The Bellbottom Incident by Neve Maslakovic Read Free Book Online

of delight as soon as they noticed it. Abigail took out her cell phone and snapped a picture of the blackboard.
    “Abigail, you brought your phone along?” I chided her.
    “I figured no one’s gonna see it in my pocket. Hey, this must be Dr. Mooney’s desk, look,” she exclaimed. The professor was a bit of a father figure to her, which no doubt fueled her interest. She bent down to examine a pair of mismatched conga drums nestled under the wooden surface. The drums were the start of a collection whose gems would one day include a didgeridoo from far-time Australia and many other musical instruments collected by Dr. Mooney on his journeys in time.  
    “Gabriel and Lewis must have desks in here as well,” I said, looking around. “I’m guessing that one is Gabriel’s, judging by the neatly stacked books. And that one is Lewis’s—who keeps a picture of themselves on their own desk? Of all the—”
    “Shh, someone’s coming,” Dr. Little interrupted me, then continued in a low voice, “We better get out of here.”
    We tried, but it was a no-go. History, very firmly, did not want us to leave by the door we had entered, probably because voices were approaching in the hallway outside. We felt a wall of something push us deeper into the office, gently but decisively, toward a corner where there was a second door I hadn’t previously noticed.
    “There’s another exit,” Abigail whispered.  
    We quickly tumbled through the second door only to find ourselves shut in a closet.

7

    Abigail flicked on her cell phone light. We were in a cleaning supply closet, which some quirk of building design had placed in the grad student office. Sharing the small space with the three of us were a vacuum cleaner, a mop and bucket, and a large can, into which discarded paper, food wrappers, and other trash had been dumped in a decidedly non-recycled fashion.
      “…and then she told me she wasn’t interested in dating because she’s too busy with classes. Besides, I’m not her type, she said. I guess she doesn’t like physics students. The lunch only went downhill from there. It was very short, needless to say.” From the first audible word, I knew it was a young Xavier Mooney speaking. I would have recognized his voice anywhere.
    “I don’t think I’ve met this Isobel,” another voice said, accompanied by the thump of textbooks hitting a table. This one was undeniably Gabriel Rojas’s. “Have I?”
    “I don’t know. She’s a geology student.”
    I had met her. She was my boss, a professor of geology turned dean of science. Xavier was very definitely not her type, though not for the reasons he imagined. Back home, Dr. Braga was away for the weekend with Mindy, her longtime partner, for a visit to Mindy’s family in Chicago.  
    “I even put on a suit and tie to impress her. Honestly, I don’t know why I bother. Never mind that, though. Something occurred to me during lunch. What if we’re thinking too small with our Time Machine?”
    “Elaborate.”
    “The plan is to try and sell them”—he didn’t say who—“on the concept of sending an object on an infinitesimal jump into the past, a nanosecond or two. But, to be quite frank, that’s just boring.”  
    “No jump into the past is boring,” Gabriel said in his usual cautious fashion, the one I was familiar with from countless department meetings.  
    Abigail, next to me, was positively twitching with excitement as she eagerly took in every word. Dr. Little was crouched, peering through the closet peephole. I tapped him on the shoulder and he moved aside to let me take a look. I brought my eye to the keyhole. There they were, young Drs. Mooney and Rojas. No, that was wrong; they weren’t doctors yet, I reminded myself. But they certainly were young. Gabriel, thin and scrawny in a plain white T-shirt, had his elbows on the table and looked lost in thought, as he often did. Xavier’s feet were propped up on his desk, which connected to Gabriel’s