I asked her what she did.
“I meditated a couple of different times today,” she said. “First right after you left—”
“I tried that, too! Why didn’t it work?”
But I knew why: I was too agitated.
Halli was more generous. “Maybe it was too soon. Maybe we both needed a little time.”
I petted the dog, who had cozied up right beside me again. I could get used to that. I’ve never really been a dog person—or a cat person or any other kind of animal—but if this is what it was like, I was all for it.
I took a sip of cocoa. It was better than any I’ve ever tasted in my life.
Or maybe the whole experience made everything better. It’s hard to express just how happy I was to be back there. I had done it again. And Halli had, too.
On purpose.
Maybe it should be obvious that a parallel version of me would want me around, but it wasn’t obvious to me. I’ve gotten used to the kind of friendship Lydia offers: fine to have me around, also fine not to. We don’t hang out every day. We don’t even talk every day. She and her family live about two blocks over, but unless Lydia and I are at school or doing something like the barbeque earlier tonight, we don’t really make the effort to see each other.
I don’t know how other friends do it, but that’s what works for us.
So to have Halli actively want to hang out with me—twice in the same day—well, that was something new. And very special to me.
“I feel like I should ask you a million questions all at once,” I said. “In case I disappear again.”
“Why did that happen before?”
I explained to her about the phone, and about the steps I’d taken this time to make sure nothing would interrupt me.
“A noise was all it took?” Halli asked. She stared into the fire for a moment and considered that. “Interesting.”
“Well doesn’t it make sense?” I said. “If I was in a deep meditation before, then anything that would bring me out of it had to interrupt the signal.”
“What did it sound like?” Halli asked. “The phone ringing. Was it loud or did it sound more muffled, like it was far away?”
“It sounded . . . I don’t know, regular. Like it was right beside me, which it was.”
“And when you woke up,” Halli said, “what were you wearing?”
“Same thing as when I got here.”
“Interesting,” she said again.
Obviously I wasn’t the only one trying to puzzle through how the whole thing worked.
“Do you have a theory?” I asked.
“Maybe. Let me add a little wood first.”
She built up the campfire while Red and I sat watching. Sparks danced from the center as Halli plopped on a nice fat log. She used a stick to stir the coals underneath.
“I told you I’d been trying to contact my grandmother,” Halli said. “You probably thought that was strange.”
I saw no reason to lie. “Yes.”
“She is dead,” Halli said. “I saw the body. I know she’s not coming back.”
“Then why?” I asked. “How did you think you could speak to her?”
“Do you know anything about the ancient yogis? In India?”
“Not really.” Lydia may have talked about that here and there, but it was never anything I paid attention to.
“If you read the histories,” Halli said, “you find all sorts of reports of yoga masters—the saints and gurus—who reappeared to their students after death. I thought maybe . . .”
She stirred the fire again. “I don’t know. It was worth a try.”
“Was she a teacher?”
“She was my teacher,” Halli said.
I didn’t feel like I really had a grasp on our conversation. One minute we were talking about why I kept showing up places wearing just my boxers and a shirt, and the next we were talking about Indian saints and gurus reappearing after they were dead.
“You don’t understand,” Halli guessed.
I smiled and shook my head. “Not at all.”
“We were in India, Ginny and I. We used to go there every year—I was born there. In a little town called Halli.”
That explained the name. Mine would have been Yuma.
“So what were your parents doing there,” I asked, “in India?”
“Saving the world, of course. But then they came to their senses and went back home and left me with Ginny.”
“They just . . . left you?”
“Yes.”
Wow. I really didn’t get her life.
“So Ginny and I lived there for a while, and then we started moving around a lot, but we always came back to India once a year. She loved it there—we both did.”
“I’ve only been to two other states in my whole life,” I told Halli, a little embarrassed at my lack of adventurousness.
“And another universe,” she pointed out.
“Oh.” I smiled. “Yeah.”
“I love traveling,” Halli said, “but I also think it’s good to stay in one place sometimes. That’s what I’ve been doing lately.”
She added another log to the fire. The thing was blazing now.
“So, there we were last year,” she continued, “enjoying our month in India, and one day Ginny went off to her early morning meditation and she never came back. I didn’t know she was dead until someone came to tell me that afternoon. And I was too sick to go see her body until the next day.”
“Sick? What was wrong with you?”
“Oh. Ginny poisoned me. So I wouldn’t follow her.”
13
“She poisoned you?” My Grandma Marion might be critical, but she’s not homicidal.
“Not enough to kill me,” Halli said. “Just enough to make me sick so I’d have to stay home that day.”
“Why did she want you at home?”
“Because she was going to die.”
“You mean she did it on purpose?”
“No,” Halli said, “but she knew. Otherwise she wouldn’t have poisoned me.”
