Time Travel for Love and Profit Page 5

  “What,” said Chicago, “I’m not witty?”

  “Of course you’re witty, Chicago. I’m writing your dialogue. But I wouldn’t mind having a real person to laugh about all this with. Preferably a boy with a rare and spectacular brain who recognizes immediately how kissable I am.”

  “I’m hurt,” said Chicago. “If I only exist in your imagination, why do you bother coming to visit me?”

  I was about to say, “Because you believe that I’m going to build the world’s first functioning time machine. Didn’t I explain this already?” But I stopped myself, because that wasn’t entirely true.

  I mean, yes: I was personifying a black-and-white photograph and confessing the details of my life to her because I needed to talk to someone who wouldn’t think I was bonkers. But it was more than that. I could’ve picked a stuffed animal or a picture of a famous mathematician or adopted a dog if all I needed was a friend who wouldn’t judge me.

  There was something about Chicago, specifically. She felt alive to me. I didn’t have the same thoughts when I was away from her as I did when I was standing there looking at her. Maybe the photograph had its own soul. Was that possible?

  “At this point, anything seems possible,” said Chicago.

  I looked at her two heads and sighed. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” I asked.

  “Maybe it’s both,” she said.

  Both. That’s the kind of answer you get from a woman who is walking in two directions at once. Clever, but confusing.

  “Why don’t you find your birth certificate,” said Chicago. “See if it has the right date.”

  “I should also check my medical records,” I said. “And my school records.”

  “Don’t forget photographs,” said Chicago.

  “I wonder if I’ll be able to find any evidence of my missing year. Or if the universe has forgotten me like everybody else did. Anyway, I’ve decided that as long as I’m stuck here, I’m going to test New Nephele. Work out the bugs in the new me with a fresh batch of freshmen before I go back in time for real.”

  “New Nephele? Are you serious? Is that the best way for you to spend your time right now?”

  “Of course it is,” I said. “Becoming un-rejectable is the whole reason I invented Dirk Angus.”

  “Huh,” said Chicago. It seemed like one of her heads was trying to look at me.

  “What, Chicago?” I asked. “You can’t just say ‘huh’ in a suspicious voice without elaborating.”

  I swear I saw the two-headed woman shrug. “It just seems like if New Nephele was that important to you, you would have worked on her all summer instead of having a private math party.”

  Hmm. Chicago had a point. I’d spent the entire summer developing the timeship app without thinking once about how to become the new me. “I did the math first because it was the easy part,” I said. “Now I’m ready for the hard part. Gut-renovating my entire personality.”

  “Right, the math was the easy part,” said Chicago. “Dirk Angus should be a snap to fix, then.”

  I tugged on my hoodie sleeves. It would be a snap to fix—once I figured out what the problem was. The problem was, I didn’t know what the problem was. The code for Dirk Angus was as clear and sharp as a killer icicle. The app had done precisely what I’d asked it to do. Apparently, I’d just asked it to do the wrong thing.

  “I need to rest my brain before I dive back into the math. Meanwhile, becoming New Nephele will be…funnish. I assume. Zany and, you know, liberating, once I get into character.”

  “If you say so,” said Chicago. “How will you do it?”

  That was precisely the question. Time Travel for Love & Profit was full of exciting statements, such as “Now is the moment to reconstruct your past in your true image,” but it was awfully light on specifics.

  “I guess I’ll have to improvise. Act like Ramsey Schultz without the mean parts. You know: be sassy, wear a stylish outfit, get some backup dancers…all that.”

  “What stylish outfit would that be?” asked Chicago. “Your fancy hoodie?”

  Hmm.

  “I’ll ask Mom to take me to the mall tonight,” I said.

  “The mall? Seriously?”

  We both shuddered. “Got any shopping tips?” I asked.

  “Don’t ask me,” said Chicago. “I’ll be wearing the same outfit forever.”

