On the second day of Sashtun’s stay at the hotel, she walked to one of the nearby restaurants, a different one than she’d eaten at the previous evening, for breakfast. Then she called the county bus service and asked them to pick her up and take her to a store where she could buy clothes. Again, the person on the other end wanted a specific address or the name of a particular store, which Sashtun couldn’t give her. She hung up and asked some of the people in the restaurant if they could recommend a nearby store to buy clothes from.
It turned out that there was an enormous general store within walking distance of the restaurants and hotel, so she didn’t call the bus dispatcher back, but set out walking south along the busy road. She had less than half a mile to go before she reached the store. The store was huge and sold a bewildering variety of things, many of which she’d never heard of, but the section with clothing was big and easy to spot from the entrance. She was soon able to identify the employees of the store, who wore a distinctive vest with the store’s sigil, and asked one of the women to help her find things.
“Sure, honey,” the woman said. “What are your sizes?”
“Uh... I’m not sure.” She was only vaguely aware of the units of measurement they used here, and had no idea what her new body’s shape was in those units.
“Lost some weight recently, huh? I can measure you.”
So she did, stretching a measuring tape around and along Sashtun at various points, and then recommending a set of sizes of clothes to try on. Sashtun explored the racks of clothing and found that most of them had a little tag sewn into the collar or waist indicating the size. Even after learning her sizes, she wasn’t sure what units they were denominated in.
She took several articles of clothing to the dressing rooms, along with underwear and bras, and tried them on. Only a fraction of the ones nominally in her size actually fit her, but after a few hours of trial and error, she had three suits of clothes to take back to the hotel. She walked out of the store wearing a blouse and trousers similar to those she’d seen other women wearing at the restaurant or in the store. She dropped off her purchases, and her old male clothes, in her hotel room, undressed and rested a little while, and then went out to eat again.
She should make her money stretch further by buying food to keep in the room and eat. It would have to be less expensive than eating at the nearby restaurants every time. The store she’d just been to seemed to have a food section, though she’d been so tired after trying on dozens of outfits to find a handful that fit her that she hadn’t felt like buying any.
The next day after breakfast, she looked up banks and found the nearest, then called the county bus and asked them to take her there. She tried to cash the check the WE BUY GOLD proprietor had given her, and the teller suggested opening a checking account instead; after debating with herself for a few moments, Sashtun agreed. However, the teller asked for identification to prove she was the “Sashtun Kusnar” named on the check, and she had to admit she had no such papers. She was stymied; she would have to sell another bar of gold, and insist on getting the full price in cash this time.
She got the county bus to take her directly to the Walmart south of her hotel, and bought groceries — mostly fruit, as well as an assortment of prepackaged foods she wasn’t familiar with but which turned out to be pretty tasty, when she got them back to the hotel and opened them. She also bought a couple of books, one a history of one of this world’s wars, one a novel.
She thought about calling Carson and asking if the portal had opened, but decided against it. No use bothering him when he still wasn’t sure if she was who she said she was, or if the portal were real. He would undoubtedly call when the portal opened again, which might not be for weeks — or even months, in the worst case.
That evening, she ate from the fruit and packaged crackers she’d bought, and again for breakfast the next day. She spent much of the day trying to read the history, but the bewildering array of unfamiliar names, and the background information that the author assumed any educated person would have, made it hard to make headway. The novel wasn’t much better; the narrative conventions of this culture were strange, seemingly preferring to dive right into action and explain who the characters were later if at all. Maybe next time she went to the store, she would look for a children’s book. In the evening, she walked to one of the nearby restaurants again.
After supper, when she returned to her hotel, she felt so lonely that she broke down and decided to call Carson or Amanda, even at the risk of annoying them. Perhaps she could ask them to let her speak with Davey? But when she got out her phone and tried to use it, nothing happened. Pushing the button on the side didn’t make the screen light up. She got out the papers and booklet that had come with it and started studying them, but she was missing too much context; the writers assumed too much about what she knew.
