The Switch Read online

  Now, writing while you’re looking in another direction is always a trick, and since I was no expert at cheating, I had to keep moving my eyes and my head back and forth between Jemma’s desk and mine to make sure that Lithuania didn’t spill into Latvia and Latvia didn’t invade Estonia. Just as I was writing the third “ia” on my map, one firm hand fell on my shoulder and another whisked the test from underneath my pencil.

  I looked up slowly and found my nose pointed right into Ms. Furbel’s ample bosom, which was a lot more developed than Jemma’s, though no one would ever describe Ms. Furbel as having a good figure.

  “Come with me now, Jacobus,” she said. “You’ve cheated for the last time.”

  She made me sit beside her desk in front of the room until the others had finished the quiz. For those ten horrible minutes, in addition to extreme stomach cramps, I had a chance to ponder the seriousness of my situation. I had been caught cheating, and I couldn’t cry foul or claim innocence. I was going to the office, and from there, who knew? Every kid in the room was stealing quick looks at me between their pencil strokes. Looks that said, “You’re a dead man.” Every kid except for Jemma. She kept her head down, which meant I had embarrassed her. So much for my new girlfriend.

  I had never felt more mortified than I did at that moment. And the words, “you’ve cheated for the last time” kept echoing in my head.” The last time? How about the first time.

  Then another stomach-turning thought came to me. What if in this reality, I was not only a snitch, a friend of bullies, and possibly even a sex-fiend, but a known cheater?

  I’ve gotta get out of this, I thought, over and over. I’ve gotta get to the switch. It was a ridiculously unrealistic hope, but it was all I had.

  If I survived the principal’s office, survived the calling of my pretend mom and the writing of a note to my pretend parents, it was only because I believed I could undo all of this with a flip of the switch. This belief gave me a kind of magic shield, and as the torture went on, I began almost to feel as if I could look at my tormentors and say, “Go ahead. Have your fun. Next time I see you, none of this will ever have happened.”

  Luckily, I was allowed to finish the day, and that meant that I could still see Mr. Bohm. If anyone could understand my plight, it was a guy who understood advanced physics.

  I watched the last few minutes tick down to the final bell in my Algebra II class, and when it went off, I was up like a jackrabbit. The building emptied quickly, and soon it was just me and a few stragglers left in the wide, granite hallways, with their forever smell of cleaning fluid and floor wax, and lockers hiding secret stashes of candy and breath mints. My blurry sense of familiar and unfamiliar twined and retwined as I mounted the stairs to the second floor, as if I were coming in and out of focus. This was my school, all right. It just wasn’t my life.

  Mr. Bohm was talking to J.T. Slivowicz, the little guy I mentioned earlier, who was a total science geek. I’d never paid much attention to J.T. He was almost too small to notice. One of those kids you don’t see unless he’s the only other kid in the room. A quiet, keep-to-himself kind of kid. But when I came in, he gave me a strange look. Strange, and yet I have to say, familiar. Unlike every other look I’d gotten.

  It was a look that said, “I know how you feel.”

  Then, Mr. Bohm said, “Okay, J.T. Let’s work on it.” And then, the kid left.

  “And what can I do for you, Mr. Rose?”

  No words came out at first. I stood awkwardly and scoped Mr. Bohm, wanting to be certain he had the same eyes behind his glasses, and the same smile behind those eyes.

  “I have a physics question,” I finally said. “But it’s weird.”

  “Something from class?” he asked. “You look a little perplexed.”

  “I am.” I chewed on my lip. “I guess the first thing I need to ask you is not to think I’m crazy.”

  He raised his right hand and said, “I do solemnly swear, Jacobus. You’re difficult sometimes, and argumentative, but not crazy.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I guess.” I decided to stay at the desk because my legs and my whole body were shaking. “One time in class you talked about something called ‘the many worlds theory’.”

  “Hugh Everett and Bryce DeWitt, right,” he said.

  “And in that theory, it says there can be lots of different universes all going on at the same time, right?”

