In What World

by Bridget Morrissey

Genres: General Fiction; Romance; Contemporary Romance; LGBT & Pride; Romantic Comedy

Synopsis

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?

Release date: August 11, 2026

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 352

Sample

"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 break a leg."

Dallas continues clutching his imaginary wound. "If you keep sticking your foot out to trip me, I just might."

"I'm sorry!" she says again, her eyebrows sloping downward in regret.

"I'll forgive it." Dallas lets the sentence linger, the obvious completion being but I won't forget.

Alice and I went to WRHS at the same time. She was a grade below me, but we did yearbook together for three years. Graphic design was legitimately Alice's passion, and she had a knack for it that went far beyond any other student on staff. She loved the creative aspect of putting together the yearbook, and her work won our school multiple awards. I just knew yearbook was a good activity for college applications, and I liked having something non-theater related to do between shows.

Alice and I both consistently turned in our materials early, and we were always among the first to volunteer for the miscellaneous field trips that sprung up, like visiting the printing press or going to the three-day-long yearbook convention. I recognized in her then the same thing I used to see in myself-a determination to go above and beyond, believing that the more you committed to something, the more you'd be rewarded, like there was some sort of cosmic scale that weighed your effort and provided you the appropriate compensation in return.

When Alice got a teaching position at WRHS last year, it felt like fate had pulled her back into my orbit. The cosmic scale had betrayed her in the same way it had betrayed me, placing zero value on our dedication to our respective crafts. She'd been laid off from her graphic design position, replaced by AI, and was forced to return to her hometown in pursuit of the kind of job where she couldn't be exchanged for a computer.

At least not yet.

She's gotten even more stunning since we were teens. Her long black hair is still as shiny as I remember, but now it looks professionally styled every day, which I've since learned is due to her evangelical commitment to her Dyson hair dryer. She's traded in her Old Navy polo shirts and flip-flops for flowy, neutral linens that turn her into this very hot, very competent-looking woman who you'd want to do knife-sharpening ASMR for you as you fall asleep.

"Will you still be here in an hour?" I ask her. "We can have dinner together."

"I'll be here," she says. "That sounds great."

"It could be longer. We might get held up by some . . . questioning parents," Dallas warns, putting on his best grande dame voice to emphasize the drama of it all.

"We really might," I say. It wouldn't be a Dallas Winthrop production if someone wasn't furious about his decisions. He's made it a tradition to keep the spring musical a secret until the December before it will open, and because he has a penchant for choosing risky shows, there are often some overzealous parents eager to discuss the show's subject matter with us.

"I can wait," Alice tells me. "I'm sure I'll still be reading these essays. Remind me why I asked them to write these by hand?"

"So you wouldn't have to suffer through reading twenty papers written by AI," I remind her.

"That's right. Down with the evil robots. They'll never take our souls. Well, break a leg. They're going to love the play you picked."

"It's a musical, dear," Dallas tells her.

"They're going to love the musical," Alice corrects.

As we continue down the hallway, Dallas puts his arm around me, tilting his head toward mine. He doesn't like Alice for me. He's never said it, and I've never dared to ask, but two decades in his presence have made me acutely aware of his teaching style. He isn't trying to make Alice learn proper theater etiquette. Very few members of our faculty know or remember it, and Dallas doesn't make a spectacle of correcting anyone else by pretending to be mortally wounded. He's trying to emphasize how wrong Alice is for me by finding ways to point out our fatal incompatibilities-me, a lifelong theater nerd, dating a woman who can't remember to say "Break a leg" even though she went to this very high school and has had plenty of continued exposure to the arts, thanks to Dallas and me.

It's just not the lens through which she views the world, I always want to argue. She's still a creative like you and I, but she sees things through the eyes of a designer, not a storyteller! Talk to her about our costumes, or our set! You'll get it then.

That's me fighting the Dallas who lives only in my mind. He accepts my one-sided arguments with no pushback. The real Dallas would surely make some kind of devastating-yet-true observation in return that I'd never be able to forget. Which is why I'll never actually bring it up.

"Did you hear the news?" real Dallas asks.

Closer to the auditorium, he's hung up three gigantic posters of Priscilla Covington-French like championship banners. Or, excuse me, they are of Cilla Cove, as she is professionally known, supporting cast member on the critically acclaimed, widely beloved TV medical drama Heartbeats.

I give Dallas a wry glare, then look to Cilla's face the way a person might examine their own reflection, scouring her every nonexistent pore for clues as to how she ended up near the top of a career she swore she didn't want to pursue.

Every single school day for the last few years, I've had to pass by her gigantic twinkling eyes and cloyingly sincere smile. She always manages to look like she's recently finished giggling, perpetually in on a secret you'll spend the rest of your life trying to decode.

"I don't think anyone on staff missed the three separate emails you sent on the matter," I say to Dallas.

"Was it really three? My keyboard's been sticking." He smiles. "Maybe I should send another? Just to apologize for the duplicates. And to make sure everyone read what the other emails said."

"Should we go ahead and print flyers, too, for anyone who might want to cut down on their screen time?" I ask. "What's the loss of a tree or two if it means celebrating the success of Cilla Cove?"

"I like the way you think," he says.

Dallas has every right to be proud of Cilla, who secured her first-ever Golden Globe nomination this morning for her work on the final season of Heartbeats. After all, it was Dallas who plucked her out of his freshman English class and begged her to audition for the fall play. She owes her success to him in a real way.