Fair Coin (11 page)

“This wasn't exactly what I had in mind when I asked you to dinner,” Ephraim said.

They were sitting in Jena's living room. The last time he'd been here was for her party, which already seemed ages away even though it had been less than a week ago. This time it was just the two of them, which he much preferred, though he knew they weren't truly alone. Mrs. Kim was skulking around the kitchen, and Jena's father was resting upstairs.

“I thought it made more sense to meet here, since we're doing research,” Jena said. She patted the MacBook on the couch beside her. “I have my computer and wireless Internet, and all the books in my room.”

Ephraim wondered what her bedroom was like, but Mrs. Kim's close monitoring made it clear that it was off-limits. Not that it seemed likely Jena would invite him up there anyway.

“And this way you can truthfully say that we didn't go out together,” Ephraim said.

“Bingo,” she said.

She was acting normal, friendly even, though he wasn't sure if she saw him as a potential boyfriend anymore or if her curiosity was simply piqued. Returning to her house reminded him that she had liked him once, and he hoped she would again.

“So, tell me what you're looking for.” Jena bit into her chicken taco and leaned back. She propped her bare feet on the coffee table beside the take-out containers.

Now that he was here, he was afraid to tell Jena about the coin. How would she react? As much as she liked fantasy books, was she capable of believing in real magic?

“Come on, Ephraim,” she said quietly. “Let me help.”

He put down his burrito and rubbed his hands clean on his denim shorts. He retrieved the wishing coin from his pocket and placed it on the glass tabletop.

Jena leaned forward to examine it. “A quarter. You want to find out if it's rare or something?”

“No, I'm already pretty sure it's rare. It's…” He took a deep breath. “It's magic.”

“Magic?”

He nodded.

“A magic…quarter?” she said.

“I'm not sure it is a quarter really, but it looks like one.”

Jena stared at him. “You aren't kidding.”

“No.”

Jena picked up the coin and turned it over and over in her small fingers. She stared at the reverse side. She rubbed at it with a thumbnail, then held it up to her face and squinted at it with first one eye, then the other. She smiled, and Ephraim was worried that she thought it was all a joke.

“‘The Enchanted Island,’ huh?” She glanced at it one more time before closing her fingers over it. “Well, where else would you get a magic coin? So, what does it do?”

“That's what I hope we can figure out,” Ephraim said. He told her about how he'd found it and the first time he'd used it: about the dead body that everyone had thought was his, the note in his locker telling him how to make a wish, and the changes he'd seen in his mother. Jena listened silently while he explained, wiggling her toes from time to time. He couldn't read her intent expression, but he knew how it must sound.

Jena looked him in the eyes. “You know that's all a bit hard to accept,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“But I always try to be open-minded.”

“You believe me?” Ephraim asked.

“I didn't say that. I think you're either telling me the truth or you believe you're telling me the truth,” Jena said. She examined the coin again.

“So it's magic, or I'm crazy? Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

She didn't seem to hear him.

“You never saw this other body at the hospital?” she asked.

“No, but my mother did. And Mrs. Morales confirmed it was there, before my first wish. After that, no one remembered it but me.”

“You don't have that note anymore, either. Which means there's nothing and no one to corroborate your story.”

He shook his head. This was just how it had gone when he told Nathan about the coin. Then he remembered.

“Wait. I still have these.” He pulled out his wallet and showed her the two identical library cards. She examined them carefully side by side.

“Not to be a stickler, but you could have printed a second card at work,” she said. She passed them back to him. “Sorry.”

“With the same barcode?” he asked. “The system wouldn't let you do that.”

“You're right. But those cards have different barcode numbers.”

He checked them again. She was right. He'd never compared them, just noted that his name was printed on both.

“That doesn't matter. The coin rearranges things when I make a wish.” He squeezed his fingers around the cards, the plastic edges digging into his hand. “It changes things…and people. I know I can't prove any of it—”

“Now, don't get all defensive. I'm just trying to reason this out. So, if you made a wish about your mother being out of the hospital, why would it make your body disappear?”

“Jena, I'm not dead. That body wasn't mine.”

Jena frowned. “Obviously you're not dead yet, but he is. The other Ephraim, I mean.”

“The other…? What are you talking about? There's only one me! And what do you mean by ‘yet’?”

Jena slapped the quarter down on the glass top of the coffee table. “Calm down, Ephraim. You seem really certain of what's possible and what's impossible, for a guy who's trying to convince me he has a magic wishing coin.”

Ephraim sighed. “Point taken.”

“I'm just working this through, okay? That's why you asked for my help,” Jena said. “If you want me to believe you, you have to keep an open mind, too. Anything is possible if we're talking about magic. Or whatever power this coin has.”

“I just don't see how there could be two of me.” Ephraim said.

“The simplest solution is usually the truth. It seems like you had a twin, so you probably did.”

“That's
the simplest solution? How about it was just some poor kid who looked a little like me?”

“Consider all the other clues: the wallet, the library card, the watch. I see at least two possibilities. Maybe he was from the future.” She tapped the back of the coin. “A future where Puerto Rico is part of the United States.”

“He can't have been much older than me, if the hospital and my mother confused the two of us. Besides, the date on the coin says Puerto Rico became a state in 1998—which it didn't. That's historical fact. It'll be true in ten years as much as it is now.”

Jena pouted. “That doesn't necessarily invalidate my theory. But it would mean you were going to die pretty soon, after wishing yourself back in time to give yourself the quarter. Which also implies that
you're
the reason you have the coin, which just opens this up to all kinds of temporal paradoxes. Okay, let's set that aside for now. Too messy.”