  “Well, it says that instead of all possibilities collapsing into a single reality, there are as many realities as there are possibilities.”

  “So there’s a reality where the car that almost flattened me on Geneva Street last week really did hit me and I’m dead now?”

  “Hmm,” he said. “We’d have to calculate the probabilities, but theoretically, yes.”

  “And people really believe this? Scientists, I mean.”

  Mr. Bohm took a breath. “Well, it’s a prediction of a widely accepted theory called inflation, which explains how our universe got so big so fast. It’s mainstream physics, along with other theories. But remember that all you need to do to make a theory mainstream is demonstrate that the math is self-consistent. So far, there’s no actual experimental proof, because no one who has ever branched into a different reality can come back to tell the tale.”

  “What if I could?” I asked.

  “Could what?”

  I shifted from foot to foot, suddenly aware again of the disturbing here-thereness of my situation. I smelled the chalkboard and heard the birds chirping outside the big plate glass windows, but half of that was memory of my world and half of it, my experience of this one.

  “Suppose you could, I dunno, get flipped into a parallel universe all of a sudden. And you knew it was happening.”

  He tilted his head, whether out of interest or worry, I couldn’t say.

  “If you subscribe to the theory,” he said, “it happens all the time. Only it branches so quickly, we never notice…like we don’t notice that we’re orbiting the sun at about nineteen miles per second. The world is kind of like a magic trick sometimes.” He motioned me to the desk in front of his. “Sit down, Jacobus. You look a little unwell. Tell me what’s troubling you.”

  I girded my loins. Figuratively speaking. “Yesterday when I left school, it was April Fool’s Day, my best friend was Connor Black, my worst enemy was Hartūn, and I’d never cheated on a test. On the way home, something happened. Everything was changed. It was May first, Connor wouldn’t talk to me on the phone because we were mortal enemies, and my parents were completely different people. And today, Ms. Furbel accused me of being a serial cheater.”

  Mr. Bohm leaned back in his desk chair and gave me a long look. He was about my parents’ age, maybe a little younger, with thick-rimmed glasses that were always slipping down the ultra-thin nose on his ultra-thin face. I liked him because of that smile in his eyes. He’d once told us that Einstein was a screw-up in school and that grades were “only part of the picture.”

  “Do you think I’m crazy now?” I asked him.

  “Nope. Still sane in my book. You’d be crazy if you didn’t bother to ask whether or not I thought you were crazy. What happened on the way home?”

  “If I tried to explain it, you might change your mind about me. But I could show you.”

  “Let’s try something else first,” he said seriously. “Comparing notes. When I was your age, I honestly believed there had been an alien landing on earth, and that the government was hiding the spaceship at a place called Area 51.”

  “I’ve heard of that,” I said.

  “There was good evidence. Or what seemed like good evidence to me. I even wrote a science paper on it. It all seemed very logical. And then one day, I discovered a flaw in my logic.”

  “What was it?”

  “Well, my own science teacher pointed out to me that travel from another star system would have involved such advanced technology that there was no way the U.S. Air Force could have captured the ship so easily. He made me re
alize that I had been thinking of spaceships in terms of our technology, as if they were just superfast, saucer-shaped airplanes. But they wouldn’t be. They might not even be material in the way we think of that.”

  I frowned. “I don’t get the connection.”

  “When it comes to long-distance space travel—hopping from solar system to solar system or galaxy to galaxy—we don’t have the tools yet to even think about it. We’ve got the math, but we don’t have the mechanics. Likewise with parallel universes. We have some elegant math that suggests they might exist, but we may never have an experimental proof. And one thing’s for sure: if you did happen to slip into another reality, you most likely wouldn’t remember the one you’d left. To use your example, you’d only know the one where the car hit you. Of course, knowing wouldn’t help if you were dead.” He said it with that inner smile.

  Mr. Bohm was the only teacher at Lincoln Park High who could smile after saying something like that.

  “So you’re saying I’d only know where I am and not where I’ve been…”

  “Exactly,” he said. “At least, that’s how the theory works. You would have branched off onto a completely different worldline.”

