Page 51 of The Otherworld

“Exactly, and experience is what I don’t have—because I have never experienced anything. And I’m afraid I never will.”

I can’t help but smile at her forlorn tone of voice. “You’re only eighteen, Orca. Your life is just starting; you have plenty of time.”

She sighs. “I know. But sometimes, I don’t feel like it. Sometimes I feel like my life is… slipping away. And I’m powerless to stop it.”

“Now you sound like Jack.”

“Do I?” She grins, tying her acres of hair into a loose bun on top of her head. “How so?”

“He’s young and restless. Can’t stand the thought of being stuck in one place. Can’t even stand the thought of having a job that ties him down. I swear he’s said the same thing to me before—about his life slipping away. And he’s lived in, uh, the Otherworld all his life. It hasn’t exactly cured his restlessness.”

Orca seems to turn this over in her mind as she scrubs a few purple potatoes under the faucet. I watch the water flow over her small, delicate hands.

“And what about you?” she says, casting me a look over her shoulder. “Do you ever feel trapped?”

I shake my head slowly. “No.”

She seems disappointed by this answer, turning back to the sink. She grabs a frighteningly large butcher knife and a cutting board and starts julienning the potatoes like a master chef.

I watch as she slices up a bunch of vegetables and tosses them all into a bowl, cracking eggs, throwing wood on the fire, heating a pan, flitting around the kitchen—strands of hair slipping out of her bun and brushing against her face.

I find it hard to believe that her father thinks she’s “weak and incapable.” My god, the girl seems capable of literally anything—except maybe reaching the top shelf.

She’s totally unaware of the true nature of this situation, but I can see it clearly—being an outsider who is ten years older. It’s not that Orca is weak; it’s that she’s pure. She’s innocent. She’s grown up isolated from the muck and mire of the “real” world, and I can see why her father doesn’t want her anywhere near it.

“Well, Adam,” she says after a silence, “I know you wonder about different paths you might take in life.”

“Oh?” I raise an eyebrow, crossing my arms over my chest. “And how did you uncover this dark secret about me?”

Orca grins. “What you wrote about the multiverse. The idea that we might exist in another universe, having made a completely different assortment of decisions that have set us on a completely different path in life.”

I feel color blaze over my ears as I realize what she’s saying—what she’s quoting.

My journal.

“Uh… yes.” I clear my throat, rubbing the back of my neck. “The… uh, the multiverse.”

“I find that so fascinating. Can you explain it to me?”

This is a first—a question no girl has ever asked me.

“Sure, yeah. Um.” My brain is still caught on the first thing—the fact that she did read my journal. What else did I write in there? I can’t remember, damn it. “The multiverse is just a theory. It hasn’t been proven. But it hasn’t been disproven, either. Like pretty much everything else in science.”

“Like the emotional bonds between orcas in a pod,” she chimes in, dropping scoops of the mixture into the sizzling pan on the stove. “They’re some of the most intelligent creatures in the ocean—their emotional capacity is more highly developed than a human’s.”

“Really? I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah. Something Papa taught me. Sorry, continue. The multiverse.”

“Right. So… it’s the idea that parallel universes exist. Which, of course, means parallel earths. And parallel lives. So we all exist in these other universes, but we’ve made so many divergent decisions that even a replica of ourselves looks completely different.”

Orca tilts her head, considering this, as a delicious aroma fills the kitchen. I still haven’t deciphered what she’s making—some kind of potato pancakes?

At last, she says, “So there could be another me, in another universe, who grew up on the mainland. A me who has a completely different life.”

I nod. “That’s the theory.”

It’s a concept I’ve thought about for years but never actually spoken of. Writing down my ideas in a journal is the closest I’ve ever come to sharing them—and even then, I had no intention of ever letting anyone read it. The journal is only a means of untangling my thoughts, the ones that wrap around my mind during long workdays, after hours of building an engine or rewiring instruments into a dash.

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