Page 167 of Under Story

His regression frightens her. Eli’s intellect has always been a constant.

Coach Brewster waves them over. “Scrimmage!” he calls through a bullhorn, handing out blue and red jerseys.

Eli and Laurel are named to the red team.

“Maybe we can’t do this alone,” says Laurel, pulling the jersey over her head. “The problem could be too big for the two of us to solve. I mean, how many people did it take to send an astronaut to the moon?”

The question was rhetorical, but Eli knows the answer. “At the height of the Apollo program? About four hundred thousand.”

“See?” says Laurel as they walk to their positions.

Tim Wiggins serves for the red team. The ball sails over the net, into the back zone. Mikey Schneider leaps to meet it and hits the ball to Riordan.

Eli edges closer to Laurel. “We found the first portal by ourselves.”

“Yeah, but part of that was luck. The Arc was right in front of us.”

Coach Brewster blows his whistle. Riordan has missed.

“Red team wins the serve,” says Coach Brewster. “Rotate.”

Eli moves into the serving position. After he sends the ball over the net, Laurel drifts toward him again.

“Do you remember when we talked about the portal with Kenji?” she asks. “He said that each of us have different puzzle pieces.”

“Enough chitchat, Salter,” says Coach Brewster. “Guard your zone or I’ll switch you to blue team.”

Laurel glares but arranges her grip. After Coach Brewster turns away, Eli raises his eyebrows and mouths: Kenji?

Laurel feels flustered. He must have noticed something in her tone. She hasn’t told Eli what happened with Kenji, and he hasn’t told her more about Angela.

A spate of action allows her to ignore the question. Jules volleys the ball to Noah, who sends it to Maisie, who passes to Laurel. When Noah strikes the ball into the midzone, Laurel and Eli dive to the floor. Eli wins the point.

“It’s like—you and I are each one neuron,” she explains, as they stand back up. “Maybe a question this massive requires…well, a critical mass.”

The ball is flying toward her. In her haste, Laurel bounces it twice.

“Coach Brewster,” Amy Wagner shouts, “that’s a foul.”

“Blue team, point and side-out. Salter and Wiggins, trade places.” When Eli opens his mouth to protest, Coach Brewster holds up a hand. “Rosen, if you can’t control yourself, you’re both looking at detention.”

Laurel stalks to the other side of the net. She’s never been so ready for fireflies and soft serve and swimming pools: summer in the Midwest.

—

Eli can’t grow a beard anymore. His frame is narrower than it used to be. Most of the boys at McFarland High hide these changes with baggy T-shirts and jeans. Laurel stuffs her bra. To regain a few inches of height, she wears platform shoes. It doesn’t matter that she was once a leading scientist: adults talk down to her, and strangers call her miss instead of ma’am. The latest Seventeen magazine features a beauty special: “How to Maintain Your Nasolabial Folds—and Your Credibility—for as Long as Possible.”

Sometimes Laurel and Eli talk about the time they spent apart. She tells him about her friends from the Center, and how they organized when a developer tried to buy the backlands. Laurel listens as Eli describes his own adventures: his trip to Peru, or the year he sang in a skate punk band.

His tenure at Stanford was more ordinary than she expected.

“On my first day,” he explains, “this HR person brought me to my office. She kept saying things like, ‘Throw a rock, and you’ll hit a Nobel Prize winner.’ ” Laurel groaned. “The rest of us felt like duds.”

But he laughs as he says it. Eli’s attitude has changed. In Madison, his true goal was both grueling and private. At Stanford, work became more collaborative and less anguished. He liked mentoring the junior professors, people in their sixties and seventies. He even saw his biggest achievement—the Duoverse—differently.

“I used to be so proud. I felt like: Even if I never do anything else with my life, at least I came up with this. But maybe I just put a little bit of the Duoverse together. Or maybe I found one way to describe it. I can’t have been the first. Other people probably had their own ways of telling the story.”

In July, Laurel lies on Eli’s bed as a tangerine sun fades to lavender. They keep their voices down: as always, the door is insultingly cracked.