Relativity (17 page)

The wall clock—a red rooster with a round belly—squawks, “Cock-a-doodle-doo,” letting us know that it’s seven thirty.

“We need to get going.” Mom clears the table, gathers her briefcase and purse. I push my chair back and set my empty juice glass in the sink. It’s perfect, actually. Mom’s giving me a ride to school—and essentially the tree—because I only have a short hike once we’re on school grounds.

I slip the vial of medicine into my pocket while Mom pauses at a small mirror next to the door. She twists a tube of lipstick and glides the color over her lips. I’m having trouble watching. Her breath fogs the glass. She breathes, she lives. Leaving this version of Mom behind would feel like a colossal mistake if I weren’t confident about saying hello again soon in another universe. Where everything will be flawless and complete, like a balanced chemistry equation.

“Ruby?” She’s waiting for me to snap out of my thoughts. “You ready?”

“Sorry. Let me get my backpack,” I say. I’m dreading the idea of lugging it around with me. All those books, my notebook, the code …

Suddenly I make a mental connection I should have made last night. But I’d been too exhausted, my mind too cluttered.

Ó Direáin’s journal!

A vibrating noise startles us, and Mom grabs her cell phone. “It’s a text message from Patrick,” she says, stepping out into the hallway. “He wants to know how you’re doing.”

She starts typing a response.

“Just give me a second,” I say, ducking back inside and into the bathroom. I close the door and pull the shower curtain and find what I want—the bottle of grape shampoo. I dry it off and tuck it into my backpack. If I can’t take Mom with me, it’s better than nothing.

Then I slip into her bedroom and visually search her nightstand. The big brown book I assumed was the Bible is there, and now I know it has to be Ó Direáin’s journal. Mom said she loves to read it at night before falling asleep.

I flip it open and read:

Ó Direáin, an eccentric genius, spent hours at the end of each day encrypting his scientific journal to protect his ideas. At least forty pages of code continue to elude even the best cryptologists’ efforts
.

My heartbeat accelerates. This is major.

I shove the book into my backpack, making it a few pounds heavier. I have to strain to zipper it shut. For a moment, I consider ditching one of the string theory books, but I’m not ready to let my science go. Mom is tucking her phone into her back pocket when I rejoin her in the
hallway. She locks the apartment door behind us and slips her hand into mine. “Okay?”

“Yep,” I say. “Let’s go.”

I’m jealous. I think of Ennis High and its narrow hallways, its buzzing and yellowed fluorescent lights, and the pitted football field. To go to Ó Direáin High every day instead? A dream. I run my hand along the massive stones as I enter the front doors. It’s a castle.

Mom guides me into the main office and explains the situation to the secretary, who keeps sneaking glances at me, trying not to stare. Then Mom takes me by the arm and leads me into a room with a leather couch, an exam table, a sink, cabinets, and a TV.

“You probably should keep your leg elevated,” she says, steering me toward the couch. She hands me the remote. “I’ll see you in less than two hours, okay?”

It hits me that the time has come to say good-bye, because a few minutes after she leaves the room, I’m taking off.

“Mom?”

“The nurse will be in later to check on you,” she says.

“But Mom,” I say, grabbing her arm, feeling that same disorienting vertigo I felt yesterday when I first laid eyes on her. As if the Earth is reversing its rotation, the ground shifting beneath us.

I pull her onto the couch next to me.

“What is it?” She takes my face in her hands, searching.

“I—” I choke on a sudden heaving in my chest and concentrate on not crying. “I—”

“Is it your leg?”

“No, not at all.”

We sit in silence, and I start to fidget. Will these be the last words we say to each other? What was the last thing she said to me that day eleven years ago before she left for work, for her accident on the interstate?
Be careful on the monkey bars. Don’t suck your thumb. Have a great day
.

“What did you pack for me? For lunch when I was four years old?”

Mom bites her lower lip. “In Pre-K? Why?”

