“All right, it’s almost time to go down to our special assembly!” said our science teacher. “I can’t believe we’ve gotten such an amazing guest to come here to Alexander Hamilton Middle School!”
The class erupted into noise as people started putting their textbooks in their backpacks and otherwise gathering up their stuff to go down to the auditorium.
“Special guest?” I slung my lizard-containing backpack on my shoulder. “Who?”
“Are you kidding, girl?” Jovi laughed. “Only your favorite television science celebrity herself!”
I felt another wave of dizziness. No, it couldn’t be.
“Shady Sadie the Science Lady!” said Ned the perfect sculpture boy.
“Shady Sadie? Here? In Parsippany?” I goggled. “But last time, we just watched her video on the computer.”
“Last time?” snorted Zuzu with a meanness unlike her normally sweet disposition. “Keep dreaming, Turnpike Princess!”
Jovi swirled her blond ponytail in Zuzu’s direction, then linked her elbow with mine and dragged me out of the room. “Haters to the left!” she said, but kind of teasingly, as we passed by.
“Shady Sadie the Science Lady is here?” I asked. “In Parsippany?”
“Well, sure,” said Jovi. “I mean, her atom-smashing labs are here in town, so I guess it’s not a long trip for her to come by our school.”
“But …” I didn’t finish the sentence. More than one thing had obviously changed since I’d last been in Parsippany. Shady Sadie the Science Lady had a national science television program that I’d been watching and obsessing over forever. And I knew for sure she didn’t work in an atom-smashing lab—or anywhere else—here in Parsippany, New Jersey! (Please, I was her biggest fan. If she’d worked in Parsippany, I would have been at her door every day begging for an autograph or something.)
Man, since I’d managed to solve the riddle of the three keys and traveled through the wormhole’s tiny door, I felt like I had been in a strange bizarro version of my life. But whereas most of the other weird things that had been happening seemed like nightmares—my parents’ behavior, my best friend and frenemy changing places, Naya disappearing—this seemed like a dream come true. My scientific idol—the rock-star scientist of the multiverse—was actually in my school!
And maybe, if I could figure out how to get a moment alone with her, she could help me understand what was going on, and get back to the right version of New Jersey, where poor Lal was trapped!
Jovi pulled me into the auditorium, which was super loud and rowdy as usual. When Principal Chen came up to the podium, though, the whole auditorium quieted down in less than a millisecond. Even the worst middle school bully knew that our principal took no prisoners and gave no second chances, and only a total idiot would mess with her short but lethal form. I noticed that Principal Chen looked just as pregnant as she had last time I’d seen her, when she’d chased me in her SUV down the icy soccer field. I really, really hoped she didn’t remember that.
“Why, thank you, students. Thank you so very much for quieting it down to a dull roar,” said the principal. “I was hoping against hope you wouldn’t further embarrass yourselves before our esteemed guest. At least all my hopes were not in vain.” Principal Chen looked at us over her pink cat-eye glasses with the deceptively cute rhinestones at the corners. She looked just the same as always, only with one major difference—her normally bone-straight hair was in double-helix-like curls about her face. Huh, when had our oh-so-serious principal gotten a perm?
“I know that some of you only appreciate the importance of scientific subjects when they are diluted by the false light of celebrity,” Principal Chen went on. “But so be it. In our solipsistic, selfie-obsessed culture, of course the only scientists given any respect are the ones with their own television programs!”
“That’s an interesting introduction. I don’t know why, but I’m guessing it wasn’t good old P. Chenny who invited Shady Sadie.” Jovi laughed.
“P. Chenny?” I repeated.
“Yeah,” said Zuzu, plunking down on my other side. “Don’t you think our principal is in desperate need of a good nickname?” She reached across me and gave Jovi a high five.
“That kid in her belly is either going to be another Vlad the Impaler, or like Mother Teresa or something,” Jovi whispered back.
