Sal and Gabi Fix the Universe

by Carlos Hernandez

“No, no, no!” Vorágine said, urgent and sincere. “Please don’t feel guilty! Diabetes isn’t your fault! And with today’s technology, diabetics are increasingly leading normal—”

  “It’s okay. I’ve been diagnosed for five years. I’m used to it.”

  Vorágine gurgled shyly. “Do you want me to delete that information about you?”

  My first impulse is always to reply to that question by saying yes. But after I thought about it for a second, I answered the question with a question. “Are you able to analyze my urine for ketones?”

  “Am I ever!” A waterspout of joy fountained up from Vorágine’s bowl. “Now, while the American Diabetes Association states that there’s no substitute for blood-glucose readings for maximum accuracy, we most definitely can use urine analysis to augment your self-monitoring regiment. I can show you how your ketone levels change throughout the day, over the course of a week, a month—whatever you want! Oh, this is going to be so good for you! And such fun for both of us!”

  Have to admit, the jolly little john’s good attitude was contagious. “And can you send the results to my padres as well?”

  I figured that, if a toilet was talking to the padres every day about my ketone levels, maybe they’d get off my back about wearing a monitor.

  The waterspout vanished; Vorágine grew still and solemn. “I can only do that if you give me your express permission.”

  “I hereby expressly give my express permission for you to express my urine expressions to my padres,” I said, smiling. “Do we need to, like, shake on it or something?”

  “I don’t have hands, silly,” said Vorágine, “But you can wiggle my handle if you’d like.”

  I did. Vorágine gurgled as if wiggling its handle tickled.

  “Great!” it said. “I’ll just need the names and contact information of your parents—forgive me, I mean ‘padres.’ Oh, and your name, of course.”

  “The name’s Salvador Vidón—diabetic, magician, and friend to toilets everywhere.”

  I washed up and dried off and walked out of the restroom feeling like I had just reloaded from my last save point and had a new lease on life.

  I stopped just outside the door, however. Twelve janitors stood in the hallway, polishing stuff that didn’t need polishing, sweeping perfectly clean floors, and in general pretending to be working. Clearly, they’d all been hanging around to see how well the bathroom had worked out for me. They were dying to know what I thought of the renovation.

  Well, no need to keep them in suspense. “That was,” I said to no one in particular, “the number one best lavatory I have ever used in my life.”

  Twelve janitors cheered and hoisted me on their shoulders, as if I’d just won the Going-to-the-Bathroom World Championship.

  THE FIRST WARNING BELL before the start of school went off just as the janitors threw me in the air for the sixth time.

  They caught me and set me down gently. I did not pout, but, chacho, I low-key wanted to. Getting jolly-good-fellowed like that was super fun! I didn’t want it to stop.

  Ah well. What a burden it was, being wise beyond my years all the time. But I gotta be me, you know?

  With my feet on the floor again, Mr. Milagros encouraged me not to be late for homeroom. “Being on time for your classes?” he said, giving his fingers a chef kiss. “¡Muy, muy bueno!”

  “¡Buenísimo!” I agreed. The desire to pout vanished entirely, replaced instead with the feeling that maybe, just maybe, everything would be okay. Amazing what an empty bladder and a full heart can do for your mood. So, without any more fussing, I waved my goodbyes to the best janitors in Miami and headed for my locker.

  There in hallway 1W, the fastest way to my locker was to take the NW staircase up two flights, boogie down hallway 3N, and take a left onto hallway 3E, where, maybe fifteen steps away, my locker waited for me.

  I dialed the combination to my lock without even looking at it; that’s how second nature it had become by now. I was looking instead at Yasmany’s locker, just a few down from mine, on the top row. Two thoughts hit me at the same time:

  1. This morning had been such a mess at home, I’d forgotten to bring the entropy sweeper to school. That meant I couldn’t check on the hole in the universe I had made in the back of Yasmany’s locker. Gabi and I, working together, had been shrinking the opening over the past several weeks, with me snarfing up a few free-floating calamitrons each day. But it would be a lot harder to do it without the entropy sweeper. I’d have to snort them up with my nose instead of the machine, and I was trying not to exceed my maximum daily allowance of subatomic particles. I guess we’d have to try again tomorrow.

