Extra Life

  There is a new universe for every possible thing that could happen, an endlessly branching tree of options. So let’s say you erase a word you wrote down in your TV script: boom, a new universe where you didn’t erase the word. A guy in Moscow decides not to pick his nose: boom, a new, nose-picker universe. An alien protozoa-type-thing on Alpha Beta 516 decides to wriggle its cilia backward instead of forward—boom, new universe.

  Consider a reality where Hitler won World War Two or the Cuban Missile Crisis ended in Nuclear Winter. Heck, in a zillion other variations, life on earth never even started, or, if it did, the dinos never died out.

  All these possibilities were absolute reality somewhere.

  Everything possible, happened, and was happening still.

  In the reality I came from, a boy named Horace Vale went out for a walk downtown and disappeared forever. There would be search parties, milk carton photos. His parents would deplete their bank accounts looking for him, but they’d never get any closure, because that Horace Vale simply slipped through the cracks…

  …and found himself deposited into a new universe not his own. Russ 2.0 wasn’t me me, but an alternate me, a living entity completely separate from me, the same as me, but not exactly…

  “I’m an inter-dimensional alien invader,” I realized aloud. And another insight, another glitch, suddenly became glaringly obvious. I was sent back to my own bedroom at seven a.m., a point in time when my original self should’ve been fast asleep on his pillow. I should’ve materialized right on top of him, but he wasn’t here. Just me and my father.

  “Where’s the other me?” I wondered aloud.

  “Other you?” Dad knotted his eyebrows. Smart guy, but I was asking him to jump into a scenario that was already moving at approximately light speed. Confusing to anyone, even the guy who would set this crazy stuff in motion.

  “When I go back in time,” I told him, “there are two of me. The me I was and the me I am. So where is the Was-Me me?”

  Dad nodded, checked his watch. “I guess he’s at school,” he said.

  “What’s he doing there this early?”

  He shook his wrist, put the watch face against his ear. “Ticker on the fritz,” he said, “but in my office, just before I heard you scream, the clock on my computer said it was exactly one in the afternoon.”

  The shock of misplaced time. It wasn’t seven a.m. It was one p.m. A six-hour leap instead of twelve. My time sliced clean in half.

  And almost half an hour had already passed since I came through the wormhole. At this moment, Paige was out by the high school track being bullied by Asshat. Soon she’d be headed home, headed toward a death I refused to believe was self-inflicted. And here I was, wasting time across town, debating physics with my father.

  THE LOSS of six hours stumped my father. A few hasty recalculations gave him a fresh hypothesis involving half-life atomic energy decay. It seemed the device might only be able to recapture half its energy after every use. Twelve hours becomes six becomes three and so on. If I did it again, I’d leap to four o’clock, then five-thirty, or so he figured.

  But I’d received my own stern warning (from myself) not to do it again.

  After I vetoed Dad’s predictable idea to drop by Rush Fiberoptics, he returned to his attic office, cracked his knuckles, and set off to solve the problem I presented him with. We needed a new approach—one that involved gaining remote access to Rush’s database to see what they knew about a time machine. Even if he had zero hope of replicating the program, there was still a chance he could find a way to stop this perpetual spin cycle.

  He was a much better hacker than chauffeur, so I biked to school alone.

  No answer when I called Paige on the cell phone I borrowed from Dad. She was still in class. I couldn’t bring myself to leave a message. How do you explain to a friend that you’re calling to thwart a suicide she hasn’t even contemplated yet? How do you tell her when you know, and she knows, that she’d never do such a thing to herself in the first place? I’d just have to intercept in the flesh.

  I felt optimistic with fifty bucks in my pocket and my own clothes on again, especially a pair of firm running shoes. I had a mess of stinging blisters from Connie’s flip-flops. My stupid bicycle was another story—rusty from disuse, chain jerking between gears.

