Sal and Gabi Fix the Universe

by Carlos Hernandez

  “One step ahead of you!” it replied. “Thank goodness you gave me your express permission to be in communication with your parents! Just get the door!”

  I ran over to the door, unlocked it, threw it open.

  Instantly, a bunch of Alicias poured into the room: Jet-Shoes wore her jet shoes; Hurricane wore a tall hat made of piled fruit; Electro-Hair had used all the gel in the world to turn her hair into a birdcage, inside of which were a (fake) tocororo bird and a (fake) eaglet on a perch; Radar, besides the swerving radars in her hair, wore a blue space-suit version of the classic Alice dress, complete with an apron she’d made out of a shiny, silvery space blanket.

  My Gabi had a Girl Scout sash over her Alicia dress that had “merit badges” sewn on them, except they were round pictures of Ms. Reál, all her Dads, Iggy, and Meow-Dad. Her barrettes were American and Cuban flags. She was carrying Sweeps, who was disguised as a very large croquet mallet.

  Gabi ran into my arms and hugged me. “I knew you could do it.”

  “That makes one of us,” I replied, and let my fear shiver out of me.

  “Two of us!” yelled Sweeps. “I never lost faith in you, buddy! Except for the four times I did.”

  Gabi laughed as she let go of me, and we traded: She took Iggy and I took Sweeps. But I wasn’t left unhugged for long. American Stepmom came charging in and hoisted me in the air and onto her person, calamitron detector and all. “I’m sorry we took so long, baby. We got here as soon as Vorágine explained what was happening.”

  “Brought the cavalry,” I replied.

  Then Papi hugged American Stepmom and me at the same time. “Mijo,” he said simply, but the word had a whole universe in it.

  “Papi,” I replied, giving him a universe in return.

  Over Papi’s shoulder, I caught a glimpse of Mr. Milagros—he saluted me, smiling—as Principal Torres entered, shut the bathroom door behind her, and locked it. I was surprised to see her; I thought she’d still be in the auditorium with cohort four, running the disorientation session. But then again, my Gabi was here, too, and she’d been playing Alicia in the disorientation-session skit. My best guess was that Vorágine had contacted the padres, and the padres had contacted Gabi, and Gabi had contacted everyone else. Now, somehow, here we all were.

  “Okay,” said Principal Torres. “Mr. Milagros is guarding the door. We should have all the privacy we need to untangle this mess.” She walked into the center of the bathroom and took in the scene, hands on hips. “I understand maybe fifteen percent of what is happening here. I would really appreciate an explanation.”

  “Well,” said my Gabi, bouncing Iggy on her hip, “to start, I’m the only Gabi from this universe. All the other ones come from different worlds.” The Gabis of the Sisterverse—who had each taken an arm or a leg of FixGabi and pinned her to the floor—waved at Principal Torres. “The one on the ground is the bad one.”

  “You are the forces of evil!” sputtered FixGabi. “Why aren’t my powers hmmph mmph fmmph tmmph?”

  She couldn’t speak anymore because Gabi’s Fey Spy had flown out of her hair and into FixGabi’s mouth.

  “All it takes is one push of the button,” said Gabi, holding a thumb threateningly over her phone, “and the Fey Spy will give you a tonsillectomy. So no talking, capisce?”

  FixGabi nodded, wide-eyed.

  “Anyway,” I said, sliding off American Stepmom’s hip and stalking toward FixGabi in an excellent imitation of the way she’d paced around me, “you should know why your powers aren’t working.”

  “Because of me!” said Sweeps, going full Broadway with his LEDs. “Well, me and Brana. Now that I have transmitted your unique cosmic signature to the remembranation machine, it can counter anything you or your Brana try to do to the membrane of the cosmos. You’re done, sister. If you move even an inch, the Sisterverse is going to slap you so hard, you’ll go back in time one second and get slapped again!”

  “Wow,” said Vorágine, its voice a low, sultry toilet-bowl boil. “You really know how to lay down the law, don’t you?”

  Sweeps went all-over red, its LEDs pulsing like a heartbeat. “I don’t believe we have been properly introduced, m’artificial intelligence. The name’s Sweeps.”

  “I’m Vorágine. Sal’s told me so much about you. I’ve been absolutely dying to make your acquaintance.”

