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His hands tense, his eyes flashing with a thousand megawatts of electricity. “Well, I’m the one with more experience. Maybe you should be.”
“Classic. A man eager to steamroll a woman and make her work for him.” In one swift motion, I push out my chair and get to my feet, hating the feeling of him towering over me. I can send all that electrical energy right back to him. “That’s what your scientists were so good at, right? I know all about Rosalind Franklin.”
“What are you—” Miles tries between sharp breaths, as though arguing with me is diminishing his lung capacity. “What does that have to do with—”
“Anything I can help you with?”
A librarian is standing on the opposite side of our table, probably drawn by the sound of our raised voices. She’s a middle-aged white woman with graying brown hair in a cute wavy bob and an oversize houndstooth sweater I would absolutely wear.
My heart is racing, and I savor the chance to get a proper inhale. “We’re fine. Thank you.”
“You just holler if you need anything,” she says, giving us a warm smile before retreating into the stacks.
“Happens every day,” Miles says when she’s gone. “She’s actually been quite helpful, but now that I know my way around the library, I always feel bad telling her I don’t need anything.”
I grunt in response, slumping into my chair and refusing to make eye contact. Maybe I really did die and this is my hell: trapped in a library, forced to research quantum mechanics for all of eternity. I’d much rather have all my body hair plucked out strand by strand, thanks.
A soft creaking as Miles sits down next to me. “Can we at least try it my way?” I can tell it’s taking all he has to keep his voice level.
“Fine,” I say, considering I don’t have any other options. “But I’m not your fucking assistant.”
“Noted. And—I’m sorry. Again. For being on edge… again.” He plucks a notebook from his backpack and opens it up, I’m guessing because the chalkboard’s run out of space. “With time travel, time loops, anomalies, whatever you want to call them—it’s all about finding patterns. What I want to know,” he continues as he writes this next question in bold ballpoint-pen lettering, “is why us? Out of all the people on campus, assuming this doesn’t go beyond UW, why Barrett Bloom and Miles Kasher-Okamoto? Aside from the fact that we’re both in Physics 101 and live in Olmsted, but that could apply to a thousand different people. I keep coming back to thinking we might have done something the day before we got stuck that triggered it.”
“Like, what, we both tripped and fell into a swirling vortex of doom? I feel like I’d remember that.”
“Swirling vortex of doom,” he repeats, another one of those half smiles playing on his lips, and against all my natural instincts to loathe him, it makes me soften a little bit. I keep waiting for him to go all out with one of his smiles, but I’m not sure I’d be able to withstand its power. “Sounds like a heavy metal band.” Then he refocuses, that ghost of a smile gone. “What were you doing the day before you got stuck? September twentieth?”
I’ve been so focused on Wednesday that Tuesday feels like a lifetime ago. “I woke up. Obviously. I had cereal for breakfast, I think? I went to an info session for the Washingtonian, went to a freshman orientation. Walked around campus, pretending I knew exactly where I was going because I’d been there dozens of times with my mom, even though I definitely didn’t.”
Watched everyone taking selfies with their friends in the quad. Signing up for clubs. Eating dinner together. And thought, My life is about to change. This is the place it happens.
“I did some laundry, because I planned poorly and didn’t end up doing enough of it before I moved in. Lost a sock, because that’s what I get for trying to have clean clothes, apparently.” RIP, SHITSHOW sock. “The Olmsted dining hall was serving all-you-can-eat pasta, so I did some damage there, and then I managed to sneak into the elevator with a few bowls I wasn’t supposed to take upstairs. And then, well, my roommate hadn’t moved in yet, so I took advantage of the alone time and did some… solo self-care.”
“Took advantage of the—” Miles’s pen stutters in his notebook, a little squiggle that looks like a spike on an EKG. A blush spreads across his cheeks, the tips of his ears. “Oh. I’m, ah, not going to write that one down.”
My brain-to-mouth filter has not properly functioned for years. It’s possible I’ve never had one.
“I highly doubt my orgasms were so momentous that they literally stopped time.” I really had to go ahead and make it plural. Surely, I’m about to make a scientific discovery of my own: whether it’s possible to die from embarrassment.
“If that were the case,” Miles says, still staring down at the paper, “then I’m shocked more of us aren’t shuttled through time on a regular basis.”
Is he… making a joke? I’ve only had a few glimpses of the Miles who isn’t this buttoned-up academic, this person with empathy and a sense of humor. In another universe, because I’ve halfway lost hope in this one, maybe Miles is even capable of fun.
“Anyway,” I continue, eager to move past this topic, my face painfully slow to cool down, “nothing I did was life-altering. Or timeline-altering. Clearly.”
Miles tugs on the collar of his shirt, his cheeks returning to their normal shade. The tips of his ears, however, still glow red. “Mine wasn’t very noteworthy either,” he says, and proceeds to recount his day in excessive detail, from the type of toast and jam he had (multigrain and raspberry) to a play-by-play of the floor meeting his RA held.
“We weren’t even in the same buildings for very long,” I say. “Or at the same time. It wasn’t like some chunk of metaphysical space junk fell on top of us, unless that’s what you want to call whatever’s on the floors of the Olmsted bathrooms.” There was a reason I’d ranked it dead last on my residence-hall application.
“And no swirling vortex of doom,” he agrees. “Which doesn’t mean my theory is wrong, necessarily. It just makes this a little more challenging.”
After more discussion, we find we have one thing in common: both of us wake up at 6:50 every morning, meaning the day doesn’t reset at midnight, and we’ve never been able to successfully stay awake to outrun the loop. When I passed out at the hospital, that didn’t restart the loop either.
“In terms of rules, at least we have that,” I say.
“But we also don’t know if the rules are always changing, or if they’re fixed,” he counters. “Since you weren’t stuck from the beginning, it makes me think they’re not entirely fixed.”
For all my hostility, I should probably give Miles a marginal amount of credit here. Would I prefer to be stuck in a time loop with an early-2000s Milo Ventimiglia? One hundred percent. But maybe being here with a budding physicist has its benefits. What was it that Miles said about it on my first first day? Something about how the universe acts, and predicting how it might act in the future. If there’s an explanation for what’s happening to us, physics might lead us to a solution.