  Though the sky had been clear in the last two variations, in this universe it was gray, almost buzzing electronically like TV static. The shaded windows on cars seemed to almost glow. But when I looked head-on, just a regular window. Usually, you’d need Photoshop or CGI to get these unsettling effects, these glitches in the space-time fabric that could be my fault.

  I hit the school grounds during the end-of-day rush, later than I hoped. Solid lines of buses, cars, and walkers streaming out of every exit, diesel clogging the air. As I coasted along the access road, some wiseass yelled from an open bus window, “Hey, Vale! Y’all’re going the wrong way! Escape! Escape!”

  He was right, though. I was too late. Paige would already be on her bus headed home, and I didn’t know which one was hers.

  I cut across the sloping eastern grounds and pushed the bike behind a cluster of bushes. Right away I spotted them: Connie and 2.0 exiting through their usual side door, headed toward a backwoods trail that cut a few minutes from their afternoon commute.

  I couldn’t hear them, but 2.0 was broadcasting his agitation obviously enough: blabber-mouthing, throwing off wild gestures, walking backwards in front of Connie when he wanted to emphasize a particular point he was making. General obnoxiousness.

  Connie was just about sleepwalking compared to his sidekick. He was weighted with too many secrets and plans, more than I could guess. For now, I had to keep my cover, had to restrain myself from leaping out and confronting them, setting off some fresh chain of butterfly effects.

  But, believe me, I’d been doing some calculating, and I had a few accusations to level at my closest friend, Connie. For starters: there was the issue of how fast he initially bought into my time-travel story when I showed up at his house in a soggy cardboard box, or how easily he formulated theories about how it could’ve happened, even though nothing like this had ever occurred in the history of humankind. How easily he betrayed me in the end, even if a second leap was my only choice. He zapped me out of his life with the press of his thumb. All I knew for sure was Connie knew more than he knew he knew.

  For now, I had the facts I needed. Russ 2.0 was leaving school on time, uninjured, instead of nursing a wound in the assistant principal’s conference room. Which meant he never went out and confronted Paige’s bully. Which meant he got distracted because somebody stole his cell phone. Which meant there had to be three of us now, not just two.

  The Horace Vale who was born and raised in this universe.

  The Horace Vale who leaped to seven a.m. and was now at the Silver Bullet.

  And me.

  Me on a rescue mission, 2.0 headed home with Connie, and 3.0 (really, what else would I call him?) plotting to tinker mercilessly with Bobby Parker’s brain. Three Horace Vales fumbling around, screwing up the universe.

  Back on the banana seat, I tried to dial Paige’s cell again as my bike jostled down the hillside, but my fingers hit all the wrong digits. I called her when I reached smooth sidewalk. Straight to voicemail. Left a message this time, begged her to call me back on my Dad’s cell a-sap, then I cut as straight a path toward her house as I could.

  In twenty minutes I skidded up to her duplex. My dismount was more like ramming the front steps and tumbling over the handlebars. I slapped her screen door two-handed instead of knocking, wheezing for breath. “Paige!”

  Nobody was in the living room when I shielded my eyes and squinted.

  The doorbell buzzer didn’t work.

  “Paige!” I yelled again, and opened the screen door a crack.

  Still no answer, so I stepped in. A cat leapt off the back of her couch and skittered past, scaring the crap out of me. I went into the kitchen. Tried to
prep myself for what I might see—down on the floor, slumped over the table.

  Nothing but a slow drip from the faucet. Dishes piled up for cleaning. Then, a toilet flush, water running in the bathroom sink. Paige came out still buttoning her pants. The moment was awkward for both of us, as she noted aloud, using her spiciest language.

  Paige could curse me for hours for all I cared because she was alive.

  “I was worried,” I explained. “You weren’t answering your phone.”

  “So you break into my house?”

  “I didn’t break—the door was open. And I called your name twice.”

  She swiped her cell phone off the kitchen table and checked. “No missed calls,” she said. She wasn’t wearing her hat for once. I couldn’t remember the last time I saw her hair unfurled. She looked almost—soft.

