This is a talent—whatever she is doing, it is definitely her talent.
Gently, oh so gently, she slips that earlobe between her teeth. The smallest of bites, the tiniest of licks, and then her secret weapon—a hint of breath. The breath is important. The breath is what sends goose bumps up and down my arms, over my chest, down, down, down until I can barely think.
A little more and then, suddenly, she steps away. It takes a second to get back to a place where I can think. When I do, though, I have to pull my shirt until it’s low. She glances down, laughing. “You like that, huh?” she whispers.
Like it? This is acceleration and displacement and in . . . um . . . certain . . . um . . . parts—a directional movement of—up, up, up, aka velocity.
“Let’s compromise. Take off for just a few hours,” she says. This is her new tactic: compromise me into compliance. She flattens her feet and stares up at me with her pale-blue eyes. Please, she mouths, her fingers rubbing the inside of my palm.
I give myself the speech: Don’t do this. You have responsibilities—your own things. This is a trap. Don’t do this. Don’t do this. Don’t do this. Don’t do this. Don’t do this. There’s a lot of don’t do this in speeches that concern Erika and her talents.
“How about we compromise by you staying here? Work on your homework while I finish up?”
“And then what? We’d do more homework together?”
I nod. Because as much as I try to make Erika happy, I also have to keep my parents happy. And nothing makes them happier than having a son with straight As.
And I’ve had straight As every quarter since ninth grade.
But that takes work and dedication.
She laughs. “I don’t think I have that much homework to do. Anyway, I told Manny we could study for the chem final together. And he’s right around the block—”
“Oh.” I make a face. “Manny.”
“Stop,” she says, smiling.
“What? You said you want me to be more jealous.” I push out my chest, like I’m Superman or something, about to take on Manny, her track buddy, who I’m pretty sure is a pacifist. At least, that’s what most of the stickers on his backpack imply. “If he makes a move on you, I’ll kick his—”
“Oh my God. No, no, no. You’re terrible at this.” She laughs again.
“It’s not something I want to be good at,” I say, half seriously.
She’s silent for a few seconds, watching me carefully. Then the easiness returns. “Well, I said sometimes it hurts my feelings that you’re not jealous. There’s a difference.” She bends over to pick up her purse, slinging the strap across her chest. “I have to go, scholarship boy. You just keep your focus on that GPA. Or else we’ll never get the shiz out of here.” She slips her hand under my shirt, pulling me closer by the waistband of my shorts. When she steps away, she tugs down my shirt for me. “There. No one will notice.”
I smile, embarrassed.
“So, call me later?”
“Sure,” I say. “Later’s a much better name than Erika.”
WORMHOLES
BUT EARLIER THAT DAY, WHEN Erika texted, I was traveling down that wormhole. I was on that journey because that’s what happens when someone reappears after four years. And suddenly that someone, that her, is standing in the middle of your high school cafeteria as if she had never left . . .
You is what you think. You are here.
And for a second you wonder if you’re hallucinating. Because, let’s be real, you’ve imagined this day more than you’d like to admit. You’ve seen it play out in your head hundreds of times. But when it happens, in your cafeteria—man, of all places, the cafeteria—you stand there, watching her with her lunch tray in hand, eyes searching for a place to fit. For a friendly face. And you can’t move because your feet are paralyzed. You’re holding up the lunch line, and everyone thinks you’re acting weird. But what they don’t know is that you’re traveling.
Through time.
You are a time traveler.
On a mission through a wormhole, the past suddenly connected to the present through a not-so-simple bending of the space-time continuum.
Just one-quarter shy of graduation.
Meanwhile, your responsible girlfriend, the one who never disappears, is texting you. Her unheard words circulate through the machine in your pocket. But those words can’t reach you. Because you’re not in the now. You’re in the then.
You’re with a bottle that spins and a girl who kisses you, a girl who hasn’t yet disappeared, taking your heart with her.
And with all that going on, you forget one of the fundamental truths about wormholes.
