“Yeah,” I said, “great.”
Big conversation going on, Mom. Discussing the theory of the universe here. Can’t really talk about tapioca balls.
She picked up the phone to dial it, so I was safe to run back.
“Sorry,” I sat as I plopped back into my chair.
“I think you should tell her,” Professor Whitfield said.
“Later,” I said. “Now tell me what you were saying.”
Dr. Whitfield gave his beard a scratch. “All right. You know about the observer problem in quantum physics?”
“Yes,” I said. “Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle—the fact that subatomic particles behave differently when they’re being observed by scientists than when they’re not.”
“Correct,” Dr. Whitfield said. “It’s a minor application of psychokinesis, although no one wants to admit it. They’d rather call it the ‘observer problem’ and leave it at that. But what I think is—”
“Honey?” My mom opened my door. She had the phone to her ear. “Rice noodles or vermicelli?”
I shouldn’t have tilted my screen away. That’s what tipped her off. She got a funny sort of smile on her face. “What are you doing there?”
“Nothing. Vermicelli sounds great.”
“Mrs. Masters?” came the voice from the screen.
“No,” I mumbled. “Seriously.”
“Mrs. Masters?” he said again.
I hate teachers sometimes.
My mother spoke into her phone. “I’ll call you back.” Then she gave me a warning look and stepped over in front of my computer.
What else could I do? I turned the screen to face her.
“Dr. Whitfield, this is my mother. Mom, Dr. Whitfield.”
“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Masters.”
My mother scowled. She really hates being called that. “Actually, it’s Ms. Fletcher.”
“Sorry,” Dr. Whitfield said. “Nice to meet you.”
My mother looked from him to me. “Would you like to tell me what this is about?”
“He’s just this physics professor I’ve been talking to,” I hurried to explain, before Dr. Whitfield could say anything himself. “We’ve been talking about this book he wrote—he has some really interesting theories, and I was hoping he could help me with the project I’m doing for my Columbia application. Right, Dr. Whitfield?”
“In . . . part,” he answered.
“He knows Professor Hawkins,” I added. “And I was hoping he’d give me a personal recommendation. I’m sorry I didn’t ask you about that before, Dr. Whitfield. Will you?”
Dr. Whitfield was not amused. He shook his head.
My mother isn’t stupid. “What’s going on here?”
“Audie, you should explain your experiment to your mother,” he said in a stern voice. I could tell he wasn’t very happy with me. “I have to go. Nice meeting you, Ms. Fletcher. Audie, call me when you’re ready to talk more about science—and less about Professor Hawkins.”
And with that, he hung up.
“What was that all about?” my mother asked.
I shrugged. “Scientists are so touchy sometimes.”
But she wasn’t about to let me off the hook that easily. “What sort of experiment are you doing? What does he have to do with it? What are you doing calling someone like that—do you even know that man?”
I improvised. “Mr. Dobosh gave me his book to read.” I pointed to where it lay over on my bed. “And Professor Hawkins talks about him in his parallel universe book. So I thought maybe if I contacted him, he might be willing to talk to me about some of the concepts in his book, and maybe write a special letter to Professor Hawkins or something.”
“Honey, you know I’d be thrilled for you if you got into Columbia—it would really be wonderful. I’m not happy that you’d move so far away from me, but I know it’s what you’ve wanted for a long time.
“But lately, this obsession! Look at you—so exhausted you can barely keep your head up. I’d rather see you go to a state school than wear yourself out like this. Are you sure it’s really worth it to you?”
I slouched back in my chair. “Mom, it’s everything to me. I don’t care if I don’t sleep until the November first deadline. I’ve got to have the most killer application I can come up with, or they’re never going to let me in—you know that! Not with my math scores.”
“What makes you think Dr. Whitfield can help you get in? He didn’t seem very enthusiastic when you asked for the recommendation.”
“I know. I think maybe he and Professor Hawkins hate each other. Maybe the whole thing was a mistake.”
My mom went over to my bed and picked up Dr. Whitfield’s book. She flipped through a few pages of it, then turned it over to look at the back cover.
“A lot younger,” she said.
“Yeah. Look down below—see what Professor Hawkins said about him.”
My mom read it. “Sounds like they were friends back then.”
“I know. I wonder what happened.”
Without her noticing it, I’d totally deflected the conversation away from ever talking about my experiment. It was my own little version of psychokinesis: mind over mother.
She glanced at her phone. “I guess I should call back for our food. Let’s eat soon so we can head for bed. I’m beat.”
“Me, too,” I said. “I just have to finish some of my homework.”
“Honey, I love you. I want you to be happy. Just don’t push yourself so hard, all right? I worry about you.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
I am a horrible daughter.
But on the other hand, at least this way she won’t worry.
So maybe I’m a good daughter after all.
At least that’s a theory.
28
Beautiful morning. Birds tweeting, sun gently caressing my eyes, drool collecting in a little pool under my lips. A perfect night, fully-rested, long, beautiful sleep—
I jerked awake and looked at the clock.
AAAAAAH!
