Welcome to Ghostliness & Nerfherders Presents: Paper Girls, Issue #8! In the previous installment, KJ is still missing. Erin’s older self is heavily medicated, rife with self-esteem problems, and a life that didn’t go the way she planned. Mac’s older self is not alive because her slightly older self died of cancer in 1992. We haven’t seen Tiff’s older self yet.

Meanwhile, some girl who looks like Erin, but either isn’t Erin OR is Erin after some extensively fucked up time travel adventures, is trying to make her way to the First Folding. This is also where the real Erins are headed. To do what, I don’t know yet.

Some giant tardigrades showed up, too. I don’t think that will be of any consequence to the story anymore. One of them started eating the other one!

Paper Girls, Issue #8 [August, 2016]
Written by: Brian K. Vaughan

COVER ART! Ol’ Skullface Mac doesn’t exist in the future. This will be quite a fucked up revelation. Perhaps she’ll need to borrow some of Old Erin’s sweet, sweet Xanax.

“Only time is timeless.” Is that supposed to be profound? Here, let me try: Only the end is endless. Only a piece of fruit is fruitless. I could go on and on.

The two Erins, Young and Old alike, are investigating the dead, rundown mall. And it’s hella gross. Water everywhere, crumbling infrastructure, mannequins covered in cobwebs. It looks like teenagers haven’t even broken in and fucked here in years.

“I feel like my grandma,” says Young Erin as they meander through the concourse.
“How so? You’re suddenly racist in weirdly specific ways against other Asian people?” Old Erin responds flippantly.

No, not exactly that. Just the way she lost her marbles at the end, soundin’ like Joe Biden, couldn’t even string two words together, didn’t know who anyone was. Alzheimer’s. Like years and years have gone by and everyone was around for it, but Young Erin happens to remember none of it. This must be what it’s like.

“For what it’s worth, I’m just as adrift as you,” Old Erin offers her own dose of what-the-fuck-itis, “Time travelers with pet monsters, telepathic Apple products… it all makes as much sense as Dad’s rants about the Iron Curtain when I was your age.”

Wandering through the mall isn’t proving to be very illuminating. The iPod of Tomorrow isn’t broadcasting any more signals to Old Erin’s brain. Things are starting to look less hopeful.

Whatever, same difference. It’s all stickball.

Young Erin gets sad again, wondering why the hell her older self can’t remember a single thing about any of this crazy stuff in her 12-year-old life. Wondering why the hell she doesn’t remember any of her new paper route friends. They’ve only been together for a couple days, but they’re all pretty tight. Seems tragic that it doesn’t matter 30 years from now.

Enough of that forlorn nonsense for now! Old Erin is getting a vision: a flashing symbol right in front of the old Kay-Bee Toys! Time to check it out, maybe there’s a pile of old Rubik’s Cubes to play or something, kid. Take your mind off of…you know, all the fucked up shit going on!

They head toward the location. They are being followed…

An entire George H.W. Bush administration! Not too shabby. OK, well, kinda shabby, actually.

Now this is what I came to see! Mac contemplating mortality, that’s the good stuff. She sits on the curb smoking and Tiff chides her for filling her lungs up with cancer spores. “He said I die of leukemia, not lung cancer. What difference is one more of these gonna make?” Puff puff. Oh yeah baby, that sweet sweet tar…

Tiff is optimistic. Maybe there’s a way to change the future? Nope! What’s done is done! *puff* There ain’t changin’ nothing! “Remember what that future teen told us? ‘Your ending is your ending, no matter what’.”

Tiff is like, those dumb mother fuckers are dead now. What do they know? Choose your own fate?

Mac doesn’t want to. Time to pack up, sister, and go visit the 2016 version of Tiffany Quilkin! Let’s see what sorry state her ass is in. Maybe she weighs 400 pounds. Maybe she’s in prison for selling counterfeit designer purses. Maybe she has four shitty kids and a husband who yells at his Xbox all day. Wouldn’t that be fun? Let’s go see.

Tiff is doubtful that her future self even stayed in this dead-end town. “If I hadn’t started teaching at M.I.T. by now, my parents have probably already had me killed,” she claims, trying to reroute to some other plan that doesn’t involve ever finding her 400-pound white-collar crime Xbox-husband-having future self.

Mac and Tiff are interrupted by police cars and fire trucks whizzing through the subdivision at 140 miles per hour. Odd, they usually go about 10 mph slower. What’s the big hurry? Is there a black guy reading in the park that they need to go murder or something?! Ha! Fuck tha police!

Something’s up, and Tiff has an unsettling feeling that they should check the mall to see if the Erins are still alive and kicking.

Speaking of various Erins, the Not-Erin child is hitching a ride in the Uber car while the poor woman tries to swerve and escape the fighting tardigrades. They’re bloodying each other up and falling into bridges, tearin’ up Ohio with their tardigradiness. The woman is terrified, but Not-Erin is quite indifferent.

“Enjoy them while you can,” says Not-Erin, “because I’m pretty sure this will all be undone soon.”
“Undone how?”
“By your descendants. My forefathers. Same difference.”

OK, so Not-Erin is from way in the past then. That makes sense. Star Wars, right? A long, long time ago. Sure.

So, surprise! Every timeline is the shitty timeline because there’s only one timeline, and guess what, it’s shitty!

