Verwandte Artikel zu In What World

In What World - Softcover

Morrissey, Bridget

 
9798217188017: In What World
Softcover
ISBN 13: 9798217188017
Verlag: Penguin LLC US, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

Two high school rivals begrudgingly reunite as adults to investigate the disappearance of their beloved former teacher, only to wind up traveling through a series of alternate realities together.

Total opposites, Marlowe Jenkins and Priscilla Covington-French hated each other in high school. Now in their thirties, Marlowe is barely scraping by while Priscilla is wildly successful. Their rivalry should be long dead, yet both women remain connected through their mutual mentor, drama teacher Dallas Winthrop. Their unending tension has nothing to do with the fact that they’ve kissed. More than once.

When Dallas goes missing, each woman believes she can figure out where he is. Except this is no ordinary disappearance. Dallas has found a way to explore alternate versions of reality. While trying to follow him, Marlowe and Priscilla find other versions of themselves instead, surprised to learn not all Marlowes and Priscillas are fueled by hate. In fact, some Marlowes and Priscillas have very different strong feelings for one another. . .

The more Marlowe and Priscilla are forced to rely on each other, the harder it becomes to ignore their simmering attraction. But with every alternate reality they search, they only get further from their real life and responsibilities. Do they play it safe and hide behind their rivalry, or take a chance on each other that could permanently change the world as they know it?

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Bridget Morrissey

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

"Dare," Priscilla says, grinning into her red Solo cup before tossing back the last dregs of her Diet Coke like a shot.

It's no surprise that she's the first one to choose dare instead of truth. Priscilla Covington-French would rather streak naked across the Wilbur Reed High School stage than be honest about something.

Jaz Sinclair surveys the small circle we've formed around the coffee table, where an empty glass Coke bottle lies on its side, waiting for an upcoming round of Spin the Bottle. For us seniors, it's our last high school cast party ever. In less than three weeks, we'll be let loose into the real world. We'll never again act together on the WRHS stage. We will never gather in a cast member's house, our parents upstairs drinking wine as we figure ourselves out down below, safe in the confines of a carpeted basement. I'll spend four years getting my bachelor's degree in acting, then I'll be off to New York to put it to work, where memories like this will live so far in my rearview I'll have to strain to recall them.

Jaz lingers on every face in the group. When her eyes meet mine, it's as if we're back onstage together, like we've somehow rehearsed this moment a hundred times, but we're still hoping to capture the authenticity and successfully pretend we don't know exactly what she's about to do.

"I dare you to kiss Marlowe," she tells Priscilla.

The basement quiets. Only the thump of the stereo playing my Ultimate Divas of Broadway CD mix cuts through, Patti LuPone wondering when it will be her turn.

Patti, you're more than welcome to take your turn right now.

My protest forms, but I swallow it back like my own shot, knowing better than to make the moment too big. To push back is to admit that Priscilla affects me.

She does not.

Priscilla laughs, too loudly, of course, as she readjusts the messy braided pigtails she's worn to every cast party since freshman year, when that particular group of seniors told her it looked cute. They'd offered it as genuine praise, not the usual backhanded compliment they paid the other underclassmen. Priscilla's hair is too short for the style now, jagged from the cut she gave herself for the musical-not to mention brassy from her box-blond dye job-but she won't give up the braids. Who else would make themselves look less appealing for a high school musical?

Me. I would. But I'm no Priscilla Covington-French. I do things like read the entire script ahead of rehearsal, or, you know, say my lines as written.

"Come on. Give me something real!" Priscilla says, as if Jaz's dare is some kind of harmless warm-up prank.

I take my own Solo cup filled with Dr Pepper and press my lips to the rim. "Wow. Okay," I mutter.

Everyone here knows I'm a lesbian. It's a delicate piece of me, fragile in the hands of my impulsive, insensitive peers, but it's one I've needed to embrace anyway, wanting a sense of ownership over myself that no one else can compromise. Everyone also knows that Priscilla has hooked up with girls. Two girls she's made out with in the last year are in the circle with us-Dana Weldon and Melissa Tomlinson. Priscilla hasn't made kissing girls a part of her identity like I have. She treats her actions like hormonal-theater-kid fun. Maybe for her, it is. All I know is that I won't let her treat me like a joke.

