“Then, in the middle of this conversation, Fermi came out with the quite unexpected question ‘Where is everybody?’
The result of his question was general laughter because of the strange fact that in spite of Fermi’s question coming from the clear blue, everybody around the table seemed to understand at once that he was talking about extraterrestrial life.”
—Edward Teller
Every day since Erica Anders Singleton had come to Quibbletown, New Jersey, had been wrong. The day she saw the tall and disjointed old house her family would live in, gone forever their Manhattan life of rushing and shouting, of dinner parties and elevators, was wrong. The first day she walked onto a school bus of blank-faced Quibbletown kids, gone the days of being walked the four blocks to the Bubble School by her father, was very wrong. The weekends, when so often now her parents worked, leaving her with endless days of silence to fill, echoing through the tall, too-big house, Mrs. Birch knitting in the dining room, no kids in the neighborhood but the threatening staring older boys from the cul-de-sac, were wrong. And of course her days at Quibbletown Elementary, so terribly different from the Bubble School, were very, very wrong. But there was a particular time, a bad time, a time when the days went so far wrong that it became hard to find herself in the strange, warped distance from everything that was good and true and right. That time was recess.
The bell rang. As the class erupted and Erica collected her papers, she felt something small hit the back of her head. She brushed her hand there. A sticky gob of something fell and a mist of hushed giggles needled her.
She looked around. Stephanie Tibbets and her friends were leaving with some boys, one of whom—Tommy, Erica thought his name was—held a straw.
Erica frowned. Teaming up with boys to pick on her was a new thing. Should she say something? Or ignore them?
She thought about hiding, perhaps shutting herself in a bathroom until recess was over. As she considered this, a familiar sensation opened up before her: The moment slowed, and one by one a series of possibilities stretched out in all directions in front of her mind, shadows of futures that could be, depending on different things she could do.
Erica tried to ignore the spiraling possibilities and to focus on what she needed to do, which was the obvious thing, the ordinary thing. The thing that was expected. Get up and go outside and play. Get up and go outside and play. Get up. Go outside. And play.
She didn’t realize that she was the last kid left sitting at her desk until Mrs. Hortense called out to her, sternly, from the door. “Erica?”
Mournfully, she got up and walked toward the door. Mrs. Hortense, smelling like must and cleaning spray, glowered at her as she went by. The sounds of kids taunted her as she paced down the long hallway toward the echoes of their laughs and shouts.
Her reflection, walking dejectedly alongside her, appeared in the glass of a display case. For not the first nor the second time, the thought washed over her: I’m unpopular here. Why? She stopped and turned to the case, standing up straighter, brushing some strands of yellow hair back as she checked her ghostly reflection. As far as she could tell, she wasn’t ugly. And she didn’t think she was mean either, but the way the other kids treated her made her unsure. Was she mean? She thought about what her father always said: People who are wrong are almost always convinced they are right. People who are bad are almost always convinced they are good. If you honestly want to be good, don’t be too certain you are good. All people fool themselves. Question your own motives. Then question them again.
She sighed. Tired of staring at her reflection, she started to turn away, then noticed there was something new in the case, against the wall. A very large, bright poster; a banner really, filling almost the entire back of the thing. A panorama of well-behaved, airbrushed, children beamed out of it. Some, on the left, sat attentive at desks, staring brightly forward at an unseen teacher, while others, on the right, socialized with manic intensity, some playing kickball, others having animated conversations at cafeteria tables. The scene stretched off into a single point of perspective in the middle distance, where it all disappeared into a blinding flash of white light. A headline, blazing across the top of the poster in enormous, drop-shadowed, intimidating red letters, screamed “LOOK AT WHAT THE OTHER KIDS ARE DOING!”
For some reason she didn’t understand, the poster horrified Erica. She wanted to look away, but instead kept staring at it, trying to figure out what it was about it that was so troubling. The banner was new. What had been there before? She tried to remember. Something about how you should intervene when someone was being bullied. “No bullying” —that had been the old theme. This, evidently, was the new theme. But what was it trying to convey exactly? Why was the school trying to get kids to pay attention to what other kids were doing? What would happen to you if you failed to watch what the other kids were doing?
Suddenly her reflection disappeared; the light had been blocked by another, larger reflection, looming behind her in the glass. With a start, she whirled around to see Mr. White standing there, motionless, as if he had been there for a long time.
Mr. White was the recess monitor and a specials teacher for the older kids—anthropology or something. He stared at her with no expression. A pen was clipped to the pocket of his gray shirt, and his hands hung lifelessly at his sides. The hall lights gleamed off his rimless glasses so you couldn’t see his eyes, making his face seem weirdly insectlike. “Do you need something, Miss Singleton?”
