At the Edge of the Universe Read online

  “I’m not sure I understand,” he said.

  “Imagine the universe is a pot of nearly boiling water. The bubbles on the bottom of the pot are other universes that appear real and stable to their inhabitants, but which, in reality, are not. Eventually, those bubbles rise to the surface and pop. That’s a false vacuum.”

  Dr. Dawson’s hand twitched. “And you believe we’re living in a bubble on the verge of bursting?”

  “It’s a theory.”

  “But how does that account for Thomas Ross’s disappearance?”

  I’d said more than I’d meant to, but I’d already decided to tell my parents Dr. Dawson fell asleep during our session as my excuse for not wanting to see him again, so it didn’t matter.

  “If our universe is a false vacuum, then maybe the people living in the real universe are trying to warn me.”

  Dr. Dawson uncrossed his legs and recrossed them, resting his hands in his lap. “So your theory is that the inhabitants of the true universe have stolen your boyfriend and left you the sole custodian of his memories in order to send you a message?”

  “Like I said, it’s one possibility. Besides, there are other weird events.”

  “Flight 1184?”

  Shit. I’d walked right into that one. “Sure.”

  “Do you feel up to discussing it?”

  “Why not? I’ll always remember those long, meaningful talks I had with the FAA investigators as the highlight of my nearly brief life.”

  Dawson retrieved his notepad. I swear he actually looked relieved to hold it again. “The police report states you were laughing after the plane went down.”

  “Went down.” I shook my head. “Why does everyone go to such ludicrous lengths to avoid saying ‘crash’? They say the plane ‘went down’ or ‘fell’ or, my personal favorite, ‘attempted an uncontrolled emergency landing.’ The fact is the plane crashed. It crashed into the ground, killing a hundred and sixty-seven people. A hundred and fifty-five in the plane, and twelve on the road it crashed into. If Renny hadn’t snooped on my computer and ratted me out to my parents, the death toll would’ve been one sixty-eight.”

  “Why were you laughing, Ozzie?”

  The FAA investigators had asked me the same question a hundred different ways. I think they believed my laughter was an indication I’d caused the crash or been involved in some way, but they hadn’t found a speck of evidence I’d been responsible. After they released me, my friends and parents constantly told me how lucky I was fate had plucked me from my uncomfortable seat on the express flight to a fiery death. But I didn’t feel lucky.

  Dawson patiently waited for my answer. Less than ten minutes of our session remained, and I had nothing to lose.

  So I said, “You want to know why I was laughing?”

  He nodded. “I do.”

  “Because I went looking for Tommy and the universe killed a plane full of people to suggest I stay in Cloud Lake. Don’t you think that’s funny?”

  Dr. Dawson glanced at his notepad, then at me. “No, Ozzie, I don’t.”

  “Well, I think it’s hilarious,” I said. “Especially if it’s true.”

  TOMMY

  TOMMY’S SKIN IS HOT. HE is a heat-generating star. His radiation accumulates in my cells, breaking them down, breaking me down, twisting my DNA into tight double-helix knots. His umber skin contrasts against my pale Florida-sun-defying complexion. Our bodies form a T—Tommy’s head on my stomach—our faces turned toward the sky.

  “You ever think the moon might want to kill us, Oz?” Tommy’s voice rumbles in his chest, deep as the Mariana Trench, more buttery than my mom’s chocolate chip cookies.

  “Uh . . . no?”

  He glances at me, the whites of his eyes wide. “Come on. Look at that shifty rock. Are you really trying to tell me she’s not scheming ways to bump us off?”

  I wiggle left, away from the shell digging into my spine. Sweat pools on my stomach under Tommy’s radiator skull. “I’m pretty sure the moon isn’t plotting genocide. Because it’s a rock.”

  “Nah,” Tommy says. “She’s biding her time, waiting for the perfect opportunity to knock Earth from orbit and take her rightful place around the sun.”

  “You’re so weird.”

  “That’s why you love me.”

