“Thirty seconds,” Lionel says, hoisting his entire arm in the air to signal an optimistic thumbs-up.
Sumner backs away to give me space. Heart in my throat, I tighten my fingers around the coin and let the cold air sink into my skin. This has to count.
And then Lionel’s voice carries over the burbling fountain. “Now.”
Please, I beg,reset everything to how it was before.
I release the penny, tossing it high into the air, and watch as it falls into the water with the faintestplop.
Lionel and Sumner are staring at me as if I can verify it worked. But I can’t. I’m not sure what I expect to happen. Nothing about the evening feels significantly different. There’s no universal shift in the atmosphere, no uncanny display in the sky. I don’t feel altered, but did I sense any change the first time?
Sumner nods toward the houses. “Should we see?”
Right. There’s only one way to confirm.
As we run, icy wind stings my cheeks and makes my eyes water and turns my fingertips into icicles. A pressing desperation vibrates outward. My heartbeat clamors, brightening with saturated hope and longing. Thishasto work.
We round the corner of the building, and that’s when reality comes crashing down. Because just beyond the hilly incline, hat pressed against his chest, is William.
32
Sumner doesn’t make fun ofme or sayI told you so. He doesn’t try to explain the lack of logic behind the experiment. The disappointment rooted in the lines on his face match my own, and that’s when I realize he’d also hoped it would work. Despite my own foolish optimism, deep down, a tiny piece of me knew it wouldn’t. No matter how much I wanted it.
There’s quiet defeat in William’s demeanor. He doesn’t express his disappointment, but it’s apparent in his lack of vigor. Even Lionel withdraws into himself without any usual encouragement. When I try to apologize, Sumner reminds me it was worth pursuing even if we didn’t get our desired outcome.
Our only remaining chance is the isoborometer.
“There’s something here,” Sumner says the following evening in Danforth’s room. We’ve made it a priority to meet up every evening until we’ve made significant headway.
I glance up from my seat across from him. “What?”
He flips to the end of my dad’s journal, then whirls it around so it’s facing me. “You know how Maxwell simplified Faraday’s law of induction? It looks like your dad did the same thing with the equations in the academic article.” He points to a series of symbols and numbers scrawled at the top of the page. “See?”
To me, math has always seemed like its own language, one Sumner can easily translate. It takes me several minutes to piece together what he grasps, and he’s right. My dad was able to streamline the original equations. I hadn’t recognized them as one and the same. They’re so far back in his journal that I didn’t pick up the connection. If only I hadn’t been quick to get ahead of myself; if only I’d lent Sumner his entire journal earlier. Would any of it have made a difference?
“You’re sure?”
“Almost certain.” He places his elbows on my desk and folds his arms, chin atop his wrist as he looks up at me. His glasses slip a millimeter down his nose. “Between you and me, we can solve the rest. I know we can.”
He says it with such conviction that I’m overcome with emboldened determination.
Over the next two weeks, we focus on unlocking the rest. Adjustments are made to the isoborometer’s specifications, and we plug them into Lionel’s software to ensure there aren’t errors. When we do hit a snag, we backtrack and try again. Sumner is patient as we tip our heads together and pass guesswork and guidance back and forth.
“If we widen the area around the armature by a millimeter, it decreases the chances of stalling without compromising the function,” I explain one evening, showing him the math to back up my claim. “See?”
Sumner double-checks my work. “That’s brilliant.”
“Please,” I say dryly, “don’t sound too shocked.”
I don’t miss the way his mouth bends into that tilted smile.
Lionel and William take over implementing this while Sumner and I get closer to our breakthrough in the equations. Once curfew hits, we FaceTime each other from our rooms and continue working late into the night. We have to keep our voices down to ensure no one reports us for noise violations, and more than once we fall asleep mid-conversation.
One morning, I open my eyes to Sumner’s sleeping form, his phone propped against his pillow, glasses tangled in his hair as his bare chest slowly rises and falls. There’s something so strangely raw seeing him like this that it stirs a fervid tingling across my skin. My thumb taps to end the video call before he wakes.
All of my focus is narrowed into this inexplicable cosmic puzzle, so much so that I begin running late to my meetings with Mrs.Vidar-Tett. I scramble to do homework assignments last-minute because I forget to pay attention to due dates, and I drop one more slot in the ranking. We have close calls with evening curfews so frequently that Lionel begins setting an alarm, but it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except figuring out how we’re going to stop time from folding in on itself.
“December sixth,” Lionel says as he slides his iPad along the table where William, Sumner, and I are eating lunch. “That’s when we should aim to have this complete, if not earlier.”