“She’ll probably be a saint,” laughed Zuzu. “Just to rebel against her mom.”
I looked from Zuzu to Jovi and back again in astonishment. When had they gotten so chummy?
“Just give Zuzu a chance, will ya?” whispered Jovi in my ear. “I know you didn’t get along when you were younger, but we’re on the fencing team together now and she’s actually not that bad once you get to know her.”
I felt my head spinning. Zuzu had said almost the exact same thing to me about Jovi not that long ago. Or, I guess, today. Depending on how you looked at it.
“So you guys are friends now or something?” I muttered.
“Yeah, kind of,” Jovi agreed. “Actually, yeah, totally.”
I wanted to say something more, but Jovi shushed me, while the other kids in our row gave us dirty looks. I slunk down in my seat when I realized the principal was looking right in my direction. No one, and I mean no one, wanted to be on Biggie Chen’s bad side.
“Well then,” sneered the principal. “Without further ado, let me introduce you to the host of public television’s longest-running science program, none other than Shady Sadie the Science Lady!”
As the trombone music for my favorite program blared over our school loudspeakers, I couldn’t help but feel grateful to the wormhole for making this possible. In my previous New Jersey story line, this would never have happened. But somehow, magically, I’d made it to a version of Parsippany where my television scientist role model was right in front of me in real life.
“Hashtag awesomesauce,” I gushed.
“Hashtag you’re adorkable,” countered someone in a mocking voice. It was Ned, who, I realized, was yet again sitting right behind me. I turned to give him a dirty look, but he gave me a face-melting smile and then handed me a teeny plastic flower bouquet that he produced from thin air. Jovi and Zuzu giggled as, totally flustered, I took the flowers before turning back around.
And then I was busy drinking in the sight of my own personal superhero. Shady Sadie had danced onstage to her show’s theme music and was now standing there beaming at us. Shady Sadie the Science Lady was wearing her signature round dark–rimmed glasses, pantsuit, and bow tie. Today’s suit was a psychedelic blue with the outlines of butterflies all over it. Her bow tie too looked like it might be an actual butterfly resting on her throat. Curiouser and curiouser. What was with all these butterflies? That couldn’t be a coincidence, could it?
Shady Sadie’s short black hair was all spiky in a zillion directions, and she bopped in place like she didn’t know how to stand still. “Heya, young scientists!” Sadie boomed as the music finally finished. Just like on TV, the audience yelled back, “Heya, Sadie!”
She pressed a button, turning the projector on behind her, so that she was standing in front of a giant dark screen with a tiny pinprick of light in the center. Space, I supposed. But then the tiny light started to expand more and more, until, taking up the whole screen, it seemed to explode in a shower of light.
“The big bang!” Sadie said, her voice echoing impressively through the auditorium. “The beginning of our entire multiverse! From a tiny spark, it has grown infinitely! And it continues to grow every day! Think about all that life—all those stories—expanding without end!”
“Booo-ring!” singsonged Ned from the seat behind me. I felt him tugging at a strand of my hair and whipped around.
“Stop that!” I hissed. “It’s not cute!”
“But I am!” he said all mock-suavely, raising an eyebrow in a way that weirdly reminded me of Neel. He held out his palms all “jazz hands” like—and did I imagine it or did little flames shoot out of bot
h?
Before I could ask what kind of amateur magician could produce fire from his hands, Jovi pulled at my sleeve. “P-to-the-Chen’s looking this way again!”
I whipped back around. I did not want to attract Principal Chenopolis’s attention again, no matter how cute and/or annoying Ned was.
Sadie flicked an image of a boring-looking gray building on screen. Wait a minute, I’d actually seen it before. It was on Route 46, in the shopping center next to my parents’ convenience store!
“We at Smarty-Pants Science Corporation are trying to re-create the environment of the big bang so that we can study it and prevent anything that would reverse the expansion of the multiverse!”
