A Problematic Paradox

by Eliot Sappingfield

  First impression: my new home would need some serious redecorating. The walls, blank for the most part, were begging for some tasteful art or some fun and tasteless art. Or anything with a dragon or a spaceship on it. Instead, the living room’s lone decoration was a crookedly hung teen heartthrob poster—the kind that come folded in girls’ magazines. On it, a teenage boy was sitting on a beanbag chair holding a purple teddy bear, looking thoughtful, morose, and approachable. He might have been cute if he didn’t look a bit like a llama.

  Hypatia saw me looking at it. “That’s not mine. Rainbow put that there. She was one of my roommates. We’re not supposed to display personal effects in common areas unless the roommates all agree, but she hung it up without consulting me. Just so you know it wasn’t my idea.”

  The girl was gone, but the poster remained. “It’s crooked,” I said.

  “That’s a twenty-degree angle. Teen Hits! Magazine says varying angles when hanging posters creates a carefree and whimsical atmosphere. At least,” she added, “that’s what I assume Rainbow was going for.”

  “She was your roommate?”

  “Yeah,” she said with a sigh that might have contained either nostalgia or relief. “I had a couple of roomies, Pauline and Rainbow Dawson. They’re identical twins from southwestern Oregon—humans, too. I really liked them, but . . . they’re in a better place now.”

  “Oh god, Hypatia,” I said, a little shocked. “I had no idea. I’m so sorry.”

  “Oh, it’s okay. I’m sure they’re more comfortable in the big dorm downtown. Some kids can’t handle the lack of structure that comes with neighborhood housing.” As she spoke, she retrieved a water bottle labeled WATER BOTTLE from a pocket on her backpack that said WATER BOTTLE. After filling it at the sink, she inverted it four times, tapped the cap on the counter each time, and set it on a shelf in her fridge with at least a dozen other bottles, all labeled identically.

  I had to smile. “I can already tell it’s like the Wild West around here. Why did they leave?”

  “I don’t know. I honestly think they would have flunked out without my help. Every night I’d have to come straight home and force them to do their homework. Neither of them had any initiative. And don’t get me started on their housekeeping. I had to make each of them a chore list so they would stop forgetting things. Their last month here, they were in charge of cleaning the kitchen and didn’t even bother to clean behind the fridge.”

  “How many roommates have you had before me, Hypatia?” I asked.

  “Well, this is only my fourth year in the house. Before that I had a private dorm room, but . . . there have been a couple,” she said.

  “A couple?”

  “Okay, eleven!” she snapped. “But they were all incorrigible. Before Rainbow and Pauline there was Tectella Deusta. She used to wear her shoes all the time—even in bed! She left snow cones in the shower! Sylvia Plynth tried to sneak in an industrial pizza oven so she could start an unauthorized delivery business. Marissa Fountain kept inviting her stupid boyfriend over after hours—the Chaperone ended up pigmentizing him right in the living room! I was up half the night cleaning it . . .”

  I hadn’t the faintest idea what being pigmentized meant, but was pretty certain I didn’t want to find out.

  These were bad signs. I was really starting to like Hypatia and was actually counting on us working out as roommates, but I was getting the impression she would tire of my bad habits and peccadilloes in short order. “Look,” I said. “I can tell you right now, I’m probably going to do a lot worse stuff than all that put together. Are you going to kick me out, too?”

  Hypatia looked horrified. “Kick you out? I’ve never kicked anyone out! They all left me! I thought they were my friends, and they just moved out and stopped talking to me altogether.”

  Until then, I’d been sympathizing with the eleven ex-roommates. But Hypatia had been the one left behind, and I suddenly felt sorry for her, having been in that situation once or twice myself. “That sounds pretty miserable.”

  Hypatia shrugged noncommittally, pulled two cups of steaming hot tea from a cabinet, and handed me one. We sat at the kitchen table and sipped for a moment, while I wondered how she kept tea hot in a cupboard or whether she had a very quick and quiet tea machine in there.

