Relativity

by Cristin Bishara

  Then I get a whiff of chocolate, and my olfactory receptors go berserk. I’m standing in front of Sweet Treats, and I can’t resist. The allure of refined sugar. Besides, I just scored an extra two bucks at the library. Door chimes jingle as I walk in the bakery. Glass display cases showcase scones, muffins, oatmeal raisin cookies, chocolate chip cookies, brownies, and carrot cake cupcakes. Rich, strong coffee adds to the aroma.

  “The smallest, cheapest version of coffee you make, and one of those tiny cranberry-walnut mini-scones, please,” I tell the girl behind the counter.

  “What? You don’t even say hello?” The girl gives me wry smile. She twists a blond pigtail around her finger.

  “Hello,” I say, trying to sound convincing. Crap! Somebody else who knows me, and I have no clue.

  “Cool haircut,” she says. “So where’s Patrick?”

  “Huh? Oh—I’m not sure.” My poor heart. How many times in the past twenty-four hours have I subjected it to sudden stress? It’s pounding hard again.

  “I swear this is the very first time I’ve seen you without him. It’s like you’re connected at the hip. I wish I were that close with my brother. It’s sweet. You know, I forgot you wore glasses.”

  “Honestly, I’m in a huge hurry,” I say. “Could I just get a small coffee and one of those mini-scones?”

  The girl laughs and I see that she’s wearing braces. She’s sixteen, maybe seventeen. Maybe she’s in Patrick’s year at Ó Direáin High. “I’m still in shock that you’re not getting a Diet Coke,” she says.

  Yuck. Methanol.

  “What?” she asks.

  I didn’t realize I was talking out loud. “Nothing. It’s just that methanol is a breakdown product of aspartame. Aspartame’s the artificial sweetener.”

  “I know what aspartame is.”

  “Well, they use methanol in camping stove fuel and antifreeze and formaldehyde,” I say. She gives me a blank stare, and I add a weak, “Forget it.”

  “Ruby?” the girl says with genuine concern. “Are you okay?”

  “Never better,” I say.

  She hands me my mini-scone wrapped in a thin napkin. “Coffee will be just a sec,” she says. “I’m brewing a fresh pot.”

  I pop the entire scone in my mouth and use it as an excuse for my silence. I shrug and point to my mouth as if to say, Sorry, can’t talk with my mouth full.

  “Five fifty,” the girl says.

  I hand her the ones I got from Carol at the library. Then I dig through my wallet for more money.

  “Here you go.”

  “What’s this?” the girl asks, pressing her eyebrows together. “Who’s Washington? Are you trying to give me fake money?” She sounds both amused and offended.

  “What do you mean?” I take the money back and examine the bills. The two from Carol have a guy named Henry Lee III framed in the portrait oval. They’re a darker shade of green too, but otherwise they look identical to my money from home. No wonder my dimes didn’t work in the Xerox machine at the library.

  “I think that’s illegal, right? Trying to pass off counterfeits.”

  “I’m sorry, I seriously didn’t notice …”

  The girl’s face softens into a smile. “Knowing Patrick, he was probably playing a practical joke on you, putting Monopoly money in your wallet.”

  “Oh, that Patrick,” I say, like I’m admonishing a bad puppy.

  “Tell you what,” the girl says. “Tell him to come in. He owes me three fifty.”

  “You sure?” I give her the two Henry Lee III bills and keep my Washingtons.

  She nods and hands me my hot coffee.

  “Thanks. Gotta go.”

  Get me out of this coffee shop!

  And out of this town? Yeah, I’m second-guessing my impulse to see Mom. It’s an impulse, that’s all. Totally devoid of logic. I should just get back to the tree. I hurry along the sidewalk, wishing I could run, trying not to slosh coffee all over myself. As people pass by, I’m careful not to make eye contact. What if someone else recognizes me?

  What if I recognize … George?

  It’s him. On a park bench, with a sketch pad and a packet of colored pencils. He looks up with those aquamarine eyes; his tank top shows biceps I never knew he had. What is he doing here, thousands of miles from San Francisco?

