“Yeah, but not—I mean, you won’t become five when we go back,” I said. Unless—would he? Ten years ago I was fourteen because of the looping. Jazz was five. Eek. How had I not thought about that? “So—okay, you’d have to buy into the multiple universes thing. You’d stay fifteen, and in a parallel universe you’d be…But then, the new timeship won’t take us to a parallel universe, will it? That’s kind of the point.” I didn’t think Jazz would reverse-age when we passed through the wormhole together. But I wasn’t positive. “I mean, yes,” I said, thinking aloud. “There’d be risks….”
Jazz let go of my hands and cracked his knuckles one by one. “Possibly. Possibly the slight risk of losing my entire life. The slightest risk of oblivion.”
I poked his arm. “You know you think oblivion would be awesome.”
Jazz scooted the black cat out of his lap. My cat followed. “What do you mean by that?”
I felt off balance. Like he’d heard something I didn’t intend to say. “What do I mean by what?”
Jazz stood and looked down at me. It was a bad angle. His face was sunken beneath his cheekbones and his eyes were lost in shadows. “Eva saved me. I’m helping her build her surf shop with the ridiculous check my father mailed when she got custody of me. And Mo looks up to me. He’s like my brother now. Do you know how lucky I am? You want me to abandon them?”
“Of course not! Jeremiah, how was I supposed to know—”
“If they hadn’t taken me in, I’d be living—I don’t even know where. On the street, I guess, which yeah. I guess you can’t relate to that. I happen to like my life, Nephele Weather. I worked hard to make it not suck. Oblivion isn’t appealing to me. At all.”
“So let’s not obliviate your life! I didn’t mean—and how was I supposed to know that Eva and Mo are so great? You’ve never let me meet them!”
Jazz was buttoning his jacket. His movements were tight. Like he was trying to control something.
“Wait,” I said. “Are you leaving?”
Jazz’s voice was strained. “How could I ever let you near Eva and Mo? You’d drill holes in their brains! Forget mine. I knew what I was getting into. I had a choice. Them? They didn’t ask for this. They didn’t ask for me. And they definitely didn’t ask for you.”
I felt sick. The colors in the alley weren’t crisp and bright anymore; they were flat and empty. The record was skipping; the wind was making the screen door bang.
There was nothing wrong with Eva and Mo. There was something wrong with me.
I hadn’t even considered that meeting Jazz’s family would hurt them. I’d been leading mortals to my river in the underworld for so long, I’d forgotten how disgusting its waters were. The murky slime that coated its surface. Its terrible stench…
I held back the tears. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It was tremendously stupid to make a joke about oblivion.”
“Are you kidding? Oblivion would be awesome. Who cares whether or not I exist? In fact, let’s go back farther. Maybe I can be un-born. That would solve my parents’ problems, too.”
“Jeremiah, how can—” My voice caught in my throat like it was stuck in a trap. “How can you even say something like that?”
The cats were scuffling near the food bowl. The tears were falling now, burning my cheeks. Jazz put on his helmet, got on his bike, rode around the corner and was gone.
I wiped my eyes and nose with my hoodie sleeve. Of course Jeremiah didn’t want to go back in time with me.
I was a monster.
I heard a bike and looked up.
Jazz circled back into view, pedaling fast. He yelled, “See you tomorrow.”
“You will?” I said.
“I mean—whatever, Fi. Yeah,” he said. “All right? I’m sorry. Don’t—just—we’re whatever. Tomorrow. Okay?”
Then, again, he was gone.
Coastal weather in the spring catches tourists off guard. One minute they’re guzzling barrels of local wine at a restaurant down on the harbor, snapping selfies with sea lions. Then the fog rolls in and they’re tipsy and grouchy, buying flimsy yet expensive windbreakers as fast as the Main Street trinket shops can restock them. Then, with no warning, the same tourists are getting beamed by a sun that’s ignoring their drama as it scorches them from a clear blue sky.
