Page 45 of Exit Party

“Why are you so hung up on this person?” Obie asked.

“I’m planning on stealing a painting from her,” I said. I sensed a shift among my friends, an increased admiration. We respected criminality, as a group. Aurélie looked interested.

“You should talk to my dad,” Obie said. “He’s good at stealing stuff.”

“Why do you want that painting so badly?” Cole asked.

“I never met my father.” I couldn’t quite meet my friends’ eyes when I talked about this. “The painting was his.”

“Then you should get it back,” Aurélie said. The other two grunted in a noncommittal way. No one taunted me.

What I didn’t say: I used to stare at that painting by the hour, and imagine my father staring at it in the past, and then imagine time collapsing so we were looking at it together, and there was comfort in that. When my mother sold the painting, the only trace I had of my father was gone.

Nico came to visit me at the school that winter. “You’re not missing anything in Paris,” she said, when we went for a walk together after classes ended for the day. Our destination was a café in the local village. It was January and raining, but not cool enough for jackets, so we walked in our T-shirts under umbrellas. She looked tired, I thought, like she’d been travelling too hard. She’d been meeting with scientists elsewhere in Europe, but she didn’t really want to talk about it. I suspected she’d been dismissed more than once as a lunatic, showing up at universities and asking to speak with fringe members of the physics department about the possibilities of travel between parallel universes. It must have taken a toll.

“I sometimes miss it, though,” I said. “Just seeing people I don’t go to school with.”

We were walking down a perfectly straight driveway lined with dripping trees, the passage from school to village.

“The dome construction is unbelievably loud. Everyone’s always in a bad mood.”

“Everyone in Paris is always in a bad mood anyway,” I said.

“It’s worse now, though. No one can sleep.”

“Nico,” I said, “can I ask you about Ari Soriano?”

“Why?”

“She has my father’s painting.”

Nico gave me an appraising look. “You’re talking about that painting Gloria sold her, all those years ago?”

“Swan Dive,” I said. “I loved the painting, Gloria told me it belonged to my father, and then she sold it.”

“You’ve told me that a few times.”

“The painting was in the other place too, wasn’t it? The place you came from.” Two girls from my school were approaching, in the opposite direction, and the one closest to me was wearing a distractingly tight shirt.

“It hung in the lab,” Nico said quietly. “I always thought it was beautiful.”

“Can you tell me anything more about Ari?” I was distracted by the girls.

“She did a lot of different things,” Nico said. “She worked for a militia for a while, in the Republic of Ohio, then she got into some kind of trouble that sent her fleeing to Paris. Then she was a kind of professional wife for a year or two, married to a retired mercenary. I visited her in the hospital a few times, after he died, but I’ve barely spoken with her since.”

We’d almost reached the end of the avenue. The damp streets of the village were ahead, and the boba tea café was lit up, windows shining in the gloom. Few people moved in the streets.

“What about before the militia?”

“Look, Sebastian, these are all just biographical details. If you’re trying to understand her,” Nico said, “the only important point is that she doesn’t trust anyone, and I don’t think she cares very much about anyone but herself. She does whatever she wants.”

I was careful to maintain a neutral expression, but what I was thinking was, There’s freedom in that. We’d reached the café, and I held the door open for Nico. It had been built as a farmhouse in the seventeenth century and now it was a warm, crowded place, with tiny round tables and uncomfortable wood chairs. The fragrance of tea and sugar and fruit was intoxicating. I found us a table by the far window, with a view of the grey village square, and went to get boba tea.

When I returned she was gazing out the window, and for the first time I noticed my friend Cole at the next table, drinking tea and eating miniature waffles with Aurélie, who he was dating these days. I nodded and waved in the most minimal way possible, really just the twitch of a hand—that was the only socially acceptable way to say hello that year, and even at fifteen I thought that was stupid—and settled into the chair just behind Aurélie’s. Her handbag was hanging precariously on her chair back.

“Who did you see this time?” I asked Nico. “On your research trip.”

She sighed. “I was in Copenhagen,” she said. “Talking to a professor there who had ideas about travel between parallel universes. Did I say professor? Ex-professor. Defrocked professor. He was basically a paperweight. He couldn’t be fired for contractual reasons, but he hadn’t taught a class in decades.”