Free Feedback by Peter Cawdron Page A

and Galileo proved that over five hundred years ago, but in practice it’s very hard not to think of sunrise and sunset. Try picturing Earth-turn instead. You'll give yourself a migraine!”
    “You’re such a geek,” Helena said. “Only you could take a perfectly romantic notion like a sunset and turn it into something weird.”
    Jason laughed, saying, “Well, reality is weird, and that’s the problem, it’s our notions that are distorted, not reality.”
    Helena just shook her head as she finished her breakfast. “Listen,” she said, checking the time on her phone. “I don’t know what you boys are up to today, but how about I take Lily with me. We can’t have her running around the city in your baggy clothes. I’ve got some spare clothes I can give her.”
    “I’ve got plenty of spare clothes,” Jason said, feeling a little affronted by Helena assuming she could lay claim to Lily.
    “Have you got any spare bras?” Helena asked, raising an eyebrow.
    “Ah, no.”
    “I didn’t think so.”
    Jason couldn’t help but smile. Helena liked to be right. She got up, motioning for Lily to follow.
    Lily looked a little bewildered. She glanced at Jason so he said, “Have fun.”
    “But what about your phone?” Lily asked, holding it out in front of her. “What about my father?”
    “I'll call Helena if I hear anything,” Jason replied, taking the phone gently from her.
    “We’ll let you boys pick up the tab,” Helena said, taking Lily’s arm and winking at them as they left.
    “She’s a wild one,” Mitchell said, but it took Jason a moment to realize Mitchell was talking about Helena not Lily, and that surprised him, exposing how much he’d taken a shine to Lily.
    “Dude,” Mitchell continued, seemingly reading his mind, “you realize this can’t go on, right?”
    “Huh?” Jason said, lost in thought for a moment. Sitting there in the booth, he could see the girls outside waiting at the lights, getting ready to cross the street.
    “She’s going to find her dad, and then she’ll be out of here.”
    “Yeah, I know.”
    Jason was doodling, drawing equations and ratios on a napkin, barely aware his mind was running through a physics calculation. Dark strokes outlined various Greek letters and scientific notation. He’d written one equation several different ways, reversing and inverting portions of the equation but always arriving at the same result.
    “You are such a weirdo,” Mitchell said, pointing at his scribbled notation. “When most people are distracted, they bite their nails, they don’t reframe Schrodinger’s equations.”
    Jason laughed, “Yeah, funny one, that. Just the way my mind works, I guess. I find math soothing.”
    “Oh, it’s a cure for insomnia,” Mitchell added, pretending to agree. “So, Mr. Good Samaritan, what are you going to do when she leaves you?”
    “There’s nothing between us,” Jason confessed, “Just a passing fascination, I guess. But if she’s still around tonight, I thought we’d go to the fireworks in the park.”
    “You and a couple of hundred thousand other people,” Mitchell quipped. That was the thing about New York, even when it seemed empty over a long weekend, there were still millions of people around. Empty was a relative term in New York.
    Down at the intersection, Helena turned and pointed, directing Lily’s gaze up to the second floor window where the two young men were seated. Lily waved. She had one hand on her purse with the strap sitting comfortably over her shoulder. To anyone else, it would seem perfectly rational for a young woman to want to keep her purse secure, but Jason knew otherwise.
    “It’s empty, you know,” Jason said, his mind still dwelling on that fact.
    “What is?” Mitchell asked, sipping some coffee.
    “Her purse. There’s no money, no passport, no credit cards, no ID, no names and addresses, nothing.”
    “You looked?”
    “I looked,” Jason confessed.
    “Dawg,” Mitchell replied. “I’m