  * * *

  —

  On the ride to the mall that night, I watched the sky. It was a paler shade of gray than it had been that morning; less intimidating, like it was giving up on the day. Orange clouds blew across it in feathery streaks. I needed to ask Mom where she kept my birth certificate, but I didn’t want to risk it while she was driving. I couldn’t predict precisely how she’d react—which was the problem. I felt guilty enough about the brain holes without potentially morphing my mother into a swaying, glossy-eyed highway terror.

  While Mom listened to the news, I wondered about Chicago’s lack of interest in my popularity project. Did the photograph know something I didn’t? But what?

  Mom parked near the mall’s entrance. After she dropped the car keys in her purse and twirled her hair into a topknot, I decided it was safe to ask my question.

  “Hey, where do you guys keep my birth certificate?”

  “In the file,” said Mom, chirpily.

  “Which file?” I asked.

  “The file with the birth certificate,” she said, smiling.

  She wasn’t swaying, but the smile was bad. People don’t smile about files.

  “Where is that file, though?” I asked. “In your bedroom? At the bookshop…?”

  Mom nodded, still smiling, like she was reliving some long-ago kiss. “It’s right there where it always has been,” she said, dreamily, as she unbuckled her seat belt.

  Okay: so Mom was avoiding the birth certificate question just like she and Dad were avoiding conversations about my first freshman year. Did the legal documentation of my birthday still exist? Did I still exist? I was beginning to wonder.

  I rested my head on the headrest. Headrests should be everywhere, I thought. I should start walking around with one.

  “C’mon, Fi! Back-to-school sales beckon,” said Mom, and I grunted in resentment. “This was your idea,” she said, and I grumbled, “Purportedly,” in a bitter tone that I do realize was inappropriate. Nevertheless, we both got out of the car.

  * * *

  —

  Inside the mall, I was immediately distracted from the birth certificate question. The lighting was green and blinding. Music was thumping and fountains were drooling and it smelled like new shoes and soy sauce. People were eating cinnamon buns the size of their heads. From every store window, mannequins with painted-on eyeballs stared at me like they were challenging me to make a fashion mistake. I would’ve bought anything to get out of that hellhole.

  Mom put her hands on her hips like we were going into battle. “Our mission is school clothes,” she said.

  “And accessories,” I added.

  That’s when I saw her: the mannequin in the window at a store called Teen 2 B U ’n’ Me. I said, “That’s her.”

  “Who?” said Mom.

  “New Nephele. I want it.”

  “You want what?” asked Mom.

  “All of it,” I said as I went to get a better look at my future self.

  The mannequin’s silver pants made her butt look dazzling. Her tight black cropped shirt made her boobs gleam like they were dipped in glossy paint. She was wearing a furry white cardigan and a long string of silver beads that dangled over her belly button. One lavender sock, one green. To top it off, her hair was electric blue and several different lengths, like she’d taken a lawn mower and zoomed it across her head and ended up accidentally adorable. And she was frowning like she was mad at the world for looking at her
.

  She was everything I’d never wanted to be but was absolutely going to become, starting now.

  It’s not like I thought the outfit would do the work of becoming the new, insult-proof me for me. A new look would simply kick-start the process. That was the point of a makeover, wasn’t it? To boost your confidence? There were entire television shows devoted to this concept. Yes, I used to think those shows were shallow, but I also used to think that there was nothing wrong with me. Now anything that made me resemble someone different from the miserable human I was seemed like a stroke of damn genius. The different-er, the better.

  Inside Teen 2 B U ’n’ Me, the bass was pumping as Mom and I walk-danced to the beat. But when Mom spoke with the saleswoman about the outfit in the window, she stopped dancing and swung her purse over her shoulder in a way I found impressively spunky, and made a mental note to imitate.

  “Sorry, sugar bun,” she told me. “I’m not ready to live in the Subaru.”

  “What?”

  “Hon, they want eighty bucks for those pants and sixty dollars for that junky little necklace. And she’s only wearing half a shirt—”

  “I LOVE that necklace.”

  “Yes…I mean, I understand. We can find you something very similar—except for that shirt; it looks like a bandage.”

  “I don’t want something very similar,” I moaned.

