Time Travel for Love and Profit Read online

  this is a borzoi book published by alfred a. knopf

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2020 by Sarah Lariviere

  Cover art copyright © 2020 by Vidhya Nagarajan

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Photograph on page 307 copyright © The Estate of Harry Callahan; courtesy of Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9780593174203 (trade) — ISBN 9780593174210 (lib. bdg.) — ebook ISBN 9780593174227

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part I

  Chapter 1: My Miserable Destiny

  Chapter 2: Dirk Angus Is Born

  Chapter 3: Hungry Like a Black Hole

  Chapter 4: I’m Here! Wherever That Is…

  Chapter 5: New Nephele’s Dress Rehearsal

  Chapter 6: Optical Illusions Are Not Just for Those Wacky T-shirts They Sell in the Tourist Traps

  Chapter 7: Older & Wiser & Younger & Worser

  Part II

  Chapter 8: Immortal Beings Are Never Not Evil

  Chapter 9: Dirk Angus Rips a Bodice

  Chapter 10: The Week of the Toilet Burrito

  Chapter 11: Just Because a Girl Is Evil Doesn’t Mean She Can’t Be Nice

  Chapter 12: Battle to the Death with Death

  Chapter 13: Time Ends Things

  Chapter 14: Nobody Wants to Be Normal

  Chapter 15: Rage Logic

  Chapter 16: Unknown Unknown After Unknown Unknown

  Chapter 17: Join the Cult

  Part III

  Chapter 18: Stupid Cupid

  Chapter 19: California Forever

  Chapter 20: Love and Other Incidental Findings

  Chapter 21: Oblivion Is Definitely Not Awesome

  Chapter 22: Saving the World from Death and Destruction Is Way Less Fun Than I Thought It Would Be

  Chapter 23: Meet La Toilette

  Chapter 24: Poof!

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Dedicated to my children, Laszlo and Adèle Mapp

  The day my best friend, Vera Knight, dumped me, I didn’t know what happened. We were sitting in the cafeteria right after winter break. I was eating my usual burrito. Vera was eating her usual six jelly beans and a bagel. I said, “My current favorite mathematical concept is fractals. Not only do they make psychedelic patterns, they also describe infinity.”

  Vera nodded, and nudged a white jelly bean across the table with her index finger.

  “What’s your current favorite mathematical concept?” I asked. “You’re probably still obsessed with square roots.”

  Vera kept nodding and looked over her shoulder. I looked where she was looking and saw nothing but Ramsey Schultz, with her bored facial expression and her multitude of extraneous accessories. The dangly feather earrings, the metallic boots, the table of worshippers who shadowed her every move like spy drones.

  “Square roots,” I said. “I knew it.”

  Vera stood, said “I’ll be right back,” walked to Ramsey’s table, sat and didn’t say another word to me for the rest of the year.

  Of course, at the time, I didn’t know Vera was ghosting me. Sure, I knew that Vera and Ramsey had been taking ballet together, and that Ramsey, according to Vera, was “actually supersweet.” But Vera said she’d be right back, and I believed her. So I enjoyed the remainder of my burrito, ignorant of my miserable destiny. The icy shivers I would get when Vera passed me in the hallways and looked through me like I was transparent. The dizziness that would hit when I realized she was never going to answer my texts. The misery of overhearing my peers describe a party at Vera’s house, during which there was a kissing game, where actual kissing happened. Vera and I had sworn we’d tell each other every single detail of our first kisses. Did Vera kiss someone? Who was it? How was it? The loneliness of knowing she’d never tell me.

  Things only got worse from there. When I walked down the hallway, Ramsey and her minions hissed. I guess they were supposed to be snakes, and I was the prey or something? Whatever it was, it worked; I felt like a moving target. Other kids pretended not to see me, as if looking at me might get them sent to Outcast Island, too. Then one day, someone shouted, “Neffa-Freak!” And the insult caught on. Perhaps because it’s easier to pronounce than my name, which is Nephele, after a cloud nymph from Greek mythology who is so obscure I was pretty sure nobody but my mother had ever heard of her. NEH-fuh-lee rhymes with especially is what Mom used to tell me to tell people, but you’d have to be alarmingly adorable to pull that off. Alarming I could do. Adorable? Not so much.

  And then there was Valentine’s Day. Oh, how I loved Valentine’s Day. The one holiday a year when a dashing stranger might parachute into Redwood Cove out of nowhere, march up to me with a rose between his teeth and kneel, holding a sign above his head that said, Nephele, your beauty may be complicated, but it is unmistakable, while a chubby baby with hot-pink cheeks shot an arrow made of sunbeams through my heart. I was sitting on the redwood stump outside the school, imagining other things my valentine might proclaim, such as Nephele, let’s go to the beach together and contemplate irregular polyhedrons until the sun plunges into the deep blue sea, when Youki Johnson fist-bumped Kyle “Dirty Dog” Jones and started walking my way.

