Criss Cross by Lynne Rae Perkins Page A

She says, maybe when she grows up, she can run a real one.”
    The cashier laughed. She said, “I used to play with a toy cash register when I was little, too. And see? My dream came true.”
    She was entirely pleasant and cheerful saying this and yet, there was some other kind of knowledge in it, too. A knowledge that it sure as hell wasn’t her dream come true, but, oh well, here she was.
    There was some kind of “Totally Fine” clue there, but it was such a good line itself that Hector decided to save it for its own song. He wrote, “And see? My dream came true” in his notebook. That one could have a million verses.
    He still didn’t know what the verses would be for “Totally Fine,” so he fiddled around with chords and notes, looking for a tune. Periodically he went into the refrain.
    He was also thinking about his voice. Finding his own voice. Liz had talked about it the night of the coffeehouse, but Hector wasn’t sure what it meant. Did you have to just take it as it came out of your throat? If you tried to improve it, or try out some other kind of voice, was that fake, or could it all be part of your own voice?
    He tried singing “Totally Fine” in a slow, deep, gravelly voice. Then a falsetto. Papa Bear, Mama Bear. He felt silly. He sang it in a sarcastic, angry shout, which he knew wasn’t his voice, but it was kind of fun so he did it several times, standing up and really slamming the chords. He jumped up and down a little and spun around.
    Rowanne was standing in the doorway watching him.
    “It’s just you,” she said. “It sounded like more.”
    It bothered Patty that electrons were so constantly in motion. It made the whole world seem like a place on the verge of disintegration. What if the molecules in this chair suddenly got all excited and spun apart? What if they realigned themselves and decided to be something other than wood? It was one of the many areas of science that she preferred not to think about: the very small (atoms) because they were so busy, and the very large (universe, infinity, time) because they were so unending.
    Also relativity and the universe turning back in on itself, whatever that was supposed to mean. Picture a man on a train, picture trees going by. Yeah, sure. It was nothing like those things.
    She was going to have to take her chances on actual people in trains with actual trees going by because the other stuff, the guy who gets younger because time is moving sideways next to his train, which science teachers seemed to feel was so exciting, made her feel like there was no ground beneath her feet. It gave her the creeps.
    Patty wondered if her aversion to these ideas would relegate her to a job pouring coffee at a diner in The Future. She hoped the diner would be on earth. She hoped the coffee would be real. And the cups. And how soon was all of this going to really kick in? She glanced over her shoulder at her room to make sure that it hadn’t reconfigured itself while her back was turned. She went downstairs and called Debbie on the phone, letting their conversation block out any thoughts about the expanding and compacting molecules that were simulating Debbie’s voice in her ear.
    The grass was still wet from the rain that had fallen earlier in the day, but the twilight sky was clearing and, in the west, an evening star hung a few inches above a deep pink and orange fringe, tail end of the sunset. Russell’s sneakers were getting soaked. He lifted the lid, dropped the garbage in, and pressed the lid back on firmly to keep the raccoons from getting into it. He saw that a Styrofoam cup had fallen outside the can and, when he bent to pick it up, something else caught his eye.
    It was some sort of a necklace, a slender chain with flat gold letters linked together in the middle of it. He thought it was probably something belonging to his little sister, Annette, but when he held it up in the fading light, the letters seemed to spell
Debbie.
He took it into the