Sal and Gabi Fix the Universe

by Carlos Hernandez

  Also by Carlos Hernandez

  Sal & Gabi Break the Universe

  Copyright © 2020 by Carlos Hernandez

  Designed by Phil Buchanan

  Cover illustration © 2020 by Guilherme Asthma

  Cover design by Phil Buchanan

  All rights reserved. Published by Disney • Hyperion, an imprint of Buena Vista Books Inc. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Disney • Hyperion, 125 West End Avenue, New York, New York 10023.

  ISBN 978-1-368-005619-9

  Follow @ReadRiordan

  Visit www.DisneyBooks.com

  Para Mami

  Mientras que yo viva, tu vives.

  (So long as I live, you live.)

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 37 1/2

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Epilogue

  Epiloguier

  Epiloguiest

  About the Author

  SAL COME QUICK I’M about to fix the universe

  That’s the text message that woke me up at still-dark o’clock in the morning. I read it like twelve times on my smartwatch until I was fully awake.

  I didn’t mind being woken up. Ever since Mami died, I’ve kept text notifications on because I’m scared of missing important messages. And I mean, this one seemed pretty important. Papi was about to “fix the universe,” whatever that meant.

  And hey, bonus: It had burst the nightmare I’d been having like a balloon. Glad to be free of it. Phew, baby.

  Holding my smartwatch up to my mouth, I used speech-to-text to ask Papi, “Where are you question mark.”

  The response came a few seconds later: REMEMBRANATION MACHINE HURRY

  If I’d been more awake, I would have known that the only place he could have been was inside the big computer that was the culmination of his life’s work as a calamity physicist. Last I’d heard, it wasn’t working very well. Sounded like maybe it was doing better now.

  I sat up, flipped off the covers, planted my feet on the ground, and took a minute to try to Humpty Dumpty my brain back together again.

  It’d been a rough night. You’d think that after having the same nightmare for five years I’d be used to it. Plus, most people wouldn’t even consider it a nightmare. There’s nothing scary about it. Most people who’d lost their mamis would welcome a dream in which she came back to life and was laughing and cooking in a kitchen, just talking about normal stuff, just being family.

  But, see, the problem is then you wake up. Your mami vanishes along with your dream, and all that’s left is the dark of night. Takes me forever to fall asleep again. I just stare at the ceiling for hours, feeling like I am my mami’s grave.

  Like you’re your mami’s grave?! I thought, making fun of myself. Come on, Sal. Overreact much? Nightmares suck, but now it’s morning. Time to reclaim your brain. The brain is the king of the body, remember?

  Whatever, brain. I’m moving, I’m moving.

  Step one: Check in with myself. I felt groggy but fine. Nothing hurt. In fact, the more I woke up, the better I felt. Hungry? Yeah, a little. But I was absolutely parched. I smacked my lips: dry, dry, dry, dry, dry. I was as thirsty as a diabetic. Which makes sense, seeing as I am a type-1 diabetic.

  Nothing to worry about, though. I had it under control. Mostly. Mostly mostly. A lot of the time?

  This is why I had to use the smartwatch. It had all sorts of apps and tools for diabetics—monitors and reminders and Did You Know? diabetes trivia pushing itself into your eyeballs at random intervals. After my blood sugar crash three weeks ago, which had earned me an overnight stay in the hospital, American Stepmom and Papi said it was either this smartwatch or a pump. I’ve tried the CGM thing before, and I know it’s so great for so many people. But it made me feel like I was never allowed to forget for one second that I have a “condition.” It kept waking me up at night. My smartwatch only does that when Papi texts me that he fixed the universe—and that has happened exactly once. With the smartwatch, diabetes doesn’t feel like it’s that big of a deal. It’s just a pain in the pancreas, instead of being a 24/7 reminder that I have a disability with no cure and no chance of improvement.

  Well, not in this universe, anyway. Not yet.

  Well, no need to get depressed before I’d even gotten out of bed. I rose, stretched, and enjoyed the silky smoothness of my Bruce Lee pajamas. They never fail to make me feel powerful. If only they had pockets, they’d be perfect.

  On my way to see Papi, I stopped in the kitchen for a bladder-busting, water-tower-size tumbler of water and chugged it. Ah. I refilled the tumbler again and headed for the living room.

  Or what used to be the living room. The remembranation machine basically took up the whole space. (And let me tell you, that was an accomplishment. We didn’t call our house the Coral Castle for nothing. It had a ton of rooms, and all of them were positively palatial.) Turning the corner out of the kitchen, I basically ran into the massive black box of humming metal that was the machine’s housing. It hummed because of all the internal fans that had to run constantly to keep its computer processors cool. It takes a lot of processors to repair holes in the fabric of spacetime, I guess.

  “Papi?” I called out, and then sipped more water. Just couldn’t get enough this morning.

  “In here, Sal!” replied American Stepmom from inside the remembranation machine.

  “Hurry, mijo, hurry!” said Papi. He was in there, too.

