I’m not scared of girls—Lua’s my best friend, after all—and a lot of my friends are girls, but the boys in my class who joke around about kissing and tell stories about the girls they’ve kissed—most of which are probably lies—act like kissing is no big deal. Only, I can’t help feeling like it is a big deal. Like it’s something that deserves to be treated as more than a party game.
I turn toward Tommy. “Is that why you’re mad at me? Because you think I’m going to kiss Sonia?”
Tommy shrugs. “No.”
“Lua says Kimber’s got a crush on you. I bet she’ll say yes if you ask her to the dance. Maybe she’ll even let you kiss her.”
“I don’t want to kiss Kimber,” Tommy says. He glances my way again. “I was kind of thinking I wanted to kiss you.”
“Me?”
Tommy clenches his jaw. “Yeah. You.” The way he spits out the answer feels like he’s daring me to rag on him for it.
I’ve never considered kissing Tommy, but the thought of it isn’t nearly as frightening as kissing Sonia or a girl chosen for me by a fickle bottle’s spin.
“All right,” I say.
“All right, what?”
“You can kiss me.”
“Right here?”
“Why not?”
Tommy scans the area around the trailer. His father’s still at work and his mother’s in the back. No one’s watching. Tommy slides to the chair next to mine, closing the distance between us. “You sure?”
“Yeah.”
He licks his lips, leans over, and kisses me. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do, so I close my eyes and push my mouth against his. The whole thing only lasts a couple of seconds, but a gentle electric current runs through my skin, and I feel a pleasant stirring in my groin that I like but don’t understand.
When I open my eyes, Tommy’s staring at me.
“Well?” he asks.
I smile. I’m not sure if I’d feel the same way if I kissed a girl, but I suspect I wouldn’t. Kissing Tommy felt important. It felt honest.
“How about we skip the dance, go trick-or-treating on our own—maybe egg Mr. Glass’s house for stiffing you after you cut his lawn—stay up all night, and watch scary movies in my room?”
Tommy grins. When he flashes that gap between his front teeth, the world is right. Tommy’s smile is, and always has been, my favorite thing.
“And maybe we can try kissing again,” I say. “I want to get it right, so I think we should practice. A lot.”
9,970,000,000 LY
NOT ALL OF MY THEORIES about Tommy’s disappearance were completely fantastical. The most likely hypothesis was that Tommy had simply run away, which was why I’d tried to fly to Seattle to find him, especially since his home life sucked so badly.
Once, when Tommy was nine, he’d left the cap off the toothpaste. Mr. Ross had found it and dragged Tommy out of bed by his ear in the middle of the night, while Mrs. Ross sat in the kitchen unable or unwilling to stop her husband. He screamed at Tommy, and when Tommy couldn’t offer a satisfactory reason for not replacing the cap, Mr. Ross threw a plastic brush at him, which missed, hit the wall, and shattered. A plastic chip ricocheted, cutting Tommy below his eye. A millimeter higher and it might have blinded him. Then his father squeezed the entire tube of toothpaste onto the counter and forced Tommy to brush his teeth with it every morning and night until he’d used it all. Mr. Ross didn’t relent either, not even when ants swarmed and became trapped in the disgusting glob.
The only problem with my theory about Tommy running away was that it left me with unanswered questions like: Why hadn’t he taken me with him? And how had he erased himself from everyone’s memories but mine?
There was also the issue of Flight 1184. I didn’t believe for a second that the crash had been an accident or a coincidence. The NTSB investigators had recovered the plane’s black box, which they said had indicated a mechanical failure of some sort—though I suspected they hadn’t been completely forthcoming with the information—had caused the crash, but I had a feeling it was connected to Tommy and the shrinking universe. I just didn’t know how.
No matter which way I turned the puzzle in my brain, I wound up with too many questions, exactly zero answers, and more theories than I could hope to test. Like that my life was a dream. Or a computer simulation. I was a self-aware character in a metafictional book à la The Neverending Story. Each scenario was wilder and less plausible than the ones before, but any one of them was possible.
Worst of all, I couldn’t ignore the most obvious question: What if I made Tommy up?
But just because I couldn’t ignore the question didn’t mean I considered it the answer. Besides, I needed to believe in something, so I chose to believe in Tommy.
? ? ?
I arrived early to physics to talk to Calvin.
If Calvin remembered Tommy—even if he only remembered passing him in the hall or seeing him at some party from across the room—he could prove I hadn’t made him up, and then my friends and my parents and the endless parade of therapists would have to believe me. As screwed up as he seemed, Calvin was my first real lead in months.
I’d barely slept Sunday night, rehearsing what to say to Calvin. My stomach had twisted itself into balloon animals through my first four periods, and by the time I reached physics, I wanted to puke. Only, Calvin wasn’t there when I arrived.
Ms. Fuentes was standing in front of the whiteboard, and she smiled at me when I threw my backpack on my lab table. “Morning, Ozzie. You’re early today.”
“Trying to catch Calvin before the bell.”
“Good for you.” She turned from the board and rested her hands on her lab table. “I expect you boys to build me an exceptional roller coaster.”
“No pressure or anything.” I sat on my stool as other students, none of whom were Calvin, filed into the classroom, their faces buried in their phones.
Dustin swept through the door and slugged me on the shoulder. He scanned the room for Jake Ortiz, who had actually made an appearance, though he looked rough and crusty.
“Better go check in with my slacker lab partner,” Dustin said.
“Good luck with that.”
The final bell rang, and Calvin Frye rode its fading echoes through the door, took the seat next to me, and immediately rested his head on the desk. He wasn’t even carrying books, and he smelled like sour gym socks.
Ms. Fuentes launched into our next lesson, and I waited until she turned her back before I elbowed Calvin.
“Hey,” I whispered. “Wake up. We need to talk.” Calvin grunted but didn’t move. I nudged him again. “Don’t pretend you can’t hear me.”
“Ozzie?” Ms. Fuentes asked. I hadn’t noticed she’d stopped drawing diagrams on the board. “Is there a problem?”
“No, Ms. Fuentes.”