Parallelogram Omnibus Edition

by Brande, Robin

  There was a small lake in front of the main building, and the three of us strolled along one side. The night was clear and cold. Red pranced with his tail high, so happy to be with his girls.

  “Does your mother do that to you?” Halli asked me after a while.

  “Do what?”

  “Make you want to throw something.”

  “No,” I said with a laugh. “Hardly ever.”

  “It’s gotten much worse since Ginny died,” Halli said. “She never used to try to track me down before.”

  “Maybe she worries about you, or something.”

  Halli muttered, “Or something.”

  We wandered back toward the hut. By now I was so tired I wouldn’t have minded taking a little nap in the dirt. But it was too cold for that, and I looked forward to that soft second bed I’d hidden behind back in Halli’s room.

  “Good night, boy,” Halli said, pressing her forehead to Red’s and scratching behind both his ears. “I’ll come get you early tomorrow. Stay warm.”

  “He doesn’t mind you leaving him?”

  “No, he’s been here before,” Halli said. “He knows I’ll always come back for him. Besides, he has some friends in there.” She pointed to the Husky on one of the bunks in back, and a big fluffy mutt to the left. “Rodolfo and Moritz. Good company.”

  I gave Red a big hug around the neck and told him good night. “What time do you think it is?” I asked Halli.

  She looked up at the sky. “Around 8:30, I’d say.”

  Amazing, I thought. “You can tell that from the stars?”

  “No, from the sounds in the hut. Dining room is closed. Everyone’s going to bed. Listen and you can hear it.”

  The night was so still, I could hear it. It’s all in training yourself to find the noise. Maybe that’s what Dr. Whitfield was talking about in his book—something as simple as this, listening for what you don’t usually bother to hear, but your ears are perfectly capable of picking up.

  “I should probably go,” I said. “My mom might come home for lunch to check on me. I should be sick in bed.”

  “When are you coming back?” Halli asked.

  “Tonight. I mean tomorrow morning, for you. Is 10:00 still okay?”

  “I’ll be on the trail,” Halli said. “I’ll find us a good spot and wait for you. But let me warn you: tomorrow’s a big hiking day. So get your sleep and have a good meal. We have a lot of terrain to cover before we get to the next hut.”

  I felt this weird kind of tickle on the back of my neck. Or maybe it was on the back of my skull. I scratched there to make it go away.

  “Are you coming back in?” Halli asked.

  “No, I’d better not—” The tickle felt very uncomfortable now, very hard to ignore. “I think I should—”

  My brain yanked at my body. Ripped it right out of Halli’s world back into my own. I must have landed back on my bed in the splittest second before my mother opened the door.

  “How you feeling, honey?”

  Groggy and disoriented and WEIRD.

  “I’m . . . fine, Mom.”

  Something had just happened. Something out of my control, and yet it felt fully part of me. Not like when my phone rang that first morning, and the sound of it summoned me back to my world. Not when Red did the same to Halli.

  This was something more subtle, more internal, and kind of made me a little sick to my stomach. There hadn’t been any sound that I was aware of. It was just a feeling, and that feeling was enough to instantly bring me back.

  While my mom made us soup for lunch, I quickly logged on and checked Professor Whitfield’s class schedule for Thursdays. It looked like he was done by 1:45. I checked my clock—a little more than an hour to wait. As soon as my mom went back to work I had to find him. Because this was definitely weird. And I thought if anyone might have insight, it would be him.

  I think it’s possible I just had my first psychic experience.

  33

  “Not psychic,” Dr. Whitfield corrected me. “Remote sensing.”

  “Okay, remote sensing,” I said. “What’s the difference?”

  “Calling something psychic implies that only someone with special abilities can do it. Remote sensing is something we’re all capable of—we just need to train our brains to pick up on the signals.”

  Kind of what Halli described last night—or this morning, really—when we were listening outside the hut.

