Everything I Thought I Knew

by Shannon Takaoka

  I guess I could have stuck with the topic I’d originally proposed way back in October: “Exploring Newton’s Laws of Motion in Our Everyday Lives.” An object in motion stays in motion. Force equals mass times acceleration. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Focusing on classical physics is a safe bet and would have earned me an easy A. But I’ve always been fascinated by quantum mechanics. Instead of dealing with the behavior of things we can see and measure with certainty, like the distance a ball travels after being hit with a bat or the speed of a car, quantum physics is concerned with the weird and chaotic world of subatomic particles, and what the behavior of these particles might tell us about how reality works. It’s way more theoretical than classical physics and not even close to certain, but definitely not boring. And if I was going to be stuck in summer school working on this project, I figured that I might as well pick something I’ve been curious about ever since I watched my first episode of Doctor Who: Is our universe the only one?

  My report begins with an analysis of the theory of inflation, which is the easiest one to explain: The big bang sent a huge explosion of particles hurtling through space — a massive cosmic dust cloud that to this day continues to expand. Reality, as we know it, took shape thanks to a very specific arrangement of these particles, a configuration that created our galaxy, our solar system, and the planet we call Earth. In a continually inflating and infinite universe, sooner or later this same exact pattern is destined to repeat, creating other worlds out there identical to our own. Warmed by an identical copy of our sun. Orbited by an identical copy of our moon. In this world, a duplicate me might even be writing these exact words, right now. Weird, right?

  But not as weird as string theory, which posits that because quantum particles — the smallest units of matter and the building blocks of the universe — behave unpredictably, it’s possible that other universes, and the galaxies, stars, and planets within them, have evolved according to completely different sets of physical laws. Universes where time moves backward instead of forward. Universes where there is no gravity. Universes where it’s possible to breathe CO₂.

  Jane, who I thought had already left for the day, is now reading over my shoulder. “You are a strange person,” she says. “No wonder trigonometry makes perfect sense to you.”

  I turn around. “Jane, are you feeling all right? It’s not like you to be here any later than necessary.”

  She laughs. “I know, right? But I’m only trying to save you from your nerd-girl ways. My friend Aliyah is having a party tonight. You should come.” Jane seems to have a lot of friends who throw parties.

  “I can’t. I have to finish this.” And now that I’ve fully immersed myself in the project, I’m kind of enjoying it too. More than I’ve enjoyed any school project in a long time.

  “Suit yourself,” she says. “But also, my mom and stepdad are taking my brothers to a baseball game later. If you change your mind, we can ransack her office for UCSF passwords before the party?”

  After the scene yesterday with my parents, I’m not so sure I want to add hacking into medical records to my list of offenses. I had to promise to check in with them to confirm every single time I take my medication to get out of being grounded over the tattoo. Plus, I already know they are not going to be very cool about me spending another night out with Jane. I never used to come home hungover (and without shoes) when I was with Emma.

  “Maybe later this week? My parents are going to kill me if I don’t turn this in by next Monday’s deadline.”

  Jane sighs. “All right. But your parallel-universe self is probably going to have a lot more fun tonight than you are. Just saying.”

  “And you claim to understand nothing about physics,” I tell her. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Maybe,” she says as she heads out. “It all depends on how much fun I have tonight.”

  Jane is on to something, even though she was making a joke. Another Chloe may, in fact, have just walked out the library door with her.

  The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is the one I find the most brain-bending of all. It makes yet another assumption based on the unpredictability of quantum particles. If it’s impossible to predict, with absolute certainty, whether a particle will zig, zag, or dance upside down on the ceiling, what if it does all three? This theory suggests that for every action with multiple possible outcomes, a parallel reality is created where each potential outcome actually does happen. Multiple possibilities spawn many worlds. It’s an incredible idea, almost the stuff of science fiction, but there are more than a few extraordinarily smart physicists who believe it could be possible.

