She couldn’t possibly have been attempting to do something so Herculean.

She was probably just heading home.

But—she was the most remarkable person he had ever met.

And he wouldn’t have put it past her to try to do something so Herculean.

And that was when he started nerding out over his theory. And he tried to figure out how long it would take for Ginette to return to him—and be (actually) close to him again—if she were to keep walking west and go all the way around the world.

The Earth, he knew, has a circumference of 24,902 miles at the equator.

And say Ginette walked at a pace of three miles per hour.

And say she walked eight hours a day.

That’d be twenty-four miles a day she could cover.

And 24,902 miles divided by 24 miles per day equals—Pete rummaged through his bag and pulled out a calculator and discovered the answer: 1,038.

1,038 days.

That’s how long it would take for Ginette to circumambulate the globe.

That was almost … Pete divided 1,038 days by 365 days in a year, and his calculator revealed an answer of 2.84 years.

Pete didn’t know if he could be without Ginette for 2.84 years.

But maybe it didn’t have to be 2.84 years, because, he bet, some days Ginette would be able to put in ten- or twelve-hour days walking.

Plus, she walked fast, so she could probably cover more than three miles in an hour.

And she’d be able to run sometimes.

So maybe her pace would be more like three and a half miles an hour.

Okay. So if she walked at a rate of three and a half miles an hour for an average of ten hours a day, that would mean she’d cover thirty-five miles a day.

And 24,902 miles divided by 35 miles per day equals 711 days.

And that, his calculator told him, was not even … 1.94 years!

Which was still a long time to be without the girl he had just confessed his love to.

But wait! Pete just realized something! She wouldn’t be walking at the equator. She’d start out walking along the Road to Nowhere, which was at the forty-seventh parallel north. And if she followed the forty-seventh parallel north, that would make for a shorter distance than she’d be walking if she were at the equator.

And Pete had learned—for fun, while he was working on his map projection project for science class—that the circumference of the Earth at any particular latitude could be calculated by using the formula 2πr(cos θ), where r is the radius of the Earth at the equator—or 3,963 miles—and θ is the relevant degree of latitude, in this case, 47. And the math revealed that the circumference of the Earth at the forty-seventh parallel was 17,622 miles.

And 17,622 miles divided by 35 miles per day, his calculator told him, equals 503.

Which is 1.38 years.

Which is still a long time to go without the girl you love.