Everything, Everything (12 page)

“How does that work?” His eyes are scanning the ceiling.

“It’s industrial. The windows are sealed so air only comes in through the filters on the roof. Nothing over 0.3 microns gets in. Also, the circulation system completely changes all the air in the house every four hours.”

“Wow.” He turns his head to look at me and I can see him trying to come to terms with just how sick I am.

I look away. “The settlement paid for it.” Before he can ask I add: “The trucker who killed my dad and brother fell asleep behind the wheel. He’d been working three shifts in a row. They settled with my mom.”

He turns his head back towards the ceiling. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s strange because I don’t really remember them. Meaning I don’t remember them at all.” I try to ignore the feelings that surface when I think about them. There’s sadness that’s not quite sadness, and then guilt. “It’s weird to miss something you’ve never had or don’t remember having, anyway.”

“Not so weird,” he says. We’re both quiet and he closes his eyes.

“Do you ever wonder what your life would be like if you could just change one thing?” he asks.

Not usually, but I’m starting to. What if I weren’t sick? What if my dad and brother hadn’t died? Not wondering about impossible things is how I’ve managed to be relatively Zen.

“Everyone thinks they’re special,” he says. “Everyone’s a snowflake, right? We’re all unique and complicated. We can never know the human heart, and all that?”

I nod slowly, certain I agree with what he’s saying now, but equally certain that I’m going to disagree with whatever’s next.

“I think that’s nonsense. We’re not snowflakes. We’re just outputs for a set of inputs.”

I stop nodding. “Like a formula?”

“Exactly like a formula.” He props himself up to his elbows and looks at me. “I think there are one or two inputs that matter the most. Figure those out and you’ve figured out the person. You can predict anything about them.”

“Really? What am I going to say now?”

He winks at me. “You think I’m a brute, a heretic, a—”

“A crackpot,” I complete for him. “You don’t really believe we’re math equations?”

“I might.” He lies back down.

“But how do you know which input to change?” I ask.

He sighs a long, suffering sigh. “Yeah, that’s the problem. Even if you could figure out which one to change, then how much should you change it? And what if you can’t change it precisely enough? Then you couldn’t predict the new output. You could make things worse.”

He sits up again. “Imagine, though, if you could just change the right inputs you could fix things before they went wrong.” He says this last part quietly, but with the frustration of someone who’s been trying to solve the same unsolvable problem for a long time now. Our eyes meet and he looks embarrassed, like he’s revealed more than he meant to.

He lies back down and throws a forearm across his eyes. “The problem is chaos theory. There are too many inputs to the formula and even the small ones matter more than you think. And you can never measure them precisely enough. But! If you could, you could write a formula to predict the weather, the future, people.”

“But chaos theory says you can’t?”

“Yup.”

“You needed a whole branch of mathematics to tell you that people are unpredictable?”

“Had that figured out, did you?”

“Books, Olly! I learned it from books.”

He laughs, rolls onto his side, and laughs some more. He’s infectious and I’m laughing, too, my whole body responding to him. I watch for the dimple that I’m no longer supposed to be paying attention to. I want to put my finger into it and keep him smiling forever.

Maybe we can’t predict everything, but we can predict some things. For example, I am certainly going to fall in love with Olly.

It’s almost certainly going to be a disaster.

MADELINE’S DICTIONARY

ob•ses•sion
(əbˈseSHən) n. pl. -s. 1. acute (and completely justifiable) interest in something (or someone) acutely interesting. [2015, Whittier]

SECRETS

MY CONSTANT IMING
with Olly is catching up with me. I fall asleep during not one but two movie nights with my mom. She begins worrying that something’s wrong, that my immune system is compromised somehow. I tell her it’s simpler than that. I’m just not getting enough sleep. I guess I understand why, given our situation, her doctor’s brain would go immediately to the worst-case scenario. She tells me what I already know, that lack of sleep is not good for someone with my condition. I promise to be better. That night I only IM with him until 2
A.M.
instead of our usual 3
A.M.

It feels strange not to talk to my mom about something, some
one
, who’s becoming so important to me. My mom and I are drifting apart, but not because we’re spending less time together. And not because Olly’s replacing her. We’re drifting apart because for the first time in my life, I have a secret to keep.

THANK YOU FOR SHOPPING

NUMEROLOGY

NUMBER OF:

minutes it takes Olly’s dad to begin yelling after he arrived home last night:
8

complaints about the goddamn roast beef
being overcooked again:
4

times Olly’s mom apologized
6

times Olly’s dad called Kara a goddamn freak for wearing black nail polish:
2

minutes it takes Olly’s mom to remove Kara’s nail polish:
3

times Olly’s dad mentions that he knows someone had been drinking his goddamn whisky:
5

that he’s the smartest guy in the house:
2

that no one should forget that he makes all the money:
2

pun-filled jokes it takes to get Olly feeling marginally better when he IMs at 3 AM:
5

times he writes “it doesn’t matter” during our IM conversation:
7

hours of sleep I got last night:
0

cigarettes Kara buried in the garden this morning:
4

visible bruises on Olly’s mom:
0

invisible bruises:
Uncertain

hours until I see Olly again:
0.5

OLLY SAYS

HE’S NOT ON
the wall when I see him again the next day. Instead he’s in what I’ve begun to think of as his resting position: bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet with his hands tucked into his pockets.