  “Hi, George.” My voice fails me. I’m not sure any noise is coming out at all. And I realize that I’m standing like a statue, directly facing him, staring. Absurdly.

  Does he know me? What am I to him here? A friend, a fling, a complete stranger? I want to hug him and tell him how happy I am to see him. Tears rush to my eyes. I miss you! I need you!

  He cocks his head at me, amused. “You’re from French class, right?”

  I nod, remembering the yearbook I found at Patrick’s house yesterday, in Universe Two. President of the French Club. C’est cheese! So George recognizes me but doesn’t know my name.

  “I’m Ruby Wright,” I say, offering my hand. Touching him delivers a jolt more intense than the doorknob’s. Electric. I hold on an extra second.

  “George Pierce,” he says, sizing me up. “But what’s different about you? The hair, the glasses?”

  I nod. That’s about all I can seem to do. Nod.

  “You wanna sit down a minute? You look pale.” He pats the bench next to him.

  I sit too close and he inches away. “Sorry,” I say.

  He smells like sandalwood soap, and I’m overcome by the urge to press my nose against his neck. “What are you working on?” I squeak. I clear my throat and try again. “The mountain?”

  George taps a gray pencil against his sketch pad. “I don’t know. It’s weird. Something from a reoccurring dream.”

  I smile. “It’s Mount Diablo. In California.”

  “Really? You know that for sure?” His face lights up. “I’ve never been to California.”

  “Never? I thought you must have moved here—” I stop myself. I shouldn’t assume anything. In this universe, maybe George was born here.

  “Moved here from California? Yeah, I guess you’re right. I was something like two months old. But that hardly counts.”

  A Ruby and a George, both living in this small Ohio town, both in the same French class. It makes my heart swell, my hands shake. What are the chances? What could it mean? Is my parallel Ruby destined to be with this parallel George, and they just haven’t clicked yet? Am I fated to be with my George, back in Universe One? Someday, somehow? The idea of fate and destiny have always made me cringe. If you can’t measure it or prove it, you might as well forget it. Coincidence can be explained other ways. I mean, just because there’s this uncanny correlation between at least two coexisting states of—

  “What did you say?” he asks.

  “Huh?”

  “You just mumbled something about quantum something or other. Planes?”

  “Yikes,” I say, my cheeks flaring. “I’m sorry. I have this thing about talking out loud. And I kinda don’t realize it.” I shrug and smile, attempting to seem amused at my eccentric self.

  He gives me a look, like he’s trying to decide if that’s funny or scary. Or maybe even a little cute?

  I clear my throat and point to his sketch of Mount Diablo. “If you hike up to the Juniper Campground, which is at about three thousand two hundred feet, you can see the Golden Gate Bridge.”

  We’ve actually been there together, not that long ago, in Universe One.

  “So it’s in San Francisco,” he says.

  “Across the bay.”

  George studies his drawing. “Maybe I was there in a previous life.”

  I grin. “Or in a parallel universe. If you believe in that sort of thing.”

  His stomach growls, volume ten. He laughs, embarrassed. “Sorry. I was just about to get Chinese food for lunch. You wanna come?”

  “I’d love to, but I’m broke,” I say. “And I should get going. I mean, I think I should leave now, though maybe there’s no compelling reason after
all. To go or to stay. No, no. I take that back. I mean, I need to get home. Plus I have this coffee here.” I raise my cup, as if that’s my closing argument.

  He takes the coffee from my hand and sets it on the edge of the bench. “Coffee’s not very filling. Come on. I want to hear more about Mount Diablo.”

  Suddenly I worry about the butterfly effect. The seemingly insignificant flapping of a butterfly’s wings can effect an atmospheric change, which eventually can alter the path of a tornado. Little alterations, big repercussions.

  I don’t belong here. I need to click my way through the universes and get back.

  “Is that a yes or no?” George asks. His lips are parted, half-curled into a smirk, and he’s daring me. To say yes. I slide closer and this time he doesn’t inch away.