I’d totally missed it! Slept right through and missed it. Ate my bún with vermicelli, slurped up the happy little tapioca balls at the bottom of my almond milk tea, dressed in warm clothes to go meet Halli on the train from Munich to the Alps, then sleepily tucked myself into bed.
And forgot to set a single alarm.
Stupid! Aaaaah! What must Halli think? She probably tried and tried to reach me last night, and I was too busy dreaming. What an idiot. What a useless excuse for a scientist. Can’t even stay awake for an experiment of this magnitude? I don’t deserve to go to Columbia. I might as well just stay in bed and watch cartoons all day. A lot of people do that, right? And they’re happy, right?
Instead I brushed my teeth, took a shower, and felt massively sorry for myself. Idiot. Stupid. Loser.
Not that I deserved it, but the day did start looking up almost right away.
“Hey, Aud! Wait up.”
Will jogged up to me in the hall before first period. He smelled like Dial soap. How do I know it was Dial? Because I made a project a while back of sniffing him, then going to the store and sniffing all the soaps until I could find the match. Then I bought it and I’ve been showering with Dial ever since, so I can smell like him. Yes, Dr. Whitfield, that’s what I do with my AB “above-beyond” senses. What’s that? Not what you had in mind?
“Hey, you going to the office this afternoon?” Will asked.
He knows Wednesdays and Fridays are my workdays.
“Yeah, why?”
“The new computers came in last night,” Will said, “so I’m going to install them after school. Thought I’d give you a ride so you wouldn’t have to take the bus.”
I could have melted in a puddle at his feet. That guy is so nice. First to remember that my mom is back in town, which means she’s using the car, and second to even think about what that might mean to me—having to take the bus and all.
“Yeah,” I said, “I’d really love that! Thanks
for offer—”
“Heeeey, Audie girl,” came the silky voice from behind him. Of course it was all too good to be true.
“Hey, Gemma.” I didn’t even look at her, but stayed focused on Will. “So then I’ll . . . meet you?”
“Where are we going?” British chick asked, just like I was afraid she would.
“Just work stuff,” Will told her. “I need to hit the office after school.”
Gemma tossed her hair and gave me a wink. Dang! She got me! I didn’t even realize I’d looked over at her until it was too late.
“Hope you won’t keep him for long,” Gemma told me, as if I had anything to do with it. To the contrary, I hoped instead that the boxes were all missing critical parts, and Will would have to spend hours and hours searching for them and then calling tech support. We’d order in some Chinese food, sit around all night, I’d get to look at him and smell him to my heart’s content—
Gemma curved her manicured fingers around the back of Will’s neck, then leaned over and flicked her snaky tongue inside his mouth. Ugh. So disgusting. My school needs to do better about policing PDAs.
“So I’ll see you,” I told Will, already turning away. I was hoping I could get that last image out of my brain.
“Yeah, see you,” Will said with a laugh, and when I looked back they were going at it again.
AAAAH! MY EYES!! MAKE IT STOP!
What can he possibly see in her?
And what can I do to be more like that?
29
I raced home from work, got there by 5:15. If I could quickly do a few hours of homework, eat something fast, get to bed by 9:00, SET MY ALARM for 2:00—five hours sleep wasn’t much, but it would have to do. I had to find Halli tonight.
It was hard to tear myself away. Will was still working on the computers when I left, but our mothers were both in the office, too, so I couldn’t really just sit there all afternoon staring at him the way I wanted to. And besides, the bookkeeping always backs up when I don’t stay on top of it, and it’s close enough to the end of the month that I figured I might as well pay the bills.
“How are we doing this month?” Elena asked me when I brought her the checks to sign. My mom looked like she was busy catching up on her paperwork, so I decided not to bother her.
“Not too bad,” I said. “Same base donations, and a lot of new people responding to the fall campaign.” Every August and September, Build a Fund for Good does a special donation drive to buy supplies for some of the low-income schools in our community. We should be able to write some pretty fat checks and make a lot of kids happy once all the deposits are in.
“How about consulting fees?” Elena asked.
I ran a quick report from our accounting program. “A lot better than over the summer—look at those two extra gigs in Houston.”
Lately my mom has been making more of a push to get her consulting services out there. Other non-profit organizations around the country hire her to come in and assess the way they’re running their businesses. My mom spends anywhere from a couple of days to a week, looking over their finances, reading the personnel files, talking to management about what goals they’d like to reach. Then she usually meets with the staff to do a kind of motivational/educational workshop that gets everybody fired up and ready to really move the organization forward.
I know it’s very rewarding for my mom to see the changes she can help people make, but it’s also pretty exhausting. And lately she’s been taking those trips at least two or three times a month.
She let me take the car home and said she’d grab a ride from Elena. So I had the house to myself for a little while. Time to try Dr. Whitfield again.
He answered almost right away. He was wearing a lab coat this time. I wondered what kind of experiment he might have just been doing.
“I’m sorry about yesterday,” I said.
“Did you tell her yet?” the professor asked.
“No, but I will. I promise.”
“Audie—”
“Please, Dr. Whitfield, can we go back to what you were telling me? About the observer problem and psychokinesis. I really want to know.”