  “Your mistake was getting to know them,” I said, noticing an error in her alphabetized spice rack—the parsley was positioned before the paprika. “If you avoid bonding until you know whether they’re awful, you don’t have to care as much when they flake out.”

  Hypatia noticed I was looking across the kitchen and twitched. “That does sound miserable,” she said, switching the positions of the parsley and paprika.

  “Miserable? Nah,” I said. “Works for me. You never know who’s going to turn out to be a jerk.”

  “Did you have a lot of friends at your old school?” she asked.

  I was about to say something snide when Hypatia returned to her tea and I could see she was being genuine and not sarcastic. She was actually asking about my friends, as if it wasn’t obvious that I didn’t have any.

  “You know,” I said philosophically, “it’s not how many friends you have. It’s about having one or two really good ones.”

  “Do they know where you’ve gone?”

  “Who?” I asked, then, “Oh, yeah, the friends. Yeah, they know. I mean no, they don’t know. How could I have told anyone where I was going? I didn’t know myself, till I got here.”

  “If you need to call or email—” she began, but stopped.

  I believe Hypatia is at least part psychic.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  She could tell something was bothering me. If she was going to change her mind about being friends with me, it was better to get it over with, like tearing off a Band-Aid. Besides, it changed the subject, and fibbing about having friends was starting to get depressing.

  “You need to know something about me, Hypatia,” I said. I took her hands in mine and squeezed them, offering what little comfort I could. “I’m a slob.”

  She snatched her hands away and clasped them over her mouth. “No!”

  “I am. I was raised by a bachelor. We lived in mobile homes that we kept inside a larger building, and whenever one of them got too dirty or gross, we’d just call someone, and they’d take away the old trailer and replace it with a brand-new one. Until a few minutes ago, I didn’t even know cleaning behind a refrigerator was a thing people did.”

  “You won’t room with me. Is that it?” Hypatia asked.

  “I want to. You’ve been nice to me all along, and nobody else has. But what if you get tired of me being . . . how I am?”

  Hypatia nodded. “I can deal with it, as long as you don’t mind me picking up after you and nagging a bit. And don’t leave in the middle of the night.”

  Had someone done that? Ugh. “Look, Hypatia. I think you’re pretty cool, and I have no desire to leave, so we should find a way of making this work. Let’s make a deal,” I said. “I’ll promise not to get offended by you pointing out my flaws if you forgive me for making no effort to change them.”

  Hypatia considered this. “Could you make a token effort from time to time?”

  “I’ll make an occasional effort if you set a goal of breaking one rule or letting go of one thing per week. Rules are made to be broken, you know.”

  She scoffed. “I find that implausible. The act of creating a rule is to establish a guideline for behavior. The very nature of a rule contradicts—”

  “It’s a cliché, silly! It means that breaking a rule every once in a while is good for you.” Then I had an idea. “We’re going to break one right now.”

  Hypatia’s eyes grew as wide as dinner plates and flashed electric blue. “No, I can’t! Wait—which rule do you mean?”

  “Come up with one,” I said.

  Sh
e thought it over, looking like she was worried the CIA might storm the building at any moment. “We’re not allowed to watch TV programs with mature ratings.”

  “There you go,” I said. She didn’t move, so I led her into the living room, parked her front of the television, and placed the remote in her hand.

  “Nikola, this is a class fourteen offense. It’s right up there with bringing beverages into buildings marked ‘no beverages’!”

  “Gotta start somewhere,” I said. “You ready to do this?”

  Hypatia took some time studying the remote, as if she’d never seen one before. Her thumb trembled over the power button. “Okay. Let’s go.” She collected herself and pressed the power button.

  The television lit up, and we were greeted by a newscaster describing some unimaginable bloody genocide in a remote corner of the world. Clearly, this was just fine for kids, so I powered on my tablet, looked up a programming schedule, and found a talk show with an adults-only rating. “Channel 342,” I said.