“Hi,” I say from the door, waiting for my stomach to complete its crazy Olly dance.

“Hey yourself.” His voice is low and a little rough, sleep deprived.

“Thanks for chatting last night,” he says, eyes tracking me all the way to the couch.

“Anytime.” My own voice is husky and low as well. He looks paler than usual today and his shoulders are slumped forward a little, but still he’s moving.

“Sometimes I wish I could just disappear and leave them,” he confesses, ashamed.

I want to say something, not just something, but the
perfect
thing to comfort him, to make him forget his family for a few minutes, but I can’t think of it. This is why people touch. Sometimes words are just not enough.

Our eyes meet and, since I can’t hug him, I wrap my arms around my own waist, holding on tight.

His eyes drift across my face as if he’s trying to remember something. “Why do I feel like I’ve always known you?” he asks.

I don’t know but I feel it, too. He stops moving, having come to whatever decision he needed to.

He says your world can change in a single moment.

He says no one is innocent, except maybe you, Madeline Whittier.

He says that his dad wasn’t always this way.

CHAOS THEORY

TEN-YEAR-OLD OLLY AND
his dad are at the breakfast bar in their old penthouse apartment in New York City. It’s Christmastime, so maybe it’s snowing outside, or maybe it just stopped snowing. This is a memory, so the details are a bit uncertain.

His dad has made fresh hot chocolate. He’s a connoisseur and prides himself on making it from scratch. He melts actual bars of baking chocolate and uses whole “one hundred percent of the fat” milk. He takes Olly’s favorite mug, pours in a layer of chocolate and adds six ounces of hot milk heated to almost boiling on the stove—never in the microwave. Olly stirs the milk and chocolate together while his dad gets the whipped cream, also freshly made, from the fridge. The cream is just lightly sweetened, the kind of sweet that makes you want more. He spoons one dollop, maybe two into Olly’s mug.

Olly raises his cup and blows on the already melting whipped cream. It slides across the surface like a miniature iceberg. He eyes his dad over the top of the mug, trying to gauge what kind of mood he’s in.

Lately the moods have been bad, worse than normal.

“Newton was wrong,” his dad says now. “The universe is not deterministic.”

Olly kicks his legs. He loves when his dad talks to him like this, “mano a mano,” like he’s a grown-up, even though he doesn’t always understand what he’s saying. They’d been having more of these conversations since his dad’s suspension from work.

“What does that mean?” Olly asks.

His dad always waits for Olly to ask before explaining anything.

“It means one thing doesn’t always lead to another,” he says, and takes a slurp of hot chocolate. Somehow his dad never blows on the hot liquid first. He just dives right in. “It means you can do every
goddamn
thing right, and your life can still turn to shit.”

Olly holds his sip of hot chocolate in his mouth and stares at his mug.

A few weeks ago Olly’s mom had explained that his dad was going to be home for a while until things were fixed at his work. She wouldn’t say what was wrong, but Olly had overheard words like “fraud” and “investigation.” He wasn’t quite sure what any of it meant, only that his dad seemed to love Olly and Kara and his mom a little less than he did before. And the less he seemed to love them, the more they tried to become more lovable.

The phone rings and his dad strides over to it.

Olly swallows his mouthful of hot chocolate and listens.

At first his dad uses his work voice, the one that’s angry and relaxed at the same time. Eventually, though, his voice just turns to angry. “You’re firing me? You just said those assholes were clearing me.”

Olly finds himself getting angry, too, on behalf of his dad. He puts his mug down and slips off his stool.

His dad paces the length of the room. His face is a storm.

“I don’t care about the
goddamn
money. Don’t do this, Phil. If you fire me everyone’s going to think—”

He stops moving and holds the phone away from his ear. He doesn’t say anything for a long minute.

Olly stops moving, too, hoping that whatever Phil says next will fix everything.

“Jesus. You guys can’t do this to me. No one’s going to touch me after this.”

Olly wants to go to his dad and tell him everything is going to be OK, but he can’t. He’s too afraid. He slips out of the room, taking his hot chocolate with him.

The first time Olly’s dad gets afternoon drunk, violent drunk, yelling-at-the-top-of-his-lungs drunk, doesn’t-remember-what-happened-the-next-day drunk doesn’t happen until a few months later. He’d been home all day, arguing with financial news shows on television. One of the anchors mentioned the name of his old company, and his dad raged. He poured whiskey into a tall glass and then added vodka and gin. He mixed them together with a long spoon until the mixture was no longer the pale amber color of the whiskey and looked like water instead.