“Just wishing I could remember.” I try to visualize opening a brown paper bag and finding a peanut butter sandwich, chips, an apple, and a note in my mother’s handwriting.

“I don’t remember what I put in your lunch, but I do remember what you took for show-and-tell.” A mischievous grin spreads across her face. “You had to bring something every Monday, for the letter of the week.”

“Like
C
is for ‘cat’? I took my favorite stuffed animal?”

Mom shakes her head. “For
C
we took a live cockroach in a jar.”

“Really?” I grin. “I bet that went over big. Whose idea was that?”

“Both of ours. We used to make lists of ideas. For
P
you took the potty from your dollhouse, which sent the entire class into giggles that your teacher couldn’t contain for fifteen minutes. By the time we got to
W
, we were in big trouble. Whoopee cushion.”

“I love that,” I whisper. I feel like I’ve been given a few pieces of an incomplete puzzle, one that I’d given up on a long time ago because I’d lost the box top and didn’t even know what picture it was supposed to make.

She pulls my face to hers so we’re touching foreheads. “I love you.”
She glances at her watch, pops to her feet, and forces a smile. “I’ll check on you between classes.”

Just like that she’s out the door. The room buzzes, the lights seem to flicker. She’s gone. I force myself to count to sixty, to take ten deep breaths—
H
is for “heartache”—and then I’m gone too.

The secretary’s back is turned; she’s busy dealing with two guys arguing about who hit whose car in the parking lot. So I sneak out of the office unnoticed.

The hallway is crowded with students, and I’m going the wrong way, a fish swimming upstream. Finally, I make it to the front door and squeeze my way through, muttering apologies as I go.

Just outside the door a girl thrusts her chin at me. “Check out Ruby Wright,” she says.

Another girl claps me on the back. “Your hair rocks. I wish I had the balls to do that.”

“Um. Thanks.”

I scan the crowd, looking for George, when I catch Patrick’s stare from across the throng. He elbows his way toward me, wearing a purple-and-gold football jersey, and I get the feeling that I’ve become the end zone he’s determined to reach. Cut left, roll right. There’s no way to dodge him. “Ruby,” he says, reaching across three people to grab my arm. Touchdown!

“Hey, big brother,” I say. More like Big Brother, because he seems to be everywhere, watching my every move.

“Here. I found this on the Internet last night.”

He hands me a piece of paper. It’s an article entitled “Long-Forgotten Head Injuries Linked to Mental Oddities and Illnesses.”

I roll my eyes.

“Seriously!” Patrick says. “Remember that time you fell out of that tree and cracked your head and broke your collarbone?”

“Yeah?” No. I climbed a lot of trees, but I never fell. I guess the Ruby in this universe didn’t have the same luck.

“Old head injuries can cause weird things to happen in the brain. Your personality and memory can be affected. Depression, stuff like that. There’s one lady who started talking with a Swedish accent twenty years after she fractured her skull.”

Patrick’s overbearing worry is annoying to the tenth power, but it’s oddly endearing at the same time. No one’s ever treated me like this before. “Why do you care so much?” I ask.

“Are you kidding?” He pulls me into a headlock and gives me a gentle noogie. “Remind me to buy you some Rogaine.”

I wrap my arms around his waist and press my head to his chest. For a moment, I feel a rush of love. But then my heart suddenly turns cold when I think of the injustices I’ve endured. Robbed of both a brother and a mother in Universe One. Why did the roads have to fork in those directions? It’s too much tragedy for one person. It’s not fair. No way I’m going back to that place.

Just then a burly guy wearing a football jersey punches Patrick’s arm. “Dude,” he says, casting me an up-and-down look. “Got a minute?” A girl in a cheerleading uniform trails behind him. She stares longingly at Patrick. I wonder if she practices that look in the mirror.

I try to hand the Internet article back to Patrick, but he pushes it toward me. “Read it,” he says. “Please.” Then he walks off with Mr. Muscles and Ms. Vixen.

Good-bye, Patrick. I watch him until he’s absorbed by the crowd.