  A wave splashes over my toes, washing them with the salty aroma of fish and seaweed. We should think about heading home, but it’s already so far past my curfew that a few more minutes won’t save me from my parents’ sensible lecture about staying out too late. Tommy’s curfew changes depending on his father’s state of drunkenness, and failure to return home by Mr. Ross’s whimsical and unknowable deadline could earn Tommy a shiner or worse.

  Tommy’s father is an asshole.

  “You still taking the PSATs Saturday?” Tommy asks.

  “Unfortunately.”

  “Your mom driving you?” I nod. “Can I catch a ride?”

  “No way. Take the bus, scrub.” I laugh and rub my hand along Tommy’s bare chest, tracing his dense muscles, pretending I don’t notice him flexing. “We’ll swing by around seven.” I twist my neck to glance at Tommy, but he’s still staring at the moon. “What changed your mind?”

  Tommy shrugs. “Pop wants me to work at the garage with him over the summer. He said it’s time for me to learn a trade.”

  “You? A mechanic?” Tommy could recite the names of every US president, explain the differences between parthenogenetic and apomictic asexual reproduction, and whip out an expert essay on the troubling racism present in the works of H. P. Lovecraft in an hour, but his impressive stockpile of knowledge doesn’t include how to repair combustion engines.

  “Right?” Tommy says. “I don’t know dick about cars.”

  “You definitely know more about dick than cars.”

  “Never heard you complain.”

  I grope for Tommy’s hand in the dark and lace our fingers together. His hands and feet are always cold. Like his heart and brain hoard his body’s warmth, leaving his extremities to freeze.

  “You think taking the PSATs will keep you from having to work with your dad?”

  “No, but I have to do something,” Tommy says. “Sometimes I feel like I’m floating alone in the ocean. Other times I feel like the ocean’s in a paper cup.” He squeezes my hand. “I refuse to end up like my folks. But what if Cloud Lake’s all there is? What if this is it?”

  “Would that be so terrible?”

  “Not if we’re together, but I’d rather start our lives somewhere else.”

  “Where?”

  Tommy stretches. He sighs. “Anywhere, Ozzie. Anywhere is better than here.”

  14,380,000,000 LY

  I JERKED AWAKE, CONFUSED AND disoriented. I’d fallen asleep sitting at my desk, and my stiff neck protested when I turned it. My laptop’s screensaver shone the only light in my room—the rainbow swirls bouncing from one edge of the screen to another, morphing and changing colors as they sought to escape.

  I stretched, rubbed the crusty sleep from my eyes. I checked the time on my phone. 1:43 a.m.

  I’d been writing down my memories of Tommy, trying to recapture the history we’d lost. I’d always kept a journal, but when Tommy disappeared, the entries had all changed, and I was determined to record everything I remembered so I’d never forget. It was more difficult than I thought it would be. I hadn’t safeguarded my memories of Tommy, because I figured we’d always be together making new ones.

  My parents hadn’t woken me. Since the oh-God-what-are-you-doing?-Why-didn’t-I-knock? incident, my mom rarely entered my bedroom anymore. I think the mess also bothered her. But there’s a difference between messy and dirty. Dirty implies used plates under the bed and layers of dust on the furniture and crumbs of past meals embedded in the carpet. All of which described Renny’s room, not mine. My room was merely a bit disorganized. Stacks of library books teetered on the edges of my desk, clothes waiting to be folded sat in a lump on the foot of my bed, notebooks and journ
als and more books stood atop my nightstand and TV and on the floor.

  Neatness is the trademark of a boring mind.

  I woke my computer and called up the folders containing my where-did-Tommy-go? sites. Links to information about the places Tommy and I had dreamed of visiting. Countries and cities we’d spent hours discussing in hushed voices, planning for the day we could leave Cloud Lake and disappear into the anonymous crowds.

  Each folder had a different name. “Maybe” for places Tommy had mentioned. “In the realm of possibility” for vague areas he’d thought had sounded interesting—Meyrin, Switzerland, for example, because he wanted to tour CERN. “Likely candidates” for locations Tommy had spoken of often, which included Boulder, Colorado; Savannah, Georgia; and the Grand Canyon.