She knew that she should just answer Mr. White calmly and go out and join the other kids on the playground. But in the moment of fear, at the same time as she saw herself doing the expected thing, it happened again. The side-seeing.
A series of alternative scenarios sprang up for her to consider, all leading to different outcomes. She saw herself turning and running screaming out the front door of the school and all the way home, calling her father out of a meeting at work, saw him arriving home early and comforting her, hugging her and telling her everything would be all right. Only slightly less clearly, she saw herself kicking Mr. White in the shins and shouting in his face, then being dragged away by Mrs. Hortense and Dr. Schermer, then stonewalling the school psychiatrist Mrs. Pratkin until, again, her father showed up to take her home. She saw another version of herself lying stridently to Mr. White that she knew what he was up to and wouldn’t stand for it. A seemingly infinite procession of actions and outcomes, each less likely than the last, spun into the future, as the moment hovered, poised and still. And for some reason, Erica knew that the very worst thing to do was she must do: the inevitable thing, the obvious thing. Tell Mr. White no, I’m fine, and go out on the playground to play with the other children.
“No, I’m fine,” she said.
A diagonal crease, like a computer slash, appeared between Mr. White’s eyebrows. He leaned forward slightly, scrutinizing her with a subtle clockwise tilt of his head, as if he could see inside her mind. A long moment passed. Then he tilted his head slightly counterclockwise. “Are you quite certain of that?” he asked.
Erica spun on her feet and walked toward the playground door as fast as she could, shaking and almost stumbling in her haste to get away, feeling the man’s glare against her back all the way down the hall.
She stood in the doorway and looked out at the playground. Stephanie and her friends were clustered by a hedge near the school building, looking at her and giggling.
Erica sighed. One day she had made the mistake of mentioning over Stephanie’s shoulder, having noticed a picture in a book she was looking at, the fascinating fact that a sea star pushes its stomach inside out in order to digest its food. “Eeewww!!” had come the too-loud reply, followed by the wide eyes of Stephanie’s friends swiveling to pin her in cold-eyed curiosity. “That’s disgusting!” Then that first hail of sharp little frost-needles of laughter that would follow her all of her Quibbletown days. From then to now, Erica had been known by the Mean Girls as Starfish.
She looked away from the girls and scanned the yard and saw Benjamin, playing alone between the concrete sphere and the pyramid. She fixed her gaze and walked toward him, purposefully, trying to pretend like she somehow hadn’t heard Stephanie. The continuing ice-sting of laughter bounced off her as she strode past. “Starfish? We’re talking to yooou! Starfish! Come over here!”
What had been her mistake in saying that to Stephanie? To approach a fellow student in a friendly way and volunteer an interesting fact would never have been seen as an invitation to attack at the Bubble School. But then, the kids at the Bubble School were different from the kids here. The kids there were… well… they were crazy!
Like everything in Manhattan, the days at the Bubble School, in her mind at least, were filled with action, with running, laughing, shouting. Even the Bubble School kids’ minds were in constant motion. A line of chairs was not a line of chairs: It was a spaceship. A piece of chalk was a magic stone, the images it drew portals into other worlds, like books, their pages full not of facts to be memorized, unexpected and strange mysteries, pasts and futures real and imagined, the entering of which could change everything…
At Quibbletown, everything was different. An imagination was not a good thing to have. If you had a crazy thought, or knew something interesting, you were supposed to hide it. Apparently. Not that Erica felt she understood the invisible rules of this cold new world, where meanness was a virtue and imagination a weird deformity to be shunned. The only thing she could see to do, most of the time, was to keep her head down and suffer through the days as silently as she could.
She dodged past an older boy who had run across her path from the central court to catch a stray ball, and arrived at the pyramid. The Quibbletown playground was surrounded by a wide strip of dirt planted with giant concrete shapes. It was like the planners who built the place in the 70’s had intended to make a garden there, but decided instead that a blank strip littered with monoliths was more in keeping with the place’s forbidding, brutalist architecture.
Benjamin was crouched halfway between the pyramid and the sphere, the edge of the playground pavement and the fence, using a stick to carve shapes onto the hard soil with great concentration. Ben was small, and all of his features were small. He had short, swirly brown hair in a kind of Roman-looking cut, and Erica vaguely knew his family practiced some obscure Eastern European religion. He was the only person at Quibbletown she understood.