  “But what was it?” I asked. “It made me feel . . . itchy.”

  “Describe to me again the experiences you and Halli had when you heard noises back home.”

  I went through the two scenarios again.

  “Interesting . . .” He scratched at his beard. I was starting to get used to the gesture.

  “Professor?” I was also starting to get used to that. I liked calling him “Professor” instead of “Dr. Whitfield” all the time. It felt more informal, and he didn’t seem to mind. “Do you want to hear my theory?”

  “Yes, of course,” he answered immediately. Like there was no question I might have some good ideas.

  “I’ve been thinking more about the observer problem. One thing Professor Haw—” Maybe it wasn’t so good to keep talking about him all the time—especially in front of Professor Whitfield. “One thing I’ve read in various books,” I began again, “is that the observer problem might also affect whether something is a wave or a particle. When we’re looking at it, it’s a particle. When we look away, it goes back to being a wave.”

  “That’s one of the theories,” Professor Whitfield said. “Go on.”

  “So what I was thinking was that maybe that’s what’s happening to me. Maybe when I’m over there I’m a particle because I’m focused on myself and what I’m doing, but there’s still an aspect of me that’s a wave, and maybe it leaves like a kind of vapor trail, you know? Like when an airplane goes through the sky.”

  “A vapor trail . . .” The professor scratched his beard. “Some sort of signature wave that you can follow back?”

  “Right,” I said. “And maybe the wave version of me is aware of things going on back here that the particle version of me could never know.”

  “So it signals you—”

  “And then the wave whooshes me back. That’s what it felt like, anyway.”

  “Fascinating,” the professor said. “So you think it was in response to whatever stimulus was associated with your mother coming home? Because you didn’t consciously hear anything this time, right? Not like when you heard the phone ringing.”

  “Right,” I said. “It must have been subconscious. My wave form knew I would get into trouble and so it called me back.”

  He shook his head. “This is all so—”

  “I know,” I said. “Bizarre.”

  Professor Whitfield chuckled. “That’s one word for it.”

  It was such a relief to be able to have a conversation like this—an intelligent, complicated discussion with someone who actually knows enough quantum physics to understand how bizarre it really is. I’ve been craving that for so long. It was just the kind of conversation I once dreamed of having with Professor Hawkins.

  Professor Whitfield smiled. “Audie Masters . . .”

  “Yes?”

  Then he simply clapped. “Excellent work today. You should be very proud of yourself.”

  I beamed. “Thank you, sir. So do you think I’m right?”

  “I don’t know, but I can appreciate some fine analysis when I see it. I’m going to think it over tonight. Let’s talk again tomorrow.”

  34

  Halli wasn’t kidding about the day’s hiking being hard. The trail went straight up in some places—there were even thick cables along the side of the cliff faces so you could pull yourself along and not fall off.

  “Sorry I’m so slow,” I said to Halli.

  “Don’t worry about it. You’re doing fine.”

  But I wasn’t really doing fine. I could tell I was holding her back. My genetic d
ouble and I are not genetic doubles when it comes to physical strength. Clearly Halli could have gone twice as fast if I weren’t there. I really have to start working out.

  Plus I didn’t want her to know, but she’d been right about the boots: they were giving me blisters—big, fat, honking ones. I just had to keep hiking, and hope the boots would break in at some point.

  The trail we were on wasn’t just steep, it was also slick in places where the rocks were in shadow and never quite dried. I was walking like an old woman, making extra, extra sure of my balance and footing. Meanwhile Halli seemed to be made of mountain goat genes—the slippery rock didn’t bother her at all.

  I might have been walking like my own version of an old woman, but the real old women—the burly-looking Austrian woman who passed us, the two German ladies who looked like they could have fully kicked my behind, and proved it by sprinting past both Halli and me while we picked our way up the trail—those were the women I want to grow up to be some day.

  I mentioned it to Halli, and she agreed.

