The Switch

by Hill, A. W.

  I took off after Connor, but when I got into the hallway, it was as empty as a tomb. Off in the distance, small footsteps pitter-pattered up the familiar stairs to the second floor.

  Another glitch, as with Jemma. Some kind of crack between the worlds that connected Connor and me for just those few seconds. A crossed signal, like two radio stations at once, and then one of them fades as if it had never been there at all.

  A “Pssst!” echoed down the corridor like the hiss of a coiled snake. And then the hiss became my name—my new name.

  “Jerrold! Over here!”

  The sick feeling hadn’t gone away, and now added to it was a sudden coldness, like fever chills. I noticed a motion from the entryway of a classroom down the hall, and when I squinted to focus, I realized it was Mose, beckoning to me.

  “Here!” he whisper-shouted. “Room 106.”

  He was only showing me where my next class was. Only trying to help me. But I was so edgy from the Connor encounter that even help felt dangerous. I really did not want to go into that classroom. But Mose was now making such a fuss that I felt like I had no choice. I put my finger to my lips to shut him up and made my way down there.

  “C’mon, Jerrold,” he whispered. “You’re late.”

  Something about being called that name again got to me, and all of a sudden, all that stuff about “floating” and the good feelings of being comforted by my new mom went right down the drain. Then I noticed to my horror that the teacher was Ms. Heimann, who had a reputation for calling out students who were tardy.

  “Well, good afternoon, Jerrold,” she drawled. “How nice of you to stop by. Class, say hello to Jerrold.”

  The whole class parroted her in this sing-songy way, some of them soft and reluctant, others loud and obnoxious. “Hell-o, Jerrold.”

  And then I did it. The irreversible thing. I used the F-bomb.

  “I am not f—ing Jerrold,” I enunciated, angry as I’d ever been, and then right away felt like I wanted to pass out.

  “Well,” she huffed. “You are certainly not welcome in this classroom—or any classroom at Pulaski—with that kind of language.” She turned to a girl in second row, first desk. “Keira, you’re class monitor today. Would you take my desk and continue the chapter reading while I escort Mr. Rose to the Principal’s office?”

  As soon as we got into the hallway, she gave me a hard look. “What in the world has gotten into you? I’ve never heard you—”

  But as soon as she’d looked at me, she must’ve seen that things weren’t right.

  “Are you okay, Jerrold?” she asked. “Are you ill?” Teachers always say “ill” rather than “sick.”

  “No,” I said. “And my name is Jacobus. And by the way, six years from now, you’re gonna get fired for making a kid who was late to class stand on his head for five minutes and get a blood clot in his brain and go to the hospital and die.”

  That was true, although maybe not in this universe. She just gaped at me, her jaw moving up and down but nothing coming out until this:

  “What on earth?” She stopped in the middle of the hall and put her hands on her hips. “Are you on drugs, Jerrold?”

  “That’s a really lame question,” I said. “No.”

  “We do not use ‘lame’ when we mean to say ‘stupid’ or ‘inane,’” she said, “and we do not refer to our teacher as stupid.”

  “Whatever.”

  I just didn’t care anymore. None of this was real. This wasn’t my world, and I sure wasn’t going to hang around in it long enough to be punished.

  “You’d better think long and hard about what you’re going to say to Principal Arbogast,” she said.

  As it turned out, I did have a good long time to think, because the principal was in some kind of school board meeting, and they also had to call my so-called mom because my infraction was off the charts. At some schools, and with some teachers, blurting out the f-word was not a hanging offense, and even at Pulaski, you could do it on the playground without getting more than a stern look or a warning from the teacher on duty. But Ms. Heimann had a so-called zero tolerance policy.

  The final bell rang at 3:45, and the principal was still a no-show. I was sweating from head to toe. I calculated a twenty-minute walk from school to the baseball diamond where I was to meet Gordon. That meant that in ten minutes, I had to be out of there. This, I realized, was not going to happen if I stayed to face the music.

