Now That You're Here (Duplexity, Part I) (29 page)

“Another good question.” Mac crosses his arms and studies his drawings. Finally, he says, “Perhaps his body is acting like its own kind of transporter, delivering only what's inside.” He stops and considers what he just said. “Ah, now that's an interesting thought, isn't it? In the transporter, a person steps their entire body inside the machine and their whole body travels. But if the body
is
the transporter, then only a portion of the person would jump.”

“Which portion?” Danny asks.

“Whatever it is that makes you you.”

None of us respond. Seems like we're entering philosophical territory, a final frontier of sorts for Warren and me.

“I'm not sure what to call it,” Mac says, using a red marker to circle the stick-figure Danny on the whiteboard. “But I think the EMP caused a breach between Danny's body and his consciousness, for lack of a better word. His whatever-it-is that makes him who he is.”

Warren snorts. “That's just—”

“Brilliant,” I say, stopping to let the theory sink in. “But we still haven't pinpointed why this happened to Danny and not everyone in range of the EMP that morning.”

We're all staring at the board, like we have been all night, and suddenly, instead of the markings looking like Sanskrit to me, it makes sense. Like that box drawing that flips when you change how you look at it. All the words scribbled on the whiteboard fall together and there's the answer right there.

“Paint.” I point at the whiteboard. “The ingredients. Chromium? Cadmium? All of those things listed are used in paint.”

“How much exposure did you have?” Mac asks. “Are we talking a daily occurrence?”

“Easily.”

“Do you wear a mask? Gloves?”

“Depends on where I am. Sometimes a bandana. Sometimes just my shirt pulled up. Gloves are hit-or-miss.” I sit forward on the couch. “Doesn't really matter, though. Paint always gets everywhere.”

“Interesting,” Mac says. “If you've been steadily exposed to these elements, breathing them in, absorbing them through your skin, then perhaps they've accumulated in your system over time. All the elements are in place. Tinder for the fire, so to speak.”

“But what started the fire?” Warren asks.

Eevee shrugs. “The EMP.”

He shakes his head. “No, there's something else. Something we've missed.” He flips through the pages of his notebook. “An EMP is magnetic. Not incendiary. Why would an electromag
netic pulse result in combustion, inside of only him?” He studies the diagrams on the whiteboard, then looks at me as if the answer should be written on my forehead. “What made the EMP energy focus differently on him than on everyone else?”

“You mean the paint's not enough?” They're all lost in thought.

“Focus…” Eevee drums her fingers on her knee. I watch her fingers moving and try to breathe through the tightness creeping across my chest.

“Could it have been some kind of electrostatic charge?” Warren asks Mac. “That could trigger pyroelectric fusion.”

Eevee continues to think out loud, her lips moving, her voice soft. “We focus light with lenses. Crystals. Lasers use photonic crystals.” She stops drumming and her jaw drops as her hand goes to the neck of her shirt. “Pyroelectric. Crystals. Bismuth. He was wearing a—”

Static slams through my head, drowning out Eevee's voice, drowning out the room.

No. Not now. We're so close.

I see her turn toward me, see her face twist with fear. Pulsing pounds me and the room hazes to white. My mouth opens but all I can get out is “Eve.” The other Danny doesn't push back at all, and I'm too weak to fight the pull on my own.

The other world fills my eyes. They're coming for me. My only option is to run.

Before I even realize what's happening, I'm out the door, screaming after him.

“Danny?!”

I find him cowering in the shadows on the far side of Mac's Jeep, his face staring up at nothing. I grab him by the shoulders. The gravel digs into my knees. “Danny, look at me. Look at me. Please.” I pull him to me and look up at the sky, too, at the stars overhead. Tears stream down my temples and pool in my ears. I don't care. I don't care about the sky or the stars or science or myself because all I want is for him to be here and to be okay.

From his throat comes a raspy sound. Then, my name. “Eevee.”

I pull back to look at him, my hands still gripping his shoulders. His eyes are like glass. Does he see me?

“Danny.” I shake him. “Come back. Come back to me.” I hear the door slam. Hear Mac and Warren run across the gravel. I scream at them to help, but they're as useless as I am.

For a split second, his eyes clear and his hands reach up to grab my arms. “You,” he whispers. Then they cloud over again. A violent shiver goes through him and he crumples into a ball.

