Always/Never

Chapter 4 / Physics, Timelines, and Stuff

A few days passed, and I came face-to-face with the revelation that living with myself could have qualified as a medieval punishment.

Being that we were both in the same wing of residence, we shared a bathroom. When the thought crossed my mind that it was the perfect time to take a shower, the same thing had also occurred to Rory. When I abandoned it to use the one downstairs instead, Rory decided on it, too.

Overnight, I had the habit of rolling over and knocking my hand against the wall. It was closer than I remembered it being, and certainly, the bed was smaller than mine at home. Rory must have agreed; I could have sworn a knock emitted from my righthand side.

I groaned as I dragged myself awake. Not having class should have been relaxing, but so far it had been anything but.

Blearily, I crashed out of the room to knock on Rory's. The door shook as I tried to wake her. It took much longer than expected for the lock to flick, and somehow the instant I opened the door, she was already tucking the bedsheets over her neck.

"You've got to go to class," I said. It didn't escape me that I wouldn't have listened to her telling me what to do.

"Close the door. You're letting in the sunlight."

I sighed. Neither of us wanted to yield. What was the point of skipping, anyway? I tried to think. "Avoiding going to class will not prevent you from becoming a villain."

"Maybe it will."

So that was it. I shut the door. Drifted to the desk to place my back against the chair. I let it dig into my muscles. A nice distraction from this whole debacle. "If anything, it'll make it happen faster. When I got my power, it was because technology was... an escape from what happened. I must have locked myself in this room for ages."

That summer, I thought about dropping out. It had never crossed my mind before that moment. But what use was it to return to this campus when it was the place where everything fell apart?

Rory lowered the bedsheets stamped with the image of blackbirds and power lines that, from a distance, resembled tripwires. "What happened?"

I didn't answer. It would defeat the point, but she knew that. We both do.

I stepped past the motherboard to grab her computer bag, decorated with sewn-on patches, and filled with printed-out worksheets. Grades I didn't remember getting. Ninety-eight on a packet that belonged to a history exam. Ninety-two on a double-sided sheet from computational electromagnetics.

It took me a moment before my stiff fingers slid the papers back into place. Since the machine, I hadn't invented much of anything. I didn't even know what the spare parts on the floor were for.

"What if not going changes something? And maybe that's what puts things right again," Rory said as I unplugged her laptop, shoving it inside the bag.

"You're going to class. Everything has to happen exactly the way it did the first time."

"Do you have any idea how improbable that is?"

I shoved the computer bag at her. "About as probable as the chance of me being born. Yeah, yeah. Who cares what the numbers say? I built a time machine. I think we can wave goodbye to probability. Take the bag."

She glared. "You know we're already not following the way everything happened the first time. You know that stopped being possible the moment you showed up here."

"So we're getting back on that path," I said.

She didn't bother to hide her eye-roll. Setting the bag beside her, she stood in a flash as the sheets spilled out around her. "Why don't you go if it's so important?"