He looked up at Erica from his labors and broke into animated speech, walking around his dirt-scratchings and pointing with his stick, as if continuing a conversation he had already been having. “So see, I counted off the distance between the globe and the pyramid, following the circle formed by the shapes. I don’t have a measuring instrument, so this is approximate, but it’s about 24 feet.” He dropped the stick and rubbed his hands together with glee. “This is gonna be really really cool.”
He had drawn an arc connecting the sphere and the pyramid, and then some intersecting lines that looked like a mathematical diagram, with a circle where some of the lines intersected. Erica looked over and saw Stephanie and her friends walking toward them. She looked back at Benjamin. “The Mean Girls are going to make fun of you.”
Benjamin blew air between his teeth dismissively. “Pf. Like they ever don’t make fun of me. Now listen listen listen. Stand with your back to the tetrahedron.”
“The what?”
“The pyramid. No no, on this side. Here. Now look where I’m pointing and tell me what you see.”
Benjamin stood in front of her and pointed toward the central court. “A bunch of boys kicking a ball around?”
“No. Look beyond the boys. To the other side of the yard.”
“The cube?”
He grinned and sparkled, not seeing Stephanie behind him. “The sexahedron. Now look…”
“The sexy what?”
Peals of laughter now from the Mean Girls. Before Quibbletown, Erica had never thought the sound of laughter could be so awful. “Oh I’m sorry, Starfish, did we interrupt your sexy time with your boyfriend?” Crying, screaming laughter, so loud now it was attracting the attention of other kids.
Erica sensed rather than saw an adult looking at them. She peered around to the right of the pyramid and saw Mr. White by the Buckyball. He was standing straight, arms by his side, watching. The white pinpoint reflections from his glasses stood out from his face, making him seem as though he were standing closer than he was.
Erica looked back at Ben. He was frowning, trying to ignore the laughing girls. “So listen. There are 6 shapes, right? The five platonic solids and the sphere. But they’re not arranged in the right order. That got me thinking…”
It was hard for Erica to focus on what Ben was saying, because Stephanie kept talking over him. “I know what platonic means. It means when a boy and a girl are just friends. Ben? Ben? Are you and Starfish just friends? No? Are you her boyfriend?” More laughter.
Suddenly the boys who had been with Stephanie in class were there, nearby, paying attention to the laughing girls. One of them threw a kickball, forcefully, to one of the others.
Erica frowned. Were these boys with Stephanie and her friends? Boys joining with girls to pick on other kids, together… this was new. LOOK AT WHAT THE OTHER KIDS ARE DOING!
Ben didn’t see them and moved closer to Erica, stammering as he desperately tried to ignore what the other kids were doing and explain his idea to Erica. “See, I-I-I-I, I think, I think, I think, th-th-the lines between the sh-shapes represent lines of… Erica?”
Erica had looked over at Mr. White again and started in surprise. He was standing stock still, staring at them, but seemed to have somehow moved closer, without moving. He was by the shape on the other side of the sphere now, the one Ben had told her was called an octo… an octo…
“STARFISH!”
At the shout, Erica’s attention snapped back to Stephanie, who had stepped closer, a death’s head grin on her blocky face. “Wake uuuuup, Starfish!” she sang, which produced another shower of stinging laughter.
“My name’s not Starfish.”
More laughter. Ben was anxious. He didn’t want Stephanie to walk on the lines he had drawn, which she now did, carelessly, her grin having turned more personal, more warmly vicious now that she had provoked a reaction from Erica. She took three steps toward her and tilted her head, causing a brown curl to jiggle loose from her square forehead. “What did you say?”
Erica looked past her as Ben, upset, went to touch her arm. His voice rose to a whine and his stammering intensified. “Hey! D-don’t- d-d-don’t- d-d-d-”
Stephanie turned on him and started mocking his stutter loudly, with a moronically slack expression. “D-d-d-d-d-duUuUuH!” The laughter intensified, then the cruel girl casually dealt the death blow. “You sound like your Mom! DuUuUuUH!” Ben’s face turned red as Stephanie went on, merciless, drooling and twisting her arms in parody. “I can’t th-th-thpeak! I c-c-c-c-c-uUuUuUuUH!”
The laughter had intensified into a scream. The boys, drawn in by the chaos, had come closer. One of them dodged the thrown ball, which hit Ben hard in the shoulder. He staggered sideways and yelped in pain. “Ow!”
The laughter had intensified into a scream. The boys, drawn in by the chaos, had come closer. One of them dodged the thrown ball, which hit Ben hard in the shoulder. He staggered sideways and yelped in pain. “Ow!”
Erica turned sharply to look at Mr. White. He was closer yet again, still just standing with his arms at his sides, glowering. Erica somehow read in his expressionless grimace that whatever punishment his presence promised would be directed not at the perpetrators of this bullying. A rationale would be found to direct it at Ben and her. The victims.