Since the oblivion conversation, I’d felt like a tourist in the galaxy of Jazz. One minute he’d be his old poetry-spouting, revelation-having self; the next he’d be light-years away, exiting the Lab without explanation. He was still referring to himself as “the incidental finding,” which surprised me. And we were still kissing. But it was confusing. Did he think I was a monster, or didn’t he? It seemed like he kept changing his mind. It was exhausting.
On my tenth last day of freshman year, Rex and I walked into Mr. Zuluti’s class together. I took a seat next to Jazz, who started talking midstream. “Something is definitely missing from Dirk Angus 10.0. There are too many unanswered questions.”
“Questions like what?” I asked.
“Rex, be honest,” said Jazz. “Would you say we are men who dream we are butterflies, or butterflies dreaming we’re men?”
Rex dropped his boulder of a fist on Jazz’s shoulder. “You kids talk about the trippiest stuff.”
“Seriously, though,” said Jazz.
“Dunno,” said Rex. “Not gonna worry about it.” Rex and I fist-bumped and he went to a lab table.
Jazz was looking at me like he was waiting for an answer, and I was trying to figure out what the question was. I said, “So—butterflies?”
He kept talking. “We need to know what happened to your birth certificate and the photographs and the other missing documentation of your existence. And everyone’s memories. Until we figure that out, we can’t be sure we’ve solved the problem.”
“We can’t? I mean, I blame Lanthano.”
“That’s the river you made up?”
“The river of Lies—and I prefer the word ‘discovered.’ Greek mythology has been coming in really handy lately when I can’t explain something. It used to irritate me, being part Greek and named after a cloud nymph. Now I feel like it gives me permission to embellish.”
“Right, well, even according to your river-of-Lies theory, the photographs and stuff aren’t gone. They’re hidden,” he said. “It’s like the universe did a magic trick.”
I couldn’t tell whether Jeremiah actually thought something was missing from Dirk Angus 10.0 or if he was just trying to stall the project. Before I could figure out how to respond, Mr. Zuluti clapped. “Everybody take a seat.”
I looked around. Could it be another last day of freshman year? How sad. Sad, going through the last day without Serrafin. Sad, saying goodbye to Wylie’s classroom, which also felt like home.
After class, I gave Mr. Zuluti a hug.
“Come back and visit me anytime, Nephele,” he said.
“Count on it, Wylie,” I said. Then I looked in his eyes and saw the boy with the alien T-shirt, and thought about the photos of him as a freshman that he’d thrown away so long ago at the Big Blue Wave, and wondered if I might be able to prevent that awful thing from happening—
And I looked at my feet, at the combat boots I’d bought just to know what it might be like to be Wylie Buford’s friend—
And I felt weak. The memories of all my years of wondering about Wylie Buford were crashing down on me in a waterfall. The next time we met, what would our future be? Could it possibly be any better than the way things had just turned out?
I walked away from Mr. Zuluti feeling jittery. I tried to shake that feeling for the rest of the day.
* * *
—
After school, I spotted Airika and Rex standing by the redwood stump with Jazz, who was holding a camera with a long lens. I recognized it as the one Clyde Watkins had given him in the fa
ll. “Let’s get somebody to take a picture of us!” said Jazz. “C’mere, Fi!”
Airika pulled me into the group and Jazz snapped the selfie. He checked the picture. “Oh yeah. I look totally hot.” When he tried to show it to me, I looked toward the stump at a cluster of mushrooms. There was only one reason he’d take a photograph he knew would disappear. To provoke me. I didn’t appreciate it.
“We should go,” said Airika. “Our parents are throwing a last-day-of-school party for all their friends. Adults only, so it’s obviously about us. Stinky cheese.”
“Afternoon wine,” said Rex.
“Catch a wave this weekend, Fi?” said Airika.
“Definitely,” I said.
We waved goodbye, and Jazz and I unlocked our bikes. I put on my helmet and looked at him. He was holding his coiled bike handle, frowning. “What am I going to do about us?” he asked.