A wormhole can kill you.
Middle School
2. MARTA, AN EPIC STORYTELLER
BACK IN THE DAY, I knew this girl named Marta Ochoa. Marta was a big-eyed girl with an even bigger heart, who loved nothing more than to tell a story from the absolute beginning. The first time I heard Marta tell a story was in second grade, on a field trip to the Miami Seaquarium. That’s when Marta pressed her face to a stretch of glass and recited every detail about her “very, very first trip” to the Seaquarium with her stepdad. And how she’d “never had a dad before,” but this one was “pretty good” and felt like a “real papá” and much better than her mom’s last “novio,” who was a “freeloader.” Or, at least, that’s what her abuela called that novio all the time: Juan, un conchudo. And the story went on and on, circling backward in time until I knew the name of every boyfriend, the conchudos, the idiotas, and the one guy that her abuela declared, “Más feo que un carro por debajo,” which meant that he was pretty ugly, even uglier than the underside of a car.
You’re probably wondering why I’m even bringing Marta up. Well, it’s because she had an unwavering belief that every story had a beginning and those beginnings deserved—no, needed—to be told, which is why I’m taking us back to four years earlier, in middle school.
Back then we did everything together. We took the bus together. We ate lunch together. We hung out after school together. We even went through the extras together: Jade’s cheerleading competitions, Sookie’s chess matches, Diego’s football games, and Sally’s runs.
Sally was fast, maybe the fastest girl in the county. She won first place at a lot of meets. They had a bookcase at her house, in the living room, that was weighed down with Sally’s trophies: a collection of gold-colored, plastic medals hanging from various colored ribbons. First place was Sally’s standard place. And it should have been no different on that day, except it was.
It was because something singular happened. Something that had never happened to Sally before: She fell.
She fell hard and twisted, tangled up in the legs of another runner as they rolled head over torso over legs until they came to a stop at the edge of the track. Still, she persisted, bleeding her way across the finish line, arriving second to last.
Another first for Sally.
The coach called out, “Blake, get over here! Let me see that.” But Sally waved her away, pointing firmly to her dad. Coach Sami nodded after a second, used to Sally’s dad taking the lead on everything. He was, after all, an almost Olympian, a star runner at the University of Miami before an injury ended his career, but now he had a legacy. That legacy was Sally.
On the way to her dad, Sally stopped to talk to us. She looked a mess—blond hair askew, hands scraped and dirty.
“Are you okay?” Sookie asked, staring at the bleeding knee.
“Eh,” Sally said, smiling through her pain as she lowered herself onto the ground. “Did you see that, though?” There was a twinkle in her eye, her voice slightly excited. “The girl from Hammocks cut into my lane, and I couldn’t stop myself from hitting her. And it was so strange because it was one of those moments where, like, your brain clearly sees what’s going to happen and you get these warning messages, but it doesn’t send the message fast enough to your legs. Like, I knew I was going to hit her, but I couldn’t stop myself, so bam!
” She laughed, only wincing again when Sookie bent over to assess the scrape, skillfully palpating the skin around Sally’s cut.
“Hmm . . . ,” Sookie said while she continued her examination.
Sally glanced at her father, who watched us from the bleachers, his lips twisted with . . . worry? Disappointment? Anger?
It was hard to tell with Mr. Blake. There were days like yesterday, when he had us over for pizza, handing out T-shirts that shouted: RUN, SALLY! RUN! And there were days like last week, when he didn’t answer their front door—didn’t let Sally or her brother, Boone, answer either—even though we knew they were home because the car was in the driveway, the lights were on inside, and we could hear the TV blasting as we walked up the sidewalk.
“That’s just how he is,” Sally would say, and then she’d crack a joke or tell a story, all the while shrugging off her father’s peculiarities. We shrugged his peculiarities off too, because we did everything together, even ignore the obvious.
“Should we clean it?” Sookie asked, leaning back. The skin around the wound was red and puffy. The cut wasn’t deep, but it was caked over with dirt.