When I turn back toward the parking lot, I’m worried that I’ve missed George, but there he is. He must have been waiting patiently for me to finish my conversation with Patrick.

“You okay?” he asks. “You’re heading the wrong direction, you know. The school’s that way.”

“I—uh,” I fumble. “I forgot something in my mom’s car.”

“That guy you were hugging …” He frowns, and I can see where he’s going with his train of thought.

“Patrick’s my brother,” I say, liking the way those words sound. Patrick Wright is my brother, Sally Wright is my mother.
Is
, not
was
.

“That’s what I thought. I wasn’t sure.”

His aquamarine eyes are hypnotic, and the lines start to blur. I could be George’s girlfriend here. I step away from him, shaking the thought. “I wish I could stay, George. I really gotta get going.”

“Hang on.” For a moment I think he’s going to kiss me, but instead he slides off his backpack and unzips it. He reaches in and pulls out a box.

“For you,” he says.

“A gift?” I open the box and inside there’s a white LEGO space shuttle. It’s exactly right, the way I remember it as a child. “Even the rocket boosters are perfect!”

George nods proudly. “But wait!” he says in an infomercial voice. “There’s more!” He hands me a sheet of paper. It’s grid paper, and he’s neatly drawn assembly instructions in ten numbered steps. “If anyone ever takes it apart again and makes it into a fugly house, you can fix it.”

“Do me a favor, okay?” I tell him, our faces close.

“What is it?”

I take a deep breath, not sure how to explain. “Later today, soon, I think—I really hope—the old Ruby is going to be back. I’m not sure where she is at this moment, but I’m wishing and expecting that she’s okay, and she’ll be home when I leave.”

George narrows his eyes at me, half smiling, probably not sure if I’m joking.

“I’m dead serious,” I say. “She’s not going to remember our Chinese lunch yesterday. She’s not going to know we kissed.”

“Ruby—” He inches backward.

“Just promise me you’ll ask her out,” I say. “Because I think there’s a reason you’re both here, in this town, taking French together. I think you’re, well, I think you’re—I mean we’re—meant to be.”

“You’re making no sense.”

“I know it sounds insane. I don’t really believe in fate, but there’s this undeniable and uncanny correlation between at least two coexisting planes—”

George holds up his hand to stop me from talking. “You sound completely bonkers, Ruby. Daffy, lunatic.”

I nod. “Demented, I know.” Unreal. We’re replaying the conversation we had last week at the café, on the leather couch, when he took out his iPhone and hit the thesaurus app. Only then we were talking about my dad, not me.

Before George speaks, I can already hear the words in my head. “Cracked, brainsick,
non compos mentis
,” he says.

“Please!”

He looks alarmed. “I was just trying to lighten the mood.”

I look up at the sky and its converging rain clouds. If only I could make this work somehow. Take George by the hand, walk into the fresh air, and just keep going. Through downtown Ó Direáin, past the library and the park. Away. Away from all this tangled-up confusion. I can see us walking through fields of wildflowers. Add a rainbow.

“Ruby?” George touches my arm and jolts me back.

“You’re amazing,” I say to him, cradling the LEGO spacecraft. “Thank you for this.”

The bell rings, and we’re the only two left standing outside. George doesn’t seem to mind that I’m making him late.

“Could you do me a favor?” From my backpack, I pull a piece of paper and a pen. I quickly scribble a note, fold it in half and write “For Sally Wright” on the outside of it. “Could you give this to the secretary in the office?”

“Sure.” Another bell rings and George inches toward the door. “See you in class,” he says.

I give him a quick kiss on the cheek and turn away, pretending to head toward Mom’s car.

“Unbalanced, unhinged, nutso!” he calls out after me. Then I hear him laugh with that teasing tone in his voice. And I know I haven’t ruined it for George and Ruby in this parallel world with my perplexing behavior. He still likes her/me.

Besides, it’s hard not to notice the thread. Call it what you want, there seems to be something bigger at work, and I’m beginning to believe that no matter where I look, we’ll be together.