If I hadn’t gotten Miney’s makeover, I could have just walked right out. Slipped through the door without a single person noticing. Now, because of new clothes and three fewer inches of hair, I need to come up with an excuse, a lie, because I have shed my cloak of invisibility. Of course I’m following her. That’s not even up for debate. There’s just no way I could stay here and finish out the remaining forty-two minutes of this period staring mournfully at her empty chair. Also, Gabriel is sitting next to me in all his olfactory glory and I can’t bring myself to ask about my missing notebook. It’s gone. Stolen. I feel it nearby, though, like a phantom limb. I’ve decided not to worry. Surely they’ll read the first page, realize it’s not full of history or physics notes, and then give it right back. No harm, no foul.
“Mr. Schmidt? I need to…” I make a mental note that next time I will think of my excuse before I raise my hand. He’s looking at me. No, not just Mr. Schmidt. The entire class. Again. “I need to empty my bowels.”
I say it loudly and with confidence, which Miney claims is the key to a good lie. Sounding like you believe it yourself. There is laughter, but it holds a different quality than usual. It doesn’t sound like breaking glass. It sounds collaborative. Could the change be a result of my haircut and new clothes? Nah. I may not like my classmates, but they can’t be so stupid that their opinion of me could be swayed by something as inconsequential as my appearance.
“TMI,” Mr. Schmidt says, which I know from Urban Dictionary means too much information, an expression that makes little sense to me, because my defining ethos is that there is never enough information. That’s how one gets smarter. “Go, Mr. Drucker.”
He points to the door, and though it doesn’t fit my cover story—I’m a terrible liar—I throw my backpack over my shoulder and run.
I find Kit in the school parking lot, standing in the middle of the road with her head back and her arms outstretched.
“It’s snowing,” she says. “Can you believe it?”
I nod because I can believe it. Last night, when I checked my NOAA Radar Pro weather app, it said there was a seventy-two percent chance of precipitation today between the hours of one and five p.m. It’s twenty-six degrees.
“Sorry to make you skip. I just thought—” She doesn’t finish her sentence, just lets the words trail off into the air. Sublimated into another form, like snow to fog. I reach over and catch a flake just before it lands on her cheek.
“Did you know that it’s not mathematically impossible for two snowflakes to be identical? They’re made up of a quintillion molecules that can form in various geometries, so it’s just highly improbable.”
“A quintillion?”
“Picture a one and then add eighteen zeros.” She shrugs and I don’t think she pictures it. Which is too bad because the image of a quintillion looks just like a line of poetry. “The point is it’s totally possible. Unlikely, of course. The chances are like one in a gazillion. Which is not an actual number but an exaggerative placeholder, but you get my point. It’s possible.”
I look at the falling snow. Wonder if any of these flakes have a twin somewhere, if they have somehow defied the odds. Here’s the thing about making a friend that I didn’t understand before I started talking to Kit: They grow your world. Allow for previously inconceivable possibilities.
Before Kit, I never used the word lonely, though that’s exactly what I was. My mind felt too tight, too populated by a single voice. I don’t like excessive noise or light or smell, which are the inevitable by-products of human interaction, and yet my consciousness—that which will hopefully survive my inevitable death—still longs for personal connection. Just like everyone else’s.
It’s basic physics, really. We all need an equal and opposing force.
Kit stares at me, and I stare back. Eye contact usually feels like an ice headache. Just too much, too fast. Sharp and unpleasant. With Kit it feels like the first few seconds on a roller coaster, all gravitational force, no escape, pure thrill.
I am nervous. I keep talking.
“There’s something comforting about the thought, isn’t there? That even something crazy like that—two identical snowflakes—can actually happen? I think about that sometimes when I’m upset.” She flashes her perfect smile at me, which isn’t perfect, not really. Her third tooth from the left is slightly chipped. But it’s literally breathtaking, and so I stop talking because I don’t want to activate my asthma.
“Everything is so unbelievably shitty right now,” she says, even though she’s still smiling. “I can’t even begin to tell you how shitty.”
I nod. I don’t know what to say to this. I want her words to match her face or, maybe to a lesser degree, vice versa. A tear escapes out of the corner of her eye, and she wipes it away, fast.
“But I’m going to take that as good news. The snowflake thingy,” Kit says. “So thank you for that.”
“Should we walk?” I ask, because I suddenly don’t want to climb into a car. I want to stay outside, in this light, quiet snow. I want to stand next to Kit, watch her brace herself against the wind, hear the tiny whoosh of snow as it falls onto her jacket.
“Yes, please,” she says, and then, like it’s the most natural thing in the world, like we do it all the time, she interlaces her fingers with mine.
