Time Travel for Love and Profit

by Sarah Lariviere

  “What?”

  “You know. Nothing.”

  “You want to be sure my house is normal. And that my mother isn’t drugging me, or that we’re not like—”

  “In a cult. Which would be fascinating, but I might think about extricating you. Which is okay, because then I’d get to be a hero. And like—”

  “Or maybe you’d join the cult,” I said.

  “Ah,” said Jazz. “Far more interesting option.”

  It’s never winter in Redwood Cove. At least, not the type of winter that involves snowball fights or ice-skating on lakes or townsfolk selling roasted chestnuts from wooden carts. Does that actually happen anywhere, ever? I need to travel through space instead of time someday. But then I’d be a tourist.

  Shiver.

  What I’m saying is that the coast is always blooming; it never quite falls asleep. So in February, when it wakes up officially, it feels almost too alive, like a blooming monster. Muddy paths try to swallow your shoes, bees buzz past you like fighter jets, twining vines devour walls and fences, and the whole town starts to smell sickly-sweet, like perfume mixed with boba tea.

  On the second Saturday in February, Airika and I were wading through the surf, dragging our boards back to the beach.

  I know: Me? Surfing? On the coast, it isn’t so shocking. Every kid in Redwood Cove winds up in surf camp at least once. And I love swimming in the ocean, home of dolphins and crabs. So while Airika rode waves like an Olympic athlete who had a marketing deal with orange juice, I flailed in the shallow water contemplating the way jellyfish ripple—gleefully, it seems to me, albeit with a sinister lack of a face—while attempting not to feel self-conscious in a wetsuit that showed every curve of my body that my hoodie usually masked.

  We dropped our boards in the warm sand and sat on our towels. Airika pulled two protein bars out of her sack and handed me one. “Protein bars taste like chewy chalk,” I said. “They have no right to be so addictive.”

  Airika said, “Right?” And inhaled hers in ten seconds flat. Seagulls were encroaching upon us, looking inquisitive. I shooed them. “I refuse to make you addicts. Find fish.”

  Airika downed half her water bottle and grabbed her board. She said, “I’m going back out.”

  “Hang loose,” I said. “Those waves are macking!”

  Airika scrunched her nose to indicate that I was massacring her language.

  As I watched her run back into the water, I was glad that Airika showed me what real friendship could be. That you could like somebody without being exactly like them. That girl made up for ten years of friendlessness.

  And if everything went according to plan, I would repay her at the end of the summer by abandoning her on the shore of the river of Lies.

  I’d looked them up, the rivers of the Greek underworld. There were five of them. Styx, the river of Hate, which separates the living and the dead, is the one where I’d imagined Clyde Watkins chatting up Charon, the grisly ferryman—and where I couldn’t let myself imagine Serrafin being. There was also Acheron, the river of Pain; Phlegethon, the river of Fire; Cocytus, the river of Wailing; and the fifth river was Lethe, the river of Forgetting. Once you drank its waters, you couldn’t remember your life on earth.

  When I read about Lethe, I theorized that I’d discovered another river, one that made you forget someone else’s life and the parts of your life that had that person in it. An icy river whose waters shocked your system, making you shudder and freeze.

  I named my discovery Lanthano, which, if the internet is to be believed, is Greek for something that is hidden or has escaped notice. Like the truth.

  Lanthano was the river of Lies.

  I was an ambassador from the underworld, leading the people I loved to drink from the river of a very specific sort of forgetting. One that varied from person to person, depending on how much they needed to hold on to me, how hard they were willing to fight to keep their memories from washing away.

  Which meant that my battle with Death was more like a betrayal. According to my theory, I’d been working for Death the whole time.

  Yeah. My life had become a wee bit complicated.

