Emet North has done it all. They received a grant from NASA, taught snowboarding, translated Spanish into English, and received an MFA from Johns Hopkins. Their debut book, In Universes, is a surreal sci-fi-tinged book about parallel worlds and trying to find a place to fit in.
Below is an excerpt from the second chapter, titled “A Universe Where I Said Hello.”
North’s debut book is available for purchase now.
An excerpt from In Universes
Chapter Two | “A Universe Where I Said Hello”
Faffi stares into Britt’s eyes and thinks apple apple apple apple. The apple in her mind is green with a pinkish tinge. It’s tart and crisp and the skin is a little waxy. Apple apple apple. Her head hurts, that’s how hard she’s concentrating. Britt’s eyes are a warm, deep brown with yellowish flecks in them. Her front tooth is chipped and her cheeks are round and rosy and freckled. Raffi wishes she had freckles. But no, her thoughts aren’t allowed to wander. Apple apple APPLE. Britt shakes her head, breaking eye contact.
Nope, she says, nothing yet. Britt refuses to guess. She’s fourteen, a year older than Raffi, and decisive. When it works it’ll be obvious, she says. But when it’s Raffi’s turn to listen for Britt’s thoughts she doesn’t know what obvious means. Thoughts pop in and out of her mind, and any of them might be Britt. Her brain feels porous, not entirely her own. She doesn’t know if she likes the sensation or not.
What if random people are putting thoughts in my head? she asks.
That’s not how it works, Britt says. You have to know someone. Inside and out.There hast o be a Bond. From the way she says it, it’s obvious the word gets a capital letter.
✶ ✶ ✶
A few weeks earlier, Raffi doesn’t know that Britt exists. She’s living in her own world, which is mostly unpopulated. She’s new to town, new to the little pink house with one bedroom and almost no furniture where she and her dad live now. She gets the bedroom, her dad sleeps on the couch. In the fall, she’ll start seventh grade, but before school is summer: sticky days so devoid of activities that each one feels endless. Raffi’s parents, newly divorced but a unified front for once: “How about summer camp?” But Raffi knows they do not have The Money, so she says she hates summer camp, hates bug spray, hates fruit punch, etc. She says she is old enough to stay home alone during the day, and her parents, barely staying afloat in the ocean of their own problems, give in.
The truth is that Raffi is afraid of the empty house. So instead of going to summer camp, she goes on walks. She wakes up in the morning and pours herself a bowl of the Lucky Charms she’d never been allowed to eat and reads the sticky notes her dad leaves on top of the orange juice. The stickies have terrible giraffe riddles on them, things like “Why did the giraffe get bad grades?” and on the back, “Because she had her head in the clouds!” Raffi saves every one.
After cereal, she pulls on khaki shorts and her favorite T-shirt— tie-dyed and starting to smell from being worn too many days in a row—and locks the pink house’s door with the key she wears on a lanyard around her neck. She knows she is unbearably uncool, but at least this summer there is no one else to notice.
The first time Raffi sees Calypso, she stops and stares. The horse is grazing next to a run-down house. She’s a gray so dark it’s nearly
blue, with snowy dapples and an elegant white face that shades back to gray around her nose. She gleams in the sun, her tail swishing.
A few feet from where the horse is whuffling her nose across the scrubby grass, an old couch steams in the morning’s heat. Raffi’s never seen a couch outside before. Rusted toys and single shoes peek out of the weeds. It makes Raffi’s skin crawl. She imagines begging her dad to let her rescue the horse, promising to get a job. It’s hard to imagine him saying yes, but this is her made-up scenario, so she doesn’t let that stop her.
A screen door slams, and a girl appears: auburn hair in a ponytail, denim cutoffs hugging her legs. She whistles at the horse, who perks up her ears and ambles over. The girl runs her hand down the horse’s neck, saying something Raffi can’t hear, and the horse nudges the girl’s shoulder, and watching the two of them together makes Raffi flush. She slips away before the girl can see her.
Raffi meets Britt for real at a barbecue on the Fourth of July. Raffi is certain she and her dad would both be happier staying home, microwaving Lean Cuisines and watching The Princess Bride for the hundredth time. But her dad says, “We don’t want your mom thinking you don’t have any friends here.” One of Raffi’s many fears is that she will be made to live with her mom, so off they go. The woman hosting the party works at the same aerospace engineering company as Raffi’s dad, and she insists on introducing Raffi to the other kids. Raffi looks at her dad pleadingly, but he quirks his mouth and shrugs, so she follows the woman. Her hands are sweating, she’s wearing the wrong clothes, she forgot to brush her hair. But when she’s introduced to Britt, she forgets about clothes. She almost blurts out I’ve seen your horse, but this seems too close to saying I was watching you and your horse, or, I saw you but you didn’t see me, which both sound creepy. She catches herself in time. Instead, she says hi then turns red and sidles away, wishing she could turn into a bowl of potato salad and get eaten.