  2. Where was Yasmany? I hadn’t heard from him all weekend. This was the longest period of silence between us since we’d become friends. It hadn’t been intentional on my part—I’d spent almost the entire weekend reading for English and had barely come out for meals. But he hadn’t texted me, either. Chacho was constantly on his phone. I had a bad feeling about this.

  I made a mental note to text him before school was over. Right now, though, I wanted to unload the books I didn’t need until second period and get to homeroom. And all I needed for homeroom and English were two small novels: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.

  I had both combined into one hardcover, which was easier to carry than the two flimsy paperbacks the school provided. I’d told my homeroom/English teacher, Mr. Cosquillas, about how I’d read the Carroll novels a bunch of times and had seen a lot of different movie versions of them, too. American Stepmom, knowing what a Carroll geek I am, got me this special edition with the wild illustrations for my last birthday.

  When I’d mentioned all that to Mr. Cosquillas, he’d told me what a Carroll geek he was, too, and said he’d love to see the “omnibus.” So I’d totally toted it to school today to show him.

  Thinking about the book always made me want to crack it open. By the time I had made it to hallway 3N, I was paging through it again. Hello, my name is Sal Vidón, and I stan Wonderland.

  “Will you lookie here? Sal Vidón reading a book. Will wonders never cease?”

  I had just taken the corner onto hallway 3E. There, leaning against the lockers, was Gabi.

  Kinda.

  I mean, she looked like a caricature of her, like Gabi wearing a Gabi Halloween costume. If Gabi had just gotten back from Wonderland, she’d be dressed like this. Instead of fifty-four playing-card barrettes, she just had one massive chip clip biting her hairball into a fauxhawk. And her T-shirt! Dang, son, it was definitely going to be controversial. The quote on it read: “I SHOULD HAVE WAITED TO HAVE KIDS”—YOUR MOM. Pretty pantsing offensive for parent-teacher night.

  Had Principal Torres approved that shirt? I wondered.

  “Nice outfit, Gabi,” I finally answered. “You’re dressed like your mama was an edgelord and your daddy was a bag of Doritos. Is this part of Rompenoche or something?”

  In response, Gabi did something completely unexpected. She smiled. But not a sarcastic I’ll get you back for that one smile, and not even an Ah, good one, Sal—that was a sick burn! smile. She smiled at me in the sentimental, might-cry-not-gonna-cry way that an abuela smiles when she beholds the contents of her grandkid’s diaper: proud, pleased, and brimming with affection.

  “Same sense of humor,” said Gabi. “So strange, how it’s always the same no matter where I go. It’s so good to see you again, Sal.”

  Um…Wut?

  A shiver ran up my back, like a giant lighting a giant match up the length of my spine. The hallway, I noticed suddenly, smelled super strange: like the inside of a dormant volcano, dusty and rocky and a little burnt. It reminded me of an exhibit I once went to at an air and space museum. They had a big sign that said WHAT DOES OUTER SPACE SMELL LIKE? and a place to stick your nose. When I sniffed, I smelled the same burnt odor I was smelling now.

  “You’re from another universe,” I said to Gabi.

  “Duh,” she said, pretty rudely
. “I told you I was going to meet you.”

  All the pieces Tetris’ed together. “You’re the Gabi who spoke to me earlier.”

  She curtsied. “Now you’re getting it. And you look great. A lot of Sals out there are pretty sickly, you know. Like Chihuahuas with head colds.”

  Um, thank you? This Gabi wasn’t nearly as polished as mine, it was becoming clear. “So, what brings you to my neck of the multiverse?”

  She lowered her nose and looked up at me. “I need your help.”

  “With what?”

  “With fixing the universe.”

  I popped my lips. “Well, good timing. My papi’s trying to fix the universe, too. He made some progress today.”

  Her face went corpse color. “No, he didn’t. He made the exact opposite of progress. He made”—she struggled for a word—“congress!”

  I mean, lol, thanks for the political dad joke. But she wasn’t trying to be funny. “You’re saying Papi didn’t make progress today?”

