He did, and said in a British accent, “Hello there.”
Not Will.
“Change in plans,” Halli told me. “We’re going to have to help Daniel here onto some dry ground, then I need to wrap his ankle.”
“What happened?” I asked.
Gemma gave the guy on the ground a gentle shove. “My brother is an ahse, that’s what.”
He completed the trio of British accents by answering, “I’m afraid so. Sorry, everyone.”
Halli told him not to worry, then organized the rest of us to help support him the last hundred feet or so from the shady patch into the sun. “We’ll have more room there,” Halli explained, “and none of us will have to freeze.”
As soon as I was close enough, Gemma held out her hand and said, “Sarah. This is my brother Daniel. And that lot is Martin.”
I did my dork wave. “Hi. I’m Audie.”
“Halli Markham’s cousin,” Gemma—or Sarah—said.
“Yes.”
“The resemblance is remarkable.”
“People say that all the time,” I said.
“I didn’t know Halli Markham had a cousin,” Gemma/Sarah said. “Nobody’s ever mentioned you.”
What did she mean, nobody had ever mentioned me? What business was it of hers whether Halli had fifty cousins or none? Gemma was just as annoying here as she was back home.
“Which side?” the guy called Martin asked.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“Cousin on which side—mother or father?”
Halli gave me the subtlest of head shakes. “We should start moving him,” she told everyone. “That ankle’s already starting to swell.”
That diverted their attention, for which I was grateful. But I still didn’t understand why I was being questioned by these total strangers. Why did they even care?
It took a while to help Daniel hobble and hop from the slick to the dry, the cold to the warm. But totally worth it. My fingers were frozen by the time we got back to our lunch spot. It didn’t take long to get chilled in the shade.
We helped Daniel recline again, his back up against a rock, and then Halli went to work. She gently unlaced and removed his boot, while he winced and cursed and sucked in his breath.
His ankle looked like someone had stuck a pump to it and inflated it. It was already turning a grayish sort of purple. No wonder Daniel didn’t like it when anyone touched it.
While Halli dug into her pack to get the first aid kit, Gemma/Sarah and her friend Martin went back to questioning me.
“The reason I asked that,” Martin said, “was I wondered if Virginia Markham was your grandmother, too.”
“Oh.” I glanced at Halli for guidance. Again she subtly shook her head.
“No, we’re cousins on my father’s side.”
“Who’s your father?” Gemma/Sarah asked.
Now look here! I wanted to say. Butt your big face out. But again Halli stepped in.
“Our families don’t really get along,” she said. “It’s a shame, really, because Audie and I have only just rediscovered each other. I think the last time we were together was when we were babies.”
Daniel grimaced as Halli started wrapping his ankle in white tape. “Will we be reading about the two of you now with all your adventures?” he asked, looking like he wanted to distract himself with any sort of inane chat.
“Hope so,” Halli answered, smiling at me.
I smiled so hard back at her I had to look away before I embarrassed myself. But seriously, that might be nicest thing I’ve ever heard.
“Pity you missed the Atlantic,” Daniel said to me. Then he leaned back and closed his eyes and gave up talking for a while as Halli really got in there and wrapped.
I tried to play along. “Yeah, I’m sorry I missed it, too.”
“How old were you when you did that?” Gemma/Sarah asked Halli.
“Twelve.”
“Right!” Gemma/Sarah said. “Unbelievable!” She ticked off the accomplishments on her fingers. “The only grandmother-granddaughter rowing team ever to race across the Atlantic, the eldest and youngest competitors ever to race, and the eldest and youngest ever to successfully finish.” Gemma/Sarah shook her head. “Brilliant.”
“Thank you,” Halli said, not looking up from Daniel’s ankle. I tried to catch her eye—to get any sort of clue—but she stayed focused on her tape job.
“What did you think of that, Audie?” Gemma asked. (I had to start thinking of her as Sarah. Sarah.)
