He looked deeply into her eyes. “I can’t believe that of all the people I could run into after my accident, I happened to meet you first. It’s like the eleven eleven didn’t just save me, it smiled on me, too.”
Oakley didn’t know what to say. She’d never heard anyone evaluate her. At least not in a kind way. For the past couple of years, all her external feedback had been that she was a loser and Shoe Girl and someone who didn’t respect Populars enough to know not to kick their tuna sandwiches. Her internal feedback hadn’t been a lot better. Trying out for the TV show had taken enormous willpower to overcome that mean voice inside her that told her she’d never be good enough.
“Eleven eleven sent me to a girl who has the best, sultry alto voice I’ve heard in a long time. It sent me to a girl whose mom made my favorite meal, and who had been watching for me for years. Eleven eleven gave me a safe place to land, even when everything else from my life burned and fled away. I don’t know why it brought me here, but I am glad it did.”
So was Oakley.
But how? How had it happened?
“We need to go see if we can find Mr. Mulroney. It’s too late tonight, but if we go tomorrow, he might have some of the answers you need for how to get back.”
It shouldn’t bother her to think about that possibility. However, after only a couple of days, she was starting to dislike the idea of letting Hudson go.
Scene 8: “In a World Like This”
Oakley hadn’t ever visited a high school teacher on the weekend. If her mom hadn’t been a teacher, she might have been like other kids and assumed that teachers live at the school. However, Mom’s existence proved that teachers were human and had lives and feelings and real senses of humor—not just corny classroom jokes.
Still, her hand hovered over the brass door knocker of a lion’s head with a ring attached. It wasn’t that she was afraid of Mr. Mulroney—it was that she had no idea how she was going to ask him their question: Is time travel possible? She would sound like an imbecile.
Wouldn’t she?
Maybe she should leave it up to Hudson. Hudson seemed to have some kind of power over teachers that made them do whatever he wanted them to. Like with Mr. DiConcini, when Hudson suggested they take the test together, Mr. D sent them out in the hall where more than test-taking had happened.
When she remembered what happened outside the math classroom, a thousand little bubbles popped inside her chest, bubbles filled with sweet syrup that poured all through her soul. But she brushed them all away really quickly. He was leaving—as soon as possible, and going back to his time. Either that, or he was going back to his family, and possibly resuming his Awesome Popstar Career, and Oakley would be left a nobody in Wood River again. He’d never think of her once he went back to his life, no matter what effusive praise he’d given her yesterday.
She was far too practical to be believing the flattery of a displaced boy who only liked her because she was the only girl in the now that he knew.
Rap, rap, rap. She swung the door knocker again. At last, someone appeared at the door, opening it just a crack. Through the narrow opening into the darkened foyer of the old brick house, Oakley could see the thick, single band of black eyebrow belonging to Mr. Mulroney.
“Oh. It’s kids.” He didn’t look thrilled to see them. It occurred to Oakley that Saturdays were a day off for teachers, and the last thing they probably wanted to do was get bombarded by students.
“Sorry, Mr. Mulroney.” She stepped back on the porch. “We, uh, can just come see you on Monday at school with our question.” Even though it’s life and death. Sort of. It was about whether or not Hudson could get his lost life back, anyhow. “It’s fine. Sorry to bother you.”
“No, no. I just wasn’t expecting anyone yet.” A breeze brought the scent of a charcoal grill. “It’s my birthday, and we’re having a few friends over, but not for an hour. I’m just getting the coals on the barbecue ready. Come on in.”
He pulled wide the door, which stuck on the high-pile carpet, and Oakley and Hudson went inside. The narrow foyer had an antique-looking crystal chandelier, light blue and metallic wallpaper, and about a hundred family pictures. It smelled like a charcoal grill, even inside the house.
“Who’s here, dear? Have Markie and Donny arrived already?” A woman bustled in, stopping them in the hallway and wiping her hands on an apron. “Oh, hello.”
The woman stuck a hand out to greet Oakley, who shook it. Her hand was cold, as if it had been in a soapy sink full of dishes in the kitchen.
