The Theory of Everything (18 page)

“You know I can't do that,” Walt said. “First, I don't know where he is, and second, that's not how it works.”

“So you know where he's
not,
but you don't know where he
is
?” I said. “As far as magical powers go, you got gypped.”

“I'm not a genie,” he said. “I don't grant you wishes or consult an eight ball—I protect you. And guide you toward the truth.”

“And what is the truth, exactly?” I said. “You know, for someone who tells me so little, you hold an awful lot of power over me.”

“You have free will,” he said. “You act as you please.”

“Yeah, but I take your advice,” I said. “And I don't know anything about you except that your boss is a council, and their rules run your life. I don't know why you're here and why you're even bothering with me. Are you giving guidance or messing with me? Why do I even listen to you?”

“Because we have a connection,” he said.

“Not anymore,” I said, walking toward the diner.

“Wait,” Walt said, following me. “Let's talk.”

I turned, rain dripping from my hair into my face.

“I don't want to talk,” I said. “I want to eat breakfast with my best friend, someone who is actually trying to help me. And then I want to go to NYU and look for clues. I would ask you to help, but we both know where that got me.”

“Sophie, please,” he said. “I don't make the rules.”

“Oh, yeah?” I felt anger rising, with a vengeance. “Well, then I don't follow them.”

Drizzle started up again as I walked away, Walt's voice fading in the background. He could show up again, right in front of me, but I didn't think he would. He may have been a lot of things, but the panda who blocked my path wasn't one of them.

|||||||||||

“Whoa,” Finny said as I slid into the booth across from him. “Good thing these booths are vinyl.”

“I know,” I said, wiping my face with a napkin as water dripped from my hair. “But Walt had the umbrella, and he made me mad, so I wouldn't stand under it. Hence the wet-dog look.”

“Use this,” Finny said, handing me his jacket. I squeezed most of the water out of my hair into it and I would have felt bad, but I was with him when he bought it. And it was only three dollars.

“What did you fight about?” Finny pushed his orange juice to the side and flipped his phone over.

“Who were you talking to?”

“No one,” Finny said, grinning like Cupid. Wait.

“Finny . . .”

“Like I can help it if your super-hunky boy crush called me.”

“Drew called you?”

“I might have slipped him my number when I slipped him yours.”

“Finny!”

“What? If you two get together, we'll all be friends and he'll be calling me, anyway,” Finny said.

“What did he want?”

“My lips are sealed,” he said. “He's doing something special for you, and I don't care what you threaten me with, I'm not telling you.”

I leaned back in the booth. When it came to love, Finny was horrible at keeping secrets, which meant all I had to do was wait it out.

“That's fine,” I said. “I'll see Drew this weekend if I'm not eternally grounded. I think I can wait.”

“You're not even going to grill me?” he said, picking up the notebook sitting on top of Dad's book.

“It's not important,” I said. “Well, not as important as that.”

I pointed to Dad's book.

“And this,” I said as a mug of coffee appeared in front of me. Finny stared as I held the sugar pourer over it, counted to five and then added half of the silver cream container.

“What?” I said. “I call it Comfort Coffee. It only appears in times of crisis.”

“Buckwheat blueberry pancakes with fruit?” the waitress said, holding two plates over our table.

“You ordered me breakfast?” I said, scooting my coffee over.

“Yup,” Finny said. “You said those were your favorite.”

“Hearts,” I said, cutting into the stack with my knife. Not finding Dad was making me ravenous. “But Dad's book is my new favorite. Can you tell me about the first part?”

“I can do better than that,” he said, clearing his throat. “I can read it to you.”

CHAPTER ONE:
THE LAW OF TRAVELING

. . . People often talk about traveling, from Bangkok to Brussels, from Taiwan to Timbuktu. Yet no one talks about traveling to parallel universes. And that's what the Law of Traveling is all about.

