“How would joint rulership work?” I asked. “They’d vote on stuff? Or do rock-paper-scissors?”
“Nephele Ann, there will be a question-and-answer period following the story.” Jazz put his hands in the pockets of his suit jacket. “For years, the pink bicycle stayed tied to this tree with the knot. Until one day, a brave knight rolled into town on the Greyhound bus. He was unafraid of bold fashion choices, and the townsfolk were often overheard whispering that he was the most mind-numbingly handsome bastard they’d ever seen.”
“Gratuitous…”
“The smoking hot new guy in town declared he’d be the one to untie the knot. But he soon found that this knot had no ends to untie. So the drool-worthy, eleven-on-a-scale-of-ten knight did this.”
Jazz pulled a pocketknife out of his jacket and handed it to me.
“That evening, the gods hurled lightning bolts at each other for fun, and their happy flatulence was great rolls of thunder. The knight had solved the mystery of the Gordian knot, and suggested a solution to the queen.”
I unfolded the knife and refolded it. “I’m lost. Are you saying you’re my ruler now? Or a god? I feel like you kind of took over the story….”
I looked up. Jazz had taken a step closer to me. “What I’m saying, Nephele, is that you don’t need to untie the knots you’ve tied in time. Just cut them. You’re the math queen—that’s why I gave you the knife. Is there some kind of mathematical thing you can do that’s the equivalent of cutting the knots?”
With Jazz so close—his warmth, the scar above his eye—I could barely answer the question. And I was trembling.
But he was right.
He was right. I’d been so consumed with untying the knots in the fourth and fifth dimensions that I hadn’t considered that there might be another way of dealing with them. But there was another way.
“Yes,” I said, letting myself swim a little in his eyes. “There is some kind of math for that.”
When Jazz kissed me, I felt warm. And cold. Like I was dissolving and reconstituting.
I hoped I was doing it right. It felt like we were doing it right.
Jazz leaned back, smiling. “Wow. That was my first kiss!”
I smiled. Jeremiah did not hide his feelings. All of him was right exactly there.
He pointed at me and kept talking. “Okay: Rex claims you can have really bad kisses. And, like, kisses with nothing in them, like you’re smashing your face on the back of your hand. But that was—I’m gonna say that was a good kiss. Right, Fi?”
I could not stop smiling. I thought I might never stop smiling. I said, “It was a good kiss.”
“Have you ever…? Was that…?”
I shook my head. “First one.”
“Rad,” said Jazz, shaking his head and looking, as he always did, at the sky. He pointed at me again. “Up for a second one?”
I didn’t hesitate to say yes.
That night, I evaluated my reflection in the mirror. My eyes were different. Less like a nocturnal animal, more like smoldering streetlights. My lips were more luscious, more plump. And although I had not combed my hair, it appeared to be deliberately disheveled rather than neglected. For the first time in forever, I felt older.
But somehow, Jazz felt even older than me. He seemed indestructible, like a bomb shelter.
As I fell asleep, I didn’t fantasize about kissing anyone. I just closed my eyes and slept. I slept so deeply I didn’t even dream. Not about math, not about anything. That hadn’t happened in a very long time.
* * *
—
The next couple of months were all about kissing. Long kisses, short kisses, kisses on the head, kisses on the backs of each other’s hands. I loved how it felt to walk up Main Street with Jeremiah’s arm around me. I felt like a hermit crab who had finally found a shell that fit.
I hadn’t mentioned my idea about going back in time together. I was afraid he’d say no. I was afraid he’d say yes. That asking the question would spoil the perfect bubble we were in, with all the kissing.
But I was pretty sure Jazz was thinking about it, too. Every time I asked to visit his cousin Eva the super-surfer and her toddler son, Mo, Jazz would say “Sure,” then find some excuse for why he couldn’t bring me to the beach shack where they lived. It made me sad. He didn’t need to be embarrassed of his own family, no matter how sketchy they were. Leaving the present together was the perfect solution. I’d bring it up once we had a functioning timeship.
Meanwhile, back in the Lab, I managed to develop a mathematical formula that would show Dirk Angus how to cut the knots in the quantum foam. As I worked, I felt embarrassed I hadn’t noticed the knots years ago. They seemed so glaring now. Fat and lumpy. Breakthroughs are great, don’t get me wrong; but admitting that there were epic flaws in your original idea is hella painful. I’ve decided that science is like a sausage factory. Major discoveries are delicious, but you don’t want to know what’s in there.
Now the question was, what kind of fold would prevent me from tying a knot the next time I dragged the universe with me through the quantum wormhole? How could a snake swallow its own tail without choking?
To answer the question, Jazz and I had been spending our free time in the Lab making origami. Origami can be very complex. You can fold something, unfold it, refold it to access a different surface, turn the piece, invert the fold, and on and on until you can hardly believe that the three-dimensional thing you’ve created was ever a flat paper square.