  Mom sighed. As we stood in Teen 2 B U ’n’ Me with the bass thwacking our heads, I felt guilty. People loved the Big Blue Wave, but my parents’ business would never make us wealthy; it wasn’t meant to. It wasn’t some Silicon Valley tech start-up that throws expensive parties where people eat artisan artichokes rolled in diamond dust and drink liquid gold straight from the bottle—the kind of business that was driving up rent all over the California coast, including the rent my parents paid for the bookshop. And I knew this.

  “Sorry, Mom,” I said. “I guess just…something similar like what?”

  “I don’t know, Fi,” said Mom. She looked toward the saleswoman again. I recognized the focus in her eyes. She was getting ready to negotiate.

  Fact: There is a compass inside my mother that analyzes every situation and points to the most embarrassing way out of it. So I quickly said, “Do you smell caramel corn?” and dragged her out of the store.

  To make a long story short, sometimes a girl must use fancy shops as style inspiration. With help from the caramel corn sugar rush, Mom and I found something similar at the discount place on the other side of the mall, and the grand total was, in her words, “something we can live with.”

  New Nephele may have been a fashionista, but current Nephele had sensory overload. It was only one outfit, but it was a start.

  * * *

  —

  That night, as I lay curled under my star quilt, a fog of fear settled over me. I felt like a small nocturnal animal surrounded by invisible predators. Thinking about the way the lights in my parents’ eyes had flickered on and off while their memories flew out the windows. Thinking about sitting in Mrs. Saint Johnabelle’s classroom, feeling like a ghost. Somehow, people’s missing memories had to be related to the reason that my time machine had failed. But how? And the fact that people’s memories were inconsistent—my parents remembering me but forgetting my first freshman year, Mrs. Saint Johnabelle and Vera and Wylie forgetting me altogether—it had to be a clue. Saving Wylie Buford was the only good idea I’d had that day, but I couldn’t do that until I fixed Dirk Angus, and I didn’t know where to begin. I felt helpless.

  So I concentrated on the one thing I might be able to control tomorrow: pulling off that very conspicuous outfit. I decided to imagine myself wearing the silver pants while kissing a boy. Specifically, I pictured myself as a younger version of the romance-novel heroine Dr. Carissa Silk. She would definitely wear metallic pants if she ever got dressed. I didn’t have a crush on a specific boy, so I went with a younger Thor Jackson. On the cover of Delirious in Denmark, book one of the Nordic Nocturne series, he’s writhing on the concrete floor of his jail cell, having a nightmare about his true love, who jumped off a Viking ship and drowned. I loved the way he was gritting his teeth like he couldn’t bear to open his mouth without her. I fell asleep drowning in Thor’s imaginary kisses—the type of kisses where one person is basically eating the other person’s neck. “Thor Jackson, are these metallic pants too conspicuous?” I asked while he devoured my clavicle, and he growled, “New Nephele, you’re irresistible. Get used to it.” As I drifted off to sleep, I almost believed him.

  When I woke up the next morning, my limbs felt like sandbags and my brain felt gooey, like it was clogged with slime. I yawned, which flooded me with oxygen, and everything came rushing back.

  Dirk Angus. My second freshman year. My parents’ brain holes. Vera and Wylie and Mrs. Saint Johnabelle forgetting me. I felt panicky, like I was trapped in a fishing net.

  When I glimpsed my silver pants and clingy shirt draped over my desk chair, I moaned. What was I thinking with that outfit? And, I mean…what was the plan? Act sassy and spunky? How the hell would I do that?

  I rested my fists on my eye sockets. I had a very strong feeling that I should skip school and concentrate on fixing my timeship. I mean, my parents had black holes in their brains. I didn’t know if they’d get worse or spread or what. I grabbed my phone and scrolled through the code for Dirk Angus once again, slowly. Still flawless. I had hit a mathematical wall. I felt like there was a cloud of evil time particles hovering in the quantum foam around me, and if I took a deep breath I’d choke.

