Time Travel for Love and Profit Page 6

  A flock of seagulls were cawing above me, flying in a jagged rhythm, like they were bouncing on the wind. Fumbling their way toward their rightful fate, I thought, just like me.

  Where our street meets Highway 1, the houses are replaced by sand dunes dotted with orange poppies and a stretch of redwood trees. The hill is especially steep there, which might have been why the sandals I picked to show off my mismatched socks started slicing into my ankles. Meanwhile, gusts of wind kept blowing my hair into my face and sticking it to my lip gloss. Every time I un-stuck it, it whipped right back into my face and got re-stuck, so finally I just left it and crossed the highway. This is when I noticed that my silver pants were itchy around the waistline—but you know what they say: fashion kills.

  Do they say that? They should.

  Outside the school, I saw two girls from my new homeroom standing near the honeysuckle vine and felt a jolt of fear. One had a halo of curly black hair and a complexion like speckled autumn leaves, and was wearing reflective sunglasses. The other had bleached-blond hair, a long, thin nose and a creamy leather jacket with tons of zippers.

  These girls were stylish. They were sleepy. They were bored with the world.

  They were Coco Livingston and Lara Black—the Vera and Ramsey of my second freshman year.

  I looked down at my beaded necklace and made a split-second decision to remove it. I was shoving it inside my backpack, feeling relieved that Mom hadn’t let me buy a crop top, trying not to bump into anyone as I headed in Coco and Lara’s direction to introduce myself, when I noticed someone else from my new homeroom sitting alone on the redwood stump, reading a book and laughing. She was wearing an oversized Berkeley sweatshirt, and I was pretty sure her name was Marla. What was she reading? What was she laughing about? I made a mental note to ask later. For I, too, had an excellent sense of humor. Maybe the girl was this year’s Wylie, and after New Nephele stole everyone’s hearts, Marla and I could team up and share witty observations in a podcast.

  But first things first: I needed to pass as normal with Coco and Lara.

  The closer I got to them, the more my jaw quivered. There was no need to be nervous. This was only a dress rehearsal for when I went back in time for real. I had absolutely nothing to lose.

  The pep talk helped; I could breathe again. Then the new Vera and the new Ramsey noticed me staring at them and started staring back. Immediately my jaw stopped quivering because my face turned to stone. I couldn’t even make myself blink.

  Loosen up, New Nephele, loosen up, for the love of Dionysus, I told myself as I threw them a flirty wave. My hair was still glued to my lips. I removed it and said, “Hey there,” in what I detected was a slight New Zealand accent. Not sure where that came from, but I decided to roll with it.

  The girls looked at each other.

  The stiffness came back with a vengeance. Every muscle in my body felt tight enough to chisel a diamond. I had to force my lungs to expand and then force the air back out. When I moved to fluff my hair, which was going to be one of my flirtatious quirks, I saw my bald arm, which shocked me and made me remember the burping bathroom sink, and I accidentally made a strangled noise, like a hiccup.

  My mouth tasted funny. My eyes itched. I felt like I was losing my balance.

  Someone yelled, “Excuse me!”

  Mrs. Saint Johnabelle was rushing past the students. “This young woman is going to be ill,” she said, wrapping her arm around my shoulders. “Someone help me escort her to the nurse’s office.”

  Did anyone admire my metallic butt while I hurled scrambled tofu on my homeroom teacher’s shoes?

  I didn’t know. My eyes were scrunched shut and I was never going to open them again.

  Not the first impression I was going for.

  * * *

  —

  The nurse’s office was silent. The nurse was shorter than me and had one of those faces that looked like she was both highly suspicious of and totally uninterested in me at the same time. She had me lie down on an examination table, where I instantly fell asleep on a rock-hard pillow that was smaller than my head.

  I slept for a long time and dreamt my fingertips caught fire from touching a star. Or was I the star? I didn’t know, but it felt too vivid for me. When I opened my eyes, I was staring at a rectangular ceiling light that was blinking and buzzing like it was being electrocuted. I said, “Excuse me, do you have any spare pairs of pants?”