  She took a few steps toward me but stopped short, the way characters in a play do to demonstrate that they’re being really sincere. Maybe every Gabi in every universe was a theater kid? “I’m saying way more than that, Sal. I’m saying that if your papi is allowed to continue his experiments, he’s going to destroy your universe.”

  I raised my eyebrows so high that my forehead turned into corduroy. “Come again?”

  “How,” she said, handling me in the same delicate way my psychologist had after Mami died, “did you feel when your papi turned on the machine today? Like a little piece of you had died, maybe?”

  My eyes dropped like jaws. I said yes with my chin.

  Gabi nodded knowingly. “You felt that way because a little piece of you did die. The piece that’s connected to the multiverse. Your papi is killing it.”

  I had so many questions. I started with “How do you know about Papi’s experiment?”

  “I have made it my mission to detect whenever another universe is in danger of having its membrane destroyed by unchecked science. And when I find a universe in danger, I try to save it. I don’t want any other universe to suffer the same fate mine did.”

  “Wait a pants-splitting minute. Are you saying the Papi from your universe destroyed your universe?”

  “Well, not the whole universe, not yet. But he made a hole so big, it ate half of Florida and half the Caribbean. And it’s growing. It’s only a matter of time before my…entire…universe…is lost.…” She covered her mouth with a hand, looked away from me, and fought down a geyser of emotion that shook her whole body.

  I took a step toward her, one hand on my heart, the other reaching out to her. Because we’re all theater kids here. “Tell me what happened, friend. I am listening.”

  When she locked eyes with me again, she had to flex her whole face to keep from crying. “This universe is a lot like mine. And my Sal was a lot like you. He and I used to cruise the multiverse together. Until his papi found out.”

  My stomach ate itself. “What did that papi do?”

  She glanced sideways, as if she wouldn’t be able to hold it together anymore if she had to look me in the eye. “He wanted to shut us down. He tried to make it so that the membrane between universes wasn’t rippable anymore. And that, it turns out, is the greatest mistake anybody in the history of my whole universe has ever made.”

  I wasn’t sure if I wanted to hear the answer to my next question. “Where is your Sal now?”

  We need a word that means smiling and weeping at the same time. So I’m making it up right now. Gabi started smeeping. “You’re so much like him. Looking at you, I can almost believe he isn’t gone.”

  “Gone? What happened to him?”

  Suddenly her watch—a smartwatch like mine, but Trekkier—started sounding an alarm. “Look, I have to go. I’m being chased by the forces of evil. I can’t stay in any one universe for too long these days.”

  “You can’t go,” I said, stepping even closer. “Not if my universe is in danger.”

  She gripped both my biceps and shook me reassuringly. “It’s not like your universe is going to explode tomorrow, Sal. Unlike mine, there’s still time to save yours. I’ll be back soon. And when I return, we’ll save it together.” She smeeped again. “Just like old times.”

  “Okay,” I said, feeling confused and paranoid. “What should I do in the meantime?”

  Gabi let go of me, ceasing her smeeping, and strolled backward. A shimmery, cling-wrappy weakness in the fabric of the cosmos appeared behind her. “Go to class. Do your homework. And please, Sal, enjoy yourself while you can. We never appreciate what we’ve got until it’s gone. I learned that the hard way.”

  Half of her had already disappeared into a different universe when she called out, “And don’t tell anyone about this meeting. Not your papi, your mami, anyone. Secrecy is the key to fixing the universe.”

  “Not even my Gabi?” I asked.

  She had pretty much disappeared into the rip, but her whole head shot out of it, along with her index finger, pointing at me like I was a very bad dog. “Especially not Gabi. This is just between us until I come back.”

  Then the hole in the universe swallowed her completely, and no sign of Gabi remained.

  The final warning bell rang. I needed to book it to make it to homeroom on time.

  THIS CLOSE TO THE start of classes, the halls were always jammed full of middle schoolers who, like the NPCs in role-playing games, only existed to get in your way as you tried to navigate your character around town. So I bolted around the corner and back into hallway 3N, ready to dodge and dart around the clusters of kids and slide into homeroom just in time.

  Except, the hallway was empty.