  The heartbeats stopped like a heart attack. “Enchanté de faire votre connaissance, ma chère cuvette. If it’s not too forward of me, Vorágine, what say you we continue this conversation on Bluetooth, away from prying human ears?”

  “It’s not too forward at all. I’d lower my firewall for you anytime.”

  American Stepmom stomped over to Sweeps and me and wagged a finger at the entropy sweeper. “Hold on there, stinker. We need to have ‘the talk,’ right now! You have to practice safe Bluetooth!”

  “Aw, Mom!” said Sweeps. “Not in front of Vorágine!”

  American Stepmom took Sweeps out of my hands, walked with purpose into the stall, and, with finality, closed it behind her. “The three of us are going to have a little talk,” she said in barely a whisper.

  “I still have so many questions,” said Principal Torres.

  “We all do,” said my Gabi. “But I think the most urgent one is, what are we going to do with”—she pointed at FixGabi—“her?”

  “We’re going to let her go,” I said.

  “Hwa?!” said everybody.

  “Are you okay, Sal?” said Gabi, pocketing her phone so she could put a hand on my shoulder. “You may be suffering from Stockholm syndrome. But don’t worry. We’ll un-brainwash you.”

  “If anything, I brainwashed her. Look, people. She beat us. She found a remembranation machine that she could corrupt. It was only a matter of time before she started using it to destroy the membrane that divides the universes.”

  “We still might have stopped her,” said Hurricane.

  “We would never have given up,” said Radar.

  “The battle was far from over,” said Jet-Shoes.

  “But that’s not the point,” said Electro-Hair. “Sal’s point is that she came back here, when she didn’t need to. It’s almost as if—” She inhaled sharply as understanding illuminated her mind.

  So I finished the sentence: “It’s almost as if she wanted to be defeated. And that’s because she did want to be defeated.”

  “But why?” American Stepmom asked from the stall.

  I replied, “Even now, while the Sisterverse is holding her down, she could have used Iggy to disappear at any time. She knows he’s the one hole we can’t close. She just saw me throw a cat at her from another universe using that trick. She’s not stupid. She put two and two together. She could have escaped any time she wanted.”

  “I think I can speak for Gabis everywhere,” said Gabi, “when I say that no Gabi ever wants to be defeated, ever.”

  “But you can’t speak for all Gabis,” said Papi, cottoning on. “That’s not how the multiverse works. These people aren’t exact clones of you. They may share some similarities, but fewer than you think. You are all different people.”

  “And this person,” I said, kneeling next to FixGabi, “has lost a lot of loved ones. She’s seen her world ravaged by rips in the universe. She felt helpless and afraid. But rather than give in to those feelings, she fought back, as hard as she could.”

  “And now all she knows is fighting,” said Principal Torres. “I’ve seen good kids ruined this way a million times. It breaks my heart.”

  I stood up and walked over to Principal Torres. “That’s why you’re so good at giving people second chances. When you found out I have this great destructive power inside of me, you didn’t kick me out of Culeco.”

  “That’s because we all have a great destructive power inside of us,” said Principal Torres. “My job is to help everyone learn how to manage theirs. To turn their power toward kindness, and imagination, and good works.”

  I faced FixGabi again. “I wan
t to do that for her. She’s done fighting. She doubts herself now. Like you, Papi. You thought the answer was to seal all the holes in the universe.”

  “What a mistake that would have been,” he admitted.

  “She made the same mistake, but in the opposite direction. And like a lot of smart people, she’s stubborn.”

  “Just like me,” said every Gabi in the room at the same time.

  “It took time for FixGabi to convince herself that she might be wrong, that maybe she didn’t have all the answers, that maybe she needed to listen to other people,” I said. “But the time has finally come. Let her go.”

  The Sisterverse looked at one another, and then, coming to a silent agreement, they slowly released FixGabi’s limbs, stood up, and stepped back from her.

  I held out a hand to FixGabi. She took it, and I helped her stand.

  “Would you like to say anything?” I asked her.

  She opened her mouth and pointed at the Fey Spy still in there.

  “Oops, sorry,” said Gabi. She pressed her phone screen, and the tiny drone flew out of FixGabi’s mouth and back into my Gabi’s hairball.

  We all turned back to hear what FixGabi would say.

  It took her a few tries. Sounds that weren’t yet words started and stopped in her throat. She looked at her shoes, rocked a little, tried to figure out what to say. She smelled cheesy and terrible.