  * * *

  —

  That night, I was lying under my star quilt, too awake to fall asleep. Jazz had left an hour earlier, and my bedroom, which we had taken to calling “the Lab,” looked like a junk shop hit by a tornado. On every surface, books were flagged with neon sticky notes. Math, poetry, Jazz’s comic books, oversized collections of impossible-looking art. Knotted ropes hung like macramé plant holders from nails in the walls, which were plastered with an ever-expanding collection of quasar pictures. We’d collected rocks, ferns and tree branches to help Jazz visualize fractals, and we were experimenting with the effects of time on living creatures like yeast and plants. So on my desk, a goopy sourdough culture was burbling, belching breath that smelled like sweaty socks, and on my windowsill, radish seeds sprouted.

  And between Wylie Buford’s soupy-mess-of-creativity approach and Jazz’s knack for making connections between absolutely everything, I’d found the knots I’d been tying in the quantum foam whenever I used my timeship. They looked like this:

  Two linked teardrops with a halo and a twining tower, a mini-universe with a core of infinite energy, forever looping back on itself. Each knot reminded me of a magical beanstalk arching into a rainbow and sinking below the horizon into the ocean floor and rising again, a path that never stopped and never started, a place where you could live endlessly, following the path of your own symmetrical maze.

  The problem now was that even in four or five dimensions, I couldn’t figure out how to untie them.

  And I couldn’t imagine how to pull the universe through the quantum wormhole behind my belly button without tying some sort of knot.

  Jazz said we’d figure it out before my end-of-summer deadline, “No prob!” And I believed him. He wasn’t a math guy, but he’d cannonballed into the deep end of all the stuff I’d been thinking about. He came over practically every day.

  Do I even need to say that J. J. Shipreck was my biggest crush of all time?

  It was a savage beast of a crush with razor-sharp teeth, and it never stopped drooling. It was basically a bulldog I kept locked away in…Gosh. I didn’t like the idea of keeping a bulldog locked away. Is that what I was doing?

  What I’m saying is, I definitely couldn’t think about. You know.

  Kissing Jazz.

  I mean, at night, before I fell asleep, of course. Thirsty for Thrills had nothing on the situations I invented that would have required Jeremiah to extricate me with declarations of his love and the type of kiss where both people melt into a puddle on the floor.

  What was even more disturbing was that I got the feeling Jazz wanted to kiss me. Like he was waiting for me to give him the signal and I was actively blocking the signals I was dying to send. How did I know he wanted to kiss me? I don’t know. It was that thing. The unnameable thing that’s between people.

  Plus, we sort of pretended we were going to get married. As in, he’d say, “When we get married, let’s move to Iceland.” And I’d say, “And give our kids Icelandic names.” And then we’d take a half-hour break to discover the best Icelandic names according to online articles such as “Trending Icelandic Names for Your Super-Stylish Baby.” We picked Borgar and Voney.

  I’m not sure why we did that. We knew I was going to leave. I guess it was fun to imagine what might happen if I didn’t. And since I was leaving, there was nothing to lose by planning our future together.

  Except everything.

  I mean…

  Of course I was fantasizing about staying with him. Giving up on time travel and acting like a normal girl who had just met someone amazing.

  But that would have required being a normal girl. Pretending that I hadn’t led my parents to drink from th
e river of Lies, and that going back in time wasn’t the only way I could heal them. Pretending that I wasn’t obsessed with the questions about time travel that had been visiting me for the past ten years and the answers that showed up occasionally. Pretending that I hadn’t promised Serrafin I wouldn’t give up. Pretending that I wasn’t convinced that time travel could save the ocean I’ve been splashing in and listening to and walking beside forever, and that I didn’t believe that answering the time-travel question once and for all was my rightful fate as a girl who was born loving math.

  Math wasn’t everything to me; I’d learned that when Serrafin died. And I’d recently realized I’d been working for the underworld unknowingly, so I was all too familiar with how tricky Death’s battle tactics could be. The universe didn’t play by my rules or by anyone’s. So far, there was no scientific Theory of Everything, no overarching explanation for how the place worked. Scientists knew a lot, but at the heart of it all, there was still a mysterious gap. If I’d vaguely known that when I’d started this project, I knew it clearly now. The odds were against me succeeding. They always had been.