  “I always look at women like that,” she said, “and wonder what they were doing at my age. I like to backtrack and think, ‘To be her at 90, I have to do this at 17.’”

  “Like what?” I asked, thinking maybe I should start doing those things, too. Although really the question was, to be Halli at 17, what do I need to start doing right away?

  “I try to eat the way they eat,” Halli said, “get out and hike as much as they do—do you realize a lot of these older people have been hiking these mountains all their lives? ‘Oh, look, it’s Thursday, I think I’ll go climb a peak.’ So I try to be like that. This whole past year Red and I have gone out every day—hiking and backpacking in the summer, skiing or snowshoeing in the winter.”

  I thought about my own life and my own schedule—there was no way I could do something like that every day. Maybe go for a walk or do some sort of workout, but hike or snowshoe all day? No way.

  And finally something occurred to me that I must have known, but hadn’t really considered before. “You don’t go to school.”

  “No,” Halli said. “Ginny taught me everything herself.”

  “And that was . . . okay? I mean, with your parents?”

  I should have known better than to ask that. Halli scowled. “They didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  I needed to go back to a safer topic.

  “So is that what Ginny was like?” I asked. “These old women we keep seeing up here?”

  It worked. Halli smiled. “No—much, much tougher. Ginny could have out-hiked even those Italian guys we saw yesterday. She was amazing.”

  Sometimes it seems like Halli doesn’t want to talk too much about her grandmother, but this time she did.

  “The last time I was up here with Ginny,” she said, “I was fifteen. We stayed about three weeks, just hiking around, never wanting to leave.” Halli turned around to check on me. “Keep your hand on the cable. Good. That’s good. Try to keep your eyes forward—don’t always look at your feet. It’ll make you dizzy.”

  She was right about that. I was becoming a little rock-blind—that’s the only thing I’d been looking at for hours.

  “This hut we’re going to today,” Halli continued, “it was Ginny’s and my favorite. We tried to come back here every year.”

  “Is that all the two of you did?” I asked. “Travel around? India for a month, the Alps—where else?”

  “Lots of places. That was my education. Ginny taught me by showing me.”

  “Is that why you know so many languages?”

  “Yes,” Halli said. “It’s from living with people and having to learn to understand them. Ginny hardly ever translated for me. She wanted me to learn.”

  I hoped Halli wasn’t going to throw me into the deep end of the pool by refusing to translate for me anymore. I already felt isolated enough during dinner last night. If Halli hadn’t occasionally said things like, “He says he’s been hiking for a week, and finally the weather is perfect,” or “She wants to know if this is your first time here.” (When I smiled at the woman and nodded, she asked Halli a flurry of other questions. I saw Halli grow more and more uncomfortable. She said, “nein” a lot, meaning “no,” and finally shrugged and gave a short, almost stiff response. The woman shrugged, too, and gave me an odd look. The whole thing was weird.)

  The sky was that golden yellow again. I loved the sun here. I almost didn’t need to wear the sunglasses Halli had brought me. It felt good to lean back sometimes and feel the sun on my face—especially whenever we came out of one of those dark, slippery patches where I kept imagining losing my footing and careening down the mountain.

  Around noon Alps time, Halli and Red and I found a warm patch of flat rock where we could sit and have our lunch.

  Halli unpacked a whole container of peaches. Not ripe, heavy peaches like I’d seen back in her greenhouse, but sliced peaches that she’d been dehydrating that night at her house while we discussed the details of our trip. First she dehydrated them to take all the water out so they’d weigh nothing for most of her travels, then she rehydrated them with water she had poured over them this morning. They plumped right up and tasted sweet and fresh. She threw a few to a very grateful Red.

  But that wasn’t all. She also unpacked a loaf of bread with sunflower seeds all over the outside, like a crust. And a fresh cucumber that she cut slices off with her camping knife, and a kind of savory spread that she said she also made fresh at home, then dehydrated, then rehydrated again today.