She continued her study of those papers the following day. There was another little tool that had come with the phone, which she’d never unwrapped — the phone store proprietor had said something about it, but faced with such a flood of new information, she’d absorbed only a tiny fraction of it. She opened it and found it consisted of a black boxy shape with metal prongs coming out of it, and a long cord that trailed off in another small metal prong. Trial and error showed that the small prong would connect neatly to a slot in the side of the phone, but what about the other end? After a while, she gave up on it and went back to trying to read. The novel made a little more sense this time, thought there was still much that she didn’t understand.
The next day, after paying the hotel clerk for one more day — her last day before she would need to sell more gold — she looked at the phone and the cord she’d attached to it again while she ate a breakfast of apples and “Cheetos”, strangely flavored crackers that came in various amorphous shapes. Suddenly, her mind connected the prongs on the end of the boxy black thing with the slots at the base of the lamp by the bed. She tested it, and found that not only did the prongs fit neatly into the slots, but the phone screen lit up! It wasn’t usable, as yet; it didn’t respond to the touch-commands that the phone store proprietor had taught her, but she figured that might come in time.
She went out to eat some hours later, finding that the restaurant where she had eaten the delicious roasted chicken wrapped in bread was closed, but the others were open. She ate while reading a few more pages from the novel, and returned to her hotel room not long before the sun set. She examined the phone to see if it was usable yet. It didn’t respond right away, but some trial and error with the buttons got it to do something, and after a minute or so, it was back to displaying the same options that it normally did. She could call Carson or Amanda by typing in one of those numbers on the slip of paper Davey had given her.
But should she? She was lonely, but she knew that annoying them would not make them more likely to believe her, if they doubted her and Davey’s story. She decided to wait another day or two, and went back to reading.
She had scarcely been reading for a quarter of an hour when there came a knock at the door. She set the book aside, went to the door, and opened it. The maid had already come to clean the room earlier...
She opened the door, and there were Davey, his father, and his sister. Unexpected tears welled up in her eyes. “Did it open?” she asked, barely able to make her voice function.
“Yeah,” Davey said, and hugged her. “You can go home soon! And for now, you can come live with us!”
On the way back home, they talked about sleeping arrangements.
“She can stay in my room,” Davey offered. “And I could sleep on the sofa downstairs.”
“Or you could share your brother’s room?” Dad suggested.
“Nah,” Davey said. “I’d rather have my own bed, even if it’s a sofa. Carson will get grumpy if you make him share his bed with me.”
“That’s probably true,” Dad said, “but I won’t stand for him taking it out on you.”
“Thank you for giving up your room to me,” Sashtun said. She was sitting up front with Dad.
“You’re welcome.”
Then Dad wanted to know how she’d been doing, taking care of herself without their help in this unfamiliar world. “I’m sorry we didn’t help more,” he said. “But it was so hard to believe —”
“I understand,” Sashtun said. “Some parts of Davey’s story were hard to believe at first, too.” She told them about the guy at the WE BUY GOLD place and the guy at the phone store, who’d helped her a lot, and how she’d gotten advice from people eating at Chick-Fil-A and the staff at Walmart, and how she’d tried to open a bank account and deposit a check, but couldn’t do it without a driver’s license and so forth.
It didn’t take long for them to get home, and Mom had supper ready for them when they arrived. They sat down to supper, and even though Sashtun had just gotten back to her hotel room from a restaurant when they went to see her, she ate a little too, and told Mom it was the best food she’d eaten in days.
Then Davey went to his room and got a bunch of his school stuff, and the book he was reading and a couple of other books he wanted to read soon, and his handheld game system, and drawing pads, and sleeping bag, and took them down and piled them up on the end table next to the sofa. Sashtun unpacked her stuff in Davey’s room; she didn’t have a lot, but she’d bought some clothes, snack food, and books at Walmart.
Davey hummed happily as he got ready for bed that night, after Mom and Dad finished watching their boring TV show. If Kashpur was able to open the portal every six days, or maybe a bit more often, maybe he could go visit Zindla and her family for Spring break? And some or all of his family could go with him and meet his friends, and see more of that world. Zindla coming to visit him here might be weird; she’d be a guy almost as old as Uncle Rob, wouldn’t she? But not really too weird, he decided. He’d invite her. If nothing else, maybe he could step into the other world for a few minutes sometime and write a short note to Zindla and her family.