  “There’s been some—technical difficulties,” I said. To prove it, I nodded at the digital display on her microwave. 8:88 o’clock.

  Paige didn’t seem concerned. “What were you worried about, that you’d have to come all the way down to the ghetto to check on me?”

  “It’s not… I heard you had a run-in with some douche in gym class. I thought maybe you might be upset about it.”

  “I’m legit impressed that you care,” she said, “but I’m also fine. Same old b.s. I get all the time at school. Nothing new. I learned a long time not to get worked up. Who even told you?”

  I couldn’t think fast enough to be sure my answers would gel with the rest of the facts, but I also couldn’t exactly ask her to believe I was an inter-dimensional visitor with time-travel foresight.

  “I, uh—people were saying you wrote some stuff on Facebook.”

  “I don’t even have a profile on thefacebook.”

  There is was again, thefacebook.

  “Why are you saying it all foreign-exchange like that—thefacebook?”

  “Because that’s what it’s called,” she said.

  “Is it?”

  “Anyway, who cares? I have like zero interest in ‘social media.’”

  Of course Paige was right—she didn’t have a profile, at least not in the universe I came from, where the site was plain old Facebook, minus the the, and YouView was called YouTube. All these dizzying little variations.

  She said, “Somebody’s messing with y’alls head, Christopher Nolan.”

  Then she chuckled at me, broke out a six-pack of Coke from the fridge and popped one open for each of us. When I took a sip, it wasn’t my universe’s delicious and refreshing Coke. It tasted like a Xerox machine smelled after too much duplication.

  “What happened with Savannah?” she asked, leaning against the counter. She’d taken off her trademarked flannel, and her white tank top was rather form fitting. She’d… developed since last time I noticed, which was probably back in little league.

  “Oh, uh, the whole thing fell through,” I said after too long a pause.

  “Bummer. Listen, I’m sorry for busting your balls about the project deadline. Sometimes I think things are funny that aren’t. So, uh, thank you for checking up on me, even if it’s a false alarm and—”

  “Do you mind if we look?” I blurted.

  “At what?”

  “Facebook. The. Just to see. Maybe there’s an impostor or something.”

  Paige shrugged and said, “Knock yourself out. Laptop’s upstairs.”

  Carpeted steps led to a narrow landing with Paige’s room straight ahead. The only other bedroom was her mom’s, I guessed. She and her mom moved here about a year back after what happened with her brother and her parents’ separation. Trying to get out from under the shadow of things that should never have happened.

  Her room was a sports hall of fame where she was the only inductee. Mounted baseball bats, field hockey sticks, soccer trophies. Not a teddy bear or scrap of pink in sight. She tossed herself onto the bed and flipped open the laptop lying there. While it booted up, I admired a shelf loaded with baseballs and a procession of Paige’s snide grins on the yearly baseball cards our little league association made for us.

  Comforting to see mementos from a past I actually remembered.

  Freakily, she had a 2004 Curt Schilling baseball card, faded and scarred with creases. It was a duplicate of the lucky card I used to keep under my cap. The one I dumped in the trash after my disastrous last pitch.

  “Did I ever tell you about my Curt Schilling card?” I asked her.

  “Um, yeah,” she said. “That is your Curt Schilling card, genius.”

  For a second I thought maybe in this reality, our past actions were different. Maybe here Mom did let Paige pitch the rest of the game. Maybe in this world, we won, and I gave Paige the card as a gift for bringing home the trophy.

  Maybe, but no.

  “I fished it from the garbage after you chucked it,” she said, “which I thought was pretty asinine. I wanted to keep it as a reminder of how y’all screwed up my big shot on the mound and ruined my major league dreams. Grudges inspire me, sometimes.”

  “Glad I could be of help,” I grumbled.

  She got the Internet running and logged into thefacebook with my account. Same password, even in this reality. I got a hit on Paige’s name and called up the profile. The pic was definitely of her, standing in the woods, wearing an Aussie bush hat instead of her trademarked baseball cap.