“These are a couple of my students, honey,” Mr. Mulroney said, his voice as cold as his wife’s hands. “Well, at least Oakley is a student at the high school.” He gave Hudson a passing glance of non-recognition. “Her mother teaches kindergarten—Stacey Sanders. You’ve met her at the all-faculty social.”
Mrs. Mulroney just nodded and smiled as if she had no idea who he meant. “You’re staying for the barbecue, I hope?” She patted them each on the shoulder.
Oakley shook her head fast. “We, uh, just had a couple of questions for Mr. Mulroney—physics questions. Theoretical physics questions.”
“Well, well. My favorite kind of questions.” At this, Mr. Mulroney’s eyes lit up at last. “It’s almost like a birthday gift. Come on into the sitting room, kids.”
Mulroney led them into a room that should have been called a library, not a sitting room—as there was barely anywhere to sit, at least not anywhere not covered by stacks of books. Books rose in stacks on all the furniture and almost every inch of carpet except a narrow path. Besides those, bookshelves stretched from floor to ceiling on every wall except the one with the big, plate-glass front window.
Mr. Mulroney moved aside a couple of book piles and pointed at a curved, tufted sofa upholstered in a dark green velvet. Hudson and Oakley followed his lead. The couch wasn’t as plush as it looked, and Oakley didn’t sink into it much. Maybe it was being propped up from beneath by more stacks of books.
She didn’t check below it to verify.
Mr. Mulroney sat a moment, then seemed to change his mind. Instead, he seated himself on the ottoman of a nearby book-buried easy chair and pulled the stool right up to Oakley and Hudson’s knees, his eyes still glittering.
“When I hear that students have questions, deep questions about physics, I’m all ears. Especially if the questions are pressing enough to make them seek me out on a weekend.” He clapped his hands together, as if ready for their big pitch and might at any second yell, Play ball! “Lay it on me.”
Hudson looked over at Oakley, and a sudden confusion filled her mind. Again, she had no idea how to ask this question. It would sound ridiculous. However, Mr. Mulroney seemed to be eager, and sincere, and what did she really have to lose except her self-respect? The shoes she was wearing deleted that anyway.
Casting fear aside, she forged ahead, saying, “Is time travel theoretically possible?”
Mr. Mulroney’s eyebrow shot up. Well, they both did, but since they were connected in the middle with a thatch of thick hair, it seemed like one. Sort of like Bert’s on Sesame Street.
“Time travel, eh?” He rubbed his hands together. “That’s a tricky one, and not to be taken lightly. What makes you ask?” Suddenly, his eyes were crawling up and down Hudson, and he wore a skeptical look. “You’re not thinking about experimenting with it, are you?”
“No, sir.” Hudson didn’t even crack a smile. “I take it very seriously.”
The air between them all got heavier. Mr. Mulroney leaned back and stroked his chin. “Well, I guess you’d better start at the beginning. Tell me exactly what’s going on, or I doubt I’ll be able to answer your questions adequately.”
Oh, no. Nuh-uh. Oakley wasn’t going to let Hudson give up his secret. She and Hudson barely knew what the deal was with Hudson’s trip. She didn’t want word to get out before they knew whether he could even get back—or whether he wanted to. It was not only that Oakley didn’t particularly trust Mr. Mulroney,
but frankly, she didn’t trust anyone.
“Can you just give us the basics?” She tried to deflect his direct questioning, not sure how well it would work. He looked like a dog staring at a hambone. “Like, is it possible, and how does it work, and is there any documentation of it anywhere?”
“Documentation? No. No-ho-ho.” Now Mr. Mulroney was the one looking defensive. “No one would be that foolish. Now, answer me this: where is it you’re trying to go? Back to buy lottery tickets? Back to buy stocks?” Then he stopped himself. “No, you’re kids. You’re not worried about things like that yet.” He clapped loudly. “I know. You’re dreaming of going back in time to meet a movie star like maybe Marilyn Monroe, aren’t you? Why are people so obsessed with her?”
