Lua rolled her eyes. “Maybe I won’t go. Maybe the universe will shrink so much that there won’t be anywhere to go on tour.”
“Fuck you, Lua.” My confusion and hurt turned to indignation. “I know I sound crazy, but you’re supposed to be my best friend. You’re supposed to be the one person who believes me. Have you considered that the only reason I’ve been spending time with Cal is because, of all my friends, he’s the only person who doesn’t treat me like I’ve lost my mind?”
“Everything’s not about you, Ozzie!” Lua fumbled to unbuckle her seat belt and shifted around to face me. Only, where I expected to see fight, I saw something worse: fear. “Do you get that? The whole fucking universe doesn’t revolve around you and your problems. Some of us have our own shit to deal with, but you wouldn’t know that, would you? No. Because Tommy’s gone and the universe is shrinking. You care more about some boy who doesn’t exist than the people in your life who are here and trying not to drown.” She clenched her fists and her jaw, and her body shook like she was crying but had turned her tears inward.
Her words smacked me so hard that I almost wished she’d stayed quiet and angry. “Lua, I—”
“I’m drowning, Ozzie!” she shouted. “I’m drowning.”
I got out of the car and walked around to her side. I opened the door and crouched in front of Lua. I took her hand and held it to my chest and waited for her to look at me.
“I’m sorry, Lua. I didn’t know.”
“You didn’t know because you didn’t ask.”
“What can I do? Just tell me what to do.”
Lua sniffled and wiped her nose with the back of her free hand. “Stop being such a shitty friend, for one.”
“Done.”
“And be here. Be present. Stop living in a past that never existed.”
Give up Tommy. That’s what she was really saying. That I should stop looking for Tommy, stop missing him, stop loving him. I couldn’t do that. I didn’t want to. And it wasn’t fair of her to ask me to, but at the same time, it wasn’t fair of me to expect her to care about someone she couldn’t remember.
“I’ll try,” I said. It was the best I could offer. Sometimes I wished I could forget Tommy the way everyone else had. It would have been easier. “And, if you want, I won’t bring Calvin to lunch anymore.”
Lua slapped my arm. “That’s not what I’m saying. Of course you can bring him to lunch. Just don’t forget that we’re there too.”
“I won’t.” I reached into the car and hugged Lua like I was trying to squeeze the last breath from her lungs. I never wanted to let go. Fighting with Lua was like fighting with myself.
When I let go, Lua said, “Come on, I’ve got rehearsal in an hour.”
I nodded and got back into the car. As we neared Lua’s house, she said, “I’m glad you put yourself out there, Oz. But Calvin Frye? Really? I didn’t think you’d go for someone like him.”
I laughed a little. “He certainly wasn’t at the top of my list of guys I expected to hook up with. But, seriously, for the last time: We’re just friends.”
“Keep telling yourself that,” Lua said. “Is he a good kisser at least?”
“Not nearly as good as you.”
“That happened one time.”
“And you loved it,” I said. “The memory of my awesome kiss will haunt you for the rest of your life.”
“Whatever.”
I parked in front of her house. Before she got out, I said, “You know, Calvin told me that he thought he was drowning once, but he realized he could breathe underwater. Who knows? Maybe you can breathe underwater too.”
Lua paused with her hand on the door. “No one can breathe underwater, Oz.”
“I guess you’re right,” I said, but I hoped she was wrong.
231,507 AU
MRS. ROSS SAT HUNCHED OVER A legal pad, writing furiously. Despite what she’d said about never returning, she’d been sitting at her usual table by the window when I showed up for work, and I ignored her so she wouldn’t run off again.
The evening passed slowly. Ana had volunteered to shelve the new arrivals—she was quiet, but getting the hang of the job—so I killed time pretending to reorder the science books while I actually read through some of them hoping to come up with a new theory about why Tommy had vanished. Calvin had floated an interesting idea that there was no single true reality, that we each created our own realities. He’d tried to explain it as each of us living in a bubble, and sometimes those bubbles overlapped and interacted, but that they still remained sovereign. He said it explained how two people could know each other but still view the world in radically different ways. The theory made as much sense as anything else I’d come up with, though I wasn’t sure it explained why Tommy had disappeared. If I was shaping my own reality, then it seemed unlikely I would have crafted one in which Tommy didn’t exist.
My favorite theory so far, though also unlikely, was that all of this was an experiment. Scientists from the future had discovered how to move people between alternate universes, and had accidentally thrown me into an unstable one—one where Tommy had been stillborn—and while the scientists, back in their own universe, couldn’t communicate with me directly, all the weird things that had happened, like being partnered with Calvin and Flight 1184 crashing, were their warped way of influencing my actions and helping me figure out how to get home. I wished they could have sent me a text with clear, easy-to-follow instructions because, really, I had no idea how anything they’d done was going to lead me back to Tommy, but I guessed it didn’t work that way. Assuming this theory was even correct, which it probably wasn’t.
My head was swimming with possibilities, and I didn’t notice Mrs. Ross approach until she cleared her throat.
“Good book?”
I looked down at the book I was holding—Brian Greene’s The Hidden Reality—and shrugged, trying to remain nonchalant.
Mrs. Ross held out her legal pad. The pages were filled with wide, loopy cursive. “I was wondering if you were still willing to help,” she said. “I’m no good at essay writing.”
I allowed a cautious smile to emerge. “Sure,” I said. I told Ana I was taking a quick break and sat with Mrs. Ross at her table. She chewed on the end of her nails while I read her essay. The practice topic had asked her to describe the happiest moment in her life. Mrs. Ross wrote in straightforward but sincere style about the day she found out she was pregnant. She’d been sixteen and had already taken a couple of home pregnancy tests but had needed to know for sure, so a friend drove her to Planned Parenthood. She described sitting in the doctor’s office waiting for the results. How her friend had tried to comfort her by stealing a latex glove and blowing it up like a balloon. The mixture of panic and joy when the doctor confirmed her pregnancy. She was too young to have a baby, and she knew her parents would disown her, but it was still the happiest day of her life.