  Outside the classroom window, kids milled around, waiting for rides or whatever, and the sound made me a little lonely. More than a little lonely. I turned back to Mr. Bohm.

  “But when you told us about the theory, you said some people think these different worlds could overlap. I think you said, ‘tangential’.”

  “They couldn’t interact. Not according to the theory. They might brush up against each other, or even exist in the same space, but any ideas about interaction come from the realm of science fiction.”

  “It’s not impossible, though,” I said, recalling Sherlock Holmes. “Right?”

  “Close,” he answered. “Otherwise—”

  “But you even drew one of those diagrams with the—” I arched and interlaced my fingers. “—overlapping circles.”

  “Venn diagrams,” he said.

  “Exactly. Venn diagrams. Showing how there could be accidental collisions where you’d see yourself across the street buying—”

  I stopped cold.

  “What is it, Jacobus?”

  “I was about to say ‘buying an Orange Julius.’”

  “What’s an Orange Julius?” asked Mr. Bohm.

  I don’t know for certain, but I think that right there and then my heart murmured.

  “You never drew those Venn diagrams?” I asked.

  “I’ve drawn lots of them,” he said. “But not in the discussion of the many worlds theory. Not as far as I remember. What’s in that head of yours, Jacobus?”

  I looked down at the floor. Then out the window as the tree branches were lifted by the wind. Finally, back at Mr. Bohm. “Nothing,” I said. “It must be like the Area 51 thing. There must be a flaw in my logic.”

  He nodded, with that same look of concern I’d seen on my parents’ faces. A look that was like a held breath, and then a question: where are you, Jacobus? Where have you gone? It was a look that said that I was the odd man out. And I was. I was sure that if I put my parents, Connor, Ms. Furbel, the principal, and Mr. Bohm in the same room, they would all agree on which world we were in, and it was a world without Orange Julius. And if Mr. Bohm was right that you couldn’t carry memories from one world to another, then my memories of a world with Orange Julius, and Oreos in the cupboard, and fighting parents, were false memories.

  That could mean that I truly was crazy, and that scared hell out of me. But every instinct in my body told me I wasn’t.

  “Thanks.” I got up quickly. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Jacobus!” he called out.

  But I was gone. All I wanted to do was get to the switch.

  Hartūn waited by the wide steps at the main entrance. I didn’t stop or even slow down. I just said, “Let’s go.”

  “What’s this all about?” he asked. “I gotta be home by 4:30 or my mom will freak and probably call the FBI or something. She’s always worried I’m gonna get abducted ‘cause I’m so cute ‘n stuff.”

  That made me stop.

  “Your mom thinks you’d get abducted because you’re cute?” Hartūn was many things, but cute wasn’t one of them. This was possibly the weirdest thing yet.

  “Yeah,” he answered. “Why?”

  “Nothin’,” I said and pointed across the street to the formerly empty lot now taken up by the truck and its cargo. The little red house seemed even more lopsided today, as if it had been slipping off the truck bed, centimeter by centimeter, all through the night. And still, nobody was around. Just as strange, none of the other kids passing by seemed to pay much attention to it. Did it have to be pointed out in order to see it?

  “Doo-doo-doo-doo, Doo-doo-doo-dooo,” sang Hartūn, doing the Twilight Zone music that we all knew even though we’d never seen the show. I have to admit, the meme made me laugh, something Hartūn had never achieved with me before.

  “What the frick is that?” he asked. I’d also never known Hartūn to hold back on using the f-bomb when life gave him any excuse to use it. This was a new, G-rated Hartūn.

  “Weird, huh?” I said. “What’s inside is weirder.”

  We dashed across the street.

  “C’mon!” I scrambled up on the truck. Hartūn, who was on the chubby side, made it up with a little more difficulty. But finally, after my longest night and my longest day, we stood together before the door.

  Moments later, my hands were on the switch.

  “Listen,” I said. “We’re friends, right?”

  He nodded. “Best buddies.”

  “And you trust me, right?”

