What Teddy wanted me to do—that was just a meta version of warped hindsight. A dizzying reach down through time with the benefit of all I thought I knew about the world. I would create that all-consuming tsunami, and, like Noah, ride it out, until it brought us to a better world. It wasn’t lost on me that the biblical flood involved killing everyone else in the process.

I wanted to tell myself that Teddy was just blowing smoke and that this was bizarre wishful thinking. But the Edwards had a perspective that I couldn’t possibly have. Fact: if being the sub-loc meant that I was the center of the universe, then the universe was mine to mess with. And if I did it right, the universe would be grateful, wouldn’t it? My grandma would say God was working through me, because that’s the way he worked. I wasn’t stealing the power of creation, I was channeling it for the greater good.

These were the kinds of thoughts that filled my aching head the whole week. I was sitting in math class, crunching equations, when all the while I’m thinking that I could write a wrong answer, and then make the universe change math itself, so that my answer was right. Would that be an abuse of power?

And the thought of abuse of power made me think of Layton, who was sitting two seats away from me in math. I’d like to say he was a brainless meathead and couldn’t do math for his life. But he was good at it. Not sure whether it came naturally, or whether he had to work at it. All I knew was that he got furious at himself when he made simple mistakes that led to wrong answers—and in math, most wrong answers come from simple mistakes. A billion-dollar spaceship once crashed on Mars because the engineers made the simple mistake of forgetting to convert to metric. Simple mistakes; major consequences.

Layton demanded perfection from himself and visited that upon the people in his life. Nothing and no one was ever good enough. Everyone was riddled with faults and subject to harsh judgment. No surprise that Katie was always first in the line of fire.

On Wednesday, I caught another one of their private moments before class. He didn’t like the way her hair was that day. He was “encouraging” her to wear it differently—the way he liked it. He wasn’t berating her—it was one step short of that. More like haranguing. Nagging until she caved. He always seemed to know exactly how far he could push her and get away with it.

Katie and I had English together, and Layton didn’t. I told her what I saw, and asked her, just as I had in the previous world, why she didn’t bail on him.