The thought caused a knot of sick despair to twist at her stomach, and at the same time another thought appeared to her, a singular thought that floated before her as if etched in the air in gold letters: The only person who can do anything is me.
The boys had gathered around and were laughing along with the girls as Stephanie continued to taunt Ben who, red-faced and fighting tears, fiercely tried to force his uncooperative mouth to make defiant words. The noise he made sounded like a ratchet: “St-st-st-st-”
Stephanie, standing too close to him, turned her face sideways and drooled. “St-st-st-st-st-stupid?” The laughter rose to a horrific intensity, but Erica didn’t hear it. She was looking at Ben, suffering, trying not to cry, looking wildly around, noticing Mr. White looking coldly down, no doubt wondering why the adult was not intervening on his behalf.
And stretching away from her like reflections in a kaleidoscope, in the frozen moment, she saw at an infinity of different things she could do.
And stretching away from her like reflections in a kaleidoscope, in the frozen moment, she saw at an infinity of different things she could do.
As always, the most obvious option, the thing it seemed like she should do, the thing she inevitably ended up doing, shone brightest, the center of a wheel. I should take Ben’s arm and lead him away from the jeering bullies. In an immediate outer radius, the slightly less obvious possibilities. She could put herself between Ben and Stephanie. She could tell her to step off. She could push her. She could walk over to the boy who had thrown the ball at Ben, grab the ball from him and throw it away. She could shout out to Mr. White. She could see herself, different versions of herself, doing these things, each of which would cause different dominoes to fall, different futures to unfold…
She could do something crazy. She could run off the playground and into the street. She could run and throw a rock at a passing car; she could throw herself in front of a car. She could start singing “Mary Had A Little Lamb” at the top of her lungs. She could tear her hair out and start blithering like an idiot. On and on and on.
This always happened to Erica. This side-seeing. These moments when time seemed to stand still and she could envision, in one vast encompassing glimpse, all of the different things she could do that would lead to unexpected outcomes, sometimes crazy outcomes. But for as long as she could remember, she always did the most obvious thing, even when it didn’t seem like the right thing to do. She just couldn’t fight the inevitability.
There was something about this moment, however, about Mr. White standing there beaming injustice from his invisible eyes, that broke something in her. For the first time she could remember, she searched the possibilities and chose the least obvious possibility she could find, a possibility that would break the wrongness unfolding from this terrible, terrible moment.
There was something about this moment, however, about Mr. White standing there beaming injustice from his invisible eyes, that broke something in her. For the first time she could remember, she searched the possibilities and chose the least obvious possibility she could find, a possibility that would break the wrongness unfolding from this terrible, terrible moment.
Erica shut her eyes, opened her mouth, and screamed.
In a strange way, being sent to the Principal’s office wasn’t so bad. Dr. Schermer didn’t seem to hate Erica the same way the teachers did. Plus he wasn’t boring. He liked to read books, for fun.
Erica loved books. She would have expected a school principal to have books on how to make kids get better test scores, things like that. But Dr. Schermer’s books were not like that at all. They were the kind of books her parents might read. Books with intriguing, exotic titles. Being And Time. Disclosing New Worlds. Crossing The Postmodern Divide. Seeing Like A State. The titles of his books made her wonder what they could possibly be about. She liked that. She wanted to read them.
“Erica?” Mr. White snapped his fingers. “Erica, are you paying attention to what I’m saying to you? Erica?”
She returned her attention to Mr. White, sitting across from her at Dr. Schermer’s office table. “No, I wasn’t,” she answered, without defiance.
The diagonal crease on Mr. White’s forehead deepened again. He sat up straighter and then leaned forward, cocking his head in that way he did. “Do you have trouble?” he said slowly, as if speaking to a mentally deficient person. “Paying attention?”
The words hung in the air, ominous. He had Erica’s full attention now. “We’re going to need to work on that.” He sat back again, slowly. Another diagonal crease appeared between his eyes. “You know, if you don’t pay attention to what the other children are doing, it becomes more difficult to make friends. You want friends, don’t you?”
Why did this sound like a threat? The light from his glasses made her uncomfortable. She looked away. “Don’t you?” He said again.
“I have friends.“ Erica recalled Ben cowering, the other kids laughing, Mr. White looking on. She recalled the mounting feeling of menace, of a vice closing on her, of unbearable, crushing injustice. And she recalled the thing happening again. The side-seeing.
