Mrs. Saint Johnabelle was the one who had told me that we should pay attention to our questions. The time-travel question had chosen me. And for a decade, the answer had been so close. I could see it peeking at me through every window. Hiding between the sentences in every book. Lurking in the misty background of every picture frame.
I cared about this question. No matter how miserable I got, I still believed I could find the answer. Serrafin believed it, too. I’d promised her I wouldn’t give up, and I’d meant it. I needed to finish the work I’d started almost as much as I needed to fix Mom and Dad.
But I didn’t have forever to do it. I couldn’t handle forever.
Forever was just too much.
I followed Mom into the kitchen and sat at the green table. Mom opened the refrigerator and pulled out a couple of beets. This is it, isn’t it, I thought. My final battle with the universe. Dirk Angus 10.0 would be my last attempt to go back in time. If I failed again, I’d have to break my promise to Serrafin. Give up, grow up, and live with the consequences of my time-travel disaster.
Our cuckoo clock resembled a gingerbread house minus the snow. Below the pointy roof was a shuttered window that the cuckoo bird never popped out of anymore. The hands were stuck at 9:21. Dancing gnomes with bulging eyes and hot red cheeks were lifting beer steins, frozen in the dance they used to do when I was little and the bird sang. They reminded me too much of my frozen parents.
So I’d ticked time off, had I? So to speak. Okay, lame joke. Couldn’t resist. I’m saying—time had made me mad, too.
The universe thought it could do whatever it wanted with me. That it could bat me around like some cat tormenting a rodent that’s not quite dead.
The universe didn’t know me very well.
If I only had one more shot—to save my parents, save the planet, and once and for all make my aggressive weirdness worth something—I was gonna make that sucker count.
It’s time for the sun to rise. It’s time for the moon to glow. It’s time to be born, time to crawl, time to cry; it’s time to get old, to get sick, time to die. Time has an agenda and it doesn’t share it with us.
But I had an agenda, too. I was scratching green paint off the kitchen table with my fingernail, eager to get to work on Dirk Angus 10.0, miserable that I had to do it without my lab partner and her sour-cream-and-onion chips. The woman who had become, whether she knew it or not, my only real friend. Green paint flakes fluttered to the floor.
A plate of scrambled tofu landed in front of me, quivering like a pile of guts. Dad sat across from me and sliced a piece of cantaloupe. Mom was wrapped in her bathrobe, pouring coffee.
I pushed away my tofu. “You guys, I’m staying home from school.”
Dad looked up. “You’re sick?”
I said, “I’m mourning.”
Dad looked at Mom.
My parents had known Serrafin for a decade. There had been open houses. Science fairs. Teacher conferences, email exchanges. And I talked about her. Frequently. My parents were staring at each other like they were trying to remember where they’d put the car keys. Finally, Dad said, “That teacher of yours must’ve been the bee’s knees. Wish I’d met her. You didn’t know her long, but death brings things into focus, doesn’t it? If you let it.”
I was so frustrated. A big chip of green paint lifted off the top of the table and took a layer of wood along with it.
“Hey! Please don’t ruin the table,” said Mom.
“I’m sorry!” I snapped. “It’s just, you guys seriously don’t remember her?”
“Should we?” Mom’s eyes turned hazy, like someone from a storybook who drinks a steaming potion, goes walking in the woods, meets a talking bear and never comes back. And then she froze. Dad, too, was immobile.
In the twenty lost minutes (it was twenty now), I ate my tofu, washed and dried the dishes, went to the bathroom, brushed my teeth and retook my seat. Then my parents thawed, and Dad refilled his coffee. “You’re down, Fi. I feel you. But you can’t stay home.”
“So I’ll go to the bookshop with you.” That was an even better idea. I needed a meeting with Chicago.
Mom’s eyes softened. “You can’t, honey.”
Dad nodded. “You’ll push through.”
