The Girl That Could Have Been Me

The branches of the pear tree cast soft shadows around me. The gentle summer breeze ruffled the pages of my book and I smoothed them back down as I turned the page. Fluffy clouds filled the bright blue sky and beams of sunlight filtered through them in brilliant rays.

A stick cracked behind me and my head snapped up. I peered around the tree, laying my fingers against its coarse bark, and caught sight of the back of a girl.

Cropped just above her shoulders, her dark dyed blue curly hair shifted in the wind. Fishnet tights hugged her thighs, disappearing under frayed black shorts. She wore thigh-high boots, heeled at the bottom, drawing her up to a height that matched the self-assurance in her shoulders.

She turned around, and I noticed the red scabs around her fingers, the nubbed, bitten-off nails, and the hundreds of white scars that ran up the length of her arms. A bloody rose held by a skeletal hand decorated her gradient ink-splashed tank top, and a silver chain hung from her belt loops. My eyes lifted from her clothes to her eyes and my breath caught in my throat. The book tumbled from my fingers and thumped on the pine needles surrounding the base of the tree because that girl, with the blue hair and the edgy clothes and the scars, she was me.

“Hey,” She said, offering me a small smile as she stuffed her hands into her pockets.

Her eyes ran over me critically, from my bare feet to my light-washed jeans to my pink top, up my unscarred arms to my freckled heat-blushed cheeks and my dark brown curls that reached a few inches just below my shoulders.

“Wow…” She exhaled, and her tone held a kind of grief in it. “I knew you’d be different, but this…” Her gaze drifted to the book. “At least some things are the same.”

I swiveled to face her fully. “Who are you?”

She shrugged and settled down on the grass in front of me.

“I’m you.”

I shook my head. “That’s not funny. Long lost sister? Secret twin? Lookalike? Which is it?”

But she just smiled. “I’m you.” I started to speak, but she cut me off. “I come from an alternate universe. One where our life wasn’t so…blissful.” She picked at a piece of grass.

“That’s not possible.” I crossed my arms. “This is some kind of prank, right?”

Her brown eyes met mine squarely, forcefully, with an edge to them that frightened me.

“Believe me or don’t believe me. I don’t care either way. But I have questions. And you have the answers.”

“I don’t—”

“What name do you go by?" She returned to plucking blades of grass.

My brows creased. “What do you mean? My name’s Jackie—Jacqueline--like it’s always been.”

She nodded to herself. “I thought so.” She sighed with a lost kind of pain, as though she’d searched for days in the wilderness, trying to find a way out, trying to find help, trying to find a strand of hope, only to come up empty-handed and slowly wither away into hopelessness.

“I go by Leslie.”

I frowned. “Why?”

Her jaw clenched. “Because the girl I used to be, my Jacqueline, she died.” Something dark flashed behind her eyes. “They killed her.”

“I don’t understand.” I nibbled at my lower lip. “Who’s they? What are you talking about? Where did you even come from?”

“I probably shouldn’t tell you.” Leslie murmured. She dragged her fingers through the dirt. “I just wanted to see you—to see who I would have been if…if…” She stopped. “I should go.”

She started to rise to her feet, but I caught her wrist.

“Wait.”

She looked back at me, and I could tell from the reluctance in her body that she wanted to stay just as much as I didn’t want her to go. “I want to know what happened to you.”

I didn’t care if anything she said was true. I didn’t care if she came from an alternate universe or not. I didn’t care how she got here or what she wanted. I wanted to know. I needed to know. Because it didn’t matter if she was me from another universe or not. What happened to her could just as likely have happened to anyone, could just as likely have happened to me. And the fact that she had my face only made it more real.

Leslie sat down against the pear tree beside me. She took in a deep breath, digging her nails into her palms.

“Okay.” She said. “Okay.”

And then she told me everything, every dark, damaging secret, every trauma, every loss, every betrayal. She spilled her life’s story, and I listened, and my stomach twisted, and my chest tightened, and my throat closed up, and I had to raise my eyes to the sky to stop the tears that welled up in them.

Because that could have been me.

Because maybe, in another world, in another life, that was me.

Guilt flooded my chest, guilt because I got the life without pain. All of her suffering, all of her loss, all of her trauma, I had been spared from it all. I got to be free, happy, loved, while she shattered into irreparable pieces.

When she finished, neither of us spoke a word. When she asked me about my life, I almost couldn’t do it. I almost couldn’t tell her.

But I did. And she smiled with a deep sorrow in her eyes as I talked about how much my parents loved each other, about how my brother teased and mentored me and how I looked up to him like no other, about how I excelled in school and fell in love with my best friend, Amy, how she fell in love with me, and how we told our parents about us, and how accepting they were, about my first years in college and my roommate who became my best friend, about graduation and my valedictorian speech and my new job as an electrical engineer. I talked about my love for animals and electronics, about my writing and how I was working with a publisher on my book, about my apartment with my lizard and my cat, about my hopes and dreams and every wish that’d come true. And when I finished there were tears in her eyes too.

For hours we talked, about nothing and everything. She told me stories and I told her stories, and some of our stories were the same and others different. I learned who she’d become, and she discovered who I had always been. And when we finally lapsed into silence, there was a kind of bond between us that could never be broken.

“Are you happy?” She asked.

I stared up at the fluffy clouds and the bright sky and the branches of the pear tree casting beautiful little pockets of shade down over us.

“Yes.” I said. “I really am.”

She laid her head back against the tree, a shaky breath slipping out through her lips.

I turned to look at her.

“Are you?”

She hesitated. “Not yet.” She murmured. “But I will be.”

The sun began to set, turning the sky into a rainbow of hues, and we watched, a quiet sort of contentment in our hearts, as the day slipped into night.

“You’re not what I expected, Jackie.” She said. “And I’m glad.” Her lips twitched up at the corners. “Because it means I didn’t lose. Life took everything from me. But I didn’t lose.” She carefully got to her feet, and I rose with her. “We are not the same.” She said. “But we both get to win.”

She took my hands in hers and squeezed.

Then she stepped back, twisted something in her watch, and disappeared.