  “No,” said the nurse, suspiciously yet disinterestedly. “Feeling better, then, are we?” When she cleared me to go to lunch, I put on my backpack and reluctantly left the quiet room.

  I’d only been going to introduce myself to those girls. Why would that make me sick? Was it truly that difficult for me to act normal? My footsteps echoed in the empty hallway as I walked past the sad green lockers to the cafeteria.

  As soon as I stepped over the cafeteria threshold, I got hit with the smell of a hundred thousand years of lukewarm meat. At a table near the door, Coco leaned over to Lara and said, in a voice that wasn’t trying not to be heard, “Look. It’s Psycho Socks.”

  I spotted an empty table with a crumpled napkin on it, took a seat there and put my head down on my arms. My belly gurgled, and it didn’t mean I was craving a burrito.

  If I didn’t fix Dirk Angus fast, it was going to be another long year.

  * * *

  —

  At dinner, my parents and I had a conversation that sounded like a comedy sketch from an old-fashioned radio show. “But where’s the file with my birth certificate, Dad?” / “With all the other files, Fi.” / “But where’s that?” / “Where’s what?” / “The place with the files!” / “It’s where we keep your birth certificate.” / “But where is that?” / “Where’s what?” / “My birth certificate!” / “Your birth certificate? It’s in the file.” I rolled my eyes and excused myself from the green table.

  The only way I could escape from time’s underwhelming comedy routine was to upgrade Dirk Angus, so I spent the rest of the evening in my bedroom, determined to find the flaw in my equations, trying not to think about New Nephele’s epic fail, and epically failing. If I couldn’t bust out my assets with a bunch of strangers, I’d never be able to pull it off with Vera. Did I have any assets? I felt sassy and spunky. Somewhere inside me, a rock star was ready to sing. Maybe I was delusional. Maybe Chicago was right about the New Nephele project. Even if I could figure out how to act more like my peers, my mission felt selfish and idiotic now that my timeship had hurt Mom and Dad.

  Dozens of tabs were open on my web browser, and my desk was plastered with books about quantum theory, topology, theoretical physics—all the books that had gotten me into this mess in the first place. In fact, rereading them only reassured me that I had made the best damn time machine a girl could possibly make. The missing memories were my only clue about where Dirk Angus had gone wrong.

  That night, a full moon shined through my window. My quasar pictures glowed softly on my wall. As I lay in bed breathing the cool night air, I imagined micro-quasars forming out of the quantum foam in my parents’ brains. The fountains of light shooting out of the quasars were their memories of my first freshman year.

  What even is a brain, I wondered? A glob of neurons, fat and water whose entire job is to make sense of the world. When a brain encounters something that doesn’t make sense, it collects information, analyzes it and develops a reasonable explanation. For instance: if I look in the mirror and my nose is green, my brain doesn’t jump to the conclusion that I’m becoming a frog. Instead, it assumes I touched my face while helping my mother paint a certain kitchen table. If I am becoming a frog, my brain will require compelling evidence to be convinced of that.

  By that logic, for most people, it must’ve made more sense to forget me than to remember me and wonder why I was still a freshman. Not that forgetting me made sense—it didn’t. But what
I’d done made even less sense. I wasn’t important enough in most people’s brains to justify questioning their entire concept of time. Which, when I thought about it like that, I could hardly take personally.

  But my parents loved me. For fifteen years, I’d been the center of their world. And they’d been the center of mine. For my parents, forgetting me made no sense. Their brains refused to do it. Yet their brains couldn’t deal with my time loop either. Not only was the concept illogical, it was probably terrifying.

  Huh. Maybe that’s why they seemed paralyzed whenever we got too close to the subject. My parents were frozen with fear. Their brains were trying to protect them from the horror of what was happening. I mean, I was petrified too, wasn’t I? Weak and woozy and shivering with silent screams—like the Sphinx in Greek mythology, beaten at my own game, ready to devour myself—

  I took a deep breath. Back to logic:

  For my parents, it made the most sense to remember me but forget the previous year. In both cases, people’s brains were using some version of autocorrect. But what did that have to do with the design for my timeship?