  He nodded again.

  “Then I’m gonna have to ask you just to follow directions, okay? It’s not dangerous or anything. There’s no electricity.”

  “Okay,” said Hartūn, a smidgen of nervousness in his voice.

  “Grab hold below my hands and help me flip the switch to the up position. The spring is really strong, so it might throw you back a little.” I took a deep breath. “Are you ready?”

  For the third time, he nodded, and then said, “What’s it gonna do?”

  “Probably nothing,” I said. “But we’ll find out together.”

  In my anxious ignorance, I didn’t think about a very important thing, and it still haunts me. I didn’t think about the fact that by having Hartūn help me, I might also be switching him. And that he was perfectly happy where he was. He wasn’t a bully, he had a best buddy, and his mom thought he was cute. I try not to beat myself up about it. As far as I knew then, I was just putting things right.

  But when you put things right for yourself, it can put things wrong for other people.

  With four hands on the handle and our feet braced against the wall, we gave it a go. THHWWACKKK.

  We were both on our butts, and the switch was still in the down position. I felt sure we’d gotten it up. Maybe it didn’t want to go up, in which case, I might be stuck forever in this reality. “Damn.” I glanced at Hartūn. “What’s my name?”

  “Jacobus,” he replied, and then added, “Duh.”

  “Are we still best friends?” I asked.

  “For life,” he said loyally.

  “Then we need to do it again.” I stood and dusted myself off. “This time, we can’t let it throw us off. We keep pushing until it’s up.”

  And the second time was the charm, though we still wound up on our asses. This time, I knew in my bones things were different.

  Before we stood, I looked at Hartūn and said, “It’s been nice being friends, Hartūn. Even though it’s wrong.”

  Looking back, it was kind of a crappy thing to say. And maybe that was because, in this world, I really wasn’t such a nice guy.

  He gave me a strange look. A really strange look.

  And then he said, “Who are you?” and scrambled out of that little red house as fast as his doughy body could carry him.
r />   I was alone again.

  here was a playground with a baseball diamond kitty-corner from my building. It belonged to a Catholic elementary school. Around that diamond, from first to second to third to home plate and around again, so many times I lost count, I paced, trying to make sense of what had just happened. Make sense? Who was I kidding?

  Probability. There’s a word you don’t hear much from adolescents unless they’re math geeks or the type that watch Nova on public television. But I knew in my gut that it figured into what had happened with Hartūn. “Quantum effects can never be predicted with absolute certainty,” Mr. Bohm had said, on the same day he’d drawn the Venn diagrams that he insisted he’d never drawn. “Only the probability, even if that probability is 99.9999%.” It was the kind of thing Mr. Bohm said when he forgot that he was teaching high school students and imagined he was at Harvard or something. Most kids would just stare fish-mouthed when he said these things, but he never gave us any more explanation. Just went right back to teaching high school science without missing a beat, leaving that alien seed planted in our brains.

  When Connor and I had pulled the switch, everything at first had seemed mostly normal. The change only came later, when I was walking home, and by the time I called Connor that night, the fix was in. But this time, the change had been instantaneous. And worse, Hartūn hadn’t even recognized me, which meant that unless he was suffering some sort of temporary amnesia, we had never been part of the same history at all.

  That reminded me of another weird quote Mr. Bohm had thrown at us one day. It came from a guy named Richard Feynman, who, even though he was a total brainiac theoretical physicist, liked to play guitar and bongos and drove around in some bizarre day-glo painted minivan. “Reality is a sum over histories,” he had supposedly said.

  That, Mr. Bohm explained, was math-speak for the crazy idea that our reality—the one we think is the only reality—is just the one that comes out on top: the probability that fought it out with all the other probabilities and won. Or to put it in gamer-speak, it’s the fork we end up taking on our way to the inevitable faceoff with the Boss.

  Now, as crazy as it seemed, I was discovering the truth of Richard Feynman’s words. Life had different potential outcomes, too. And somehow, in some way, that old-school switch was acting like the 0’s and 1’s in a computer program.