“Why bother? My father’s gonna kill me anyway. It’d be nicer to die from an infection.” Doubt etched her lips, little frown lines appearing like parentheses.
“Yeah, but that looks harsh. You should clean it,” Diego said.
“Yeah,” Jade echoed, pressing her shoulder against his. “Harsh.”
“That’s it. I’m getting the first aid kit.” Sookie headed off to the bleachers.
Diego placed his finger close to the scrape, tapping lightly on the skin. “Does it hurt?”
“What do you think?” Sally snapped, wincing again. She looked up at the sky and then over to me, knowing that I was always queasy around injuries. “This is making you sick, right?”
“Maybe.” Fresh blood oozed from the wound, and for a second I bent down, putting my head between my legs.
“Wimp,” Diego coughed, and Sally kicked him with her good leg. “Stop.”
“Sally?” Mr. Blake called out from the stands. “Sally!” I glanced back. Sookie was talking to him, pointing at the first aid kit and nodding her head.
“Ignore him,” Sally said to me then. “I’ve been thinking about that dream you had.”
“Huh?” I asked, caught off guard.
She fingered the charm at the end of a brown leather necklace, a mustang in mid-gallop—a gift from us on her thirteenth birthday. “The one you told me about during lunch the other day?”
We had played this game since seventh grade when once, during lunch, Sookie had described a recurring nightmare that ended with her being chased by a monster and unable to scream.
Diego had been like, “That’s messed up.”
Jade was like, “I’d have been so scared.”
But Sally glanced up from her PB&J and asked casually: “So if you can’t scream, you can’t get help. Maybe there’s something you need help with but you’re not getting?”
This response might sound weird, but Sally was one of those super-smart kids. Every year when we got back the scores from our standardized assessments, I fell short of her results. My ten Xs—the ones that marked my position on the chart—always began at the center of the page, the tail end of average, and flowed right, into above average. That fit. I was the kind of student who had to work hard to get As. Sally was the kind of kid who read something once and could recite it back to you word for word.
“Oh, that’s called verbatim,” she had told me in fifth grade, when I noticed that her answers on a difficult science test were exactly what was said in the textbook. I thought she was cheating, but she said, “Nope. I can repeat things with the original words that I read, aka verbatim.” So it wasn’t a surprise that Sally’s chart showed only three to four Xs on the far right of the above-average spectrum. The rest, like Sally, were somewhere beyond the chart.
It turned out Sally really liked dream interpretation. After Sookie’s dream, she always asked us about ours. The dream I had told her about took place in school and seemed pretty standard, except that I had experienced the dream again and again for eight months, from September to now, in early May.
“Okay.” I played along. “What does it mean?”
“Well, you keep showing up to class, but you don’t have your homework, right? Even though you know you’ve done it. And it’s like that for every class, right?”
“Yeah. That’s what it seems like.”
“And you feel frustrated?”
That was the trick behind Sally’s dream-interpretation skills. She never focused on what the dream was about exactly. She always focused on how the dream made you feel.
“Yeah, I do.”
“Anything else?” Sally’s eyes darted momentarily to her father, talking animatedly to Sookie, who was practicing her listening nod.
“I don’t know.” I thought about the dream, scanning for any other feeling. “I guess I feel angry.”
She nodded, closing her eyes as she mulled over this detail, my feeling of anger. A minute later she said, “I think it’s about you being prepared for something, like you’ve done your homework, but you can’t complete the final step. You can’t turn it in. So you’re frustrated and angry with yourself.”
She paused again, considering. “Is there something you’re ready for but haven’t done?”
“Oh.” Jade leaned in, always a sucker for Sally’s dream analysis. “Like complete the task to get credit?” Jade shot me a look. “Is that it, Marco?”
“Yeah,” Sally said. “Exactly.” She squeezed her fist as another wave of pain hit. “There’s probably something you need to do to make the dream stop.”
“Turn in the homework,” Jade encouraged.