  My own brain was boiling over like some rabid mathematical potion, but I was stumped. Luckily, the next day was Friday. After school, I could spend the whole weekend swimming in brains at the Big Blue Wave.

  In the morning, I didn’t bother to blow-dry my hair; I shoved the mess of black tangles in a bun and threw on my hoodie and jeans. Dress rehearsals would have to be postponed. New Nephele was too distracting. It was imperative that I devote all my energy to developing Dirk Angus 2.0.

  On day three of my second freshman year, as I plopped into a seat at an empty lab table in Mrs. Saint Johnabelle’s classroom, Coco and Lara smiled at each other with a look in their eyes like Let’s-see-what-stupid-thing-Psycho-Socks-does-next. Give me a break, I thought. All I did was say hello in a sassy accent, wave flirtily and puke. I didn’t insult your mothers and kidnap your pet geckos.

  When third period ended, everybody got up from their lab tables to go to lunch. I got up, too. But as I watched kids congeal into groups, joking and whacking each other and checking their phones as they headed to the cafeteria, I couldn’t join them. I couldn’t bear the thought of sitting alone yet again at an empty table in a room full of my peers.

  So I lingered in Mrs. Saint Johnabelle’s classroom, hovering awkwardly near her desk, wondering what to do.

  When everyone was gone, the door slowly shut itself and Mrs. Saint Johnabelle looked up. “Can I help you, Ms. Weather?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, maybe. I just wondered…” Mrs. Saint Johnabelle was peering at me through the thick lenses of her clear plastic glasses. I knew what I wanted to ask, but I also knew she’d say no, and I didn’t know what I’d do then, so I was stalling. “Could I maybe, like, I mean today. For today only, possibly eat lunch in here with you?”

  “Sure!” she said, waving her hand back and forth over the classroom, like I could take a seat wherever I damn well pleased.

  I felt like I’d just slipped off a lead jacket. “Really?” I said. “You don’t mind? I won’t bother you. I mean, I have a book to read.”

  Mrs. Saint Johnabelle pulled a giant bag of potato chips out of nowhere and ripped it open. She said, “Read away.”

  I started for my usual lab table in the back row, but it felt rude to choose a seat so far away when we were the only two people in the room. So instead I sat in the front row, directly across from her desk.

  Unfortunately, the only book I’d brought with me was Time Travel for Love & Profit, which was definitely not going to help me fix Dirk Angus. I wished I’d planned ahead and brought something useful—neuroscience or astrophysics or knitting or jousting or pretty much anything except Oona Gold’s exceptionally vague book of advice. But I didn’t want Mrs. Saint Johnabelle to feel like she had to entertain me, so I took the book out of my backpack and opened it to a page at random.

  Time travelers are wanderers. They resist progressing through life along a marked path. They prefer to forge through the jungle of human emotions armed with the razor-sharp machete of their intelligence, whacking away their illusions, and—

  “Theoretical physics!” said Mrs. Saint Johnabelle, and I looked up. She nodded at my book. “Time travel belongs to a branch of science called theoretical physics. Scientists in that field perform something called thought experiments. They’re a wonderful way to flex the muscles of your mathematical imagination.”

  Um, yeah; I was familiar with theoretical physics. Theoretical physics and I had serious beef—beef that had just gotten personal. But I was surprised that Mrs. Saint Johnabelle was so enthusiastic. I watched her eat a handful of chips. Was that her whole lunch? I didn’t see anything else.

  “You don’t think science fiction is a waste of brain cells?” I asked.

  Mrs. Saint Johnabelle took her time chewing before she answered. “Not at all. Scientific questions inspire human beings in fascinating ways. The things that make you curious are a gift, Nephele. Pay attention to your questions. By the way, have you ever seen the television program Star Trek?”

  I shook my head.

  She grinned like she knew something dangerous. “I’ll loan you the DVDs. You’ll love them.”

