Page 51 of Not You Again
“Carly Florence,” the mayor said as she tucked into a beanbag. “Nah, Carly Sue has a better ring to it.”
Carly gave her an amused look. “I was hoping you’d be here,” she said earnestly.
“Yeah, where the hell have you been anyway?” The mayor adjusted her gold bolero and fanned out the sequined jacket so that it more resembled a cape. “Moms doesn’t feel as fun without you.”
“I’ve been distracted.” She cleared her throat. “I got swept up in trying to find a way out of the loop.”
“Rick got to you, huh?” Franco clicked her tongue. “He’s got some wild theories, I’ll tell you what. He once told me that the reason mice try to come into our homes is because the aliens use them as spies. I mean, that would be smart of the aliens, but I’m pretty sure that’s not true.” Mayor Franco cocked her head in a way that suggested she was considering the idea again.
Carly hesitated. Rick hadn’t gotten to her—Adam had gotten to her. And the sooner Carly told the truth, the soonershe’d find a way out of the loop. “How about we go into the crystal igloo and I’ll tell you about it?”
And so, it was inside the makeshift igloo, filled with colorful crystals, that Carly told Mayor Franco about Adam, the eclipse and how they might be on the verge of being sucked into a wormhole. Adam hadn’t wanted to tell anyone else what they’d found, but now Carly had told the person in town who would let everyone know.
Because while Adam might want to keep their information close, Carly didn’t want to vanish. She wanted to break out of the loop. Once she did, she’d get back to her old life, and the email from Marilyn Montgomery, and she’d never think of Adam and his wonderfully scratchy shadow of a beard again.
When she’d finished telling the mayor everything she knew, Carly felt safe with the knowledge that she was no longer alone, even if Adam had wanted her to be.
Chapter 18
Adam
Even in his darkest moments, Adam had an inkling that the loop wouldn’t last forever. A hope that came from his understanding of physics and Newton’s laws of motion. Because every action had a reaction, and eventually the action of the time loop would have an equal and opposite reaction.
What he couldn’t account for, though, was what would happen to all of them once the loop came to its end. He’dhopedthat much like a scratch on a record, they would simply return to the exact spots where they’d left off and carry on as if nothing had happened. But more than likely, they wouldn’t simply be returned the way they were. There would be changes—the reactions—to the loop. If they even survived it...
All of these thoughts swirled in an unsteady mix that was hard to silence. But then Adam felt an intense pressure on his hand, which grounded him back to the present. He was at his parents’ house. Sheila and Bill sat across from him at the kitchen table. And the pressure he’d felt was Sheila’s nails digging into the top of his hand.
“Mom,” he said and pried her fingers off.
“What?” Sheila asked, then snapped out of her haze. “Oh, sorry, honey.”
Adam hadn’t had a conversation of this magnitude with his parents since the day Shireen imploded their marriage. This time, however, wasn’t about Adam’s life—it was about all of theirs, and the gravity of the situation was not lost on them.
“So,” Bill started to say, “do you actually think we’re all about to vanish? The woman you spoke with—”
“Dr. Song.” Adam sipped the coffee in front of him. The world might be ending, but he still needed caffeine.
“She’s a scientist who believes this is where the loop is headed?” The fear was etched across his dad’s face.
“I mean, it’s where I think the loop is headed.” Adam tried to keep his tone even and calm.
“And she does, too?” his dad asked, like he didn’t buy what Adam was selling.
“Why does her opinion matter more than mine?” Adam was annoyed. “I’m telling you I’ve looked at the evidence.”
“Her opinion comes with a doctorate,” Bill said.
“Can you two knock it off?” Sheila put a hand between them.
Of course it was only natural that his dad would want to know what the scientist thought. When getting a professional opinion, you wanted the doctor to tell you if you were going to live or die, not the guy who buried people for a living. But still, something in Adam was really bothered by all of this. Because if he’d gone to Caltech, then he’d be the doctor in this scenario.
“Sorry.” Adam wasn’t used to fighting with his parents. In fact, he never did. They occasionally bickered, but those quickly resolved. He tried to smooth things over with, “This is all a little stressful for me.”
“Of course it is.” Sheila stood, crossed to the fridge and pulled out the coffee cake. Instead of cutting them slices, she brought the whole thing to the table with three forks. Shestabbed a piece with a heavy serving of frosting. “So, we might only have a few more loops, huh?” she said through a bite.
Adam swallowed. Yes, a few more loops might be all the time they had left in the world. He wasn’t the optimist, and he didn’t have Carly to pull him out of his spiral.
Carly. She’d looked almost pained when he said he’d tell his parents on his own. Maybe he should’ve brought her, but he also needed to process his own feelings. He’d hid his deepest fears from Carly, not wanting to scare her. But he didn’t plan to give his parents false hope.