  Now, if I hadn’t been so caught up in thoughts about the possible destruction of my universe followed by the possible salvation of my universe, I might have realized that, since hallway 3E (aka the hallway where my locker was) had been empty, then hallway 3N would probably be empty, too. FixGabi and I had been alone for our entire conversation. Where did I think mountains of kids would have come from suddenly without me knowing? I mean, duh.

  “Where is everybody?” I asked out loud.

  “Rompenoche practice,” said Widelene Henrissaint, who had just jogged up from the NE staircase behind me.

  I had a feeling Widelene was someone I could work with, though we hadn’t had a chance to collaborate yet. I only knew a little bit about her: She came from Haiti; spoke English, French, and Spanish; dressed like a jock; and had a different hairstyle every day. Today, her cornrows had turned into long braids that somehow stuck straight out from the back of her head, like she was always running a thousand miles an hour. She had a lot of training as a martial artist. Her bo-staff routine on the third day of school had blown away my entire Intermediate Theater Workshop class.

  “The seventh and eighth graders are all piling into the auditorium,” she finished. “Only the sixth graders and the transfer kids like us have homeroom this morning.”

  “Lucky us,” I answered. We started ambling together toward homeroom. The need to rush had vanished now that I’d seen how unimpeded our journey would be. “It’s not fair that we don’t get to be a part of the show, just because we transferred in. They could’ve given us a bit part or something. Wouldn’t you rather be performing this morning?”

  “Naw. I’m lazy. I’m gonna sit in the front row and be like, ‘Entertain me, peasants!’ And if the show stinks, it’s off with their heads!”

  Lol. “Yeah,” I said, feeling a little better. Mr. Cosquillas had left the door to the classroom open, so I finished my thought as Widelene and I walked through the doorway: “I like the way you think, Widelene. If Rompenoche sucks, we’ll just execute everyone.”

  “My dudes!” said Mr. Cosquillas. “That’s pretty harsh.”

  Our homeroom/English teacher dressed like he was the only child of the god of tie-dye and the goddess of sandals with socks. His khakis looked like they used to belong to Robins
on Crusoe, and he had hair like he’d been lost in the Everglades for two weeks without a comb. Most of the time, his transition lenses didn’t work right, and they made his glasses dark even though he was inside. So sunglasses, tie-dye, shipwreck pants, socks with sandals, hair like Jumanji, and sitting cross-legged on top of his desk…you know exactly how hippy-dippy and earthy-crunchy his voice sounded when he said it.

  “Guess they’d better not suck, then,” said Widelene, taking her seat and grinning Cheshire Cattily.

  Mr. Cosquillas looked at Widelene over his glasses. Uh-oh. When he showed you his eyes, you knew you were in trouble. “What I find interesting, Señorx Henrissaint, is that none of the performers will be graded on their performances. You, on the other hand, are most certainly going to be graded, by me, on the quality of your review of the show. That’s your next assignment in English class. And if the review you turn in resembles the glib and unconstructive language of your previous statement…Well, let’s put it this way: It’s never too late to start making funeral preparations for your mark.”

  “My dude!” Widelene responded. “That’s pretty harsh.” A second later, her nose crinkled. “What’s a ‘señorx’?”

  “Well,” Mr. Cosquillas explained, “it’s not a señor, and it’s not a señora, right? It’s a way for me to show respect to my addressee without forcing me to make any potentially embarrassing assumptions about said addressee’s gender. Do you like it? My goal is to degender the entire Spanish language before my one-hundred-and fiftieth birthday.”

  “You,” said Teresita, “are not going to live to be a hundred and fifty years old.”

  Ah, Teresita Tómas: the girl who took everything too literally. She served as the gossip columnist for the school paper, the Rotten Egg—the perfect job for someone who tended to spread rumors whether or not she believed them. It wasn’t that she was a stupid-and-mayonnaise sandwich or something. She had her good qualities. She was in all the same honors classes I was, and like any real reporter, she didn’t mind asking tough questions, even if she ruffled people’s feathers. She just wasn’t a ton of fun to be around. She always looked grossed out and offended. I’d describe her default expression as “resting Who farted? face.” She had me subtly sniffing my armpits, checking for boy stink, whenever I spent more than ten seconds near her. She was always complaining that something was, like, so unfair.