Neil Gaiman - Interworld

Before I could say anything, Ted pulled out the card Mr. Dimas had given each of us on which was written the location where we were to be picked up. “We have to get to the corner of Maple and Whale,” he said. “Hey, maybe we can get your dad to pick us up, Harker.”

This is all you have to know about Ted Russell: He wouldn’t be able to spell “IQ.” Not because he’s dumb— which he is, as a bag of rocks—but because he couldn’t be bothered. He was a year older than me, due to having been kept back. I knew I would get nothing but the kind of jokes even grade-schoolers would roll their eyes at from him. But I was willing to put up with Russell, obnoxious jerk that he was, to be here—to be anywhere—with Rowena Danvers.

I suppose there may have been prettier, smarter, just generally nicer girls at Greenville High, but I’d never bothered looking for them. As far as I was concerned, Rowena was the only girl for me. But after two years of trying, I had failed to convince Rowena that I was anything more than a minor extra in the movie of her life. It wasn’t that she hated me, or even disliked me—I wasn’t important enough to warrant that. I doubt that we’d exchanged more than five sentences during the entire school year, and probably four of those five were along the lines of “Excuse me, but you dropped this” or “I’m sorry, were you sitting here?” Not exactly the stuff of which great romances are made, although I treasured every one of them.

But now, just maybe, I could change that. I could become more than an anonymous blip on her radar. I was practically fifteen, and she was my honest-to-goodness First Love. I mean it. Or I thought I did at the time. It wasn’t just a crush. I wasn’t simply in love with Rowena Danvers—I was madly, deeply, passionately in love. I even told my parents how I felt, and that took guts. If she ever noticed me, I said to them, this would be one of the great love affairs of the century. They could see I was serious, and they didn’t even tease me. They got it. They wished me luck. I would be Tristran and she would be Iseult (whoever they were; that was what Dad said); I would be Sid and she would be Nancy (whoever they were; that was what Mom said). I wanted to impress Rowena Danvers, and so what if demonstrating that I knew how to cross a street in the right direction wasn’t exactly the stuff that Shakespeare was made of? I’d take what I could get.

I said, “I know where we are.”

Ted and Rowena looked at me dubiously. “Yeah, right. I’d sooner put the blindfold back on. Come on, Rowena,” Ted said, taking her arm. “Everybody knows that Harker couldn’t find his butt with both hands tied behind him.”

She pulled her arm free and looked at me. I could see that she didn’t relish walking five or six blocks with Ted Russell, but that she also didn’t want to be wandering around downtown for the rest of the day. “Are you sure you know where we are, Joey?” she asked.

The woman I loved was asking me for help! I felt like I could have found my way home from the dark side of the moon. “No problem,” I said with all the confidence of a lemming who thinks he’s headed for a nice day at the seashore. “Follow me. Come on!” And I started down the street.

Rowena hesitated a moment more, then turned away from Ted and started walking after me. He stared after her in shock for a moment, then waved his arm in a “g’wan!” gesture. “Your funeral. I’ll tell Dimas to send out search parties,” he shouted, then he laughed and pumped the air.

It must be nice to be your own audience.

Rowena caught up with me, and we walked on for a while in silence. We crossed Arkwright Park and headed north—I think—on Corinth.

Within six blocks I realized something very important: It’s good to know where you are, but it’s better to know where you’re going. Which I definitely did not—in a matter of minutes I was more lost than I’ve ever been. And, what was worse, Rowena knew it. I could tell by the way she was looking at me.

I was starting to panic. I didn’t want to let Rowena down. But I also didn’t want her to see me with egg on my face. So I said, “Wait here just a minute,” and I ran on ahead before she could say anything.

I was desperately hoping to find another street or landmark that I recognized. I turned the corner and saw a building at the end of the next block that looked familiar, so I started down the street—Arkwright Boulevard, next to the park—to make sure.

The weather in Greenville is weird at the best of times. It comes of being so close to the Grand River, which gave us the beer-brewing industry and the tourists who come down to walk the nature trail and to see the falls, but also gives us the mists that spread around the town whenever it gets chilly.

One of those mists started at the corner of Arkwright and Corinth. I headed straight into it, felt it beading cold on my face. Most mists thin when you’re in them. This one didn’t. It was more like walking through thick smoke, blinding and gray.

I just pushed through it, not really noticing it much— after all, I had more important things on my mind. From the inside of the mist I could see shimmering lights of all different colors. It’s weird what a town looks like when all you can see are the lights.

I turned the next corner onto Fallbrook and stepped out of the mist—and stopped. I was in a part of town I didn’t recognize at all. Across the street was a McDonald’s I’d never seen before, with a huge green tartan arch above it. Some kind of Scottish promotion, I guessed. Weird. I noticed it, but it didn’t really register. I was too busy thinking about Rowena, and wondering whether there was any way to explain what had happened that wouldn’t leave her thinking I was a complete idiot. There wasn’t. I was going to have to head back to her and confess that I had gotten us both completely lost. I was looking forward to it about the same way I look forward to a routine dental checkup.

At least the fog was almost gone when I got back to the cross street, panting and out of breath. Rowena was still waiting where I had left her. She was staring into the window of a pet shop, with her back to me. I ran straight across the street, tapped Rowena on the shoulder and said, “I’m sorry. Guess we should have listened to Ted. That’s not something you hear often, is it?”

She turned around.

When I was a kid—I mean, just a little kid, back in New York, back before we moved to Greenville, before Jenny even—I remember following my mom through Macy’s. She was doing her Christmas shopping, and I could have sworn that I barely took my eyes off her. She was wearing a blue coat. I followed her all around the store until the press of people scared me and I grabbed her hand. And she looked down. . . .

And it wasn’t my mom at all. It was some woman I’d never seen before, who was wearing a similar blue coat and had the same hairstyle. I started crying and they took me off to some office and gave me a soda and found my mom and it all ended happily enough. But I’ve never forgotten that moment of dislocation, of expecting one person and seeing another.

That was what I was feeling now. Because it wasn’t Rowena in front of me. It looked like her, as much as a sister might, and her clothes were the same. She was even wearing a black baseball cap, just like Rowena’s.

But Rowena had always been real vain about her long blond hair. She’d said more than once that she wanted to let it grow as long as it could and never cut it.

This girl wore her blond hair in a buzz cut—real short. And she didn’t even look like Rowena. Not really. Not when you were up close. Rowena’s eyes are blue. This girl had brown eyes. She was just some girl in a brown coat and a black baseball cap, looking at puppies in a pet store window. I was totally confused. I backed away. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought you were someone else.”