Lincoln
The Fourth Loop
A couple of months into your fifth time being sixteen, I made the mistake of telling you about the breakup that had happened
the night before you first looped. That, plus a new desperation inspired by my being a full year and grade ahead of you—the
creeping sense that you were being left behind—meant you were dead set on finding a way to reverse your situation.
“So you’re saying I was a dick, right?” you asked, going over the facts of the breakup as you drove us home from school in
our new old car, Toro. “A jerk?”
“I mean,” I said, “I think you just didn’t want to be in the relationship anymore, but yeah, the timing was unfortunate. She
was like, ‘I love you,’ and you were like, ‘No, thanks.’”
“And then the next day, here we are.” You shook your head and gritted your teeth. “Loop Town. Loop City. Loop-de-loop.”
“Well,” I said, squirming in my seat. “I don’t actually think that’s what—”
“I should try to reverse it, right?” you asked, as if you’d just stumbled upon the idea for an app that would reshape society
as we know it. “Unloop myself ! By being the kind of boyfriend who is not a jerky dick!”
I tried to talk you down, but you were unflappably obsessed.
In March, you started dating this senior girl, Nina Chen.
She was really cool—played volleyball, obsessed with horror movies—but I felt worried that you were just going through the motions more than anything else, determined to be the Best Boyfriend Ever.
You wrote Nina notes, brought her tulips at school, took her out to eat at that Italian place Vincenzo’s that serves homemade pasta.
Alas, Nina eventually saw through it, could feel that you weren’t really in it, and dumped you in July. I was relieved.
But you more or less gave up after that, descending into a funk that was exceedingly unpleasant to be around. Come December,
on the night before your birthday, you rallied whatever enthusiasm and drive you had left and attempted to break the cycle
by pulling an all-nighter. “If I never sleep,” you said, again with the fervor of an overworked scientist fumbling madly for
an epiphany, “there’s no way to send me back to sixteen, right?” Except there was because, around 6:00 a.m., you closed your
eyes for a moment, which turned into five minutes of sleep.
When your eyelids rose, you hopped out of bed, excited for your sixteenth birthday.
And I was officially two years older than my older brother.