Chapter 8
Adam
Adam knew he wasn’t a scientist. In fact, he’d never told anyone he was. Carly and Rick, however, seemed to believe otherwise,
as evidenced by their barrage of questions.
Have there been other changes in the sky?
What happened to make the eclipse shorter?
Has the loop shortened, too?
Adam’s answer to all of these was a simple, “I don’t know.” He’d found it best in situations where he felt uncertain of the
stakes to think before he spoke.
Carly, on the other hand, seemed to have the opposite approach. “What if the eclipse losing time means we’re finally out of
the loop? What if there’s a way to speed that process up? Wouldn’t that be amazing?” She asked rapid-fire without waiting
for answers.
“And what if this is all happening because I’m getting closer to the Truman Show door the government doesn’t want us to find?” Rick’s eyes bugged out behind his goggles.
Adam couldn’t bring himself to look at Carly, just in case she didn’t find any of this alarming. Instead, he focused on a singular flamingo nearby. The paint around its plastic eye had worn off, giving it a deranged expression, which was reflective of how Adam felt.
The thing about being a people pleaser to his core was that Adam was easily swayed. That was why he’d agreed to Carly’s suggestion
of telling Rick in the first place. In hindsight, there were other options Adam could’ve suggested instead. After all, there
was a whole Dark Sky Community run by those who loved the stars just as much as he did. And early on in the loop, he’d even
met a Caltech professor who’d come to Julian specifically to study the eclipse.
Sure, odds were those people had succumbed to the insanity that was a time loop, but maybe hearing about a change would kickstart
something inside them.
Instead, Adam was sandwiched between a professional conspiracy theorist and a cute screenwriter.
Cute? How had that word slipped into the equation?
Adam finally glanced at Carly, wondering if she could hear his thoughts. And maybe she had, because she pressed a palm against
the side of the trailer above her head and stretched herself out like a cat. She wasn’t a tall person, but the line of her
made his chest warm.
Hot. There was a new word.
“You’re still testing the perimeter?” Carly asked and, much to Adam’s disappointment, she dropped her hand and returned to
a normal position. She did readjust her glasses though, which he realized were a thick, dark purple frame. He rather liked
those, too.
“I won’t stop until I get to the end of it.
” Rick pulled a worn map from the back pocket of his jeans.
When he unfolded it, there was a curved line drawn in thick black ink around the top half of Julian.
There were small X marks around a quarter of the circle, ticked off like the seconds on a clock.
“The map doesn’t stay, obviously. I have to redo this each morning. But I keep track as best I can.”
Adam had seen the map before. When the loop began and the initial shock of repeating every day wore off, the town had come
together each reset to strategize ways out. Adam had attended those town meetings. He’d even seen Carly there, not that they
were speaking or anything, but she sort of stood out with her Wednesday Addams clothes and her nonstop need to talk, like
a goth prom queen.
From the beginning, Rick had pulled out his map and come up with a theory about how to escape. The “Pop the Bubble” theory,
as it became known, was this: The town was surrounded by some kind of bubble that kept them all trapped together. They knew
this because when people in town tried to simply drive away, while they might be in the car one minute, once they hit the
theorized invisible barrier, they restarted the next loop with everyone else. To physically leave Julian wasn’t possible—not
so far—and any attempts at doing so just reset that person. So according to Rick, to get out of the loop they needed to find
a spot in the perimeter with an exit door. If there wasn’t one, then maybe going through a spot over and over again could
cause the perimeter to weaken, create a hole and pop the bubble.
So far, though, Rick was still here. They all were, of course.
“You’ve been doing this by yourself?” Carly asked.
“Well, no. The town helped me work on this initially, but then people got discouraged and stopped trying.” Rick folded the
map up and put it back into his pocket. “There’s still a few of us working to find a way out. I’d say we’re about a quarter
through the map.”
The town was only eight square miles, and that was exactly what their world was, too.
Eight miles would be the only thing Adam would ever know for the rest of his life if he didn’t find a way out.
Adam hadn’t allowed himself to feel hopeful about ending the loop in a very long time.
Hope could be a dangerous thing—he knew that firsthand when it came to Shireen.
But there was something about this conversation that lit an ember in his chest. What if they could stop this?
What if he didn’t have to restart every day in the middle of an argument?
