Lincoln
The Third Loop
Your fourth time being sixteen (the third time you looped back) was arguably the weirdest for me.
It was the year I became older than my older brother.
Only by a little, though: I had just turned sixteen in October, so it meant you and I were almost exactly the same age, some
supremely twisted version of fraternal twins.
By then, Mom, Dad, and I had gotten somewhat used to how this went:
You woke up, psyched for your sixteenth birthday, completely unaware that you’d been that age for a while now and that the
world had continued spinning and evolving even though you hadn’t.
We weren’t going to be caught off guard like the previous year, when it hadn’t even occurred to us that you might loop back
a second time. No, this time we were prepared, even as we of course hoped that maybe the loop was finished, that it was a limited-time thing and you would triumphantly emerge from your bedroom crowing, “I’m seventeen! And
I remember yesterday!”
That didn’t happen.
Instead, I lay under the covers staring at the ceiling, a hard knot of dread in my stomach as I heard you whistle your way to the bathroom and start the shower.
I waited to take my turn until I heard you leave the bathroom and shut your bedroom door, like you were the horror movie ghoul I was desperately trying to avoid.
I wanted to put off the Moment of Realization, followed by our parents’ Faux-Calm Explanation, for as long as possible. I
knew nothing could match the awfulness of that first loop day, when we had no idea what the hell was happening, but the previous
year’s wasn’t really much better. Your birthday had quickly become my least favorite day of the year.
“Yo, Link,” you said upon my entrance to the kitchen, chunks of brown sugar cinnamon Pop-Tart crumbing from your mouth onto
the table.
“Happy birthday, CT.” My voice was actually shaking because I truly didn’t want to be doing this again. Mom and Dad weren’t
even downstairs yet; they were obviously dreading it too.
“Did you . . . get a haircut or something?” you asked, your expressive eyebrows pressing downward.
“Um,” I said, listening for our parents’ footsteps on the stairs so I wouldn’t have to explain this on my own.
“You look, like . . . different.”
“Yeah,” I said, opening up the fridge, mainly as a way to hide. “I do look different.”
“Well, it looks good! Actually makes you look older.”
I wanted to crawl into the fridge, curl into a ball, and wedge myself between the orange juice and the milk. I could reemerge
later that day. Or next week.
“Hey, bud,” Dad said, finally appearing in his assistant principal uniform—button-down, tie, and khakis—with Mom right behind
him. “Happy b-day.”
“Whaddup, Dad!” you said. “Your firstborn is sixteen today! Glad you didn’t forget. That’s what happens in the movie Sixteen Candles. It’s old. You probably haven’t even heard of it, Lincoln.”
You were technically right—I wouldn’t have heard of it, if you hadn’t said the exact same thing on your previous three birthdays.
Mom and Dad exchanged a look, which I knew meant, Okay, here we go. Mom gave me a nod. I nodded back. It was as if we were all about to get on a roller coaster. In a way, we’d been on one from
the moment you first regressed, and here we were approaching another big drop. Another big loop.
“Carter,” Mom said, taking a seat at the round table. “There’s something we need to talk to you about.”
“Oh boy.” You flipped the last nub of Pop-Tart onto your tongue. “Are we doing the birds and the bees talk again? Are there
details you think I’m still not aware of?”
“It’s not the birds and the bees talk,” Dad said, sitting on your other side and gesturing for me to sit too.
I slowly lowered into a chair, even though I wanted to sprint out of the room. Out of the state.
“You really do look older,” you said to me, a note of disgust in your voice. “It’s weirding me out a little.”
“That’s actually a great segue.” Dad folded his hands on the table as if he were discussing plans for a funeral. “Lincoln
looks older because . . . he is older.”
You narrowed your eyes and scanned them over the three of us.
“Lincoln is your age,” Mom said. She gestured for me to speak, as if that was going to somehow solve this.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m sixteen.”
“You—” Mom tried to speak, but her voice got too wobbly to continue.
“You have a condition, Carter,” Dad said. “You can’t age past sixteen. This is your third loop, your fourth time having this birthday.”
You burst into laughter. You actually threw your head back before slapping the table. “You guys decided to celebrate me turning
sixteen with a time-loop prank? Giving Lincoln a new haircut and making him look sixteen? That’s so bad it might actually be good.”
“It really isn’t a prank,” Dad said.
“Ha!”
As you can imagine, things went on like that for a while.
We were both late for school.
Our parents had already prepared for the next part, following the playbook they’d crafted the year before with our principal
Mr. Nguyen: You would return to Ms. Destin’s sophomore homeroom in order to have one familiar element in your school life.
Lucky for me, I was not in that homeroom. You and I had only one class together that year—geometry—and thank god, because
otherwise both of us may not have made it to age seventeen.
I’d known for a while that I was a better student than you, and I’d known for a while that our parents knew it too. They’d
made it annoyingly clear with comments to you about applying yourself like your brother does, about not being so afraid of
failure that you didn’t try at all.
