A systematic beeping woke me. Slowly forcing my eyes open to see a blurry red jumble of lights on my bedside, I rubbed my eyes and grasped for my glasses. The digits came into finer detail as the lenses fell over my eyes and rested on the bridge of my nose. It was 0700, bright and early. At least, bright and early compared to my usual sleep schedule if I didn’t have an alarm.
Pushing my legs out from under the covers and leaping off the comfy mattress onto my feet, I hastily grabbed whatever clothes I could find that were passably clean off the floor of my room and stripped off my pajamas as I hopped into the shower. The water was initially cold, but it always took a moment for the water heater to kick in. Besides, I didn’t mind the cold water. I couldn’t afford to waste precious time waiting for the water to warm up.
I stepped out of the shower, dried myself off, and donned all of the clothing that I had grabbed in a hurry. First the red-and-black underwear, then the crinkly black-with-white-stripes sweatpants, then the wrinkled and somewhat damp grey shirt and green sweatshirt.
After brushing my teeth vigorously and rinsing my mouth with water, I stepped out of my bathroom. The clock read 0712. I metaphorically patted myself on the back for the great efficiency in preparing for the day. Assuming I give myself 5 minutes to walk to the bus stop, I now had approximately 43 minutes to work on my Chronomometer, the latest (and perhaps the most ambitious) tinkering project of mine. Scratch that. The clock flipped to 0713, meaning 42 minutes. I was wasting time.
I trotted over the piles of dirty laundry on my floor over to my cluttered desk. Blueprints and drawings decorated the walls behind it with complex mathematical equations regarding the constant flux variable in the temporal flow of reality. In the common layman’s terms, it was measuring time. Specifically, it was measuring the length of the second. It is, after all, the most manageable unit of time to study. I tried using one-hundreths of milliseconds earlier--it yields more accurate data--but the side effect of using smaller numbers means that I waste more time writing out each set of data. It was temporally more efficient, but it was simply more convenient to round off at the one-hundredths place of a second.
In my many weeks of this project, I have already discovered the constant flux variable--or, in the very least, a formula to determine it at any given second--and I have built a mechanical casing capable of housing such a formula within the dense body of a pocket watch.
Albert Einstein once told a secretary that time was relative. He always said something about how time with a nice girl lasting mere moments while time spent sitting on a stove seemingly lasts hours. Of course, he wasn’t literally meaning this. It was simply a way to explain his work in a few words to somebody who didn’t know anything about the nature of time.
He had a point, though. Time wasn’t quite as constant as we like to think; rather, the ebb and flow of time is constant. That was the wall that I had hit when working on my research. I needed to find a way to alter and manipulate this variable for my benefit. I had adapted the time formula to remedy this issue, but it was always off by a rather large amount. Perhaps I was failing to consider a variable.
“Timothy!” my sister called for me downstairs, presumably for breakfast (which, as usual, I would skip in favor of working on the Chronomometer). I glanced at the clock which read 0757. I spent far longer on my project than I had intended--two minutes and seventeen seconds too long, to be exact.
“Coming!” I yelled, hopping off my stool. I grabbed my backpack from the side of my bed and walked over to the door. I looked back at my desk, and the gleaming golden beauty sat there, pleading with me. It was asking me to take it with me, and who was I to say no?
I snatched the pocket watch off the desk and stuffed it into my coat pocket. I sprinted out of my bedroom door to see Allie with her hands on her hips.
“What were you doing? We have to go!”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Sorry to keep you waiting. I lost track of time.”
She rolled her eyes, and she bounced down the staircase to the front door. I followed closely behind, only I was hopping to the front door as I pulled my shoes on each foot. I pushed through the door.
“Bye, mom!” I called backwards as the door shut. A muffled response came back, but I couldn’t understand it through the thick wood of the front door.
The bus was just pulling into the stop. We hurried over to the stop sign that it sat at, getting in line behind the other neighborhood kids boarding the bus. I stepped onto the bus, filing down the aisle as we parsed the seats for any empty ones. We routinely sat next to each other on the bus because it guaranteed a lack of conversation, which wasn’t too bad in terms of people you had to sit by. I also suspected that she felt bad for me because I didn’t have a ton of friends to sit with, but this remorse is unwarranted. I needed not friends, only an inspired idea and time to work on it. Unfortunately, my sister and I would have to sit in different seats today as there were no empty spots but plenty of single-seaters.
One of my sister’s friends flagged her down, scooting over in her seat. Allie ran over to her friend, throwing her backpack in the overhanging storage. I kept walking down the aisle, hoping that somebody would offer me a seat. I hated asking. Nobody offered. In fact, people often put their backpacks in the way of the seat to prevent me from even asking. I don’t blame them. Solitary seating is most preferable.
I came to the back of the bus, and, to my surprise, somebody actually smiled at me. I had never seen her before. She wore glasses like mine--thick glasses, that is--that were veiled behind her long and wavy auburn hair. She had a striped blue sweater over a white collared shirt with jeans that matched the sweater.
It was a girl, and she was patting the seat next to her. I looked around, thinking she meant somebody behind me. She laughed.
“You can sit here, if you want…?” She pushed the hair out of her eyes and tucked it behind her ear. I gulped as I gingerly put my backpack above the seat, and she moved closer against the window of the bus as I sat down.
“I’m Anna, by the way,” she laughed and stuck out her hand.
All registers and alarms were going off in my head. This was not normal by any stretch of the word. I had a stranger--a girl, and a cute one at that!--offer me a spot next to her on the bus. I’d never even so much as met eyes with a girl who wasn’t in my family, let alone talked with one.