  Hypatia pressed the keys with trembling fingers. Suddenly, we were looking at three men with the most impressive mullets I’ve ever seen.

  The one on the right was furious at the one on the left. “I ain’t never seen them babies before in my life. You left them in my tub—that makes them your problem.”

  “Well, Trixie said you knew all about it!” said the one on the left.

  A host appeared. At least one person in the studio owned a decent set of clothes. “Why don’t we ask Trixie herself? Come on out, Trixie!”

  The lights flickered, and a faint buzz filled the air. “The television program Feuds n’ Fighting is rated TV-MA and is prohibited by the School Code,” the Chaperone said.

  A moment later, the TV went black, and the remote actually leaped from Hypatia’s hand and dropped onto a sofa cushion.

  “Oh my goodness,” Hypatia said.

  I sighed. “Yeah, I guess they really keep an eye on—”

  “We’re like Batman and Robin!” she cried excitedly as she threw her arms around me for a hug that might have been more appropriate if we’d just completed a marathon together.

  After the hugging, a couple minutes jotting down a brief journal entry, and a couple more creating a simple spreadsheet to track her scheduled infractions, as well as my agreed-upon efforts at not being a slob (this column was blank), Hypatia announced that it was time for my tour of the house.

  First she led me into the kitchen, pointing out all the major appliances like we hadn’t just been in there. (I forgot to ask about the instant tea.) She then positioned me in front of the pantry door. “This is a little trick I worked up. Are you ready to be amazed?” she asked.

  “Yes?” I said. I’ll confess, I had my doubts.

  Hypatia smiled mischievously. “Well, take a look at this!” She swung open the pantry door to reveal three dusty shelves, a half-full trash bin, and a single can of wax beans on the center shelf.

  “Beans!” I said, trying to sound excited. “You really do know how to party, Hypatia.”

  Her brow furrowed as she looked around the door into the pantry. “Stupid door,” she said. “Hang on.” She closed the door, kicked the lower hinge, and opened the door again.

  The beans were gone. So was the pantry. In their place was a perfect image of a sidewalk, illuminated by the glow of streetlamps and light thrown from store windows. A cool, fresh breeze drifted through the opening. To the right was the front window of the Pi R Circle Bakery. To the left—City Hall.

  “It’s the downtown,” I realized. “It looks so real.”

  “It is real,” Hypatia said. “It’s a one-way wormhole I made last year after I was almost late for class.”

  “How did you come up with it?” I asked. “I’ve never even heard of that kind of technology.”

  “The parahuman community has been working with wormholes for decades. They make travel instantaneous and use almost no energy once they’re established. I used what was left of Ben Rufkin’s portable lightning generator to get it going. You’ll meet him later—he’s the bald kid with no eyebrows who always looks surprised. I got the plans from the library, and it only took an afternoon to put together. The real trick is getting them aimed properly. It’s tough to hit a moving target, even one so close.”

  “Downtown looks pretty stationary to me,” I said.

  “Think absolute position. The downtown is stationary relative to us, but it is also moving around the earth at 770 miles per hour, and the earth is moving in a different direction around the sun at about 67,000 miles an hour, while our solar system is moving at about 514,000 miles an hour around the galactic core, and that’s not even considering—”

  “I get the idea,” I said, staring in amazement at an astrophysical phenomenon human scientists had only theorized about.

  “My point is that it might not be right on, particularly if someone is running a microwave nearby, or—”

  “Looks fine to me,” I said as I made to step out onto Main Street to take a look around.

  Hypatia grabbed the back of my shirt, stopping me. “It’s one-way. If you went through, you’d have to walk home all over again. We can take it to school tomorrow morning.”