I remember the first time that happened. I was in third grade and you were in sixth. I came home with a hundred on a math
test, and Mom and Dad were so psyched.
“See?” Mom said to you. “You could do this too, Carter—you study, you do the work, you get a hundred. It’s not hard.”
I was stupidly proud in that moment. Here, finally, was something I did better than you.
In my mind, you were untouchable in so many ways—first and foremost by, like, being a charming, funny person who had a fearless ease when interacting with others.
I could never even begin to fathom how to do that.
So I actually thought you might be excited about my score too.
“Wow,” you said, sarcasm tendrils creeping like vines into your words. “Way to go, Linky.” Then you flicked my ear really
hard and laughed.
So, now, being in the same grade, doing the same work, even sharing the same car—Dad’s old Toyota Corolla, the one you named
Rex—I knew it wouldn’t go well.
And it didn’t. You gave up trying in school very early in that loop, instead choosing to channel your energy into being a
perpetually annoying brother.
“Cool if I drive?” I asked one night in May when we went together to pick up dinner from this nearby Thai place.
“Nah, sorry,” you said, holding out the key and unlocking the car. “Older brother gets dibs.”
“Right,” I said. “But, I mean, technically, I am older now.”
“Dude. Are you seriously gonna play that card? I have a condition.”
“Okay, fine,” I said, even though I didn’t see what the big deal was if I drove the seven minutes to Lucky Thai.
“You drive like a grandma anyway,” you said as we got into the car. “No offense.”
I knew it was true—I was and am an overly cautious driver—but it still felt dickish to call it out like that. And I did take
offense.
I silently stared out the window as we pulled out of the driveway, thinking maybe we could avoid talking.
“Do you have a crush on Teddy Landerham?” you asked, this grin in your voice.
Apparently talking was unavoidable.
“Why?” I asked. “I don’t even know if he’s gay.”
“I know, I know. It just seems like you guys have a good connection. When you’re talking at lunch.”
“Oh.” My neck heated up, secretly thrilled that you had picked up on this. I did have a crush on Teddy Landerham, but it was too risky to straight up tell you that. Secret-keeping had never been your thing.
“Maybe. He’s cool, but . . . I don’t know.”
“I could ask him out for you if you want.” You took your eyes off the road to wiggle your eyebrows at me.
“That won’t be necessary. Ever.”
“I gotta say,” you said, “it’s kind of amazing being twins with you. Getting to observe you up close in your natural habitat.”
“Yeah, it’s fun,” I lied. It wasn’t a complete lie—we’d had some great moments together that year. Mostly, though, I felt
that becoming the same age had been a very bad thing for our relationship. The dynamic was all off, and you didn’t even seem
to realize.
“Whoa,” you said. “It just occurred to me: If we figure out how to cure this thing and get me to seventeen, we’ll be twins
forever.”
“Oh yeah,” I said, gripping the handle above the window. That could not happen. I could not allow that to happen. “I know
I say this all the time, but I really am sorry you’re going through this.”
“Hey, thanks, Link,” you said. “It does suck very much. But, you know, not your fault.”
“Yeah. Well.”
I watched Scoops ’n’ Sprinkles move in and out of my view, which meant we were just two minutes from the Thai place.
“Does feel like I should try to make lemonade out of lemons, though, right?” you said. “Like, since I’m kind of famous for
my condition, I should probably use that to make bank as an influencer or something, right?”
“You did that last year, actually. It didn’t go great.”
“For real? What happened?”
“You know, what you’d expect. You got tons of followers, and then there was a backlash. People saying you were lying about
your condition, that you were just pretending to be sixteen over and over again for attention. And you got super anxious keeping
track of what everyone was saying, and you could never be apart from your phone, so Mom and Dad had to confiscate it, and
you were so pissed, et cetera et cetera.”
“Oh god. That sounds horrible.”
“It was.”
You were silent for a few seconds. “Maybe,” you finally said, “you were just jealous of all my followers.”
You poked your fingers into my rib cage, which made me laugh against my will because, as you know well, I’m very ticklish.
“Definitely not,” I said, pressing myself against the car door as I continued laughing. “And stop.”
“I don’t know if I can.” You tickled me even more intensely. “This is my responsibility as your brother.”
“Seriously, CT. Fucking stop!”
“All right, all right, geez—”
“STOP! STOP!”
Distracted by your moronic tickle attack, you drove straight through a red light. A car was coming at us from the left, but you slammed on the gas just in time to fly past it and instead crash into a streetlight approximately fifty feet from our destination.
The air bags came out, we both experienced some minor whiplash, and the front of Rex was demolished. The people at the auto
repair shop told Mom and Dad it could be fixed, but it was going to be so expensive that they decided to just buy us another
used car instead.
And that pretty much sums up the third loop.