When the last day of summer finally arrived, I was sitting on my star quilt, holding my phone and wearing my backpack, which contained Oona Gold’s useless, aggravating book, Time Travel for Love & Profit, to which I was now inexplicably, sentimentally attached. As I waited for Mom and Dad to fall asleep, the wind blew through my window and the foghorns sang their mournful song.
When I opened Dirk Angus 3.0, I felt a very specific type of relief. Like when you’re hiking a trail in the redwoods and you take a wrong turn right off the bat, and go super out of your way, and run out of drinking water, and hours pass, and your thoughts stop making sense, and you’re on your way to being a meal for a mountain lion or a pack of coyotes or a dinner party that includes multiple species of wild carnivores, then you fall on your hands and knees and crawl around the corner and realize, Wait a minute, this is it! The trailhead! Somehow you made it back to where you started. However, if you want to reach your destination, the view you came all that way to see, you still have to do the whole hike.
That was okay. Time was one thing I had plenty of, apparently.
No offense to Oona Gold, but if I ever write a self-help book, I’ll be sure to mention that fulfilling your rightful fate requires a high tolerance for colossal face-plants and can cause significant collateral damage.
Anyway, this was it. My moment of truth. You know that part in the science fiction book when the heroine says, “I was born to complete this mission. I’ve come too far to turn back,” and you’re like, Um, you’re kind of a chaos machine, maybe you should actually turn back, and there’s a description of the heroine’s eyes, and they’re all zingy and devastating because she sees a future only she can see? And she finally gets kissed by the international man of mystery who believed her all along? In my story, this is that part.
I would never become a sassy, spunky social media queen who could take a flattering selfie. I knew that now. But I could certainly fulfill my rightful fate as a mathematician. At this point, if I wasn’t a brilliant scientist, what was I?
I’ll tell you what.
Nothing.
As for getting kissed by that international man of mystery—someone who was cute, but not in a cutesy way; funny, but not in a jokey way; someone who appreciated situations that were highly abnormal—I’d concluded that that outcome was impossible. As a scientist, I accepted this. When your whole world is falling down around you, you absolutely must stay realistic.
The redwood trees kept growing. In their canopies, mosses spread creepily and hairy rodents scampered and millipedes scuttled with their minuscule feet. Clouds of insects swarmed and ferns unfurled and berries ripened and dangled from thorny shoots and fell a hundred meters, spinning down, down, down, where they splatted and rotted and stank while the trees kept stretching to the heavens, and they, and the life in their canopies, and the sky and sun and moon they were reaching for, all looked down on me and laughed, because nature is insufferable and the universe is obnoxious.
I was slumping down the sandy hill toward the highway, listening to the bloated foghorns call each other in their groan-y language. A squadron of pelicans sailed past me looking prehistoric, like pterodactyls. The cypress branches that had fallen in last night’s storm were already dripping with seagull poop, and the wind that never stopped wouldn’t leave my hair alone. Nature was mocking me, and I was lost in its chaos, patterns too complex to understand. The universe was punishing me for trying to decode it. Its never-ending-ness was scratching out my eyes.
I crossed Highway 1 and trudged down the stupid path covered in stupid wildflowers toward the stupid, stupid high school, kicking every twisty blue eucalyptus leaf, trying to forget my parents’ wrinkled faces as they wished me luck that morning, trying to forget that abominable green kitchen table.
I could hear the ocean just beyond the highway. The ocean, my fellow semi-immortal.
It was my tenth first day of freshman year.
But who was counting?
As I approached the school, I thought of one of Dad’s Eagles albums, this creepy lyric in the song “Hotel California”: You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. Redwood Cove High School was my personal Hotel California. I was tied up in a tangled nightmare of time.
How did I not anticipate this outcome? How had I been so overconfident? If this was how child prodigies thought, no wonder people called us abnormal. Clearly, I wasn’t. It’s not like my best friend was a black-and-white photograph or anything.
