Page 107 of Everything All at Once

“Wait!” I scrambled to my feet, put my hand on his arm. “So dramatic,” I said, panting. “Just hold on a second.”

“Okay,” he said, pulling his hand away from me, keeping the bottle as far from me as he could.

“I already told you I didn’t want it.” I rolled my eyes and sighed. “I want you to drink it.”

“Me? Why?”

“Think about this scenario, right: you throw it out to sea in this grand, poetic gesture. But the bottle doesn’t break; it floats on the waves until it gets to some faraway, uncharted island. There’s been a plane crash, and someone who looks a lot like Tom Hanks is stranded on the island. He finds the bottle. He’s really, really thirsty. So he’s basically the only person on earth who would pull a strange glass bottle of water out of the ocean and actually drink it. And he does drink it, so now he has to spend eternity on that island, alone.”

“That is... very specific,” Sam said. “But I see your point. I guess I could just dump the water out?”

“I think you need to drink it.”

“I already drank it, remember?”

“Has anyone ever drunk the water twice, though?”

“No, there’s not really a point, is there?”

“Well, what’s the harm? You can’t get doubly immortal.Oh, or maybe you’d become a god? Like Zeus? That would be cool.”

“I don’t think it would make me a god.”

“So just drink it. I dare you.”

“You dare me to drink the water that I have already drunk again?”

“Yes.”

He thought about it for just a minute, lowering the glass to eye level, studying the liquid within. Then he relaxed, shrugged, unstopped the cork, and raised it to his lips. He drank deeply, and when he was finished, he replaced the cork and let the bottle fall to the ground.

And I watched the air around him change, just so, so subtly, nothing anyone would see unless they knew exactly what they were looking for. A slight shift, the most gentle of breezes. Something crooked tilting into place. A crack in the laws of the universe filled up with putty and made whole again.

I smiled.

“Come on, let’s get out of here. I’m hungry.”

That night Em came over with Jackie, and together with Abe and Amy and Sam, we set up Monopoly on the coffee table.

“Can I play?” Dad asked hopefully, sticking his head into the room.

“No!” Abe and I shouted at the same time.

Defeated, he retreated to the kitchen.

We put an Alvin movie on in the background but muted the TV. I glanced at it every now and then but tried not to get caught up; the Alvin movies always made me cry.

Sam had never played Monopoly. In three hundred years, he’d just never gotten around to it.

After an hour or so, I went into the kitchen to refill our supply of snacks. Abe followed me. When I turned around from the fridge, he was leaning against the counter, arms crossed, expectant.

“Well?” he said.

“Well what?”

“Was Ponce de León right?”

“No, of course not,” I said. “There was a perfectly reasonable explanation.”