  I think back to all the Chloes I saw when I used to close myself inside the three-way mirror in the department-store dressing room with my mom. How I used to wonder “What if?” What if the first Chloe exits to the right and the second exits left? What if the third forgets to study for tomorrow’s math test? What if the fourth gets hit by a bus on her way out of the store? What if all the “What ifs” happen? What if there are a multitude of universes that represent every choice, every chance, every conceivable possibility encountered by every single particle, every single cell, every single living thing? In an infinite multiverse where no outcome is 100 percent certain, anything that can happen will happen.

  If the many-worlds theory is true, another universe exists where the genetic quirk that resulted in a defect in my right ventricle never appeared. In this reality, I was born with a perfect, normal heart. There was no collapse during cross-country practice, no desperate wait for a donor, no transplant, no pause in the progress of my life. Somewhere out in the cosmos, I’m carrying on as if nothing significant has changed. I’m preparing to start college in the fall like the rest of my friends — my mind preoccupied with dorm room storage strategies and the undergraduate course catalog. Emma and I spend hours analyzing the personalities of our soon-to-be roommates based on the twenty minutes we’ve spent talking with each of them on FaceTime. I finished my AP Physics project months ago, when it was originally due. I’m not even wondering “What if?” because nothing has happened to make me consider what my life would have been like now if I hadn’t almost died. There’s no medication to take every day. Or weird memories. Or dreams of burning tunnels. But also . . . no Jane. No heart tattoo. No learning to surf. No Kai.

  And then it hits me. Despite everything that has happened, everything that is messed up and confusing and disorienting right now, everything that is making me doubt who I was and who I am, there’s a question in my mind that I’m not sure how I would answer: If I could reroll the dice and have the chance to live in that alternate universe where everything carried on as normal, where there was no fork in the road, no before and after, no heart transplant, would I?

  Summer is the season when fog hangs over the coastline like a wet blanket, often spoiling picnic plans for the tourists who show up in nothing but T-shirts and shorts. The visitors will get lucky today, though. This Wednesday is sunny and warm, with a sky so clear and blue I can see all the way out to the jagged peaks of the Farallon Islands, where white sharks are known to glide through the kelp forests, hunting for elephant seals.

  Despite the warmth in the air, I zip up my wetsuit before I head down the path between the dunes. I tell myself it’s only because the water will still be cold, not because I’m self-conscious about my scar.

  Kai is already on the beach waxing his board, the top half of his wetsuit unzipped and dangling around his hips. I hesitate before approaching, not sure how to act when faced with his naked torso, toned from paddling over ocean waves. Get a grip, I tell myself. It’s just Kai. Yes, it is just Kai, but usually he’s encased up to his neck in neoprene. And, okay, that is a very sexy tattoo encircling his left bicep. Which means that he must be at least eighteen. Or a lawbreaker like Jane. And now me too, I guess. He looks up just as I’m about to drop my backpack and board next to him on the sand.

  “Hey, Batman,” I say, ran
domly recalling our conversation about surfing and superheroes a few weeks back. It’s the first thing — the only thing — that pops into my head. All the skin is scrambling my brain.

  “Batman?” He half smiles and makes a what-the-hell-are-you-talking-about? face, clearly not remembering. “Are you supposed to be Robin?”

  “No way,” I say, slightly embarrassed that I brought up the Batman thing. “Robin sucks.”

  Kai nods toward the ocean as he pulls on the rest of his suit. “Waves suck today.” The water is uncharacteristically calm, with only a light ripple of foam softly washing over the shore.

  We head out anyway and practice pop-ups until my arms feel like wet noodles. Kai says it’s good to work on muscle memory so that when I catch my next real wave, I’ll be surer of myself, more centered, less likely to fall off. My balance is getting better, and I manage to ride a few baby swells toward the beach, each time feeling more and more at home on the board.

