by Nicola Yoon
I nod slowly, certain I agree with what he’s saying now, but equally certain that I’m going to disagree with whatever’s next.
“I think that’s nonsense. We’re not snowflakes. We’re just outputs for a set of inputs.”
I stop nodding. “Like a formula?”
“Exactly like a formula.” He props himself up to his elbows and looks at me. “I think there are one or two inputs that matter the most. Figure those out and you’ve figured out the person. You can predict anything about them.”
“Really? What am I going to say now?”
He winks at me. “You think I’m a brute, a heretic, a—”
“A crackpot,” I complete for him. “You don’t really believe we’re math equations?”
“I might.” He lies back down.
“But how do you know which input to change?” I ask.
He sighs a long, suffering sigh. “Yeah, that’s the problem. Even if you could figure out which one to change, then how much should you change it? And what if you can’t change it precisely enough? Then you couldn’t predict the new output. You could make things worse.”
He sits up again. “Imagine, though, if you could just change the right inputs; you could fix things before they went wrong.” He says this last part quietly, but with the frustration of someone who’s been trying to solve the same unsolvable problem for a long time now. Our eyes meet and he looks embarrassed, like he’s revealed more than he meant to.
He lies back down and throws a forearm across his eyes. “The problem is chaos theory. There are too many inputs to the formula and even the small ones matter more than you think. And you can never measure them precisely enough. But! If you could, you could write a formula to predict the weather, the future, people.”
“But chaos theory says you can’t?”
“Yup.”
“You needed a whole branch of mathematics to tell you that people are unpredictable?”
“Had that figured out, did you?”
“Books, Olly! I learned it from books.”
He laughs, rolls onto his side, and laughs some more. He’s infectious and I’m laughing, too, my whole body responding to him. I watch for the dimple that I’m no longer supposed to be paying attention to. I want to put my finger into it and keep him smiling forever.
Maybe we can’t predict everything, but we can predict some things. For example, I am certainly going to fall in love with Olly.
It’s almost certainly going to be a disaster.
MADELINE’S DICTIONARY
ob•ses•sion (əbˈseSHən) n. pl. -s. 1. acute (and completely justifiable) interest in something (or someone) acutely interesting. [2015, Whittier]
SECRETS
MY CONSTANT IMING with Olly is catching up with me. I fall asleep during not one but two movie nights with my mom. She begins worrying that something’s wrong, that my immune system is compromised somehow. I tell her it’s simpler than that. I’m just not getting enough sleep. I guess I understand why, given our situation, her doctor’s brain would go immediately to the worst-case scenario. She tells me what I already know, that lack of sleep is not good for someone with my condition. I promise to be better. That night I only IM with him until 2 A.M. instead of our usual 3 A.M.
It feels strange not to talk to my mom about something, someone, who’s becoming so important to me. My mom and I are drifting apart, but not because we’re spending less time together. And not because Olly’s replacing her. We’re drifting apart because for the first time in my life, I have a secret to keep.
THANK YOU FOR SHOPPING
NUMEROLOGY
NUMBER OF:
minutes it took Olly’s dad to begin yelling after he arrived home last night:
8
complaints about the goddamn roast beef being overcooked again:
4
times Olly’s mom apologized:
6
times Olly’s dad called Kara a goddamn freak for wearing black nail polish:
2
minutes it takes Olly’s mom to remove Kara’s nail polish:
3
times Olly’s dad mentioned that he knows someone has been drinking his goddamn whiskey:
5
that he’s the smartest guy in the house:
2
that no one should forget that he makes all the money:
2
pun-filled jokes it takes to get Olly feeling marginally better when he IMs at 3 AM:
5
times he writes “it doesn’t matter” during our IM conversation:
7
hours of sleep I got last night:
0
cigarettes Kara buried in the garden this morning:
4
visible bruises on Olly’s mom:
0
invisible bruises:
Uncertain
hours until I see Olly again:
0.5
OLLY SAYS
HE’S NOT ON the wall when I see him again the next day. Instead he’s in what I’ve begun to think of as his resting position: bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet with his hands tucked into his pockets.
“Hi,” I say from the door, waiting for my stomach to complete its crazy Olly dance.
“Hey yourself.” His voice is low and a little rough, sleep deprived.
“Thanks for chatting last night,” he says, eyes tracking me all the way to the couch.
“Anytime.” My own voice is husky and low as well. He looks paler than usual today and his shoulders are slumped forward a little, but still he’s moving.
“Sometimes I wish I could just disappear and leave them,” he confesses, ashamed.
I want to say something, not just something, but the perfect thing to comfort him, to make him forget his family for a few minutes, but I can’t think of it. This is why people touch. Sometimes words are just not enough.
Our eyes meet and, since I can’t hug him, I wrap my arms around my own waist, holding on tight.
His eyes drift across my face as if he’s trying to remember something. “Why do I feel like I’ve always known you?” he asks.
I don’t know but I feel it, too. He stops moving, having come to whatever decision he needed to.