  I walked over to the front, where the display monitor was mounted and one set of goggles (the ones that let you actually see calamitrons) hung from a peg. To the right of the monitor and goggles, the metal door into the machine lay open. I ducked my head and stepped inside.

  This was exciting. I’d never been inside the remembranation machine before.

  The interior had an eerie green glow thanks to the tiny lights on the black metal boxes stacked on my left and right. The processors were rattling and jumping on aluminum shelves and overclocking themselves so hard you could smell hot metal. It sounded like a low-key wind tunnel in there, thanks to all the fans running.

  Straight ahead of me stood Papi, wearing his white bathrobe and poofy white slippers, big as a polar bear in this confined space. He had on a pair of calamity goggles, too, and in his hands he held a pile of p
apers from which he was reading out loud.

  Listening to him read was my stepmom, American Stepmom. She had on her favorite sleepwear: flying-squirrel footie pajamas, complete with flying-squirrel skin flaps under the arms and a squirrel-head hoodie. I don’t know how she could stand them. I mean, footie pajamas in Florida? She must have been a thousand degrees in that onesie.

  “…going to raise the calamity saturation value by two point four two times ten to the twelfth power and monitor the permeation valence,” Papi was saying to her. “If PV rises more than point seven, Lucy”—he took a moment to whistle dramatically—“we’ll know we succeeded.”

  “Oh,” said American Stepmom, nodding fast, her flying-squirrel hoodie nodding one second slower than her head. “Yes, yes, of course. But what if the X factor starts to dance the electric bugaloo with my sonic screwdriver and I get sent back to ancient Egypt?”

  Papi blinked. “What are you talking about?”

  American Stepmom gripped his shoulders with her creepy squirrel mittens. “What are you talking about, Gustavo? I’m not a calamity physicist, remember? I am your darling wife, who is an elementary school assistant principal and a total hottie. Your science friends should be helping you with this!”

  Papi laughed at himself. “I’m sorry, mi amor astronómica. I just couldn’t wait. The inspiration hit me in a flash.” He flicked the pages in his hands. “This paper has had Bonita and me stumped for two weeks now. I couldn’t make any sense of it. But last night, as I was sleeping, I figured out the first page in a dream. Or at least I thought I had. I had to see if I was right.”

  “Buenos días, padres locos,” I said.

  Papi went nova with joy when he saw me. He handed American Stepmom the papers so he could run over and scoop me up. He’s always been a scoop-you-up-and-hug-you-till-you-spit-up-your-guts-like-a-sea-cucumber kind of papi. “¡Mijo!” he yelled in my ear as he squished me. “¡Mijo, mijo, mijo!”

  “Papi,” I croaked. “Papi, Papi, Papi.”

  American Stepmom tapped Papi’s shoulder to get him to release me before I lost consciousness. “Be careful, Gustavo! You don’t want him to spill his water in here, do you?”

  “I saw it,” Papi said defensively, adding, “The machine is everything-proof.” But still he put me down.

  And that’s just what American Stepmom wanted, because she took the opportunity to swoop in and give me a hug that wasn’t nearly as deadly as Papi’s. But it was, thanks to her squirrelly skin flaps, just as enveloping. “Good morning, Sal,” she said, in a whisper so low and sincere you’d think I hadn’t seen her for a year. “How are you feeling today?”

  “Got to pee,” I said, finishing my water. “Otherwise good.”

  She broke off the hug and rapped her smartwatch with the pages she still held in her other hand. “I didn’t get a report yet this morning. You didn’t test your blood sugar?”

  “I would have,” I said to her, sounding more like a whiny kid than I liked to, “except that Papi texted me to come right away. Something about fixing the universe?”

  “I didn’t want you to miss it, mijo,” Papi said, high on life. “This could be the solution to all our problems. If my calamity calculations are correct, Sal, you’re never going to have to worry about tearing holes in the universe ever again. Not to mention that this is scientific history in the making! Come, come!”

  He didn’t wait for us to come. He bulldozed American Stepmom and me deeper into the remembranation machine. By extending his hand, he asked for the pages American Stepmom had been holding. He visually scanned the first page one more time, then input some numbers on a touch screen on the back wall. He checked his math in the air, scribbling with his finger, and nodded.

  “Okay,” he said, taking two deep bear breaths. “Okay, it’s right. I know it’s right. So let’s do this.” Then, suddenly inspired, he said, “Wait! You do it, Sal. I want you to have the honors.”

  I generally enjoy having the honors. “Sure. What do I do?”

  “Just press enter.”

  Easy enough. I pressed the key on the video screen.

  And then Mami, whom I had felt living in my chest since the day she had become Mami Muerta, was gone. Instantly there was nothing of her soul left inside me.

  I felt as empty as a grave without a ghost.

  OUTSIDE THE REMEMBRANATION MACHINE, I sat on the carpeted floor, looking out of the huge living room window in front of me and taking calming breaths. I had my knees up and my back against the remembranator’s black-box housing.

  To my right, also with her knees up, sat American Stepsquirrel.