Parallel universe or not, the story didn’t make any sense. People didn’t act that way. Unless I was right about what I thought before: maybe the humans on this planet behaved in ways completely different from what I knew.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just don’t . . . ”
“Understand?” Halli finished. “Believe me, it’s taken me a year to even begin to think I understand. I still don’t know if I do. Ginny left me in a hard position. She’s all I think about, sometimes.”
All this time I thought it would be about me. Me making this great scientific breakthrough. Me traveling to another universe. Me meeting my alternative self. I never considered that the other me might have a whole life of her own, with her own unsolvable problems. And so far, a grandmother who tried to poison her to keep Halli from being there when the grandmother died beat out any of the petty problems I had at home.
“But,” Halli said, “that’s enough of all that.”
“No, really, it’s fine—”
“No, really,” Halli said, “it’s not. I’ve already spent too much time thinking about her. I need to think about other things.”
Which pretty much meant I could forget any of my follow-up questions, of which there were many. Starting with, “How did she poison you?”
But Halli was back to figuring out me and my boxers. “Have you ever heard of bilocation?”
“Bilo . . . no, I don’t think so.”
“It means the ability to be in two places at once. To be there in body—in full physical form—in both locations.”
“You mean like the way someone can split photons?”
“I don’t know,” Halli said. “Maybe. How does that work?”
“You shine a photon—it’s a particle of light,” I explained, “through a slit, and you split the light into two locations. They’re both still part of the same photon, but now that photon is in two separate places. It’s more . . . compli
cated than that, but that’s sort of generally it.”
“Okay,” Halli said, “now think about doing that with your body.”
I did think about it. For about five seconds. And then dismissed it. “I don’t see how that would work. There’s too much mass involved—no one has ever done that before.”
“The ancient yogis did it,” Halli said. “All the time.”
She told me that according to some of the histories she’s read, ancient yoga masters could appear in two places any time they wanted. Their bodies would be in meditation in one town, and would appear in front of a student in another town miles away.
“As a spirit or something?” I asked.
“No, as a full physical form. Their students could hug them, eat with them—no different than if the master was there in the room. Which he was. While he was also in deep meditation somewhere else.”
Now I thought about it for more than five seconds. A campfire is good for helping organize your thoughts. I stared into the flames for a good long time and let what Halli said percolate in my brain.
“So I’m in my bedroom at home right now.”
“Possibly,” Halli answered.
“And I’m also here—you can see me, Red can smell me and feel me—his head isn’t just passing right through my lap onto the ground.”
“You’re here,” Halli confirmed. “You drank my cocoa.”
“Wow.”
“Yes, wow,” she agreed.
I couldn’t help but grin. “This is way better than I imagined. No one has ever done experiments like this.”
“But what about what you were telling me before?” Halli said. “About the three-branes, and bridging the gap between the universes and all of that? Does this still mean you did it?”
I had to think about that. “I’m not sure. I’ve made contact—obviously—but I don’t know if that’s the same as leaving one dimension and traveling to another. That’s a good question.”
“Or staying in one dimension and still traveling to another,” Halli pointed out.
“Wow,” I said again.
“I think the next question is,” Halli said, “can we make it happen both ways? Can you send yourself here, and I send myself there?”
Chills went through me, and not just because of the cold night air.
“I don’t know—do you want to try?”
“Maybe you should go home first,” she said. “Then we’ll wait a little while and we’ll try to contact each other again.
“But then you have to try to stay where you are,” Halli added. “I’ll focus on coming to you.”
“I can’t believe we’re even talking about this.”
Now it was Halli’s turn to grin. “Fun, isn’t it?”
14
The first thing I had to do was clean my room. It’s one thing to let Lydia see it the way it normally is, but let my genetic double from another world see what a slob I am? No way.
I did what I could in half an hour, which is when we agreed we’d try again. Even though I told Halli it might take me a while to get into the meditation. It seems the harder I try to relax my brain, the harder it is to do.
But finally, sometime after midnight, I felt a pinch on my left big toe. I opened my eyes.
“Heya,” Halli said.
She looked around my room. The lighting was low so I could get in the meditative mood, but even with bad light you could still see the place was pretty shabby.
Halli wore the outfit I’d last seen her in at the campfire—her gray hiking pants, the blue sweater, and her dusty boots.
“Where’s Red?” I asked.
“If we’re right about this,” Halli said, “he’s still curled up on top of my sleeping bag, right next to me in the tent. He shouldn’t even know I’m gone.”
“It’s stupid, but I was kind of hoping—”
“I could bring him?” Halli said. “I know—I actually tried. I thought about him the whole time. Obviously that’s not enough.”
It’s amazing how disappointed I was. “Oh, well. Maybe we can try again.”
“You don’t have a dog?” Halli asked.
“Never really wanted one before.”
Halli got up from my bed and started looking around.
I cringed a little. “It’s pretty messy.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ve seen a lot of places.”