  After a while, we give up on the waves and float side by side, straddling our boards as the sun warms our backs. I love the sounds that surround us out here. The water rolling into and away from the shore. The occasional call of a seabird. The soft rush of the briny ocean air in my ears, which has a texture and weight that distinguishes it from the air you breathe most of the time at school or home or walking down the street and never notice. No phones ringing, no chimes indicating incoming notifications and texts. I like that Kai never makes me feel like I have to make conversation about nothing. There are no questions here about how my final summer school projects are coming along or whether I’ve taken my medication. He doesn’t ask about how I’m feeling today or if I’ve put any more thought into the college acceptance letters that sit, still untouched, on my desk. But then he really doesn’t know to ask those questions anyway. To him, I’m the Chloe who knows how to read a surf report and who’s able — just barely, but able — to catch a wave. I watch his hand trailing in the water, the tips of his fingers making small currents on the surface.

  No surf means that no one else is nearby, aside from an old man doing the breaststroke about twenty yards away. He’s wearing only a pair of swim trunks, and I wonder how he’s not shivering. Despite the sunny skies, the water still feels pretty cold to me, even in a wetsuit. I look out at the beach, shading my eyes with my hand. A wet golden retriever runs along the shoreline, chasing gulls that circle and swoop around him, always just out of reach. Two blond kids are digging a hole in the sand. The late-afternoon sun sparkles on the surface of the water. Fingertips puckered and wrinkled, I’m just about to suggest heading in when Kai reaches out for my arm.

  “Chloe. Look.”

  A large dark shape is spinning through the water very close to the left side of my board, and for a split second it seems like the world has been put on pause. The golden retriever, the digging kids, the man swimming in the water nearby are frozen in the frame. There is only me and Kai and the shadow spinning toward us. There is no time to move.

  The shape flies out of the water, rocking my board back and forth, so close that I can smell it, so close that it showers me with a kaleidoscope of ocean spray.

  A dolphin.

  And then another. And another.

  A whole pod of them keep coming, some leaping like the first one, some circling out of the water in twos and threes, another curious enough to swim around and then under our boards. I reach out and run my hand over a shiny wet back as it passes by. And just as soon as they arrived, they’re gone.

  Were they even there at all?

  I look at Kai. His face confirms that I was not hallucinating.

  “Holy shit.” He laughs. “That was incredible. I’ve seen them out here before, but never this close. You touched one.”

  “I did,” I say. “Its skin felt like rubber.”

  The water around us is still sloshing from the movement of the dolphins, and our boards have drifted a few feet apart. He reaches out for mine and pulls his closer. “I seriously thought you were about to get eaten by a shark.”

  I don’t know what I thought. It all happened so fast, I hardly had time to imagine what kind of animal was moving toward me before it surfaced. But now that the moment has passed, I consider another outcome: an alien black eye, pink gums, and jagged white teeth, the water red with blood. In another universe, I could be dead, the subject of a dramatic reenactment on Shark Week: Tragically, the young woman had undergone a lifesaving heart transplant less than a year before the fatal attack . . .

  I try to laugh off the idea of a shark encounter, even though in these cold, seal-friendly waters, it’s possible. “Guess that would have been bad for your business, huh?”

  “Well, I probably would have kept your tragic ending on the down low,” he says. “I can’t afford to lose any customers.” I notice that he’s still holding on to my board, his hand slightly behind my back.

  The old swimmer man is treading water now and looking our way.

  “Your girlfriend must be a mermaid!” he calls.

  “I know!” Kai calls back, not bothering to correct the assumption that we are a couple. Our eyes meet and he shrugs.

  I can feel a blush blooming on my face and am embarrassed about my body’s indifference, yet again, to keeping what’s going on in my brain under wraps.

  “Think I’m going to head back,” I say. “Getting cold!” I dive forward on my board and paddle quickly ahead, not at all cold.