She couldn’t remember if she had always done it, or if there had been a beginning to it. She did remember gradually coming to the realization that it was a thing. That it was not something everyone did. Somehow, even before she had come to this realization, she had a name for it, a name that started as a private joke, a play on sightseeing. She was the girl who could see other worlds, where things she could do would change everything. Like the story her father had told her about the butterfly that flapped its wings on one side of the world and caused a hurricane on the other side of the world. And if she wanted to, she could go there. All she had to do, in the moment of side-seeing, was to choose an action that was just the slightest bit out of the ordinary, and the world would change. She would be in a different world. A world that was just like the old one, except for the fact that every single thing that happened from then on would be completely different from what would have happened had she done the obvious and inevitable thing.
There was just one problem with visiting a different world. And that was, once you stepped in, you could never get back out. The other world, the one you would have been in had you done the obvious thing, would go on without you. You would never know how things might have been had you just gone along with the plan.
That was why, in all the hundreds or thousands of moments of side-seeing Erica had experienced in the past, she had always chosen to do the obvious thing, the thing that seemed to her the default, the inevitable, the plain, boring, unthinking monotonous ordinary thing to do.
Until today.
And it had been exactly as she feared. She remembered, as the echoes of her scream, stretched across the valley where they had bounced back from the Watchung ridge wall, died out, the feeling of displacement; of discontinuity—a settling, as if the entire world had turned on an invisible axis and settled kachunk! into a new configuration. Like turning a key that interrupted the order of things. The shocked silence as all the children on the playground stopped what they were doing as one and stared at her, the only sound the rushing of the air, a bird chittering in a distant tree, a car passing by on Washington Avenue, the subtle vibration of everything, of reality, shifting and hesitating for a moment... before resuming. She replayed the scene of Mr. White erupting from his stillness in wobbly consternation, striding in her direction, brushing kids aside, grasping her arm roughly like a cop, hustling her off the playground.
She let the memory go and forced herself to look at him, to stare without blinking at the white reflections where his eyes should be. Quietly: “I remember protecting my friend while you stood there doing nothing. While he and I were being bullied.”
Mr. White should have gotten angry at that but he didn’t. Instead, he did something far worse. He smiled. “Your idea of protecting someone is to scream at the top of your lungs?”
A clock ticked on the wall behind Erica. Mr. White’s smile was unwavering; mirthless and menacing. He tilted forward ever so slightly. “Why did you do that?”
“I… I don’t know.”
He cocked his head again. Again, the gesture made him seem like his gaze could penetrate her skull like an X-ray. It made him seem like an insect. Or like a bird contemplating whether to eat her. And suddenly Erica had the panicked, irrational thought that he could see inside her mind. That he knew about her side-seeing.
“There is a reason,” he said, as if to confirm this. “What is it?”
“There is a reason,” he said, as if to confirm this. “What is it?”
The handle of the door behind Dr. Schermer’s desk turned, and Dr. Schermer came in, carrying a binder. His cheeks were a bit flushed, as if he’d had to rush to get there. “Hello Erica. Mr. White.”
Mr. White stood. “Dr. Schermer,” he said, stiffly, and sat back down, never taking his eyes off Erica.
Dr. Schermer put the binder on his desk and came over to stand at the head of the table. He put his hands on his hips and looked over at Erica, not unkindly. “I think Erica and I, just the two of us should talk for a bit. Does that sound good to you, Erica?” She didn’t sit up any straighter or uncross her arms, but she nodded.
Mr. White sat stock still. Dr. Schermer looked at him, pointedly. “All right Mr. White?”
Mr. White turned slowly to look at Dr. Schermer and made some silent mental calculation that somehow failed to end with him leaving. “Of course.” He looked back at Erica.
Dr. Schermer looked at Mr. White strangely. He craned his head in an exaggerated manner, as if trying to get his attention without being rude. “Okay?” Mr. White looked at him again. “We’ll take it from here,” Dr. Schermer said.
It dawned on Mr. White he was being asked to leave. The diagonal creases between his eyebrows deepened. He stood very slowly, looking at Dr. Schermer. A moment passed. “I’ll send you my report on this incident,” he said.
Dr. Schermer sat in the bright plastic chair at the head of the table. Mr. White hadn't moved. Dr. Schermer looked up at him. “That’ll be fine, Mr. White.”
After another moment of hesitation, Mr. White turned and left. Dr. Schermer looked at Erica with his eyebrows raised and sighed. He waited several seconds after the door closed to say anything.
“Do you want to tell me what happened?”
“Some kids were bullying Ben. Mr. White wasn’t doing anything about it.”
“And that’s why you screamed?”
She frowned and slouched lower in the chair. There was another long moment in which nothing was said. Finally, Dr. Schermer spoke. “It hasn’t been easy for you here, has it?”