  So I lean in and kiss him. It’s what I should have done last week on that leather couch at the East Bay Café. It’s not the kiss of my dreams, but it’s George, and he’s not pulling away. In fact, he laces his hands behind my neck and pulls me in closer. I feel dizzy, totally off-center. But in the best possible way.

  “Is that a yes or a no?” he asks again, raising one eyebrow. “Girl-I-hardly-know-from-French-class-who’s-suddenly-kissing-me?”

  “You’re buying.” I nudge his side with my elbow. “And I’m warning you, I’m hungry.”

  He laughs, and I feel weightless.

  Chapter Seven

  Location: Universe Four, Cloud Nine. Shanghai Restaurant.

  George pushes the soy sauce out of the way and hands me a menu across the table. “The steamed pork buns are really good,” he says. “Have you had them?”

  I realize that he expects that I’ve eaten here before. It’s a small downtown, and this is probably the only Chinese place. No doubt everyone who lives in Ó Direáin has been to every one of the businesses on this street, time and again. I dodge his question by saying, “I love pork buns.”

  “The Peking duck is awesome, so is the barbeque assortment platter.” George studies the lunch specials, and I study him. So far he seems a lot like my George from Universe One. The way he smells, the way he raises one eyebrow when he’s teasing, the way he holds his neck in the palm of his hand when he leans on the table.

  “You wouldn’t happen to know a girl named Jamie, would you?” I try to ask casually, but my voice quivers. I hold my breath, waiting for his answer.

  He looks up from his menu. “Jamie?”

  I nod, eyes locked on his. Is he taken? Did he and Jamie break up in this universe? Or are they meeting up for ice cream and a walk through the park tonight?

  “Nope,” he says. “I can’t think of a Jamie I know. Why?”

  “She’s someone from California.” My voice trails off.

  He looks perplexed. “So how would I—”

  “Stupid question, sorry. Never mind.” I guess Jamie doesn’t even live here. Never moved here. But I couldn’t assume anything, because after all, a version of myself lives here alongside George. “You have a little sister named April, right?”

  “Yeah. And a dog named—”

  “Trigger!” I blurt before I can stop myself.

  The look on his face transforms from confusion to suspicion. “How do you know so much about me?”

  “I, uh …” My eye catches the Facebook logo at the bottom of our menus. Like us! “We have a bunch of mutual friends on Facebook? I, um, read some of your posts. You know, just clicking around.” I sound like a stalker. Just shut up, Ruby!

  “Is this your complicated way of asking if I’ve got a girlfriend?” He raises an eyebrow, his voice settling on that familiar teasing tone.

  I breathe, relieved. “Yep, that’s it.” It would have been so much easier to just come out and ask.

  “Nah. Besides, I just started hanging out with this quirky new girl I kinda dig.”

  Me? ME?

  Our waitress suddenly approaches. A tiny woman with black hair wound into a bun. “Are you ready to order?” she asks. “Drinks first?”

  “Green tea,” George says.

  She looks at me. “That’s fine,” I say. “Bring a pot.”

  Once she’s gone, George closes his menu and leans across the table. “So what else do you know? From Facebook or whatever.”

  “You like art. And symmetry.”

  “Repeating patterns,” he says. “Yeah.” He flips through his notebook until he finds a pencil drawing of a field of flowers. I’ve seen this sketch before! George was working on it last week, just before I left Walnut Creek.

  “Each flower is like a mini-spirograph,” he says.

  I know! I was the one who showed him how to do this.

  “How did you put math and art together like that?” I ask, knowing it couldn’t have been me or my alter Ruby. “Did you go to an exhibit or something?”

  “No. It was a fluke thing. This guy at school dropped his homework on the floor one day, and I saw the graph paper and the repeating lines all curled together like some growing, living thing, and inspiration struck,” George says, breathless. “But I don’t know anyone who can show me more, unless I make an appointment with the math department, I guess.”

  “You’ve got room for a butterfly.” I point to an empty space above one of the smaller flowers. “Graphs of polar equations can look like butterflies.”

  “Yeah?” His voice surges with enthusiasm. “What’s a polar equation? Can you show me?”

  I already have. Back in Universe One. “Sure,” I say, my cheeks glowing. “I’d love to.”

