Ryan couldn’t believe they were listening to this jerk.
“Forget him!” he told her. “He’s crazy! I’m the one who designed this! I know what I’m doing!”
He hurried over to the computer, furiously punching in code. The lasers started to fire in individual quadrants as Ryan #2 started to pitch and rock, trying to drag himself to the controls and free himself.
“You don’t understand what you’re doing!” Ryan #2 shouted.
“Shut up, Fake Ryan!” Ryan shouted back.
The power started to surge, the lights overhead pulsing as Sissy pulled power from the grid.
“Uh, this doesn’t feel right.” Carter looked pale, and Ryan only had a few more seconds.
“Ryan! Stop!” Tree was getting worked up now, but Ryan ignored them both and kept typing commands into the control console.
The door flew open with a bang, and Samar and Dre appeared, mid-debate:
“But a parsec is a measure of distance, not time!” Dre said.
Samar scoffed at her. “Are you calling Han Solo a liar?”
They both suddenly became aware that they weren’t alone and froze mid–nerd fight.
When Ryan #2 turned and looked at them, Dre let out a quiet, “Whoa.”
Samar did a triple-take, then stared hard at the bottle of Yoo-hoo he was drinking.
At that precise instant, the lab door banged open again, and Ryan saw Dean Bronson storm in, flanked by a pair of burly campus security guards.
“What did I tell you about turning that thing on?” the dean bellowed.
Ryan ignored him and kept entering commands as fast as he could. All the lasers were firing now. It was just a matter of a few more seconds—and that’s exactly what he got when Bronson and his buddies realized there were two of him in the room.
“Turn it off! Now!” Bronson was trying to get to him, but now he couldn’t take his eyes off Ryan #2.
Ryan stayed right where he was, willing Sissy to power up faster.
When Bronson saw that he wasn’t budging, he yelled, “Get him!” at the campus cops, who sprang into action, climbing through the mass of electrical cables as fast as they could.
Ryan reached behind the console and grabbed a giant wrench they used to tighten connections on the machine. He started swinging it in an arc around his open flank while he continued to type commands.
Come at me, dudes. I can code with one hand tied behind my back.
Only Samar realized in the moment what he was doing at the computer, and he shouted at him, “Ryan! What are you doing?”
Ryan #2 was rocking back and forth now like he were riding a bronco, about to break the chair they’d tied him to, but Ryan was almost done. The device was reaching critical mass. The entire room hummed with an energy that made his hair stand on end while the lights flickered and surged like the Vegas strip at midnight.
“Almost there!” Ryan shouted over the dull roar, right as he saw Ryan #2 rock free with a violent lunge that finally undid the cords.
Quick as a flash, Ryan #2 turned, grabbed the chair, and charged at Sissy, apparently ready to smash the sphere into a million bits.
“No!” Ryan shouted as he saw Ryan #2 raise the chair over his head and swing it…
A boom radiating out from Sissy sent every person in the room flying backward away from it, the very air around them shimmering like it was made from interdimensional spider webs.
Ryan was lifted along with them, and in that split second, as they all hung suspended between the molecules of Earth, he saw the floating stream of Samar’s Yoo-hoo curling toward the air in a beautiful, liquid ribbon. He saw the chair, ripped from Ryan #2’s grasp, tumbling upward against gravity, away from the sphere it was meant to destroy. He saw the look of defeat on Ryan #2’s face as the shock wave leveled the room, sending all of them hurtling toward the perimeter of the lab, Dean Bronson’s jaws flapping like a dog who had stuck his head out the window on the highway.
Both security guards were thrown backward toward the door, one of the glass panels exploding from the blast, and as the roar filled his ears, Ryan saw one final thing before they were plunged into total darkness:
Tree and Carter, flying through the air, each still reaching for the other’s hands across all of space and time.
8
The only thing Tree could hear was the ringing in her ears from the explosion.
Her whole body buzzed from the energy that had pulsed through the lab, and she was afraid to move. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been out, but as she lay there, trying to determine if anything was broken, the ringing became less of a squeal in her ears and began to sound more like…
A bell.
Her eyes flew open with shock and horror, and she shot straight up in Carter’s bed.
There he was, rummaging around under his desk as her phone started ringing on his nightstand.
Yeahhh! It’s my birthday, and I ain’t gotta pick up the phone!
Carter pulled himself out from under the desk.
“Oh, hey. You’re up! I wasn’t sure if you wanted to sleep in or not.”
Tree felt the shock in the pit of her stomach explode into anger. “No. Fucking. Way.”
Carter stood there, looking flustered. “I…uh…folded your clothes—”
Tree leaped out of bed and marched straight to Carter’s door. Flinging it open, she yelled over the trombone player at the end of the hallway, “Ryan! Get in here right now!”
After a moment, Ryan slunk into the room.
“You two know each other?” Carter asked.
“Yes!” Tree shouted at the same moment Ryan shouted, “No!”
Carter frowned, confused. “Huh?”
Tree was so pissed off she couldn’t even begin to explain it all again to him. Instead, she turned on his roommate with the white-hot rage of a thousand suns and did her dead-level best to murder him with her voice.
