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“Between this and the pepper spray, I must be destined to cause you pain,” I say once he’s safely clothed.
When he gives me this look, his dark eyes impossible to read, I wonder if maybe that pain goes both ways.
DAY FOURTEEN
Chapter 19
IF ELLA DEVEREUX TAUGHT AT UW, there has to be a record on her, and on the next Miles day, he suggests we try to find it.
There’s a long line of students waiting to talk to the bored-looking woman behind the counter in the physics department office. “If this is about switching classes, you’ll have to fill out one of those forms,” she says when I get to the front, pointing to a stack on the desk next to her.
“Oh—it’s not,” I say. “I’m a reporter on the Washingtonian, and I was hoping to get some information about a professor who used to work here?”
She sighs as though I’ve asked if I can change my major to mushroom foraging. “And this is something that needs to be done on the first day of the quarter? I have a long line of schedule changes to process.”
Next to me, Miles squares his shoulders, readjusting the collar of his typical plaid flannel. “We’ll be fast. Her name is Ella Devereux, possibly Eloise Devereux.”
“One moment.” When she disappears, the people behind us in line let out a collective groan.
“We’ve just made a dozen new enemies,” I whisper to Miles, who seems unfazed.
“They’ll forget us by tomorrow.”
The woman returns with an older man wearing a frown beneath a salt-and-pepper mustache. “You’re the ones looking for Devereux?” he says, arms crossed over a UW sweatshirt. “We don’t have records for anyone with that name.”
“You—what?” I say, taken aback. “Are you sure you spelled it—”
“If there’s nothing else we can help you with,” he interrupts, “I suggest you get back to your classes.”
I blink at him, aware we’re being brushed off but unable to comprehend why. “You don’t have any records at all? We were talking to Professor Rivera, in the horticulture department? He said she taught this class about time travel that was really hard to get an A in, and that she stopped about ten years back?”
When the man just stares at me, I realize how ridiculous my words sound.
“My mother is a professor in this department,” Miles says, backing me up. “She recalls working with Dr. Devereux for a year before she left.”
“We see thousands of students come through here every year. Hundreds of professors. Perhaps they got the name wrong.”
“Then could you at least look in the back there”—I crane my neck to see around the corner—“and let us know who taught Time Travel for Beginners?”
“Are you fucking kidding me,” a guy behind me mutters.
“I’m not sure what kind of a joke this is,” the man says with a derisive laugh, “but we are an esteemed institution. That class sounds like pure fiction.” He gestures to the exasperated crowd filling the office. “Now. We have a line full of physics students with legitimate concerns to help. If you’re not one of them, I suggest moving on.” With that, he waves forward the next person.
Shoulders slouched, we venture back into the quad, through Red Square, passing the swing dancers and Save the Gophers Kendall and all these people completely unaware that what they’re doing today may very well not matter.
“It’s a dead end,” Miles says as we grab a bench near a group of slackliners. “We can’t find someone the internet and physics department are telling us never existed.”
But my journalistic instincts refuse to be quiet. We could pry more information out of Professor Rivera. We could keep digging. Desperately, I glance around at the scene in front of us, as though a hint is hiding in the trees or grass or buildings from the early 1900s. There has to be something we haven’t tried yet. A burst of inspiration and hope that I could really use right about now. Even Groundhog Day didn’t give me any grand ideas.
“Barrett.” Miles says my name softly, wrapped in a sigh, a mix of reassurance and resignation. As though he thinks I haven’t heard him, when the truth is that I am so attuned to Miles’s voice at this point, he could whisper from twenty feet away and I’d hear him. “I’m not sure we’re getting anywhere.”
“You’re supposed to be the optimistic one,” I say, tapping his ankle with my SHITSHOW-socked foot. Not matching socks, because it doesn’t matter and my other one is still lost. Earlier this morning, he told me the sock was the most Barrett Bloom thing he’d ever seen, and the fact that I had only one of them even more so, and I chose to take it as a compliment. And promised to buy him a pair of his very own if we ever get out of this.
When we get out of this.
“I am?”
“Well, it can’t be me! I’m too cynical!”
