The gap year, p.1
The Gap Year, page 1
In one terrible day, high-school science nerd Anna Reyes loses her college scholarship, gets thrown back to ancient Greece in a lab accident, and becomes the only person who can save the world.
The only thing Anna ever wanted was to be just like her celebrity-physicist father. Now she’s stuck in the past with his best student Indy, a snarky, genetically-enhanced border collie and physics postdoc. The two of them have all the technology of the future at their fingertips. Or at least they might, if they can manage to re-create it from the pieces they brought back with them. But how do you use power like that without making things even worse? And how can you save the world if you can’t even save yourself?
Copyright © 2023 by Wade Walker
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed, transmitted or shared in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permission requests, contact the author at wadewalker.com.
All characters, events, places, and products in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and unintended.
First edition: July 2023
Hardcover ISBN: 979-8-9885654-0-6
Paperback ISBN: 979-8-9885654-1-3
eBook ISBN: 979-8-9885654-2-0
Cover illustration by Fernanda Suarez
Book cover and layout design by theBookDesigners
To my moms, who taught me to love these books
And to my wife, who always believed
1
Anna was reasonably sure her father wasn’t going to kill her before lunch. But we’ll just have to see how things go.
It was a summer Tuesday morning, two weeks after her high school graduation, and Anna Reyes was staring at the email that could wreck her whole future. The words “Entrance examination results…” were all that fit in the little popup on her phone’s lock screen. But that was enough to set her hand shaking as she fumbled her phone up from the bathroom counter and touched the interface ring around its edge. She set her still-running hair dryer down with the other hand as the phone linked up with her tiny neural implant.
Alixa? Can you summarize it, please? Anna’s stomach was plummeting in sick premonition, and she couldn’t bear the long seconds it would take to read through the email herself.
Your weighted score was eighty-seven percent. Her phone’s neural net spoke the crushing words soundlessly into her mind. Your raw score was sixty-three out of one hundred.
Her hair dryer whirred to itself on the counter, forgotten, as her mind raced back over what Alixa had told her, trying to undo what she’d heard.
She was leaving in less than fifteen minutes to meet her celebrity-physicist father Mateo Reyes in Austin. She was starting her own physics degree at the University of Texas in the fall, as an incoming fellowship student in her father’s research group. Expectations were always high for fellowship students, and her being named Reyes sent them higher still. So she and her father were going to plan out her summer self-study program, to make sure she’d crush it. And then they’d have a nice lunch.
Only now, none of that’s going to happen.
Anna set down her phone, stunned. Her hands picked the hair dryer and brush back up, distractedly resuming the routine of taming her dark, unruly hair. Her fellowship required a weighted score of at least ninety percent, no exceptions. And without that fellowship, there was no way her father was going to try to shoehorn his very-smart-but-apparently-not-quite-brilliant daughter in among his award-winning graduate students and famous colleagues.
Alixa, what was the breakdown? As if it mattered.
You scored very well on the computational and visualization portions of the test, her phone said to her over their mental link. Your only lagging score was in manual symbolic manipulation.
Of course it was. Anna closed her eyes with a groan. Symbolic had always been her weakest area, but she’d thought she had finally brought it up to scratch. How much longer until the car gets here?
Your pickup time is in thirteen minutes. Alixa paused. Do you wish to cancel?
For a long moment, Anna thought about it. It would be so easy to just bail, for once. Make her apologies to her dad. Pick something easier to do with her life?
No. She met her own eyes in the mirror. No way.
It seemed like she’d spent her whole life studying, doubling and tripling down at every setback. Skipping parties, hangouts, friendships. If she gave up now, all that sacrifice would be wasted.
I’m doing this. I just don’t know how yet.
She turned off the hair dryer and put it away, her decision solidifying. Getting to Austin would take the better part of an hour. So she’d have to figure out some kind of plan before she got there.
Back in her bedroom, she quickly pulled on a plain gray T-shirt from a monochrome row of similar shirts in her closet, then added shorts and sneakers, practical choices for the late-May Texas sun. She paused halfway out the door, frowning as damp hair brushed her neck.
Ugh. There was a wet patch in the back that she must have missed. Anna raked at it with her fingers, then gave up. It’ll have to dry on the way.
She hustled down the half-flight of stairs to the kitchen. Her mother Helena sat on a stool at the counter, sipping her coffee as she pored over dense legal text on her tablet.
“Morning, sweetie!” Her mother’s smile faded into concern. “Aren’t you cutting things a little close for your meeting with your father today?”
Anna tried to plaster a carefree expression over her inner turmoil. “Eh, I’ve still got…” She checked her phone. “Eight whole minutes!” She thumbed the screen as she looked up, hiding the email about her exam results. She could discuss those with her mother if she survived the morning.
“You know how your father packs his schedule.” Her mother’s expression was as neutral as her tone. “If you miss it, you might not get another chance for a month.”
“No worries, Mom.” Anna tapped her usual breakfast order on her phone’s screen, the gestures so quick that she’d already finished and dropped the phone on the counter before she could’ve asked for it mentally. “I’ve got this.”