A glimpse of Priscilla's real hostility presses against her hollow friendliness, her eyes narrowing on me as her mouth goes taut.

Right there, I want to shout, pointing out the change to our castmates, who all believe Priscilla hung the moon. Don't you see? It's not all my doing. She hates me, too!

"What was that?" Priscilla asks me. "Sorry. I couldn't hear you."

She's sitting exactly two people away, kitty-corner on the curve of our circle. I keep my volume the same. Don't even move my lips from against the cup. "Wow. Okay," I repeat.

"I genuinely thought Jaz was kidding," she says.

"I can pick something else," Jaz tells her.

Jaz is Priscilla's best friend. She's the only one, other than me, who seems to know when Priscilla is pretending. She won't humor her by agreeing that she was joking, because she wasn't.

"Please do," I say. "I'm not trying to make anyone uncomfortable with my presence."

Blotches of red grow like weeds up Priscilla's neck, visible even through the two layers of orangey-tan Ben Nye foundation she applied down to her collarbone and decided against washing off after the show.

"I'm not uncomfortable. I would kiss you," she tells me.

"I would kiss you, too," I say back. She doesn't get to bulldoze me with a statement like that. "It's just acting."

"Obviously," she replies.

Look at us, two bulldozers crashing into each other. Welcome to the monster truck show.

"I'm really sorry, Marlowe. I wasn't trying to make it weird," Jaz says. I know she means it. Probably because in private, she's confided to me that she also likes to kiss girls.

I swear, everyone involved in drama is gay, gay, gay.

"It's all good," I tell her. We might have a lot of complex dynamics within our cast, but everyone really does look out for me. Most of the time. "Let's move on."

"Okay, let me think." Jaz begins her search again, her eyes roaming around her basement for a new challenge.

That's when Priscilla lunges.

Her mouth crashes into mine, searching and insistent. There is no time to stop my body's reaction. I pull her closer as my lips part, making space for the slick heat of her tongue, and I smell the faintest whiff of alcohol she must've snuck into this parent-organized cast party. The pads of her fingers grip my shoulders so hard I feel it in my bones.

My head whirls with how good she tastes, the genuine shock, and, god, the raging pulse between my legs, completely unrelated to the girl who has one knee wedged between my thighs and her mouth suctioned to mine.

When I pull back, finally able to connect my mind to my body, Priscilla doesn't look away. Doesn't wipe my spit from the corner of her mouth. Doesn't let go of my shoulders.

"I never back down from a dare," she says, breathless.

PRESENT DAY

1

MARLOWE

December

Dallas Winthrop offers me the rest of his croissant as we walk side by side through Wilbur Reed High School. Even though I'm not hungry, I take it, catching the falling crumbs in my palm as our steps fall into sync down the English hallway.

Classes are over, but the after-school activities haven't started yet. In this brief interim, our school becomes a museum, with us teachers serving as the docents, eager to share all the new history that's unfolded today among these withering WRHS artifacts.

See that spot beside the water fountain where the linoleum is cracked? That's where Brayden McCaffrey shoved Asher Kincade after lunch, earning Brayden his first-ever in-school suspension. What neither boy knows is that is also the place where class of 2010 alumna Marlowe Jenkins got rejected when asking class of 2009's Katy Thatcher to her final homecoming. That spot, you see, is a place of great suffering.

I wipe potential croissant flakes from the corners of my mouth and pop my head into my girlfriend's classroom. "We're on our way to break the news," I tell her.

"Good luck!" Alice says, smiling as she makes little cheerleader fists of enthusiasm.

Dallas, wearing a handmade velvet cape and a matching velvet beret, stumbles backward into the lockers outside Alice's door. He clutches his stomach, staring down as if he's been stabbed, hands trembling in performed shock.

Alice Yeung, never one to remember the conventions of theater, even after six months of dating me and almost twenty years of knowing me, palms her forehead. "Sorry! I'm fried from reading essays," she says. "I meant to say...

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Verlag
Penguin LLC US
Erscheinungsdatum
2026
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 13 
9798217188017
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
352
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