Nothing works.

I keep trying not to look at Mabel’s empty bed, but of course, I do. The morning she died, she’d left without making her bed. I was pretty annoyed by that, but I made it for her. The teal comforter is just how I left it. I haven’t touched it since.

Mabel had all these messy habits, like leaving wet towels on the floor, eating Cheetos in bed and spreading the crumbs everywhere, and cluttering our shared nightstand with tubes of lip gloss. When she started high school, she got really into lip gloss because Grams finally allowed her to wear it to school.

Our nightstand is still cluttered with lip gloss tubes. I can’t stand the idea of putting them away. But I also can’t stand to look at them. When I see them, I think of that morning and the last things I ever said to her. My stomach hurts when I remember it.

Grams keeps telling me she thinks it would be healthy if we packed up Mabel’s stuff. You know what else is healthy? Salad. My point? Just because something is healthy doesn’t make it good.

I groan and slip out of bed. I turn on the light and drag the box from Quinn out from under my bed. I read through all the articles again and jot down notes in my journal.

Time travel is possible, I write.

Wormhole? I write. Where do I find one?

I think of the giant oak tree Quinn showed me. The articles do say that the best places to find a wormhole are places that are old and familiar. Forests are old, I guess. I don’t know how familiar they are. Quinn’s pretty familiar with the woods, though.

I grab my laptop and power it on. I type wormhole into the search bar and start reading everything that comes up. There are some helpful things like an article that explicitly states that forests are good places to find wormholes, but one thing I find makes me pause.

Some scientists hypothesize that time travel is the easiest between two points in time that aren’t very far from one another. For example, in accordance with this theory, it would be easier to time-travel back two days in time than it would be to travel back ten years.

I write down that whole chunk of text. It’s almost October. In a little more than one month, it will be one year since it happened.

I think about how I felt sitting under the desk today during the drill. I don’t want to feel helpless anymore—I want to do something. I reread everything I’ve written down.

Hypothesize. The word jumps out at me. That’s it.

I turn my notebook to a blank page and write down the first step of the scientific method.

Make an observation, I write.

My sister is dead. I miss her so much.

The second part probably isn’t necessary. A scientist like Dad would definitely trim it. I scratch it out.