I slammed my fist on the table. “Push through what? The new science teacher is…” I searched for the right words to describe the goateed man with the googly eyes. “He’s a box of stale crackers!”
“Let’s get through the visitation,” said Mom. “After that, if it’s still troubling you, we promise to hear you out about your new teacher.”
Mrs. Saint Johnabelle’s visitation would be the next night in a funeral home half an hour down the coast. I was extremely relieved I hadn’t missed it.
* * *
—
If at breakfast I’d been mad that my parents weren’t as sad as they should’ve been about Mrs. Saint Johnabelle’s death, by third period I was infuriated—but not at my parents. My peers had known Serrafin for a week, and most of them were giggling and gossiping and acting like nothing had happened. Being in her classroom without her felt awful, and Mr. Replacement was eyeballing me nonstop. His tone of voice was so bland I could barely tune in long enough to decipher his words.
Airika sat next to me again. “Fi,” she whispered, “how are you? I was worried when you ran out yesterday.”
I didn’t know if Airika was a glutton for punishment, some kind of masochist or possibly an angel or a nun, but I made this face, I didn’t even know what the face was, it was just a real face that I’m sure showed how I really felt, for people who could read faces, not that I was thinking about it that way at all, I just felt myself unable to prevent my actual face from happening, and Airika said, “Listen. This is sad.”
I said, “Right?”
She nodded.
At lunch, I was staring at my burrito when I heard a husky voice. “We woulda learned a ton from her.” It was Airika’s friend Rex, the kid with the bandana. Which, that day, was black. I’d never looked closely at Rex. His eyes were striated, like polished amber. When his fist dropped on my shoulder it felt like a boulder. He said, “Stay strong.”
As I watched him walk away, I realized that Airika must’ve told Rex I was sad, and now they were both being nice to me. Why? That’s when I noticed a crowd gathering around a table near the pizza line. Jeremiah Jackson Shipreck was doing a magic trick.
So. Rude.
After lunch, I passed him in the hallway. “Why not dance on her grave?” I asked.
Jazz stopped walking. “What did I do?”
I stared at him. He was wearing rainbow suspenders.
He looked at the deck of cards in his hand and shook his head. “Because—? And yesterday, you—when they said she—so you must—oh. Oh, man. I wasn’t even thinking about it. A moment of silence, right?” Jazz bit his lip.
I wanted to slap my own face. I’d detonated again. I’d gone off like a feelings grenade when I’d explicitly promised myself I would not do that anymore. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have said that. You’re fine.”
Jazz looked at my hand. Which was touching his arm. Why was I touching him?! I pulled my hand away and started babbling. “I’m just—weird about stuff. Sometimes. So they tell me.”
Jazz slipped his thumbs behind his rainbow suspenders. “I get that from you.”
I wasn’t sure where to look, exactly. What direction was this conversation going?
Jazz looked at the ceiling, just like he had the day before, when he’d gotten on a roll about Peter Pan.
Piper, I mean.
Incidentally, I was addicted to the Peter Piper game. Pudgy piggies plucking petals from petunias. Portly peddlers porking in the park. What? Did I just think that?
Jazz caught my eye. “Look at your smile.”
I said, “What?”
Did he just say something about my smile?
“Allow me to ask your forgiveness, Nephele Weather,” said Jazz. “For my boorish and insensitive behavior.”
“Forgiven,” I said, feeling tilty, like the floor was tilting. “But I’m the insensitive boor. Very sorry. Honestly.”
“Forgiven, Your Boorishness,” he said. Then he bowed.
I resisted the urge to bow back and tried not to wonder where he shops. What percentage of that qualified as banter? My brain was full, and the line of topics waiting to get in looped all the way around the galaxy. Must process boy interaction another time.
* * *
—
After school, I slipped into the front seat of the car, buckled the screwy seat belt and slammed the door.
“How are you feeling, sugar bun?” asked Mom.
“Slightly better,” I said.