  Oh, he is so George. My George, in dozens of ways. Every way, as far as I can tell.

  So why is George so much the same here, and why am I so different? Maybe it’s because his forks in the road have been subtle. Little jogs instead of life-altering detours, like losing a parent. If Mom had survived, I could be president of the French Club. Maybe I’d even—against all odds—like the color pink, just because she did, or because she made me a pink dress when I was five that I loved, or because Santa brought me a giant pink teddy bear when I was six. Things that never happened, but could have. I can’t deny the possibility that I’d be a very different person if I could subtract tragedy from the equation.

  I study George some more, trying to find some hint of difference. The only thing I can say is that I’m pretty sure he never wore tank tops in Universe One.

  He suddenly looks up from his menu and catches me blatantly staring, mostly at his biceps, so I blurt, “Rice noodles!”

  He grins. “How about I order a few things and we’ll just split?”

  I clear my throat and try to recover. “What I meant to say was ‘the rice noodles stuffed with shrimp sound exquisite.’”

  “You’re funny, girl-I-hardly-know-from-French-class.”

  I shrug innocently and look around the restaurant at the paper dragons hanging from the ceiling, the jade pots in the windows, the Chinese characters painted onto the walls. Near the door is a crate of toys for people getting takeout, to keep their kids occupied while they wait for their food.

  “LEGOs,” I say, pointing to the box. “Loved those when I was little.”

  “Yeah, the way you can take the same bunch of pieces and make totally different things with them.”

  “Exactly,” I say, thinking of parallel universes. “Identical building blocks, varied configurations.”

  “I had this pirate set, and my sister kept making puppies out of the black and white blocks. Totally drove me crazy.”

  I groan. “Oh boy. That reminds me of a childhood incident.”

  “Childhood incident,” George repeats warily. “Do I want to hear this?”

  “Scarred for life,” I say, nodding solemnly. This is a story I’ve never told my George, back in Universe One, so now this George will know something personal about me that my George doesn’t. Another deviance between universes. “A babysitter ruined my LEGO space shuttle.”

  He gasps in mock horror. “No!”

  “I had this perfect—and I mean flawless—repl
ica of Discovery.”

  George gives me a sarcastic yeah-right look.

  “It was! Down to the rocket boosters. So I went to bed, and when I got up the next morning, she’d made it into a house.”

  “A house?” George laughs. “That sucks. Have you made it through therapy?”

  “The boosters were now a chimney.”

  He leans across the table. “Why did you kiss me?”

  “I—” My cheeks flush. I look out the window, and on the other side of the street I can see the library. I’m reminded of the Xeroxed address I have in my pocket, my mother’s address. “I’ve been wanting to, for a long time.”

  “I don’t get it,” he says.

  “I know you don’t. I’m some girl from French class who whacks off her hair, and gets a tattoo, and starts kissing guys on park benches.”

  “Guys? Plural?”

  “No! You know what I mean.”

  “I don’t.”

  “It’s like the LEGOs,” I say, looking into his aquamarine eyes. “I took that stupid house and tried to rebuild my space shuttle, but I couldn’t do it. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get it back to the way it was supposed to go. I wanted it to be perfect again, but I couldn’t make the pieces fit together right. It was so frustrating.”

  Before George can ask another question, our waitress is back with our tea. “Are you ready to order lunch?” She sets a bowl of shrimp chips on the table.

  “Number five and seven,” George says. “And the pork bun appetizer.”

  We hand her our menus, and she hurries to another table, scribbling on her notepad as she goes. George looks after her, then back to me. “I like you,” he says.

  “I like you too.”

  He snaps his wooden chopsticks apart and arranges them in a V-shape. “Mount Diablo, you say.”

  “Yes. That’s your mountain.”

  We spend the rest of lunch talking about his sketch, and I give him some details to fill in about the plants that only grow in the Mount Diablo area: fairy lanterns, manzanita, chaparral bellflower, bird’s beak, and Mount Diablo sunflower.

  When our waitress places the bill on the table, I sigh. “I should get going.”