Almost immediately, the kitchen fab above the stove went ding! and a bagel appeared behind the window in the fab’s front door. Anna pulled the door open, grabbed the warm, newly made bagel, split it expertly with a table knife, and popped it into her dad’s old antique toaster.
Her mother rolled her eyes in amusement. “You know fabs can make those pre-toasted, right? Pre-buttered, even?”
Anna smiled back, their well-worn shared joke making her forget her dire situation for a moment. “Admit it. They smell way better when you toast them by hand.” She nodded toward her mother’s tablet. “How’re the votes looking on your bill?” She grinned. “Any last-minute blackmail letters you need me to drop off in Austin?”
“Not today, at least.” Her mother’s smile turned wry. “It’s all over the news this morning. Every state’s legislative calendar is on hold. They’re waiting for some closed-door special session in Washington, D.C., to finish so they can all take some kind of emergency vote. They’re being very secretive about the reason, but I’m sure it’s not to fast-track one environmental lobbyist’s boring amphibian diversity bill.”
Anna snatched her bagel out of the toaster just before it began to char, buttered it with a few swipes of the knife, and began wolfing it down, alternating bagel bites with swigs of iced tea from a bottle she’d fabbed while the bagel was toasting. Her mother raised an eyebrow.
“Ahm layh, emembuh?” Anna said with her mouth full.
Her phone buzzed on the countertop. Pickup in two minutes, the screen said. Destination, the University of Texas at Austin, Archibald Wheeler Hall.
Anna’s appetite shriveled, her stress about the upcoming meeting with her father closing back in. Wheeler Hall was the building where her father had worked for as long as she could remember. Ever since middle school, she’d daydreamed about all the great scientific discoveries they’d make together once she finally joined him there. Now that dream was coming apart right in front of her, and she had less than an hour to figure out how to pull it back together. She chewed the last of her bagel glumly as she stood up and pocketed her phone.
“Say hello to your father for me.” Her mother’s smile was a fraction less than full. Her parents’ divorce had been sticky, though they had tried not to let it affect their only child.
“I will, Mom.” Anna hugged her mother briefly, but hard. Then her phone vibrated in her pocket just as she saw the car through the front windows, coming down to land gently in the yard. She squeezed her mother one last time, then broke the hug and ran out the front door, waving as she closed it behind her.
2
The car waited in the front yard, its bulbous yellow body hovering low on four glowing blue repellers, hemmed in amid spiky juniper bushes and paddle-shaped prickly pear cacti. Anna rushed down the porch steps and reached for the car’s door handle, anxious to be away.
Then she paused, looking behind her at a brown beetle trapped on its back on the smooth path, six legs waving helplessly in the air. It was a common sight this time of year, one that she normally didn’t just walk past.
This time she wavered. Less than an hour! And what’s one beetle, more or less?
But finally, she dropped her hand with a sigh. She walked back to the struggling insect, then n
We’ve gotta put out there what we want to get back. She gave the beetle an ironic wave after it righted itself and crawled away into the grass. At least somebody gets a lucky break today.
She ran back to the waiting car and jumped in, settling uneasily into its deep single seat as it rose smoothly into the sky above the El Paso suburbs. The narrow Rio Grande glinted off in the distance, and the dry olive-green and brown landscape flashed by below as the car climbed, leveled off, and surged east.
In this part of west Texas, you could still see the scars of long-gone oil fields, small white squares connected by long straight lines etched into the rocky soil. In her grandparents’ time they’d still been recognizable as old-fashioned ground roads, but now they were just whitish streaks cutting through the grass and scrub. Even the mighty roadbed where the old Interstate 10 had run was little more than a long hump that notched the limestone hills here and there.
Okay, let’s work through this. Anna struggled to guide her circling thoughts into some coherent plan. I missed the ninety percent cutoff on the entrance exam. So my application for the fellowship that dad’s sponsoring me for will be denied. Which means I probably won’t be accepted into the honors physics program, either. She bounced one leg on the car seat as she thought. I guess I could apply for normal admission. That’d put me in the right college, at least. Her heart sank at the idea. Then I could spend my first six months really sweating my symbolic manipulation, then re-take the exam and place into honors the hard way. Yay?
But even if that worked, would she fit in afterward? She’d met some of her father’s students. None of them seemed like they even knew what a remedial course was. They were curve wreckers, not test re-takers. And would Dad even be able to sponsor me a second time? Isn’t that nepotism or something? She wasn’t sure what the university’s rules were, but handing out second chances to your own children sounded pretty questionable.
Then a horrible thought struck her. Dad probably doesn’t even know that the exam results came back later than usual this year. What if he thinks I’ve known about my score for weeks, and I’ve been trying to hide it somehow?
She groaned, frustrated, and unthinkingly opened her social media feed to distract herself, flicking through it using her phone’s mental link and touchscreen at the same time. She skimmed a story about that congressional emergency thing her mom had mentioned at breakfast, but it was all just speculation. Her mom would be itching to dish the inside story for her later, anyway. She skipped over a few more posts before her eyes caught on a headline that screamed, “Shocking rumors from Hawaiian telescope facility!”