“Uhhh . . . I thought it was great!” I said. “Really great. Very proud.”
I saw Halli smile. Not smile with pride, but almost like she was enjoying watching me try to improvise.
While I, on the other hand, was not enjoying hearing about this from Hairball instead of my own alternate me. Didn’t Halli think I would have loved details like this? Rowing across the Atlantic? Are you kidding me? Why had she been holding back?
“Don’t you wish you’d been out there,” Sarah continued, “battling the waves and the sharks?”
“Umm. . . that’s really more Halli’s thing than mine.”
“Maybe the two of you will race together now,” Sarah said. “Now that Virginia’s—”
“How’s that feel?” Halli asked Daniel a little bit more loudly than she needed to. She smoothed her hands over the taped-up joint.
Daniel reached down and felt the ankle, too. “Remarkably well,” he answered. “Thank you.”
“Can he walk?” his friend Martin asked.
“No,” Halli said. “We’ll all still have to help him. The more he tries to walk on it, the longer it’s going to take to heal.”
“How long will it take?” Sarah asked.
“Could be a week,” Halli said. “Everyone’s different.”
“A week?” Sarah said. “But that’s nearly our entire holiday!”
“I’m really sorry,” Daniel told his companions.
“Let’s just shoot him and leave,” Martin suggested.
“Love to, but my mum would be mad,” Sarah answered. She sighed dramatically. “All right, we’ll let you live, you git.” To Halli she said, “How far to the next hut?”
“You don’t want to know,” Halli said. She glanced up at the sky. “We should get started. We don’t want to get caught out here at dark.”
I wasn’t sure about my own time limit anymore. How long ago had we stopped for lunch? I went through the calculations again—noon here was 4:00 in the morning at home. Six-thirty, when my alarm would go off, was 2:30 in the afternoon here. Which it might be close to.
The math was making my brain hurt.
I went over to Halli and whispered, “Time?”
She nodded. “Might be a problem.”
She looked around us, then pulled me toward the shaded section of trail. “We’ll be right back,” she told the others. “Sorry. Just wait right there. Audie needs to check something.”
“How are you going to explain it?” I asked as we both hurried out of sight. “That I’m just gone?”
“I don’t know,” Halli said. “This is bad. Obviously I wasn’t expecting these people.”
I looked up and around us. “Is there any place you could say I went?”
“No. There’s nothing around here except the next hut.”
We both crouched on the cold trail and thought.
“I’ll say you took a shortcut,” Halli invented. “Those people don’t know this trail. I’ll tell them you went a different, harder way to get things ready at the next hut.”
“You think they’ll believe that?”
“I wouldn’t,” Halli said, “but they might.”
I knew I had to go, but first I needed to get this off my chest.
“Halli, why didn’t you tell me? About rowing across the Atlantic? What else don’t I know?”
Halli sighed. “I don’t know—a lot, I suppose. Can we talk about it later?”
“But then will you tell me?” I asked. “Everything? I
mean seriously, starting from the beginning. I don’t feel like I know you at all.”
“Will you tell me everything from the beginning, too?” she asked.
“Yeah, right,” I said. “Like I’ve done anything nearly as important.”
“I want to know,” Halli said. She stuck out her hand. “Deal?”
I rolled my eyes and shook her hand. “Deal. But mine’s boring.”
“How do you know mine isn’t?” Halli said.
“I don’t know, somehow anything that starts with, ‘There I was, rowing across the Atlantic,’ seems like it would be a pretty good story.”
“There I was,” Halli countered, “living in an alternate world . . .”
“You’ll see,” I told her. “Boring.”
But undeniably getting more interesting with each passing day.
36
“What is with you lately?” Lydia asked me at lunch. “You look like you never sleep anymore.”
Oh, I sleep. For a few hours. Then I hike the Alps the rest of the night and sometimes help rescue injured young Englishmen. And still make it to school by first period.