  I tossed my phone on my star quilt and thought, Okay, okay. Something will come to me. For now, I just need to focus on New Nephele.

  Time Travel for Love & Profit was on the floor beside my bed; I picked it up and flipped through it again, hoping in vain for some last-minute inspiration about how to use the sex appeal of my future self to squelch my furry and repugnant actual self. The best I could find was this:

  You’re not alone, time traveler. Every creature in the cosmos is fumbling its way toward its rightful fate.

  “Fumbling” was definitely the word. I had one new outfit, a vague idea of who I wanted to pretend to be and I had to be at school in an hour. Well, a girl had to start somewhere.

  I got out of bed.

  When I asked to borrow Mom’s hair dryer, she practically wept. “You’re growing up so fast,” she said, which she did not realize was ironic.

  I stood in the bathroom blasting screaming hot wind into my hair until it was so slick and shiny that my ears poked through it and I felt like Santa’s helper. The only makeup Mom had let me buy on our mall adventure was lip gloss, which made me look, I don’t know…wet?

  But easily the most disturbing part of the morning was when I shaved my arms. The black hair filled the bathroom sink. It looked like someone had sheared a yeti. Then I made the idiotic mistake of turning on the faucet to wash the hair down the drain, which clogged it.

  Have you ever seen a sink burp fur? It’s exponentially more vile than it sounds. Things come up from the pipes with the fur, if you know what I’m saying. Think spit bubbles. Islands of mossy toothpaste.

  On the other hand, my arms were bald! Which was…hot? I had no idea. But I looked different, and different had to be better, because it definitely couldn’t have been worse.

  In the kitchen, my parents were sitting at the green table. Dad was sipping coffee and Mom was sharpening her carving knives. I said, “Bye, guys,” and Mom said, “Look at you,” and set down a knife to hug me.

  When I let go of her, I noticed that her eyes were extra turquoise. They were full of tears. She rubbed my arms, smiling. “You know, I did this once.”

  “What?”

  “Shaved my arms.”

  “Mom!” I said, glancing at Dad, who hid his face by pretending to gulp down coffee.

  “I get it, F
i,” Mom said in a gentle voice. “But you’re Greek, you know? We’re hairy people. We have hairy arms and hairy eyebrows, and mustaches—”

  “Mom.”

  “I just want you to know that you’re beautiful exactly the way you are. And also, please remember—”

  I didn’t catch the rest of Mom’s mortifying sentence, which she’d probably lifted from some pamphlet full of stock phrases they give mothers when their daughters start their periods.

  Yet, as I ran down our warped red front porch steps, part of me knew Mom was right—which was also annoying. I felt frustrated, like I was doing something preposterous and couldn’t stop. What did I expect to happen today, exactly? The new batch of freshmen were going to fall in love with me because I had a metallic butt? I knew better than this. I wasn’t an idiot.

  But that’s the thing. I wasn’t an idiot. I’d had this idea because, sometimes, makeovers work. Vera was into stylish clothes now, and Vera wasn’t an idiot. And, you know, clothes were—they were fine. They wouldn’t change me in a bad way. They’d just…What did they say on those makeover shows? They’d enhance my assets. That’s what I needed; I just needed to concentrate on showing off the parts of me that resembled my peers, so that they wouldn’t think I was some aggressively weird child prodigy who had nothing in common with them. Besides, there was no reason not to have a metallic butt. Was there?

  In the sunlight, I squinted to inspect my blinding costume. Well, there were a few reasons. For starters, my outfit would never decompose. Someday global warming would be so extreme that the only things left on earth would be supersized scorpions, swarms of flying cockroaches and these pants.

  But I couldn’t stop now. I mean, I wanted to try my social experiment. To attempt to be a non-prodigy version of myself. And my time-travel failure had given me a chance to practice with a bunch of kids who had zero memories of me raving about the beauty of parametric equations or explaining stellar parallax or pondering the distribution patterns of mycological spores at recess, and see what happened. To prove to myself that I could be like them, if I wanted to. I wasn’t entirely abnormal. I could be other things, too.