  “Ms. Krull,” I said to the broomstick-thin lady behind the counter. “Can I use the bathroom?”

  She looked at me suspiciously. Besides being as thin as a twig, she had her stiff gray hair bunched up tight on the back of her head in what they call a “bun.” This made her look even more no-nonsense. She conferred, whispering, with the other office lady, maybe trying to decide if one of them should escort me to make sure I didn’t bolt. I knew they couldn’t stop me from using the bathroom: it’s not legal anymore for teachers to torture students—at least not in that way. But they could make sure I didn’t get any farther. I think it was laziness that finally convinced her to write me out a hall pass.

  “Come directly back here,” Ms. Krull said, handing me the pass.

  The nearest bathroom was down the hall a bit, but it could be seen from the principal’s office if you craned your neck. I went in, waited a couple of minutes, then cracked the door. Bingo! The office ladies must have gone back to their desks because all I could see above the counter was Ms. Krull’s bun bobbing up and down.

  The hallway was filling up with kids getting out of their last period class, so I had good cover. It was now or never. I moved like a cat, the way I’d seen Mose move through those dark alleys and hallways. In thirty seconds, I was at the east doors that led to the playground, and in another two, I was out, carried along by a river of students heading for home.

  A voice rang out before I was twenty feet away. “Jerrol’! Where you off to?”

  It was Mose, calling me from the door. I shushed him, and then—after a moment’s thought—motioned for him to come with. He shook his head and cocked his thumb back inside. “I got detention, I can’t.” Then he coughed that raspy hack.

  “Yeah, you can!” I said. “Forget detention. There’s someone I want you to meet.”

  His face knotted up with indecision, but at last he slung his ratty backpack over his shoulder and ran up to join me. Just in time, too, as Ms. Krull had just arrived at the door and was scanning the playground and the street, a look on her face like she’d just bitten into a lemon. We took off and didn’t stop until we’d made it all the way to the meeting place. Out of breath and with our hearts thumping like bass from a gangbanger’s subwoofer, we dropped our packs on home plate and sat down against the backstop.

  Mose had another coughing fit from all the running, and it took him a minute to ask, “So, who we meetin’?”

  “His name’s Gordon. He might seem a little weird to you, but he’s all right. He’s lost like me, only he says he knows a way to get home.”

  “Can I say somethin’?” he asked.

  “Sure, Mose. Might as well say it ‘cause tomorrow I might not be the same Jerrold, and he won’t remember any of this.”

  “That’s what I’m talkin’ about,” he said. “This is some crazy shit you layin’ down, brother. You sure somebody didn’t pop you with a baseball bat?”

  “Mose, it’s even crazier than you think. One day, maybe you’ll understand.”

  “Try me now,” said Mose. “Can’t hurt.”

  “Well, first off: it’s not science-fiction. It’s science. I got flipped into a parallel universe. I’m still me inside. Me—I mean Jacobus, the kid who’ll be your age seven years from now. I still have his memories, and when I picture myself, I look like him. But that me is now inside this other kid, Jerrold. You can appreciate how hard this is to pull off, right?”

  “Man, you deserve an Oscar if you’re acting.”

  “I’m not acting, Mose. Look, what it comes down to as far as I c
an understand, is that when the universe was made—you know, the Big Bang—somebody decided ‘why bank it all on one universe? Let’s make a bunch of them and see what works. Let’s make it so that anything that can happen, does happen in at least one of ‘em.’”

  “Can I ask another question?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I wasn’t sure I could answer it, but the more we talked, the more it began to make a kind of sense.

  “You said ‘somebody’ decided to make a bunch of different universes. Who’s that? Are you talking about—” He cocked his thumb to the sky.

  He had me there, just as I’d had Gordon when I’d asked him the same question. “Don’t know, Mose. And to tell you the truth, I haven’t thought about it yet. If it’s God, he’s kind of a joker. Maybe even a gamer. If it’s a superior alien race, maybe they’re playing chess, and we’re the pawns.”

