I exhaled slowly. “What did I tell you about that word? You can. You don’t want to.”
“No, I can’t.”
“Won’t.”
“Can’t,” she sang under her breath. “My recital is tomorrow.”
That made me pause. A crease pulled between my brows as I looked up at her again.
“The recital you’re going to be at,” she added, quieter now. “Right?”
I stepped back into the dark, using the few seconds it took to grab a camping chair from beside their firepit to get my head straight. I forgot about the recital. I didn’t know how. It had been in my phone for months. We talked about it almost every day. I’ve watched her fingers bleed over strings as she practiced for it.Fuck.
When I reached her window again, she was still there, watching and waiting. I set the chair down, unfolded it, and nodded toward her. “If you won’t go anywhere, I’ll stay.”
She shifted, pulling her knees into her chest as she settled against the bookcase in her window seat. “You’re not coming tomorrow, are you?” Her chin rested on top of her legs.
I shook my head slowly, forcing the words out. “My mom changed our flights to Texas.”
“Oh.”
I swear my heart broke with that small sound. She tried to play it off, but I saw it—the way she swallowed and picked at a loose thread on her shorts. The way her shoulders pulled in slightly. I noticed and I hated it. I didn’t like letting people down, least of all her. It was an omen that had been staring me down for months. Hovering above us like a dark cloud.
My grandmother said our red string was tangled, that it would eventually work itself out, and we’d find our way. But what about my parents thread? What of my father’s absence? My mother was so certain of her red string, she’d been willing to bet her entire life on it only to end up a broke single mom living with her parents. My friend, Elias, had a different term for it. Quantum entanglement.
Which was basically just a science way of saying that what I had with Solace was complicated, and it went further than just a random friendship.
I didn’t know if Solace and I shared matter, or particles or whatever. All I knew is that we were so tightly wound around one another, I sometimes didn’t know where she began, and I ended.
In some ways, as much as it pained me to admit, I thought it was better this way.
“Where were you tonight?” Her voice took on a rare hard edge. “You were supposed to stop by.”
For the infamous Davis summer bonfire. “Yeah, I know. I’m sorry. I was packing…” My voice trailed off and my fingers caught on the hem of my shirt, twisting the fabric. There wasn’t a summer I’d missed, but so much shit changed in the last two days I wasn’t sure I would have even made good company tonight. “I’m leaving early tomorrow, instead of later next week.”
“What? Why?”
“I finished it.”
That got her attention.
There was really no other way to say it, so I pulled it from my pocket and held it up between us. Even in the low light, her eyes lit up with recognition as she took the round smooth surveyor from my hand.
“Oh my god. Jude. When did you test it?”
I exhaled loudly. “Two days ago. It recognized me, my mom—even the cat.” It was all I could do not to smile. “It actually works.”
She turned it over, studying every rough edge that I’d terribly soldered together. I tried not to cringe. It wasn’t great to look at but the technology inside worked, and thank god because I was beginning to lose my mind.
The science experiment had taken me almost five years if you counted its inception, which—I did. It was the sixth grade and I was attending my first space camp. The first few weeks were filled with lessons about Earth and our atmosphere, which then sent me down a rabbit hole of research on nuclear weapons and other threats to the global climate. Heavy stuff for a twelve year old, but when your dad is a planetary geologist, you get used to the world-ending shit real quick.
When I was seven and visiting my dad on-site, for one of his rare “I feel like being a dad” moments, his coworker told me science was humanity’s responsibility to Mother Earth—when you see a gap, it’s yours to close. Whether through inquiry or intervention. See a need, fill a need.
So I found a need, in the form of software that could predict survivability odds. My hope was that one day it could be integrated into a larger system that had the ability to assist doctors and medical professionals keep people alive. But I wasn’t there yet.
What I had was a prototype.
It was a clunky handheld object built around the old screen of an iPhone and wired with a mess of sensors and data I wouldn’t have even had access to if it had not been for my mentors. It contained data on weather patterns, thermal activity, air quality, carbon monoxide detection, and even radiation levels. Though, that one earned me a few weird emails. It was stuff your average weather app couldn’t tell you, except that wasn’t what was ground-breaking.