We hold hands for two minutes and twenty-nine seconds, but when we turn the corner onto Clancy Boulevard, we stop, and I wish I knew who initiated the release. Did I get distracted by the counting and accidentally reduce my pressure, thus signaling a desire to let go? I don’t know. There’s a ninety-two percent chance it was Kit. I liked the feeling of her hand in mine. Her fingers were longer than I would have guessed, the collective weight of a dog’s paw. I think about what it would be like to kiss her, to touch my fingertip to her clavicle cluster, to not worry about our physical boundaries. I imagine it would be like splitting an atom, a distillation into component parts. Everything small enough to be countable. Everything as perfect and forever as pi.
“You’re quiet today,” Kit says. We haven’t spoken in two minutes and twenty-nine seconds. Too hard to talk and hold hands at the same time. That would be system overload.
“Was just thinking,” I say.
“Me too. I wish I could do it less.”
“What?”
“Thinking.” I look over and see that Kit’s face is wet. From the snow? From tears? Has she been crying since we left school?
“You’re sad,” I say, and it occurs to me that it is entirely possible, likely even, that I’ve been having the best two minutes and twenty-nine seconds of my life while Kit has been crying.
No, I was wrong: There will never be two identical snowflakes and I will forever be out of synch with the rest of the world.
I look at the mini mall across the street because I don’t want to see Kit’s face. The mini mall is an emotion-free zone. A bagel place, a dry cleaner, the Liquor Mart, and a knickknack store that sells an assortment of useless items like miniature figurines and napkin holders. Why do they wrap everything up in clear cellophane and twirled ribbon? Little Moments, that’s what that store is called. Little Moments. I hate that place almost as much as I hate Justin.
“My mom cheated on my dad. I just found out,” Kit says, and uses both of her hands to wipe her face. “How screwed up is that?”
I don’t say anything, because I’m pretty sure her question is rhetorical. And if it’s not, I wouldn’t even know how to begin to measure the precise dimensions of how screwed up something is. So I stay quiet and wait for her to say more. This technique seems to work with Kit.
“I don’t even know what to do, you know? Like what the hell am I supposed to do with that information?” she asks, and this time I think she is seriously asking, but before I can answer she goes on. “It’s all irrelevant now anyway. I mean, he’s dead. D-E-A-D. Dead. Adios, amigo. Hasta la vista, baby. Why should it matter?”
“I’m sorry.” I picture a Venn diagram and three circles overlapping for this catchall phrase, I’m sorry, best used (1) when someone is sad, (2) when someone dies, and (3) when you have no idea what else to say. In this case, all three apply. In my mind I scribble the word Kit in the overlap. “It probably doesn’t matter, but I get upset all the time about things that don’t matter. Like open loops, for instance.”
We cross at the light, and I let Kit lead the way. I have thirty-three dollars and fifteen cents on me, more than enough cash to pay for a meal for both of us in most of Mapleview’s under-two-dollar-sign Yelp-rated restaurants. I doubt Kit would pick three dollar signs.
“I don’t know why I’m telling you all this,” she adds. “I haven’t even told Vi or Annie.”
“We’re friends.” I say it like it’s no big deal, like it’s the truth and has always been the truth, and also like I’m not suddenly terrified that just by uttering the words out loud I’ve put myself in the “I will never get the opportunity to kiss Kit Lowell” zone. “Anyhow, I wish there were a way to fix this for you. I would undo it if I could.”
“You’re sweet,” she says, and that smile is back, the one that I’m starting to realize is not a smile at all. It just resembles one in form. The snow is starting to fall harder now, in bigger geometrical formations, rendering the possibility of two matching ones infinitely more remote.
“You know what we need? To rip a major hole in the space-time continuum. And then we could go back in time and fix everything for you.” I realize with a pang that time travel would do nothing to fix me. I’m different at the genetic molecular level. We’d have to alter my dad’s sperm or my mother’s egg, which would, in effect, undo my very existence. I don’t want that. “Have you asked your mom why?”
“Why she cheated on my dad?”
“Yeah.”
“No.”
“Maybe you should. Could help close the loop.”
“You are obsessed with this loop concept.”
“Think about the infinity sign,” I say, and I wait for her to do it. To imagine it. She stops walking and so I assume that’s what’s happening. She’s letting me paint pictures in her mind. Picture me kissing you, I want to say. Picture that. “You see how it just flows into itself. Or even the concept of pi. It has an order and a rhythm and doesn’t end. Ever. Continuous flow. That’s how everything should be. Closed loops. Just ask your mom why.”
“I like your new haircut,” she answers, apropos of nothing, and then reaches up—to touch my head, I think, but then she jams her hands back into her jacket pockets. “Your outsides match your insides better now.”
“I don’t know what that means,” I reply.
She doesn’t answer me, though. Kit just stares up at the sky and lets the snow bathe her face with its infinite variation.