Time stops. No one moves.

No one even breathes.

Then Danny gasps, tilts his head up, blinks. He glares at me, confused, and I can tell from his eyes it isn't him. He looks past me at Mac and Warren. At the house, the street. At himself.

He stumbles two steps forward.

And he runs.

I land with a jolt and gasp for air. My head feels heavy. The roaring in my ears fades and all I hear is the sound of my breathing.

Maybe if I don't open my eyes it won't be true.

Far off, I hear the sound of a closing door. Of footsteps getting closer. They've found me.

My eyelids open just enough to let the blinding light in. The world buzzes in white. This body feels familiar. Fits right. I inhale and feel the cold air fill my lungs. Stretch my neck and know how the muscles will move.

I'm me again.

The footsteps stop outside the door. I let my eyelids open, squinting until the room comes into view. Blank white like an empty canvas. Give me a rattle can and I'd do a job on this place. Paint it until the walls ran so black they'd never come clean.

The door slides open with a
whoosh
and she walks into the room. Her heels
click-click
across the polished floors and her perfume filters through the air.

I look her dead in the eye. The one who turned me in. The one who landed me in this place.

Eevee Solomon.

Chaos theory states that systems run through cycles as a way of reaching equilibrium, adapting to accommodate for each variance.

An unexpected hailstorm blankets the Arizona desert in white. Drivers skid on the roads. Children are late for school. Meteorologists have an unusually busy day. Then the system adapts and life returns to normal.

Sometimes, though, a variance is introduced that is so disruptive the only way to achieve equilibrium is dynamically, setting the system into a pattern of continual adaptation.

A scientist warps the fabric of space-time, allowing a boy with a supernova heart to break the bounds of his universe. The system bounces from situation to situation and life never settles down.

The day after Danny jumped, Warren and I went back to Mac's house. The place was locked up and his car wasn't in the drive. Taped to the front door was a notice that read:
WARNING. THIS BUILDING IS UNSAFE. DO NOT OCCUPY
.
We searched around for clues about what happened. While we still couldn't see through the blacked-out shop windows, the generators were gone and the gravel was rutted with footprints and tracks. We asked a few of the neighbors if they'd seen anything, but no one would talk to us. Clearly, someone had been moving heavy equipment; but was it Mac, or the feds? What if DART still exists, and they found out about his transport success? Maybe they're the ones who confiscated everything and shut Mac down.

I just can't believe he's gone.

Every day I try to adapt, to figure out the new normal. It's crazy, when you think about it. Danny wasn't even here a full three weeks, but in that short time, he changed everything. Now I have to learn how to live without him. For the rest of my life.

I'm learning how to hide the pain. Pretend it doesn't exist and no one will notice. Nothing to see here, move along. Go through the motions as if everything is the way it's supposed to be.

“I'm thinking cell regeneration in lizards.” Warren swaps textbooks between his locker and backpack.

“How many times do I have to tell you, Warren? No animals.”

“I'm just messing with you.” Smirking, he closes the locker door, then zips up his backpack and hefts it over his shoulder.

Campus is dead. No one sticks around on Friday afternoons. I think the teachers race the students to get out of here first.

It's taking him a while to get over the hurt of Missy narcing on us. I'm not sure I'm over it yet, and I wasn't even the one dating her. When Warren confronted her about it, she confessed to telling Principal Murray what we were up to. Murray, in turn, grew suspicious, found the transporter unit and got the feds involved. When Warren asked her why, she said she wanted to upset our chances of winning the science fair. That's the hardest part to take. All this loss and heartache just because of her jealousy. I made Warren swear to never,
ever
share our secrets with any future girlfriends. He agreed, but also said he would absolutely make certain that the next girl he dates doesn't speak Klingon.

“Your temperature-variation idea wasn't so bad,” Warren says.

“Oh, I don't know.” I adjust my own bag, heavy with homework. “The whole thing seems kind of silly now, doesn't it? Maybe we should just skip this year. Not really the same without Mac, you know?”

“Skip the
science fair
?”

“Okay, calm down. It's not like I asked you to sell your sea monkeys.” The sidewalk ends and we walk through the teachers' parking lot, toward the east gate.

“Sea monkeys,” he says under his breath. “What if we crossbreed sea monkeys and test if the new generation swims faster than their progenitors?”

