years. 

“Morning,” she replies. Her stomach twists. She leans a little further over the guardrail, peering at the tangled mess of blankets on the bottom bunk across the room. 

Nayoung grabs a stack of clothing off her bed and goes to the plastic drawers against the only wall in the room not occupied by a bed or shelves built into the wall. She stubs her toe, which is quiet, and then yelps, which is less quiet. The mess of blankets whines and shifts, and Sophia wants to throw up when she sees Yoonchae’s fifteen year old face poke out. 

“Sorry, 미안해,” Nayoung murmurs, one hand out in front of her placatingly. 

Yoonchae shifts, burying her face in her pillow. Her eyes slip shut again and Sophia watches, frozen, as Nayoung puts the rest of her laundry away. She pauses when she’s done, looking up. 

“What day is it?” Sophia asks, hearing her own voice high and reedy in her ears. Yoonchae was just teaching Lara this the other day. “The date. 며칠?”

She watches Nayoung’s face shift, understanding, and the other girl grabs her phone. She holds it up to Sophia’s bunk, and Sophia has to squint against the light, without her contacts. She sees August first, and thinks okay, I’m dreaming, and then the first number, which isn’t as important as the one after that, which reads 2023. 

“Nayoung,” she says, “pinch me.” 

The other girl just laughs and steps away. When she opens the door, Sophia can hear the familiar sound of Megan and Dani giggling, but she can also hear Karlee talking and Ezerela’s electric toothbrush, and the world shrinks, briefly, into a very small point. 

All of her clothes are so juvenile. It takes her half an hour to pick anything out because there are so many pairs of sweatpants and none of them are a normal color. Most of her hoodies have flowers on them, and she barely recognizes any of the brand names. There’s a bucket hat hanging from a plastic hook on the wall. 

Yoonchae keeps coming in and out of the room to change her shirt. Sophia is having trouble not reaching out to squeeze her cheeks or something ridiculous like that, because Yoonchae looks so mature now, but this is still what Sophia thinks of when anyone says her name. She looks exhausted, and Sophia wants to tell her, desperately, that things will get both better and worse. 

“All good?” She asks when Yoonchae enters for the third time, holding a thumbs-up out in front of her. If she remembers correctly, Yoonchae’s english lessons are still focused on a list of basic industry terminology. Kind of fucked up, Sophia thinks, to be learning how to translate Nikky’s critiques before learning how to have a casual conversation, but she supposes that Yoonchae did sign up for this. They all did, sort of. 

Yoonchae doesn’t say anything, but she gives Sophia a smile, very polite, in return. She flashes a thumbs up, then leaves the room without changing again, and Sophia decides she’s going to have to wear these white sweatpants with purple acid-wash flowers on them. Nayoung has a neat stack of neutrals on her shelf. Sophia is strangely, deeply jealous. 

It’s almost exactly how she remembers it, except it’s a little worse. Missy is shorter, somehow, and Mitra is, like, actually around. She appraises them all with this look in her eye that Sophia’s come to recognize is just hatred. Mitra doesn’t know she hates them, because it’s hidden under how much she dislikes herself, and she isn’t aware of that either. 

At least, that’s Sophia’s working theory. That’s what she tells herself when Mitra scoffs at Dani showing up two minutes late in full beat. 

“You had time for all this, though,” she’s saying, waving at her own face. “Just not the time to get here when we ask you to be.” 

Dani has always been smart with things like this. She just looks at Mitra until the woman blows an annoyed puff of air out through her nose and leaves, calling something over her shoulder to Nikky about extra reps. 

“You’re okay,” Sophia hears someone reassuring. “She’s just on one today, Dani.” 

If it wasn’t her, Sophia has this working theory that it would’ve been Adela. They’re not well matched skill-wise, but she’s good with people. Maybe better than Sophia, at this point. 

A few steps away, Megan is standing with her arms wrapped around her stomach, looking kind of sick to her stomach as she watches Adela sling an arm around Dani’s shoulders and lead her over to the mirror to put her dance bag down. 

Nikky claps her hands loudly. Sophia feels her whole body jolt attentively, muscles tensing. They’re told to line up by mission group, so she does. 

She finds Megan, finally. It’s on a hunch that she even goes looking. 

The younger girl is wide-eyed when Sophia grabs her wrist and drags her away from the gaggle of girls in the lobby of the dance studio into the nearest bathroom, but she doesn’t protest, which is mostly how Sophia knows she was right. She doesn’t say anything while Sophia collects herself, which is how she really knows. 

“Something happened,” she says after a few beats. Megan is already nodding. “This isn’t supposed to be happening.” 

“Not again,” Megan breathes, shaking her head. “Not—” her voice breaks, and Sophia realizes that this is what she sees every time Megan gets nervous about going on stage at festivals or sold-out shows. Seventeen years old, slightly sloppy makeup. 

“It’s okay,” she’s promising before she can stop herself. “We can figure it out. We can get back.”

She doesn’t know if what she’s saying is even possible. Get back, as if the future is a place they can just drive to. Earlier, she watched Megan reach out for Yoonchae during dance practice and pull back like she’d been burned before she could get there. She’s done it too, thinking that Lara will know to step closer when she puts an arm out. She gets Marquise instead, which is also nice, and so, so much more painful. 

“How?” Megan asks. She ducks Sophia’s attempt at a hug to look at herself in the mirror. She prods at her cheek, lips curling into a little snarl. Her eyes are shining still, and she’s blinking a little too hard. She used to straighten her hair almost every day. Sophia had kind of forgotten about that. “What if we, like, mess up the timeline?” 