“Why do you keep saying multiverse?” someone shouted out from the audience. “Instead of universe?”
“I say multiverse because I have faith ours is not the only story,” said Sadie. “I have faith there are universes we can’t even see, but that exist in parallel to ours.”
“Like alternate dimensions?” asked Sophie Hiller, one of the hard-core comix kids. “Like on that episode of Star Travels? When the captain gets transported into the universe of green-skinned warrior women?”
Everybody laughed, but good old P-to-the-Chen turned around to shoot some death lasers out of her eyes. The auditorium quieted down pretty quick.
“Kind of,” agreed Sadie, pushing her glasses back up her nose. “Multiverse theorists used to think that universes were like strings each held in parallel to each other, which vibrated like the strings on a guitar. Now many think it’s more like thin membranes all lined up—pieces of bread in a loaf—with us as the jelly on the bread! The only thing is, those of us on one slice can’t see any of the other parallel slices.”
The image on the screen changed to a loaf of bread being cut by a knife floating in midair. I sat forward. Multiverse theory wasn’t just an idea for me; it was a fundamental truth of my entire life. It was how I could be from another dimension and at the same time from New Jersey. It was how I could hop from one reality, one identity, one story of my life, into another and back again. Multiverse theory was what it meant to be, well, me.
Sadie was pacing back and forth across the stage now, waving her arms as she spoke. “Anyway, whether you believe in string theory or what scientists now call M, or membrane, theory, the important thing to know about the origin of the universe is that it began because of chaos.”
Wait, what? Someone else mentioning chaos. Why was this word coming up so often? Sesha was working with some sort of Anti-Chaos Committee, and then, I realized with a start, there was that slogan on Ned’s ski hat, Kill the Chaos.
“Chaos is something that you middle schoolers know a lot about, right?” Shady Sadie was asking.
There was a nervous tittering in the audience, which was shut down way quick by our principal turning around in her seat and giving the titterers a laser-eyed death glare.
The Science Lady looked around at us, the stage lights glittering on her dark-framed glasses. “Well, who can give me a definition of chaos?”
Jordan Ogino raised his hand, and when she pointed at him, he shouted, “My bedroom—at least according to my mom!”
There was more tittering, and more quieting down after even more death-glaring from our principal. Shady Sadie took it in stride and said, “Sure, chaos can mean something that’s messy, disordered. What else?”
“Confusion?” shouted Vic Perralta.
“Disorganization?” said Lily Santiago.
“So something bad, right? Something we don’t want in our lives?” said Sadie, holding her arms out wide. “But here’s the thing—the multiverse needs chaos! In fact, it was born, in a sense, from that initial singularity into chaos! The very fabric of the multiverse, and of life itself, is chaos, unpredictability, diversity!”
“That’s not true!” I was surprised to hear the voice coming from right behind me. It was Ned. This time, it wasn’t his hands that were shooting fire, but his words. “What about rules? What about those single stories that bind us all together? What about the all is one, a theory of everything?”
That made me sit up. The all is one, that phrase about the interconnectedness of everything. The last time I’d heard it, Sesha had used it. I shivered. I was getting a really bad feeling about all this.
“Ah!” said Sadie, delightedly pacing the stage as she rubbed her hands together. “We have a future physicist in our midst! Or maybe a philosopher! Yes, indeed, many of the greats—Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking—they were looking for a theory of everything, one master idea that explained everything—gravity, electromagnetics, what have you—in the universe. But we have yet to find such a unifying tale. There is still so much about the multiverse that lies outside of our theorems, our predictions, our understanding.”
“What about Laplace’s demon?” Now Ned was standing up, and the entire auditorium was looking at him.
“Holy detention slips,” Jovi mumbled. “Not-by-the-Hair-of-My-Cheni-Chen-Chen is going to roast him for dinner.”
I would have thought so too, but the weird thing was, our normally no-disruptions-on-my-watch principal just kind of smiled as Ned continued to interrupt our guest.