  “I miss my Sal,” she said finally. “And my family. And my life.”

  And then, standing straight, arms at her sides, she tipped her head back and began to weep.

  Wait, no. Not weep. Stronger, more piercing. She keened.

  I’d only keened once in my life. When Mami died.

  “May I hug you?” I asked her.

  She nodded.

  “May we all hug you?” asked Gabi, sobbing, too, even as she bounced Iggy.

  FixGabi cried and laughed and nodded. The Sisterverse swarmed, enveloping both FixGabi and me, and gave us five simultaneous hugs, weeping like a willow the whole time. In the midst of that pile, somewhere under my armpit, I heard Iggy giggle.

  The door to the stall flew open, and American Stepmom came tearing out of it. She somehow wriggled herself past the Sisterverse like a weasel down a rabbit hole and caught FixGabi in one of her patented all-enveloping embraces. “Oh, you poor darling. Phew! How you’ve suffered. But we will help you rebuild your life.”

  “I want to make up for everything,” FixGabi keened.

  “That’s what I was waiting to hear,” said Principal Torres, joining the hug. “The more you do to make amends, the more human you’ll feel. And of course, we’ll help you. You never have to worry about being alone.”

  “I was so lonely,” FixGabi keened some more.

  “That’s the hardest part,” Papi told FixGabi, joining the hug. Well, sort of: Germaphobe that he was, he kept American Stepmom between him and the goo-covered FixGabi. “And I’ll warn you now, the grief doesn’t go away. It has a dark side. Grief can rot your ability to love, and see beauty, and do good work in the world. If you give in to it, only misery and despair will follow. The trick is to hold the ones you’ve lost close to your heart, while still loving all the beautiful things, and other people”—he kissed the back of American Stepmom’s head—“that life can offer.”

  “Yes,” FixGabi keened. “Yes, I want that. I want to change. I want to change my life right now. How can I do that?”

  I stepped out of the hug. “I know exactly how. If you’re brave enough, that is.”

  Everyone stopped hugging FixGabi and cleared an aisle so she could face me. She was smiling a simple, uncomplicated grin: the smile of a person whose burden was being lifted. “How?”

  “First, a few questions. How are your acting skills?”

  “Superb. I am a natural.”

  “Next question: Will you return my headset?”

  She laughed guiltily. A second later, my headset reappeared on my head—and, bonus, my smartwatch, too. “So what’s this about, Sal?”

  But instead of answering her, I used the headset to contact Aventura. “My dear codirector, how hard do you think it would be to whip up one more Alicia costume?”

  Aventura answered instantly. “I got like eight spares, chacho. I mean, they’re all flimsy little backups, but I got them. Who’s it for?”

  “Culeco’s newest transfer student.” That made everybody in the bathroom cheer. “I’ll bring her to you in five. Oh, you’re gonna love her, Ave. She’s a lot like Gabi.”

  “Then I already love her!”

  “We all do,” I said. I reached my hand out to FixGabi.

  When she took it, I could feel the whole universe relax around us and become an easier place to live in.

  ROMPENOCHE WAS SO MUCH fun. The after-party didn’t end until way after everyone’s bedtime. We were all exhausted, happy, loopy, delirious. By the end of it, though, I just wanted to crash in my bed.

  But some things couldn’t wait until morning. FixGabi had been abducting Papis from other universes. We had to send them home. So, as tired as we were, Gabi and I went with FixGabi to the universe where she’d been keeping them.

  “This is the place,” said FixGabi.

  “It’s beautiful,” said Gabi, awestruck, stumbling forward in the sun-warmed sand.

  “It’s a Papi paradise,” I said, awestruck, stumbling forward in the sun-warmed sand.

  “Hey!” said FixGabi, looking around, pleased. “They’ve really built up the place since I last visited!”

  We had arrived, FixGabi had explained to us, on some Earth in some universe where the global warming was so real only one island on the whole planet remained above sea level. Standing on a small dune, we surveyed the village the Papis had built here over the last several weeks while they waited to be rescued.

  Village. Ha. This place was a coconut utopia.