“We won’t.” Sophia is lying through her teeth. “I don’t think that’s possible. This might all just be some weird simulation.” 

Megan keeps pulling at her own skin in the mirror. She turns, examining her body. She can nearly get both hands around her entire waist. Sophia gets that sick feeling again, seeing the lines of Megan’s ribs beneath her sports bra. 

“That’d be real fucked up,” Megan says to herself in the mirror. Her nose wrinkles and she shakes her head again. She presses the heels of her palms into her eyes. 

Sophia has avoided looking at her own face in the mirror for too long. She’s not sure how it is that three years can do so much to a person. Three years and some complicated contracts. More eyes on her than she could’ve ever imagined and a few steady-handed doctors. Well, whatever. She’d had to redo her makeup after making it look too good on her first attempt. Twenty year old Sophia is not supposed to know her correct lip shade. She’s supposed to have pimples and awkward eyeliner and clumpy mascara. 

Megan showed up today without any makeup on. She was wearing sunglasses, just like she does when she’s trying to give her skin a break but doesn’t want to go full barefaced out in public, and Nikky made her take them off. You think you’re a pop star, Megan? She’s nicer to Megan than she is to some of the others, but Sophia could tell the joke had landed poorly.

“Yeah,” she agrees softly. “It would.” 

The bright side, if there is one, is that Sophia’s body knows everything her brain forgot. She moves through the choreo without fumbling anything too bad, and Nikky gets too caught up berating someone else to notice that she isn’t hitting half of the counts on time. 

Lara doesn’t come over to talk to her during their break. Manon sips water quietly in the corner of the room. She fans her face with her hand. Sophia remembers her looking so much older than she does now. 

“Sophia,” Dani chirps from behind her. “Nikky asked me to help you with your isolations really quick.” 

She must’ve just dyed her hair back to brown again. Sophia is expecting blonde when she turns and she must make some kind of face when she doesn’t see it, because Dani shrinks back a little. 

“Sorry, I can wait a few. Or, Adela’s over there, I can—”

“No, no,” Sophia shakes her head. It’s making her dizzy to be looking down at Dani like this. Usually, now, or in the future, Dani wears heels or platforms to be closer to the rest of them in height. But Sophia could stare right over the top of Dani’s head right now if she went up on her tiptoes. Without the heavy eyeliner, Danie’s eyes are so big. “You’re so good, Dani. Just got lost in my head for a sec.” 

She wants to go over and tell Manon she’ll make it. She wants to go over and apologize. 

“Oh, okay!” Dani smiles and, oh, Sophia might cry about this later. There are deep bags beneath the younger girl’s eyes and she’s, ironically, in need of some sunlight. A bit of a tan might help the gaunt look Dani’s got going for her right now. “Let’s do it then.” 

“Yes.” This might actually be hell. Sophia has died and has apparently done something so horribly wrong in life that this is her eternal punishment. Nikky is barking something at Yoonchae, who keeps looking over her shoulder at Nayoung. Manon is there and Sophia can’t go up to her. “Let’s do it.” 

It takes her a few days to figure out where they are in the timeline. In the end, it isn’t even her. Megan comes up to her on a Sunday and drags her outside into the backyard. Her hands are sort of shaking, and Sophia tamps down the urge to ask her if she’s eaten. 

“They’re about to tell us it’s a survival thing,” Megan whispers after looking over her shoulder a few dozen times. Most of the windows in the house have the blinds pulled down over them. Sophia would bet more than half of the girls are trying to catch up on sleep. “In like a week. Maybe less. Look at my hair.” 

She lifts a strand gingerly. What she means is, look at how they styled me. Sophia still hasn’t spent much time looking at herself in the mirror. Something about it makes her feel more off kilter than spending time with Marquise, which she hasn’t done in years. 

“So we got dropped in right before the worst part,” she surmises quietly.

Megan digs the toe of her sneaker into the grass. They’ve been getting unseasonal rain all weekend, and Sophia isn’t sure whether that had happened the first time around. The weather hadn’t really been top of mind for her. They spent most of their time in dance studios or recording booths. They spend most of their time in dance studios or recording booths. 

Even now, she’s half-convinced the grey sky is about to open up on them. It wouldn’t be a long run back into the house, but she has the feeling that they’d end up soaked regardless. 

“I have dreams about it sometimes,” Megan admits. Sophia doesn’t need to ask what it is. “This is punishment for something.” 

“That’s not how it works,” Sophia says, but she isn’t really sure. It could be anything, this time. She has no idea if this is cosmic or religious or scientific. She wasn’t kidding about the simulation thing. It’s almost more believable than the alternative: we got transported back to our twenty and seventeen year old selves for no apparent reason at all. The strangest part, maybe, is the fact that they’ve retained their current psyches. Mentally, Sophia is twenty-three. And she keeps writing 26 as the year in her journal. 

She’s got a laundry list of things she’s unsure about. She can’t remember if Megan was on Lexapro at seventeen or not. Yoonchae is either five foot eight or five foot six. Now is then, and then is now. 

“We don’t know how anything fucking works,” Megan replies, and starts walking back inside. 

Sophia is expecting raindrops to start falling right as the sliding door slams shut. She stands there in the yard for a while, waiting on the rain, but it never comes. 

They learn pretty quickly that they can’t actually do anything differently even if they want to. Sophia catches Manon in the hallway late at night after a vocal session, and because she is crazed or maybe just grieving, she grabs the other girl’s wrist. 

“Manon,” she says, and watches Manon’s face shutter, expression going flat. 