Oakley looked over and saw that Hudson was wearing one of Sherm’s t-shirts that had a line-graphic of Marilyn Monroe’s face on it. It was one of the weirder shirts Sherm owned, considering his personality, but sometimes he told Mom that she reminded him of Marilyn, and that made her giggle.
That thought made Oakley’s skin bunch up at the back of her neck.
“No, sir.”
“Well, good.” Mulroney looked satisfied by that, at least. He stopped stroking his chin. “That’s good because it’s not possible anyway.”
Not possible! Oakley’s heart dropped into her stomach. “It’s not?”
But, but—she knew for a fact it was possible. After all, here sat Hudson right on the couch beside her. She’d felt his lips, his breath, his touch. He was as real as real could be.
“Of course not.” Mulroney sounded so final. “It’s just ludicrous.”
Oakley deflated.
“I have read and studied this, sir, a lot.” Unlike Oakley’s, Hudson’s shoulders squared rather than drooped. He spoke with authority. “And I am convinced that time travel is, in fact, possible.”
To Oakley’s shock Mulroney looked horrified—like Hudson had just killed his favorite class pet iguana.
“Of course it is. That’s not what I was saying.” Mulroney put up his hands and waved them in their faces. “What I meant is that going back in time isn’t possible. Time travel is only possible in a forward motion through the stream. Otherwise, the continuum is inevitably disturbed.”
Oh. So that was what he meant. Oakley bit her lip. She looked over at Hudson. He was biting his lip, too.
Only possible forward, not backward. The words bounced around in Oakley’s mind, a mirror of the bouncing around of her heart in her chest. Hudson couldn’t go back.
“So a person can never go back?” Hudson asked. His voice was weak, like he’d been punched in the gut.
“Never.” Mulroney pronounced it like a king’s edict. “Think of the complications, the consequences. It’s just not moral.”
Moral. The word bounced around in Oakley’s mind. She’d never considered that there could be a moral component to time travel.
Not that it mattered immediately. The salient point rang like the echoing of a tolling bell: Hudson could never go back. The implications bounced like a pinball against the pop bumpers on a pachinko machine, dinging around and hitting the elastic bands in her heart.
He was stuck. He could never return to his life. He could never see his friends again. He couldn’t go back to his tour or his music or his timeline.
Pain for his loss—now apparently irrevocable—pulled her apart.
Until she hit on one, guilt-inducing but sigh-of-relief-inducing fact: He’s staying here. With me.
“Son, if you’ve actually, as you said, studied the topic, I would think that was the first thing you’d come across.” Mulroney suddenly looked less intrigued by them both and started looking at his watch. The charcoal must be ready by now.
“Wait!” Oakley had a lot more questions. “What’s, uh, the second thing he should have found out?”
“Well, the causes of forward time-slip, obviously. If he’d studied.” The side of Mulroney’s mouth tugged backward. “I don’t much care for lies, Mr. —”
“Townsend,” Oakley offered, not adding the Pete first name. Due to Mr. Mulroney’s age, he would’ve totally picked up on the music reference. “What are they? The causes, I mean?”
“Waves.”
“That’s just what I said.” Hudson seemed pleased with himself. “When I slipped, I mean—when I heard about someone who experienced it, I heard that there was a disconnection between body and spirit, and then a massive time wave hit.”
“Yes.” Mulroney nodded. “Just so. There needs to be a massive disturbance, such as an electrical field in flux, of course. If the traveler’s body encounters this field at the precise moment that the time wave crests, a forward thrust in time can happen. Usually it’s just a few seconds. Then the traveler feels as if he has blanked out.”
Whoa. Oakley had blanked out a few times. Had she time-traveled?
“But never backward?” Oakley asked again, stupidly, because it seemed to exasperate Mulroney. “I thought waves could go several directions, depending on a disturbance, like, say, a boat cutting through water or something.” Oakley hadn’t been at the ocean enough to sound intelligent, but she thought she could remember this property of the water.
“Natural waves, I mean, of course. Time is also a natural wave. When the time slip occurs, the time traveler rides on the crest of a time wave, rather than riding naturally through the peaks and valleys.”
