The bathroom walls close in on me. My body rebels and screams, Get out! Can’t breathe. Get out!
I grab the knob and fight with the door at first, pushing instead of pulling. I flee to my bedroom to get my anxiety pills, but it’s going to be bad regardless. The attacks that sneak up out of nowhere for no apparent reason, those are the ones that get you. I pop a pill, sit on my bedroom floor, and hug my knees. My brain continues to short-circuit, reacting as if I am under imminent threat of death when I was just doing my hair. The explosion inside of me feels so real I want to scream. Sweat pools down my back, and hives break out on my arms. I peel my T-shirt off my body to escape the heat, but nothing helps.
What if it’s not a panic attack? What if it’s related to the vertexes? Maybe it’s radiation poisoning. Oh God, what if I really am dying this time? I need to go back to the hospital before my skin starts melting off my body.
“Mom,” I yell from the floor. “Mom? Mom!” I don’t think she can hear me from here. She’s the only one home, and the last time I saw her she was in the backyard gardening.
Oh, God, they’re going to find my corpse, and Dad will flip into PTSD mode, Mom will never stop crying and have a nervous breakdown, and Benji will blame it all on me and refuse to come to my funeral.
“Honey?” Mom’s voice calls. It takes her a second to find me huddled in the corner wearing only a bra and shorts. “Alex, are you okay?”
“I need to go to the hospital. I think I have radiation poisoning.” I begin to sob and rock back and forth.
“Honey, they said the vertexes are fine. No radiation. Did you take your medication?”
“Yes, but it’s not working. It’s from the radiation, I know it. Are you just going to stand there and watch me die?”
“Honey, no.” She wraps her arms around the back of me. “I know you’re scared, but we’ve been through this before. If you don’t feel better soon, then I promise I will bring you to the hospital. We just have to wait it through.”
Waiting is the absolute worst. “Fine, but if I die, you’re going to feel really guilty.”
She nods and slips the hair elastic from my wrist.
“Can you call Rita? Tell her not to come over?” I beg as she smooths my hair back. I almost tell her to cancel on Dominick too, but I need to see him tonight to talk about yesterday. We couldn’t exactly talk about it on the ride home with my parents listening.
“Absolutely. Climb into bed and I’ll sit with you.”
She pulls the crisp, purple and blue, patterned sheet up to my chin. A cocoon. I pray that when I wake it will be over.
Two hours later, I open my eyes and feel exhausted. My chest still has phantom pain, like soreness after a muscle spasm, but nothing like before. Mom was right—I didn’t need to go to the hospital. But I’ll never admit it to her, and she’ll never bring it up again. It’s a silent code we have in our house, a code we use to cover up a lot of things.
At dinner I inform my parents that their precious Benji is returning. Mom practically leaps from her seat at the dinner table while Dad starts bombarding me with questions. Now I understand why Benji called me to deliver the news. Jerk.
Dad badgers me for information that I don’t have. Stuff about “world security versus national security” and “pulling out of volatile regions too soon without the right reinforcement and protection of our interests.” I push salad around my plate, take a bite of my cheeseburger. At least once Benji returns, he’ll be stuck in the hot seat.
“Regardless of what happens, we’re staying put,” Dad finally states.
I speak up. “No matter what? Even if a comet comes?”
“Ben, we need to discuss it as a family,” my mother says.
“We’re staying put,” Dad repeats.
Mom places a hand on his forearm. She’s not going to fight him, though, as usual. I roll my eyes. Dad catches me.
“You mean you’d go?” He holds his fork over his salad in midair waiting for my response. Or maybe to poke my eyes out.
“Well, no,” I say, “I don’t have enough information.” I pick at the remains of my dinner. “According to the news, there’s no comet in our vicinity.” I feel like a newscaster spewing regurgitated facts stored in my journal.
“Exactly,” Mom says. “There’s not enough information.”
“True,” Dad concedes, “but regardless, we’re staying put. A captain goes down with the ship. People go down with the planet.”
“What?” I argue. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Why is it ridiculous? We were born here, and we should stay here. Humans weren’t meant to time travel to other universes. It’s unnatural. If time is up, time is up.”
I can’t eat. “You mean to tell me that if there was a comet, you’d expect us to sit here and die?”
Dad slams down his fork. “No, I expect the UN to get involved and stop the damn thing. I expect us to wait as a family while the government does what it does best.”
As a family. Mom and I look at each other. I can’t tell what she’s thinking. Does she think we should wait and die together, too? Bullshit. I’ll be gone. They can kumbaya together all they want.
At the sound of the doorbell, I escape the conversation to let Dominick into the house. He embraces me in a soft hug and follows with a long kiss. How we were ever just friends for so long is beyond me.
“You okay?” he asks. “You look tired.”
“I’m fine.” If he had seen my condition hours ago, he would’ve called an ambulance.
“Strange date last night,” he says.
“That’s an understatement,” I add, swinging my ponytail off my shoulder. “It’s even stranger in here.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ll see. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
We pass into the dining room, and Mom smiles at Dominick. Dad stabs at his salad.