She tilted her head to read the spines of books above my desk. “Physics I, Physics II, Phun With Physics, Physics is Phun—I can see why you know so much.”
“Oh, those are from when I was a kid.” I pointed to the bookcase in the corner, its shelves sagging under all the newer books by Professor Hawkins and a bunch of other quantum physicists. “That’s mostly what I read now.”
Halli gave me a look like she was impressed.
“What do you read?” I asked.
“Mostly the explorers,” she said. “Savage, Thayer, Shackleton, Monroe—that’s all I’ve ever really been interested in. I’ve probably read hundreds of them by now.”
The only name that sounded familiar was Shackleton. And I wasn’t sure why. Had he discovered some island? I’d have to look it up.
But it couldn’t be the same guy. Just a similar name in a different universe.
Halli made a half-turn toward my closet, then very generously pretended she hadn’t seen it. It’s gotten so bad I can’t even close the door on it all the way. It’s crammed with every piece of clothing I’ve worn since probably fourth grade. I have to get around to weeding that out one day. It’s just never been a priority.
“Can I see the rest of your house?” Halli asked.
“Sure! Of course!” I said with false enthusiasm. Of course she wanted to see more—wouldn’t I, in her place? And of course that hadn’t occurred to me before. The house was a total wreck.
I just hoped she lived in a place not so different from mine. Because mine was kind of a dump.
It’s not my mom’s fault—or mine. We’ve just had to make do. We’ve lived in this same house since I was little—since the year my mom and Elena started working together, when Will and Lydia and I were four. My parents moved to Tucson because of my dad’s job at the time, and even though that didn’t last very long, they decided we should stay.
We’ve kept the same furniture since then. For thirteen years. My mom’s pretty good at sewing, so everything gets fresh slipcovers every now and then. She and I also go through these periods where we feel like repainting everything, including the walls and the cupboards and tables and chairs and anything made of wood—but generally the house looks like what it is: a two-bedroom, one-bath place where a mother and her daughter live together and hardly ever invite anyone to visit.
But Halli was very nice about it. “This place is really sweet. I like how cozy it is. Do you live here alone?”
That was sort of an odd question. “No, my mom, too.” And then I remembered something Halli’s mother had asked in their quick conversation: “When are you going home?” Not “coming” home, but going.
Halli lowered her voice to a whisper. “Is she sleeping? Can I see her?”
“Who, my mom? No, she’s away on business right now.”
Halli’s mood immediately darkened. “Oh. Of course. You said she was like mine.”
“No—I mean, she does live here, she just has to travel a lot lately. For her work.”
“Of course,” Halli said. “Right.”
I felt like I should have done a better job of defending my mother. But the truth is she has been traveling a lot lately—what else was I supposed to say?
I changed the subject. “Do you live alone?”
“Now,” Halli said. “Before I was always with Ginny.”
“Where do your parents live?”
“In Seattle.”
“Where do you live?” I asked.
“Colorado. A little town called River Grove. It’s not far from that mountain where I’m camped right now.”
Which only se
rved to remind me of how other-worldly this whole situation was. Halli was here with me, but not really. Or yes really, but also someplace else.
“What about you?” Halli asked. “Where are we?”
“Tucson. Arizona.”
She smiled. “Ginny and I went to Arizona once. It was hot.”
“Yeah,” I said, “that’s basically it.”
Halli kept on wandering through the house. At the far end of the living room she paused in front of our wall of pictures. Five framed collections of a bunch of snapshots from when I was little up until a few years ago. My mom and I haven’t gotten around to adding any of the new ones. Not that there are too many exciting photos to add. Most of them are the same old stuff—us over at some barbeque at Lydia and Will’s, us opening a few gifts on our birthdays or at Christmas—the usual. Yawn.
But Halli was fascinated.
She spent time in front of each picture. She especially studied the ones with my mom and me.
She pointed to a snapshot of the two of us standing outside our house. I was probably around eight or nine.
“They look almost exactly alike,” Halli said, peering closely at my mother. “Maybe a little different around the eyes?”
“Yeah, maybe,” I said. I didn’t want to insult her mother, but the truth is I do think mine is prettier.
Halli continued to study the photos. “Who are they?” she asked, pointing to a picture of Lydia and Will and me at one of our moms’ fundraising events when we were in junior high.
I gave her the brief rundown—best friend, best friend’s twin brother—just the basics. I didn’t feel like I should really get into the personal stuff. Not because I didn’t trust Halli, but just because I didn’t really know her. Which is a weird thing to say about your exact parallel self.
Halli worked her way through the rest of the photos. When she came to the last set she said, “You don’t have any of your grandmother?”
“Um, not up there.” Because really, my mother and I don’t need reminding. We know she’s out there. Her phone calls are intrusion enough—we don’t want to have to look at her every day on top of that.
But of course Halli would want to see her—it reminded her of Ginny. I pulled out a couple of photo albums where I knew Grandma Marion made an appearance.
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