by Jason Letts
Chapter 2
There’s something about an irresistible pair of lips that gets your blood pumping and makes your mind foggy. Just the right shade and a thickness that draws you in, it seems like you could get lost in them and never want to escape.
Cammie had arrived early for school, and she wasn’t at all sure about whether or not she wanted to be there, but now some boys skateboarding on the pavement nearby had her attention and one in particular was preventing her from going anywhere.
Apart from a face that was soft and immaculate, he had a thin frame, black hair that hung over his eyes, and an attitude decrying that he didn’t care about the rules, which Cammie found strangely appealing. He tried to do a jump with his skateboard that didn’t work, but even that didn’t seem to matter.
His detached manner struck Cammie as being so different than her own. Everything felt like it was so extremely important that if it wasn’t on her mind for a second the entire world would fall apart. If he could get away with doing whatever he wanted, why couldn’t she be a little reckless if it meant helping her brother?
On the one hand, she had her responsibilities at school, including her special academic mentor, her pre-SAT work, and the desire to get the grades that would get her into the college of her dreams. Then there was the dire threat of what would happen to her brother if she just sat around and hoped it would be ok. He would end up just like her mother, and it would all be her fault.
From where she stood, she could see the library containing the information she would need to learn about Huntington’s. Reading would give her some ideas and from there she could design any number of experiments. The library was actually right on her way home too. Now all she had to do was choose. Do what she was supposed to or do something to save her brother.
Her eyes were still on the handsome boy skating as these thoughts and worries drifted through her mind. Other students passed by, but she was oblivious to them. All of a sudden, the boy glanced at her, and Cammie could’ve sworn he smiled.
Completely stunned, Cammie spun around and tried to make it seem like she hadn’t been staring. She clutched the straps of her backpack and started down the sidewalk, leaving the front doors of her school behind.
Cammie had been on a first-name basis with the librarian since she was in kindergarten. It was nothing for her to brush off people her own age to drop into the library and bury herself in books for hours, only now she felt she had a very good reason to do it.
Her hands, arms, shoulders, and back ached as she carried a stack of books two feet high to the checkout counter. Straining, she lurched her booty onto the edge and pushed them closer to the elderly woman with the scanner gun.
“More medical books, Cammie?” she asked, checking out the titles.
“As usual, Mrs. Carnahan.”
“Have you got another experiment planned?” she asked.
“Something like that,” Cammie replied, offering a sneaky grin.
After loading as many of the books as she could into her backpack, Cammie still had to carry a thick volume in each hand. She exited the library and started down the street, crossing paths with a few other students along the way.
“Where are you going? School’s this way,” one boy observed.
“I’ve got more important things to do,” Cammie shot back, but it took her most of the way home to shake off their laughter. By the time she arrived, it was barely after nine o’clock in the morning on a Monday.
My shift at Ben & Jerry’s ran from the morning until two o’clock, which would leave me several hours until class at night. Sometimes I felt a little stupid about going to class since I already knew the material, but getting a diploma was important to Nathan, so I went through it for him.
Class was the last thing on my mind when I got home and discovered what Cammie had done though.
“Hi,” I said, completely stunned.
“Hi,” she replied, missing her cue to explain what the heck was going on.
“What is all this stuff?” I asked.
“Oh, you know, stuff,” she squirmed as I put her on the hot seat.
The entire living room had been transformed into a makeshift laboratory. The library books had just been the beginning. They occupied space on the dining room table next to several high-powered microscopes that I guessed she talked her teachers into letting her borrow.
The computer had been moved onto the coffee table by the couch, and it had a model of the Huntingtin gene on it. Test tubes and vials were set into a centrifuge on the kitchen counter amongst other equipment she’d collected over the years. Altogether it looked an awful lot like the lab at the haunted house, and I knew it would end in just as much of a disaster.
And that was before the smell hit me.
“What are these rats for?” I gasped, coming around to the living room and spotting a half dozen of them in a cage on the chair. They scurried around, twitching their whiskers at me.
“Testing…” Cammie squeaked.
“Why did you do all this?” I came around so I could look her in the eye. She had a guilty look on her face, but that didn’t mean she was going to stop.
“I’ve got a lot of work to do if I’m going to cure this disease. And if I don’t take matters into my own hands, nothing’s ever going to get done. So I’ve got to get started now,” she said.
“But you’re supposed to be at school!”
Cammie pursed her lips and got up, putting her hands on the table and leering at me.
“Some things are more important than school. I’ve known I was going to spend my life curing this disease since I was first old enough to understand my mother had it, and now I have more of a reason than ever to fight it or else I’ll be losing my brother too. Why is it so hard for people to realize this is what I’m meant to do?”
I put my hand to my face, knowing we were approaching something very delicate in this conversation. It was true that Cammie was supposed to spend her life fighting the disease, but she couldn’t do so now at the cost of her education. And I was afraid that the only way to convince her to put things in perspective would threaten her very purpose of being.
