Lily Kazinski arrived home at 4:37 P.M, the tires of her bicycle screeching wildly against the cement sidewalk, the colorful array of autumn foliage adding a delightful rustling after-noise. After taking in a gulp of chill late afternoon air, Lily turned off the podcast she was listening to on her ancient hand me down iPod, pulled out her earbuds, and slipped both of them into her pants pocket.
For a moment, Lily wondered why she went through the trouble of riding her bike all the way from Camden College, which was more than an hour away from home, when she could have just waited for the bus like a sensible person would and had been home in half the time or less it typically took her.
There were two reasons. One happy, one not so much.
The happy reason Lily took the scenic route was that it was October in Illinois, and Autumn happened to be her favorite time of the year. Falling leaves, nature hikes, apple picking, pumpkin spice lattes, carving jack o'lanterns, wearing awful sweaters...all that corny jazz spoke to her. She didn't know why it did, and as a biracial girl it made her and her friends laugh at how stereotypically white she acted sometimes, but she was a dork at heart, and had come to accept that.
Lily didn't want to admit the truth to herself, but the second reason, the real reason was that she hated living at the Sunset Arms and wanted to stay away from it as often as possible.
The venerable Shermer apartment building, which had existed since at least the 1940s, wasn't inherently terrible. Everything more or less worked inside. It was clean. It was warm. It was small, but not unbearably so. Some of the tenants were loud, or creepy, or drug addicted(Often all of the above), but they mostly left you alone if you left them alone.
Lily guiltily realized that she could be doing much worse right now. At least she had a loving family who cared about her. At least she wasn't living in Syria or South Side Chicago or the Shermer Fields trailer park, and it's not like her mother could afford anything else than this. Not on a janitor's salary.
Still, the twenty year old couldn't deny what her gut told her, the Sunset Arms simply didn't feel like home. Secretly, Lily yearned for when she was five years old, when she and her brother and both of her parents were still together as a unit.
They had once lived in a big red house in the nice part of Shermer, with two stories, a white picket fence, a dog, and a big back yard. Back when dad wasn't a petty vindictive jerk. Back when Mom wasn't yet a depressed obese mess. It was suburban bliss. Lily still rode past it on her bike when she had the opportunity, remembering the last time she had built a snowman on the front lawn with Russell.
It was the time before her father had finally confronted her mother's infidelity and the fallout that ensued.
Shivering equally from the cold and from painful memories, Lily climbed the set of stone steps that led into the Sunset Arms.
The new owner really needs to install a wheelchair ramp the teen thought.
As she walked through the tiny lobby to collect her family's mail, the yellowing tile floor as familiar to her as the back of her hand, she felt goosebumps erupt underneath her sweatshirt as the telltale voice of the superintendent barked from behind the oppressive pane of glass separating him from his tenants.
"Hey kid!"
Lily tensed up and slowly turned around.
"Hey, Mr. Spilotro" she answered neutrally.
Ralph Spilotro was a balding, short tempered man in his late fifties who managed the building. Lily didn't like dealing with him.
"Tell your mother when she gets home that she's a payment behind on the rent. I'd like to speak with her about it."
"Sure thing, boss" Lily said, mail in hand, turning toward the flight of stairs. She began to wheel her bicycle up.
"You know, we have a perfectly good bike rack in the back of the building" Ralph added.
"I know!" Lily yelled back as she rounded the corner and up the first flight of stairs, pretending not to hear Ralph's muttering.
No way was Lily going to trust one of her only possessions with Ralph, who easily could be running a chop shop for all she knew, and if not him, probably someone else. As a journalism major, she was aware that Shermer had a severely underreported crime problem and suspected that Ralph was involved in something, but she wasn't going to tell him that.
Still, Ralph was right. Lugging a bike upstairs everyday was prohibitively difficult and not to mention awkward, especially for a not particularly athletic girl like herself.
"Hey, my life, my problems" Lily assured herself, as if hearing this very exposition play out in her head.
**
Lily eventually made her way up to the fourth floor, only slightly wheezing. She rolled her bicycle to 4E, the Kazinski's little nook of the world where they kept their stuff, unlocked the door, and walked inside.