  * * *

  —

  That fall, I called the county courthouse on a weekly basis, trying to track down my birth certificate. The person who answered the phone always said the same thing. “So sorry for the delay. Please visit our website and complete our online form.” Which I did. Repeatedly. My birth certificate never arrived.

  Same thing with my school and medical records. Whenever I tried collecting them in person, every administrator I met smiled the same off-key smile, something between a clown and a compulsive arsonist, and said they’d be happy to help me, while they didn’t. My parents became animatronic ghouls whenever I asked to see a photograph of myself or had any questions about my missing year.

  From a scientific perspective, it was awe-inspiring. Everything that placed me at a particular moment in time was lost. The universe was staring right through me, just like my so-called peers. The fact that I’d stumbled into such a spectacular math problem almost made the experience less devastating.

  I spent my free time at the bookshop reading anything that seemed remotely relevant to the Case of the Missing Memories and taking tea breaks with Chicago. Unfortunately, the bookshop didn’t have many books about neuroscience, except a few that promised to teach you how to master something, like playing golf, or asking your boss for a raise. And those were shelved in Self-Help—a genre that had gotten me into enough trouble already. On the other hand, Time Travel for Love & Profit came the closest to describing what was happening to me:

  No one will recognize that you’ve changed your past except your future you, who will be aligned with your rightful fate. Everything that’s different about you will be quietly folded into people’s current understanding of who you are now. The people around you will do the work of hiding your time travel for you.

  Which was, more or less, my autocorrect theory. And it still didn’t explain what had gone wrong with my timeship.

  Meanwhile, autumn turned into winter, my arm hair grew back thicker than ever and Dad sprouted a long, wiry beard with silver streaks that made him look exactly like the devil. New Nephele’s metallic pants collected dust on my closet shelf, and I spent every lunch period talking theoretical physics with Mrs. Saint Johnabelle.

  Then came the holiday break, and our annual video call with our relatives in Greece, including my mom’s cousin Penelope, who didn’t want to go to her mother-in-law’s house for Christmas dinner, and didn’t want to stay home alone eating yiaprakia just like last year. And just like last year, Mom replied, “It sounds like you’re caught between Scylla and Charybdis,” and they laughed, and just like last year, I cringed and made
a mental note to avoid referencing Greek mythology in casual conversation so I wouldn’t become my mother. You don’t need to do loops in time for certain conversations to repeat themselves endlessly.

  It was on New Year’s Day at the Big Blue Wave when something significant finally happened. I was sitting cross-legged on the threadbare Turkish rug in the Art section when the skylight flew open and I was showered in a rainbow of confetti.

  In other words, I had a revelation.

  Serrafin Saint Johnabelle reached into the giant foil bag, pulled out a single sour-cream-and-onion potato chip and took a delicate bite. As she chewed it, she looked drowsy and content, like she was dreaming of her blissful childhood on a sour-cream-and-onion farm.

  We’d been having lunch together for four months, and I’d never seen Serrafin eat anything but sour-cream-and-onion potato chips. No protein. No beverages. I didn’t know how the woman stayed so energetic. But she was a grandmother, so she was healthy, apparently. Maybe when she wasn’t at school, Serrafin was all about green smoothies.

  Incidentally, Mrs. Saint Johnabelle never let me call her by her first name. I just liked to pretend that’s how we rolled.

  “So, Nephele,” said Serrafin as she dusted crumbs off her lapels, “tell me you made progress on your time-travel thought experiment over the break.”

  I said, “Something did occur to me.”

  “Oh?”

  I unzipped my backpack and took out a collection of prints by an artist named M. C. Escher. On every page there was an optical illusion—an image of something that should be impossible, but in the picture isn’t. For instance, there was a staircase in the shape of a square where every flight appeared to be going up, like you could climb up the stairs forever without going back down. There was also a hand that was drawing itself and a snake swallowing its own tail. I opened the book to the page with the snake and handed it to Serrafin, who wiped her fingertips on a tiny wet wipe before taking it.