“Look, maybe you should listen to your brother, ok? Nathan wants you to do well in school. So why don’t you stick to that now and save this for your doctoral thesis?” I suggested, but for some reason Cammie got offended and started yelling at me.
“What’s the big deal if I skip school to do this? I’ll probably still manage to get all A’s anyway. And besides, I didn’t hear you complaining about me missing school when we were trying to save Nathan from the accident, or when you got stuck here and told me all about how he was going to die!”
“This is different!” I shouted.
“How is it different?” she barked.
“Because you can’t help him!” I shrieked over her.
My face felt hot and I took a deep breath. She pushed me and pushed me, and I was afraid I’d said too much. Cammie stared at me, her mouth open a little bit. Her glasses had gone a bit crooked, and her frozen face meant her mind was working overtime to try and figure out what I’d said. I hoped she’d never figure it out, because it would destroy her life almost as much as Huntington’s disease did to Nathan’s.
Still, I didn’t know how I could convince her to do what we needed to do to save Nathan without telling her why what she was doing now would never work. I felt like I’d violated one of my most basic principles, to never interfere in the choices people make.
“And why can’t I help him?” she murmured, her sweet, innocent brown eyes feeling as hot as the sun to me.
“That’s not what I meant,” I objected, backing away. “It just won’t help him now. You have to wait until you’re in college to work on this.”
“That’s not what you said!” Cammie came around the side of the table, pointing at me.
“Look, it’s nothing. I just have a better idea is all,” I stammered, not wanting one of the few things I remembered about the futu
re to unhinge her.
“Why can’t I help him?” she shouted, her shrill voice ringing in my ears.
I had backed into the living room, twisting my head into knots trying to think of any way to escape. There was nothing left to do but tell her the truth and hope it wouldn’t turn out as bad as I feared. Swallowing hard, I reluctantly raised my eyes to meet hers.
“There’s a Cammie out there who finds the cure for Huntington’s disease, but she isn’t you.”
Cammie squinted for a moment, then her eyes widened while the rest of her remained very still.
“What?” she gasped.
I rushed toward her, putting my hand to her shoulder as though she were about to crack like a vase. I didn’t want to say any more, but now I had no choice.
“I should’ve never told you this, but doing research and running experiments won’t do anything to help Nathan. But you’ve already invented everything we need to save him.”
Cammie appeared very young, her lip trembled a bit, and I wondered if she would cry. I couldn’t imagine how hard this was for her to take.
“So there’s another me out there who is smarter than me?” she concluded, ignoring my last point. “And I spend my entire life trying to fight a disease and it turns out to be a big waste?”
“No, no, don’t think of it like that,” I said, trying to comfort her. “Even I have no idea what kind of a difference you’ll make. There can be so many unintended benefits and peripheral accomplishments. I just know you don’t find the cure, that’s all.”
The blow knocked Cammie back onto the couch. She doubled over, covering her face in her hands and putting them both to her knees. When she removed them, I expected to find tears on her cheeks, but instead everything just seemed pinched together as though she were sucking on something very sour.
Sitting next to her, I watched her take a deep breath and then exhale. She slowly twisted her neck to bashfully face me. I could already tell she felt ashamed for having a fruitless future.
“So what do we have to do to save him?” she whispered, her eyes still closed.
I cleared my throat, suddenly feeling on the spot to explain my plan before I was ready. In my head it felt like it would make sense, but actually making it work was another matter entirely.
“I have to find the Cammie who invents the cure and bring it back.”
Confused, Cammie peered into me and tried to figure out how such a thing could be possible. Perhaps she knew what I was referring to but refused to accept that I meant it.
“You invented a machine that switches things among parallel universes,” I went on. “I used to be able to do that myself, and if I still could I’d have that cure in my hands in the blink of an eye, but your machine just might work well enough to let me anyway.”
As soon as I’d started talking about the experiment she’d created for the state science competition, Cammie immediately started twitching and shaking her head. The whole idea must’ve seemed viscerally repulsive to her.
“But you said we can’t do that!” she objected. “There is no way we could ever know we were sending you to the one Earth out of ten trillion where the version of me invented the cure. You would never be able to get back, and even if you did we would never know you were gone.”
She was right, of course. Cammie’s machine did seem to make switches at random depending on which subjects weren’t being directly observed. Also, the division between parallel universes was mental as well as physical, which prevented anyone from comprehending that a switch had been made. Despite all this, I had a hunch I could make it work.
“Cammie, it’s true that you might never know I was gone, but I know for a fact I’ll remember if I’m switched into another reality. At the competition when you exchanged your bear with another you had never seen, I was the only one who realized it. That’s the one part of me this body doesn’t block.”
She was still more than skeptical though, and it seemed to pain her how my proposal didn’t match up with her logic.