“Ryan, you dumb-ass! You sent me back!”
“What?” He blinked at her.
“It’s Monday the eighteenth!” she yelled.
“Uh…”
“I can’t believe this! I just got out! How could you do this to me?”
Ryan turned to Carter, completely weirded out. “Who’s this crazy white girl?”
Tree stomped over to the dresser and yanked her clothes on. She felt like she might disintegrate—fall apart at the seams and just cease to exist, which, in this moment, would have been fine with her.
“Maybe you just had a bad dream.” Carter was trying to help. Of course. As always. But Tree couldn’t contain the bile that boiled up inside her.
“You’re right. It is a bad dream. It’s a nightmare! This sucks the hardest mega-balls in the history of shitty ball-suckery!”
She grabbed a pillow off Carter’s bed and smashed her face into it, muffling the loudest scream she had ever attempted. It lasted for a while, and when she ran out of air and pulled the pillow from her face, Carter and Ryan just stood there, staring at her, possibly afraid. She had to pull it together.
Tree took a deep breath.
“I’m okay,” she said.
“You sure?” Carter wasn’t convinced.
She nodded. “Yes. He just needs to fix this. Now.”
Ryan cocked his head and considered her for a moment. “This is a joke, right?”
Calmly, Tree walked up to Ryan and got right up in his personal space. She meant business, and she lowered her voice to a serious level so he would know she couldn’t be trifled with.
“I wish,” she said. “Ryan, we need to go back to your lab, turn on Sissy, and figure out how to send me back.”
He frowned. “How do you know about Sissy?”
Tree just couldn’t even anymore.
“Let’s go!” she said, and marched out t
he door.
She was three steps down the hall when she realized they hadn’t come along. With a sigh, she walked back to their room, poked in her head, and snapped her fingers.
“Ándale, people!”
This time, they followed her. She led them out of the dorm and right into yesterday.
All over again.
The creepy art student who checked her out was right on time. Tree passed him and barked like a dog. He jumped like she’d tased him, and she just didn’t have the bandwidth for the student activist.
“Stop global warming?”
Tree sidestepped the girl’s clipboard in a hurry, but she did say “Sorry,” and she actually was.
As she led Carter and Ryan across the quad, the day unfolded with her greatest hits:
Sprinklers.
Car alarm.
The singing pledges on the lawn.
Tree passed them all without hesitation, not even pausing when Tim popped out from behind the arch of the covered walkway.
“Hey, you haven’t returned any of my texts—”
“You’re gay,” she said without breaking her stride.
He stood there stunned, but Tree remembered the handsome guy he’d be with at the basketball game tomorrow and felt assured in the confidence that she’d done the right thing.
Ryan was practically running after her. “You’re going the wrong way. The lab’s back there.”
“I have some business to take care of first,” Tree explained.
She didn’t say another word until they’d reached the Kappa house. Carter and Ryan followed her up the stairs, past Emily in her headphones on the front porch. She waved at Tree, and Tree tried to smile an acknowledgment, but she was on a mission. She briefly considered telling Emily that she might want to move away from the window above her, but she was already opening the front door, and she wanted to get this over with.
She motioned for Carter and Ryan to follow her upstairs, but after she got to the middle landing, she stopped. A frown slowly crossed her face as she waited for Danielle to appear in her yellow sports bra, as she had every time she’d relived the day.
But Danielle wasn’t there.
“What’s wrong?” Carter asked.
“She was supposed to be here,” Tree said.
“Who?”
Tree shrugged it off and headed back up the stairs.
When she opened the door of her room, Lori was seated at her vanity as always.
“She finally rolls in.”
“Where is it?” Tree asked.
“Where’s what?”
Lori glanced up as Carter and Ryan walked into the room and stood in the doorway, fidgety and unsure.
“Oh, hey, Carter.”
“Hi,” Carter said with a smile.
Tree looked at Carter and tried to quiet the nagging doubt in her stomach. Since when did these two know each other? What the fuck is happening? She turned back to Lori.
“Where’s the cupcake?”
Her roommate-slash-murderer let out a little laugh, pretending to be confused. “What cupcake?”
“The one you made for my birthday,” Tree said sweetly. “The one you poisoned.”
Lori played along. “Oooohhhh. That one.”
She laughed again, grabbed her black duffel bag, and started packing it with gym clothes.
“I’m serious!” Tree said.
Lori paused. “Look, Tree, I don’t know what stupid joke Danielle put you up to, but there’s no cupcake. Sorry. I’m pulling a double for Jen. She has the flu. Happy birthday, though. Toodles!”
Lori zipped her bag and walked out the door.
And then she was gone.
Tree felt like the ground was shifting under her feet as she listened to Lori walk down the stairs and out the front door.
“What’s going on?” Carter asked.
“I have no idea.” She shook her head. “It’s all different.”
9
Tree finished her explanation and slurped the last few drops of her Diet Coke through a straw. Carter and Ryan both sat with their mouths hanging open at what, over the past two days, had become Tree’s favorite table in the cafeteria. The soft light poured in through the trees, and she watched as students wound their way across the quad, unaware that there was an actual wrinkle in time occurring as they hurried to class.