  “Or maybe,” said Mose, kind of softly, “It’s just the way it is. Just the way the whole thing is built, like bowl full of bubbles, with different stuff happening in each one. I mean, why not?”

  “You got a point.” I looked up and noticed Gordon coming across the playground in his catcher’s gear. “Why not?”

  Mose hadn’t seen him yet, so he asked one last question.

  “And you’re sayin’ you got bounced from one bubble to the other? How does that happen—”

  “Don’t ask me how it works. I mean, I know why it happened. I flipped a switch. But that’s no answer. Otherwise, I would’ve figured out a way to get home. ‘Cause you know what I’ve learned?”

  “What’s that?” said Mose.

  “That even though there might actually be better universes than yours—with better parents, or cool friends like you, or even world peace and a cure for cancer—home is always the one you started from.”

  We looked up at the crrreak of Gordon’s chest-guard.

  “Hey,” said Gordon.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Who’s this?” He nodded to Mose.

  “This is Mose. He’s cool.”

  “He a floater?”

  “Nah. But he gets it.” I turned to Mose. “Don’t you, Mose?”

  Mose’s jaw went a little slack, but I gave my eyebrows a flick, and he started nodding and said, “Yeah.” He held out his hand. “Pleased to meet you, Gordon. I’m Mose and—” He looked over at me. “Well, what he said.”

  “All right, then,” said Gordon. “Let’s hit the road.”

  ordon was in a hurry. He headed purposefully back in the direction of the high school, which was also the direction of the little red house, but when we reached the five-cornered intersection two blocks south, he veered suddenly and took the northeast spoke instead of the northwest one, aiming for the corner where the Orange Julius shop was.

  “It’s this way, Gordon.” I pointed left.

  “One more Julius before we go,” he said. “I need to think.”

  “I thought you said you had a plan.”

  “I do,” Gordon said through his catcher’s mask. “But it isn’t completely hatched yet.” Then he added, “So right now my plan is to have another Julius. I wanna make sure I have one more in case I wind up someplace where there aren’t any.”

  Mose gave me a look of deep skepticism.

  “Don’t worry.” Gordon tapped on his face mask before pushing it up. “My gears are turning.”

  “If you say so,” said Mose.

  “I wouldn’t mind one either,” I said. “But I’m broke.”

  “I’m buying for all of three of us,” Gordon said. “I’m feeling flush.”

  And so Gordon treated us to what might be our last Julius, and we sat on the bench at the bus stop out front, straws in our mouths.

  “So now what?” asked Mose.

  “We flip the switch,” I said, not very boldly.

  “Have to find it first,” said Gordon.

  “What?” I looked at him cross-eyed. “It’s just a couple blocks up.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Gordon.

  “What do you mean? Why not?”

  “Even if it’s still there,” Gordon replied, deep in thought inside his face mask. “It might not be the right switch.”

  As Mose did a face-palm and tossed his cup into the trashcan, I cleared my throat.

  “What do you mean, the right switch?”

  “Why do you think I’ve been stuck here so long?” he came back. “It’s not that simple. We could probably flip that switch up and down a hundred times and only end up in realities just a shade diff’rent from this one. Picture a wire that keeps splitting, and then ev’ry new branch splits, and so on and so on. To get back to that first split, we’re gonna have to hack the system.”

  “I think you just lost me, Gordon,” I said.

  Mose fist-bumped me. “Count me in the lost camp.”

  I got up and wedged my cup into the overfull trashcan. “Well, now I have to at least see if it’s there. C’mon. Since Gordon here hasn’t ‘hatched his plan’ yet, we might as well check it out.”

  “Sure, why not?” said Mose.

  “Okay,” said Gordon, flipping down his mask.

  The sun shone directly overhead, bleaching out the sky and making it that Easter egg blue that only seemed to come on cool spring days like this. Powered by the protein boost from the Julius, I led the way back to the corner of Cleveland and Dickens, Mose at my side and Gordon lagging behind, his arms crossed over his chest guard.

  “He’s probably doing equations in his head,” I whispered to Mose.