  She was watching me carefully. She wasn’t crying, but her eyes were wet and ready. It was a little funny, seeing someone dressed like a furry being so concerned and adult. And also slightly disconcerting.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “It was just a dizzy spell. It’s over now.”

  Which was true. I wasn’t light-headed anymore. I still felt like I’d been grave-robbed harder than Tutan-freaking-khamun, but American Stepmom didn’t need to hear that right now. It would just make her fret more.

  “Sure, baby,” she said, sharing one of those smiles that’re meant to lend courage in times of trouble. “But let’s be guided by the numbers, yeah? See exactly what we’re working with?”

  I find talking in a French accent a great way to lighten any mood. “Eet would be mah pleazhure,” I said. Then—after showing her there was nothing up my right Bruce Lee sleeve, and nothing up my left Bruce Lee sleeve—I revealed a lancet and a test strip.

  Where had they come from? It’s magic! You’ve been a great audience! Don’t forget to tip your server.

  Even though she was eager for me to get on with the blood test, only someone who knew her as well as I did would ever know. American Stepmom’s patience level is over 9000. “I never get tired of your magic tricks,” she said, squeezing a little more love into my knee. “You’re really, really good, you know.”

  “Bat of co-arse aye know!” I answered. “Aye am, how you zay, a zheen-yus!”

  Then, making airplane noises (which you can still do with a French accent, by the way), I flew the lancet around us and buzzed her eyes a few times before I rammed the tiny needle into the side of my left index finger.

  “Rammed” is an exaggeration. I barely felt it. Years of practice have taught me how to make finger sticks less painful than, say, sneezing while drinking Coke Zero.

  I pressed the test strip against the little dot of blood that had formed on my finger. It lapped up the blood vampirically. Then I inserted the strip into a slot on the side of my smartwatch (told you it was smart). American Stepmom brought her smartwatch up to her human and squirrel faces so she could see the results at the same time I did. (My smartwatch has WiFi and links automatically to the padres’ watches.)

  Results arrived almost instantly. My blood sugar number was pretty much where we expected it to be, given that I hadn’t had breakfast or any insulin yet this morning.

  “Phew,” said American Stepmom. She has an almost magical ability to give the word “phew” an entire sentence’s worth of meaning. This “phew” meant When you almost fainted back there in the remembranation machine, I thought your levels might be off, but this reading has lessened, though not completely eliminated, my concerns.

  “Phew news is good news,” said Papi. He turned the corner to where we were sitting, bearing a tumbler of water he’d gotten from the kitchen for me—my third of the morning.

  I took it greedily.

  Now that his hand was tumbler-free, he looked at his own smartwatch and then exhaled his relief. “Oh, thank goodness. All normal. You’re fine, Sal.”

  Glub, I confirmed. I had already started drinking and didn’t see a need to stop to answer his question. Man, I just could not chug water down fast enough today.

  “He is not fine,” said American Stepmom. “He nearly fainted. And he’s drinking a lot of water. Polydipsia is one of the warning signs for DKA.”

&nbs
p; “I’m not DKA-ing,” I told her, sipping water sullenly. I hated even saying those three letters together. DKA had been Mami’s official cause of death.

  American Stepmom had more empathy than a mood ring. She backed off a little. “Okay, baby. But do you have any idea why you might have felt faint, Sal?”

  “No,” I said instantly. Like I was hiding something. Even though I wasn’t. Was I?

  American Stepmom turned to face Papi, and he was giving her one of those Our child is not telling us the whole truth looks. She faced me again, patted the air with both squirrel hands, and said, “Check in with yourself before you answer, baby.”

  Papi crawled toward us and put his head on American Stepmom’s shoulder. “Do one of your meditation techniques, Sal.”

  I wanted to tell them I wasn’t hiding anything, but to be honest, I wasn’t sure I wasn’t. I might have been hiding something even from myself. So I just said, “I can do that.”

  I crossed my legs, rested the backs of my hands on my knees, made beaks out of my fingers, and closed my eyes. Breathing is the most important part of meditating. You have to notice it, control it, lose yourself in it, and enjoy it, all at once. It’s not easy, doing all of those contradictory things at the same time. But once you figure out how, you can truly relax. And when you relax, my chacho, the multiverse opens up to you.

  Or at least it used to. Now, though, the opposite happened. The urge to cry exploded inside me, billowing like a thunderhead. I opened my eyes and turned to my padres. I had trouble speaking. “I feel…less.”

  They looked at each other, then back at me. “Less what?” asked Papi.

  “Just less.”

  Papi’s face became serene, the way it did when he figured something out. “I wonder…” he began, raising himself off American Stepmom’s shoulder.

  “What, baby?” she asked.

  Papi looked at me. “You say you’re feeling, I don’t know, smaller? Shrunken? Trapped inside your own body?”

  “Yeah,” I answered. “Something like that.”

  “Huh.” Papi sat on his heels and looked at the ceiling. “You know, Sal, fainting may have been a good sign.”