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FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 23
Chapter 41
THURSDAY LASTS FOR ONLY TWENTY-FOUR hours, exactly as it’s meant to, before giving way to Friday. No fanfare, no confetti cannons, no revelations about the ever-shifting nature of the universe.
I’ve spent so much time focused on Thursday that Friday seems like a foreign concept. I wake up to photos from yesterday’s proposal, the greeting cards looking like a tornado rolled through our living room. Maybe the sculptures don’t have the structural integrity of what Jocelyn, Miles, and I built together, but with my mom and her fiancée embracing in front of them, they look perfect.
And then I’m back in Physics 101, Monday-Wednesday-Friday, taking Miles’s seat from my first first day.
I even bought the textbook and did the assigned reading.
Miles, creature of habit that he was is, heads up the stairs, a frown tugging his brows into a crease when he spies me in his seat. Still, he sits down next to me, each lovely detail of him setting off alarms in my brain. His hair, artfully mussed the way it always is in the mornings, especially if I’ve just run my hands through it. His shoulders, and how I fit against his chest when he wraps his arms around me. His throat, and the spot I kissed until I left a mark.
How can he remember none of that?
“Do you know the Wi-Fi password?” I ask, right as he’s taking out his laptop.
The frown deepens. “You. You stopped me in the quad yesterday.” He punches a few keys on his laptop. “It’s on the board.”
But, miraculously, he doesn’t change seats.
He’s wearing another button-up over a T-shirt, a blue one this time. I have to fight the urge to climb into his lap and nibble on one of his ears. It’s cruel of the universe that he doesn’t remember the day we spent entirely in our rooms, switching whenever we knew our roommates were on their way, learning what we liked and what we really liked, telling secrets and unraveling histories. Talking about our hopes for the future. A future we weren’t sure we’d get to have and one I’m not sure I can bear alone.
He was the one worried we might not remember each other, and he’s the one who’s forgotten me. Those memories of the past month are precious, and even if something went wrong and this is an entirely different version of Miles, I can’t accept that they’re not in there somewhere. The flash I experienced when we almost kissed is proof of that.
I’ll just have to jog his memory. I dig into my bag, piling a salted chocolate-chip cookie, a bagel from Mabel’s, and a batch of freshly fried mozzarella sticks on the desk next to me. One could argue it’s too early for mozzarella sticks, and to that I say, clearly you’ve never experienced the culinary delight that is deep-fried cheese from the Dawg House.
“Did you bring a whole refrigerator to class with you?” Miles says. Good. I’ve gotten his attention.
“You haven’t tried these yet?” I open a compostable cup of marinara and swirl a mozzarella stick through it, trying to recall exactly what he said about them all those days ago. “They’re perfectly crisp but not burnt, and the cheese melts in your mouth. I’ve had them every day since I moved in.”
Miles’s frown flattens for a moment.
“What is it?” I ask, taking another bite.
“I’m just… having some déjà vu.” He drops his gaze back to his computer. “But enjoy your mozzarella sticks, I guess.”
When class starts, I take the opportunity to raise my hand at the first question Dr. Okamoto asks.
“Physics is the study of matter and energy and how they relate to each other. We use it to understand how the universe acts and predict how it might behave in the future,” I declare.
She gives me an odd look. “That’s correct,” she says, “but the question was about Newton’s third law.”
Someone in the second row raises their hand, and Dr. Okamoto calls on them.
“What are you doing?” Miles hisses, and I just smile sweetly and offer him a mozzarella stick. Sadly, he refuses.
Come on, I urge him. You know me. Those memories have to be in there somewhere.
The person I fell in love with can’t just be gone—because what if he doesn’t fall in love with me this time?
By the end of class, I’m shocked Miles hasn’t made a mad dash to the other side of the auditorium. I’ve made a messy show of eating mozzarella sticks, which unfortunately lost their crispiness on the walk from the Dawg House to physics, answered as many of Dr. Okamoto’s questions as possible, and even pulled up r/BreadStapledToTrees. Nothing.
As he’s packing up, sliding his PHYSICS MATTERS laptop into his bag, I turn to him again.
“Hey. So you might have noticed I’ve been acting a little weird—”
Miles chokes out a laugh. “Oh really? Have you?”