Raffi sits under a tree and opens the book she brought with her, which is called Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe. Its neon-green cover caught her eye at the library, and when she flipped open the book, she read: What would you do if you had a time machine? You might return to the past to rescue a lost loved one. You could kill Hitler and prevent World War II. If Raffi killed Hitler, probably her grandparents would never have met and she wouldn’t be born, but that seems like a fair trade. She can’t focus on the book though. She watches the other girls at the party, hanging out in a cluster and swinging Hula-Hoops in endless circles around their hips. Britt’s not with them. She’s sitting on the grass with her siblings off to the side of the yard, her baby sister perched in her lap. She airplanes potato chips into her sister’s mouth and drinks Coke and laughs at something her brother is saying.
When the sky darkens, Raffi finds a spot alone on the grass to watch the fireworks. The adults are drinking beer and talking in too-loud voices, as if they’ve been replaced by weirder versions of themselves. She pretends not to notice when Britt sits next to her.
So when did you move here? Britt asks.
Last month, Raffi stammers, hating herself.
I heard your parents split up, Britt says, and Raffi thinks rude but she doesn’t say anything. My parents suck too, Britt says, nodding her head toward two adults arguing with each other by the grill. Raffi shrugs, still feeling awkward, but the sense of camaraderie prompts her to say, at last—
Do you have a horse?
Britt’s whole face goes soft. Later, Raffi will know that this is the look of love, but at the time all she thinks is that when Britt smiles like that she becomes, suddenly, pretty.
Her name is Calypso.
✶ ✶ ✶
Raffi’s summer changes just like that. Before, it was the summer of the empty pink house, the summer of divorce, the summer of long walks. But with a few sentences, it becomes the summer of the horse. The summer of apple apple. The summer of Britt.
Britt’s house is the opposite of the pink one: cluttered, noisy, overfilled with people. She has four siblings, shares a room with her younger sister who’s two and a half. Britt’s mom is always losing things and shouting for someone to find something dammit. She hardly seems to notice the presence of an extra body, but when she does, she smiles and says “Oh hi, Rachel, honey” or “How’s it going, Ramona?” Britt grimaces, but Raffi doesn’t mind. Her own mom needs everything to be perfect, finds endless flaws in Raffi’s behavior. She forces Raffi to wear a dress and go to synagogue and sit right, eat slower, stop fidgeting, why is your room such a mess? Britt’s mom doesn’t yell at them for talking with their mouths full or having dirt on their jeans.
They spend most of their time in the big backyard with Calypso. There’s never much food in the fridge at Britt’s house, so Raffi brings the lunch her dad leaves her each day, and they split it sitting under the trees. Raffi asks her dad to buy baby carrots, and she and Britt feed them to Calypso. Like this, Britt says, flattening Raffi’s palm so the carrot sits atop it like an offering. Raffi is afraid at first, but Calypso is gentle and the hairs on her nose tickle Raffi’s hand.
Britt loves her horse more than anything in the world. She says it like that sometimes: I love you more than anything else in the world. It isn’t enough to say a thing, Raffi knows that. But she also knows everything Britt’s done to have Calypso: babysat for a rich family a town over every week since she was eleven; convinced
her older brother to help her build a shed out in the backyard; researched horse care and no-fee-rescues at the library, and photocopied all the info into a giant binder she used to give her mom an hourlong presentation. (Halfway through, according to Britt, her mom said, “For the love of god, girl, I get the point.”)
Next year I’ll be old enough to get a real job, Britt says. And then I’ll be able to buy Cally anything she needs. She tells Raffi about the money she keeps in a secret place—maybe I’ll tell you where one day—for vet bills and the horse dentist. About the time the family she babysits for went away for a month, and she couldn’t afford to buy Calypso’s grain. I could see her ribs, Britt says, it was so awful. But soon Cally will have the best of everything. Raffi believes her.
To Raffi, the smell of horses will always mean this: summertime, Calypso following Britt around, the crunch of carrots, the faint racing of Raff i’s never-quite-at-ease heart.
debutiful 