It wasn’t all about the perfect things. We did other things, too, that had nothing to do with any of this stuff. We had contests: Who could come up with the most cash in one day without actually taking it out of the bank. (I could, by selling my mom’s car on Craigslist while she was at work. Sorry, Mom!) Who could acquire the best new skill that we’d never tried before even once. (I won that one, too. I played “Auld Lang Syne” very badly on the saxophone; she spent the day trying and increasingly furiously failing to ride a unicycle.) Who could get on TV. (She won by talking her way into the local news station, posing as a summer intern, and then “accidentally” walking on set while they were live. They got so many e-mails from people who enjoyed her cameo that by the end of the day they’d offered her an actual internship. That was Margaret for you.)
I couldn’t have cared less who won. With all apologies to the rest of humanity who were forced to repeat August 4th over and over again like so many lifelike animatronic automatons, being stuck in time with Margaret was better than any real time I’d ever had in my life. I was like the Square in Flatland: I had finally met a Sphere, and for the first time in my life I was looking up and seeing what a crazy, enormous, beautiful world I’d been living in without even knowing it.
And Margaret was enjoying it, too, I knew she was. But it was different for her, because as time passed—I mean, it didn’t, but you know what I’m saying—I began to wonder if there was something else going on in her life, too, something she didn’t talk about and that I didn’t know how to ask her about. You could see it in little things she did or didn’t do. She checked her phone a lot. At odd moments her eyes went distant, and she got distracted. She always left a bit early. When I was with her, I was only ever thinking about her, but it wasn’t like that for Margaret. Her world was more complicated than that.
We finally watched Time Bandits, anyway. It holds up pretty well, though I don’t think she liked it as much as I did. Maybe you have to see it as a kid, the first time. But she liked Sean Connery.
“Apparently it said in the script, ‘This character looks just like Sean Connery but a lot cheaper,’” I said. “And then Sean Connery read the script and called them up and said, ‘Let’s do it.’”
“That must have been a perfect moment. But I don’t get why he comes back at the—”
“Stop! Nobody knows! It’s one of the great mysteries of the universe! Forbidden knowledge. We shouldn’t even be talking about it.”
We were on the foam couch in her family’s rec room, which had a thinly carpeted concrete floor and one glass wall that looked out at a big backyard.
I’d spent most of the previous hour inching imperceptibly sideways on the couch, nanometer by nanometer, and then subtly shifting my weight so that my shoulder rested against hers and we were sort of leaning against each other. It felt like some cool sparkly energy was flowing out of her and into me and lighting me up from the inside. I felt like I was glowing. Like we were glowing.
I don’t think anybody in the history of cinema has ever enjoyed a movie as much as I enjoyed Time Bandits that night. Roger Ebert watching Casablanca could not have enjoyed it one-tenth as much.
“Margaret, can I ask you something?” I said.
“Of course.”
“Do you ever miss your parents? I mean, I can hang out with mine pretty much whenever I want—and anyway, where my parents are concerned, a little of that goes a long way. But you hardly see yours at all. That’s got to be hard.”
She nodded, looking down at her lap.
“Yeah. That’s kind of hard.”
Her corkscrewy hair fell down over her face. It reminded me of double helices, of DNA, and I thought about how, somewhere inside them, there were tiny corkscrew-shaped molecules containing the magic formula for how to make corkscrewy hair. How to make Margaret.
“Do you want to go find them? I mean, we could probably track them down inside of twenty-four hours. Hit that yoga retreat.”
“Forget it.” She shook her head, not looking at me. “Forget it. We don’t have to.”
“I know we don’t have to, I just thought…”
She still wasn’t looking at me. I’d hit some kind of a nerve, a raw one that led off somewhere that I didn’t quite understand. It hurt me a bit that she wouldn’t or couldn’t say where. But she didn’t owe me any explanations.
“Sure. Okay. I just wish you’d gotten a better day, that’s all. I don’t know who it was that chose this day, but I question their taste in days.”
She half smiled; literally, one half of her mouth smiled and the other didn’t.
“Somebody has to have bad days,” she said. “I mean statistically. Or the bell curve would get all messed up. I’m just doing my part here.”
She took my hand—she picked it up off my lap in both of hers and sort of it squeezed it. I squeezed her hand back, trying to keep breathing normally while my heart blew up inside me a hundred times. Everything went still, and I almost think something might have happened—like that might have been the moment—except that I immediately blew it.
“Listen,” I said, “I had an idea for something we could try.”
“Does it involve unicycling? Because I’m telling you, I never want to see another of those one-wheeled devil-cycles in my life.”
“I don’t think so.” I kept waiting for her to put my hand down, but she didn’t. “You remember you had that idea once, where we travel as far as we can and see if we can get outside the zone where the time loop is happening? I mean, assuming it’s limited to a zone?”
She didn’t answer right away, just kept looking out at her backyard, which was getting darker and darker in the summer twilight.
“Margaret? Are you okay?”
“No, right, I remember.” She let go of my hand. “It’s a good plan. We should do it. Where should we go?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think it matters that much. I figure we should just head straight to the airport and get on the longest flight we can find. Tokyo or Sydney or something. But you’re sure you’re okay?”
“Absolutely. Absolutely okay.”
“We don’t have to. It probably won’t work. I just thought we should try everything.”
“We absolutely should. Everything. Definitely. Let’s not do it tomorrow, though.”
“No problem.
“Day after, maybe.”
“Whenever you’re ready.”
She nodded, three quick nods, as if she’d made up her mind.
“The day after tomorrow.”
* * *
We couldn’t start out before midnight, because of the cosmic nanny effect, but we agreed that at the stroke of midnight we would both leap out of bed and she would immediately book us flights on Turkish Airlines to Tokyo, leaving Logan Airport at 3:50 a.m., which was the earliest flight to somewhere really far away that we could find. Margaret had to be the one to do it because she had a debit card, because she had a joint bank account with her parents, which I didn’t. I promised I would hit her back if it worked.
Then I snuck out into the warm, grassy-smelling night to wait and be attacked by numberless mosquitoes. There was no moon; August 4th was a new moon. Margaret came rolling up with the lights off.
It felt close and intimate, being in her car with her in the middle of the night. In fact it was the most boyfriendy I’d ever felt with Margaret, and even though I was not in actual fact her boyfriend, it was a thrilling feeling. We didn’t talk till we were cruising along the empty highway, surfing the rolling hills on the way into Boston, under the indifferent, insipid orange gaze of the sodium streetlights.
“If this works, my parents are going to think we ran away together,” she said.
“I didn’t even think about that. I left mine a note saying I caught the bus into Boston for the day.”