  12

  HEARING VOICES

  After the kitchen, Hypatia re-introduced me to the living room and entryway, which had all your standard living room and entryway features. (A table! Chairs! Another table! The place where Hypatia gets mad if you don’t put your shoes there!) Straight ahead was a hallway, which ended in the bathroom, and two other doors that I assumed were the bedrooms. The bathroom was stocked with the usual assortment of hygienic items, including a new toothbrush and an unopened bottle of shampoo labeled NIKOLA KROSS GENETICALLY TAILORED SHAMPOO AND ANTI-RADIATION WASH. I cracked the seal and took a whiff. It smelled absolutely wonderful—something in the vicinity of freshly mowed grass, tangerines, and the way old books smell. I had to suppress the urge to wash my hair immediately.

  Hypatia’s room was on the left and was filled to the rafters with various types of pinkness: a pink bed, a rose desk, a light-red table adorned with blush flowers in a fuchsia vase, and about a quarter million stuffed animals, all in various degrees of pink.

  “I like it,” I lied.

  “Your room is across the hall, there. After everything that happened today, I’m way behind, so I need to get some homework done. Do you want to get breakfast tomorrow morning?”

  “Sure thing,” I said.

  She shut the door, and I stood there a moment in the dim, silent hall. I realized it was the first time I’d been alone since Miss Hiccup picked me up. Had I really slept in my own bed the night before last?

  The weight of everything that had happened settled on me. I looked up my old hometown news channel’s website and found a story about a gas leak that had destroyed a hazardous materials warehouse. All I had to do for details and photos was “click here.” Before I did that, I wanted to be sitting down. I opened the door to my new room and completely forgot about what I was supposed to be doing.

  I was immediately and irrevocably in love with my room. A high loft bed made of wrought iron and random chunks of stainless steel stood imposingly in one corner. The sheets were bright white with the slightest flecks of silver thread sewn through them and were incredibly soft. An obese throne of a recliner stood in one corner of the room, next to a gorgeously complex-looking stereo. The walls were a bluish off-white color I rather liked, with the exception of one wall, upon which was a gigantic glossy photograph of a mountainside that was pretty enough, if you liked looking at mountainsides, which I guessed I didn’t hate.

  Between the bed and the chair were my books. My bookshelf looked right out of an old movie, deep brown wood, covered end to end with hundreds of books from mammoth old scientific tomes to minuscule diversionary paperbacks with pictures of teenagers looking whimsical and mysterious. Th
ere were also books clearly written by parahumans for parahumans (which were obvious because they tended to glow faintly in places). I spied titles like The Subtle Art of Teaching Humans Not to Kill Themselves by Oscarina Throckmorton and A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer by John Percival Hackworth.

  Below the bed, facing the mountain scene, was a desk at least as large as our front door, covered in paper, pens, folders, markers, and all the other supplies I could possibly need. On the floor next to the desk, a large desktop computer glowed impressively blue and red. No monitor, though. I’d have to pick one up at the bookstore.

  “Do you like your room?” someone asked.

  “I do,” I said, turning around to discover nobody standing right behind me. The buzz should have clued me in, but the Chaperone’s voice sounded so human that it still fooled me.

  “During your few hours here, I’ve been observing you, as I do with all new students, and have tailored this room to your personal tastes as I have perceived them to be. For instance, I detected a slightly elevated heart rate when your eyes lingered on a certain chair I suspected you wanted to sit in, so I took the liberty of having one brought over. Your student file lists video games as an interest, so I have seen to that as well.”

  I looked around and didn’t see anything of the sort. “Where?”

  “Sit down,” the Chaperone said calmly. Could a computer be calm?

  I sat in the chair at the desk and was instantly shocked as the mountain on the opposite wall disappeared. The wall was a gigantic monitor.

  “Holy cow,” I said.

  Ignoring my appreciation, the Chaperone went on: “Your computer is stocked with a complete array of software. Everything you should need is in there.”

  “This. Is. Incredible,” I said, clicking around and noticing every game I’d ever wanted to play was installed, as well as programs for every other purpose imaginable, from photo and video editing to 3-D design, drafting, calculations, physics simulations, and several I could not even fathom a use for.