Free Saving Lucas Biggs by Marisa de los Santos Page B

book, eat a peppermint pattie, and have a conversation with your dad all at the same time. Big mistake. My dad whirled around, cobra fast, and corrected me so sharply that I swallowed the stupid pattie whole. Luckily it was fun-sized, even though there was nothing fun about it that day.
    No, what most of us call it—when we talk about it, which isn’t often—is “the quirk,” sometimes “the O’Malley quirk” although that’s not quite right because it’s been paddling around in our gene pool for so long that there are plenty of people with other last names in our family who have it. Plus, rumor has it (“rumor” being mainly my uncle Joe) that other people totally unrelated to us have the quirk, too, or had it. Picasso, for one. Harriet Tubman, for another. But no one really knows that for sure. It could just be Uncle Joe, trying to lump us in with the important folks.
    Lots of families have genetic quirks. Double-jointed thumbs. Perfect pitch. Synesthesia, where sounds and smells—and letters—or in the exceptionally cool case of Duke Ellington, musical notes, blossom into colors before your eyes. Heterochromia, where your eyes are two different colors; a girl named Iris (that was her name, no lie) on my field hockey team had this, and everyone was crazy jealous, including yours truly. Extra ribs. A photographic memory, which some scientists say doesn’t even exist but which seems to run in families all the same.
    My family has time travel.
    As for how it works, well, all I can tell you is what my dad told me. It’s not magic, exactly, although parts of it seem pretty magical. So do a lot of natural occurrences, though, when you think about it: the Northern Lights, those people who can reel off prime numbers up to six digits the way you and I would recite the multiplication table, the speed of light, black holes, monarch migration, and practically every single thing bees ever do.
    My dad gave me the scoop the day after my tenth birthday. It wasn’t some big, ceremonious presentation, no “now my child, I will pass down the wisdom of the ages” type of thing, and he was really careful not to scare me. But he was serious for sure, especially when he swore me to secrecy. “Not even Charlie,” he told me, which is how I knew he meant business.
    We were sitting on our front porch eating leftover cake. Every now and then, while he was talking, my dad would sketch pictures in the air with his fork or draw a little diagram on his napkin. Since my dad’s not such a great drawer, this wasn’t so helpful, but that was okay because he is an excellent explainer.
    Here’s what he said:
    “Time isn’t just one long tunnel all of us humans travel down, keeping each other company inside while we’re alive, and that we leave behind for the rest to keep on exploring when we die.”
    Honestly, I hadn’t thought much about the nature of time before, but if I had, I would’ve described it more or less the way he just had, so I said, “It’s not?”
    “Nope. Time is a garden hose stuffed in a suitcase.”
    I laughed.
    “No kidding,” said my dad. “An infinitely long garden hose stuffed into a very big suitcase, a suitcase larger than just about everything you can think of, including our universe.”
    “That’s big.”
    “Yep. And the hose is stuffed in such a way that every bit of it is touching every other bit of it, if you can imagine that.”
    I tried. “I can’t.”
    “That’s okay, I can’t either. But the point is that every bit of time is actually curled up cozily beside us, all day every day, even if it is hopelessly, eternally just out of reach. Out of reach unless —and here’s where things get tricky, so please pay attention—you figured out a way to poke a pinhole in the walls of the hose, those walls being otherwise known as the limits of reality as we know them, and you slipped through the pinhole from one loop to the next in an instant.”
    “Yeah, but nobody could do that,” I