Seize the Parallel: Parallelogram, Book 3

Chapter 10

10

My body is my body no matter who happens to be inside it, so it took a little coaxing to get it to do what Halli wanted. But the yoga studio is always kept pretty warm for just that reason, to let people unclench, and so by the end of the first class Halli found what she was looking for from my limbs and my joints and my whole skeleton in general.

Lydia seemed amazed.

Not so much that I could do it, but that I even tried.

“Are you sure you want to stay?” she asked Halli after the two of them finished the first class. “I mean, you did great, but it’s a lot of yoga for one day. You shouldn’t try to push yourself or you’ll be sore tomorrow. Then you won’t come back.”

Lydia had seen it before with people who came to the studio all ready to change their lives, and went limping and groaning out, never to return.

But Halli had her own reasons for wanting to stay. Not just to do another round of yoga—she’d had her fill, and could have happily run home right then, since the studio was just a few miles from our house, and now she knew the way—but because she was avoiding someone. Two people, in fact.

Professor Whitfield and Albert were all hot to continue looking for me. And that required Halli. They wanted her to sit in my room and meditate to see if I made contact again.

But Halli had been thinking about it. Or really, feeling about it. She trusted her instincts, and this time her instincts told her it was no use. She had devoted hours over the previous week doing everything the professor suggested, trying to bring herself into some sort of resonance with me, but none of that had worked.

When I finally did show up, Halli knew she had nothing to do with it. She was just about to go for a run, when suddenly I dropped into my body and greeted her. She knew without a doubt she hadn’t even been thinking of me at that moment.

She figured it was like a one-way valve: I could come in any time I wanted, but she couldn’t go out. She couldn’t send any kind of signals to reach me, and she couldn’t leave my body. The professor and I had said as much, too. The former way Halli and I communicated was gone. It had died with Halli in that avalanche. Whatever new universe I’d created, I also formed some new path of communication that Halli wasn’t in control of. It all rested with me.

Halli had tried to explain her feelings about that to Professor Whitfield the night before, but he didn’t agree. He wanted her to keep trying, as many hours as she could every day, until she found me again.

So instead of arguing with the professor, Halli decided to just keep herself unavailable. She had her own strategy for what to do next, and it didn’t involve sitting in my bedroom for hours upon end calling to me with her mind.

Halli was tired of her mind at the moment. What she wanted to do was move around in a body.

And besides, she was curious about Lydia. Halli knew from me that Lydia and I have been best friends since we were little, but that’s mostly because our mothers are best friends. Lydia and I don’t really have that much in common. Not the way Halli and I do.

But Halli saw something in Lydia that I’ve never really appreciated: a devotion to training her body in a particular way. I’ve always viewed Lydia’s yoga obsession as sort of silly and impractical. What good is spending hours every day contorting yourself and sitting there trying to meditate, when you could be reading physics books and really feeding your mind?

Of course, that was before I took home one of the meditation CDs Lydia mentioned off-hand one day, and through that, accidentally ended up solving one of the biggest mysteries in physics by not only proving that parallel universes exist, but by actually going to one. And then even taking it one important step further by finding Halli, my own parallel self. So I guess yoga does have its uses. As long as you pair it with physics.

But in the same way I know Halli would have loved that two-hour insane workout this man named Ferguson put me through over on Halli’s parents’ island, I’m not surprised Halli really took to Lydia’s yoga. It was another way of blocking out the noise of life for a while and just focusing on the pure mechanics of moving her—or my—body just right.

At the end of the second class, Halli was drenched in sweat, and smiling. She hadn’t felt better all week. She finally, for the first time, felt almost like herself again. Even though she could see in the mirror all during class that she was clearly a different girl.

When Halli emerged from the yoga room, Lydia stuck out her hand. “Who are you? I don’t believe we’ve met.”

Halli froze for a second. But then she realized it was a joke.

“You’re a good teacher,” she said, shaking Lydia’s hand. “Thank you.”

Then she walked outside to cool off in the fresh air.

When she looked back through the glass doors, she could see Lydia watching her with a kind of confused look on her face. As if something felt...off. We all get used to how our friends talk, what they say, how they act, and if suddenly they seem down or nervous or different somehow, we pick up on it. At least if we’re not totally self-absorbed, which I’ll admit I’ve always secretly thought about Lydia. But maybe I’ve been wrong about her. Because maybe she did notice some subtle change that afternoon—something beyond just me deciding to try yoga all of the sudden.

But that change was nothing compared to what Lydia would see later that night.