“But you’ll still never know you’ve made it to the one place you need to go. My machine just plain can’t do that. The odds are ten trillion to one,” she implored, but I could tell there was something more than the difficulty of it that bothered her.
“Ok, I’m going to explain something very essential about the universe now. For every action, all of the possible outcomes are distributed by a spirit to the countless parallel worlds. That means every time someone does something, it’s going to work out perfectly for someone. So if you can trust me, we’ll make our decision to do this and hope that it works, because for one outcome it absolutely has to.”
Cammie burst from her seat and started pacing around the room. She had her arms against the sides of her head until she threw them down and shouted.
“This is insane!”
“Believe me,” I begged.
“No! It’s never going to work. My life’s not going to be a failure, and I’m not going to help you disappear when we’ll never see you again. It’s not like we’d be getting another version of you in your place if you weren’t there already. You’ll just be gone, and how do you think Nathan will react to that? And I’ll admit that I would be sad if you were gone too, as long as I could remember you were ever here in the first place.”
Now I got up, refusing to let her forget what we were doing this for.
“This is the only way to stop this disease from killing Nathan!” I argued, and Cammie dropped her head.
“It’s not like the disease will probably even kill him. Lots of people with Huntington’s end up dying because of pneumonia, heart disease, or from injuries when they fall. Then between thirty-three and seventy-six percent suffer from psychiatric disorders like anxiety and depression. He could very well die from suicide too,” she explained.
“Umm, you’re not exactly making the best argument that we shouldn’t help him.”
“Well I’m just saying!” she gushed, her face flushed. The situation was crushing her and she didn’t know what to do about it.
“We can make this work, Cammie, and then things can be better for him,” I added softly. Even though there was no easy solution, I was tired of fighting.
“Nathan’ll never be able to let you go,” she muttered.
“If this works, he’ll never have to,” I said.
*
Nathan continued going to work at the cement factory as usual, but he did spend a few solitary moments each day staring up at the massive silo occupying the middle of the warehouse. It hadn’t taken them long to fix it, and now that it was back Nathan kept seeing glimpses of it crashing down on top of him. The obvious danger of the falling silo was so much easier to face than the subtle danger of the disease.
A couple of footsteps signaled that someone was approaching him, and Nathan tore himself away from his contemplations. Willy, Nathan’s best friend at work, had a wrapped present in his hand that could only be a bottle of wine, judging by the shape. Nathan hid a look of disappointment.
He’d casually mentioned he’d gotten some bad health news to Willy, who must’ve put together what it was because of what happened to his mother. The last thing Nathan wanted was anyone’s pity, even if it was an awfully nice gesture.
“Kind of surprised to see you coming in to work these days. Thought you might need a little time off,” Willy said.
His friend’s sympathy was obvious, but Nathan wilted under it. He scratched the back of his head and nodded.
“Taking some time off sounds nice, but the bills don’t plan on giving me a break. Not to mention I’ve got more responsibility around here with getting everything back in order. No, as far as I’m concerned what I want most now is for everything to be as close to normal as possible.”
Willy seemed to agree, though it was much harder to tell if he really did. People will usually go along with anything a sick person says.
“I hear you. Gotta take care of the family,” he added.
“That’s right
,” Nathan said.
There was a brief pause and then Willy extended the present to Nathan.
“Anyway, I just wanted to give you this, from the Misses and me. We’re sorry to hear about your health and hope it turns out the best way possible,” Willy said, putting a hand on Nathan’s shoulder.
“Yeah, thank you. That’s very kind of you,” Nathan said, a little bit embarrassed. He looked his friend in the eye and knew he meant it, but then the looming silo distracted him again.
“Maybe it’ll make for a nice night for you and your lady,” Willy suggested, chuckling. “I heard she stormed the factory here when the whole thing was collapsing just to get to you. The girl’s got guts. I’ll give her that!”
Nathan had to laugh too. Looking at it from the outside, it did seem like just about the craziest thing a person could do.
“Guts is one way of putting it. She doesn’t hold herself back, that’s for sure.”
Both men had their eyes on the shiny steel silo towering above them. Willy ran his finger over his moustache and leaned closer to Nathan.
“You know, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” he said, his voice low enough to be a whisper. His eyes had a curious gleam, one that almost startled Nathan for its intensity.
“Sure. What is it?”
“Day before the accident, you told me not to come in to work. I can’t believe I let you talk me into it, and I caught holy hell from Henrietta like you wouldn’t believe, but when we watched the evening news that night and saw what happened…our heads just about exploded. Just tell me. How did you know?”
“You’re not going to tell anyone I told you, are you?” Nathan asked.
“No, no, course not,” Willy confirmed.
Nathan and Willy shared a long look. There was friendship in it and curiosity, but part of what passed between them in that moment was more akin to suspicion. Pursing his lips, Nathan struggled to find the best way to explain what had happened. His mouth went dry and he swallowed.