Cassandra in Reverse

Leaving the office, Cassie decides to repeat what happened the day before and replicate the experiment. While her memory is usually exemplary, she initially has difficulty recalling what came next, eventually remembering the banana muffin. She goes back to the café and preempts the owner informing her that they don’t have any banana muffins, before going outside and being swept up—this time purposefully—in the protest. Despite being there intentionally this time, Cassie again finds herself overwhelmed and finds the Bar Humbug doorway from the day before. However, she decides that she won’t repeat this day again and that she intends to start her story “from the beginning” (65), in case the time-travel ability is an opportunity to correct the moment her life went wrong. While she doesn’t think about it directly until later in the narrative, she initially intends to go back to stop the car accident that killed her parents and led to her estrangement from her sister.

Cassie determines that she needs to figure out how to control time and is disappointed to realize that, unlike the previous day, she doesn’t appear to have gone back in time after her blackout. She decides to continue with her daily routine and goes into clothing store Zara to browse.