Twenty heads swiveled in my direction. I found Owen seated on the far side of the classroom in a middle row. Our eyes met, and he shrugged, mouthed an apology, and scratched the back of his neck with his pencil before staring down at the notebook in front of him.
I dropped into an empty seat in the front row. “Am I really, though?” I asked. Dr. Lamb was too New Age for seating arrangements, and the back of the classroom always filled up first like the students were literally allergic to the possibility of learning. “I mean, according to Albert Einstein, isn’t all time relative, anyway?”
Dr. Lamb quirked an eyebrow. With her hair pulled tightly into a bun, her needle-thin frame gave my physics teacher an uncanny resemblance to a pin. “Time,” she said, returning her attention to the whiteboard, “can be relative another day. Today we’re looking at the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.” She underlined each of the three capitalized words where she’d scribbled them in green marker.
“Who can tell me what that means?” Dr. Lamb glanced around the room, stashing the marker in the pocket of her white lab coat. As usual, she was met with crickets. I rested my chin in one palm and raised my other hand.
“Ms. Frankenstein?” Dr. Lamb crossed her arms and waited.
“According to Heisenberg’s theory,” I began, “there’s a limit to the amount of precision that can be achieved when measuring the state of a system. The more precisely you measure the motion of a particle, the less precise your measurement of its position, for instance.”
An exaggerated groan came from the back of the classroom.
“Very good.” She pivoted back to the board and began drawing an axis for a graph.
I squirmed in my seat, my thoughts turning right back to Adam. Maybe Heisenberg’s theory was true on a larger-scale system, too. Maybe, while I’d been able to measure the input—the electricity, the conductor, the positioning—to a high degree of precision, I’d let my finger slip on the output and that was where the uncertainty had slipped into the equation. I had no way now to measure what Adam had lost except to say that he seemed to have lost close to everything.
I glanced at the clock. Only ten minutes had passed. Dr. Lamb had sunk into the meat of her lecture, and instead of taking notes, I was worrying about Adam. Suddenly fifty unsupervised minutes felt like an eternity. I chanced a glance at Owen, but he was scribbling in his notebook, tongue pinched between his teeth.
A dead body was enrolled in my high school. There were approximately ten thousand things that could go wrong. I tried to concentrate on Dr. Lamb but could only grasp the movement of her lips without being able to assign any meaning to the words that were forming there, so, instead, I pulled out my black-and-white composition book and began scribbling notes from the last day and a half.
I was detailing my second line of observation when there was a jab at my back and my hand slipped, causing me to leave a long pen mark across the top of the page. I spun around in my chair. Behind me, Knox Hoyle was pretending to listen intently to Dr. Lamb’s lecture. I grimaced. Knox had beady, foxlike eyes and a thin face partially obscured by a fringe of shaggy hair smashed underneath the brim of a ragged old ball cap. He was the punter on the football team and Paisley’s on-again, off-again boyfriend. Together, they were the closest thing we had to a William and Kate. The secret to Knox’s popularity wasn’t that he was a good football player—he wasn’t, he was terrible—but that he was the guy who knew how to get anything. Fake IDs, alcohol, hall passes. He was the favor guy, and everyone at school knew him because of it.
I turned back around, but no sooner had I done that than Knox’s tennis shoe jabbed me in the spine again. My back stiffened. The rational part of me felt sorry for Knox that he had nothing better to do with his mind than formulate ways to mess with me, a girl who registered as a point-nothing on the social Richter scale. The more primal part wished I could dislodge his shoe and shove it in his mouth.
He had no idea who he was pestering. I had created life during the last few days alone, and he probably hadn’t even finished last week’s math homework. Come to think of it, I could be one of the most famous scientists in centuries already. Right up there with Darwin, Edison, and Faraday. I glared at the page in front of me and squeezed my hand into a fist. Stage Two, I reminded myself. We were only entering Stage Two. I had to bide my time, which meant for now, there was the eleventh grade.
When Knox rammed me in the back once more, I whipped around so hard I nearly pulled a muscle. “What is your problem, Hoyle?”
His eyebrows shot up in a look of faux-surprise. “What?”
“What?” I shot back. “Really?” That weasel.
“Ms. Frankenstein!” Dr. Lamb’s face became pointy with annoyance. “Outbursts belong outside.” She nodded toward the door. “No one here is above the rules, and that’s twice that you’ve interrupted class today.”
“But—”