Relativity (12 page)

He takes the coffee from my hand and sets it on the edge of the bench. “Coffee’s not very filling. Come on. I want to hear more about Mount Diablo.”

Suddenly I worry about the butterfly effect. The seemingly insignificant flapping of a butterfly’s wings can effect an atmospheric change, which eventually can alter the path of a tornado. Little alterations, big repercussions.

I don’t belong here. I need to click my way through the universes and get back.

“Is that a yes or no?” George asks. His lips are parted, half-curled into a smirk, and he’s daring me. To say yes. I slide closer and this time he doesn’t inch away.

So I lean in and kiss him. It’s what I should have done last week on that leather couch at the East Bay Café. It’s not the kiss of my dreams, but it’s George, and he’s not pulling away. In fact, he laces his hands behind my neck and pulls me in closer. I feel dizzy, totally off-center. But in the best possible way.

“Is that a yes or a no?” he asks again, raising one eyebrow. “Girl-I-hardly-know-from-French-class-who’s-suddenly-kissing-me?”

“You’re buying.” I nudge his side with my elbow. “And I’m warning you, I’m hungry.”

He laughs, and I feel weightless.

Location: Universe Four, Cloud Nine. Shanghai Restaurant.

George pushes the soy sauce out of the way and hands me a menu across the table. “The steamed pork buns are really good,” he says. “Have you had them?”

I realize that he expects that I’ve eaten here before. It’s a small downtown, and this is probably the only Chinese place. No doubt everyone who lives in Ó Direáin has been to every one of the businesses on this street, time and again. I dodge his question by saying, “I love pork buns.”

“The Peking duck is awesome, so is the barbeque assortment platter.” George studies the lunch specials, and I study him. So far he seems a lot like my George from Universe One. The way he smells, the way he raises one eyebrow when he’s teasing, the way he holds his neck in the palm of his hand when he leans on the table.

“You wouldn’t happen to know a girl named Jamie, would you?” I try to ask casually, but my voice quivers. I hold my breath, waiting for his answer.

He looks up from his menu. “Jamie?”

I nod, eyes locked on his. Is he taken? Did he and Jamie break up in this universe? Or are they meeting up for ice cream and a walk through the park tonight?

“Nope,” he says. “I can’t think of a Jamie I know. Why?”

“She’s someone from California.” My voice trails off.

He looks perplexed. “So how would I—”

“Stupid question, sorry. Never mind.” I guess Jamie doesn’t even live here. Never moved here. But I couldn’t assume anything, because after all, a version of myself lives here alongside George. “You have a little sister named April, right?”

“Yeah. And a dog named—”

“Trigger!” I blurt before I can stop myself.

The look on his face transforms from confusion to suspicion. “How do you know so much about me?”

“I, uh …” My eye catches the Facebook logo at the bottom of our menus.
Like us!
“We have a bunch of mutual friends on Facebook? I, um, read some of your posts. You know, just clicking around.” I sound like a stalker. Just shut up, Ruby!

“Is this your complicated way of asking if I’ve got a girlfriend?” He raises an eyebrow, his voice settling on that familiar teasing tone.

I breathe, relieved. “Yep, that’s it.” It would have been so much easier to just come out and ask.

“Nah. Besides, I just started hanging out with this quirky new girl I kinda dig.”

Me? ME?

Our waitress suddenly approaches. A tiny woman with black hair wound into a bun. “Are you ready to order?” she asks. “Drinks first?”

“Green tea,” George says.

She looks at me. “That’s fine,” I say. “Bring a pot.”

Once she’s gone, George closes his menu and leans across the table. “So what else do you know? From Facebook or whatever.”

“You like art. And symmetry.”

“Repeating patterns,” he says. “Yeah.” He flips through his notebook until he finds a pencil drawing of a field of flowers. I’ve seen this sketch before! George was working on it last week, just before I left Walnut Creek.

“Each flower is like a mini-spirograph,” he says.

I know! I was the one who showed him how to do this.

“How did you put math and art together like that?” I ask, knowing it couldn’t have been me or my alter Ruby. “Did you go to an exhibit or something?”