She pulls her wrist away, nearly slamming her elbow into the wall with the speed of it. There are a few tattoos missing from her hands and wrists. Sophia hates that she knows this, but she can’t remember which of Lara’s tattoos are being hidden from the execs for now and which just aren’t there yet. The thing is, Manon has always been pretty damn gracious. 

“What?” 

“This is wrong,” Sophia whispers, urgent. Manon’s eyes are shining in the dark. It's not at all what she’d meant to say. “I’m not supposed to be here.”

Manon’s gaze sweeps down and then up again. She takes a half step back, hands curling into the fabric of her sweatpants. 

“I don’t know what kind of joke that is, Sophia,” she says evenly, expression flattening. The only thing she can’t seem to control is the pull in her brow. “But it’s not very funny.” 

So Manon is gracious, but she isn’t crazy, and she doesn’t like Sophia enough to take her seriously. Not yet. 

She wakes up in the middle of the night to these little gasping sobs, largely muffled by whatever pillow or mass of blankets the crying person is pressing against their face. For a few seconds, she thinks that she’s hearing her own tears, because her cheeks are damp and she can remember enough of her quickly fading dream to know it had been a bad one. 

But then the world catches up to her—she’s not sleeping in her queen-sized bed in her room in her apartment. She’s on the top bunk of a three-person dorm-style room in a house that may as well be made up of cardboard and scotch tape. A cursory check confirms that the crying isn’t coming from Nayoung. Sophia nearly topples off the ladder in her haste to get down, falling hard to her knees at Yoonchae’s bedside. She can’t see Yoonchae in the dark, hidden beneath her blankets, but she hears her trying to hold her breath to keep quiet. 

Her instinct, honed by years of knowing Yoonchae, is to crack a little joke to break the ice. But this isn’t really the Yoonchae that she deals with on a daily basis anymore. This is Yoonchae from before. 

“Yoonchae,” she murmurs, keeping her hands where they are on her own thighs. “Why are you crying?”

She can take a few guesses. They’d probably all be right, to some degree. 

Yoonchae picks her head up from her pillow and Sophia, actually, cannot stop herself from reaching out to thumb away the tear tracks shining in the weak glow from their plug-in nightlight. Maybe she’s always been like this, because Yoonchae doesn’t seem all that surprised. She lets Sophia dry her face, and sits up a little more. 

“Is it evaluations tomorrow?” She asks quietly. 

Behind her, Nayoung shifts. She must not be awake, though, because Sophia’s pretty sure she would’ve gotten up to comfort Yoonchae if she’d heard the tears. At least, that’s what she remembers of Nayoung and Yoonchae’s relationship. They were—are—even further apart in age than Yoonchae and herself. By months, sure, but months aren’t nothing. 

Yoonchae shakes her head, even though Sophia can’t be certain the younger girl even knows what she just said. Yoonchae was—is—ways more tuned-in than anyone thought—thinks—she was, or is. It was the response part that got tricky. Is. Whatever. 

“Are you hurt?” 

No, not that. Yoonchae’s phone is facedown on the sheets next to her pillow, Sophia realizes now that her eyes have adjusted. 

“Do you miss home?” 

And, okay, it was always a little more complicated than that, but Sophia was never going to be able to understand all of Yoonchae’s complex feelings about Dream Academy while it was happening. Three years later, she still isn’t sure that she’s managed to get it all out of her. But that was now, or then, and Sophia might not be where she’s supposed to be, which she can’t fix, but Yoonchae is teary-eyed in front of her, and that’s something she can. 

When Yoonchae nods, jerkily and with trepidation written all over her face, Sophia knows that this must’ve happened already, because her body goes through all the motions for her. She perches on the edge of the mattress and opens her arms. Yoonchae slumps into them, tucking her face down against Sophia’s shoulder. She’s short enough for this to work well, but she won’t be for long. 

The thought makes Sophia hold on a little tighter. It is so, so much worse the second time.

They’re informed about the survival show while they’re all sitting in the same room, which is some intersection of merciful and terrible that Sophia can’t examine very closely even though she’s already experienced this once. Nothing has been better the second time it happened, so far, and the announcement is not an exception. 

Sophia remembers Megan clinging to Yoonchae’s side originally, and this time, she goes as far as to pull Yoonchae’s arm all the way around her so that she can bury her face in the other girl’s shoulder. It only seems to make her cry harder, and Yooncahe takes it with so much grace that Sophia thinks for a split second she’s about to find out that Yoonchae got her consciousness sling-shot backwards three years too. 

But Yoonchae doesn’t sink a hand into Megan’s hair; she hovers it awkwardly over Megan’s head for a long moment before settling it on her back instead. Her eyes are red and puffy. 

Manon is taking this shockingly well. She’s not crying. She’s standing next to her chair, jaw clenched as she stares past the group of them. Sophia follows her gaze, expecting to find nothing at the other end. What Manon is looking at, she realizes, is Missy, who is sort of crying too. 

Sophia knows something that no one else here knows yet except for Megan, and it’s that Missy will only be their manager for three years. 

Time is, ideally, not moving forward in the present while they’re stuck here reliving the past. If it is, when they get back to their proper selves, Sophia’s mental health hiatus will already be over and she’ll be in the middle of a world tour. If they get back. Which they will—she’s still confident about that much. She just doesn’t know how, really, and Megan has withdrawn so far into herself that Sophia keeps forgetting she’s there with her. 

“Do you remember what Yoonchae looks like as a blonde?”

