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Physics 101: Where Everyone and Everything Has Potential.
Every detail, perfectly re-created.
I nearly gasp when the realization hits me: maybe my subconscious is giving me a chance to fix what I did yesterday. Maybe once I do that, I’ll wake up in a hospital bed, my mom telling me that it was lucky I got out of Olmsted before the whole thing collapsed.
Yes. That has to be it.
Except when Miles walks in, wearing the same red flannel he wore yesterday, his hair damp from a shower, he scans the room before his gaze lands on me, his mouth kicking up into the smallest of smiles. Almost as though—and I realize it’s ludicrous even as I think it—as though he was looking for me, and he didn’t expect me to be in the first row.
Despite the couple hundred other empty seats, Miles heads right for me, and my stomach prepares for battle with the breakfast burrito.
“Is this seat taken?” he asks, fiddling with the frayed strap of his backpack.
“The whole row, actually.” I do my best to act normal, a calm and collected Barrett who will not let this guy get me in trouble with the professor, even in a dream. “I’ve got a lot of friends. Popularity is a burden.”
His jaw twitches. “Okay” is all he says before taking a seat in the row right behind me.
Dr. Okamoto repeats her introduction, and this time I don’t take notes. Especially now that Miles has a clear view of my laptop. I’m paranoid about what my subconscious’s version of him can see, so I shift in my seat to shield it from him.
“Government secrets?” he asks in a whisper when Dr. Okamoto’s PowerPoint freezes up for half a minute, the same way it did yesterday.
“So many,” I whisper back. Not provoking Miles, even though he’s the one who provoked me first: that’s one way I’ll do this right.
Then the slide unfreezes, and Miles doesn’t say anything for the rest of class.
Good. I have bigger things to worry about.
Chapter 6
EVEN THOUGH I’VE CONVINCED MYSELF today is an elaborate hallucination-slash-dream-slash-out-of-body-experience, that doesn’t make it any less eerie. I feel full of contradictions: my mind is hazy, while in front of me, too many details are painted in the brightest colors, exactly as they were yesterday. The gopher girl. The clubs and food trucks. The swing dancers in Red Square.
Still, I’m set on proving to my subconscious, or whatever part of me is in charge here, that I can get this right. I don’t go to the counseling center to try to swap physics for something else, and I even raise my hand in my English class.
“Comma splice,” I say, and the TA, a spectacularly eyelashed grad student named Grant, snaps out of his sleep- and/or weed-induced haze and offers me a half smile.
“Perfect,” he says from his chair across the circle. That was how he instructed the twenty of us to sit—no desks. I am a cool TA, this said. “Barrett, right?”
The way he says my name isn’t the way teachers back at Island said it: Oh. Barrett, accompanied by a forced smile, a pinch of their foreheads. So, just for fun, I raise my hand a few minutes later and answer another question.
But by the time I’m pounding up the steps of the journalism building after having watched that skateboarder plow into the group of swing dancers once more, the déjà vu is so intense that the haziness has given way to a full-on headache, a slight but insistent stabbing right between my eyebrows.
“I remember you from the info sesh,” editor in chief Annabel Costa says when I introduce myself. “You were the one who asked all the questions.”
“It’s at least sixty percent of being a reporter, right?”
A flash of something crosses her face. “Exactly what I was going to say. Let’s talk in my office.”
And there we are, corralled by the Sharpied orange walls, Annabel looking just as comfortable as she did yesterday as she tucks her black dress underneath her. It’s unsettling, being this close to her, anticipating every move she makes. I find I even remember when she gets fed up with her long blond bangs and fishes inside the desk drawer for a bobby pin.
“You know the basics from yesterday, yeah?” she says, hooking the bobby pin into her hair.
“From… yesterday?” I repeat, wondering if she’s talking about the real yesterday, the one none of these dream beings remember.
“The info session? We just talked about it five seconds ago?”
“Right. Of course,” I say. “Reporters are assigned to different sections—news, sports, features, arts. And the paper comes out Mondays and Wednesdays.”
Annabel nods. “Budget cuts have been rough. But we’re still kicking, and I think the quality of our reporting is the best it’s ever been. We were named the best non-daily college newspaper by the Society of Professional Journalists two years ago.” Her mouth pulls into a frown. “Are you okay?”
