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 dinner last night,” he said.