They’re in Megan’s car, driving to the gas station for slushies, which is only sort of allowed. Sophia has the feeling they’ll get away with it even if they’re busted. She means the question light-heartedly, something to ground them in the reality they’re used to instead of this weird, floaty past one. 

She’s not expecting Megan to step on the gas, pushing the speedometer up from sixty five to eighty in less than a minute. 

“Barely,” she spits, white-knuckling the wheel. “I tried to Google her the other day like an idiot. It was like she didn’t even fucking exist.” 

“Technically, she doesn’t yet,” Sophia says without thinking about it. “Not like that.”

Megan changes lanes. The needle flickers closer to ninety. 

“Are you not—” she takes a hand off the wheel to gesture, and Sophia bites back her chastisement. She doesn’t even have her license. “Is this not hell to you? It’s like they’re dead, Sophia, but they’re right there.” 

“It’s really hard—” 

“You wanna know my new theory?” There’s something strange about Megan’s tone. She takes her eyes off the road for a moment to meet Sophia’s. The hand still gripping the wheel twitches. “If we die, we’ll get to go back to ourselves.” 

It scares Sophia, a little bit, that she closes her eyes instead of trying to talk Megan out of it. She braces for impact, but it doesn’t come when she’s expecting it, just like the rain. After a while, she peers through her lashes. Megan’s still pushing ninety, but she’s using both hands and really, she’s just following the flow of the left lane traffic. 

Also like the rain, Sophia isn’t all that surprised when Megan has to break suddenly as lights go up red in front of her and the seatbelt retracts, tightening painfully across her chest. She lets her body drift forward and snap back, feeling the pull of it in her neck, her shoulders.

Megan gets out of the left lane after that. She rides at a measured sixty-five until they get off the freeway, and then she follows the speed limits so closely that Sophia sort of wants to get video evidence for future Megan. Or, like, pre-future future Megan. Megan in two years instead of three. Look how much you’ve grown! Except, well. They don’t end up at a gas station.

“If I was brave enough for that,” Megan mutters, once she’s parked crookedly at the curb in front of the house. “I would’ve done it already.” 

If Sophia was brave enough, she would ask what Megan means by that, exactly. The younger girl has left the key on the dash. Instead, Sophia just sits in the passenger’s seat and watches Megan go inside. There’s this tiny room in the corner of the house. If Manon had chosen to live with them, the window probably wouldn’t be dark right now. 

She gets out of the car.

If they make it all the way to the finale, Sophia might have to get some kind of hypnotherapy done so that she doesn't have to experience that again. She isn’t sure she can handle Yoonchae’s face crumpling the way it had, or Manon hovering just outside the group hug with shaking hands. 

She’s trying to prove herself now. Sophia had seen this differently the first time around. She’d kind of wanted to see Manon crash and burn just as much as she’d wanted to hear Manon’s name called while they were lined up in front of all those flags. I think to love someone wholly, and I mean really love someone, you have to hate them a little bit too. She can’t even remember which girl had said that to her, drunk off of pilfered wine coolers in Korea. 

Now, she just wants to hug her. 

She wants to drag Manon into a coat closet and ease the tension keeping her spine so stiff with her fingers, or her mouth. She hates bruising her knees, but she’d do it without hesitation, now. Everything is now, but it’s not, and that’s the worst part. She keeps thinking about what Megan had said about messing up the timeline. Like, maybe there is something she could do wrong that results in her getting back to herself and Manon’s not there anymore. She’s halfway across the world, or right there in LA and just out of reach. 

“I want this for you.” Marquise is doodling something on the diner napkin with this puffball-topped pen she found on the floor while they were being seated. “I think you deserve it.”

She turns the napkin around, points with the tip of her pen. She’s drawn six crude stick figures, and given one of them an Ariana Grande ponytail. 

“We deserve it,” Sophia hears herself saying. It must be what she’d really said in this moment when it happened. “Both of us. We can be together.” 

Maybe she’d said we can be in it together the first time. It’s blurry. 

Marquise shrugs. Then she nods, expression hardening. “Yes. Yeah. You’re right.” She taps a little harder at the napkin. Sophia wishes she had a red crayon. “We can.” 

A red crayon and, like, a magic wand to make the magic number seven instead of six. She can’t imagine not having the other five, but they all liked Marquise. They would be good together, all of them, and the formations wouldn’t be so uneven. They could afford to get sick more often. 

“Marquise.” If she can do anything, it's to warn her. 

“Yeah?”

Sophia nearly gags trying to get the next part out. She starts coughing, and okay, maybe there is something in charge of whatever’s going on with her and Megan. She’s clearly not allowed to make any changes. She just has to sit back and suffer the ride. Maybe it’s Mitra, or the devil. 

“Okay, stop.” Marquise is saying. “No talking. Just breathe. I have water when you’re ready.” 

She’d forgotten about this. 

“—but he’s only going to be in LA for like two days, and I won’t be able to get out of the shoot tomorrow,” Samara is saying. “So, could you?”

Sophia’s instinct, that little deja-vu gut pull, is telling her to say no. She could go on some tirade about responsibility and showing up for your members, and Samara would probably wilt and cancel her plans to help Manon with her vocal training. But this is an opportunity for Sophia to be with Manon one-on-one. It might be her only opportunity until things get back to normal. 

She really, really wants to know if Manon in the future—her present, or past, maybe, the future past—misses her. 

“Yeah,” she nods. “I can do it. Just let her know so she isn’t surprised when it’s me.” 

Samara nods and bounces away. Sophia considers, wildly, going out to buy some new underwear. 