I looked down at her outstretched hand. My palms were immensely moist from the nervous energy that had built up in me, but I couldn’t leave her hanging. I tried to subtly wipe my hand on my sweatpants, but it left a fairly visible spot of sweat there. She shook my hand, and the corners of her face soured a small bit. Still, she kindly pretended to not notice as our hands shook.
“I-I’m Tim. Timothy Smith, that is. Puh-pleased to make your acquaintance, Anna.” I averted my eyes and stared into the back of the seat in front of us, desperately trying to escape this awkward mess. I pressed my hands against the seat of the bus.
She huffed a little bit, clearly wanting to continue talking to me, but I kept my eyes locked forward.
The bus shifted forward, and our hands grazed a little bit on the seat. I shot my hand away, and she gave me a strange look. Again, I fought hard to avoid eye contact.
The bus rumbled away, jostling every now and then. Occasionally we would bank a corner and our shoulder would touch, but I fought bitterly against the inertial tug of gravity. That was something I could understand, not… talking to girls, evidently. And they say rocket science is hard.
Sweat poured from my armpits, and it stunk. Badly. She clearly noticed, but she thankfully didn’t say anything. She simply reached up to her collar and tugged at it with one finger.
Like an oasis in the desert of social awkwardness, the school pulled into view in what seemed like an hour later. The bus whined to a stop in the parking lot, but she nearly lept over me into the aisle before the vehicle had fully stopped. She paced down the thin corridor of the bus and down the metal stairs, and moments later she was just a body in the crowd of students going to their first period.
My gaze followed her as she walked away until I lost her in the confusion of students. Einstein was famous for that one quote about the pretty girl making time faster, but this pretty girl turned a twelve-minute bus-ride into an eternity.
Well, she didn’t explicitly make it last longer… I sort of was the one to blame for that. I was just so awkward, so gross so… unprepared.
As I waited for the earlier rows to grab their things and file out, I pulled my Chronomometer out and suspended it by its chain. It swung like a pendulum in line with each rhythmic tick of the second hand.
Given the nature of that encounter, I surmised that there might be a mote of possibility to suggest that Einstein was, in fact, literal in his quote. After all, the common denominator between my observations and Einstein’s quotations was a pretty girl.
In any case, it wouldn’t hurt to run a quick test with pretty girl as the missing variable. I quickly pulled out my tools from my backpack and removed the face of the watch off of the Chronomometer. A quick tug on the accelerator and a few quarter-rotations on the quantum observation dial later, my Chronomometer was outfitted to try out my new hypothesis.
I clicked the face back on the watch and turned the watch back to 0700, when I woke up this morning. After a deep breath to calm the nervous energy generated from the air of scientific discovery, I gently pressed the dial in to finalize the new set time.
A systematic beeping woke me. I slowly forced my eyes open to see a blurry red jumble of lights on my bedside. I rubbed my eyes and grasped for my glasses. The digits came into finer detail as the lenses fell over my eyes and rested on the bridge of my nose. It was 0700, bright and early--again?
The variable must’ve been correct this time! I pulled my phone off the bedside table and checked the date to verify that I had went backwards instead of forwards. It was the exact same date, meaning that my trial run was a complete and utter success!
I rolled out of my bed and stretched. There was a strange weight in my pockets as I stood up, and so I patted my pocket. Much to my surprise, I felt a round, hard object. The Chronomometer came with me? How interesting. This was a groundbreaking discovery, something I never could have predicted. Under no principle of relativity did time travel like this allow for the transit of objects outside of the user’s perception of time. Thereby, I had no choice but to conclude that the Chronomometer had some metatemporal properties that I was unaware of. This, of course, needed more testing, but now was not the time to do so.
Determined to do my first impression with Anna correctly, I took my time handpicking nice clothes from my closet, some that didn’t have the slightest wrinkle. I stepped into the shower and underwent my typical soapy ritual thrice just to ensure that I smelt fresh. I slapped some deodorant on underneath my arms and I rubbed barely a touch of it to my back and chest to ensure that I not only didn’t smell bad, but that I, according to the label, smelt like a ‘Freshwater Cove’. Whatever that smells like. I vigorously brushed my teeth and used mouthwash liberally.
Fresh underwear, fresh clothing, fresh scents and fresh breath. Plus, with the prior completion of my Chronomometer, I now had roughly 23 minutes to relax and wait for the bus to arrive. I decided that, with all this extra time on my hands, I could finally clean my workbench and the floor of my room.
Twenty minutes later, Allie came knocking on my door.
“I’ll be right out, Allie!” I grabbed my backpack off the now-clean floor and pulled the door open. Her jaw dropped.
“What’s up with you? Do you have a date or something?”
“Yeah, something like that.”
Allie snorted. “Likely.”
“No need to be rude.” I sidestepped her to get downstairs and out the door. She followed closely. We shouted goodbyes to mom and made our way to the bus stop precisely as the bus pulled into the spot, hurrying over so we wouldn’t hold the schedule up.
Allie, as in the previous timeline, had friends to intercept her and offer her a spot to sit, which she graciously accepted again. I, on the other hand, had a renewed sense of confidence and a goal in mind. Puffing my chest up, I strolled down the aisle, looking for Anna. I caught her already looking at me as I walked down the aisle. I smiled, and she smiled back.
“You can sit here, if you want…?” She pushed the hair out of her eyes again and moved aside to make space for me. I slid into the seat as I placed my backpack on the upper rack.
“Tim.” I stretched my hand out, and she shook it.
“Anna.”