Diego laughed, always skeptical of Sally’s gift. “Oh, please. Pretty sure dude just needs to check his backpack before he leaves the house.”
“Shut up, Diego,” Jade said. “Well, Marco?”
“Maybe? I’d have to think about it.”
Mr. Blake’s voice rose again from the bleachers. I glanced back at Sookie, who was practically body-blocking him.
“Yep. He’s going to kill me.” Sally groaned and fell back onto the grass, her lips moving as she counted—a calm-yourself-down technique her mom taught her when our kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Bryant, wouldn’t stop calling home despite all of Sally’s promises to “be gooder.”
“Fifty.” Sally sat up, looking at the fields of Seagrove Middle, the grass patchy from the thousand or so kids walking back and forth to the portable classrooms.
Sookie returned, waving her first aid kit. “Can you scoot?” she said to Jade, who nodded, happily grabbing Diego by the hand with a “Let’s give them space. Right, Sookie?”
“Yes, please,” Sookie said.
“Can you tell my dad I’ll be there soon?” Sally asked.
“Sure,” Jade said, and dragged Diego off to the bleachers.
“Should I go?” I asked, but Sally said, “No. You stay, Marco, okay?” And then she took my hand and squeezed it.
I tried not to notice the blood as Sookie worked to clean the wound or Sally holding my hand. I tried to breathe, really. But that’s hard when there is a girl like Sally touching you.
My logical side said: Maybe she just needs a hand to hold, something to help her get through this.
My hopeful side said: Maybe she needs to hold my hand the way Jade always wants to hold Diego’s hand.
It was possible, right?
A few minutes later Sookie said, “There. Done,” and Sally let go of my hand. I took a gulp of air. “Better?” I asked, and Sally nodded.
Sookie applied Neosporin and placed a Band-Aid over the raw skin. “You’ll want to clean it again later today and let it air out for a bit before you put a new Band-Aid over it.”
“Okay,” Sally said as Sookie helped her to her feet. She gave Sookie a tight hug. “Thanks.”
“Ha. Don’t thank me. Thank YouTube.�
� Sookie had a belief that every problem could be solved on YouTube. “If there’s an apocalypse,” Sookie had once said, “and you have Internet access, you only need YouTube to survive. But without Internet, you’ll probably need a public library.”
“Everything okay?” Erika—the before Erika—called out as she passed us on her way to her next race. Erika was Sally’s teammate, the second-fastest runner in the group, and she and Sally were friendly enough.
“I’m okay,” Sally called back. “Good luck!”
Sookie rolled her eyes. “I can’t stand that girl.”
“Still?” I asked.
We had gone to school with Erika since second grade, but Sookie hated her because of an incident that happened during a pretty intense kickball game in the fourth grade. That’s when Erika had said to Sookie, “You can’t be Jewish. You’re, like, Asian.” And Sookie, who was specifically Korean and Jewish, on account of Jewish parents who adopted her while teaching abroad in South Korea, said, “You can’t be pretty. You’re mean.”
And then Erika spat on her.
The loogie landed in Sookie’s thick hair, and she began to cry. Sally’s response was to pat Sookie on the back. Jade’s response was to shove Erika to the ground and kick her in the shin. On occasion Diego liked to reenact the scene by falling onto the ground in the middle of anywhere—the park, the grocery store, someone’s backyard—and screaming, “You kicked me!” while holding his shin.
“I’ll hate her forever,” Sookie continued, eyes narrowing. “And I think she has a thing for Marco. She keeps making love eyes at him in science.”
“No,” I protested. “The only eyes I see are the ones she’s got on her face, which are, like, regular eyes.”
I watched Sally, hoping for signs of jealousy, but other than a coughing fit, she seemed unfazed.
Sookie tapped her back. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Swallowed wrong. So . . . wait. What are love eyes?”
“Oh, it’s like . . . like this . . .” Sookie’s eyes widened until they were so big they nearly popped off her face. “You know, like a tarsier.”
The Universal Laws of Marco Page 2