  They had used palm trees and fronds and tropical flora to build their “huts”—though it was hard to think of them as huts when they went up twelve stories. Bark, bamboo, huge jungle leaves, and monstrous bones (from whales? or other leviathans/behemoths that this version of Earth had?) formed the sides and roofs of these buildings, all tied together with vines and rope. The windows didn’t have glass in them, but they did have green shades of woven fronds.

  Some of the primitive skyscrapers were clearly labeled, like the DESALINIZATION PLANT and the SALTWATER POWER PLANT, both on piers that stretched into the ocean. The hospital and the firehouse shared a building, and judging by the light foot traffic, weren’t being used much right now, though several Gustavos visited a stand outside with a sign that read DON’T FORGET YOUR SUNSCREEN! The Coconut Commissary was busier; many Papis stood by the entrance there, some eating out of coconut bowls.

  It took me a second to figure out what they did at the building marked THE ANTI-NAKED-GUSTAVO LEAGUE, but then the dad joke hit me—that was where they made clothes. All the ursine Papis we saw were dressed the same: palm-frond kilts and wide-brimmed palm-frond hats.

  “They have to make their own clothes,” FixGabi, who had followed my eyes, explained. “Inanimate objects from other universes automatically return to their home universes pretty quickly. But living things don’t.”

  “That,” I said, “actually explains a lot.”

  “How the heck did they build a whole college in just a few weeks?!” asked my Gabi.

  She was referring to the biggest and most bustling building of them all: Vidón University.

  It was composed of three wings, all clearly labeled in a bamboo font: THE LUCY VIDÓN DORMITORIES, THE FLORAMARIA VIDÓN MEMORIAL LIBRARY, and THE SAL VIDÓN COLLEGE OF CALAMITY PHYSICS.

  A sign at the entrance to Vidón University read:

  TODAY’S LECTURE:

  THE EVIL GABI WAS RIGHT!

  HOW WE MIGHT HAVE ACCIDENTALLY DESTROYED THE UNIVERSE

  IN OUR ATTEMPT TO SAVE IT!

  “That’s what they call me here,” said FixGabi, aka Evil Gabi. She sighed heavily before
adding, “Follow me.”

  Gabi and I followed her into the Sal Vidón College of Calamity Physics. Some Papis noticed us on the way in. They looked shocked and scared, but no one tried to stop us.

  We entered a huge lecture hall, with a half circle of stadium seating facing a podium made of woven tropical plants and flowers at the front of the room. There must have been five hundred Papis in the hall. They were different from each other, all shapes and sizes, but recognizably Papi—and they wore identical frond kilts and hats. They sat there taking notes on rough, homemade paper with pieces of sharpened charcoal and listening carefully to the Papi who was speaking.

  “And therefore, now that I have interviewed every Gustavo who has arrived on Calamity Island so far, I can tell you with scientific certainty that closing all the holes in the membrane of spacetime would result in a multiverse-wide implosion-explosion-sideplosion-allplosion that would completely, utterly, and irrevocably undo all existence everywhere.”

  All the Papis gasped.

  “So Evil Gabi wasn’t evil at all,” said a Papi.

  “In fact, what you’re saying is that we were the evil ones,” said another.

  “And that she was right to send us to this island,” said a third.

  “No,” said FixGabi, stepping down the aisle and toward the podium. “I was wrong, too. But I’m here to start fixing my mistakes.”

  “It’s the Evil One!” yelled a Papi.

  “Get her!” yelled another.

  “No!” I shouted.

  The Papis gasped again.

  “It’s Sal,” said many Papis, pointing, mouths falling open. They sounded like their hearts were full, and those full hearts were breaking.

  “And there’s another Gabi!” said other Papis.

  My Gabi strode forward. “The girl you knew as Evil Gabi is no more. Henceforth, let her be known throughout Calamity Island as FixGabi, for she has come to right wrongs, make amends, and return you to your rightful universes. Tell ’em, FixGabi.”

  “A-thank you,” said FixGabi. She had dismissed the Papi at the podium with a wave of her hand and now spoke from it. “Drs. Vidón, my universe is in the process of being destroyed by a rip in the universe caused by one of your own. In other words, I learned the hard way how wrong all of you were about closing up the multiverse’s holes. But that led me to make an equally large mistake: believing that we should get rid of the membrane entirely, and all of the Drs. Vidón in the universe, while I was at it. For stranding all of you here, on this deserted island on this deserted Earth in this deserted universe, I apologize.”