  Still—could I abandon my experiment prematurely just because I’d finally met a boy? Could I give up my last chance to un-hurt my parents?

  No. I had to finish what I’d started. And with Jazz’s help, I felt like I was sneaking up on a solution. Or it was sneaking up on me.

  Sometimes you want two things, and they’re located in opposite directions. My stuck life was finally budging, and I wanted to go both ways. But in the middle of that contradiction, I felt like I was becoming the rock-star scientist I’d always wanted to be.

  I mean, I guess I didn’t feel like a rock star. Look up “sexy” in the dictionary. What’s there a picture of? A rock star.

  But yeah. No.

  See? I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  Jazz and I could not kiss. If we kissed, I wouldn’t want to leave when it was time to go.

  So we would stay friends, and I would leave in August, and Jazz would forget me. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t forget him. I’d have to live knowing what I’d lost.

  These thoughts are brought to you by Nephele Weather’s nightly pre-falling-asleep argument with herself, during which she reviews all the reasons she cannot kiss Jazz Shipreck and then proceeds to have an excruciatingly detailed fantasy about him until she falls asleep.

  This not-falling-in-love stuff was exhausting.

  * * *

  —

  Sunday morning, I was sitting on my front porch, folding origami. Once I untangled the quantum foam, I’d need to fold time in a new way so that when I shot through the wormhole I wouldn’t tie time in a new knot. The shapes I was coming up with weren’t precisely what I needed, but origami was helping me visualize a variety of folds. I made a tricorne, which is a three-dimensional triangular object; a few cats, because I was feeling masochistic; and a sixteen-pointed star, which I threw as I yelled, “I HATE FOLDS!”

  The star glided into a rosemary bush. That was way too graceful. I needed to catapult something with more mass. I pulled off my sneakers and chucked them. One thunked on the sidewalk, then the other. I was semi-satisfied.

  When our front door opened, it creaked like it was asking a question. I felt Dad’s hands squeezing my shoulders. “Happy Valentine’s Day, Fi. You and Mom are the loves of my life.”

  I made a gagging noise.

  “It’s like that?” said Dad.

  I had an urge to ball up my socks and throw them into the street, too. Instead, I leaned back on my elbows and said, “Cupid is corny. Why would anyone trust a dude who flies around in a diaper with a deadly weapon?”

  Dad’s new budding mustache-and-beard combo made my cheek feel zingy when he kissed it. “So cynical,” he said. “May I collect your sneaks?” He sauntered down the red steps, snatched my shoes and dangled them beside his bald head.

  I inhaled a whiff of flowery shampoo and looked behind me. Mom was leaning in the doorway with her big turquoise eyes and her long silver curls, blowing Dad a kiss.

  I snapped. “Just because I have this great example of a happy marriage doesn’t mean I need to have a boyfriend.”

  Mom looked down at me. “Okay.”

  “So much PRESSURE!” I said as I stomped inside.

  * * *

  —

  Sunday afternoon there was a knock at the door, and I opened it.

  Jeremiah was standing in a patch of sunlight. Did he know it was Valentine’s Day?

  I couldn’t look in his eyes, which I’d decided were not purple, but indigo, like a brilliant stripe in a rainbow projected by a prism. Beside one of his wingtips, a beetle with a bronze shell was crawling on the peeling red paint of the porch floor. The bug glinted like a jewel in a box. Did the bug know it was Valentine’s Day?

  I wished I was a bug. A brief life inside a pretty shell until someone stomped you or swallowed you in its beak. No romance. No decisions of great consequence.

  Well, that wasn’t true; bugs made consequential decisions constantly—bugs made the world go round. They digested organic matter and pooped it out, turning dead things back into soil.

  Anyway, who was I kidding? I’d be the most stressed-out beetle ever. Trying to go back to last week, when I was a larva…

  Jazz cleared his throat.

  I accidentally looked at him. He bit his lip and raised his eyebrow.