I lifted my head off the cafeteria table, grunted something unintelligible, and went back to trying to sleep, which was hard to do with Gemma hyena-ing to her buddies over at the far table.
“I could teach you a special yoga pose,” Lydia offered. “Twenty minutes of it is like taking a two-hour nap.”
That got my attention. “Really?”
She crumpled up her lunch sack. “Let’s go to the library. They have carpeting. I’ll show you.”
Since this was the first time I’d ever agreed to even try a yoga pose, she was pretty excited.
She showed me how to sit back on my knees, then curl forward, my arms loose at my sides, while I settled my forehead (excuse me—“third eye”) flat against the floor.
“Now breathe deeply,” she said, although I found that kind of hard while I was curled over that way. It must take some getting used to.
By the time I was in position there were only ten minutes left of lunch, but if ten minutes equaled one hour of sleeping? I’d take it.
And I needed it. Because as much as I would have loved to go straight home after school and grab a nap, it was Friday, and I had to work.
“Just got another consulting request,” my mother told me when I came in. “Philadelphia next week. Is that all right? I know I just got back.”
“It’s great, Mom,” and I meant it. What a relief. Maybe while she’s out of town I can ditch another day or two of school and both get more sleep and spend more time with Halli. I’ve never really looked forward to my mother’s trips before. Now I’m all for them.
I started entering the data for all the new donations that had come in, but my heart wasn’t in it. What I really wanted to do was go home and get some sleep. But first call Professor Whitfield and report in to him—tell him about the whole Gemma/Sarah thing. I wondered what he’d say about that.
“What do you think of the new computers?” Elena asked me. She’d caught me looking at the clock again instead of entering data.
“Oh, I love them,” I said. “They’re so much faster than the old ones. Will really did a great job finding these for us.”
“And so cheap,” my mother said.
“Will’s great,” I said. It’s the kind of thing I like to say as often as possible, whenever I have a good excuse. Because Will is great. Will is great. Sounds like one of my old juvenile poems. Except I would have thrown in a few rhymes here and there. “Will is great. Wish he’d ask me on a date. Then I’d celebrate. One day he’ll be my mate. Our love is fate.”
And so on to a barfalicious extent.
A little before 5:00 I started wrapping it up. Usually I don’t care at all if I work overtime, but tonight I had better things to do.
My mom seemed to notice my antsiness. “Honey, can you give me about another half hour?”
“Oh, um . . .” I glanced at the clock for the two hundredth time. “Sure, I guess, but . . . could you maybe get a ride with Elena? Then I could take the car.”
“What’s your hurry?” she rightfully asked.
“No hurry, it’s just . . . I have some things to do for the Columbia app. I wanted to check some statistics I heard about. Supposedly there’s this graph on the Web about how many people they take from western high schools versus eastern ones.” Totally made up, total lie. And not a particularly creative one.
My mom looked a little put out. “Just half an hour—”
“Mom, really, if you wouldn’t mind—”
“Fine,” she said, holding the keys out to me. She didn’t sound very fine, but I took them anyway. I really wanted to talk to Professor Whitfield before she came home.
“Thanks, Mom. Really. I appreciate it.”
But she’d already gone back to reading an article on her computer. I’d have to make it up to her later. I was feeling pretty guilty.
But still, it had worked. I raced home and quickly logged on and contacted Professor Whitfield.
I told him the whole thing—how out of all the universes, Gemma had to show up in my life both places. And how Halli apparently had this whole big mysterious adventure-racing childhood that I knew nothing about.
I was only about fifteen minutes into the phone call, and just at the part where Professor Whitfield and I were laughing about the fact that if either of us could do math we could calculate the probability of someone like Gemma existing in every possible universe—when suddenly the door to my bedroom flew open, and there stood my mother.
She’d obviously sneaked into the house. I never heard her come in. I was better at detecting her with my vapor trail than I was with my regular ears.