  “That’s you, yeah?” I said.

  “Uh-huh, but I did not set up this profile. That picture’s on the Cape Fear Wilderness Trail website, from when I did volunteer work last summer. Anyone could’ve grabbed it off the site.”

  I agreed. The profile was little more than her name and her school. Only three friends, all of them dickheads from the academy that Paige wouldn’t in a million years want to be associated with.

  “One of those assholes must’ve set this up,” I said, but I wasn’t so sure.

  There was a stream of posts, dozens of them, stretching back for an hour (but none earlier). Paige Davis had supposedly written a full menu of emo clichés about feeling dead inside and just wanting to end it all, nobody understands me, my sex life is private, gay pride forever, etc. Generic filler that seemed lifted straight from song lyrics or It Gets Better campaign slogans.

  None of it was anything that Paige would ever say in any universe.

  Every few posts, one of her three “friends” would jump in with a callous just do it or I dare you or come over to my house and I’ll make you feel better. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised to see someone write: take the leap.

  “They’re not even trying,” Paige said with a snort.

  “This doesn’t bother you?”

  “Anyone with half a brain could tell this is fake,” she said. “No offense. And, again, thank you for caring enough to check on me, but as you can see, I’m fine. People depend on me, and I don’t forget that.”

  “I can’t believe you aren’t furious that somebody’s aping you. I’d be—” I shut up because I was making Paige’s point exactly. It was just as I suspected. She wasn’t the sort to get so desperate, and certainly not anyone you’d believe was a suicide risk, especially because of her brother.

  “Just a bunch of pampered junior ku klux sheet-heads,” she said, clicking to refresh her false friends list.

  But another profile appeared. One more person had accepted a friend request she didn’t actually make, a guy named Rob Davis. For a second, the name didn’t register with me, that is until I saw Paige bite down hard on one of her knuckles.

  “How did they…” she asked.

  Rob Davis was Paige’s brother. I’d seen his Facebook account before, actually, after it became a spontaneous memorial site, with hundreds of goodbyes and fond memories, heartfelt and clunky alike. I assumed the account had been taken down after a while, so I didn’t expect to see it again like this.

  Plus, the profile pic was different—used to be Rob’s kindergarten graduation pic but now it was just a .gif of a prescription pill bottle, a heartless joke about his
suicide method. Whoever created Paige’s profile had also hacked into Rob’s dormant account.

  “Paige, the person who did this is a serious asshole,” I said, not knowing whether I should touch her, if she’d want that kind of comfort. “They all are. You really don’t have to be ashamed about who you are. Your love life is your own business and there’s nothing wrong with—”

  She nodded half-heartedly and leaned her head against my chest. I wished our first hug could’ve been for better reasons than this.

  “I don’t understand,” she muttered.

  “We’ll find out who did this. They should be arrested at least…”

  Her breath warmed the hollow of my neck. “Thank you for coming over here,” she said. Her voice was raw, completely stripped of its usual tough protective shell. It made me want to tell her the entire ridiculous truth.

  But before I could, she sat upright and steadied my head between her hands and pressed a forceful kiss on my lips. A long, deep inhale through her nose, like she was breathing me in. My eyes went wide and my mouth wouldn’t quite shut from the surprise.

  This was how Paige Davis dealt with her pain? Even when she broke away, I didn’t have time to say a thing, because one last post had just blurted onto Paige’s fake wall. It said:

  That’s it. It’s done. All I have to do now is bleed.

  Her supposed final post.

  The culprit had to be the same sicko who’d been taunting me with mysterious phone calls and garbled email messages, who had the power to make the whole local grid go haywire with malfunctions. The same person, period. Someone targeting both of us, maybe even luring us together into one room. Here, now.

  Paige put her fingers to her open mouth. Suddenly, that kiss was probably the last thing on her mind. And suddenly the fake profile wasn’t a lame prank anymore. Because now I understood how it could possibly be that a brave heart like Paige Davis would wind up dead.