“Sounds good to me. I don't want to have to worry about dying anytime soon, and I'm having a hard enough time buying into magic without throwing time travel into the mix,” Ephraim said.

“Still, the coin came from somewhere. Some place where magic works, assuming that it's really magic.” She sat up straighter and tucked her feet under her bare thighs, momentarily distracting Ephraim from the problem at hand.

“Well,” Jena said. “If not the future, then what about a parallel universe? One where magic works, where the US has fifty-one states.” She turned the coin over. “This Washington head is facing the wrong way, too. And if the coin's from a parallel universe, maybe that's where the other Ephraim came from, too!” Her words were coming faster as she got taken with the idea.

“A parallel universe? That's just stuff for comics and movies.” He'd read stories about alternate universes: worlds where heroes were villains, or had never gained their super powers, or where history had unfolded differently.

Jena took out her cell phone and snapped pictures of both sides of the coin.

“What are you doing now?” Ephraim asked.

“Checking to see if anyone has one of these,” she said. She tapped at the screen a couple of times and shook her head. “If they do, they haven't uploaded a picture to the Internet. So for now, I'll assume that means no others exist.”

“Right. Because it doesn't exist if it isn't on the Internet.”

“Hold on,” she said. “The image scan did get a couple of hits.” She scrolled through the text on her screen. “The bust of George Washington on your quarter matches a design by a woman named Laura Gardin Fraser. She won a contest and it was supposed to be used on all quarters starting in 1931, but they ended up going with the design we're used to instead. Anyway, the only time it's ever been used in American currency is on the commemorative half eagle in 1999.”

She tipped her phone toward Ephraim and he looked at the picture of the gold-colored Washington coin. The right-facing Washington head was identical to the one on his quarter.

“So you think a Wikipedia entry proves the coin's from a parallel universe where…what? They went with a different coin design in 1931?” He passed the phone back to her.

“Multiple worlds isn't science fiction, it's a legitimate theory. I'll get our physics textbook.”

“I don't remember studying anything like this in class,” Ephraim said.

“Like you were even paying attention. I read ahead in class when I'm bored. Which is often. There's a brief overview on the subject in the back, and I found some amazing books in the library. You know, learning doesn't end in the classroom.”

He leaned forward. “Just summarize.”

She pushed her hair back and braced her hands on her knees.

“It isn't easy to explain, but I'll do my best. Okay. So, lots of physicists believe in what they call the ‘many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.’ There are several different theories about parallel universes, but the most popular suggests that for every decision we make, for every observable event, there are multiple outcomes. Each of those outcomes occurs in another world just like ours, and all those worlds exist in a collection of multiple universes—a multiverse—rather than a single universe.”

“I…didn't follow any of that.”

“I barely understand it myself.” She looked around the room for inspiration. “Here.”

Jena opened her computer and typed in a Google search. As she read the screen, he munched on a cold burrito.

“Let's try this,” she said. “You've heard of Schrodinger's cat? Everyone's heard of Schrodinger's cat.”

“Yes!” Finally, something sounded familiar to Ephraim. “That's the experiment where they put a cat in a box with a gas pellet that either killed it or didn't.”

“That's right, basically. It didn't really happen, it's just an imaginary way of illustrating a theory. According to quantum physics, until someone opens that box, the cat is both dead and alive at the same time.”

“That sounds impossible.”

“As impossible as a magic coin?” Jena crossed her arms. “Remember what I said about keeping an open mind. In quantum physics it's not only possible, it's
probable
—and it only gets weirder. The theory of multiple universes—a multiverse—suggests that even after you open the box, the cat is simultaneously dead and alive, but in different, parallel universes. In one reality, the cat is dead. In another, similar reality, the cat is alive. It all depends on the perspective of the person observing the outcome.”

Jena picked up the coin from the coffee table.

“Here's another way to look at it.” She flipped the coin before he could stop her. He tensed, even though she hadn't made a wish, and he was pretty sure the coin wouldn't work for her given what had happened when Nathan tried it. “When you flip the coin, you observe that it lands on either heads or tails.” Jena opened her hand and showed him it had come up heads. “In this universe, as far as you know, it was heads and that's the only outcome. But in a parallel universe, another version of you might be just as sure that it had landed on tails. And you'd both be right.”

Ephraim nodded slowly. “I think I'm starting to get it,” he said.

“But there's one more twist: that second universe—the one where the coin landed on tails—didn't exist until the moment you flipped the coin. At the moment you observed the outcome, another quantum reality split off from this one.” She tilted her head. “Or the other way around. There's no way for us to know whether we're in the original reality or the branched one.” She put down the coin.

“But which is the real universe?” Ephraim asked.

“They both are,” she said.

Ephraim put his hands to the sides of his head. “I'm getting a massive headache.”

“I won't bother getting into string theory then.” Jena grinned.

“So you think the coin could have come from one of those alternate realities?” Ephraim asked.

“In an infinity of other universes, a lot of them could be just like ours but with different physical properties. Maybe in some of them, magic actually works.” She leaned back and smiled, like a content cat. “But it's only a theory. It's just as hard to find evidence of multiple universes as it is to demonstrate the existence of magic.” She slid the magic coin along the glass table toward him with her foot. “Maybe harder. But since you claim to actually have a magic coin, show me what it can do.”

This demonstration had ended disastrously with Nathan, and he was in no hurry to repeat that with Jena. Not when all he had were wild theories about where the coin had come from.