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“A typical Saturday for me.”
“You pass a friend in an identical spaceship going much slower. Your friend’s watch would be operating slower than yours,” he says. “In the simplest of terms, that’s special relativity. General relativity posits that massive objects warp both time and space around them, and that warping is gravity. Again, in the simplest of terms. And because it can bend both space and time—space-time, an integral piece of Einstein’s theory—you could be on top of Mount Everest with a watch moving faster than someone standing at the bottom.
“The first time I went through September twenty-first, you and I barely interacted,” he continues. “You sat next to me in physics and asked for the Wi-Fi password that was very clearly written on the board.” I fight rolling my eyes at this. “But that was it. I didn’t know about the fire at the frat until I heard people talking about it in the dorm that night, and it took me a few more repeats to connect it to you.”
“You mean you weren’t originally invited to the party?” I splay my hands on the table between us and school my face into a serious expression. “Does the president of Zeta Kappa know about this? No—maybe we should take it up with the president of the university? I want to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
Shocker: Miles is unamused. “You know, you’d probably grasp this quicker if you stopped making jokes about it.”
“My first day wasn’t the same as yours, then,” I say. “On mine, you called me out in front of the whole class. And we wound up walking to the party together when you were creeping in the bushes.”
“I was not creeping. It’s a shortcut through campus.” He squints, as if trying to pull something from his memory. “That must have been… day fifty-nine for me. What I think is happening is that when I got stuck, my time started operating at a higher frequency than yours. That means I was experiencing more days in the same period of time that you—and everyone else—were experiencing far fewer.”
“Okay…” I have never felt less intelligent than I do in this moment. Stalling for time, pretending I’m taking in everything he said, I hook a finger around one arm of my glasses and spin them around a few times. “So when I told you I took AP Physics, I kind of got a two on the test. I’m still not sure I understand how we had two completely different Wednesdays before getting stuck.”
I expect him to grow frustrated with me, but instead he reaches for a mozzarella stick, ripping it in half, and placing the two ends next to each other. “Picture it like this. For eighteen years, our timelines have, to the best of our knowledge, moved along at the same speed. Until my first Wednesday.” At that, he splits one of the halves into two. “This is the version of you I met on that day, while this other version of you—that is to say, the version sitting next to me right now—was moving so slowly that it took her a while to catch up to that day.” He keeps tearing off hunks of mozzarella, representing all these Barretts I’ve been and never will be. “When your time caught up to mine, I had already experienced fifty-eight versions of that day.”
Oh god. This is too much. “And what if one of us suddenly starts moving at a regular speed again?”
“Then we’d need more mozzarella sticks.” He gestures to the not-Barrett Barrett sticks. “We can assume that everyone who isn’t stuck—like all these versions of you before you did get stuck—is moving at a much slower frequency than either of us. Now that we’ve caught up to each other, I think it’s safe to say our time is moving at a similar rate.”
“So there are all these different versions of me out there, continuing on their own timelines after their version of September twenty-first?”
“If you believe in parallel universes, then yes. Potentially,” he says, “but again, this is just a theory. I can’t answer that with any amount of certainty.”
“That would be a first.” Still, I’m grateful for the explanation. I’m light-headed and untethered and a little queasy, but grateful nonetheless.
“I’ve been trying to figure out why you’ve acted differently over the past few days,” Miles says. “Usually, you keep to yourself. Unless…”
“Unless what?”
He turns sheepish. “Unless we interact.”
“So you’re the one who dragged me into this,” I say, the gratitude vanishing. “Your timeline got all screwy, and you passed it along to me.”
“That’s—that’s not how this works.” Miles huffs out a breath, pinching the bridge of his nose. Like he’s offended on behalf of physics.
“You just admitted you don’t know how it works!”
“Not entirely how it works,” he corrects in this pompous voice that makes me want to dunk his face into the dish of marinara. “Time isn’t the common cold. I didn’t sneeze on you and create a parallel universe.”
“But if your timeline was fucked, and then you interacted with me and made me do something different… could that have messed with space-time, or whatever?”
His expression shifts, like he knows I’ve made a good point but would sooner switch his major to fingerpainting than admit it. “I suppose that’s not impossible,” he relents.
“Take that, AP Physics.” I hold up a victorious fist. Then something dawns on me. “The friend you were looking for at the party. That was me.” He nods. “And that’s why you sat behind me.” I steal another mozzarella stick. “You act all spacey sometimes. Like on my first day. You called me out in class, and then you forgot about it.”
“When you’re stuck here for sixty-one days, things get a little… blurred together.” But he frowns, his eyebrows pulling together again, and I get the feeling there’s something he wants to say but isn’t going to.
“Neither of us is alone now, I guess,” I say. “That’s something.”
Before Miles can assure me that yes, of course he’s thrilled to be stuck with me, his phone rings.
“Do you have to get that?”
Without looking at it, he rejects the call and flips his phone facedown on the table.
Guess he already knows what they have to say.