I was a failure as a scientist, and my life made less sense than Star Trek. It was definitely more boring. By now, I should’ve at least concocted a body double out of discarded laptops, a pouty mannequin with gravity-defying boobs and a joystick, to go in and do freshman year for me.
As I cut through the crowd, my peers’ eyes iced over like a sped-up time lapse of hundreds of freezing lakes. Every memory they had of me was getting sucked down their inner-space whirlpools, stretching and spiraling and disappearing into nothing. The new batch of freshmen didn’t have brain holes because we were strangers. It was up to me to ignore them before they discovered my aggressive weirdness and fled. It was a new feature I’d developed over the past few years, the opposite of New Nephele. I called it my force field. It was impenetrable.
In a decade of time-travel failure, I’d nailed one thing, anyway. I’d gotten surviving freshman year down to an art.
* * *
—
I plopped into a seat at the lab table directly across from Serrafin’s desk. Kids shouted over each other about which reality television character was the hottest. Television. What would it be like to care about that? It sounded fun. Fun. What would it be like to have that? I couldn’t remember. Even math sucked now. Math sucked…almost. Not quite. Just…math was still…okay, fine. I still loved math.
But it was on warning.
By the chalkboard, three girls wearing animal-print leggings were doing a dance step in sync with a hologram projected from someone’s smartphone. My phone didn’t have that feature; I needed a new one, probably. I needed a new one every year, practically. Even technology was growing up without me. Other kids did other things; the commotion blended into static. I just sat, silently swirling with aggressive weirdness. My force field was in full effect.
Then Serrafin strode into the room, wearing her pink suit and her royal-blue orthopedic shoes. For a decade, we’d been eating lunch together every single day, sharing her sour-cream-and-onion potato chips, chatting about her grandchildren, looking at pictures of her wearing pointy ears and a giant grin at Star Trek conventions, and working out the kinks in my “thought experiment” as Dirk Angus gave birth to disaster after disaster and my life spiraled into insanity. Whenever I felt like giving up, Serrafin had given me hope. She’d made me feel like I wasn’t deluded for being obsessed with the time-travel question. Like maybe, just maybe, the answer was still out there, waiting for me to find it. Just because I was the only one who ever remembered those conversations didn’t mean they didn’t happen.
Or did it?
I couldn’t think about that particular question right now.
Serrafin said, “Good morning, class,” and doubled over in a coughing fit.
I jumped up. “Are you okay?”
“Thank you,” she said in a gravelly voice. “I’m fine. Please take your—” She started hacking again. It sounded like a wicked troll was camping inside her lungs. “Pardon me. Please take your seat. My name is Mrs. Saint Johnabelle.” She looked at me. “Young lady, let us continue our introductions with you.”
When I looked into my teacher’s eyes, I felt like I was being swallowed by a cosmic death worm. I mumbled, “Nephele Weather,” and looked away.
“Lovely to meet you, Nephele,” she said. “Now—”
“Sorry I’m late!” A boy with a booming voice ran into the room. He was wearing a tuxedo jacket over a r
oyal-blue soccer shirt that said ITALY in huge letters. “Just buzzed in from Los Alamos….” The late kid stumbled backward. His backpack snagged on the door. His jeans were torn clear across both knees.
“Los Alamos,” said Serrafin, looking at one of her papers. “And you are…?”
The late kid unsnagged his bag. “Sorry! I meant Las Vegas. Man, am I tweaked to be here. And also nervous.” His black curls fell into his eyes. He swung his head to get them out, which worked for half a second, and then they fell again. Although there was only one of this kid, it felt like there were at least three.
“Your name?” asked Serrafin.
“J. J. Shipreck.”
“Fine, J.J. Please find a seat—”
“Actually, it’s Jeremiah Jackson.”
“Fine. Jeremiah, please take a seat—”
“Call me Jazz. I can’t believe I said Los Alamos. Los Alamos is a laboratory in the desert where they design nuclear weapons,” said…What was this boy calling himself? “Definitely not that desert. Different desert.”
While the late kid bubbled with random factoids, he re-tied his shoes, which were made of light blue velvet, or possibly suede.
