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Another shrug. He takes a few steps back, assessing the two columns. “I’ve been lazy some days.” I have to hold back a snort. Lazy is not a word I can imagine someone ever associating with Miles Kasher-Okamoto. It wouldn’t just be an insult—it’s laughable. “And I created a mnemonic to help remember everything. I suggest you do the same.”
“What, like ROY G. BIV?”
“Less rudimentary, but yes.”
“I’ll try to come up with one worthy of your advanced intelligence,” I say sweetly. I nod toward the chalkboard. “Learning to drive stick really didn’t work? I’m shocked.” But something is weighing on me, and I’m not sure I can commit to all this musty library research without an answer. “Before we get too deep in this… I know that you’ve apologized, and I’m over it—really. But I have to know. Why were you such a jackass to me in class?”
This seems to catch him off guard. He presses his lips together and turns the chalk over and over in his hand, as though the answer is written on it in the tiniest font. “That was uncalled for. I know. I think part of me was… I don’t know, testing the limits of what I could get away with.”
“Because you could be as cruel as you wanted, and I wouldn’t remember it the next day?” Until I did, I imagine we’re both thinking.
“Not quite,” he says. “I guess I was just frustrated with everything, and I may have taken it out on you because you happened to be sitting next to me. It was immature—I see that now. I really am sorry, Barrett.”
And maybe this will come back to bite me later, but I believe him. I believe that he’s sorry and, after all my failed attempts and determination to stay positive, I can’t blame him for wanting to test the limits.
“Thanks.” I can’t describe the feeling of imagining another version of myself out there, doing something this version of me has? had? has no control over. It feels like a violation, almost. “How do we even know these are our real selves right now?”
A wry smile. “We don’t.” Cool. Cool. Love that uncertainty. “In a way, all of them are our real selves. That is, assuming those other versions of us are still out there, living their lives. We of course have no way of knowing.”
Naturally. I gesture back at the chalkboard. “What does the dot mean?” He’s added one to a big chunk of his earlier loops and scattered throughout.
“Oh. Those are the days Zeta Kappa goes up in flames.”
I gape at him. “You’re telling me that in every version of this day before I got stuck, I set fire to that frat?”
“Not every day,” he says, and some of the tension leaves my shoulders. With his chalk, he points to loop 27. “There was one day you, uh, accidentally set yourself on fire.”
“It’s a wonder I don’t have guys lining up to date me.”
“Your stop, drop, and roll was really… athletic, though. And another day, you—” His piece of chalk falls to the floor, and he hurries to pick it back up, not meeting my eyes. I’m not sure a single living human is more awkward than Miles Kasher-Okamoto. That has to be a scientific achievement all its own. “You took control of the barbecue and made everyone hot dogs. But generally, unless I intervened… yes. You burned down Zeta Kappa.”
“Brilliant. I’m a fucking pyro.” I inhale deeply to ward off another sneeze and perhaps also a panic attack. “Somehow I get the feeling the universe isn’t doing this because it wants me to save a frat.”
“At first I thought that was what I was supposed to do. Stop the fire from happening. Once I found out about it, I kept trying to prevent it—and I almost never could. The couple times I did succeed, I still woke up on September twenty-first. Because, see, that’s the trouble,” Miles says. “Personifying the universe. We don’t know if this is something that someone is actively controlling, if there’s some puppet master out there pulling the strings, or…”
“Or if it’s something that can be explained with science.”
A slow, sly almost-grin. “Exactly. And that’s what I’ve been trying to figure out. I’ve found some articles over the years where people claim they’ve been stuck in a time loop, and if you dive deep enough online, there are plenty of message boards and conspiracy theories.”
“I’ve seen a bunch of those too,” I say.
“But I can’t shake the feeling that if we’re going to find something, it’s going to be in here. I’m trying to learn as much about relativity as possible, just to see if I can come up with additional theories. And then there’s the question of quantum mechanics, which, admittedly, I’m not as familiar with yet as I ought to be.”
“I’m just going to put this out there,” I say, because a tension headache is already building behind one eye, “but what if the solution really is Groundhog Day–ing it, and we’re stuck here until we become better people? It’s possible I was rushing through my attempts over the past week. If we tackled it together, I’m sure we could come up with something better.”
I mean for this to be a perfectly logical idea, but Miles flicks his chalk onto the table and grips the top of the chair next to me. “No.”
“Isn’t that just as valid as any of your theories?”
He barks out a sound, a sharp ha that’s never sounded further from a laugh. “My theories are grounded in the fundamental laws of nature.”
So working together is to be torture, then.
“We’re already experiencing something that goes against everything we thought we knew about the ‘rules,’?” I say, hoping my use of air quotes annoys him as much as his unchecked arrogance annoys me. “Maybe a witch waved a fucking magic wand and cursed us. Because that sounds just about as likely as science forcing us to repeat the same day over and over.”
“I thought you were here because you wanted to do things my way.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize I was just your research assistant.”