  The blond kids, a boy and a girl, are still digging on the shore when I walk out of the water, their sunscreened bodies dusted with a layer of sand like sugared donuts. They are 100 percent focused on their hole, now deep enough for the seawater to seep up and make a little pool at the bottom. Behind me, Kai stops and squats next to them to help them find a sand crab. And then he lets each of them stand on his board, so they can pretend they’re surfing. I smile as I watch them. New recruits.

  When Kai catches up to me, I sense that the frequency we’ve been operating on over the preceding weeks has changed. Although we walk together in silence back to where we left our stuff on the beach, the air crackles with electricity. It feels weird to hand Kai cash like I usually do, our business exchange complete. He seems uncomfortable taking it.

  As I throw my bag over my shoulder, Kai gestures to my wrist. “You got a tattoo.”

  “Yes.” I hold it out for inspection, my pulse quickening as he moves close. He pushes up the sleeve of his wetsuit, takes my right hand in his left and holds his right forearm against it. On it is a small heart (traditional, Valentine’s Day red) with wings. I hadn’t noticed it earlier, when I was too busy trying not to stare at the larger one on his left arm — it’s this beautiful geometric design that almost reminds me of a DNA helix.

  “We match,” he says. “Though yours is a little more realistic.”

  I am acutely aware of his skin touching mine. Can he feel my pulse pounding in my wrist? Is it giving me away? Do I want it to?

  “Well, I’m all for accuracy,” I say.

  We both study the tattoos, the charge in the air giving me goose bumps.

  “You’ll have to tell me what it means sometime.” His voice is quiet.

  “You too,” I answer.

  But today I am not quite ready to share the story of my heart. And neither is he, I think, because a shadow of sadness has fallen across his face, one that I have seen before. His focus seems to have shifted to somewhere far away.

  The sun is dropping lower toward the horizon, and people on the beach are packing up their bags and herding their kids toward the parking lot. It is later than I thought, which means I better get a move on if I don’t want my parents to make good on their promise to ground me the next time I “forget” to tell them where I am, what I’m doing, and who I’m with.

  I take a step back and lock eyes with Kai. There goes my face again. God.

  “I have to go,” I say. “Same time next week?”

  Kai hesitates for a second before he answers, like he wants to ask me somet
hing. Or maybe I’m just reading waaaay too much into a pause.

  “Sure,” he says. “Same time next week.”

  I can still feel the warmth of Kai’s skin next to mine as I make my way up the path between the dunes. I’m anxious to be on the road, hoping I won’t get caught up in rush-hour traffic. I’ve lost track of time again, something that I rarely did before. In fact, punctuality was one of my more reliable traits. But, in a larger sense, I think about “Time with a capital T” constantly, and about how our perception of it can seem so inconsistent. The days I spent in the hospital and at home after my transplant felt endless, made all the more excruciating when I considered what I was missing in the reality that existed for my healthy friends and classmates: holiday celebrations, prom, spring break. But today — sun-kissed, exhilarating, perfect — seemed to come and go in an instant. It’s like the universe purposely screws with us. You hate seventh-period PE? Well, time is going to slow to a crawl for that one! Ha ha ha!

  My feet sink deep into the sand, and I stop to reposition my board and my bag, which are feeling heavy as I struggle up the path. I adjust the straps of the bag, shift the board, and then I notice it: a small but undeniable sensation of pain, like a trickle of ice-cold water seeping through my chest.

  I lower my board and plant it vertically in the sand. I’m having trouble catching my breath. The world begins to spin like a too-fast merry-go-round and the images flash again — the dog, the tunnel, the dying woman, the man from my hospital room — making me feel light-headed and nauseous. I start to break out in a cold, clammy sweat and grab onto the board to ground myself. I need to stay calm. Breathe. So I can figure out what’s happening. Is it my heart? The heart. This stranger’s heart, finally rebelling against a body that doesn’t belong to it?

  No, I tell myself. No. No. No. It’s nothing. I am being paranoid. This is in my head. Not my heart.