For some reason, this caused a bit of heat to swell up from behind Erica’s eyes. She suppressed the feeling fiercely and continued to stare in front of her.
Another moment passed. “Can I show you something?” Without waiting for a response, he went over to a cabinet and retrieved a piece of paper from a standing file. He brought it back and unfolded it carefully. It was old.
“This is my report card from the fourth grade. I want you to hear what they wrote about me.” He held the paper in front of him and cleared his throat. “‘Michael has no problem with his schoolwork, but he needs to improve his attitude with other children if he is to make friends. He seems to have his head in the clouds most of the time, and he doesn’t make a sufficient effort to play and socialize with the other children. He projects a superior attitude, which creates resentment. If he does not change his behavior he will continue to be a very lonely child.”
Erica’s gaze had moved slowly up from the tabletop to rest on Dr. Schermer. He put the letter down. She looked back at the tabletop and frowned more fiercely. “So you think I’m like that.”
He refolded the paper and set it down. “No, I don’t, and that’s not why I read it to you. I read it to you to give you an idea of how my teachers saw me when I was your age.”
“They were mean.”
“Very mean.”
Erica thought. “Why did you want me to know that?”
He picked up the paper and tapped it on the table as he spoke. “The way they saw me wasn’t how I saw myself. I didn’t think I was superior, or that I was holding myself apart from other kids.”
“How did you see yourself?”
He looked at her. “I just thought I was doing the best I could.”
She frowned. “Were your teachers right or were you?”
“Well, the teachers couldn’t have been right, but I don’t know if I was right either. But that’s not really my point. The reason I keep this here is to remind me of how hard it is to be a kid sometimes, and that we don’t always know what’s going on.” He got up and put the paper away. “So if you want to tell me what’s going on, I’m here to listen.”
She thought about this. Then she said, “can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“What is that new banner in the hallway about? The one that says look at what the other kids are doing?’”
“Oh, yeah. That… I think it’s just trying to encourage kids to, just, you know… just have… more awareness of what other kids are doing.”
“Or what?”
“Or nothing. It’s just meant as encouragement.”
She frowned again. “Why? Why do you think kids need that encouragement?”
“Um…” He laughed. “I’m not exactly sure, to be quite honest. I haven’t had anyone ask me about it.”
“Isn’t it your decision to put the sign up?”
He smiled and sat down. “No, it’s actually not not my decision. The decisions about the school theme are made at the district level. This Spring, the theme is, ‘pay attention to what the other kids are doing.’ I’m sure we’ll get more information about it soon.”
“But…”
A knock came at the door. “Yes?”
Mrs. McLeod, the front office lady who looked like a fish, poked her head in. Her goggle eyes looked at Erica for a moment, then swiveled to Dr. Schermer. “Mr. Singleton is here.”
“You can send him in.” He stood up and looked at Erica. “I figured whatever was going on in the playground, you could use the afternoon off.”
“Am I in trouble?”
“Not at all.”
Her father came in, looking concerned.
They had moved there because her mother and fathers’ business, HERMESYS, needed to expand. They had relocated from some offices in Soho to an office park in Bernardsville. Erica had once asked her father why they had chosen to buy a house in Quibbletown, rather than Basking Ridge or Long Hill, where the children of pharmaceutical executives lived. She hadn’t gotten a straight answer, but had the sense that it wasn’t because they couldn’t afford to live in one of those fancy communities. It felt to her almost like they were hiding from something. Like fugitives. From what, she couldn’t guess. It would have felt strange to ask such a thing.
She looked over at her father. He smiled at her, then took a hand off the wheel to shake her knee affectionately. He hadn’t asked her about what had happened on the playground, and she knew he wouldn’t. It was up to her to tell him, if she wanted. About the playground bullies. About Mr. White moving without moving. About “LOOK AT WHAT THE OTHER KIDS ARE DOING!” About resetting the universe.
Suddenly she had a terrible thought: If I changed everything, isn’t he different too? She looked at him in a way she hadn’t before. Did he look slightly different? Or was it her imagination? Had those gray streaks in his hair been there before? Had those crinkles around his eyes not been there before? Or had she just not noticed them?
The idea that she had changed her father, along with everything else, engulfed her in sadness.
Suddenly she had a terrible thought: If I changed everything, isn’t he different too? She looked at him in a way she hadn’t before. Did he look slightly different? Or was it her imagination? Had those gray streaks in his hair been there before? Had those crinkles around his eyes not been there before? Or had she just not noticed them?
The idea that she had changed her father, along with everything else, engulfed her in sadness.