I sighed. This conversation was getting old. “I don’t know. Come over for dinner tonight. We can talk about what’s missing from Dirk Angus 10.0. Or if you don’t want to, don’t.”
“I do,” he said.
I got on my bike. “Then be like me, and try very hard not to think about the future.”
He looked at the sky. “I’m not sure I want to be like you, Nephele Weather.”
Sheesh. I felt like he’d thrown a martini in my face. Or I felt like a character who’d gotten a martini thrown in his face in one of my romance novels. In the book, the drink-throwing was followed by a half-naked make-out session in a taxicab, which was disturbing.
And I didn’t know how to interpret Jazz’s minor yet splashy insult, but I definitely didn’t want to make out with him, so I just started riding home. If he was behind me, he was behind me. If he wasn’t…
I checked.
He was.
Fine.
* * *
—
The garlicky scent of Mom’s moussaka and the sound of an opera drifted upstairs into the Lab. I was kneeling on my bed. Jazz was lying on the floor in his orange suit jacket and black jeans, stretching. I thought of a monarch butterfly, the kind that fills coastal trees during their winter migration. How slowly their wings move in the cold.
I said, “Hey, what were you talking about earlier, when you asked Rex if he was a butterfly?”
“Illusions,” said Jazz. “It’s an old philosophical question: How do we know we aren’t characters in a butterfly’s dream? I’ve also been thinking about this nineteenth-century magician—a spiritualist, they called them then—who was put on trial for tricking people. One of his tricks was to tie a knot in an endless cord without touching it.”
“What do illusions have to do with Dirk Angus?”
“I’m not sure.” Jazz put up one knee, crossed his leg over it and wagged his foot in the way that meant he was trying to make sense of something, trying to weave together ideas that wanted to clash. “What do you see, exactly, when you’re going through the wormhole? You’ve never really described it.”
“It’s not easy to describe. It’s smoky. Blurry. It feels like weightlessness. Flying, but also dissolving. Like I’m on fire and I melt and re-form.” I ran my fingers along the seams between the diamonds in my quilt. “It’s enough like a dream that I can’t tell what I might be making up.”
“Dreams and time travel sound so similar,” said Jazz. “Maybe the fabric of time is located in inner space. And inner space only.”
As difficult as it had been to be around Jazz lately, he’d never stopped having ideas. And I’d never stopped loving talking about those ideas with him. It was the thing I treasured about us the most. I remembered what Mrs. Saint Johnabelle had said once, her theory that the universe is located inside a black hole, or a wormhole. I was about to tell him when Mom called, “Dinner!”
Jazz got up. “Perfect,” he said. “I’m starving.”
* * *
—
Jazz and I were sitting with my parents at the green table. I was admiring Dad’s full-on wild-man beard. The white beard with the shaved head made him look like a hotheaded lumberjack. I was about to tell him that when Dad said, “Hey, Fi, remember when we painted this table green? Color still looks vivid after all this time.”
I almost choked on my eggplant. Jazz looked at me. We’d painted the table green during my first freshman year. Information that should’ve been lost in one of Dad’s brain holes. He had never, ever mentioned this memory before—or any of his missing memories. Why now? And had he just said after all this time?
My heart was thumping like a kettledrum announcing the start of a major event. Jazz raised his eyebrows and nodded at me in this frantic way, like I needed to ask Dad a question right now.
I wanted to be cautious, but I knew I couldn’t let this opportunity pass. I chose my words carefully. “I remember painting the table green, Dad. Do you?”
An invisible hand from Hades dumped a bucket of ice water on the fire; the light in Dad’s eyes fizzled out. “What’s that now?”
My thumping heartbeat stopped.
I looked at Jazz. He was watching my mother’s entire personality drain from her face.
What had just happened? Had my father been fighting to remember me? Fighting so hard that it had finally worked? Had Dad broken the spell of the river of Lies for a few seconds—until I doused him again, Death’s henchwoman, by opening my stupid mouth?