“Nick, let’s settle something,” Dad begins.
“Shoot,” Dominick says, holding the back of a dining room chair for support.
“What do you think about the whole vortex thing?”
“Vertex thing,” Mom corrects him, clearing her plate.
“Vortex, vertex, same thing,” he adds. “You staying or going?”
“Dad, leave Dominick alone,” I say.
“Let the man speak,” Dad comments. “I want to hear what he has to say for himself.”
Dominick laughs uncomfortably. He rocks the chair back and forth. “I have no idea. I think the whole thing is crazy.”
“You got that right. It’s goddamn lunacy.”
Dominick grins, but I see him stick his hands in both pockets. He does that when he’s uncomfortable but wants to seem nonchalant. Like when he talks about his father.
“A vertex and a vortex are not the same,” Mom interrupts. “Didn’t you see the explanation on the news?”
Dad blows her off and goes into the kitchen with his empty plate. Dominick turns to my mother instead. “No, what’d they say?”
Mom’s eyes light up since she actually has the stage. “Well, a hologram explained it to some scientists, and the scientists tried to explain it to us. They even drew a diagram, but I didn’t understand that part. Maybe you will since you like math.”
“Of course he likes math,” I say. “He’s planning on majoring in math at college.”
My mother’s face glows. “Really? That’s wonderful. Well, the holograms explained that traveling to parallel universes and through time both work on the . . . it sounded important so I wrote it down. Where did I put it?”
She searches through a pile of papers on the side table and grabs a yellow sticky note.
“Here we go—the ‘parabolic principle.’ It sounded fascinating, but I couldn’t really follow it. Part of it involves something called a vertex.”
Dominick
rubs the stubble on his chin. “It must work on parabolas then.” I can see his brain turning. “Do you know what a parabola is?”
“No,” she says.
So Dominick draws one.
“That’s a parabola. It works on, like, a mirroring philosophy. See the dot I drew? That’s a vertex. It’s the point of intersection where the two sides meet.”
“So that must be why they call it a vertex. It’s where our two worlds meet. See, Ben. Vertex, not vortex,” she shouts into the kitchen.
Dominick studies the shape for a few minutes. I can tell his head is spinning with possibilities. If only parallel universe time travel were a language-based phenomenon and not a mathematical one, maybe I’d follow along.
Dad returns, and Dominick pockets the paper before there’s an opportunity for criticism. Dad judges what he doesn’t understand.
“I don’t trust it,” Dad preaches, ignoring Mom’s clarification. “Nobody gives something for nothing. Everyone has an agenda. It says we have a choice. Yeah, wait ‘til that thing starts collecting us against our will. Mark my words: it’s gonna get violent.”
I nudge Dominick to follow me and escape for some alone time. On our way out of the room, I hear Dad say to Mom, “Those holograms sound like fucking communists.”
His words are something I can understand; it’s language at its finest. And I know there are probably many other people out there uttering the same thing in their homes, trying to understand the impossible and putting a label on it.
In my backyard, Dominick and I sit in our usual spots on the warped, tan-and-peach-striped patio furniture that Mom found on clearance. The ominous stars blink innocently in the sky, holding secrets in the universe I never even considered before yesterday. For years I’ve sat in the same spot plotting my escape by becoming a lawyer. To be seen as strong. Capable. Determined. I still want that, but I can’t escape the fact that a part of me wants to stay where I am. Change is harder than I thought it would be. How these vertex things fall into my life equation I have no clue.
Dominick’s typing and scrolling frantically on his phone. Why did he come here if he just wants to stare at his phone? I bite my tongue. I understand the need for information with everything going on. I’ve been watching the news and texting with Rita for the past hour. She’s freaking out. I invited her to sleep over tonight since I canceled on her earlier, but her parents said no. They are strict Seventh-day Adventists, and their congregation is having an emergency meeting to warn against the holographic prophets.
“Sorry,” Dominick apologizes while still typing. “I’m looking up the math involved with the vertexes. It’s awesome stuff, except it gets way too advanced for me.”
“It’s okay. I don’t even understand what a parabola has to do with traveling through time and space.”
“The basic principle is like this.” He walks over to a basketball in my driveway. “Watch.” He lets the ball bounce on its own. “Did you see that?”
“See what?” I was too busy watching him look athletic. It’s not a normal look for him.
“How it bounces. Watch again.”
I watch. The ball bounces in a series of hills, slowly getting smaller the more it bounces.
“Did you see it? It moves in a series of parabolas, like the drawing. Energy travels in parabolas all the time. It’s even how microwaves and satellites work.”
While I still don’t completely understand what he’s telling me, I totally appreciate how adorable he looks when he’s inspired.
“The fact that they can keep five hundred vertexes open for six months is crazy. Scientists asked the holograms how they harness enough energy to create a vertex and how they calculate the angle needed to reach a fixed coordinate.” Dominick notices my blank gaze. “How they control the bounce, so to speak. But the holograms said the technology is beyond our current level of understanding.”
