He rubs his hands. “Okay. We don’t know what Earth’s core is made up of—which means every minute of every day, we’re, well, living on a mystery.” He grips his hair a little, and I don’t think he knows he’s doing it, or how cute it is. “And we may never know! Like, we figure it’s maybe eighty percent iron—debatable number, but we’ll just go with it—but because of its lightness, that’s not the whole story. But it’s a third of our planet’s mass! So is there a shit-ton of xenon in there, or silicate … Who knows? Then when you consider the periodic reversals in Earth’s magnetic field, plate tectonics…” He throws up his hands. “It’s a mystery.”

“Plate tectonics.” I never knew that term could become so personal. “So. You study earthquakes. Sometimes.”

He hesitates before nodding, and in that moment, I know that he knows. Of course he does. Nate’s his best friend.

“In regard to earthquakes … I’m sorry about your parents,” Ben says. His voice goes soft, different. “That’s really fucking heavy.”

I bet they studied the wave in one of his classes. The underwater fault lines that sent it over my whole life. I bet he knows more about what killed my parents than I do.

“Could you … tell me about the wave?”

Ben looks at me for a long time, like I’m maybe under a microscope. “Will it help?”

I always thought that the more data I had, the more sense I could make out of anything. But maybe there are just some questions that can never be answered.

“I don’t know.”

He nods. “My three favorite words.”

“My least-favorite words.”

He smiles. “So what are your favorites?”

“Just one: Why. I even have a T-shirt that says WHY in huge orange letters. Ugly, but I love it. Hannah found it for me at a thrift shop in Venice.” I glance at him. “I hate not knowing. It’s why I science.”

“I love it. It’s why I science.”

For the past two hours and forty-two minutes, my heart has been doing things I am not accustomed to. Hannah things.

It appears that Hannah feelings are not as enviable as I thought. They are questions and not answers.

I wish Ben didn’t smell so good. Or look like Ichigo Kurosaki. Or wasn’t smart enough to do advanced physics at MIT.

I am way out of orbit. I need to correct course somehow. I think that involves standing up and leaving the room, but I seem to be experiencing a gravitational malfunction.

“What’s your favorite thing you don’t know?” he says.

Suddenly I’m back in orbit. This I can do. I turn on my side, tuck my knees in.