Must be something from Dad’s feed. She made an amused face. I thought scientists didn’t do clickbait. How shocking could a telescope possibly—
She yanked herself back to the present, slapping the phone face-down onto the seat beside her to hide the screen. Get it together, Anna. You’ve got less than… She flipped the phone back over to check, then put it face-down again. Forty minutes now, to think of how—
Her phone vibrated under her palm, the sound dull against the seat. She flipped it warily, thinking it might be some social media notification come to suck her back in, but it was her mom calling.
Crap. Her mom’s profile picture looked up at her from the screen, surrounded by a whimsical border of tree frogs and horned lizards. I don’t have time for this! The phone buzzed in her hand, insistent.
Anna squeezed her eyes shut briefly. Then she took the call, transferring it to the car’s big screen as she dragged her happy face on again. Her mother’s face appeared, life-sized but from an odd angle since she was calling from her reading tablet in the kitchen.
“One more thing, sweetie.” Her mother’s face was kind. “You were in such a hurry, I didn’t get the chance to ask about it before you left.” She raised her tablet to look into the camera squarely. “Did you ever get your entrance exam results back?”
Anna froze, trying to hide her panic, heart thudding in her chest.
Her mom was still talking. “I remember you saying that the results were late.” She looked at Anna through the camera, concern plain on her face. “And you’ve been so worried about them.”
“Yeah, um.” Anna managed to get her voice working. “Yeah, they’re really late this year but…” She groped for something true but misleading. “There’s no point in me freaking out until after they come in.”
“You know I’ll love you just the same, no matter what.” Her mom smiled. “But I’m not worried. You studied your heart out for that exam. You’re going to show your father more than he ever expected.”
Anna felt that one in her gut. “But…” She hesitated, wondering how far she could go without confessing everything. “What if I don’t make the cut?” She spoke quickly to cut off her mother’s interjection. “I know I’m not going to fail or anything. But what if I… fall a little short?”
“I know what kind of daughter I have.” Anna’s mother laughed, and the confidence in that sound filled Anna with gratitude. “You’re not the kind that falls short. And even if you did…” Her mother shrugged, smiling. “It’s not like your father would kill you or anything. You two would work it through somehow.”
Anna winced as her mother unknowingly echoed her own morbid thoughts of earlier that morning. “Any ideas on how to do that?” She pushed it as far as she dared. “Just in case?”
“Play to his ego.” Her mother’s face took on a shrewd edge as she turned her voice cartoonishly girlish. “‘I’m so sorry, Daddy. I didn’t realize how hard your career really is. I should’ve taken your advice more seriously.’ Get him to help you plan a gap year of studying, then shoot for next year.” She smirked. “And you can study just as easily in Rome or Tokyo as you could here, so it doesn’t have to be all work and no play. What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”
Anna’s mouth hung slack, and her mother laughed again. “You’re welcome. I did learn a few things from being married to the man for thirteen years.”
That would be a lot nicer than piling exam study on top of all my freshman weed-out classes. But every scrap of Anna’s pride rebelled at the thought of taking her failure and turning it into an excuse for a year abroad. It wouldn’t feel right. I need to deserve it!
“Thanks, Mom.” She gave an appreciative smile before she remembered this was all supposed to be hypothetical. “Hopefully it won’t come to that, though.” She checked the time. Crap, only ten minutes left until I land!
“Hey, let me let you go.” She tried not to look as hurried as she felt. “I still need to go over some of the stuff Dad and I are talking about, and I’m almost there.”
“Sure honey, take care.” Her mom gave her a significant look. “And don’t worry. If you focus on what your heart really wants, the rest will sort itself out.”
Her mother cut the connection, and Anna slumped back in her seat. She checked the time again: eight more minutes. Well, there’s probably not that much more to think about anyway, except—
Her phone buzzed with a text. Her eyes flicked over the details: her friend Susan, pool-side cookout next week, barbeque ribs, don’t dress like a nerd because that guy you like will be there… She jerked herself away, dismissing the notification. I’ll text back later. I’ve still got a few more minutes left to—
Anna’s phone buzzed yet again, and she felt her throat tighten as her father’s icon popped up on the screen. No! She quashed a resurgence of panic. I’m not ready yet! But then she felt a new resolve forming. Things would work out, or they wouldn’t, but it was time to get this over with.
She took a deep breath and accepted the call, this time on her phone’s display instead of the car’s. For a conversation like this, she needed every advantage she could get.
“Anna?” her father said. “I’m sorry, but there’s been a change of plan.”
“Wait. A change?” Anna was off-balance already. “What kind of change?”
“I got called out to Washington, D.C., on short notice yesterday. I can’t get back to Austin until early this evening.” Her dad’s normally handsome face looked puffy and shiny on her phone’s small screen. “Some military VIPs tapped me as a subject-matter expert for a closed-door congressional hearing that started this morning. I was up all last night preparing.”