He says your world can change in a single moment.
He says no one is innocent, except maybe you, Madeline Whittier.
He says that his dad wasn’t always this way.
CHAOS THEORY
TEN-YEAR-OLD OLLY AND his dad are at the breakfast bar in their old penthouse apartment in New York City. It’s Christmastime, so maybe it’s snowing outside, or maybe it just stopped snowing. This is a memory, so the details are a bit uncertain.
His dad has made fresh hot chocolate. He’s a connoisseur and prides himself on making it from scratch. He melts actual bars of baking chocolate and uses whole “one hundred percent of the fat” milk. He takes Olly’s favorite mug, pours in a layer of chocolate and adds six ounces of hot milk heated to almost boiling on the stove—never in the microwave. Olly stirs the milk and chocolate together while his dad gets the whipped cream, also freshly made, from the fridge. The cream is just lightly sweetened, the kind of sweet that makes you want more. He spoons one dollop, maybe two into Olly’s mug.
Olly raises his cup and blows on the already melting whipped cream. It slides across the surface like a miniature iceberg. He eyes his dad over the top of the mug, trying to gauge what kind of mood he’s in.
Lately the moods have been bad, worse than normal.
“Newton was wrong,” his dad says now. “The universe is not deterministic.”
Olly kicks his legs. He loves when his dad talks to him like this, “mano a mano,” like he’s a grown-up, even though he doesn’t always understand what he’s saying. They’d been having more of these conversations since his dad’s suspension from work.
“What does that mean?” Olly asks.
His dad always waits for Olly to ask before explaining anything.
“I
t means one thing doesn’t always lead to another,” he says, and takes a slurp of hot chocolate. Somehow his dad never blows on the hot liquid first. He just dives right in. “It means you can do every goddamn thing right, and your life can still turn to shit.”
Olly holds his sip of hot chocolate in his mouth and stares at his mug.
A few weeks ago Olly’s mom had explained that his dad was going to be home for a while until things were fixed at his work. She wouldn’t say what was wrong, but Olly had overheard words like “fraud” and “investigation.” He wasn’t quite sure what any of it meant, only that his dad seemed to love Olly and Kara and his mom a little less than he did before. And the less he seemed to love them, the more they tried to become more lovable.
The phone rings and his dad strides over to it.
Olly swallows his mouthful of hot chocolate and listens.
At first his dad uses his work voice, the one that’s angry and relaxed at the same time. Eventually, though, his voice just turns to angry. “You’re firing me? You just said those assholes were clearing me.”
Olly finds himself getting angry, too, on behalf of his dad. He puts his mug down and slips off his stool.
His dad paces the length of the room. His face is a storm.
“I don’t care about the goddamn money. Don’t do this, Phil. If you fire me everyone’s going to think—”
He stops moving and holds the phone away from his ear. He doesn’t say anything for a long minute.
Olly stops moving, too, hoping that whatever Phil says next will fix everything.
“Jesus. You guys can’t do this to me. No one’s going to touch me after this.”
Olly wants to go to his dad and tell him everything is going to be OK, but he can’t. He’s too afraid. He slips out of the room, taking his hot chocolate with him.
The first time Olly’s dad gets afternoon drunk—violent drunk, yelling-at-the-top-of-his-lungs drunk, doesn’t-remember-what-happened-the-next-day drunk—doesn’t happen until a few months later. He’d been home all day, arguing with financial news shows on television. One of the anchors mentioned the name of his old company, and he raged. He poured whiskey into a tall glass and then added vodka and gin. He mixed them together with a long spoon until the mixture was no longer the pale amber color of the whiskey and looked like water instead.
Olly watched the color fade in the glass and remembered the day his dad got fired and how he’d been too afraid to comfort him. What if he had—would things be different now? What if?
He remembered how his dad had said that one thing doesn’t always lead to another.
He remembered sitting at the breakfast bar and stirring the milk and chocolate together. How the chocolate turned white, and the milk turned brown, and how sometimes you can’t unmix things no matter how much you might want to.
A TALE OF TWO MADDYS
“YOUR MOTHER WANTS to know if I’ve noticed anything different about you lately,” says Carla from across the living room.
I’m watching the first Mission: Impossible movie with Tom Cruise. He plays a superspy, Ethan Hunt, who leads a double, sometimes triple, and sometimes quadruple life. It’s toward the end and Ethan has just unmasked himself, literally, to catch the bad guys.
Carla repeats herself, louder this time.
“And have you?” I ask as Ethan is pulling off his incredibly realistic mask to reveal his true face. I tilt my head to one side for a better perspective.
Carla grabs the remote from my hand and hits pause. She tosses the remote into the corner of the couch.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, feeling guilty for ignoring her.
“It’s you. And that boy.”
“What do you mean?”
She sighs and sits. “I knew it was a mistake letting you two see each other.”
She has my full attention now. “What did my mom say?”
“Did you cancel a movie night with her?”