On the other hand, Shady Sadie was the one starting to look uncomfortable. “You mean Laplace’s 1814 theory of an intellect who exists outside the universe and therefore can see and understand all?” The scientist laughed a little awkwardly. “That’s a bit of an old-fashioned idea, wouldn’t you say?”
“No, no, I wouldn’t say!” said Ned, practically shouting now. Since Principal Chen seemed willing to let him say and do whatever he wanted, it was Dr. Dixon who stepped over to his aisle—gesturing over other kids’ heads for him to sit down. “Young man, I think that’s enough for now. I appreciate you’re interested in the subject—”
But the science teacher was cut off by our still weirdly smiling principal. “My dear Dr. Dixon!” the Chenmeister admonished. “Don’t be such a fuddy-duddy! Remember we reward intellectual passion here at Alexander Hamilton Middle School!” Her newly curly hair boinged around her head as she talked.
Now I was big-time getting the oogly-booglies. This was way the total opposite of how Principal Chen would normally act. There was also something weird going on with this Ned kid, especially with his talk about an all-knowing demon who could see everything going on in the universe. What kind of a spell did he have over our principal? I felt nervously for my quiver and bow, only to realize I wasn’t wearing them. Oh no! They must still be stuck in the frozen tree in Jovi’s yard!
In the meantime, Ned seemed to be gearing up for a fight. “The universe needs someone who can see all, bring order to all, kill the chaos, and make everything predictable. Bring all these scattered stories and dimensions and realities into one. But I don’t think someone like that should be called a demon; I think someone like that should be considered a god!”
He said these last words with so much force, I could swear I heard lightning outside. And now Principal Chen was standing up too, her curly hair all fringing out around her. But she didn’t look angry at Ned; rather, she looked happy. Oh, this was really, really not good. I bent down and quickly lifted Tiktiki One out of my backpack and whispered some instructions. The lizard scuttled away under the auditorium seats.
As I straightened up, something drew my eyes to the stage. It was Sadie, who seemed to be looking straight at me as she said, “There cannot be light without darkness.”
I shivered. The merchant of shadows, Chhaya Devi, had said this phrase about light and darkness to Neel and me once, and it had become the organizing principle of my life, as I’d struggled to keep the light and dark forces of my existence in balance.
Sadie didn’t break eye contact with me but continued, “There cannot be singularity without multiplicity. There cannot be creation without chaos.”
Ned made a sound, deep in his throat. His handsome face was so furious, I thought he was going to yell again. Principal Chen too was starting
to look murderous.
But at that exact moment, the fire alarm went off and all was pandemonium.
Ever seen one of those Godzilla movies where the whole town runs around screaming their heads off because a giant man-eating lizard is on the loose? Well, you could have mistaken our middle school auditorium for the set of one of those movies right then. The fire alarm system set off the overhead sprinklers, which sprayed water all over everything, transforming the auditorium into a bad imitation of an indoor water park. But what made it even worse was all the super-shrill, super-earsplitting alarm noises, combined with all the yelling, and of course all the pushing and shoving. And I’m just talking about the teachers here.
“Who is the juvenile delinquent who set off the alarm?” yelled P-to-the-Chen, water streaming down her face and then bouncing off her planet-shaped belly. Her hair now seemed to be standing out from her face as if in a halo, and her tongue flickered a little weirdly out of her mouth. “You’re going to wish for detention when I’m done with you! The rest of you, get immediately to your fire stations! Some decorum, please! You’re embarrassing yourselves!”
She might as well have been speaking in a different language, or from a different membrane dimension, because no one listened to her. Tiny sixth and seventh graders were falling over in the aisles and getting trampled on by giant eighth graders. Teachers were pushing to get in front of students. Kendrick Johnson body-slammed Theresa Ozuah, in response to which Theresa Ozuah clocked him with her giant Hello Kitty book bag.
The Chaos Curse Page 8