  “Do you think he knows what he’s talkin’ about?” Mose whispered back.

  “Well, he did make a baseball materialize out of thin air.”

  “I would say that sounds like some bullshit. Except that somehow, I believe it. And the only reason I believe it is that I believe you…and that’s only ‘cause of the way the Duke looked at you last night. The Duke can sniff out bullshit, and he didn’t smell any on you.”

  “Goddamn!” I stopped dead in my tracks at the corner.

  “What?” asked Mose.

  A stiff breeze from the lake lifted the branches of the elm tree that stood on the parkway in front of the lot where the truck and the red house had been.

  “It’s gone,” I said half-under my breath. I turned around and looked at Gordon, who had flipped up his mask. He shrugged and gave me a self-satisfied smile.

  “Okay, professor,” I said. “It was here yesterday. Where did it go?”

  “I may talk a big game,” Gordon said, “but I’m still figuring it out, just like you. I’m only a few worlds ahead. Like I’m playing a video game on a more advanced level. But only just.”

  That made sense to me, as much as anything did. On the grass near the curb, a robin took two hops and pulled a worm out of the earth. Then, I swear, it cocked its head and looked me in the eye before guzzling the worm down its throat. I’d never seen a robin look so red or so real, and at the same time, so much like a 3D image, or a perfect mechanical model. The ground trembled, and around the corner, with a diesel grunt and a blast of exhaust fumes, came the same giant truck that the red house had sat on. Only there was no house on it.

  “That was it!” I shouted. “That’s the house truck. Now where the hell is the house?”

  “Do you guys know anything about quantum physics?” Gordon asked.

  “You mean black holes ‘n stuff?” Mose cocked his head.

  “That’s part of it,” said Gordon. “But even weirder. Like, in some way, everything is math. Not, like arithmetic. More like geometry, except stretched out to multiple dimensions. If I had to explain it, Jake, I’d say that the house was there and not there. In some kind of superposition.”

  Mose made a sound in his mouth like he was sucking on his front teeth.

  “Does that make any sense?” Gordon added.

  Mose put his hands on his hips, and I just stared at that empty lot.

  A minute of silence passed before I spoke up.

  “Something r
eally strange happened today at school.”

  “You ain’t kidding,” said Mose. “You dropped the f-bomb in front of Ms. Heimann.”

  “No, not that.” I winced, then launched into my spiel about meeting baby-Connor. “And I look at him, and he’s that guy, from my real life, only back then. Back now. Oh, hell—whatever. Before he even met me.”

  Gordon gave me a deep look. “Didn’t you say that Connor was with you when you pulled the switch the first time?”

  “Yeah,” I answered slowly. “But— Wait a second! You don’t think Connor could’ve been born later in this universe, same way I was born earlier? That he got switched forward and me backward.”

  “Lemme think.” Gordon put his palm up.

  “This is makin’ my brain scream,” said Mose.

  “No,” said Gordon, after he’d had his thought. “I don’t think that’s what it was. It doesn’t make sense.”

  I had to laugh. “You mean something about this does?”

  “It’s like I said yesterday—there are links between these different worlds. And one of those links is how we get home.”

  “I saw those links—with Connor and Jemma. I think what you’re saying, or what Mr. Bohm, my science teacher, would say, is that when you’re getting bounced from world to world, there’s a higher probability of bouncing into one that has some of the same history. Like the wires you talked about, or the forks of a river, right? They all come from the main stream.”

  “Exactly,” said Gordon. “And that main stream is your lifeline.”

  Mose stared down at his hand. “Like this,” he said after a few seconds, pointing to the big crease in the middle of his palm. “My grandma says that’s your lifeline. Check out all those little branches. Like little creeks, but none of ‘em go very far—” Mose shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his hoodie and stared up at the trees. “Do you think it could be the reason my life’s so messed up—you know, my dad leaving, and my mother’s drunken boyfriend beating hell out of me and that— Could it be ‘cause I got sidetracked? Could that happen without flipping a switch?”