“Remember when someone suggested a town witch had cast a spell to trap us all?” Carly looked nervously into the woods. “What
if the witch is listening?”
“Tell you what. If I’d been mayor instead of Franco, the aliens would’ve come to take us out of this by now,” Rick said with
total and utter conviction.
Adam pinched his eyes closed. What he wouldn’t give for the aliens to appear at that very moment to carry him away from this
conversation.
“Have you noticed anything unusual in the past few loops?” Carly asked.
“I haven’t.” Rick puffed out his chest. “And to be honest, should we even be getting worked up about this yet? The timing
could easily be user error.”
Adam was reminded that he’d never liked group projects. Why try to be nice to people you barely knew? Why work the hardest
and then have to share the credit?
He should be home. He should be getting ready to observe the shadow bands and time the eclipse. He should be back to the life
he was comfortable with instead of having to defend his own findings. If they didn’t want to believe that Adam had witnessed
a deviation, then they didn’t have to. He could continue to watch the eclipse as he always had and always did.
“I better head out.” Adam massaged his temples. “Just got a splitting headache.”
Rick’s expression was all sympathetic concern, exactly what Adam wanted. But Carly watched him with beady certainty. While Rick had bought the bullshit, it was clear that Carly wasn’t going to.
Adam didn’t want to stick around, though. If he did, Carly would call him out. They’d have another argument. And he wasn’t
in the mood to fight when they’d just gotten to a place where he made her laugh and she gave him knowing looks.
So he pivoted on his heel and tore off toward the hearse. The thunder of boots behind him was alarming, but he refused to
turn around.
“A headache? Really?” Carly’s voice was low, so only he’d hear. “You’ve apparently been timing the eclipse every loop like
a mad scientist, but a doomsdayer pokes and you go running?”
Carly made a valid point, but Adam wasn’t always as delicate as the day she’d taken pity on him. He could bark back, too.
“This is the one thing in my life that I really like doing. I don’t have a lot of options, but the eclipse, and the stars?
Those are my things. And I don’t have to explain those to anyone, especially not people who want to believe in witches causing a time loop.”
He finally stopped walking and faced her.
Instead of Carly rolling up her sleeves to deliver the next wallop, she said, “For the record, I brought up the witches thing
because I sensed Rick would feel some camaraderie. It’s called reading the room, and you should try it sometime.”
“Something tells me that’s a theory you bought, though,” Adam sniped back.
“You know what? I don’t want to fight. Show me, Rhodes. I said we’re in this together, so show me what you’re seeing. Maybe
Rick doesn’t want to believe, but I want to believe.”
“Is that an X-Files reference?” He was annoyed by how hopeful his voice was.
But then, to his additional surprise, she said, “I’m learning how to speak Adam.”
Adam could’ve brought Carly to a field or the center of town to watch the eclipse, but the day had been unpredictable, and
Adam didn’t want any more surprises.
Carly shoved her hands in her pockets and spun in a slow circle as she took in the tree house. “This place is . . .”
Horrendous. Grimy. Creepy. He waited for whichever word she planned to choose, but then she filled in the blank with, “Way more spacious than I anticipated.
It’s basically the size of my living room back home.”
Her expression was something close to awe. “I always wanted a tree house. We didn’t have a huge backyard, though.” She picked
up the binoculars and looked through them and directly at him. “So you were always a nerd, huh?”
“I . . .” Was he flustered? This was why Adam didn’t bring other people into his space.
“Chill out, I was a nerd, too.” She put the binoculars down. “Just a film nerd instead of Bill Nye.” She leaned a palm against
his desk, and he really did have to acknowledge the curve of her hips as her dress clung from the gravitational pull. He wondered
what it might be like to use his fingers to trace a line from her hip all the way up to her— Stop, he told himself.
And then he forced himself to say something. “What does a movie nerd do, just watch movies?” Adam crossed his arms and tried
to imagine baby Carly during a movie marathon. Her big glasses, boots and a bag of popcorn.
“Excuse me, we call them films,” she corrected. “I went to film festivals. Worked on student films. I made a list of every one I saw and wrote reviews.
I had a blog.”
And Adam thought that was rather endearing, though he wouldn’t dare tell her that. So instead he said, “But did you have a movie tree house?”