Sophia realizes very quickly that Samara had not, in fact, let Manon know about the change of plans. The way that the older girl’s face drops when she sees Sophia step through the door is almost enough to make Sophia cry on the spot. 

“Is this some kind of intervention?” Manon says, already reaching for her phone. “Because I thought I told you guys already. I’m just as committed to this as you are. I don’t need to hear whatever you have to say about work ethic, or whatever.”

Something that Sophia isn’t supposed to know yet: Manon isn’t as dedicated to the pop star life as some of them are. But that doesn’t matter. That’s the part Sophia had to learn for herself. Manon still loves it. She connects with people better than any of them. 

They’re not there yet. She blinks, shaking her head a little. 

“No, I—” her throat catches, “sorry, I just—”

Manon is so gracious. Sophia isn’t sure she’ll ever stop repeating that to herself, and to others. 

“Oh shit,” she murmurs, standing up not to run out of the room but to round the table and put a hand on Sophia’s shoulder. “It’s okay.”

She has no idea what she’s even reassuring Sophia about. That’s the thing with Manon. She’d move mountains without asking why if Sophia started tearing up about it. 

The urge to give in is so strong. Like, she knows that Manon would hug her if she started sobbing for real, which would feel so good and so wrong. 

“I’m fine, sorry,” she manages, swiping her palms over her eyes. She isn’t wearing any makeup, so. “Um, Samara asked me to cover for her tonight. One of her friends is in town.”

“And you know her part,” Manon surmises.  

Sophia nods. Manon’s hand on her shoulder is warm. She’s afraid to move and make Manon take it away. 

“Yes. So,” she swallows, willing herself not to sob, “whenever you’re ready.”

Manon steps away, taking her hand with her. Sophia can’t look her in the eyes—she examines Manon’s sandals instead. 

“Do you wanna go get something to eat?” Manon asks. 

They end up at the same 24/7 diner Sophia had been at with Nayoung just days earlier. She watches the waitress recognize her, not for her fame, but for the frequency of her presence in this place. She might end up on one of those Reddit forums for this. I (22F) watched a girl bring two different dates to the same restaurant. Or, worse, the post will go up in a few months, and it’ll read I (23F) watched KATSEYE’s Sophia Laforteza bring two members of Dream Academy into my workplace and she didn’t pay for either of them. 

“I can get the bill,” she blurts, pushing her menu away from her abruptly. It’s silly to pretend she won’t order the same thing she gets every time she comes here. Chocolate cake, black coffee. 

Manon wrinkles her nose. She’s reading the menu by trailing the tip of her index finger over each entree. It’s cute. Sophia doesn’t think her Manon does that anymore. 

“Girl, let’s eat first,” she hums. “Damn.” 

And they do—Manon orders a proper meal, so Sophia panic orders a salad alongside her cake and coffee, which earns her another perplexed look. When their food arrives, Manon splits her fries in half and deposits one of the halves onto the edge of Sophia’s salad plate. 

When they’re done eating and arguing about the bill, Manon stops suddenly, leans over the table, and thumbs something off of the corner of Sophia’s lip. 

“Chocolate, I think, ” she explains, sticking her finger into her mouth and sucking. “Yep. Chocolate.”

Sophia is so stunned that she misses Manon sliding her credit card to the waitress. 

Most of their moments are stolen. It comes with the lifestyle—they spend a lot of time together crammed into supply closets and bathroom stalls. Before the Grammys, Manon nearly ripped the fabric of Sophia’s costume by raking her nails down Sophia’s back. 

“Imagine what Yoonchae could do with that cutout in Megan’s outfit,” Manon murmurs against her throat, and Sophia pulls away to glare at her, smacking her shoulder. 

“That’s perverted,” she scolds, eyes on her own shade of lip gloss smeared beneath Manon’s nose. “You can’t say things like that about them. They’re babies.” 

“They’re almost as old as we were during Dream,” Manon hums, which is worse than pointing out the boob cutout.

Sophia pulls all the way away, straightening her top and checking her hair in the mirror. They’re in a room meant for nursing mothers. Manon had jokes to make about that too, but she hadn’t gotten very far before Sophia pushed her down into the weird, cushy armchair in the corner of the room. 

“I guess,” she says. If she didn’t know better, she would think that Yoonchae is the older of the two. She’s always acted that way, but Sophia also knows that Megan doesn’t mind being babied a little. She shows up when Yoonchae needs her to. 

Manon’s hands are at her back again, but they’re gentle this time, soothing. 

“What are you thinking?”

Sometimes, it seems like Megan and Yoonchae can read each others’ minds. They’ve never been like that, Sophia and Manon. Sophia never has any idea what’s going on inside Manon’s head, and lately, she’s been realizing that it goes both ways. 

“Time is passing,” she swallows, “so fast. Like, how is this even real? It’s the Grammy’s, Manon. Fuck, we—” she pulls away, skin suddenly feeling tight under Manon’s touch, “we should be with the others. Why are we in here?” 

Megan had been almost literally bouncing off the walls. Yoonchae kept repeating to herself that she wasn’t nervous, which means she absolutely, one hundred percent is. Dani and Lara are pretending to be much cooler about it all than they actually are. And Sophia, their leader, is in a nursing mother’s room making out with her—their—Manon. 

“A little stress relief is healthy,” Manon reasons evenly. She leans back against the counter. There is a tiny bruise by her collarbone. Sophia is going to have to cover that up herself, because Manon will forget. 

“We need to go,” she says. “I’m gonna go.” 