  Each of the folders contained countless bookmarked sites I’d culled over long, sleepless nights, but the most important folder—named “Tommy’s Favorites”—held only two links. One for each of the two locations Tommy had spoken of most frequently. The first was Larung Valley, located in Sertar County of Garze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, in China—a makeshift city consisting of thousands of tiny wood houses, home to forty thousand Buddhist monks, and one of the largest Buddhist institutes in the world. The second was Seattle.

  Tommy could have run away to China, but it was far easier for an unaccompanied teenager to book a domestic flight than an international one.

  Sometimes I wondered what might have happened if I’d hopped on a plane to China rather than Seattle. Whether that plane would have crashed instead of Flight 1184.

  I had another folder with different bookmarked pages. Websites for theories about what might have happened to Tommy if he hadn’t run away. Like the one describing false vacuums. Another explained how time travel might work in case it turned out assassins from the future had somehow erased Tommy from the timeline. Still another was all about the existence of the multiverse and how every choice we make causes the universe to split and branch off infinitely. Each theory was less plausible than the last, and it was easier to believe that Tommy had run away and somehow managed to erase himself from everyone’s memories but mine because it left me the possibility that I could find him. But the truth was that I had no idea where Tommy had gone or how to get him back.

  My bladder ached, so I padded down the hallway to the bathroom. The dark house slept less fitfully than I. Renny’s bedroom door stood half-open, his snores a stuffy rumble in the otherwise quiet night. He’d left his TV on again, the volume muted, and the frenetic dance of lights and shadows lit Warren’s room enough for me to see him in his bed, tangled in his sheets, still wearing his headphones.

  Renny’s open door wasn’t an invitation, but a remnant of his boyhood fears. When we were younger, he’d forced me to watch scary movies with him. They’d never frightened me, but Renny’s imagination conjured glassy-eyed, horned demons from every corner and shadow, and after my parents had gone to bed, Warren would sneak into my room and sleep on my floor. In the morning he’d tell Mom and Dad I’d begged him to do it, and I’d never contradicted him.

  Of all the horror movies we’d watched, I loved The Texas Chainsaw Massacre best. And not that craptastic remake, either. My favorite part is the scene where Kirk is peeking through the screen door at the front of the house—during which Renny had screamed “There’re skulls on the wall! Don’t go in the house, you moron!”—and hears squealing from inside. Then, because, as Renny astutely noted, Kirk’s an idiot, he walks into the foyer, past the staircase, to the open doorway in the back. Leatherface appears and—WHACK!—nails him once with a mallet. But that’s not even the scary part. It’s after, when Kirk is on the ground, twitching and convulsing, his face bloody, and Leatherface snatches him up, drags him deeper into the house, and slams the metal pocket door shut. I never forgot the paralyzing finality of that terrifying sound.

  It taught me something—something other than not entering creepy houses with animal skulls decorating the walls. The scariest things in life aren’t inbred, mallet-wielding psychos or machete-carrying mama’s boys or even burned men with razor fingers who kill you in your dreams. Life’s truest horror is a door that slams shut that can never be opened again.

  When I finished peeing, I headed back to my room to catch a couple hours of sleep before school. Instead of closing my door, I left it open. Just a crack.

  “Good night, Tommy,” I whispered. “Sweet dreams, wherever you are.”

  14,000,090,000 LY

  I FIRST NOTICED THE UNIVERSE was shrinking after Tommy disappeared. After I’d spent weeks scouring the Internet for digital fragments of him, clues he’d existed that proved I wasn’t delusional.

  Tommy loved arguing with strangers under the screen name TommysAlwaysRight, and he frequented dozens of websites where he’d leap into discussions covering religion or politics or My Little Ponies. He didn’t care what he argued about or which side he took; Tommy lived for picking apart the threads of a person’s argument until they, unable to defend themselves from his unassailable walls of text, dissolved into profanity-laced, frothing-at-the-mouth rants. He’d claimed he was honing his debating skills, but I think Tommy enjoyed exposing people to the hypocrisy of their own sincerely held beliefs.

  Of course, Tommy’s ability to argue any side of a debate made it difficult to know what, if anything, he actually believed.

  Sadly, those hilarious manufactured feuds had vanished along with Tommy.

