Page 7 of The Déjà Glitch

“That one. Is. Busted,” Hot Guy in 202 huffed from beside her.

Gemma jumped at the sound of his voice both because she had never heard it before and because the room was otherwise silent, aside from his feet and breathing.

“I’ll be. Done. In ten minutes,” he said, and went back to watching his phone.

Gemma considered sitting back and watching him run for ten minutes while she waited her turn, but she didn’t have the spare time in her morning. Instead, she crossed the room to the ellipticals and flipped on the TV overhead. She normally stared at the parking lot while she listened to an audiobook and envisioned far-off places, but the opposite wall offered the chance to watch the morning news while she exercised.

The TV came on muted with closed captioning scrolling across the bottom. She got to work pumping the pedals on the machine and watched a reporter with slick black hair and a News10 fleece give an update. He stood on a neighborhood corner with palm trees and a row of houses over his shoulder. It was a standard L.A. neighborhood, except for the fact that the street behind him gushed with water high enough to touch the belly of every car parked on it bumper to bumper.

The whole, strange scene somehow looked startlingly familiar.

Gemma scanned the words along the bottom to see what he was saying as he motioned at the street with a hand.

“...neighborhood in Burbank where a water main broke sometime, we think, around four a.m. Now, you can see there is substantial flooding in the area, and crews are working to drain the water before there is any structural damage.”

“What a waste,” Gemma muttered like a drought-wearied native. Her first thought at the sight of all that water was how green Mr. Weaver’s lawn could be if they diverted it to his house instead of washing it down a drain.

Her second thought was that she had had that exact thought before.

She grabbed the TV’s remote and unmuted, knowing it wouldn’t bother anyone because Hot Guy in 202 was listening to his own program and they were the only two people in the room.

“There have been no reports of damage yet,” the reporter went on, “but as you can see behind me, residents are concerned about their property.”

The camera panned to a man on the sidewalk, water up to his knees, holding keys in his hand and looking like he didn’t want to risk opening his car door and flooding the interior to move it. Behind him, two children splashed around like they were at a water park.

Gemma got the distinct sense, somehow, that she knew the little girls. They spun and kicked in the water, twirling each other around like it was the best day of their lives and sending droplets glinting in the morning sun. The taller one suddenly stopped, a flash of excitement on her face, and the microphone picked up what she said in the second before the camera panned back to the reporter. The words were in Gemma’s head, exactly, inexplicably, and came out of her mouth in a whisper at the same time they appeared on the screen.

“Dad, can we get the inner tubes?”

The blond news anchor in the studio chuckled when she came back on-screen looking polished in her navy dress. “Looks like noteveryoneis disappointed with this turn of events, Mark.”

Gemma stared at the TV in shock. That same gluey sensation she had gotten when Mr. Weaver talked about the weather clouded her mind. She thought for a secondthat maybe she had somehow turned on the previous day’s news and hadn’t remembered that she’d seen the story before, the little girls splashing in the water, but it saidLIVEright there in the screen’s corner.

She grabbed her phone and quickly searched for the story online. A smattering of results showed reports from local outlets and county and city organizations within the past hour.

She stared back at the TV.

It really was happening live.

Gemma decided to turn off the TV and return to her planned audiobook for the rest of her workout.

By the time she got back to her apartment, she was furiously trying to convince herself that she must have already listened to chapters 14 and 15 in her audiobook and forgotten because how else would she have known the big plot twist? It was a good twist, and she couldn’t have just... figured it out, could she have?

No, she told herself. She must have fallen asleep listening the night before and subconsciously stored the information.

She headed for a cold shower to snap herself out of the strange morning and felt refreshed on the other side. When she wound up in her kitchen dressed for work in jeans and her favorite white blouse that she’d picked for that day’s special occasion, ready to fill her to-go tumbler, she noted to her dismay that she had run out of coffee.

“This day is off to a start,” she told Rex. He monitored her morning routine from his gray velvet pouf in the living room. “Maybe I should go back to bed.”

He let out a little whine and rested his chin on his paws.

Gemma sighed. “You’re right. One of us has to go to work.”

She crossed the room to pat his ears and decided to stop off at the coffee shop around the corner on her way to the radio studio.

•••

By a smallmiracle, Gemma found parking half a block away from the coffee shop. It was one of those serendipitous L.A. moments where the end of one person’s journey coincided precisely with the beginning of hers. She supposed the odds couldn’t have been too slim, given the city of four million people and all the coming and going, but any time it happened, she felt like the parking gods were smiling down upon her.

---