The Measure(11)

Nina hadn’t believed in the boxes’ inscription and wanted to wait until she had met with her news team at work. But the truth was Amie wouldn’t have looked anyway. These boxes had shown up everywhere, clearly powerful beyond belief. The world had somehow tripped and tumbled through the looking glass, and Amie had read enough novels to recognize that this was the part of the story where nobody knew what the hell was going on, where the characters made rash decisions whose consequences would only be revealed chapters later.

Fortunately, the strings had arrived in the middle of spring break, so nobody at the Connelly Academy had to make the last-minute decision to cancel classes. (Very few schools had actually canceled that day, though Amie heard that most classrooms were only half-full, with both students and teachers failing to turn up.)

“Your students will, of course, have questions,” the principal had addressed the staff the following Monday. “And I’m sure that you all have formed your own opinions by now. But we cannot go telling our students anything we don’t know for certain.”

The teacher next to Amie had leaned in and whispered, “So . . . basically that means we can’t say anything at all?”

More than a month had passed since then, the gravity settled over the world. But the situation at school felt largely unchanged, the administration still trying to shelter its students as much as possible. Access to YouTube had even been blocked on school property, after a teacher realized that half of the pupils in the cafeteria were watching videos of a teenage boy attempting various means of destroying his parents’ strings. The teachers later watched some of the clips in their lounge, and Amie looked on anxiously as the boy tried cutting the strings with pruning shears, dipping them in a fizzy homemade acid concoction, pulling strenuously on one end while his bulldog chomped down on the other.

“Look, I certainly don’t want the kids getting inspired by these stunts, or watching them in my class,” Amie recalled her colleague saying. “But we can’t just act like it’s not happening. I can’t keep teaching them history and pretending like we’re not living through it right now.”

In a way, Amie thought, wasn’t that incredible?

She was well aware of the pain the strings had wrought—Nina’s girlfriend, Maura, had a short string. But Amie still hadn’t opened her own box, so she could see the world through unsullied eyes, and though she would never admit this in front of anyone, there was something almost . . . thrilling . . . about the strings’ arrival. Frightening and confusing, of course, but also, perhaps, wondrous? As a child, she imagined herself swept up by adventure, stepping inside the magical wardrobe, touring the chocolate factory, tessering through time. (Once, when she skinned her knee while playing outside, she even pressed her finger in the tiny wound and smeared a few droplets of blood on her cheek, envisioning herself as a warrior princess in a faraway land, to Nina’s germophobic dismay.) And now, the fantastic, the unbelievable, had suddenly entered her world. And she was there to witness.

Amie stood up slowly from her bedroom floor, Atonement in her hand. She had a few more papers to grade, then she was eager to finish reading. But she realized, as she placed the novel atop her dresser, that this was the first time the world outside of her books had ever rivaled the stories with its very own plot twist.





Nina




Nina and her colleagues were shocked, their eyes fastened to a computer screen in the middle of the office bullpen. The footage showed a group of police officers assembled near a bridge in what looked like a medieval village, cordoning off photographers and curious onlookers.

An incident in Verona had just made its way into the news cycle in New York. A young Italian couple, recently married, had jumped off a bridge together, hand in hand, after opening their boxes on their wedding night and discovering that the bride possessed a devastatingly short string. The groom survived the joint suicide attempt, while his wife of three days did not.

Nina winced when she realized that the tragic act, set in fair Verona, would undoubtedly spark an onslaught of tasteless Shakespearean puns in the tabloids.

“It’s so horrible,” said one of the reporters.

“But you know what’s really crazy?” asked a fact-checker. “The guy knew he wouldn’t succeed in killing himself. They looked at their strings, so they knew that hers was short and his was long. Even if he did something completely dangerous, he knew he wasn’t going to die.”

“Well, maybe he knew he wouldn’t die, but obviously he was pretty messed up about it. He still risked paralyzing himself by jumping off a fucking bridge.”

“Oh, yeah, of course. But it’s weird to think about.”

“I don’t know, to me it’s just more proof that nobody should look,” said the reporter. “Clearly, seeing their strings drove them both insane.”

They weren’t insane, Nina thought. They were heartbroken.

But she didn’t expect her coworkers to understand. They couldn’t look past the dramatic spectacle to see the ordinary, everyday anguish that lay just underneath it.

Their staff was small, dwindling every year in tandem with the magazine’s budget, and as far as she knew, Nina was the only member of the office with such an intimate connection to a known short-stringer.

Her colleagues had been timid at first, understandably wary of breaching any work-life boundaries, but the team had always been close enough to speak freely about breakups and weddings, pregnancies and deaths, and eventually they opened up about the strings.