“We’re off to an odd beginning,” said Serrafin as she guided the late kid to the empty seat at my lab table.
When I looked at him, he winked.
I cranked up the levels on my force field. It was going to be another long year.
* * *
—
As I walked into the Big Blue Wave, a fat black alley cat leapt out from California History, arched its back and hissed at me. I made claw hands and hissed back so hard I saw spit fly. The cat darted past me and ran out onto Main Street.
Dad was standing behind the counter scratching the same snow-white neckbeard he’d had yesterday. A style that has never looked good on anyone, I thought. Then I thought, Bleh. That was supposed to be a joke, to improve my mood. But thinking rude things about my parents, even true rude things, just made me feel more evil. At least he was spinning death metal. Death metal singers sound like they’re barfing hot eels. The way my life was going, that was a skill I wanted to acquire.
“Fi!” called Dad. “How’s high school?”
I didn’t have the energy to lie. “High school is sheer, unadulterated hell. Hell, I tell you.”
Dad said, “Your honesty always gives me a boost.”
I wanted to curl up in my father’s arms and bawl. Instead, I heard even more truth slipping out despite myself. “My life is a cautionary tale about a girl who bakes a magic pie and then she eats it and her face falls off.”
“It’s like that?” said Dad, in a sweet voice. “What’s wrong with your life, Fi?”
I didn’t know what to tell him, so I just leaned on the counter and watched him scratching his neck, which made me want to scratch mine. That beard could not be comfortable.
“Maybe take a break from thinking so hard,” said Dad. “Watch stupid cat videos online.”
Stupid cat videos? Every aspect of that suggestion disturbed me. But I said, “Thanks, Dad. I really, really love you.”
He said, “Aw, kiddo,” and came around the counter and wrapped me in a hug. His band T-shirt smelled like coffee and Dadness. I never wanted to leave that exact spot. “I love you too, freshman,” he said. “And hey. Don’t stress it. High school only gets better from here.”
I looked in his eyes, which were blacker than black, like the eyes of your favorite teddy bear, and I felt incredibly sad. My father didn’t know me anymore. He didn’t know me at all.
And I hadn’t even checked his brain holes yet. I couldn’t bear to know how much bigger and more ravenous they’d become.
I let Dad go and clomped upstairs, trying not to weep. Chicago wouldn’t tell me I was thinking too hard. Quite the opposite. You never could catch a break with a fellow semi-immortal.
And I didn’t need a break. I needed someone to yell at me for being an epic failure and tell me how to save myself and my poor parents from the mess I’d made instead of expanding it exponentially every single stupid time I tried.
* * *
—
“Look who’s back,” said Chicago.
“Back and forth,” I said, “just like you.”
“If you don’t fix that meathead Dirk Angus soon, your parents’ brains will become two useless blobs of cellular mush. What does Oona Gold say about how to handle it when your botched time-travel experiment annihilates the only people on earth who love you?”
I sighed. I hadn’t opened Time Travel for Love & Profit in years. I should’ve shelved that book in Fiction when I had the chance.
“You have no plan,” said Chicago. “No past, no future, no nothing. What a disaster.”
My best friend was really relishing her inner bluntness today. As I made myself a cup of tea, I thought about how much I used to love Chicago’s bluntness. I used to think that with the combination of Chicago’s brutal honesty, my love of math and my systematic application of the scientific method à la Serrafin, Dirk Angus would reveal the secrets of the universe.
Of course, Dirk Angus had revealed a secret. A secret I’d been slow to accept. In a decade of time-travel research, I’d gotten on a first-name basis with the universe’s dark side. I’d learned that it won’t hesitate to throw a wrench right at your head.
I inhaled the steam from my tea. It smelled like the wet forest. I decided to wander.
“What’s the plan?” asked Chicago as I walked away.
I said, “Read romance novels until I fall asleep.”
“Sounds productive,” she said.
