“You wouldn’t happen to know a girl named Jamie, would you?” I try to ask casually, but my voice quivers. I hold my breath, waiting for his answer.
He looks up from his menu. “Jamie?”
I nod, eyes locked on his. Is he taken? Did he and Jamie break up in this universe? Or are they meeting up for ice cream and a walk through the park tonight?
“Nope,” he says. “I can’t think of a Jamie I know. Why?”
“She’s someone from California.” My voice trails off.
He looks perplexed. “So how would I—”
“Stupid question, sorry. Never mind.” I guess Jamie doesn’t even live here. Never moved here. But I couldn’t assume anything, because after all, a version of myself lives here alongside George. “You have a little sister named April, right?”
“Yeah. And a dog named—”
“Trigger!” I blurt before I can stop myself.
The look on his face transforms from confusion to suspicion. “How do you know so much about me?”
“I, uh …” My eye catches the Facebook logo at the bottom of our menus. Like us! “We have a bunch of mutual friends on Facebook? I, um, read some of your posts. You know, just clicking around.” I sound like a stalker. Just shut up, Ruby!
“Is this your complicated way of asking if I’ve got a girlfriend?” He raises an eyebrow, his voice settling on that familiar teasing tone.
I breathe, relieved. “Yep, that’s it.” It would have been so much easier to just come out and ask.
“Nah. Besides, I just started hanging out with this quirky new girl I kinda dig.”
Me? ME?
Our waitress suddenly approaches. A tiny woman with black hair wound into a bun. “Are you ready to order?” she asks. “Drinks first?”
“Green tea,” George says.
She looks at me. “That’s fine,” I say. “Bring a pot.”
Once she’s gone, George closes his menu and leans across the table. “So what else do you know? From Facebook or whatever.”
“You like art. And symmetry.”
“Repeating patterns,” he says. “Yeah.” He flips through his notebook until he finds a pencil drawing of a field of flowers. I’ve seen this sketch before! George was working on it last week, just before I left Walnut Creek.
“Each flower is like a mini-spirograph,” he says.
I know! I was the one who showed him how to do this.
“How did you put math and art together like that?” I ask, knowing it couldn’t have been me or my alter Ruby. “Did you go to an exhibit or something?”
“No. It was a fluke thing. This guy at school dropped his homework on the floor one day, and I saw the graph paper and the repeating lines all curled together like some growing, living thing, and inspiration struck,” George says, breathless. “But I don’t know anyone who can show me more, unless I make an appointment with the math department, I guess.”
“You’ve got room for a butterfly.” I point to an empty space above one of the smaller flowers. “Graphs of polar equations can look like butterflies.”
“Yeah?” His voice surges with enthusiasm. “What’s a polar equation? Can you show me?”
I already have. Back in Universe One. “Sure,” I say, my cheeks glowing. “I’d love to.”
Oh, he is so George. My George, in dozens of ways. Every way, as far as I can tell.
So why is George so much the same here, and why am I so different? Maybe it’s because his forks in the road have been subtle. Little jogs instead of life-altering detours, like losing a parent. If Mom had survived, I could be president of the French Club. Maybe I’d even—against all odds—like the color pink, just because she did, or because she made me a pink dress when I was five that I loved, or because Santa brought me a giant pink teddy bear when I was six. Things that never happened, but could have. I can’t deny the possibility that I’d be a very different person if I could subtract tragedy from the equation.
I study George some more, trying to find some hint of difference. The only thing I can say is that I’m pretty sure he never wore tank tops in Universe One.
He suddenly looks up from his menu and catches me blatantly staring, mostly at his biceps, so I blurt, “Rice noodles!”
He grins. “How about I order a few things and we’ll just split?”
I clear my throat and try to recover. “What I meant to say was ‘the rice noodles stuffed with shrimp sound exquisite.’”
“You’re funny, girl-I-hardly-know-from-French-class.”
I shrug innocently and look around the restaurant at the paper dragons hanging from the ceiling, the jade pots in the windows, the Chinese characters painted onto the walls. Near the door is a crate of toys for people getting takeout, to keep their kids occupied while they wait for their food.
“LEGOs,” I say, pointing to the box. “Loved those when I was little.”
“Yeah, the way you can take the same bunch of pieces and make totally different things with them.”
“Exactly,” I say, thinking of parallel universes. “Identical building blocks, varied configurations.”
“I had this pirate set, and my sister kept making puppies out of the black and white blocks. Totally drove me crazy.”
I groan. “Oh boy. That reminds me of a childhood incident.”
“Childhood incident,” George repeats warily. “Do I want to hear this?”
“Scarred for life,” I say, nodding solemnly. This is a story I’ve never told my George, back in Universe One, so now this George will know something personal about me that my George doesn’t. Another deviance between universes. “A babysitter ruined my LEGO space shuttle.”
He gasps in mock horror. “No!”
“I had this perfect—and I mean flawless—replica of Discovery.”
George gives me a sarcastic yeah-right look.
“It was! Down to the rocket boosters. So I went to bed, and when I got up the next morning, she’d made it into a house.”
“A house?” George laughs. “That sucks. Have you made it through therapy?”
“The boosters were now a chimney.”
He leans across the table. “Why did you kiss me?”
“I—” My cheeks flush. I look out the window, and on the other side of the street I can see the library. I’m reminded of the Xeroxed address I have in my pocket, my mother’s address. “I’ve been wanting to, for a long time.”
“I don’t get it,” he says.
“I know you don’t. I’m some girl from French class who whacks off her hair, and gets a tattoo, and starts kissing guys on park benches.”
“Guys? Plural?”
“No! You know what I mean.”
“I don’t.”
“It’s like the LEGOs,” I say, looking into his aquamarine eyes. “I took that stupid house and tried to rebuild my space shuttle, but I couldn’t do it. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get it back to the way it was supposed to go. I wanted it to be perfect again, but I couldn’t make the pieces fit together right. It was so frustrating.”
Before George can ask another question, our waitress is back with our tea. “Are you ready to order lunch?” She sets a bowl of shrimp chips on the table.
“Number five and seven,” George says. “And the pork bun appetizer.”
We hand her our menus, and she hurries to another table, scribbling on her notepad as she goes. George looks after her, then back to me. “I like you,” he says.
“I like you too.”
He snaps his wooden chopsticks apart and arranges them in a V-shape. “Mount Diablo, you say.”
“Yes. That’s your mountain.”
We spend the rest of lunch talking about his sketch, and I give him some details to fill in about the plants that only grow in the Mount Diablo area: fairy lanterns, manzanita, chaparral bellflower, bird’s beak, and Mount Diablo sunflower.