They turned left off the main road, onto the side streets that led to their neighborhood. He glanced at her again. “Are you OK?”
She looked the other way. She had no idea how to talk about any of it. “Yeah, I’m OK.” Sensing that something more was required, she said, “it’s just… it’s weird they called you to pick me up early from school.”
“It is a little weird, isn’t it?” He looked at her again. “The school seems a little weird. Is it?”
Her father was not the type to pretend everything was okay when it wasn’t. The thing was, Erica liked weird things. The Bubble School was weird. Quibbletown Elementary was aggressively normal. Which was weird. She sighed. “I don’t like it very much.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
They had arrived at the house. The car turned and pulled up the long driveway. Her father had said they chose the house because it had “character.” To Erica, this just meant it was a shabby, misshapen monstrosity.
It was the only house with three floors in the neighborhood. The second floor jutted out on all sides like an irregular rectangular mushroom. The third floor, with its nonsensical turrets and pinnacles, was off center and also irregular, with no obvious connection to the second floor. You could change the orientation of any floor and it wouldn’t look any less peculiar and disjointed as it did already. As they approached it, the house always appeared to rotate on its axis farther than it should, an optical illusion that added, for Erica, to its ugliness. It was dwarfed and kept in darkness by freakishly tall stoop-shouldered trees, with one particular enormous tree in the center of the yard that towered crookedly above the rest, as if trying to break free from this grim nest and make a grab for the sky. This spooky house with its spooky yard was the sinister center of their bleak new Quibbletown life, and she hated it.
It was the only house with three floors in the neighborhood. The second floor jutted out on all sides like an irregular rectangular mushroom. The third floor, with its nonsensical turrets and pinnacles, was off center and also irregular, with no obvious connection to the second floor. You could change the orientation of any floor and it wouldn’t look any less peculiar and disjointed as it did already. As they approached it, the house always appeared to rotate on its axis farther than it should, an optical illusion that added, for Erica, to its ugliness. It was dwarfed and kept in darkness by freakishly tall stoop-shouldered trees, with one particular enormous tree in the center of the yard that towered crookedly above the rest, as if trying to break free from this grim nest and make a grab for the sky. This spooky house with its spooky yard was the sinister center of their bleak new Quibbletown life, and she hated it.
The house had a detached garage with a collapsed roof, unusable and condemned. They pulled to a stop in front of it. “Are you going back to work?” Erica said.
“Nope. It’s you and me for the weekend.” He opened the door and got out.
She got out after him. “Where’s Mrs. Birch?”
“She’s sick again. In the hospital.”
“Is she OK?”
He unlocked the door and they went inside into the gloomy foyer. “I’m not sure. I’ll call the hospital and try to find out more later. But it will be nice to have some time with you.” He smiled over at her as he pulled a hanger from the closet to hang his jacket.
She didn’t ask him if Mom would be there too. She knew she wouldn’t. He went into the kitchen. “Do you want a snack?”
She followed him and sat on a stool at the island. He poured himself an orange soda. “No thanks. I’ll have some soda though.” Erica thought of Mrs. Birch in the hospital. The last time this had happened it was because Mrs. Birch had fallen down and hurt herself. Mrs. Birch had diabetes, which Erica knew was related to her unsteadiness, the fact that she used a cane when walking any distance. Then a sharp downward tug of guilt wrenched her stomach.
“Dad? Can I tell you something?”
He set down the soda glasses and sat across from her. “Absolutely.”
She pulled her glass over and cradled it. “Did I ever tell you about this thing that happens to me where it… it seems like time kind of freezes for a second and I… I can see all the different things I could do that would…?”
“Lead to different outcomes?”
“Right.” She looked glum. “Different futures.”
“Yeah, you have, of course you have. I’ve always thought it was like what happens to everyone sometimes. I was with your mother once, when we lived in California, and we were driving on a winding road where there were a lot of car accidents. A truck came toward us from the other direction. The driver lost control and drove up against this concrete divider…” he motioned with his hand, “…and started come up, over the divider. I remember I could see the bottom of the truck. And it looked like the truck was going to come up and over the divider and land on top of us, smash into our car.” He put his hand down and shook his head. “Of course he didn’t hit us. He came down on his side of the divider. But he could have. I'll never forget how time… seemed to stop in that moment. And I think of it how you're describing. Like for a moment, I could see a future in which my life wouldn't continue. And one in which it would.” He took a sip of soda. “And here I am, of course.”
Yes, here you are. A different you? Erica shook her head. “This is different.”
“Tell me.”
She frowned with the effort to explain. “I almost have this sense that I’m looking at a kaleidoscope. Of things I could do differently. I know that sounds weird.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think it sounds weird.”