  Youki had the face of a superhero, and he was a straight-A student like me. And he was coming to talk to me—on Valentine’s Day. My head hummed. My tongue tingled. I was so excited that I almost forgot how to breathe. Looking back, my reaction was irrational, but at the time, I couldn’t think straight. I’d been fantasizing about a moment like this for years.

  When Youki stopped in front of me, he handed me a pink razor tied with a droopy red bow. “This is for you, Woolly Mammoth,” he said. “Shave those hairy arms.”

  Kyle fell all over himself laughing in this strangled way, like he was choking on a chipmunk. Other kids also laughed. A few frowned; a few looked at their feet.

  I looked at the pink razor dressed up in its bow tie and wondered where Youki had gotten the red ribbon. Did his mother keep a roll of it for presents? H
ad he asked her for a piece of it that morning? Had she smiled when she’d handed it to him, proud that her son had found a valentine?

  Then I looked at my arms. Thousands of thick black hairs crawled over each other like headless, skinny, wiry blind worms. I was hairy. My mother was hairy. Our relatives in Greece were total furballs. Our hairiness was fascinating, and I knew this. I wished someone would explain the rules to me about what constituted an attractive person and what did not. It made zero sense, mathematically.

  “Omigod, she’s talking to herself,” said someone, and I looked up. Behind Youki, Ramsey was wiping tears of laughter from her eyes. She said, “That girl is, like, aggressively weird.”

  Beside Ramsey, Vera was frowning, playing with a droopy branch of a cypress tree. “It’s not her fault,” she said. My ears perked up, and my heart pumped a woozy, hopeful beat. Was my former best friend finally going to defend me?

  Vera went on. “My mother says all prodigies develop abnormal personalities after puberty.”

  I closed my eyes and concentrated on the black static pattern of the galaxy. Inner space. I liked inner space. It was safe in there.

  After Valentine’s Day came spring, with its bursts of rain, and its dewy flowers, and its rapidly multiplying bunnies—and a rapidly multiplying crowd of people who yelled “Neffa-Freak!” when I walked by. I felt more and more lonely and desperate, like the world would just keep turning while I spiraled down a rickety roller coaster that was one earthquake away from collapsing.

  When the last day of freshman year was finally over, I walked directly to the Big Blue Wave. My loose plan was to hide in my parents’ bookshop until I died of a rare used-book disease, such as paper-cut plague or word poisoning.

  The foghorns moaned low and steady as I crossed Highway 1 and turned onto Main Street. The wind was tugging my hair out of its bun and tying it in knots. I put up my hood and shoved my hands deep in my sweatshirt pockets.

  The Big Blue Wave used to be a fish-canning factory. It’s brick with tons of windows and two floors crammed with used books, with a special section on California History for the tourists. Sometimes birds slip in through the skylights and flit around, pooping on the cement floor. The front door was propped open, and from Main Street I heard Dad spinning jazz saxophone.

  My parents are tragically analog. Fact: One milk crate full of records weighs as much as a baby sperm whale. Dad has more than a hundred crates, and he keeps the bulk of his collection in the shop. I’m always offering to digitize it. I think I do it just to see the face Dad makes when I use the word “digitize.” It’s disturbing.

  Dad was standing behind the checkout counter, wearing his usual outfit of a band T-shirt, a flannel button-down and jeans. Recently he’d grown a mustache. It was puffy and red, as opposed to his hair, which was curly and black, which created a clashing situation that Mom and I couldn’t decide how we felt about.

  When he saw me, he called, “Congrats, Fi! Another year bites the dust.”

  My parents were the only ones who called me “Fi.” It’s pronounced “fee,” as in when you have to pay extra.

  I leaned on the counter. “Well, it bites, anyway.”

  “It’s like that?” said Dad. “What’s up?”

  I sighed. I didn’t know what to tell him. That I’m destined to spend eternity alone? Dad would only try to reassure me. Ignore the haters, this too shall pass, get that dirt off your shoulder, etc.

  “Where’s Mom?” I asked.

  “She’s in the back, whittling.”

  My mother was in a whittling phase. “Spatula?” I asked.

  “Spoon,” said Dad. “Maybe this’ll cheer you up. Came in today.”

  Dad handed me a hardback book with a glossy cream cover that was torn around the edges. The title was written in faded purple calligraphy: Time Travel for Love & Profit. That was it; just text. No illustrations of futuristic vehicles, no calendar with the dates swirling in a tornado. No Civil War soldiers dancing in a 1970s New York City disco. No half-naked alien draped over a cowboy with perfect teeth. Oh well. It would probably be pretty good anyway. I turned the book over and read the back cover out loud. “The author, Oona Gold, lives in the beautiful cosmos.”