“Seems like it’s always been this way,” said Mom.
Dad sounded farther and farther away, like his voice was coming from a radio in another room. “Forever and always.”
I was so not ready for this. I’d tried to protect Jazz from witnessing the most disturbing aspects of the brain holes—and to protect myself from whatever his reaction would rightfully be. And I’d been successful! I’d been successful…until now.
The Weathers froze. Mom’s napkin was near her face. Dad’s finger was on his nose, mid-scratch.
Jazz was looking back and forth at my parents. “What the hell,” he said. “Oh my freaking…You did this, Fi.” He put his crumpled napkin on the table. “I gotta get out of here.”
Okay. I said, quietly, “Right.”
“Wait—no. Argh!” He rubbed his whole face with his hands. “You warned me. I keep reminding myself that you didn’t try to hide anything. It’s just…”
“I know, Jazz,” I said. “I’m a monster.”
“How long will this last?” he asked.
“Twenty minutes,” I said.
He shook his head. “Uh—” He laughed sort of hysterically, and rubbed his face again. He stood, looking at my parents. “Let’s go upstairs.”
* * *
—
I sat at my desk and opened my laptop, hoping to distract myself from what Jazz had just witnessed. Jazz went to my bed, opened my other laptop and immediately started a video.
I was poring over the websites I’d bookmarked about Lethe, the river of Forgetting, looking for examples of mortals who had fought off the river’s effects, when I found something I couldn’t believe I’d overlooked before. In some versions of the underworld, there’s another river, Mnemosyne.
Mnemosyne is the river of Memory.
I’d been so locked on the idea that I could fix my parents’ brains by going back in time that I hadn’t considered any other options. If the river of Mnemosyne was real—well, as real as anything in my life was right now—I should be able to get to it.
“Jeremiah!” I said. “You won’t believe what I just found.”
He didn’t look away from his screen.
“Jazz,” I said. No answer. I leaned over to see what he was watching that was so important.
Otters holding hands while floating in a swimming pool. This felt interruptible. I was about to just start talking when Jazz made a giant fart noise with his lips.
I said, �
�Nice. So I was researching the Greek underworld again, and—”
Jazz made another fart noise. Then it was silent, except for the sound of floating otters and cooing from the crowd that was watching them. And then? Long, juicy fart noise.
I said, “Would you mind not doing that? I’m trying to—”
Big fat fart noise.
I snapped. “Jeremiah, you’re being rude!”
He closed the laptop, stood and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Ew,” I said.
Jazz put one hand on his hip. With the other, he covered his eyes. “Yeah. I totally hate how I’m being with you. I’m not being honest with myself. And that, ah…that never works.” He let his arms fall to his sides and sighed a huge sigh, like he was putting something heavy down and didn’t plan to pick it back up. “Nephele Ann Weather, you prepared me for the worst. You did. And I told you I would help you with your timeship. It’s just, now? I’m very, very sorry. But I can’t.”
When we looked at each other, the pain in Jeremiah’s eyes made me close mine.
“I told myself that if I spent the summer with you, you’d realize you couldn’t go through with this. You’re a romantic, Fi. Your best friend is a black-and-white photograph.”
I opened my eyes. “No it isn’t. Jeremiah, my best friend is you.”
His voice was soft. “So do you want me to forget you, Nephele?”
“Of course not!” I said. “I wanted you to come back with me. But you can’t. And this isn’t about what I want anymore. It’s about un-hurting my parents. And advancing science…”
Jazz pointed at me. “Is it? Does science matter without considering the human consequences?”
What an insulting question. I didn’t feel the need to respond.
“Wow,” he said. “You would have been great working on, like, the atom bomb.”
Now I was furious.
“I’m thinking about the human consequences, and you know it. I’m thinking about my parents. I don’t know what those brain holes are doing, but you agree! It’s terrible! It’s up to me to fix them.”
Time Travel for Love and Profit Page 20