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AGAIN, I DESPISE YOU.
BUT YES.
Unfortunately, that’s exactly why I’m here. Yesterday, after Lucie did her typical woe is me for being forced to room with the monster that is Barrett Bloom routine, which is really wearing on the fragments of self-esteem I escaped high school with, I gave myself a day to wallow. One full day, during which I ignored Lucie, ordered two Neapolitan pizzas and a dozen artisan cupcakes, and watched a season of Felicity—which my mom always says never properly prepared her for college—and tried to convince myself this wouldn’t break me. Not until I’d exhausted all my resources, tried every wild idea.
Emphasis on the exhausted. That was the truth of how I was feeling as Miles’s words from however the hell many five days before pulsed in my ears. When you’re ready to take this seriously, you know where to find me. A full week of trying to get to Thursday, to Jocelyn’s proposal, and I’m no closer to knowing what’s going on.
And this means I need help.
Although I can’t see him, I’m positive he’s smirking right now, a fantastically infuriating victory smirk.
“Meet me in the physics library after class.” Miles’s voice holds a quiet confidence. A secret between the two of us, and maybe the universe, too.
FINE. LET’S RESEARCH THE SHIT OUT OF THIS.
Later that morning, I learn that UW has not one but three science libraries, and the one devoted to physics is the least loved of the bunch.
Most of the school’s libraries are either modern state-of-the-art structures or old brick buildings, gorgeous and perfectly preserved. But this one just looks… sad. Like the seventh kid in a family, cursed to wear hand-me-downs for the rest of their life. It’s in the basement of the physics building, brown-carpeted and dimly lit, probably to hide the fact that this place hasn’t been deep-cleaned since UW’s first graduating class. But, maybe most importantly: it’s empty.
“This is where you’ve been for the past sixty-five days?” I follow him through a maze of dusty shelves, fighting a sneeze.
“Sixty-six.” He slides his backpack onto what I assume is his usual table, given how he picks a seat without even glancing at it. Or, who knows, maybe he mixes it up, chooses a different table each time. Miles seems like the kind of guy who lives on the edge. “And for the most part, yes.”
“God, you could probably have your PhD by now.”
“Please,” he says with a scoff. “I’d need two years of advanced coursework and at least that many years spent on a dissertation to get to that point. The idea that I’m even close is laughable.”
“But you want to,” I say.
A shrug. “Maybe.” Then he clears his throat and turns to a chalkboard—a chalkboard, not a whiteboard—positioned behind the table. It’s not a brush-off, not quite. With a bachelor’s degree in physics, I assume he could get plenty of jobs… physicsing. It would probably be helpful if I had any sense of what a professional physicist does.
Miles picks up a jagged piece of chalk. “We both have heavy research backgrounds. You’re the journalist. I’m the scientist. We should be able to figure this out.”
“Right.” A journalist who can’t even get onto her college paper. Lately, all those magazines in my room have been mocking me. Surely, Jia Tolentino and Peggy Orenstein and Nora Ephron would have had no trouble making it onto the Washingtonian.
He either ignores the flatness in my tone or doesn’t notice. “Can you give me an abstract of what you’ve done during each anomaly, as best as you can remember?”
“An abstract?”
“A summary. A synopsis. A run-through.”
“I know what it means. I’m just not sure I’ve ever heard someone use the word in that context in casual conversation.” I drum my fingertips on the table, aware I’m about to rile him even more but diving in anyway. “If we’re going to do this, we need a better word than anomaly.”
Miles clutches the chalk tighter. “I’m open to suggestions,” he says, “as long as we can get off this tangent sometime today.”
“What about just loops? Simpler.”
“I can live with that.”
I explain to him everything I’ve done so far, and he writes it all down in neat but cramped letters. I get a flash of a future Miles as a physics professor: a crooked tie, a shirt rolled to his elbows, so excited about physics that he forgets to dot his i’s and cross his t’s.
When I finish, he draws a line down the board and, lightning fast, scribbles down his loops. All of his loops, from the look of it, and I just watch, trying to keep my jaw from dropping. He wasn’t lying about his stellar memory. There are several dozen that say library, a handful of PHYS 101, and some that are abbreviated in ways I imagine make sense only to him, like LHC attempt and one that’s simply M.
“Is LHC a drug?” I ask.
“Large Hadron Collider,” he says. “In Geneva. I tried to stay awake on the flight, but I must have fallen asleep somewhere across the Atlantic, because I woke up back in Olmsted.”
“You have to re-create this every day,” I say, some amount of awe in my voice, despite the evidence that he’s spent most of those days in the library.