“There were two of me?” Ryan seemed sort of excited about the possibility.
“Yes,” Tree said. “That’s how this whole thing started.”
“This reminds me of Back to the Future Part II,” Carter said.
“Totally!” Ryan held up his hand, and Carter gave him a high five.
They both turned to look at her for affirmation. The baffled look on her face said it all.
Carter started giving her clues. “Marty McFly? The DeLorean?”
Tree shrugged. “Sorry.”
“Are you serious?” Carter sounded almost personally offended. “You’ve never seen Back to the Future?”
A terrible realization struck Tree like a thunderclap.
“Oh my god.” The panic returned to the pit of her stomach. “Does this mean there are two of me?”
“It’s possible,” Ryan said, “but only if you were knocked into a quantum-cyclic dimension. Otherwise, you’re probably stuck in a holographic multiverse where there’s just one of you.”
Tree blinked at him. “Oh. Okay. Thanks for clearing that up, Ryan. Super helpful.”
“You’ve never heard of the multiverse theory?” he asked.
“No.”
Ryan grabbed a napkin and folded it, then poked a hole through it with a pencil. “This is our universe. But look—”
“Dude,” Carter said. “You’re not doing the folding paper universe thing, are you? It’s such a cliché.”
“Shut up,” Ryan told him. “I’m mansplaining.”
He folded the napkin again and again, lining up the holes.
“In theory,” he continued, “the universe has six dimensions. If what you’re saying is true, then maybe you woke up in the same day but not the same dimension. That would explain the anomalies.”
Tree thought about this for a second. “So, how different are we talking here?” but before Ryan could answer, she saw Danielle heading their way. “Oh, shit. I missed the house meeting.”
As Danielle walked up, Tree wasted no time apologizing. “Danielle, I’m so sorry. I just—”
“Hey, babe,” Danielle interrupted her.
Tree realized that Danielle wasn’t even looking at her. Danielle was looking at Carter, who stood up and smiled back at her.
Babe?
She didn’t have time to process as Carter leaned over to Danielle and kissed her.
Tree felt the planet grind to a screeching halt beneath her. It was the feeling of whiplash while sitting totally still.
What. The Actual. Fuck?
For a moment, she thought she might scream at the top of her lungs, then tackle Danielle and try being the killer for a change.
When Carter and Danielle finally came up for air, Danielle looked at Ryan and for the first time didn’t wrinkle her nose. Instead, she smiled and gave him a little fingernail waggle.
“Hey, Ry.”
Tree saw Ryan blush like a smitten puppy. If he’d had a tail, he’d have wagged it until he piddled on the floor in excitement.
“Hi, Danielle.” Ryan could barely make eye contact with her, but Tree could stare at nothing else. She was watching the slow-motion car wreck of her worlds crashing into one another. She looked Danielle up and down. Was that a copy of The Miracle Worker on top of the books she was carrying? Aliens must have landed and replaced Danielle with a perfect replica of her former self—only this version was capable of a healthy relationship with a go
od guy and being kind to nerds.
Just when Tree thought she’d seen it all, Danielle whipped out a pair of dark sunglasses and put them on. She waved her arms in front of her like a lost Muppet and began “feeling” her way to an empty seat. They all watched her clearly having a mental break until Danielle dropped the act and grinned at them.
“Did that look real?” she asked. “I’m auditioning for this year’s production of The Miracle Worker. Did you know Anne Frank was blind and deaf?”
Carter frowned. “Uh…Helen Keller?”
“Excuse me?” Danielle said.
“Anne Frank was in the attic,” Carter explained.
“Oh! Whatever.” Danielle laughed. “All I know is, acting blind is probably harder than actually being blind. It’s crazy.”
Maybe this is the same person, Tree thought. Perhaps some things never changed.
As if she’d heard Tree thinking about her, Danielle turned and gave her a singsong scolding.
“Well, somebody missed our house meeting today.”
Tree started apologizing as if by reflex. “I—”
“—totes kidding.” Danielle winked at her. “Birthday girls get a pass. Anyhoo, we picked this year’s charity. Ready for it?” Danielle paused for effect. “We’re doing the Special Needs Art Fair again!”
She started clapping for herself, and Tree couldn’t get over how genuine Danielle’s excitement appeared to be.
“Nice!” Carter said.
Ryan started tripping over himself to give her compliments. “You do so much good, Danielle,” he finally managed. “I really admire that.”
“Please.” Danielle modestly waved her perfect manicure through the air. “It just warms my heart seeing those little faces. I mean, don’t get me wrong, sometimes they try to hug you for too long and it gets a little uncomfortable, but you just get used to it. And at the end of the day, there’s no greater reward in life than the love of a child.”
Carter put his arm around Danielle and gave her a squeeze.
Tree tried not to throw up in her own mouth.
“Tree?” Danielle was looking at her now, concerned. “You okay?”
“Yeah…I…”
As she desperately tried to form a sentence, Tree’s phone rang.
Happy Death Day & Happy Death Day 2U Page 16