  He knew. We both knew. MUST BREAK BOY TENSION. I said the first thing that popped into my head. “Where do you shop?”

  He smoothed his suit jacket. “You wouldn’t believe the thrift stores in Vegas. Northern California has too much fleece.”

  Thank Methuselah. We’d dodged another one of the psychotic flying diaper dude’s poison arrows. In my romance novels, the heroine never successfully dodges the arrows, so I must’ve been doing something right. And I mean, I wasn’t getting kissed—so yeah. I was basically brilliant.

  “Is my hoodie made of fleece?” I asked, feeling it.

  Jazz shook his head. “Cotton.”

  “Phew,” I said. “Well, seeing as how we’re both dressed for work, I suppose we might as well get started.”

  * * *

  —

  As we went upstairs to the Lab, Jazz admired my brand-new phone in its shiny pink case. It had been a gift from Dad for helping him build the Big Blue Wave an online store over the holiday break. “How often do you upgrade?” he asked.

  “Every couple of years,” I said. “I just have to make sure I don’t go back in time with a version that hasn’t been released yet. I’ve been dying to mess around with the hologram feature.”

  “You have some ridiculous problems,” he said.

  I flicked his arm and he ran up the last couple of steps and into my bedroom, laughing his easy laugh. Then he went directly to my desk, pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket, left it with my phone, came back and sat beside me on my bed.

  “So I’ve been thinking about math and music. I was talking to your dad at the bookshop the other day, and it blew my mind. I didn’t know music had anything to do with math.”

  While Jazz went on about intervals, rhythm and time signatures, I put on a record by the vibraphone player Lionel Hampton. Dad had set up the extra record player on my dresser when I was a baby. Apparently I was a major screamer, but certain music soothed me. The song was fast, light and cheerful, with a zigzagging melody. “I wonder how difficult it would be to describe this album mathematically,” I said.

  “Is that possible?” asked Jazz.

  “Sure,” I said. “To a point.” The concert was recorded live, so in the background, people were clapping and yelling, “Yeah!” I wondered if any calculation could explain why a particular person yells spontaneously during a musical performance. Or how that yelling impacts the musicians’ decisions about how to play the next n
otes. Louder? Softer? Faster? Slower? And how do musicians influence each other? What if the drummer insults the bass player and the lead singer kisses the guitarist before the show? How does that change the songs? Maybe that’s why music kept me quiet as a baby. I could almost find the patterns, but not quite.

  “Anyway, it’s pretty,” said Jazz.

  It was pretty, that music at that moment, with the wind blowing my white curtains and the boy with the black curls sitting on my bed.

  On Valentine’s Day.

  I leaned against my dresser. I would not be going back to sit beside him.

  “Math is like witchcraft,” said Jazz. “The formulas and symbols are like spells. The Pope and the Mafia and the CIA are gonna be all up in Dirk Angus, trying to hijack its power for their own purposes.”

  I crossed my arms. “I guess so. Erasing people’s memories has already made me feel like a spy creeping around in their lives. And that was an accident.”

  “Time travel could make it easier for people to do bad things intentionally. Of course, it’s not exactly hard now,” he said. “All you need is an angry dude and a gun.”

  “And time travel will let us go back and take his gun before he uses it,” I said. “So ultimately, time travel will make the world a better place.”

  When Jazz leaned back on his elbows, I ignored the thought, He’s lying on your bed. Then he put his head on my pillow, bent one knee and crossed his leg. He was looking at my ceiling and wagging his foot, which was inside one of his dancing shoes. He was wearing his shoes on my bed, and I couldn’t ask him to take them off because then I’d be asking him to take off his clothes while he was on my bed, and I could not. Dodging Cupid’s arrows required supreme diligence. I picked up the album cover and was concentrating on the black-and-white photograph of the band, contemplating taking up the vibraphone, which would be an excellent distraction from watching a handsome boy wag his foot, when Jazz said, “I don’t think it’s possible to change the world.”