“Yeah?” she said, sounding hopeful.
I did feel better, in a way. It helped knowing that a few people cared that I was sad, even if I’d given them no reason to. Airika especially. That girl was a battering ram of niceness.
And I felt energized about finally getting to work on Dirk Angus 10.0. All day I’d heard Death challenging me, purring, Your only option is to give in to me. Everybody does, eventually, like some know-it-all cat—and it was true, in a way. The word “deadline” did contain the word “dead.” But the universe and I both knew something. Time was a joke, and I was writing the punch line. Death was nothing more than a math problem, baby. A math problem I was born to solve.
I pulled down the sun visor to check myself in the mirror and see if I was starting to resemble a sci-fi heroine. Because I was thinking up some really good lines.
“Drop me off at the bookshop, please,” I said.
“Not today, hon,” said Mom. “You and I have a date with the mall.”
“The mall?! Why?” I asked.
“You need a black dress for tomorrow.”
I shuddered. It had been years since I’d been to the mall.
Death, I was ready to battle. The mall, I felt far less sure about.
* * *
—
Mom shuffled me into a department store where a woman wearing a bow tie bombed us with squirts of spicy perfume while her twin sister offered us free eyebrow-drawing lessons at the makeup counter. “Do you see these eyebrows?” said Mom, pointing at our especially bushy examples as she dragged me past the women and onto the escalator, where we descended into the next circle of Hades. I kind of hoped we’d be greeted by a drooling Cerberus, the three-headed hellhound who guarded the underworld in Greek mythology. Today I could definitely out-bark him.
Mom snagged a few black dresses and isolated me in a dressing room to deal with them.
The dressing room was trapezoidal, with blank walls and a poofy cylindrical stool. I considered sitting on that stool and opening the geometry book that was in my backpack, but Mom was waiting right outside the door. I could see her clogs.
So I did it.
I tried on dresses.
At first, they were all the same to me. Complicated to fasten, and not warm enough. Going around with bare legs and shoulders in chilly Northern California isn’t a thing.
Then I tried a lacy one that reached my ankles. Huh, I thought. Not revolting. I opened the door. “Huh,” said Mom. “That’s decent.”
Not revolting plus decent equaled good enough for me, so I was done. When I mentioned that I was planning to wear my hoodie over it so I wouldn’t be cold, Mom dug through racks of limp fabric until she found a beaded black sweater. It glittered like stars from a distant galaxy, one of the micro-galaxies in the quantum foam I’d seen or melted into or popped out of every year when I had traveled through the swirling wormhole in time. “I’ll take it,” I said.
On our way out, Mom decided we needed shoes. I was about to throw myself on the waxy floor and pound my fists like a toddler having a meltdown (a move I’d seen and admired in the parking lot) when I spotted them out of the corner of my eye: a pair of black combat boots. They had fat laces, and the soles were so thick they could’ve crushed a coconut with a single stomp. They looked exactly like the ones Wylie Buford’s friend had been wearing back when he was a junior all those years ago, when I’d seen them together by the redwood stump.
Mom checked the price and hesitated.
“Never mind,” I said.
She twisted her silver curls into a topknot. “Nope. No neverminding. I never get to go clothes shopping with my daughter. We’re doing it, Fi. The boots are very you.”
I smiled.
* * *
—
The next day I wore my all-black outfit to school. The visitation wasn’t until after dinner, but I was proving a point.
In third period, Mr. Zuluti was scrawled sloppily on Serrafin’s chalkboard.
When the bell rang, Jazz ran in late as usual. He dropped multiple writing implements on the floor and they rolled everywhere. “Sorrysorrysorry,” he said, gathering them and sliding into the empty seat at my lab table.
Goatee man took attendance. When he got to me, he said, “Nuffeel Weather?”
“NEPHELE. Neh-fuh-lee.”
“Sorry: Nephele.”