She doesn’t hear the door open again after it shuts behind her, but she knows that at some point, Manon does follow her out and find them all in the green room. Sophia is holding both of Lara’s hands, listening to her repeat manifestations. She watches out of the corner of her eye as Manon covers up the bruise on her chest with careful brush strokes. 

They take this big deep breath at the same time. Manon has no way of knowing it, but Sophia sees it happen. She sucks air in through her nose and sees Manon doing the same, and they let it out at the exact same time. 

It doesn’t mean anything, really. 

She never actually gets around to scolding Megan like she’d planned to. 

“Yoonchae asked me to go see a movie with her and Nayoung,” Megan says before Sophia can even open her mouth. She’s palming this little blue vape pen. “The first time, I said no because I had plans with Lara already.” She brings the pen to her lips, resting it there for a long moment before pulling it away again without breathing in. “This time, I said no because I’m scared to fuck things up for us in the future.” 

Sophia climbs the rest of the way through the open window, settling herself against the roof tiles next to Megan. She’d known, before, that some of the girls would do this, but she never joined them. Yoonchae went once, when it was just Megan. They looked at the stars together, she’d said when she returned. So beautiful. The stars or Megan, Sophia isn’t sure anymore. She’d thought the stars, but she’d also thought Yoonchae would end up with a nice boyfriend someday and been wrong about that too. 

“I don’t think you should have done that, Sophia.” Megan’s voice draws Sophia out of her head, but it’s what she’s saying that makes her flinch. 

“What?”

“Dinner with Manon,” the younger girl explains. 

Calling it dinner is generous. She’d gotten back to the house hours past curfew. Sophia doesn’t ask how Megan has managed to find out. She doesn’t think she needs to. It might be a cosmic feature of their hand-wavy time situation. She’d woken up the other day and known intuitively that Megan had almost confessed their situation to Lara. 

“It just happened,” she whispers finally. “I didn’t try.” 

Megan is looking at her sadly, gnawing on her already-bloody bottom lip. Even in her seventeen year old self, the expression makes her look decades too old. 

“This isn’t some kind of test, okay?” She’s a little frantic about it, chin tipped up towards the sky, trying to convince some omniscient narrator. She won’t call it God, not now. “It’s just a coincidence. I didn’t fuck up the timeline. I didn’t step on any butterflies.”

“Are you prepared,” Megan is saying, ignoring her, “for the possibility that we never get to go back and this is just our life now?” 

She’s mostly abandoned her theory that dying will bring them back to normal, but Sophia really only stepped out onto the roof because she was sort of convinced that Megan was going to try pitching herself off of it. She leans forward a little bit, measuring the fall. It would be enough to do it, maybe, if she landed on her head or her back. 

“Jesus Christ,” Megan snaps, hand closing around the fabric of her hoodie and yanking hard. “Pull it together, Sophia.” Which feels like an unfair thing to be demanding of her now, but then again, Sophia is supposed to be the adult here. She always was, and is. Maybe it doesn’t matter so much now that they’re all living apart. 

“I think I left my house key at the studio,” is what she ends up saying, meaning the key to the apartment she has now, or then, and not the fob that lets them all into the dorm house. 

Megan looks at her, and closes her eyes. 

I don’t remember how good I did, I just remember throwing up and being sick. 

The next few weeks of her life redone actually feel like a novel experience. Sophia really doesn’t remember a lot of what happened after she got sick before the Buttons performance recording. She doesn’t remember waking up in the middle of the night to drag her pillow and blanket into the bathroom so she won’t disturb Nayoung and Yoonchae with her vomiting. 

She also doesn’t remember that after one take, her knees give out and it’s Manon’s arms that latch around her waist to keep her from going down all the way. 

She says, “oh my god, Sophia,” before someone else is coming to take her away and feel her forehead again, as if her temperature would’ve changed between slates. 

Okay, she thinks as Missy plies her with water, okay, maybe this is just it, then. I do it all over again. Maybe the future she thought she had was just a coked out dream. Her and Megan are operating within this shared delusion and they’re very lucky that no one else has picked up on it yet. 

She heard that Yoonchae got the adrenaline shakes after the Confident shoot, which has never happened to her before. She’s not sure how she would’ve dreamed up future-Yoonchae getting those if it wasn’t real, but it’s not like her and Manon are the most realistic pairing in the world. 

Maybe she’s just really fucking delusional. 

The night before the finale, Manon isn’t at her aunt’s house. Sophia knows this because she has Manon’s location for some reason, and she watches the dot creep closer and closer until it is literally on top of her own blue dot. You are here. Headlights flash, beaming through the flimsy curtains they recently put up over the windows. And so is Manon. 

She’s still talking to the Uber driver when Sophia comes outside, rapid fire Swiss-German interspersed randomly with English phrases because, well. Sophia doesn’t really know why, actually. 

“Hi,” she says breathlessly as Manon turns around, and she’s not expecting Manon to step forward and hug her, but it’s still nice. Brief, and hardly more than professional, but nice. 

“I couldn’t sleep,” Manon says, even though Sophia hasn’t asked for an explanation. “I’ve never seen your room here.”

Normally, Sophia’s room would have Nayoung and Yoonchae sleeping in it already, but Nayoung went home a week ago and Yoonchae is possibly sleeping in Megan’s room. Sophia forgot to check up on her. She brings Manon up quietly, making her take her shoes off at the door and carrying them upstairs like she’s sneaking her in past her parents. Not that it would matter if they ran into anyone else. They’d probably just go oh, hey Sophia, Manon. And move on. She can hear Emily’s voice filtering out from behind her and Megan’s cracked door. She’s crying; Lara is saying something vaguely soothing—she must’ve gotten here when Sophia was in the shower—and Sophia gets her confirmation as to Yoonchae’s whereabouts when she hears Lara go, how are you gonna let the fifteen year old be more laid back than you? 

