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shut up and went back to sipping their vending machine coffee,
waiting for Thirty to show up for one of her
question-and-hardly-any-answer sessions with me.
    That’s what “going out to eat” was in the
DARPA tunnels — me picking food from the same vending machines
Thirty and the Twenty-Fives used. I’d sip a hot chocolate while she
talked. But sometimes, I’d ask her questions first, the way Thea
did. Like, when am I gonna get to see my dad? I can’t believe he
wouldn’t have tried to get in touch with me by now. Somehow.
    It’s been so long since I’ve seen him. I’ve
seen King Arthur, and Lewis and Clark, and Thomas Jefferson, and
all kinds of people since I last spoke to my dad. I know he’s
around somewhere. He can’t have disappeared, too.
    I can’t possibly be an orphan. Time travel
couldn’t be that unfair. At least not to a thirteen-year-old.
    Could it?
    But whenever I asked about Dad, Thirty would
always change the subject. So I don’t even know if he’s okay or
not, and of course she doesn’t tell me anything about my mother,
and yet I’m supposed to answer all her questions about history and
what it feels like to go through time, and then she slips in
something like, “Did you ever want to just destroy the whole world
because you were so mad at your parents?” questions that always
seem weird to me, though I’ve come to the conclusion it’s kind of a
psychology thing, because she thinks I’m keeping big secrets from
her. Like some plan Thea and Clyne and I have to change history and
rule the world.
    That’s what weird about life. Half the time,
you have no clue what’s really going on with people, grownups
especially — what they’re really thinking or feeling or doing when
you’re not around. The other half, things are exactly like they
appear and yet no one believes that, either. Everyone looks for a
catch, and no one can believe they might really be happy, even for
a while, or really be sad. Everybody is always trying to explain
things, but sometimes, a sunny afternoon is just a sunny
afternoon.
    At least, according to my memory of sunny
afternoons, since I’m sure not seeing any of them down here.
    I’ve had both things in my life — the
unexplained secrets, and trying to hold on to what’s right in front
of you. There was this seemingly normal family, once — mine — but
there were also the time-travel experiments my parents were doing
for DARPA, and they all went wrong, and changed history. My
family’s history. Me.
    Changed my life from the way it was going to
be. From that everything-turns-out-all right-life I thought I had
when I was a little kid. To a life that includes a dinosaur for a
friend, and a girlfriend who’s over a thousand years old.
    Wait. Did I just use the word girlfriend ?
    “…your atomic map.”
    “What?” Sometimes I don’t really pay much
attention to Thirty at all. I eat my sandwich and drink my hot
chocolate and wait to go back to my room, where I have an
old-fashioned Barnstormers game going with some paper and pencils,
kind of like how they had to do it with boards and dice before
there was electricity or whatever.
    “A map of your atomic structure. Some
physical tests. We appreciate how cooperative you’ve been so far” —
was she making a joke? — “but we also want to know how it is you’re
able to do all this time-traveling without too many physical
consequences.”
    “I get sick. I throw up.”
    “That’s nothing, compared to other people who
have tried on your hat.”
    I remembered what happened the last time
DARPA let some of its —workers? Troops? — try on the cap. The ones
that came out of it alive, generally went crazy. Like Mr. Howe
seems to have be.
    “You’re not still trying to make other people
wear it?” I asked, letting the question hang there and letting my
chocolate get cold. Like I said, wearing the hat creates some kind
of impossible moment, opening up a type of rift in your own body.
But not