See you before school Monday, she texted. I left my math book in the gym maybe you could help me find it.

Got it! Code for meet her before school in the gym. I applauded myself for not being a complete imbecile, and sent her a thumbs-up.

By the time I got home, I wanted to put my head in a vise grip just to keep it from exploding.

“You’re suffering from memory fatigue,” the Edwards had told me. “While everyone else’s memories are pretty much replaced, with the sub-loc it’s different—you remember everything.” Which meant that each shift left me with a whole lifetime of new memories competing for real estate in my brain.

“The good news,” the Edwards had explained, “is that the human brain has about two point five petabytes of storage space—a million gigs—most of which isn’t used. The bad news is, with each leap, you burn a few hundred thousand gigs of mental storage space.”

It meant that I only had a limited number of jumps before my brain reached capacity. After that, I’d have a cerebral meltdown, which would leave me dead, or brain-dead, or worse—although I couldn’t imagine what “worse” could be. But in the meantime, they assured me that the eggshell/mint/potassium baths would help. “Mint enhances brain function, potassium gets more oxygen to the brain, and eggshells are practically magical in all dimensions,” the Edwards told me.

Once home, I went straight for the kitchen. Not to eat, because I had nothing resembling an appetite, but to get eggshells for an EMP bath. As I was grabbing the eggs, Hunter, who had been waiting for me to come home, popped up out of nowhere, startling me enough to drop a couple on the floor.

“I covered for you,” he said.

“What do you mean ‘covered’?”

“Your shift,” he said.

My heart literally missed a beat. “You know about the shifts?”

He looked at me funny. “Yeah, your shift at the store.”

“Oh, right.” I gave myself an idiot pass for that one.

“I told Dad you were helping the coaches scout out the upcoming crop at a few Pop Warner games. I figured a football excuse might fly with him.”

I sighed. “Okay, Hunter, cut the shit and just tell me what you want.”

He was taken aback. “I dunno—maybe just to know where the hell you were?”

Only then did it occur to me that this Hunter didn’t help me because he wanted something in return; he did it because helping was in his nature. I felt embarrassed for thinking otherwise. At the moment, I didn’t want to look at him, because I thought I might get a little damp-eyed, so I bent down, mopped up the eggs, and retrieved the broken shells.

“It’s probably better if you don’t know where I was,” I told him—but he wasn’t buying that.