Page 20 of What If It's You?

I started with my own grid. The posts were pretty spaced out, usually photo dumps to sum up a season, or a trip, or even just a special night out. It surprised me; I wasn’t some five-times-a-day poster in…I had to stop thinking of it as “my real life,” I was clearly here, it was very real, and it was possible, if still terrifying to really consider, that I might never get back.

So…World O and World D, then. Not particularly creative, but it worked.

But back to the task at hand: In World O I didn’t flood people’s feeds, but I didn’t particularly curate my posts either, sharing everything from fresh haircuts to views from the hotel when I traveled for work to snaps with a friend in whatever dark bar Ollie’s band was playing that weekend.

I scrolled through a series of Drew and me hiking, the tag placing us in the White Mountains, the main image a truly stunning view from a rocky promontory, both of us glistening with sweat behind our sunglasses as a string of peaks furred with summer greenery unfurled behind us. “Long weekend = time to add a new summit to our list.” We must hike often, then. Maybe that explained all the crunchy food in the pantry? If you thought of it as fuel for a long hike, the utilitarian trade-off between flavor and nutritional density seemed much less sad.

There was a series from a trip we’d taken to visit friends in San Francisco, the smiling faces unfamiliar; one of a Christmas at my dad’s, the setting heart-twistingly familiar, which only made the new-to-me photos feel more strange; a sunny day at an apple orchard with a couple I didn’t recognize but who stirred a warm feeling in my chest. When I clicked through to their individual handles, I learned they were Matt Garabedian and Kari Wallenstein—Matt and Kari. Clearly we were close—they showed up in a Turks and Caicos set as well.

In fact…a lot of these were of beach vacations. I lingered over an image of Drew’s and my knees knocking against each other in the sand, the sun melting into the ocean visible between our toes, the entire scene washed in lurid pinks and oranges. It was pretty, but I was surprised it was how we chose to spend precious PTO. When Ollie and I traveled, it was more haphazard, a destination chosen mainly based on the Venn diagram of “Where haven’t we been yet?” and “Where are tickets cheap right now?” which usually meant some Northern European nation in March, or Central America in July. No matter where we wound up, though, it would beinteresting, we’d find some unforgettable site to plan an entire day around, or a landscape you couldn’t find anywhere else on earth, or a unique festival that just happened to line up perfectly with our travel window. As the departure drew nearer, I’d focus on logistics—my hotel standards weremuchhigher than Ollie’s, and I actually got a shot of dopamine when I found lodgings thatmanaged to achieve the golden triad of affordability, location, and clean bathrooms. Meanwhile, he’d come up with dozens of places to eat, dance, tour—so many options, in fact, that any given day felt like a mix of total spontaneity and the exact thing someoneshoulddo on a trip to Berlin, or Osaka, or wherever else we’d landed on.

But…that didn’t mean this couldn’t be nice, too. Cocktails in the sand and days filled with nothing more than leisurely beach strolls. Was it myidealway to vacation? No. But then…inthislife, I had so much more control over the texture of every single day, a career and a home that were like something out of a fantasy—maybe time off wasn’t such a scarce commodity. Maybe Drew needed trips like that to decompress, and honestly, who was I to judge?

It made me wonder what vacations Ollie must be taking in this life, whether he was happily exploring the world out of an oversized backpack and shared hostel rooms—he would have slept on park benches if I’d been willing—or whether he’d wound up with someone like me, who loved trying new things, visiting the sites most tourists skipped over, just as long as there was a reasonably comfortable bed and a clean private bathroom waiting at the end of the day.

There’s no way he’d have stayed single. The thought clamped around my esophagus, its ache radiating through my entire body. Maybe he’d have chosen someonenothinglike me. Maybe the only reason we were even together in World O was inertia, and in this world he’d found someone better for him, someone more adventurous and less rigid who didn’t secretly harbor hopes of living inside a high-end Scandinavian design catalog.

I shouldn’t look. It wouldn’t help anything to know. Unless it would? Maybe finding Ollie in this life would close some important loop and fix me where I was supposed to be…or at least make clear what I should do, if I really was being given the choice.

Or maybe I just had to see whether the girl he’d picked was hotter than me.

But when I typed in his handle,OH_no,the profile picture staring back clearly wasn’t Ollie—in fact, it was some middle-aged dude at a tailgate, so basically theanti-Ollie.

He must have a different handle. He’d only started using that one after the band he’d been in when we met, Don’t Tell Nadine, went out on a three-month tour that he opted out of. He claimed he didn’t care, didn’t feel like he was missing out on anything, but I noticed that he didn’t follow the band’s account once he set up his own. I tried searching the band…but in all worlds they seemed to have long since dissolved. Maybe just his name would turn up a hit? But of the dozen Ollie Hugheses that appeared, none of them looked likemyOllie. Maybe he just wasn’t on socials.

I double-checked my own grid, scrolling all the way back to the early days of Ollie, which would have been very near the beginning of my life with Drew, but he wasn’t there either. Had I gone in and deleted any photos of us together after things didn’t work out? Was the reason I was in this world in the first place that Ollie and I had never met? I’d assumed the moment that AltR had turned me left instead of right in my own personal corn maze was saying yes to a date with Drew. But maybe the only way I’d ever have said yes was if Ollie had never come onto the scene?

I opened my phone contacts, searching Oliver, then Ollie, then just scrolling through name by name, staring at the screen so hard my eyes were starting to sting…

But he wasn’t there. As far as this Laurel was concerned, he didn’t even exist. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of that.

I was considering a deeper Google dive when my text notifications lit up.

FROM: Drew

Did you get the delivery?

TO: Drew

I did. Thank you—you didn’t need to do that

FROM: Drew

Of course I did

You know I like taking care of you

TO: Drew

No complaints here

Guys like thisexisted? Guys as sweet and funny and brilliant as I already knew Drew to be, and on top of all that—already a partnership lottery win—they floated you chasing your lifelong dream,andwent out of their way to make sure you were okay on the days you woke up feeling a little punky?

Forget the “AltR ported me to another universe” theory, was I just fully hallucinating?

It still felt a little uncomfortable, obviously—probably because the idea thatDrewwas the one worrying about me wasn’t meshing yet. And honestly, the entire concept wasn’t one I was used to. With just Dad and me holding down the fort, I’d had to learn early how to take care of myself. By the time Ollie entered the picture, that necessity had rooted into a hardy strain of independence, one I’d fiercely insisted he respect—being fussed over had made me feel anxious, the acts of caretaking infantilizing, claustrophobic in a way I couldn’t quite explain to myself, let alone Ollie.

Inthatlife. Biting into my second slice of fresh challah in this one, butter melting into its soft crumb, I couldn’t quite understand what, precisely, was so important about suffering through it alone.

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