Megan laughs, and Emily does too, wetly, but Sophia doesn’t hear Yoonchae’s typical ha-ha anywhere in the mix. Yoonchae’s stoicism, she knows, is more dissociative than anything else. At least at this point. 

Manon’s hand closes around her wrist and tugs gently. They go past the door and into another. Sophia suddenly feels very embarrassed about all her Disney paraphernalia. 

“This is cute,” Manon says softly, poking at a Lotso teddy on the bed. She’s poking, also, at Sophia. This is something Sophia also sort of forgot about. Manon was always making fun of her. “It’s color coordinated in here.”

She used to have so much pink. If Manon could just see her room now, she’d be so impressed. She’d sprawl herself out across the bed and go come here already, why are you acting like it’s our first time? 

Sophia swallows. “It’s fine. It’s temporary, you know.” 

Manon is squinting at the pictures tacked up next to the bed. She turns, examines Yoonchae’s half of the room. 

“Is she always as quiet as she is at rehearsals?” 

“She’s learning English,” Sophia defends, sitting on the stripped mattress that used to be Nayoung’s bed. “She’s really funny.”

“I’m sure,” Manon nods. She goes over to the shelves where they keep their clothes and looks some more. She is genuinely about to open Sophia’s underwear drawer when Sophia instructs her to come sit. 

“I just want to say,” she starts, hovering her hand over Manon’s knee, “that I hope you end up in the group. You really—well, I know what you can do now.” 

Manon shrugs. She’s looking at Sophia’s hand, so she pulls it away, which feels not at all like something she normally would’ve done, but she’s twenty-three inside herself. 

“I’m not too worried,” she says. “I just don’t want to put those dumb skirts on again.”

Sophia laughs despite herself, and Manon leans closer, bumping their shoulders together, and butterflies explode giddily in Sophia’s stomach. She’s getting all these versions of firsts for a second time. 

“Are you staying the night?” She asks, and Manon flinches, but it’s gone in a blink and she’s nodding, testing the bounce of Nayoung’s mattress. 

“I don’t see why not.”

Something that has been happening: Sophia dreams about her future life while she’s reliving the past one. Megan doesn’t get these dreams. At least, not anymore. She’d asked, and Megan just regarded her blankly. You’ve been sleeping well enough to dream? 

So, she’s uncertain, as she is about everything lately, whether or not this is actually happening. This being Manon’s hands on her hips, thumbs pressing heat into her skin. She can feel the bite of Manon’s acrylics, which means it is either real or Sophia already knows what that feels like. It’s an unhelpful distinction. 

Slightly more helpfully, Manon shifts, moving downwards, and Sophia can feel her lips moving, but she can’t hear anything Manon might be saying. She laces her fingers behind Manon’s neck to stop her, to look at her. She doesn’t mean to stop her, like, for good, but Manon stops her path downwards and tips her head forward against Sophia’s stomach, arms going around her waist loosely, just holding. Her hand slips up under Sophia’s shirt, scratching gently at her lower back. 

Yes, Sophia thinks, this must be a dream. The Manon she knows now is so gentle, but the gentleness came with time. Sophia had to earn that from her, and she knows her twenty-year old self hadn’t yet. She’d hardly earned Manon’s respect, much less her trust. 

“Hey, Manon,” she whispers, and hears it reverberating around inside her own head. “Let’s just go to sleep, okay? We have a big day tomorrow.” 

She knows, immediately, just like she had the first time, that things have been turned proverbially inside out, literally forwards, and are not quite right. 

Her alarm is going off, and it must’ve been going for a long time, because it’s done the fancy thing that it does where it lowers the volume if it’s been going off for too long because Sophia has neighbors and she doesn’t want to disrupt them any worse than she already does by singing in the shower. 

Sophia has neighbors, and they’re grown-up neighbors who do not have jobs singing and dancing for a living, which means she’s in her own bed in her twenty-three year old apartment and Manon should be, maybe, in the other room making coffee or painting or cuddling with the cat. 

She nearly knocks the alarm clock off the bedside table with the speed she flies out of bed at, tripping over her own feet as she scrambles into the hallway. The bathroom door is ajar, but it’s dark inside, so she bypasses it for the TV room. 

It’s also empty, which is weird, but Manon is very dedicated to her gym routine. Sophia rolls her shoulders, trying to calm herself down, and goes into the kitchen. 

She should make some matcha. Maybe two matchas. She can put one in the fridge if Manon doesn’t get back soon. 

Twice, she stops to pinch herself and make sure she isn’t still dreaming. It doesn’t occur to her to check her phone until there is already green powder measured out into the little bowl, and she abandons the task at hand immediately, because duh. She can just text Manon and ask when she’ll be back and make the matchas then. 

She must’ve changed her lock and home screens right before the time got fucked, she thinks as she navigates to her messages app. The picture of her and Leon is cute, but she’s pretty sure they’d just happened to run into each other at Disneyland with their families. Lara has this app that changes her homescreen for her. She might’ve downloaded that and forgotten about it. 

The last person she texted was Sohey, which is also sort of strange, but she moves past it, scrolling down. It takes a while to find Manon’s name, because it’s just coded into her phone as Manon Bannerman. Not Meret Manon or Manz or anything, which is weird, but okay, Sophia’s phone has factory reset itself before. 

