Page Turning Books

FIRST BLOOD DRAWN

The next day at Mr. Sheridan’s class Joey assured Frank that he felt somewhat better, so he would follow through with a plan they had made in the car on the way back from Big Sur, to go to the skateboard park near Frank’s house and practice tricks. Joey didn’t ride his skateboard around because he preferred his bike; he just wanted to learn competitive tricks at the park so he kept his board at Frank’s house. Both of them had only three weeks of experience since they bought their skateboards new at their local mall. Joey rode his bike to Frank’s after school but as soon as he entered Frank’s room. 

Frank’s mom heard Joey’s voice and called out, “Frankie dear, could you straighten out your room a little bit before you go out?”

“Okay mom, I’ll do it right now, then we gotta go.”

Joey saw that he was stuck hanging around for however long it took for Frank to comply with his mother’s wishes so he wandered down the hall to Freddie’s room where Freddie was sitting at his computer as usual. Freddie’s back was to Joey, so he entered stealthily and pulled up a cloth covering a dry erase board next to the door to peek at what was written or drawn on it. Freddie kept the board covered so his room would look more like a normal kid’s room rather than the habitat of a total academic egghead. Written with a marker were long were long chicken scratch formulas with symbols of all sorts – lots of x’s and y’s along with an alphabet soup of other characters and only one distinct equation:

g = R (π X rpm)2
____30____
9.81

“Hey, Freddie, what’s up?” Joey asked, turning away from the board towards Freddie. He walked forward and plopped himself down on the bed, which was adjacent to the computer chair where Freddie was sitting.

“Oh yeah, everything is cool. Hey, do you know about the nano world?”

“You mean small, right?”    

“Yeah, super small, subatomic. Our laws of physics don’t apply to that world.”

“You mean like the speed of light, gravity, stuff like that.”

“Right. For all we know, there could be different realities in the nano world, black holes containing other universes – phenomena we can’t even imagine. Some cosmologists even say that there may be trillions of Big Bangs just like the one that started our universe happening every second and creating universes like ours or even exact duplicates of ours.” 

The thought occurred to Joey of showing Freddie the very strange object that was in his back pocket, but he decided it would be premature. Freddie was a genius, so he might know or could maybe figure out what this stone really was. But Joey decided he would show it to him later after examining it himself; he hadn’t really done this in spite of what had already happened with it, just nonchalantly carried it around in his bag or pocket; Joey was nonplussed about the stone, simply hoping no more strange events would occur. 

All of these thoughts came to him in a blink of any eye, quickly enough for him to set them aside for the moment and ask Freddie, “So, what are you going to do about it?”

“Well, I can’t actually do much about it, but scientists are finding out more about it by doing experiments with supercolliders. For instance, in our macro world, everything can only be in one place at one time, but in the nano world a particle can be in two places at the same time. As you can see on my screen, I’m trying to depict a subatomic particle arriving at two places at once, but I’m not good at this 3D software. You know how to do 3D?”

“Not really, but I can make a 3D screen saver.”

“That’s actually pretty good, but not enough for what I’m trying to do. Hey Joey, are you into cosmology? Do you know different adjectives for describing the cosmos or the universe? How about inexorable, which means like, not possible to challenge, and immutable, for unchanging, and what else?“

”How about UnBigWordAble, which means there’s no word that’s big enough to be able to describe it.” 

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