She looked at him worriedly. “I… I have a word for it I use in my head. I call it side-seeing. Like I’m seeing off to the side. To other worlds that could be formed if I choose a different, less obvious thing to do.”
Now he frowned. “Okay.”
She looked down. “Normally I just… do the regular thing that I normally would do. Until today.” She looked up at him from beneath her brow.
“What?”
“Today, when I screamed on the playground, that wasn’t the regular thing I would normally do. It was a really, really not regular thing to do. Like I wanted to break something. And I’m… I’m afraid I did.”
“You hurt yourself?”
“No. And… please, please… please don’t laugh at me. I’m afraid I broke the universe. Changed it. And if I changed the universe, maybe I caused Mrs. Birch to hurt herself. Or get sick.”
She watched his head tilt and rotate in a way that she knew what was coming. “Oh honey.”
“No no no no no no please…”
“Honey I’m sorry, but just listen. You didn’t change the universe. You don’t have that power. There’s nothing you could have done to hurt Mrs. Birch or make her get sick.”
More than anything else that had happened this day, her father’s well-meaning skepticism pushed against the wall she had been holding and caused it to burst. Hot tears cascaded from her eyes.
Her father came rushing around the island and put his arms around her. “Oh honey. It’s okay.”
Her father came rushing around the island and put his arms around her. “Oh honey. It’s okay.”
Without meaning to or thinking, she shoved his arms away with a sweeping motion and was on her feet. “You don’t understand me!” The shriek boomed and echoed through the empty house.
She was immediately horrified at the stunned, pained expression on her father’s face. Unable to escape her own anguish and not knowing what else to do, she turned and ran away from his shocked stare, bounding up the creaky stairs to the second floor, running down the dark hallway to her room, slamming the door behind her. She stood there sobbing for several minutes.
Slowly she got hold of herself, forced herself to calm down. She slowly became aware of her dark surroundings, breathing and staring at nothing. Then she noticed something that made her stop.
Above her bed, one of her old drawings had been taken down and an Adventure Time poster hung in its place.
It was something she had been vaguely meaning to do for months and had never gotten around to it.
It was something she had been vaguely meaning to do for months and had never gotten around to it.
Or had she?
“It’s okay,” she said, looking out the window.
“No, it’s not,” he said. She looked at him. He paused, his face showing care in choosing the next words he was going to say. Finally, he took a breath and said, “you know how I’m always telling you you should never be too sure you’re right about things?”
“Because people who are wrong always think that they’re right,” she said. “People who are bad always think they’re good.”
He talked about this all the time. He had even worked it out for her mathematically. It had something to do with her mother and father’s Artificial Intelligence research. Being right was not about being 100% certain; you could never be 100% certain of anything, or nearly anything. Being right was about removing as much uncertainty as you could, while always being suspicious of your sense of your own rightness, always being ready to see that you had failed to consider something important. Ready to recalibrate your feelings to reflect the fact that you didn't know as much as you thought you did. Computers could be programmed to do this, but humans were terrible at it. Her parents had always impressed upon her the importance of understanding this: Humans mostly decided what they believed for reasons having little or nothing to do with what was likely to be true. They mostly decided what to believe, or pretend to believe, for social or emotional reasons. Then, usually without ever considering they could be wrong, they used their intelligence to make up reasons to convince themselves and others of what they thought they already knew. The only cure for living in a fog of delusion, her parents said, was doubt. Lots and lots of doubt. Especially about your own beliefs. And motivations.
He talked about this all the time. He had even worked it out for her mathematically. It had something to do with her mother and father’s Artificial Intelligence research. Being right was not about being 100% certain; you could never be 100% certain of anything, or nearly anything. Being right was about removing as much uncertainty as you could, while always being suspicious of your sense of your own rightness, always being ready to see that you had failed to consider something important. Ready to recalibrate your feelings to reflect the fact that you didn't know as much as you thought you did. Computers could be programmed to do this, but humans were terrible at it. Her parents had always impressed upon her the importance of understanding this: Humans mostly decided what they believed for reasons having little or nothing to do with what was likely to be true. They mostly decided what to believe, or pretend to believe, for social or emotional reasons. Then, usually without ever considering they could be wrong, they used their intelligence to make up reasons to convince themselves and others of what they thought they already knew. The only cure for living in a fog of delusion, her parents said, was doubt. Lots and lots of doubt. Especially about your own beliefs. And motivations.
Her father nodded. “Well, I’m guilty of that as much as anyone.” He leaned a bit closer, his expression serious. “Walk me through this thing that happens to you, this side-seeing, again?”
