Thomas Althorpe.
But I’ve never spoken up during any of Ms. Adewunmi’s lessons. It’s not that I don’t know the answers. And back at my old school, I never minded saying so and having everyone stare at the math-genius-prodigy-freak-show-nerd. We’d all known each other since forever. But like a lot of the villages along the coast, Holksea’s too small to support a real high school. At sixteen, everyone transfers to the giant school in town. Here, classes are twice the size and full of strangers. But mostly, it’s that ever since the day Grey died, talking exposes me. As though I’m the opposite of invisible, but everyone can see right through me.
When Ms. Adewunmi’s gaze lands on me, her eyebrows go shooting off into her Afro. She knows I know the answer, but I keep my mouth clammed shut till she turns back to the whiteboard.
“All right, then,” she says. “I know you guys have fractals next period, so let’s keep moving.”
Fractals, I write down. The infinite, self-replicating patterns in nature. The big picture, the whole story, is just thousands of tiny stories, like a kaleidoscope.
Thomas was a kaleidoscope. He turned the world to colors. I could tell you a hundred stories about Thomas, and it still wouldn’t be the big picture: He bit a teacher on the leg. He got a lifetime ban from the Holksea summer fair. He put a jellyfish in Megumi Yamazaki’s lunch box when she said I had a dead mum, and he could thread licorice shoelaces through his nose.
But it was more than that. According to Grey, we were wolf cubs raised in the same patch of dirt. Thomas didn’t belong on his side of the hedge, where the lawn was neatly clipped and his scary dad’s rules were practically laminated. And I didn’t quite belong on mine, where we were allowed to roam free. It wasn’t about like or love—we were just always together. We shared a brain. And now he’s coming back …
I feel the same way as when you flip a rock over in the garden, and see all the bugs squirming underneath.
The bell rings, too early. I think it’s a fire drill, till I see everyone around me holding worksheets in the air. The whiteboard is covered in notations, none of them about fractals. The clock suddenly says midday. And, one by one, Ms. Adewunmi is plucking paper from hands, adding them to her growing pile.
Panicked, I look in front of me. There’s a worksheet there, but I haven’t written on it. I don’t even remember being given it.
Next to me, Jake Halpern hands in his worksheet and slouches away, his bag knocking against me as he slides off the stool. Ms. Adewunmi snaps her fingers.
“I…” I stare at her, then back at my blank paper. “I ran out of time,” I say, lamely.
“All right, then,” she says, with a small frown. “Detention.”
*
I’ve never had detention before. When I check in after my final lesson, a teacher I don’t recognize stamps my slip, then waves a bored hand. “Find a seat and read. Do some homework,” he says, turning back to his grading.
I make my way through the hot, half-empty room to a seat by the window. Inside my binder is the college application packet I got in homeroom this morning. I shove it to the bottom of my book bag, to be dealt with never, and pull out Ms. Adewunmi’s worksheet instead. For lack of anything better to do, I start writing.
THE GREAT SPACETIME QUIZ!
Name three features of special relativity.
(1) The speed of light NEVER changes. (2) Nothing can travel faster than light. Which means (3) depending on the observer, time runs at different speeds. Clocks are a way of measuring time as it exists on Earth. If the world turned faster, we’d need a new type of minute.
What is general relativity?
It explains gravity in the context of time and space. An object—Newton’s apple tree, perhaps—forces spacetime to curve around it because of gravity. It’s why we get black holes.
Describe the G?del metric.
It’s a solution to the E = MC2 equation that “proves” the past still exists. Because if spacetime is curved, you could cross it to get there.
What is a key characteristic of a M?bius strip?
It’s infinite. To make one, you half twist a length of paper and Scotch tape the ends together. An ant could walk along the entire surface, without ever crossing the edge.
What is an event horizon?
A spacetime boundary—the point of no return. If you observe a black hole, you can’t see inside. Beyond the event horizon, you can see the universe’s secrets—but you can’t get out of the hole.
Bonus point: write the equation for the Weltschmerzian Exception.
?!
Even after I stare at the final question for several centuries before giving up, it’s still only 4:16 p.m. Forty-four minutes till I can escape.