A do-over. The universe is giving me a second chance. It wants me to be bold. It wants me to say: “Yes.”
Baking turns out to be surprisingly easy—or Thomas is a good teacher. A few minutes later, we’re standing side by side at the stove, me on idiot duty, melting butter, while he does something exceedingly complicated with the sugar and rosewater. And all the while I’m thinking: This is how it’s supposed to be. This is how it should have been all my life.
“Store-bought?” I tease as Thomas opens a packet of filo pastry, pretending to sound aghast.
“Shush, you.” He elbows me back.
Thomas starts folding layers of pastry into a cake tin, instructing me to brush them with my melted butter. Tutting when I keep brushing his hand instead. “Ztoppit. Now you sprinkle on the pistachios and—or, no, one giant, clumping heap like that is fine too. I think that’s what they call ‘artisan.’ A D in art, was it?”
I steal a pistachio. Thomas bats my hand away.
“Tell you what,” he says, “I’ll do the cooking, you tell me about time travel.”
I nearly choke on the pistachios I’ve crammed in my mouth. It’s not that I’d forgotten what’s going on here—absentmindedly discarding the knowledge that I’ve time-traveled, like it’s an old sock. But the universe has twisted back on itself, in order to make things right. And for a second, it seems like Thomas has figured it out.
“Your extra-credit project?” He raises his eyebrows at me, and I wonder where Ms. Adewunmi’s essay would take me. Far away from Holksea, she said. Far away from Thomas too. “It’s about time travel, right? Easy on the math, obviously—are we talking forwards or backwards?”
“A little of both, actually,” I say, stealing another pistachio.
“’Splain more.”
“Okay … If you and I went back to a point in time, like to—”
“Summer eleven years ago, after I was banned from the fair,” Thomas interrupts. “What? I’m still incensed. Those pigs were asking to be set free.”
I laugh. Sixteen racing pigs chased by Grey and Thomas’s dad, while Thomas watched gleefully from under the cake table.
“Fine. We write an equation factoring in you, and me, and our coordinates. And we need power, like ten stars’ worth, and we use it to open a Krasnikov tube…” I glance at Thomas to see if he’s following. “Erm, we bake a cannoli. One end is in the present, and we go through it to the other end—to the past.”
“G, I got what you meant,” he says gently. “I understand the word tube.”
I blush. “Then we go through the tube, tunnel, cannoli, whatever, and, er, that’s it. I mean it’s mathematically complex, but what we’re talking about is making a tunnel through spacetime.”
“Two questions,” says Thomas, as he picks up a knife and starts slicing the baklava into little diamond shapes. I keep waiting for the knife to slip, but it doesn’t. “What happens when we run into our past selves—a ‘Shoot us both, Spock!’ situation? And can you get the saucepan? That’s not the second question, by the way.”
I hand him the saucepan, peeking in. The sugar has melted and it’s pink syrup, which Thomas pours over the pastry layers as I explain, “You can’t ever meet your past self.”
He raises an eyebrow. “You sure about that?”
“Ja, because of cosmic censorship.”
“Let’s assume every time you talk science, I eye-roll till you explain it, okay?”
“Ha, ha. Space law. There are rules. If you ever got close enough to see what was inside a black hole, you’d get sucked in. The universe keeps its secrets in there. When you go back, six-year-old you temporarily doesn’t exist—the universe hides you in a little time loop until it’s safe to come out. Like a mini cannoli.”
“Otherwise—kaboom?”
“There can only be one of you.” I nod.
“Huh,” says Thomas, gazing at me like he’s trying to memorize my face. “I wonder.”
I resist the urge to prove my science credentials by pointing out: There aren’t two of me here right now, for instance. Instead, I dip my finger into the syrup and sketch a sticky diagram on the table to demonstrate. “And then vacuum fluctuations, because in algebraic terms—”
“La, la, la, la, la,” he sings, off key. “No algebra. More cake metaphors! Who knew you knew so much about patisserie? That’s also not the second question. Which is: Then what? How do you get home again?”
“That’s the interesting part.” I stand back while Thomas transfers the tin of baklava to the oven, setting the timer. “We could stay, live linearly. Wait for time to pass naturally and end up back here anyway, eleven years later. But by doing that, we’d change the universe.”
“Don’t we want to change the universe? Fight to clear my name?”
“But six-year-old you isn’t there to release the pigs, remember? You’re in a little cannoli, floating around in space until the universe is sure it’s safe.”