Free The Bellbottom Incident by Neve Maslakovic Page B

knew with certainty—his time machine idea would work. Gabe, on the other hand, was a thinker, a worrier, a tight knot of social and other doubts. He obviously didn’t like meeting new people, something he would mostly outgrow in his professorship, with his shyness morphing into excessive politeness in social situations. Learning where we were really from and that we had gotten here using a device he would have a hand in designing—well, that would have deeply affected the mild-mannered graduate student and sent History on a different path. Which explained why we’d been stuck in the janitor closet in the graduate student office earlier.
    “Hey, before Gabe gets back, let me ask you this. The three of us—Gabe, Lewis, and I—we haven’t been able to figure out how fast time streams for travelers relative to their home-time. Does it stream in parallel? Just nod if I’m correct…Faster? Slower?”
    I saw Dr. Little bite his lip, as if to fight back the urge to show off his superior knowledge on the subject by giving a detailed answer, one involving the use of pencil and paper and lots of diagrams and equations. Gabe came back and took a seat on the side of Xave that was opposite to the three of us. The friends launched into an in-character discussion—Gabe, as the young Einstein, was arguing for the cosmological constant, whatever that was, while Xave, the older Einstein, was arguing against it. We heard the terms field equation , spacetime , and relativity bandied about with abandon.
    Dr. Little just stared across the table at the two grad students as if jealous of the success and fame that awaited Xave and Gabe, and simultaneously disdainful that they were wasting time on Halloween fun instead of applying themselves in the lab. He caught my gaze, cleared his throat, and went back to eating.  
    The fried chicken and mashed potatoes were heavy and I fought off a yawn. We were all experiencing the time-travel version of jet lag, which really needed a name, I thought. Time-travel lag , perhaps. We had jumped from early evening home-time to one o’clock—no, noon—local time, which meant that it felt far later for us. I fought a follow-up yawn and transferred my attention to the students streaming into the cafeteria, keeping an eye out for Sabina.  
    There was no sign of her, but then someone else came in.
    I dropped my fork into the tiny mound of green mashed potatoes left on my plate and instinctively started to rise to my feet, but History sent me right back down.
    The someone was my mother, Missy Donovan, before she became one half of Mr. and Mrs. Olsen. She was in a group of five or six students who seemed to be using the cafeteria as a shortcut; having streamed in through one door, they were immediately heading for the other. Mom’s blonde hair had been blow-dried into a big and puffy feathered look, a la Farrah Fawcett. Her cheeks were plump and smooth, and there was a spring in her step I hadn’t seen in a long time. A moment later she was gone, the far door of the cafeteria having closed behind the group.
    “Julia?” Abigail asked. “Something wrong?”
    “Hmm? Nothing. Just saw…a familiar person. Not Sally,” I said quickly, before Abigail could get her hopes up.
    I went back to eating, but not before I did a quick mental calculation, counting back from my day of birth, April 1 of 1977. My mother had five months to go in her pregnancy. Did that mean she was aware of it already? It wasn’t anything I had personal experience with. If she knew, was she being responsible and all that? No. She’d had a cigarette in one hand and had taken a leisurely puff on it as she walked, before passing it on to another student. Maybe they didn’t know that kind of stuff was bad in the seventies? The campus ban on smoking was a good twenty years away. I had never seen her smoke—she must have given it up after I was born.
    I also couldn’t help but notice that the person she’d passed the cigarette to was not