I knew I shouldn’t have done it. She looked so hurt and disappointed, but I didn’t want to wait until after nine to IM with Olly. I can’t get enough of talking to him. I’m overflowing with words. I’ll never come to the end of all the things I want to say to him.
“And she says you’re distracted all the time. And you ordered a lot of clothes. And shoes. And she almost beat you at some game that you always win.”
Oh.
“Does she suspect?”
“That’s all you’re worrying about? Listen to what I’m telling you. Your mother is missing you. She’s lonely without you. You should’ve seen her face when she was asking me.”
“I just—”
“No,” she says, holding a hand up. “You can’t see him anymore.” She picks up the discarded remote and clutches it in her hands, looking anywhere but at me.
Panic sends my heart racing. “Carla, please. Please don’t take him away from me.”
“He’s not yours!”
“I know—”
“No, you don’t know. He’s not yours. Maybe he has time for you right now, but he’s going to go back to school soon. He’s going to meet some girl, and he’s going to be her Olly. You understand me?”
I know she’s just trying to protect me, just as I was trying to protect myself a few short weeks ago, but her words make me aware that the heart in my chest is a muscle like any other. It can hurt.
“I understand,” I say quietly.
“Spend some time with your mother. Boys come and go, but mothers are forever.”
I’m sure she’s said these very same words to her Rosa.
“All right.” She hands me back the remote. Together we watch the unmoving screen.
She pushes down on the tops of her knees with both hands and rises.
“Did you mean it?” I ask her when she’s halfway across the room.
“Mean what?”
“You said that love couldn’t kill me.”
“Yes, but it might kill your mother.” She manages a small smile.
I hold my breath, waiting.
“OK, fine. You can still see him, but you have to get some sense into you. You understand?”
I nod my agreement and turn the television off. Ethan Hunt vanishes.
I spend the rest of the day in the sunroom away from Carla. I’m not angry at Carla, but I’m not not angry either. All my doubts about keeping Olly a secret from my mom have vanished. I can’t believe that one canceled date with her almost led to my not being able to see Olly again. Before, I was worried about keeping secrets from her. Now, I’m worried about not being able to have any secrets at all. I know she’s not upset that I bought new clothes. She’s upset that I didn’t ask her opinion and bought them in colors that she didn’t expect. She’s upset with the change she didn’t see coming. I resent and understand it at the same time. She’s had to control so many things to keep me safe in my bubble.
And she’s not wrong. I have been distracted when I’m with her, my mind constantly tuning into Radio Olly. I know she’s not wrong. But still I resent it. Isn’t growing apart a part of growing up? Don’t I get to have even this bit of normalcy?
Even so, I feel guilty. She’s devoted her entire life to me. Who am I to throw that away at the first sign of love?
Carla eventually finds me for our 4 P.M. checkup.
“Is there such a thing as sudden onset schizophrenia?” I ask.
“Why? You have it?”
“Maybe.”
“Am I talking to good Maddy or bad Maddy right now?”
“Unclear.”
She pats my hand. “Be good to your mama. You’re all she has.”
FREEDOM CARD
UPSIDE DOWN
NORMAL PEOPLE PACE when they’re nervous. Olly stalks.
“Olly! It’s just a handstand. Against a wall. I’ll be fine.” It’s taken me an hour to convince him to show me how to do one.
“You don’t have enough wrist or upper body strength,” he grumbles.
“You used that one already. Besides, I�
��m strong,” I say, and flex a single bicep. “I can bench-press my weight in books.”
He smiles a little at that, then mercifully stops stalking. He flicks his rubber band as his eyes scan my body, mentally critiquing my lack of physical fortitude.
I roll my eyes as dramatically as possible.
“Fine,” he sighs, with equal drama. “Squat.” He demonstrates.
“I know what a—”
“Concentrate.”
I squat down.
From across the room he checks my form and instructs me to make adjustments—hands twelve inches apart, arms straight with elbows pressed against my knees, fingertips splayed—until I’m just right.
“Now,” he says, “shift your weight forward just slightly until your toes come off the ground.”
I shift too far and roll head over heels onto my back.
“Huh,” he says, and then presses his lips together. He’s trying not to laugh, but the telltale dimple gives it away. I get back in position.
“More shift, less tilt,” he says.
“I thought I was shifting.”
“Not so much. OK, now. Watch me.” He crouches down. “Hands twelve inches apart, elbows against your knees, fingertips splayed. Then slowly, slowly shift your weight forward onto your shoulders—get those toes off the ground—and then just push yourself up.” He pushes up into the handstand with his usual effortless grace. Again I’m struck by how peaceful he is in motion. This is like meditation for him. His body is his escape from the world, whereas I’m trapped in mine.
“Do you want to see it again?” he asks, flowing back to his feet.
“Nope.” Overeager, I push forward into my shoulder as instructed, but nothing happens. Nothing happens for about an hour. My lower half remains firmly anchored to the ground while my upper arms burn from the effort. I manage several more unintentional somersaults. By the end all I’ve gotten good at is not yelping as I roll over.