Page 22 of Not You Again
But it was hard to ignore the power ballad blaring through his airstream, Bette Midler’s “The Wind Beneath My Wings.”
Carly was nosy and couldn’t help but comment. “Great song.”
To her shock, Rick’s chin began to wobble. “It really is,” he said. “I apologize. Every time I reset, I’m in the middle of watchingBeaches.”
“Beaches?”Adam asked.
In her head, Carly also thought, Beaches? As in, the classic friendship movie? This man with the bunker and the aliens coming after him was watching...Beaches?She didn’t say any of that, though, because now she sensed a way in.
“It’s my go-to when I need a good cry,” Carly said, adding to the camaraderie. Maybe ifshecould be his friend, Rick would be willing to talk to them.
“Me, too,” Rick said. “I just wish every day didn’t start like this.” He reached out a hand, and Carly immediately took it with a supportive squeeze.Bingo.
“I know what you mean,” Carly said, and she really did. “What if I told you there might be a way out of the loop?”
Rick narrowed his eyes at them. “I’m listening.”
Chapter 8
Adam
Adam knew he wasn’t a scientist. In fact, he’d never told anyone he was. Carly and Rick, however, seemed to believe otherwise, as evidenced by their barrage of questions.
Have there been other changes in the sky?
What happened to make the eclipse shorter?
Has the loop shortened, too?
Adam’s answer to all of these was a simple, “I don’t know.” He’d found it best in situations where he felt uncertain of the stakes to think before he spoke.
Carly, on the other hand, seemed to have the opposite approach. “What if the eclipse losing time means we’re finally out of the loop? What if there’s a way to speed that process up? Wouldn’t that be amazing?” She asked rapid-fire without waiting for answers.
“And what if this is all happening because I’m getting closer to theTruman Showdoor the government doesn’t want us to find?” Rick’s eyes bugged out behind his goggles.
Adam couldn’t bring himself to look at Carly, just in case she didn’t find any of this alarming. Instead, he focused on a singular flamingo nearby. The paint around its plastic eye hadworn off, giving it a deranged expression, which was reflective of how Adam felt.
The thing about being a people pleaser to his core was that Adam was easily swayed. That was why he’d agreed to Carly’s suggestion of telling Rick in the first place. In hindsight, there were other options Adam could’ve suggested instead. After all, there was a whole Dark Sky Community run by those who loved the stars just as much as he did. And early on in the loop, he’d even met a Caltech professor who’d come to Julian specifically to study the eclipse.
Sure, odds were those people had succumbed to the insanity that was a time loop, but maybe hearing about a change would kickstart something inside them.
Instead, Adam was sandwiched between a professional conspiracy theorist and a cute screenwriter.
Cute?How had that word slipped into the equation?
Adam finally glanced at Carly, wondering if she could hear his thoughts. And maybe she had, because she pressed a palm against the side of the trailer above her head and stretched herself out like a cat. She wasn’t a tall person, but the line of her made his chest warm.
Hot.There was a new word.
“You’re still testing the perimeter?” Carly asked and, much to Adam’s disappointment, she dropped her hand and returned to a normal position. She did readjust her glasses though, which he realized were a thick, dark purple frame. He rather liked those, too.
“I won’t stop until I get to the end of it.” Rick pulled a worn map from the back pocket of his jeans. When he unfolded it, there was a curved line drawn in thick black ink around the top half of Julian. There were small X marks around a quarter of the circle, ticked off like the seconds on a clock. “The mapdoesn’t stay, obviously. I have to redo this each morning. But I keep track as best I can.”
Adam had seen the map before. When the loop began and the initial shock of repeating every day wore off, the town had come together each reset to strategize ways out. Adam had attended those town meetings. He’d even seen Carly there, not that they were speaking or anything, but she sort of stood out with her Wednesday Addams clothes and her nonstop need to talk, like a goth prom queen.
From the beginning, Rick had pulled out his map and come up with a theory about how to escape. The “Pop the Bubble” theory, as it became known, was this: The town was surrounded by some kind of bubble that kept them all trapped together. They knew this because when people in town tried to simply drive away, while they might be in the car one minute, once they hit the theorized invisible barrier, they restarted the next loop with everyone else. To physically leave Julian wasn’t possible—not so far—and any attempts at doing so just reset that person. So according to Rick, to get out of the loop they needed to find a spot in the perimeter with an exit door. If there wasn’t one, then maybe going through a spot over and over again could cause the perimeter to weaken, create a hole and pop the bubble.
So far, though, Rick was still here. They all were, of course.
