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“I heard that,” my mom says in the background, laughing.
The phone hangs up and I grin to myself. I’m glad they’re having a good time.
“They seem nice.”
I look up, surprised, and Carter smiles at me, hands in the air. “Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you.”
“No, I just didn’t hear you approach.”
“That’s because your parents were screaming,” he says, sitting in the chair next to me. “I have a theory about that.”
“What is it?” I ask him.
He’s wearing a loose white button-down shirt and a pair of short swim trunks. He tilts his sunglasses down to look at me. “Well, old people fundamentally mistrust technology, right? Plus, they’re going deaf.”
“True,” I say, “on both accounts.”
“So I think they think phones hear as well as they do. They can’t imagine a world in which things can hear better than they can. So they scream all the time.”
I laugh a little bit. “Sounds like my parents, all right.”
“Figured,” he says. “I should write a paper on it.”
“Are you a writer?”
He shakes his head. “Physicist.”
I raise an eyebrow, “Really?”
“I teach over at Cal Tech.”
“Wow,” I say. “That’s pretty interesting.”
“It’s a good job. I get to talk physics all day long and hang out in the sun.”
I notice that he’s perfectly tan, which makes sense, since he’s from California. But he doesn’t look like he teaches physics at a university. I’d normally expect more pocket protectors and way fewer muscles.
“You see that over there?” he asks me, pointing at the pool.
“Sure,” I say. He’s motioning toward the ladder that disappears under the water.
“See the way it cuts off?”
I nod a little. “Always wondered about that.”
“It’s the light bending in the water, which I’ve always thought was fascinating. I mean, light is so fluid, it’s both a wave and a particle. And the way it interacts with water can keep me talking all day long.”
“Do you work with light much?” I ask him, not sure what else to say. I don’t know a thing about physics, I realize.
“No,” he says. “Mainly I do stuff with black holes.”
“Black holes?” I grin at him. “That’s awesome.”
He shrugs. “I’m on a research team tasked with trying to find them. Big, scary suckers, but very difficult to spot. They don’t emit any light, not any at all, and they suck up all the light around them.”
“How do you find them?”
“It’s call gravitational lensing,” he says. “Basically, light that passes around the black hole bends slightly, so we look for that.”