  Lots of process, but it was so worth it. That lunch was better than anything I ever have at home or at school. Which might not be saying much, since I’m usually going straight for the Doritos and dessert at the cafeteria, but still, it was an impressive feast for how few resources she had out there on a mountain.

  After we’d eaten, Halli took a few minutes to herself to lean back against the rock and close her eyes and feel the golden sunshine on her face. And looking at her doing that, it occurred to me what the real difference is between the two of us.

  We’re like those side-by-side experiments scientists do sometimes to see what’s best for a plant. I’m the one getting too little water and not enough sunlight, and Halli’s the one being fed all the best nutrients, getting the best spot in the sun, and having Mozart played to her twenty-four hours a day.

  Our hair is only part of it, but maybe it’s the best evidence of all. Hers is so thick and shiny, mine is like a limp, tattered rag. Now expand that to my whole body, all the way down to the cellular level, and that’s probably how I compare to Halli. It’s certainly how I feel when I’m around her.

  “Do you think I could ever be like you?” I asked. Then I was sort of horrified, because I didn’t realize I’d actually said that thought out loud.

  “You are me,” Halli said. “Isn’t that the whole point?”

  Might as well keep going. “No, I mean, yes, we’re genetically the same, but look at you. Look at me. I’m like you if you’d lain sick in bed for half a year.”

  Halli tilted her head a little more forward and squinted at me. “You know what Ginny would say?”

  “No, but I’d like to hear.”

  “‘Get off your butt!’” Halli shouted in her old-lady voice. “‘Stop your whining! You think this mountain is gonna climb itself? You think this river is gonna flow backwards just so you can rest for awhile? Get up! Quit yer griping and your suffering. No one but the birds and the beasts is gonna hear it.’” Halli coughed and returned to her regular voice. “Or something like that.”

  I had to laugh. “Was she really like that?”

  “Sometimes. She was really funny. And really tough. And I really, really miss her.”

  The sudden look of sadness on Halli’s face told me maybe I’d gone too far.

  “So what do you say?” she asked, slapping her palms against her thighs. “Better get going. This mountain isn’t going to climb itself.”

  Just then we heard
a shout. Or more like a cross between a shout and a curse and a cry of pain. It came from just around the bend, from that slippery section of trail we’d maneuvered right before looking for a sunny spot to take a break.

  Red’s hackles went up. “Easy, boy,” Halli said. “Let’s go see.” The two of them went off to investigate. I followed more slowly, extra-mindful now of the treacherous footing that lay ahead.

  When I rounded the bend, I found Halli kneeling in front of a guy whose leg was outstretched. He sucked in his breath every time Halli touched his ankle. I saw him shake his head at some question, then grimace as Halli tried to rotate the joint.

  There were two other people with him—another guy around his same age—around Halli’s and my age, actually—and a young woman with long blond hair. All three of them were talking to Halli, and none of them seemed to notice me.

  But then Halli looked up as I approached, and the girl turned around to look, too.

  And oh, great masters of physics, please say no. Please say it isn’t possible.

  The girl? Was Gemma.

  35

  I stared at her in shock. She smiled a strange smile, then said something to Halli. I heard Halli answer something about “cousins.”

  My first thought was that Gemma had somehow figured out a way to follow me over.

  But then I realized no, Hairball wasn’t even a fraction that smart. And then my brain started doing the processing for me, now that it was over its initial horror.

  Gemma had her own version over here in this universe, just like I did. But honestly, did I have to run into her? What were the physics of that?

  But then my heart immediately lifted. Because if she was here, did that mean Will was, too? I looked at both of the guys, hoping it were true.

  The one on the ground—the one in pain—had short, blondish-brownish hair and a strong, athletic-looking build. Definitely not Will.

  The other guy—the one with his back to me—had dark brown hair, but not as dark as Will’s. Unless over here the sun had lightened it. I cleared my throat, hoping to get him to turn around.