“No. It was a fluke thing. This guy at school dropped his homework on the floor one day, and I saw the graph paper and the repeating lines all curled together like some growing, living thing, and inspiration struck,” George says, breathless. “But I don’t know anyone who can show me more, unless I make an appointment with the math department, I guess.”

“You’ve got room for a butterfly.” I point to an empty space above
one of the smaller flowers. “Graphs of polar equations can look like butterflies.”

“Yeah?” His voice surges with enthusiasm. “What’s a polar equation? Can you show me?”

I already have. Back in Universe One. “Sure,” I say, my cheeks glowing. “I’d love to.”

Oh, he is so George. My George, in dozens of ways. Every way, as far as I can tell.

So why is George so much the same here, and why am I so different? Maybe it’s because his forks in the road have been subtle. Little jogs instead of life-altering detours, like losing a parent. If Mom had survived, I could be president of the French Club. Maybe I’d even—against all odds—like the color pink, just because she did, or because she made me a pink dress when I was five that I loved, or because Santa brought me a giant pink teddy bear when I was six. Things that never happened, but could have. I can’t deny the possibility that I’d be a very different person if I could subtract tragedy from the equation.

I study George some more, trying to find some hint of difference. The only thing I can say is that I’m pretty sure he never wore tank tops in Universe One.

He suddenly looks up from his menu and catches me blatantly staring, mostly at his biceps, so I blurt, “Rice noodles!”

He grins. “How about I order a few things and we’ll just split?”

I clear my throat and try to recover. “What I meant to say was ‘the rice noodles stuffed with shrimp sound exquisite.’”

“You’re funny, girl-I-hardly-know-from-French-class.”

I shrug innocently and look around the restaurant at the paper
dragons hanging from the ceiling, the jade pots in the windows, the Chinese characters painted onto the walls. Near the door is a crate of toys for people getting takeout, to keep their kids occupied while they wait for their food.

“LEGOs,” I say, pointing to the box. “Loved those when I was little.”

“Yeah, the way you can take the same bunch of pieces and make totally different things with them.”

“Exactly,” I say, thinking of parallel universes. “Identical building blocks, varied configurations.”

“I had this pirate set, and my sister kept making puppies out of the black and white blocks. Totally drove me crazy.”

I groan. “Oh boy. That reminds me of a childhood incident.”

“Childhood incident,” George repeats warily. “Do I want to hear this?”

“Scarred for life,” I say, nodding solemnly. This is a story I’ve never told my George, back in Universe One, so now this George will know something personal about me that my George doesn’t. Another deviance between universes. “A babysitter ruined my LEGO space shuttle.”

He gasps in mock horror. “No!”

“I had this perfect—and I mean flawless—replica of
Discovery
.”

George gives me a sarcastic yeah-right look.

“It was! Down to the rocket boosters. So I went to bed, and when I got up the next morning, she’d made it into a house.”

“A house?” George laughs. “That sucks. Have you made it through therapy?”

“The boosters were now a chimney.”

He leans across the table. “Why did you kiss me?”

“I—” My cheeks flush. I look out the window, and on the other side of the street I can see the library. I’m reminded of the Xeroxed address I have in my pocket, my mother’s address. “I’ve been wanting to, for a long time.”

“I don’t get it,” he says.

“I know you don’t. I’m some girl from French class who whacks off her hair, and gets a tattoo, and starts kissing guys on park benches.”

“Guys? Plural?”

“No! You know what I mean.”

“I don’t.”

“It’s like the LEGOs,” I say, looking into his aquamarine eyes. “I took that stupid house and tried to rebuild my space shuttle, but I couldn’t do it. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get it back to the way it was supposed to go. I wanted it to be perfect again, but I couldn’t make the pieces fit together right. It was so frustrating.”

Before George can ask another question, our waitress is back with our tea. “Are you ready to order lunch?” She sets a bowl of shrimp chips on the table.

“Number five and seven,” George says. “And the pork bun appetizer.”

We hand her our menus, and she hurries to another table, scribbling on her notepad as she goes. George looks after her, then back to me. “I like you,” he says.

“I like you too.”

He snaps his wooden chopsticks apart and arranges them in a V-shape. “Mount Diablo, you say.”

“Yes. That’s your mountain.”

We spend the rest of lunch talking about his sketch, and I give him some details to fill in about the plants that only grow in the Mount Diablo area: fairy lanterns, manzanita, chaparral bellflower, bird’s beak, and Mount Diablo sunflower.