  Dad said, “If it gets your stamp of approval, would you mind shelving it?”

  “Sure, boss,” I said as Dad saluted me and turned to help a customer.

  The Science Fiction section is on the second floor of the bookshop, nestled between Math and Poetry. Dad had appointed me its manager, which meant I got to decide which books were worth stocking. Which was, of course, all of them. I’d never met a science fiction book I didn’t get mildly obsessed with. But I did enjoy reading new additions before we made them available to the general public.

  I flopped on the ratty yellow couch that faced the window to Main Street and cracked open the book. It exhaled a puff of mildew that made me sneeze. One of the alley cats who sometimes strolled around the shop leapt into my lap, and I stroked its silver ears.

  Introduction

  Can you pinpoint the instant your life turned from hopeful and promising into a depressing pile of horse poop?

  Have you dreamed about getting a do-over?

  Do you want love?

  Do you want money?

  If the answer to any of these questions is yes, there is only one solution to your problem:

  Time travel.

  Time Travel for Love & Profit will teach you to borrow the power of your future self to make the current you a better you by renovating your past.

  Don’t be trapped in your pathetic, hopeless and completely avoidable future. If you change the you of yesterday, you will not be the same sad you tomorrow.

  I looked up. Main Street was invisible, swallowed by a thick cloud of fog. The bookshop swirled with the shimmery sound of the saxophone. The cat looked at me, and I looked at the cat.

  Huh.

  I looked at the cover again: Time Travel for Love & Profit.

  Was this book sketchy? Yes. Self-published? Most likely. Should it be shelved in Self-Help instead of Science Fiction? For sure.

  Did I love it? Were my arm hairs quivering with anticipation? Was I going to read it immediately, cover to cover, in one sitting?

  Does an octopus undulate squishily?

  I held the cat’s pointy face in my hand. “This is it,” I said. “The solution to my problem. It’s so obvious I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before.”

  The cat yowled and leapt out of my lap and rolled on the floor in a crazy cat stretch. I looked out the window at the blobs of car headlights and the shadowy pedestrians passing through the fog.

  Okay, okay—it wasn’t that obvious. But now that I was thinking about it, why not? Why not go back in time and give myself an epic do-over? Only this time, I wouldn’t end up a friendless freak. New Nephele could be anyone I imagined. Someone Vera wouldn’t want to abandon. Someone cute boys would make elaborate plans to kiss, not to humiliate. Sure, building a time machine had never occurred to me before, but that was just because I’d never needed one. A time machine was basically a complicated math problem. Wasn’t math my one superpower?

  Right. It was decided. I was going to test the limits of my mathematical talents. To stretch my infatuation with science fiction to the breaking point.

  I, Nephele Weather, was going to build a time machine, and use it to do freshman year over. New Nephele would be sassy, like a superstar singer with a skimpy, sequined bodysuit and a team of synchronized dancers behind her. Stylish and sleepy and bored with the world, like a mall mannequin with pointy boobs and no teeth. The new me would be saucier than a truckload of barbecued beans, hotter than a blazing hunk of coal.

  No: wait, not coal. Coal was what you got instead of gifts when you’d been naughty. On the other hand, I kind of loved the idea of being associated with th
e word “naughty.” I flipped through Time Travel for Love & Profit feeling hopeful.

  It’s amusing now, sort of, to think about it. Back then, people were always referring to me as a “child prodigy.” Supposedly, I learned things ridiculously quickly. So, I figured, how hard could it be to avoid Outcast Island and make the whole world love me?

  With Oona Gold’s help, one more shot at freshman year was really all it should take. I squinted into the fog and saw my future gleaming like a newly discovered planet, twinkling in the center of a telescope.

  Round. Reachable. Perfect.

  That afternoon at the bookshop, I read Time Travel for Love & Profit twice. That night, when I crawled into bed, I read it a third time to be sure I hadn’t missed anything.

  It’s a good book. It’s one of those books that keep you turning the pages, even though there are no actual characters, and you can’t explain what it’s about, and you wouldn’t recommend it to anyone because they might not like it as much as you do, which would spoil the beauty of it, especially if they pointed out any logical flaws or sketchy theories or pseudoscience, which you were of course completely aware of, but happy to ignore temporarily for personal reasons.

  And it didn’t explain how to build a time machine—which wasn’t too surprising. If Oona Gold knew the secret to time travel, she’d be so busy winning the Nobel Prize that it probably wouldn’t occur to her to write a self-help book.

  That was fine. I could handle the technical part.

  There was one legitimate reason my peers thought I was aggressively weird. It’s because I am aggressively, weirdly good at something, and I didn’t do anything in particular to get that way.