“But if you’re smart, parts of it can occasionally be…overwritten,” Not-Erin says mysteriously. She keeps rambling, and the Uber lady is getting more and more uneasy with each subsequent sentence. She needn’t worry though, because hers and everyone else’s memories will likely be wiped clean by this time tomorrow! “Wiped clean” is my nicer phrase. Not-Erin uses the term “brutally ripped”. That’s how I’d rather describe Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson “The Actor”.

Not-Erin advises the woman to do something completely reckless and regretful tonight, because you won’t even know you did it! Try some rapes, those are always a hoot, eh?.

Yo, Erin. That’s a bad idea, Erin. ACAB, Erin.

Back at the mall, the other two Erins are yelling into the closed Kay-Bee Toys hoping for an answer back from KJ. When it doesn’t happen, they start wandering around looking for another inspiration. They consider the cops, but fuck that noise. They’re probably in on this whole thing! Whatever this whole thing actually is! It’s hard to tell. It’s getting convoluted and Old Erin needs more Xanax.

Old Erin lifts up her shirt again, revealing her previously inexplicable bullet wound scar. “I…we were both shot in 1988, yeah? But the fact that only you remember it means that, between then and now, the powers that be somehow had this all covered up.”

A conspiracy is afoot, eh? Mayhaps!

Young Erin questions her notion that the cops, of all people, would be involved in such a conspiracy. This kid has to remember the difference between what she’s seen (a lot) vs. what her older counterpart has seen (not a lot). This is Cleveland, sister! The cops are ruthless thugs!

Well, then, Lois Lane, why don’t you report about it in the paper? The Cleveland Steamer! Or whatever it’s called. And Old Erin, I have a feeling she kind of deflects this idea a little bit by starting to suddenly take pity on Young Erin’s “loss of childhood”. She’d rather spend the time now helping her younger counterpart get her friend back than worry about the future of her career. Suspicious.

Young Erin notices a blue object on the ceiling. “It looks like there’s something…floating?”

Old Erin gets her phone out and shines a light at the ceiling to get a better look. Her old-ass eyes still can’t tell what it is.

For the first time in eight issues, Young Erin smiles. She really fucking smiles.

Can I get a hells yeah for field hockey.

Back to Tiff and Mac! I wish they were gonna go try to visit Future Tiff to see how much of a fucking mess that lady might be. Maybe she’s dead too! Maybe she died of leukemia in 1989? Or perhaps she was hit by a Segway scooter.

They arrive at the mall, where they spot Old Erin’s tiny car. A squelchy, gross “gllrgh” keeps reverberating around the parking lot. “Sounds like my dad upchucking,” Mac says, reminiscing fondly.

They round the corner behind a trailer of sorts, and come across a huge goddamned maggot feeding out of the dumpster. HUGE maggot. Not giant-tardigrade size, but still larger than it has any right to be. For serious.

The girls stare dumbfounded at the thing. The thing spits a bunch of white goo out at them. Tiff gets spooged and now she’s stuck to the pavement.

“Yo ugly! You must be the grodiest thing I’ve seen in my entire life,” yells Mac, channeling her inner Mean Girl and trying to make the maggot feel self-conscious. The maggot turns its…head?…toward Mac. Tiff asks her what the fuck she’s doing. “This bag of barf can’t hurt me, Tiffany,” Mac proclaims with the confidence of a dead girl, “I know when I’m gonna die, and it sure as shit isn’t today.”

Sounds good to me! I wish I could live like that, but unfortunately I think I’m going to die any given second of every day. Right now, for instance, isn’t out of the question.

The maggot rears its…head?…and prepares to make an example out of Mac. Today’s her lucky day, though! Not-Erin leaps out into the fray and does her magic time-warping swirlie death magic, which tears the maggot bitch apart into a torrent of disgusting maggot guts and slimy sperm-like goo.

Wait a minute, now. Not-Erin is not Erin? What a twist!

Not-Erin helps free the girls from their semeny predicaments and says she’ll explain everything on the way. On the way to where? Glad you asked! On the way to where, indeed!

The only place where Mac and Tiff will be safe.

“…about sixty-eight thousand years from now,” Not-Erin smiles wryly.

Well, fuck that. The year 70,016? When global warming has already melted all of Antarctica four times over? No thanks!

Old Erin hefts her barely-even-fat butt up the mall fountain to try to retrieve the field hockey stick. She gets close enough to notice letters etched into the blade. “Did this KJ kid have words carved into her stick?” Old Erin asks, squinting like a motherfucker. Most of this hockey stick seems to be missing into another dimension. Most of the shaft is invisible.

“I don’t think so?” Young Erin answers from the floor as Old Erin leans closer to try to make out the writing. She grabs the blade and falters a bit, realizing she just pulled more of the stick out of whatever portal it’s jutting out of.

Now she’s curious. She continues yanking on it to try to draw it out of whatever Hellmouth this thing appears to be connected to. And it works! And it falls! And Young Erin catches it!

“Nice catch, us! What does it say?” the old one yells from high above.

“Um…”

Well… you may not like this…

Final Thoughts

So many questions! Why! How! What! Where! When! Why! Who! From whence!

My prediction is that the “other Erin” that isn’t to be trusted is Not-Erin, not Old Erin. It’s going to take a while for this to become apparent. Old Erin will probably be killed five minutes before the revelation!

By…

…get this…

…Young Erin? Eek!

Also Old Erin won’t trust Young Erin either. That will prove to be inconsequential.