Folding the quantum foam inside a wormhole is similar, except you have more dimensions to work with. Imagine clay on a pottery wheel. While the wheel spins, your hands guide the wet clay as it morphs continuously into new forms. Now imagine the clay isn’t clay, but the froth on a root beer. And you can smoosh it and twist it as the bubbles fizz and pop. I was hoping that by going through some basic folding motions, my fingers would have a revelation and give the good news to my brain. A bonus feature was that origami kept our hands busy. Fact: If you kiss someone enough, you develop extremely chapped lips.
One Saturday afternoon near the end of the school year, I was sitting on my floor, folding tiny animals, and Jazz was lying on my bed, folding flowers and tossing them to me. I made a cute frog that could jump when you pressed its tail.
“You can give this to Mo,” I said, handing it to Jazz. “Or I can.”
Jazz sat up and nodded at the frog.
“I can’t wait to meet Mo,” I said. “I bet he looks like you.”
Jazz said nothing. After a few seconds of awkward silence, I went to my desk and flipped open my laptop. I knew I shouldn’t take it personally that he never wanted to talk about his family. It just made me feel frustrated, sometimes. He knew he could trust me, didn’t he?
I was searching online for more origami patterns when Jazz said, “Come over tonight, Fi. Eva’s making spaghetti.”
I looked over my shoulder. “Really?”
Jazz was sitting on the edge of my bed with his elbows on his knees, scrubbing his curls with both hands. “Yeah. It’s fine. I guess. Unless you don’t want to.”
“No! Yes! I do! Great,” I said.
Jazz stopped moving, like something had caught his eye. He knelt on the floor, reached under my bed and pulled out the book with the glossy cream cover and the purple lettering, Time Travel for Love & Profit.
“I was wondering what happened to that,” I said.
“What is it?” asked Jazz.
I explained how Oona Gold had inspired my timeship and her theory about finding your rightful fate. Jazz flipped through the book, reading passages aloud. “Time travel is a secret gift that lives within us all. The power to renovate your past is potent. Use your inner wisdom to tap into the future you and become the person you know you truly are. I like this Oona.”
“I do too,” I said, feeling for th
e first time in a long time like it was true. Oona Gold had been more right than wrong, actually. Hadn’t I gone back in time, in a sense, and found a new way of thinking about my ending with Vera? It was time travel through inner space.
“So how are her videos?” asked Jazz.
“Oona’s videos? The ones you can watch online for, like, fifty bucks a month?” I said. “I’ve never watched them.”
“Are you kidding me?” said Jazz, leaping up, grabbing the extra chair and sliding it next to mine. “We’re doing this, Fi. Now. Do you have a credit card?”
“Of course not.”
“Shoot. Well, search for her. You’ve done that, right?”
“No.”
Jazz looked at me like I had just jumped out of a helicopter wearing a pineapple costume. He turned my laptop toward himself and searched. “Ack,” he said. “Dead.”
I looked at the screen. It was a website, very spare, very basic. In the center was a photograph of a woman half hidden by an emerald-green scarf. Her visible eye popped against an elaborate paisley of charcoal eye shadow. Behind her was a backdrop of gold wallpaper. Below her photo was a single paragraph:
Our mother, Oona, was a seer. She cared about self-transformation. Her self-published book, Time Travel for Love & Profit, sold nearly one hundred copies. We hope that our mother’s creativity and optimism can continue to help her readers discover their true desires.
This was Oona. This was the woman who inspired me to change my life. I had to smile. It was nice to see her face. Or her eye, anyway.
“Oona sounds really sweet,” said Jazz. “What’s the profit part about?”
“You mean, in the title of the book?” I asked.
“Yeah,” said Jazz.
“Getting rich,” I said. “But her advice is pretty much the same no matter what you want.”
“But for you, time travel was all about love,” he said.
“It was more about being liked, I think,” I said. “Love was an incidental finding. Like the discovery of the microwave. Or the invention of penicillin.”
“And like penicillin, love just saved your life,” said Jazz.
“Sort of,” I said. “Thankfully, genuine time travel will save a lot more lives than one love story.”
Jazz leaned back and looked at me. “You think so?” he asked.
“Um, yeah,” I said. “Unless you like the idea of our illustrious species obliterating the ocean and mauling the microcosmos and making the entire planet uninhabitable. When you think about it that way, one love story doesn’t even count.”
Jazz was silent, fidgeting with his earlobe.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing,” he said. “Anyway.” He stood. “I better go.”
“Okay. Do you need to tell your cousin we’re coming?”
“Oh—I mean no, no. Not tonight, Fi. I just remembered. I have…homework.”
I squinted at him. “Homework.”
Jazz walked over to the wall where my knotted bone necklace was hanging from a nail. He fingered it and scratched his ear. It looked like he wanted to ask me something.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “What did I—”
“ArrrrrrAAAAAHHHHHHHH!” he growl-yelled. He stretched his arms, shook out both legs and moved his hips like he was dancing. “I meant, yeah. I have no homework. That was a dumb lie. I need fresh air. We’ll talk tomorrow.” He spun on his heel.
I said, “Jeremiah—”
“It’s okay. I get it. Um—see you tomorrow. Partner,” he said as he slipped out the door.
