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His phone lights up next to him, and without glancing up from his book, he switches it off. This has happened every day, and he never picks it up.
“You can answer it,” I say, checking the time. 3:26. But he doesn’t.
I don’t think I’ve stretched my legs in four hours. I push the book of lectures with too much force, sending it careening toward a stack at the edge of our table. A few books topple over, landing on the carpet in a series of muted thumps. Just like that, Gladys is by our table, eyes wide with worry.
“Sorry, sorry,” I whisper, scrambling out of my chair to pick up the books. I have to admit, she’s nice company, even if we have to reintroduce ourselves to her every day.
“Just making sure you two are okay,” she says sweetly. “Some of those books are heavier than they look.”
I frown at the stack I’ve just tidied. I’m not actually sure which book I was in the middle of—that’s how far gone I am.
We can’t approach this logically. We can’t use logic to solve something illogical, and Miles eats logic for breakfast with a side of whole-grain critical thinking.
I gesture to his book. A Short History of Nearly Everything, because sure. Why wouldn’t that be what it’s called? “Have you learned it all yet? Nearly everything?”
“Almost,” he murmurs.
“I’m going to make a deal with you,” I say to research-trance Miles. He sticks an index finger in the book, bestowing upon me the honor of eye contact. “It’s not that I don’t find all of this enthralling, but I can’t do this every day. And not just because we’re eventually going to be so deficient in vitamin D that the sun will melt our skin off our faces the moment we step outside again.”
“What’s the deal?”
“We try this half your way, through research. And half my way.”
His brows push together in a dubious furrow. “If you make me wave around one of those gopher signs—”
I hold up a hand, not in the mood for any of his whole-grain Miles logic. “My way means accepting this might be magic, and not science. I’ve seen this kind of thing play out before. In fiction. I may not have a photographic memory, but there’s a lot of pop-culture knowledge stored up in here.” I tap my head the way he did ???? a few days ago. “And it means no wisecracks about my methods. I respect your way of doing things, and you respect mine. You’re the scientist. You should want to test multiple theories.”
I expect him to protest, to tell me no way is he putting any stock in something he can’t find in a textbook that smells like sadness. Instead, he nods.
“Okay,” he says. Miles Kasher-Okamoto, agreeing with me just like that. “We’ll try it.”
His dark eyes are heavy on mine. Weary. When I look at him, I don’t only see the reserved, stoic boy from day one. I see someone who’s just as lost as I am, someone who was maybe lost before his timeline ever veered off course. Sixty-nine days, and he’s spent nearly all of them in the library, and there’s something about that that makes me incredibly sad, all of a sudden.
Because yes, this is frustrating as all hell, but it’s also something else: an opportunity.
One that I don’t think Miles, with his rationed smiles and his loops painstakingly documented on that chalkboard, has taken advantage of.
“I need a break,” I say, wrenching my gaze from his, aware I’ve been staring a few moments too long. Trying to make sense of him. “Stretch my legs, reset my brain. Could we meet back up later? I’ll text you.” The three numbers I now know by heart: my mom’s, the landline we haven’t had since I was eight, and Miles Kasher-Okamoto’s.
He sighs again, a new type of sigh I haven’t been able to categorize yet. I hope it isn’t resignation. “Yeah. Of course.” Halfheartedly, he drags a highlighter through a sentence in his book. The first time he did this, I gasped, imagining the kind of fine he’d have to pay—before realizing the mark would be erased tomorrow. “I’ll see you.”
Just when I think we might be making progress, he shuts back down. All right, then.
As I make my way across campus, there’s none of that first-day excitement anymore. I know that outside the engineering building, there’s a poster for UW’s bird-watching club that missed the recycling bin that no one’s going to pick up. I know that guy who’s not supposed to be skateboarding in Red Square is going to collide with those swing dancers and eat brick in about three seconds.
“Look out!” I tell the skateboarder, if only because I can’t help myself.
When he glances my way, he loses focus—and barrels into a booth of student-government candidates instead. They let out a shriek as he knocks over their table, sending their papers flying.
“Sorry, I was—” the skateboarder says as he examines a scraped knee, but when he turns to point at me, I’m already tearing out of the square.
Jesus, I’m incapable of doing a single good thing.
Back in Olmsted, all four elevators are at the top floors, and because they take forever to get back down, I opt to trudge up the nine flights of stairs instead. Maybe the exercise and the concrete and the god-knows-what growing in the crevices will fire up my brain and set that neuron soup to boil. Give me some indication of what to do next.
Because it feels like we’re doomed to repeat this day over and over and over until something of some magnitude happens, something that definitely hasn’t happened yet. And I have no clue what it could be.
I’m between flights three and four when I hear an odd sound. I go up another flight, and my hunch is confirmed: someone’s crying. It freezes me in place for a moment before I start back up again. I huff and puff up the next two flights until I spot the source of the sound, a small red-haired girl slumped against the wall, phone clutched to her chest.