“Aren't sea monkeys animals?”

He groans.

We bicker, talk science, then bicker more all the way home. We're almost to our street when he stops short.

“Close your eyes.”

I close them and wait.

“Okay. Open them.”

He holds out a small white flower.

“What is this for?”

He shrugs. “To make you smile.”

I take it with both hands and smell the sweet perfume. “Thank you.”

Walking again, he says, “I know it's been hard for you since he jumped.”

“I'm doing okay.” I don't tell him that I dodged Danny—the other Danny—today by hiding in the girls' bathroom. How I gripped the sink to keep from falling apart and told myself again and again it wasn't him.

Warren hops onto the lava rock. “Well, if you need to talk or whatever…”

“Thanks.” He's making such an effort. Touchy-feely isn't Warren's thing, and the fact that he's even offering shows what an awesome friend he is. Deep down, though, I'm sure he knows I wouldn't actually take him up on it. “Meet you back here in the morning?”

“Yep.” He holds up the Spock sign. “Fletcher, out.” He jumps off the rock and walks into his house.

Inside my own, Mom waves from the computer. She points to the phone at her ear, then makes the same hand move like it's talking. She covers the phone and whispers, “Almost done.”

I shake my head and whisper, “It's okay.” I'm not really in the mood to talk. Sometimes I sit in my closet, stare at the drawing of us and remember. Other times I paint fractals on my walls. Today, though, I walk through the living room, into the kitchen and out to the backyard.

When I got home that morning, after Danny jumped, I found a paper on the stove held in place by the pepper grinder. Dad had created a contract. Little black bullets outlined his expectations of me: how my future would be, where I was allowed to go, who I was allowed to see, what my priorities would be and the consequences if I stepped out of bounds. At the bottom of the page were three lines. One held the half-print, half-cursive mash-up of my father's signature. The other two were meant for Mom and me. But across the paper, Mom had drawn a big X and written a note:
I'll take care of this, Eevee.

Things are still pretty tense since Danny left. Mom and I talk more, but there's a sharp edge between the three of us—especially between me and Dad—that wasn't there before. They know I have a will of my own. More importantly, I know it.

Under the mesquite tree, I pull the Vitruvian Man journal out of my backpack and flip through the pages. He filled it with stories from his world and memories of our time together. Drawings of the places we went and the things we saw. Even this tree I'm sitting under. Pages and pages filled with his feelings for me, peppered with stars cut from paint-sample cards of purple, magenta and green.

My fingers touch the necklace. What happened when he went home? Did he find the other me? I hate not knowing.

Most girls my age are trying to figure out who's going to ask them to the prom. My boyfriend lives in another universe. I don't even know if that means we're still together….

I started a new hobby: studying multiverses. It's amazing reading theoretical texts and science journals, knowing other universes really
do
exist. One theory states that parallel universes are layered on top of each other, occupying the same space, but buzzing at different frequencies. That one aligns closest with the theory we devised at Mac's. What if Danny's universe is right here, all around me? What if he's sitting next to me, as close as my breath, but neither of us knows it?

I pull my knees up to my chest and try to imagine him there, leaning against me, but all I feel is the rough bark of the tree.

The results of his blood work arrived a couple of days after he was gone. They confirmed our suspicions: elevated levels of cadmium, titanium and bismuth, as well as unusual amounts of copper, cobalt and iron. The elements of paint. The elements of stars.

For a while I obsessed on our theory of electromag
netism, the wormhole, the neutron star. Were we right? Did the bismuth necklace—a crystal with pyroelectric properties
—focus the energy of the EMP, causing a fusion reaction in the built-up elements inside Danny? Did the electromag
netic waves open a wormhole that allowed him to travel between our two worlds? I wrote up a thesis, complete with diagrams. Everything looked solid on paper, but there's no way to test it. The transporter is gone. My test subject is back in his universe. Short of building my own transport system, I have nowhere to begin. I'm even fresh out of apples.

I turn the journal to the drawing of us under the stars. Our perfect day.

It could have been a perfect life.

My only consolation, strangely, is that maybe his world is in constant adaptation, too. And maybe that adaptation will lead him back.

He promised he'd try.

I hug the journal to my chest and look up through the branches to the blue sky beyond. There's a boy out there, somewhere, who loves me.

Maybe that's enough.