“All right, then, Ms. Oppenheimer.” My teacher hops up next to me, talking round her lollipop like it’s a cigarette. “You’re a bit early. Term starts next month.”
“I needed to talk to you,” I say. “I brought my quiz back. And I wanted to ask about a theory—there’s a page missing, in one of the books from your reading list…”
“Oh! That reminds me, I have something for you.” She takes the quiz from me, but doesn’t look at it, just puts it on the desk and rummages through her things. “Aha. I picked these up, was planning to bombard you on the first day, in exchange for your essay. But, well—here.”
Ms. Adewunmi hands me a stack of brochures: Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial in London. But also faraway places I’ve not thought about, like Edinburgh and Durham, and ones I’ve not even heard of, like MIT and Ludwig-Maximilians. I run my hand over the glossy covers, trying to imagine myself in a year’s time, who I’ll be then.
She taps the stack with a long, lightning-bolt-adorned nail. “I got your theory notes. The Gottie H. Oppenheimer Principle?”
It takes me a second to remember: the emails I sent her from the Book Barn.
“It’s good. A touch science-fiction, but still. Type that into something comprehensible, and world’s your oyster.”
“This might be a silly question, but—”
“Of course you’ll get in wherever you want, Gottie. If money’s a problem, there’s funding available, especially for girls wanting to pursue STEM industry degrees, there’s all sorts of programs, grants, and such. It’s hard finding them, but they’re there. You’ll get my recommendation.”
“Actually, I was going to ask if you could understand that equation I wrote on the board?”
“No. Oh, no, I can’t.” She turns to me, wide-eyed and terrified, and whispers, “You must be a genius.”
I roll my eyes while she laughs harder than when she welcomed me to the Parallel Universe Club. Finally, she says, “Sorry. Oh, boy. It’s a paradoxical time loop.”
I quiz her with a baffled headshake.
“A joke,” she clarifies. “An equation for something that doesn’t exist. A sci-fi thing—c’mon, you don’t watch TV?”
“Could you explain it to me anyway?”
“Eh, why not.” She leaps up and wipes a space on the whiteboard clean, talking over her shoulder as she diagrams the equation.
“It describes a loop, yeah? A tunnel to the past, created in the present. A two-way wormhole. But the joke is, it can only be opened because it’s already been opened, in the past.” She circles with her pen. “And the reverse is true. It exists because it exists. It’s a paradox. Make sense?”
“Kind of.” I point to the part that most confuses me. “What’s this factor, though?”
“That’s matter created when all this happened. A sort of overflow valve. Excess energy. The equation only works if you funnel off this solution into its own section—which means it’ll never work. The whole thing is some bored physicist’s idea of a joke.”
“A joke,” I repeat. I’m disappointed—I’d hoped it was the Weltschmerzian Exception. That’s obviously a physics gag too, a hilarious mathematical urban legend. I’ll never know what happened this summer. Ms. Adewunmi sits back down next to me, swinging her legs under the desk.
“All right, then,” she says, “a joke. But it’s some pretty cool math. That it, no more questions? Surely you want to be outside on a day like this.”
I slide off the desk. When I reach the door, I turn back. “One more thing. On the reading list. How come you put Forever?”
She chuckles. “I thought you could do with some light reading. It’s a classic.”
Saturday 23 August
[Minus three hundred and fifty-six]
“Liebling.” Papa appears from the ether, knocking softly on my door.
“I’m fine, Papa,” I mumble into the pillow. “New shifts, remember? It’s my day off.”
“Ja, I know,” he says, putting a cup of tea next to my head. It’s been almost a week of moping, and he keeps trying to coax me out of it with “treats”—such as letting Ned play music at the Book Barn. This is the first time he’s sought me out in my room, though. Maybe ever. Grey was always the one to find me when I was in a funk.
I peel one eye open and watch him as he looks around, noting the emptiness, the equations on the wall, lingering by the desk, running his hand over the brochures Ms. Adewunmi gave me. The diaries.
He turns back to the bed. “Sof’s outside.”
Bah.
Papa hovers while I gulp the tea—as though he thinks I’ll book it out the window if he leaves me to it.
It’s going to be a scorching day—the air already smells like toffee, and the sun is beginning to burn. I find Sof in the shade, sitting with her sketchbook among overblown raspberries, tangles of ivy, brambles, and nettles gone to flower.