“What is going on?” she demanded, striding purposefully over to my computer. She glared at the face on my screen. “Do you know my daughter is only in high school?”
“Mom!”
“Hello, Mrs.—Ms. Fletcher,” Professor Whitfield said.
“Answer me!” she said. “What is this all about? What do you two have to be laughing about in such a chummy way? Why is my daughter sneaking home to talk to you?”
“I wasn’t sneaking home—”
“Audie,” Professor Whitfield said, “don’t you think you should tell—”
“Bye,” I said, and clicked off the call.
My mother planted her hands on her hips and glowered at me. Obviously I was in bigger trouble than I thought.
“Mom, he’s just helping me. It’s for the Columbia application.”
“Don’t give me that!” she said. “I can see there’s something going on.”
“Like what?” I asked, worried that she might have overheard some of what we’d said.
“He’s obviously very attractive—”
“What? Eww!”
“Do you have a crush on this man?” she asked.
“No, Mom! Seriously! That’s disgusting.”
She folded her arms over her chest and kept glaring at me. “Audie . . .”
“Mom—” I almost had to laugh. Of all the things for her to suspect. “I swear to you, I have no interest in Professor Whitfield except as a teacher. How could you even think that?”
Her shoulders relaxed a little. “Sometimes teachers—”
“Ew. Stop. I promise you, Professor Whitfield is not that kind of person. He’s just a regular, nice guy. He’s helping me figure out some really hard science so I can impress the Admissions Committee. He’s being nice to me—that’s all.”
My mother pursed her lips. It was her version of Professor Whitfield scratching his beard.
“You could tell me, you know. If there were anything wrong—”
“I know, Mom. I do. Of course. But there’s nothing creepy going on.”
Now she really relaxed. She sat on the edge of my bed and patted the spot next to her. I got up from my desk and joined her.
“Sweetie, I worry about you sometimes.”
“Obviously,”
I said. “But you don’t have to worry in this particular category. There’s nobody. There’s never been anybody.” Except Will. In my heart.
She put her arm around my shoulder. “You’re pushing yourself too hard. This Columbia thing is too much.”
“It’s due in a little over a month,” I said. “I just have to do it right. If I get in, then I can relax the whole rest of the school year. But it’s worth it to me to work extra hard right now and try to make it happen.”
She leaned her head against mine. “I understand that, honey, but I think you have to be realistic. You’re putting all your eggs in one basket.”
“For now,” I said, wishing she’d have a little more faith. “If I make Early Decision, I’ll know by mid-December. Otherwise I have to wait until March or April. So it’s worth it to me to know—to start working on the finances of it, too. But mostly just to know. You know, for my future.”
My mother let go of me and sat up straight again. “So this professor—he’s really going to help you?”
“I think so. He already is in some ways. He knows a lot about physics.”
“Where does he teach?” she asked.
“A school in Colorado. Some college up in the mountains.”
“I don’t mean to be insulting to him,” my mom said, “but why isn’t he teaching at one of the better schools? Like Columbia?”
“I’m not really sure,” I admitted. “I didn’t think it was polite to ask.”
“But you think he has enough clout to help you get into Columbia?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I hope so.”
My mom got up and went to the door. She paused and turned back.
“Honey, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I really think you need to consider some alternatives. If this Columbia situation doesn’t work out—”
“I know, Mom. But I just need to concentrate on that for now. Just until I get the application in. Then all I can do is wait.”
“I love you, sweetie. I just don’t want to see you disappointed.”
“I know, Mom. It’s okay.”
But it wasn’t okay. As soon as she left I sank back against my bed. If your own mother doesn’t believe in you—
It was time to stop fooling around. I needed to start putting some of this experiment onto paper, in a form that would completely blow Professor Hawkins’s hat off. He needed to give it just one glance to know that I am the star pupil he’s been waiting for, and that the next big discoveries in quantum physics and cosmology are obviously coming from me.
Parallelogram Omnibus Edition Page 13