String theory is very much a work in progress. But if we take it at its word, we know that everything is composed of tiny, vibrating strings that split and reconnect. There is evidence to support the idea that in between all these strings are spaces—gaps, if you will. Some are large, some are small, and some are just the right size for energy, gravity and matter to pass through.

The Law of Traveling contends that if those things can travel to parallel universes, so can soccer balls and raindrops, bicycles and balloons. And if we take it a step further, this principle asks you to imagine: if those things can travel, why can't we?

I leaned back against the vinyl seat like I did another time I'd had my mind blown. The time I saw the heart roll off the sleeve.

“Is he saying what I think he's saying?”

“That depends,” Finny said. “What do you think he's saying?”

“That traveling to other universes is possible?”

“Yes!” Finny said. He was so excited he bumped the table with his knee and spilled coffee everywhere. “And that's just the beginning. You won't believe what's in this book.”

I mopped up the coffee with napkins, hands shaking.

“Sophie, he talks about souvenirs,” Finny said. And then he opened the book and pointed to a diagram that connected different parts of the brain to various atomic structures. “I think he was using physics to prove he wasn't crazy.”

And there it was—another marker along the path. Just like Walt had said.

“I haven't read the whole thing, but if your dad proves his theory, it's not mental illness he's dealing with,” he said. “Which means you're not dealing with it, either.”

I wondered if there was a limit to the number of times your brain could be blown in an hour. Walt knew my dad wasn't there, Dad believed in dimensional travel, and he mentioned souvenirs in his book for anyone—everyone—to read. I came here hoping physics would explain everything, but I never actually thought that it would.

“It's an amazing idea,” I said softly, tucking my hands under my legs so they wouldn't shake.

“You choose now to start being skeptical?” Finny said.

“Not skeptical, careful,” I said.

Maybe it came from being abandoned by Dad or having to move a bunch of times, but I'd had my heart broken enough to be cautious. At least when it came to believing that there truly was one answer for everything.

“There are people who know Dad and who know more than we do,” I said. “They're all at NYU. Hopefully they can fill in the blanks left by the book.”

We ate in silence for a while, grounding ourselves for what was to come. Finny had a third cup of coffee and I had a second, full of more comfort than the first. I looked at Dad's book sitting on the table, wondering where it would lead us. Wondering if anyone believed him and, if they did, hoping they'd talk to me.

Finny pushed his plate back and his mug away.

“I'm cutting myself off,” he said.

“And I'm full,” I said, eating the last syrup-soaked blueberry. “Want to get out of here?”

“Yes,” Finny said, bounding out of the booth like a superhero. “Take me to your teacher!”

“They're called professors,” I said, giggling.

“I know, but that didn't rhyme with leader,” Finny said, leaving money on the table. “Take me anywhere that's not Havencrest, and I'll be happy.”

“Then you are about to bliss out,” I said, linking arms with him and heading for the subway.

|||||||||||

On the way to the Q train, we passed a guy playing kazoo, a woman selling god's eyes and an old man with no teeth and a coffee cup full of coins.

“Happy yet?” I said.

“You have no idea,” he said. “You weren't kidding.”

“You get used to it,” I said. And then you learn to love it, I thought.

The train was packed until a guy in a bathrobe got up and an orange seat appeared. Finny nodded at me, and I took it, squeezing in between a man wearing a suit and a woman wearing a purple jacket with shoulder pads. Papers went up, and Finny disappeared.

“Finny,” I said over a
Wall Street Journal.
“If you see a seat, take it. Just get off at Canal Street and wait under the sign. I'll find you.”

“Okay,” his muffled voice said. “Canal Street. Got it.”

I read headlines ranging from “Big Polluters Told to Report Emissions” to “White House Considers Economic Strategy Shift.” But the best one was on the paper right in front of me: “Study Assesses Women and Responses to Love.” According to the article, a recent study showed that 84 percent of women weren't emotionally satisfied with their romantic lives. I wasn't even sure what that meant, but it didn't sound good. It also mentioned that we didn't trust men, even though we wanted to. I wondered what the numbers said about pandas.