He sighed in a grumpy way, but he obviously couldn’t resist. “All right. This is just a theory I’m working on right now, but it seems to fit. Tell me what you think.”
Hold up: He wanted to know what I thought about some physics theory of his. I almost blurted out, “Really?” but managed to play it cool.
“The observer problem,” Dr. Whitfield continued, “tells us that elementary particles are affected by what we, as humans—as observers—do to them. Even just looking at them can change their velocity or position. In fact, some physicists say that particles such as electrons don’t even exist until someone looks at them.”
I’d read all of that in Professor Hawkins’s various books, but it was still sort of hard to understand. Or maybe not so hard to understand, but just hard to picture. How could something not exist until you look at it? Some physicists have even gone so far as to say that the moon doesn’t exist unless someone is looking at it. If everyone on Earth looked away at the same time, the moon would disappear from the sky. Not just no longer be visible, but no longer exist. Trippy.
“So in effect,” Dr. Whitfield said, “consciousness—what our minds are doing when we observe something—is able to directly affect matter. If just looking at a particle can change its speed or position, or even bring it into existence in the first place, then that means consciousness has manipulated matter. Which is all psychokinesis is. Mind over matter. You with me so far?”
He waited and watched my face while I thought that through.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m with you.”
“Good. Now,” Dr. Whitfield said, “let’s bring this whole theory to bear on your situation.”
I got a little chill.
“Quantum physics agrees that consciousness affects matter at the microscopic level—electrons, protons, and so forth. What you have shown, I believe, is that the same holds true at the macroscopic level—big things, like human beings.
“Can you see if I do it here?” Dr. Whitfield held up a pad of paper and wrote my name on it.
“I can see.”
He drew a circle around “Audie.”
“You, Audie, are the observer. Your consciousness is at work during your experiment. And what are you observing?” He wrote down my name a second time, and put a triangle around it. “Audie, the macroscopic entity. You could be a photon, a neutron, but you’re not—you’re a person. You with me?”
“With you,” I said.
“Why shouldn’t Audie the observer,” he said, pointing to the circle, “affect Audie the object?” he finished, pointing to the triangle. “You set out to move your body from one universe to another using your consciousness alone—not some teleportation machine or other mechanical device. If consciousness alone can affect the universe at the subatomic level, then why not at the visible, human level?”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” I said, the excitement building inside me. “You mean I thought myself over? Across the gap from my universe to hers?”
“What else could it be?” Dr. Whitfield said.
“But what about Halli’s part in it?” I asked. “It didn’t work until she started meditating again.”
“I think it might be a resonance field,” Dr. Whitfield said. “The two of you created sympathetic resonance with each other. It’s like two pianos being in the same room: if you hit a middle C on one of them it causes that string in the piano to vibrate, and then the middle C string on the other piano will start vibrating, too.”
“So it is vibration,” I said.
“Yes, but it’s more than that.” Dr. Whitfield pointed at his drawing again. “It’s psychokinesis, Audie. It’s your mind moving your matter. That’s my theory, at least. What do you think of it?”
I tipped my head back and whooped. I didn’t know what else to do. It was so thrilling—so wonderful to talk t
o someone about it and hear such an elegant, complex quantum physics solution arising out of the puzzle. I felt like I was reading a textbook and in it at the same time. Me the observer, me the observed.
“Professor Whitfield, I think it’s brilliant. Seriously wonderful and brilliant. Thank you so much—I can’t believe you came up with that.”
Dr. Whitfield smiled. “It’s not me, Audie, it’s you. I could have fiddled around with ideas like these for a long time and never had an actual demonstration of them. Thank you. What you’ve done is remarkable.”
I would have loved to stay on the computer with him for another hour or more, but I heard my front door open. My mom was home.
“I have to go,” I told the professor. “I’m really sorry. I wish we could keep talking about this. I’ll call you tomorrow—”
“Is that your mother?” Dr. Whitfield asked. “You should tell her—I need you to tell her. If this theory is right, I may want to pub—”
I clicked off the call.
My mother stood in my doorway. “Hi, sweetie, how’s the homework?”
“Not bad. I’m going to try to get to bed early again tonight.”
My mother pushed her hair off of her face. “Sounds good to me. Pizza tonight?”
“Sounds great.”
I looked at the clock. Almost 6:30. I still had at least a few hours of studying to do.
But the delay was so, so worth it. I sat there and replayed in my head the whole conversation with Dr. Whitfield. Wow. Not just microwow, but macrowow.
Was it really true? Had I really done all that he said? And what about the resonance field he talked about? We didn’t discuss that nearly enough.
I scrubbed my hands over my face. Unbelievable. So huge and thrilling and totally unbelievable.
But someone believes. Not only believes, but understands, and can explain it.
I kept my voice down, but I had to squeal. I whispered a “Yaaaaay!”
“Pineapple and onion?” my mom shouted from the kitchen.
“Pineapple and onion sounds great!”
30
I squinted. Not because the sun was so bright—it was actually this sort of golden light, much gentler than what I’m used to at home—but because my eyes weren’t used to what I was seeing. Rock and rock and rock and rock. No trees, no shrubs, just rock.
Parallelogram Omnibus Edition Page 10