* * *
—
As the sun set, my room turned orange. I was lying on my star quilt, wondering what had happened. I mean, okay. I knew he was upset about the love thing. But what did he expect me to say? Yes, love is more important than the experiment that has taken over the last ten years of my life? Love is more important than healing the earth and my parents?
I picked up one of Jazz’s origami flowers. It was a rose. A graceful shape, symmetrical and deep. The petals in their overlapping spiral made me think about the past ten years of my life. Each petal was separate but connected, like a single year repeating. For the first time, I had a vision of my life mathematically. My duplicating pattern was, in its own peculiar way, a beautiful thing, wasn’t it? I traced the ridges of the petals with my fingertips and turned the rose over to feel its smooth back.
Suddenly, I sat up.
I unfolded the rose, and refolded it. “No way,” I mumbled. “No way…”
In the plant world, a blossom is attached to a stem. A funnel that lets it drink water from the earth. But the origami rose blossom wasn’t attached to anything.
It had no hole.
To avoid tying a new knot in the quantum foam, I had to fold my ten lost years into a rose-shaped spiral, poke the wormhole in the middle and close the hole in time behind me.
This rose contained the fold. The fold that would make Dirk Angus 10.0 complete.
* * *
—
The next morning, my buzzing phone woke me up. My curtains were open and the light in my bedroom was gray and gloomy; I couldn’t tell what time it was. I grabbed my phone: Jazz. I remembered the fold and felt a jolt of energy; I couldn’t wait to tell him. Then I immediately remembered how he’d left without any warning the night before, and I felt sick. I was sure he was going to break up with me.
But he didn’t. He invited me on a bike ride to “conquer my final fear.” He didn’t mention storming out last night, and neither did I—and I didn’t mention the fold.
* * *
—
We parked our bikes in the alley behind the bookshop and sat on the curb. “Why is it that when I tell you that all cats hate me, your response is to take me on a cat date?” I asked.
“Because they don’t hate you,” said Jazz. “Cats are like people. You have to give them a chance.”
A few alley cats strutted to Jazz immediately, sniffing his hand and rubbing their heads against his legs. I watched two of them battle for a spot in his lap.
“I feel rejected,” I said. “Yet vindicated.”
“Just sit there, Fi,” said Jazz. “Just wait.”
I wanted to tell him about the fold, but I was nervous about how he’d react. Or maybe I was nervous about how I’d react if he didn’t react the way I wanted him to react. I wanted him to be happy, not disappointed. Not super happy, though. Happy with just the right amount of sad. A little sad, yet completely supportive.
And after I told him, I’d ask him the question I’d been wanting to ask all spring, the one that would make us both as happy as if we were first in line at an all-you-can-eat black bean burrito buffet.
“So, J.J.,” I said. “Guess what I found last night?”
A black cat won the battle and coiled in his lap. The other one sashayed away like it couldn’t have cared less. Jazz rubbed the black cat’s neck without looking up. “You found the fold.”
“Yes!” I said.
“Cool,” he said. The black cat was twisting, pressing its skull into his palm.
“So…yeah! All that’s left now is to write the new equations and the new code. Dirk Angus 10.0 will be ready right on time. It’ll take all summer, but we did it, Jazz. This is it.”
He nodded without looking away from the cat and said “Cool” again.
A white cat trotted up to me. I was considering snarling at it when it leapt into my lap.
“Um,” I said as the fat pile of fur adjusted itself.
“Boom!” said Jazz. “See?”
Now, that’s the level of excitement I was looking for. But not about cats.
That was fine, though; I was saving the best for last. Piano music drifted outside through the screen door, sly notes plunking in an easy rhythm. Colorful shapes spra
y-painted on one of the alley walls cut through the gray afternoon light. I took a moment to appreciate the white cat who was parked in my lap. Its cattiness. Its body, inflating and deflating. Heavy. Not squirming. Its fur was so soft.
“Thanks for the cat date, J.J. This fat, breathing lump of fur feels better than I thought it would.”
Jazz scruffed the black cat’s ears and looked at me. “Better than finding the fold?”
Well—no. But I didn’t want to kill the mood, so I said, “Maybe.”
Jazz’s mouth fell open. “Better than hanging out with your incidental finding?”
My incidental finding? I almost asked what he was talking about, but thankfully, I remembered: Love was my microwave. My penicillin. I wasn’t sure how to answer that question. I said, “I mean, finding the fold took me so long—”
“I’m not talking about the fold,” said Jazz impatiently. “Is hanging out with me better than making friends with a cat?”
“Oh,” I said. I felt like we were playing a game, but I wasn’t sure what the rules were, so I just smiled.
“Is it?” asked Jazz, sounding serious.
“Yes, Jeremiah,” I said. “You are more important to me than a cat.”
He said, “Really?”
Of course he was. I needed to change the subject. “Listen, Jeremiah,” I said, taking his hands. “I want you to come back with me.”
“Back where?” he asked.
“Back in time.”
Jazz leaned away from me like I’d startled him.
“Your parents won’t know the difference,” I said. “We could make up a hilarious cover story….”
Jazz wasn’t smiling like he’d been thinking the same thing for the past few months. He was peering at the cat like he was looking for something in its fur. “But ten years ago I was five.”
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