Connie Willis - Time Out

Dr. Young had gone up to Fermilab in February and been gone two months. She had assumed—correction, he had let her assume—he was working with the cyclotron that whole time, trying to get his subatomic hodiechrons to switch phases. “The school wouldn’t have copies of those tests, would it?”

“Are you kidding? Old Paperwork makes me make copies of everything .” She stacked her silverware and milk carton on top of her plate. “My timing’s always been off. In college I kept meeting guys who’d just been drafted.” She stood up and pushed her chair in. “It’d be great if this time-machine thing of Dr. Young’s worked, wouldn’t it? You’d be able to go back and get the timing right for once.”

“Yes,” Dr. Lejeune said. “It would.”

• • •

Wendy called after school and told Carolyn they had an out-of-town volleyball game and could Carolyn bring her money for McDonald’s and some Gatorade to drink on the bus. “Coach Nicotero says we have to have lots of electrolytes.” She and Andrew weren’t done testing Heidi Dreismeier, but he told her to go on and he’d finish the last few questions.

Carolyn ran by the grocery store and bought the Gatorade and a two-liter bottle of black-cherry pop, which she’d decided was the secret ingredient in the suicides. She took Wendy the Gatorade and the money and picked up Liz at the high school.

“Can you drop me over at Lisa’s?” Liz sad. “Harvard sent her a recruitment video. I don’t know, though. How important do you think coed dorms are?”

“I don’t know,” Carolyn said, stopping in front of Lisa’s. “We didn’t have them.”

“You’re kidding. How did you meet guys?” She gathered up her books and got out of the car. “Oh, I almost forgot. I saw Dad. He said to tell you he and Linda had to go out to the mall to look at warm-ups. He said not to wait supper.”

Carolyn went home and made herself a suicide, adding a very small amount of black cherry to try it out. Not only did we not have coed dorms, she thought, we weren’t even allowed to have boys in the dorm. The dorm mother ran a bed check at midnight, and you could be expelled for sneaking a boy into your room, but I still managed somehow to meet boys, Liz. They sat next to me in class, and they danced with me at mixers, and they called me on the phone.

The phone rang. “Thanks a lot for running out on me,” Andrew said.

“What happened?” Carolyn asked. “Did Heidi throw up?”

“Worse. Her mother came in. It took me an hour and fifteen minutes to convince her Heidi doesn’t need hodiechronicity lessons.”

“Sherri says she read this article about Housewife Hysteria, and that’s what she thinks Heidi’s mother has,” Carolyn said. She took a sip of the suicide. Black cherry was not the secret ingredient. “She can’t find a socially acceptable outlet for her frustrations and longings.”

“So she makes poor Heidi take belly-dancing. She spent forty-five minutes telling me about their Suzuki lessons. I felt like I was caught in some horrible time dilation. It serves me right for going into this business.”

“How did you get into this business anyway?” Carolyn said, opening the refrigerator and peering inside to see if there were any other flavors of pop she could try.

“You mean why did I decide to study time? Well, I …” There was a long pause and then he said in an odd voice, “Isn’t that funny? I don’t remember.”

“You mean you just sort of gradually got into it?” There was a jar of maraschino cherries in the refrigerator door with one cherry left in it. She ate the cherry and poured the juice into the suicide. “You just drifted into it?”

“Temporal psychology isn’t something you just drift into,” he said. “This is ridiculous. I can’t for the life of me remember.”

“Maybe you still haven’t gotten used to the altitude or something,” Carolyn said, trying out the suicide. Maraschino-cherry juice wasn’t the secret ingredient either. “And you’re probably under a lot of stress with the project and all. People forget things when they’re under stress.”

“You forget phone numbers and where you put your keys. You don’t forget why you picked your chosen vocation.”

“I can’t remember whether I had the chicken pox,” Carolyn said. “I even called my mother. She said I didn’t have it when I was little, but she thought I’d had it when I was in college, and when she said that, it sounded right, but I can’t for the life of me remember. It’s like there’s a big hole where the—”

“Nebraska State College,” Andrew said.

“What?” Carolyn said.

“Your college. You went to Nebraska State College. That’s where I know you from.”

“You’re kidding. You went to NSC, too?”

“No, Stanford, but—” He stopped. “You didn’t ever go to California when you were in college, did you? For spring break or something?”

“No,” Carolyn said. “Did you ever come to Nebraska?”

“No, and you still think I’m trying the old ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’ routine, don’t you?”

“No,” Carolyn said. “I think you probably had a girlfriend in college that I remind you of.”

“Not a chance. Stephanie Forrester was blond and malicious.”

She certainly was, Carolyn thought. Making him usher at her wedding.

“Brown and gold,” he said suddenly.

“What?”

“Your school colors. Brown and gold.”

She looked at the suicide and then poured it down the sink. Her school colors were brown and gold, and Andrew had never said a word about Stephanie Forrester until this minute, but she knew all about it, how the head usher was in love with her, too, how they’d gone out drinking clockstoppers and—

“I’ve got to go fix supper before my husband gets home,” she said, and hung up the phone.

Dr. Lejeune had hoped Sherri would look for the tests right away, but when she went into the office after school, Sherri said. “Oh, I forgot all about that. Old Paperwork suddenly decided he wanted me to take an inventory of the supply closet, including counting the individual sheets of construction paper.”

“How old is Mr. Paprocki?” Dr. Lejeune asked.

“Six, seven,” Sherri said, counting green. “Forty-three.”

“Forty-three,” Dr. Lejeune said thoughtfully, watching Sherri count. “Are you aware that obsessive attention to detail is a classic symptom of sexual repression?”

“Nineteen—you’re kidding,” Sherri said. She looked at the half-counted stack. “Where was I?”

“Nineteen,” Dr. Lejeune said. “Are you sure he’s never noticed you?”

“I’m sure. I’ve been wearing fuchsia for a week.” She finished the stack and tamped it down and along the side to straighten the sheets back into line. “I’ll try to look for those tests as soon as I finish this inventory.”

Dr. Lejeune went down to the music room to see what she could find out from Carolyn, but she wasn’t there and neither was Andrew. They had probably gotten lost in all the equipment, Dr. Lejeune thought, looking at the metal boxes stacked next to the piano and lined up under the blackboard. She wondered what he needed the photon counter for. And the spectrum analyzer. She didn’t even know what some of this stuff was. She picked up a gray metal box that wasn’t plugged into anything. There were no dials or markings on it except an on-off switch. Whatever it was, it was turned on.

The lights went off. “Hey!” Dr. Lejeune shouted. She took a step in the direction of the door. She crashed into the wastebasket. “Hey!” she said again.

“Sorry,” Dr. Young said, and the light came on. He came down the narrow ell and into the main part of the room, looking oddly guilty, as if she had just caught him at something. “I didn’t know anybody was in here, and I saw the light on. It’s a waste of electricity to leave a light on in an empty room and—” He stopped. “What are you doing?”