“I totally get it,” Hudson said. Oakley totally didn’t. But she didn’t want to say so and be the odd one out. “What about longer amounts of time? Like, say, years?”
“That would require a rogue wave.”
“What’s that?” she asked. “How does that kind of wave form?” She pictured it as a huge wave, the kind that became a tidal wave if it happened to reach shore.
“Rogue waves form as a nexus of several large waves converging.” He started explaining how waves converged on an ocean, and how sometimes a massive wave would form, as a random coincidence.
“So there’s nothing to do with … wishes?” Even as she said it, she knew how stupid it sounded. Wishing on eleven eleven could have nothing to do with it. Not in a scientist’s theory, anyway.
“Yes, yes. That’s been touted over and over.” Mulroney waved it off. “Superstition.”
Oakley should have known he’d dismiss her conclusion about the wishes, but she still held onto the fact of the coincidence. She’d heard her mother say she’d wished on eleven eleven to be able to find Hudson Oaks. Hudson had mentioned wishing on eleven eleven for escaping a crash in the plane. Oakley herself had wished on eleven eleven for mercy at her audition for The Next Radio Star.
It fit. The Universe had been triggered. It had found one simple solution to all three specific wishes: bring Hudson to now, and bring him to Oakley’s house. It was the convergence of time waves, of wish waves, a nexus causing a rogue wave.
“You look like a skeptic.”
“No, no,” she said to Mr. Mulroney. “I am just trying to take it all in.” And fit it to her own theories, but she also wasn’t going to argue. Not with Mr. Mulroney. After all, they’d come here to get his opinion, not tear his expertise to pieces.
“My charcoal is ready, kids. If there’s nothing else—”
Oakley had a hundred thousand more questions, but she could see Mulroney was done answering them. It was his birthday, after all. They should leave the guy alone on his day off.
Hudson halted at the door. “No going back though, huh?” he asked a second time as Mulroney was ushering them away. “No chance whatsoever?”
Mulroney shook his head with the finality of a judge issuing a sentence.
“None. It’s utterly out of the question. Now, let Marilyn rest in peace. You’ve got a beautiful girlfriend right here, and I can see she’s as irreversibly gone over you as the time waves moving forward. It’s science, even if you two are far too young to be experimenting in that laboratory. Now, good-bye, kids.”
And with that, he shut the door.
A million confusing thoughts swirled in Oakley’s head: blinking lights and sirens. It was all too overwhelming to process.
Hudson, however, had boiled it down to one single question: “You’re gone over me?”
She rolled her eyes and didn’t answer that. “Brinn and Clyde are waiting. I’m usually on time for stuff. We don’t want them asking too many questions.”
***
An hour later they stood in the Wood River Mall in the one and only department store. Oakley was surrounded by two dozen shoe boxes, all different styles in her size, and Brinn was bringing her four more pairs, to the point they were stacked in her arms and she had them balanced by putting her chin atop the highest box.
“Now, are you going dressy or casual? You might need more than one pair, you know. You might need six pairs.”
“Six!” She thought back to the piles of shoes from Mom’s closet. There were a lot to choose from there, even though they were two sizes too small. She could make them work somehow. She could claim that as an excuse and get out of here right now. Shoe shopping didn’t have to happen, especially since these awful ones weren’t worn out yet, and she really shouldn’t be looking for another pair. Not when she’d promised. “I hardly think—”
“A lot of people have six pairs of shoes, Oaks.”
At that final syllable, Hudson put down the smart phone he’d been fiddling around with. He flashed Oakley a wry smile and then innocently asked Brinn the question Oakley had been dreading since the second she’d met him.
“Oaks?” His head tilted, his eyebrow raised. “Is that what you call her?” He turned his raised brow on Oakley. “Why’s that?”
Before Oakley could stop her, Brinn was not just spilling the beans, she was dumping out the whole barrel and flinging them at the ceiling. Hudson listened, looking deliciously intrigued, never taking his eyes off Oakley.
My 90s Boy Band Boyfriend: A YA Time Travel Rockstar Romance (Teen Queens Book 2) Page 13