“It isn’t supposed to be productive,” I said. “It’s supposed to prevent me from feeding myself to the sharks. They’ll be migrating soon, you know. The great whites, the leopard sharks, the Pacific angelsh—”
“You’re changing the subject, Fi,” said Chicago, and I knew this. I’d decided to wait until tomorrow’s lunch with Serrafin to start working on Dirk Angus 10.0. As usual, I couldn’t fathom why my timeship app had failed. And I couldn’t think about it yet. My brain felt like it had been run through a meat grinder. Any information I force-fed it today would only ooze out in a useless trickle, like nap drool.
I was curled up in the beanbag in Poetry, reading a book called Dirty Limericks for Every Occasion (“There once was a young lass called Myrtle / Whose fields were especially fertile / She had taters galore / And parsnips to store / And her melons spilled out of her girdle!”), when I heard a thud and looked up.
A boy was gathering the stack of books he’d dropped on the floor. It was the late kid from my homeroom.
I reinforced my force field, took a sip of tea and kept reading.
“Hey!” he said, and I looked up again. He pointed at me. “You go to my school, right? I’m Jazz.”
I said, “I know who you are.”
The late kid pushed his dark curls out of his eyes and raised one of his eyebrows. That’s when I noticed that his eyes were violet-blue and luminous, like watercolor soaking into bright white paper or a rare photoluminescent fish.
He asked, “What’s your name?”
It felt strange to still be looking at him, but his purple eyes were locked onto mine, and it was impossible to look away. It was highly aggravating. I closed my eyes to break the lock and said, “Nephele.”
“Nephele? Huh,” he said. “Like the Greek goddess.”
“She’s not a goddess,” I said. “She’s a cloud nymph.”
Okay: I had just said the words “cloud nymph” to a boy in reference to myself. Now I was forced to imagine the late kid imagining me as an alluring, supernatural maiden who flew around seducing roaming humans, which was preposterous, because no one would ever imagine me that way. Although with eyes like that, the late kid could definitely get into trouble with some semi-immortals.
Not semi-immortals like me, of course. You never see humans getting hypnotized by gap-toothed nymphs in hoodies tweaking apps on their smartphones. Or reading books of dirty limericks, for that matter.
The late kid pointed at me again and wagged his finger. “That’s what it is.”
It’s impossible to feel normal in a beanbag. “That’s what what is?” I asked as I tried to adjust myself so I wouldn’t be talking to this boy from between my knees.
“You look like someone,” he said. “A cloud nymph.”
Somehow I sank deeper into the stuffed sack. “Sure,” I said. “I resemble that scampy sprite you used to know who wore a crown made of marigolds and had crystal charms dangling from her bare ankles.” It was imperative that I extract myself from the blob of beans. Worst. Chair. Ever.
“Can I help you?” asked the late kid.
Finally I popped out, splashing hot tea on my pants in the process. I said, “Boogers.”
As I headed downstairs, I heard the late kid call, “See you, cloud nymph….”
I felt highly annoyed. Leaving the bookshop was not my afternoon plan. I was supposed to fall asleep dreaming about heroes with glorious dreadlocks and kisses like candy until the shop closed and Dad woke me up. Now what was I supposed to do? Go home and obsess about my epic failure? Interrogate my zombie mother about my birth certificate for the ten millionth time? Why was it that every time I made a plan, that plan developed a mind of its own and ran off, wild and free, to do whatever the hell it wanted?
And who had purple eyes?
Purple eyes.
Purple.
The next morning, Mom was leaning beside the antique mirror in the vestibule by our front door, her silver waves washing over her shoulders, her turquoise eyes boring into me with their usual combination of love and epic worrying, as I attempted to zip my overstuffed backpack. For my tenth second day of freshman year, I was bringing as many books as I could carry to discuss with Serrafin at lunch. The astrophysics textbook that reminded her of late evenings studying in graduate school with her true love, her husband, Alvin, who was her “intellectual equal—almost”; the artificial intelligence books that had helped us teach Dirk Angus 9.0 how to make increasingly sophisticated choices; and a ton of other stuff, too. I didn’t know where we’d begin our work this year, but maybe something would inspire us.
Time Travel for Love and Profit Page 9