  While searching a science message board where Tommy often tried to convince others that humans and dinosaurs had coexisted, I stumbled across a post alleging the universe was thirty billion light-years in diameter. I’d taken astronomy junior year and remembered Mr. Baker explaining that the universe was expanding so rapidly we lacked the ability to accurately evaluate its true size, but what we could observe measured roughly ninety-four billion light-years across.

  Obviously someone on the Internet was wrong. I Googled “size of the universe,” which returned a ludicrous 25,400,000 results. The first few links I clicked supported the thirty billion light-years theory. Even NASA’s website confirmed the universe was smaller than Baker had claimed.

  But Mr. Baker wasn’t a real science teacher. He was a PE teacher who had only wound up teaching astronomy because Mrs. Manivong had won the lottery and skipped town. The most logical explanation was that Mr. Baker had screwed up.

  I’d forgotten about the universe thing for a couple of weeks, until I stopped to watch a Hubble telescope documentary because I was too bored to look for anything better, during which the vaguely British, smooth-voiced narrator placed the size of the universe at eighteen billion light-years.

  I checked the websites that had previously confirmed thirty billion light-years, but they had all changed to eighteen.

  So . . . yeah.

  • • •

  I tiptoed down the stairs to avoid waking Dad, who was snoring on the couch. He was sleeping facing away from me, with his knees bent to keep his feet from hanging over the side. Most of the hair on Dad’s head had migrated to his back in thick patches of gorilla fur. Thankfully, I took after our mother while Renny took after Dad, and I’d definitely dodged a genetic bullet.

  As I grabbed my keys off the counter and headed out the garage, my phone buzzed and a dramatic guitar riff Lua had recorded to play when she called blared from the speaker. I dropped my keys, which clattered on the glazed terracotta tiles, and scrambled to silence my phone before it woke Dad.

  Too late.

  “Hey, Ozzie,” Dad said. He sat up and knuckled his eyes. Pillow creases lined his left cheek, and patchy stubble covered his face. He looked like a man in need of strong coffee and a new life. “Heading to school?”

  “Nah.” I retrieved my keys off the floor. “Me and Lua thought we’d ditch and waste the day blowing money on strippers and drugs.”

  Dad nodded. Either he hadn’t heard me or had chosen to tune out my sarcasm. Both my parents had PhDs in willful ignorance. “Sorry I missed d
inner last night,” he said.

  “You didn’t miss much,” I said. He’d actually missed pork chops, corn on the cob, and—his favorite—fried okra, but his life sucked enough without me making it worse.

  “Stayed late grading papers.” Dad idly twisted his wedding band on his finger. “Listen, once your mom and I work out this house stuff, I’ll get my own place. You and Warren can live with me.”

  By “house stuff” Dad meant my parents needed to sell the house without losing money, which seemed unlikely. Despite their marriage being deader than the cat I’d dissected in tenth grade, fate and a shitty housing market had forced them to continue living together. I was also pretty certain “grading papers” meant getting drunk and bitching about Mom to his friends.

  “I get it,” I said. I’d tried my best to play Delaware in the Pinkerton civil war, but Dad had always understood me best. I may have taken after my mother in the looks department, but that was about the only way in which we were alike. Warren, an unapologetic mama’s boy, had surprised no one by siding with Mom.

  My phone buzzed again; I silenced it. Lua would wait.

  “At least you can sleep in a real bed once Renny leaves,” I said.

  Dad bobbed his head. “Maybe.”

  “It’s your house too.” I waited for Dad to agree, to stand up for himself, but my father avoided conflict like a fatal allergy. I jingled my keys. “I should go. Lua waits for no man.”

  “Hold up,” Dad said. “You send in your college applications?”

  “NYU, BU, UC Boulder, Amherst, U-Dub Seattle, Oberlin.” I ticked the names off on my fingers and could practically hear Dad calculating the cost of my continued education. Because I didn’t want to drive the man to start day-drinking, I added, “UF and New College, but maybe I’ll kick around Cloud Lake. Take classes at the community college for a couple of semesters.” I figured he’d like the idea, seeing as he taught there and I’d qualify for reduced tuition.