I love hearing him passionate about something. Even if that something scares me. I walk over and pull him by his shirt, pressing my lips against his.
When we finally come up for air, he asks, “What were we talking about?”
“The vertexes.” I grin.
“Screw it. The vertexes can wait.”
Chapter 4
Day 4: August—4,330 hours to decide
SCIENTISTS DEBUNK HOLOGRAM HOAX; PRESIDENT LEE CALLS FOR BUSINESS AS USUAL
Two days later, the same news stories play on the same loop. No new evidence has surfaced. Each day, holograms at five hundred vertex sites across the world have repeated the same recorded message. The only thing that changes is the amount of time they say we have left. Scientists have dismissed their prophecy as “pure fallacy.”
All vertexes are currently under guard, and citizens are being kept at a “safe” distance until the governments across the world decide what to do next, which makes me think they’re still worried about radiation. I store the information in my journal and check my skin for signs of mutation every few hours. Okay, maybe every hour. My temperature, too.
They’ve asked everyone to continue “business as usual.” I don’t know if that’s possible. It’s asking a lot of people to pretend there aren’t giant blue circles glowing all around us with weird holographic people not only from the future, but from a whole other dimension telling us the world is ending and expect that we can continue as if nothing is going on.
Other than that, my life has been pretty normal, or as normal as things can be when the world feels like it’s in a temporary holding pattern.
I'm in the kitchen, deciding on a quick snack before dinner, when Dad returns from his work as the manager at Stop & Shop carrying a huge cardboard box. Mom holds the door for him as he struggles to bring it inside. As soon as I see it, I know he’s up to something. Major changes always start with minor things.
He heaves it onto the kitchen countertop.
“I come prepared,” he announces.
Mom smiles until she flips open the cardboard flaps and pulls out a can of peaches. “Cans?” she questions. “Why did you bring groceries? Our pantry’s full.”
“Canned food and nonperishables are flying off the shelves. Looks like people are stocking up, just in case. At this rate, the supermarket will be wiped out in no time.”
“But we’re on a budget,” Mom reminds him. “Alex is headed to college next year. I’m only working summer hours.”
Mom works as a secretary at my old elementary school. I can still feel the burning humiliation of the days when I had my mom at school with me. Whenever I’d pass by the main office, she’d wave frantically at me until I waved back. The only times I appreciated it were when I forgot my lunch money or felt sick.
Thinking about school reminds me that my senior year starts in a few weeks. Do schools stay open while the world’s dealing with a supernatural event? I mean, nothing’s actually happening.
Maybe the vertex phenomenon will postpone my future. It’s a good stall tactic. I wouldn’t have to make any crucial, life-altering decisions. What am I thinking? I’ve been dying to start my adult life. Alexandra Lucas for the Defense, Your Honor.
“Survival is more important than our budget,” Dad explains to Mom. “Even if it all blows over, the panic alone will cause crisis in supply and demand. We need to be prepared.”
She places her hand on his shoulder. It’s not a love tap or a warning. I can tell by the way her fingers curl around his shoulder. She’s holding on instead of patting or touching. There’s a difference, and the difference matters.
“We don’t have space on the shelves,” she says. “You’ll have to keep them in the basement.” Her hand relaxes on his shoulder.
I hate when she compromises with him, acting like he’s listened to her needs even though it’s clear to me that he’s about to spiral out of control. Which makes me feel out of control. How can she not see it?
“Good
idea.” He lifts the box, gives her a quick peck on the cheek, and heads toward the basement door. My inner alarm blares with warning, like ants biting me from the inside. Someone has to watch him, make sure he doesn’t jump overboard, and that someone is me.
Mom shrugs and gives me a half-smile. “Can’t live with him, can’t live without him.”
Over the next five days I notice Dad sneaking more and more boxes of food and supplies into the house when Mom isn’t home. I find them stacked in a corner of the basement covered with blankets and sheets. Soon, an entire side of the basement becomes a ghastly landscape of hidden contraband. I know he’s doing it as a precaution, but planning for the worst makes me expect the worst. The possibilities are harder to ignore.
My parents receive a call and letter from my school advising all students to return to school in the fall and continue business as usual per the government’s request. They’re probably afraid of poor attendance rates lowering their funding.
Like Dominick said, the holograms’ warning gives us until the end of January to leave or perish. If I stay home and it’s all a hoax, then I will have wasted those months instead of finishing the first half of my senior year. I didn’t plan out the course of my life only to have strange beings from a parallel future lie to the world and prevent me from graduating on time.
But what if they’re telling the truth? I didn’t want to think about it yet, and here it is, staring me in the face. How do I plan if the world might end? How do I plan for the unknown?
I run to the bathroom and spend the next fifteen minutes sitting on the toilet. Another side effect. When life turns, so does my stomach.
The next day, the United Nations makes a decision: citizens will be allowed access to the holograms to ask questions. Knowing that the decision may create mob scenes at vertex sites, the UN has built a website to provide a constantly updated list of all the questions asked, along with the holograms’ answers. They’re hoping people will search for answers online rather than seek out a crowded vertex site.
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