When our waitress places the bill on the table, I sigh. “I should get going.”

“See you in school tomorrow,” George says.

“Right,” I say, but I know we won’t. Maybe he’ll see Other Ruby in school tomorrow. Once I leave, maybe she’ll be back. I’ve got six more universes to click through. If I’m back in my own bed, in Universe One, before nightfall, maybe all will be set to right. No harm done. No one will be permanently displaced from where they belong.

So I need to keep moving, regardless of how tempting it might be to stay here. Besides, I realize now that the “real” George back in Universe One can be mine. All I have to do is make a move like I did here. I mean, if I can spontaneously kiss him on a park bench in a parallel universe, I can do the same in my own universe, where we already have a spark. It’s not too late. We’re not too far apart.

I replay what Chef Dad said to me yesterday:
Call it what you like. Fate, destiny, effort, coincidence. True friendship defies distance
.

Then I remember telling Dad he could use that as an ad headline. For an airline.

The plan forms itself instantaneously in my mind: I’ll get a part-time job, working after school and on the weekends. It won’t take long to save enough money for an airline ticket back to California. I can tell Dad I’m going to tour Stanford, which I want to do anyway. I’ll make
a trip every six months until we graduate, until we can make plans to live in the same city.

George pushes the restaurant’s front door open for me, and I brush past him to walk outside. We barely touch. My shoulder connects with his wrist, but it feels electric again. Suddenly, he grabs my hand and pulls me toward him for another kiss. His lips are soft and taste faintly of soy sauce. His tongue brushes across mine, and I’m light-headed, delirious.

I want to remember how this feels.

“Bye,” he says, ruffling the hair on the back of my neck.

“Until we meet again,” I say, walking away, trying not to limp. My leg is suddenly throbbing mercilessly. I wish I hadn’t spent my only useful money on coffee and a mini-scone when what I need is extra-strength ibuprofen and fresh bandages.

“
Au revoir!
” George yells.

I look over my shoulder and wave. I hate saying good-bye to him—again—but this time feels much better than last week’s farewell in Walnut Creek. I’m beginning to understand the expression “head over heels,” because after kissing George I feel like I’m in zero gravity. Like I’m upside down, floating.

I’m trying to focus enough to cross the street without getting flattened by a truck, when a familiar—and frantic—voice jolts me from behind.

“Ruby!” Before I can react, Patrick has my forearm in a viselike grip.

“Oh, it’s you.” Not on my agenda.

“Where the hell have you been?”

“Would you let go of my arm? You’re kinda hurting me.” I try to get around him, but he blocks my way, left then right.

“One minute you’re behind me on your bike, the next your bike is lying on its side.” Patrick’s voice escalates. “You’re no longer on it. You’re nowhere to be found.”

People are stopped on the street, watching us. Patrick’s on a roll. “Vanished! Gone!”

I turn around and head back the way I came, toward the downtown shopping district. He follows, screaming, “What’s that on the back of your neck?”

Oh boy. Here we go again. “I got a tattoo.”

“You did what?” His voice is straining with worry. He puts his hands on my shoulders, forcing me to stop. His breath is fast on my neck as he looks at the tattoo. “What does it mean, and what did you do to your hair?” he demands. “Is that where you’ve been?”

“Yep, that’s what I’ve been doing these past few hours. I cut my hair and got inked.”

“Oh my God.” The veins in his neck are popping. I pull away and hurry on, thinking about the Ruby who normally resides here. She disappeared. She was riding her bike one minute and was gone the next. What happened to her? Where did she go? I’m guessing the second I set foot in this universe, she was displaced. I shudder, hoping she’s okay. I’m definitely causing ripples, distortions in space-time.

Patrick’s suddenly in front of me, walking backward.

“Hey, so what time would you say your Ruby—I mean, what time did I disappear?” I ask, trying to remember when I left Chef Dad’s house and entered this universe. “Around ten a.m.?”

He ignores my question. He’s got too many of his own. “Where did you get these clothes?” He points to my pant leg. “Is that blood? Are you bleeding?”

I look at the stain on my jeans. A trickle of red has made its way onto my white shoelaces. “It’s nothing.”