I took my Walkman out of my bag and felt around in my pocket for the
Love
mixtape, but it wasn't there. My logical mind knew that Peyton had washed my skirt and that she probably put the tape somewhere else, but my emotional brain panicked. What if it got washed? Or fell out and someone stepped on it? What if
Love
was gone like it had never existed? I felt in my other pockets and dug through my bag, but it wasn't there, either. No
Love
anywhere. Nada.

“No,” I said. I had come too far for this. “No, no, no, no.”

Gray Suit stared straight ahead, but Puffy Shoulders turned.

“Can I help you with something, honey?”

“I lost something important,” I said, looking through my bag again.

“Maybe it can be replaced,” she said, closing the book she was reading—
Women Who Love Too Much.
“Unless it's a photo. Once I lost the only photo I had of Mr. Murphy, and that was sad.”

She had curly hair, and bright orange balls hung from her ears, the same color as her lipstick. “I'm from Montana,” she said, as if that explained why she was talking to me, since no one talked to anyone on the subway. “Mr. Murphy was from Oklahoma, but he was a great tabby.”

A cat. She'd lost a photo of her cat. And I'd lost the closest thing I'd had to a conversation with my dad in four years.

“It was a love letter,” I said, thinking that was the best way to explain it.

“Oh, that's awful,” she said. “According to this book I'm reading, though, we shouldn't depend on others. We can get all the love we need by loving ourselves.”

I think Puffy Shoulders forgot that I was a kid, and kids weren't supposed to
have
to do all the loving themselves, but whatever. The train slowed as we approached Canal Street, and I squeezed through the door as it was closing, hoping Finny had made it.

“Ta-da!” he said when I found him standing under the sign. “What's wrong?”

“I lost the
Love
tape,” I said.

Finny grabbed my hand and pulled me up the stairs, for a change. “Not lost, just misplaced,” he said. “Like your dad.”

I punched his arm, and we walked through neon signs and chickens hanging from the ceilings, colored lanterns and tables of herbs and teapots. I'd have to compartmentalize again, or at least try. I had to put lost
Love
away for a minute and focus on what I could find instead.

“This is where you used to hang out after school?” Finny said.

“Only sometimes,” I said. Dad and I went there on the way home a few times, trying on slippers and doing origami. That's what happened when your dad was a professor. Afternoons weren't spent at home, they were spent on campus at another school or in the neighborhoods around it.

I grabbed a wok and tried it on as a hat. “Who could resist this?”

“Not me,” Finny said, hanging two bundles of herbs from his ears like earrings.

For a minute we forgot about the book and just had fun, like we did in school. We faked fights with chopsticks, tried on masks like that scene in
Breakfast at Tiffany's
and put slippers on our hands and made them talk like puppets. I picked up a red dragon mask, which reminded me of the time Dad took me to a Chinese New Year parade. Huge dragons lined the streets, and even though I knew that the floats and masks were fake, I was terrified they were going to eat me. Dad picked me up and put me on his shoulders, but instead of walking away, he walked right out into the middle of the parade, putting me at eye level with the dragons. Their eyes bulged and their teeth flashed, but when I saw the seams—and the people inside them—I knew I was safe. As the music played and the lights glowed, as I sat on Dad's shoulders eating cookies, I thought I'd always be safe.

“How about this one?”

Finny spun around in a kimono, which he dubbed the Chinese Smoking Jacket.

“Debonair, right? Or whatever the Chinese word for debonair is?”

“You look fabulous,” I said. “Buy it, and let's get out of here.”

“What's the rush?” he said, taking it off.

“There's more to see where this came from,” I said. I could only hope Dad would be one of them. “Plus I'm hungry again. Let's hit the hum bao stand.”

|||||||||||

By the time we arrived at Washington Square Park, it was almost noon. And since the rain had stopped, the park was full of jugglers and chess players, acrobats and a guy playing a baby grand piano. Parts of a shiny orange and purple dress flew by me as cards appeared in my face.