She was the first one home, as usual, so the apartment was utterly silent. If they weren't so poor, it would actually look kind of cute.
After leaving the mail on her mom's dresser, putting her own stuff away in her room and undressing into her comfy clothes, Lily poured some water into a large cooking pot she found in the cupboard and turned on the stove.
Lily wasn't much of a cook, but she could make a mean mac & cheese. As she waited for the sound of the boil, she watched TV on the faded red couch.
**
Russell Kazinski came home from work at 6:00 P.M.
"Police, there's a stranger in my apartment! She's eating all my food! Listening to my television! And what's this? She's rubbing her smelly feet all over my bed?!?"
"Scumbag, you're the smelliest one here. Go take a shower" Lily said without looking away from the screen, hiding a small smile on her face. She was eating a bowl of the finished mac & cheese while watching a DVD of The Disaster Artist she had gotten from the library.
"Of course I smell, roads and bridges don't repair themselves. At least I'm the one with a job."
"When I graduate, I'm going to be making a lot more than you, you ginger shit."
"No guarantees, and that's in four years at the earliest, freeloader."
A tense silence existed between the two half siblings before both of them broke out into giggles.
"It's good to see you too" said Russ. "Hey, a shower actually sounds like a swell idea, so that's what I'm going to do. See you in thirty."
"OK, see you then!" shouted Lily as she laughed at James Franco as Tommy Wiseau make a fool of himself.
**
When Russ was finished showering in their tiny bathroom, he came outside to see his sister. He had likewise changed into more comfortable clothing, and he smelled significantly better without the grime and sweat he came home with clogging his pores.
"I've got good news" the red haired young man said nonchalantly as he sat next to Lily on the couch.
"I'm finally getting my own place."
Lily paused the movie and turned to face Russell.
"Seriously?"
"Yeah. You and Mom won't have me to kick around any more. Now you can watch TV in here late at night without listening to the disgusting snoring noises I make."
Lily's eyes widened.
"Don't worry. I'm still going to see you two every day."
"I meant..."
"Am I still going to help cover the rent and groceries? Of course, Lill. What do you take me for?"
Lily sighed sadly.
"Sorry. I don't want you to go. Really. I like you. Love you. Even if you are an annoying Archie Andrews looking motherfucker."
"And I love you even though this you're an annoying know it all twerp. I don't want to either, really, but it's too small here. I need to spread my wings. And to be honest, I'm too embarrassed to tell my girlfriend where we live. I'm just worried what Mom is going to think."
"I'll tell you what she's going to think. Mom's going to freak. You know that she's been hanging on by a thread for years now. We're the only ones who care about her. If you leave, she might have a heart attack or something."
Both of the Kazinski kids looked on at a framed photo of their mother back in 1989, held tightly against the father they once knew when the two had started dating. Wordlessly, Russell and Lily lamented a time before either one had been born, because the twenty six year old Evelyn Kazinski they saw looked so much happier, so much more vibrant than the broken down woman who they knew now, the one who often cried herself to sleep.
**
8:05 P.M.
Behind the green door, Eugene paused door and wondered what he was going to do with the rest of the night.
He was too exhausted, and frankly, too scared to use the gemstone again. It was bad enough that he had been magically shifted through three different realities today. He certainly didn't need another drastic change.
No. What he was going to do was take a nice long hot shower. Then he was going to soak his feet in front of the TV for an hour or two. He didn't know what was on tonight, but it didn't matter. His mind was like molasses right now, and if he had to veg out watching Young Sheldon or America's Got Talent, well, he was just going to have to settle.
After that, he was going to eat a salami sandwich, if he even had salami anymore, though considering his new corpulent body, he probably did.
Then he was going to go to bed, collapsing on his mattress without even bothering to get undressed. He might even say a prayer to God, his first one in decades. Eugene had secretly been an atheist since he was sixteen, but today's magical madness made him reconsider.
With great reluctance, the former man unlocked his front door...
Russell and Lily turned around as they heard their mother walk through the front door.
"Mom, you're home!" they shouted in unison.
"Hope you're hungry!" added Lily, raising a bowl of the dinner she had made.
Eugene took one look at the two strangers sitting on his couch and immediately fainted.