She shoots off the text to Manon quickly—when are u gonna be home? xx —and slips her phone into her pocket. Breakfast seems like the logical next step. It must be a weekend, because there’s nothing written on the big whiteboard weekly calendar next to the kitchen. She usually resets the week on a Sunday. So, there’s no rehearsal, which is nice, and she can make something slow for breakfast. 

She’s still pondering when her phone buzzes in her pocket. She pulls it out and, very suddenly, becomes intensely aware of way too many things at once. 

Wrong number, is what Manon has texted back. 

One: The other side of the bed had been perfectly made when Sophia tripped out of it. Manon doesn’t make the bed almost ever. 

Two: The apartment is sparkling clean. All of Sophia’s shoes are lined up neatly by the door. Only Sophia’s shoes are lined up neatly by the door. 

Three: Sophia hasn’t seen the cat yet.

Four: Her phone buzzes again. Another M-name, but a different ending. 

From Megan: are u back?? yoonchae lowkey freaked out when i texted her this morning. met for coffee n she said shes so glad because ive been acting weird lately??? idk. call me when u can 

They’re the same as they were before, Megan and Yoonchae. Sophia tries not to feel too jealous about this. She’s still sort of in the denial phase of her grief, so it mostly works. She’s happy for them, and less concerned about it ending poorly now that she knows more about what Megan is like under duress. 

Manon is somewhere. Sophia doesn’t know where, exactly. Her phone doesn’t tell her Manon’s location anymore, and she’s been frozen since wrong number. Megan is the only one who knows that things used to be different. 

“It’s weird,” she murmurs, wan. Sophia visits her apartment at night sometimes, whenever she can’t bear to be in hers alone. It’s the worst when Yoonchae is already there. She’s gracious about it; she picked that up from Manon. She sees Sophia’s face and shuts herself in Megan’s room to give them some space without a word. Sometimes she brings tea before she goes. 

“I don’t—” Sophia shudders a little. She hasn’t cried yet, hasn’t been able to. She’s not even entirely sure what she’s mourning. “Maybe it was never real.” 

“I remember it, though,” Megan says, and winces, because that is possibly the worse option. 

The curiosity starts to get the best of her. 

She’s not expected at rehearsals anymore. She learns about her own hiatus from an email sitting in her inbox when she finally gets around to checking it. There’s something deeply ironic about it, but Sophia can’t spend too much time thinking about it or she’ll actually, genuinely go insane. 

She browses their Instagram accounts first. Most of it is exactly like she remembers. But there are these tiny discrepancies. The post from their first day with Spoon is missing, and some of the photos that Sophia knows had been taken by Manon are all at the wrong angle, like the person behind the camera has grown eight inches. 

Next, she scrolls back through their texts. She doesn’t have strong memories of what they’d looked like before, but she doesn’t need any to know that they aren’t quite right either. 

Reading the news is when she has to stop. She could never stand the speculation, but she hates it even more now that she doesn’t know which parts are true. 

Megan sends her links to dozens of Reddit posts and strange, hours-long YouTube videos about timeline-hopping and alternate universe theories. Sophia doesn’t spend a lot of time looking at any of them. She’s pretty sure that whatever happened can’t be undone, and she failed whatever test she’d been given by stepping closer to Manon when she was supposed to pull away. Temporary closeness for permanent separation, or some version of it. Manon will come back eventually, she hopes. 

“I think it’s time you start trying to move on,” her therapist tells her gently, talking about something else entirely. “It happened a long time ago.”

She decides that closure will help, or whatever the closest thing to closure that she can possibly get is. 

She drafts a text and doesn’t send it. She cleans her entire apartment again and spends two hours in the bathtub with a book she doesn’t read a word of. When she gets out, she walks around in her bathrobe and facemask, singing Petal by Ariana Grande without a backing track. 

When that’s all done and she’s in bed for the night, she grabs her phone again. She tries to put herself in Manon’s shoes. If she were Manon, how would she feel about receiving an ominous late-night text from a bandmate she supposedly hasn’t spoken to in months?

She makes herself sick trying to imagine it and gives up on being compassionate. She sends the damn thing, letting out this tiny, frustrated scream when she does, and shoves her phone underneath the pillow.

did i imagine us?

She falls asleep waiting for it to buzz. 

Sophia has previously identified a few parts of it all to be the worst. Getting dropped in right before the finale. The sheer mind-fuck of the whole stupid situation. 

She changes her mind the second she realizes that she’s awake the next morning and goes fumbling for her phone. Her room is so bright and she can barely see anything on the dim screen. It’s by muscle memory alone, however that might work, that she manages to get Manon’s contact open. 

This is the worst part. She jabs at the screen until she can see her own text. Her eyes track downwards, off to the left. 

?

One tiny grey bubble, stacked on top of another one and another one. Sophia’s next breath gets stuck, stalling out her lungs. 

ig not but

idk why ur bringing it up now

Illogically, her thumbs fly over the keyboard, typing out frantic explanations. She starts with her memories and moves onto the time warp, the time swap, the whatever the fuck you want to call it, manon, okay? She types for so long she stops feeling her thumbs, fingertips numb against the letters. Her phone gets hot in her hands. She’s spilling every feeling she’s ever had about Manon, good, bad, and ugly. By the time she gets to the end, her entire body is trembling. She’s gasping in these tiny, shallow breaths that are mostly sob. 

She has to use her index finger to press the send button. Her thumbs won’t move in their sockets. And she waits. She waits for so long that her body calms itself back down again. And still, the whole time, the message never reads delivered.