“It’s pronounced like it’s spelled. Exactly.”
“I’ve never been much on spelling.”
I mumbled, “Or handwriting.”
He leaned forward. “What’s that?”
I said, “Carry on.”
Someone said, “That girl is so effing weird.”
I looked over my shoulder. Who said that? I felt surprised. I mean, I knew I’d abandoned my force field, but so far, people had been normal with me—if not irrationally nice. I felt hot. And tipsy. Like I’d drunk too much green tea. I unbuttoned my cardigan.
Jazz whispered, “You are totally dominating in that dress, Fi.”
I was wearing black. The traditional color of mourning. He wasn’t making the connection.
“Gothic science chick,” said Jazz. “Stupendous.” Then he looked at the ceiling.
I almost told him not to call me a “chick,” but instead, I looked up too. What exactly did he see up there? God? Electricity? Spiders?
When I tuned back in, Mr. Replacement was telling some rambling story about Japan. Then he tapped chalk on the board and I jumped.
“Icebreaker time,” he said. “This activity touches on the wonder of our existence. It’s intended to give you a taste of the way I’d like us to approach complicated topics in our classroom. There are no right answers.”
Rex raised his fist in the air. “That’s what I’m talking about.”
Jazz mirrored him with a fist. “Right on, Mr. Z.”
I tapped my boot. Icebreakers should be outlawed. Ice was an essential component of the ecosystem. No ice, no polar bears!
Mr. Replacement wrote on the chalkboard as someone passed out blank pieces of paper. “For this activity, you’ll learn something new about your lab partner. You might record your partner’s responses instead of your own. Or turn your answers into a comic strip. Hence the drawing paper. All in all, I’d like a big, messy class conversation on these topics. Make sense?”
“Kinda,” said Airika. “We just talk and draw pictures?”
“This is a free-form activity,” said goatee man. “Find your own way. We’ll work until a few minutes before lunch, and then I hope someone will volunteer to share their experience of this journey.”
Share their experience of this journey? Oh, Serrafin, I thought. At least you aren’t here to watch science devolve into group therapy. I read the instructions on the chalkboard.
The Splendid Majesty of Our Cosmic Home
1. Where are you from? (Think big!)
2. What is the most distant place
to which you have traveled? (Real or imaginary!)
3. What is the most distant place to which you would like to travel? (Real or imaginary!)
4. Do aliens exist?
I didn’t bother to raise my hand. “Dude, these questions are all over the place. This will be impossible to grade.”
I did that. I called him dude.
He laughed. “Confusion is part of the exercise, Nephele. Sometimes great thinking begins in a soupy mess of creativity.”
I muttered, “A soupy mess. You got that right,” and picked up a pen. The icebreaker was ludicrous, but I was constitutionally incapable of not completing my work to the best of my ability. Serrafin may have been absent for the moment, but that was no reason to start letting her down.
Jazz tapped my worksheet with his pen. “Let’s both draw stuff, then trade. And we’ll analyze what each other drew, Freudian style.”
“What style?”
“Freudian. Sigmund Freud was the founder of modern psychoanalysis.”
“Why do you know that?”
“Because I’m fascinating, Nephele. Ready, set, go!”
Jazz scribbled on his worksheet.
Drawing was not my thing. My mother was the crafty one.
But I did it. Because he asked me to.
I drew.
After a few minutes, we traded. Jazz’s page was overflowing with cartoons. All his answers seemed to be melted into one. “What is this?” I asked.
“Las Vegas.” As Jazz pointed out lights, fountains, hotels and palm trees, they took form. On an oval-shaped sign were the words WHERE ARE YOU FROM?
“Are those fish?” I asked.
“Yup. I sank Las Vegas into the ocean. Because, you know, that’s what should happen. Except, huh. It would ruin the ocean. Also, that’s where I’m from from.”
“The ocean?” I said. “As in, evolution?”
Time Travel for Love and Profit Page 12