Some people say the story of the universe began with an explosion.
Those people are right.
The explosion happened on a Wednesday afternoon in the storage closet of the laboratory room for the science classes at Hammer Hill Middle School in Eastwick, Connecticut. It wasn’t, universally-speaking, a huge explosion--certainly not a "big bang"--but it was large and loud enough to shake the wall of the classroom next door and scare the bejeezus out of all the sixth graders in that science class.
All except one…
Piper Lobe didn’t hear the lab explode on the other side of the wall. She didn’t see chunks of plaster and ceiling tiles fall onto the surprised students on that side of the room, or see the glass doors shatter in the cabinets that held rock samples and fetal pigs. She didn’t hear the frightened screams, or the sudden blare of the fire alarm, or the surprisingly loud voice of Debbie Mandrake, the quiet girl from the back of the class, who took charge and ordered everyone to get out while Mrs. Ames shrieked helplessly at the blackboard.
Piper was completely unaware of the chaos that surrounded her because all of her attention was focused on the chaos inside her. The twelve-year old girl sat at her desk, her head thrown back, her eyes wide and unseeing, and heard the words.
There were four of them. They were loud and they filled her head, causing massive pressure to her brain. They hurt. They left no room for any other thoughts--which was a shame because Piper usually had some great ones.
“Come on!”
Something was shaking her. Piper felt like she was waking up but knew she hadn’t been asleep. She could control her body again. She could unclench.
“Come on! Piper! Wake up! Are you having a seizure or something?”
The shaking returned. A big hand was pushing her shoulder...although, to Piper, most hands were big hands. She blinked and found funny Marty Denver standing over her with a scared look on his face.
She collected her stunned, squished thoughts and managed to ask, “W-what?”
“Do you need me to carry you?” he yelled over the alarms and the sound of the other students pushing their way out the classroom door. “I mean…I could. You’re probably light as a feather, you being so sm--”
“Don’t say it,” Piper’s snapped, instant anger poking a hole through her jumbled thoughts.
Marty’s cheeks flushed with embarrassment through a dusting of plaster. “Sorry! Sorry, it’s just...we have to get out of here!” Marty’s feet were dancing below him, ready to go and go fast.
Piper wiped dust from her eyes as she remembered. “Did you hear it?”
“Of course I heard it,” Marty said. “I think it was right next door!”
“What? What was next door?”
“That explosion! The--” He looked confused. “What did you think I was talking about?”
“The voice...in my head...” She realized her words sounded crazy as she spoke them but she couldn’t stop. She looked up at Marty. “You didn’t hear the words?”
Panic filled his eyes. “Look, something’s wrong. I’ll carry you.”
He bent down to scoop her out of her seat, but Piper grabbed his arm and squeezed it for emphasis. “Four words!” she said, “They weren’t out loud! They were in my...” She couldn’t say it again. “They weren’t from next door!”
“If those words were, ‘Run Away! Run Away!’ I’d listen to them--Ow!” Marty pulled his arm away from her sharp fingernails. He turned to see the last of the other students jostling out the door and couldn’t keep his feet from following after them. He gave Piper one last confused look and said, “Whatever you’re doing, this weirdness…you know this is why nobody talks to you, right?" Then he gave in to his fear and bolted out the door.
A little thought of ‘ouch’ passed through Piper’s brain, but it didn’t last. She was alone in the classroom, and as far as she was concerned it might as well have been silent. The sounds of the evacuation of Hammer Hill Middle School couldn’t compete with the four words that had filled her head:
“THERE I AM OOPS.”
They were loud words, as loud as they were meaningless. Had that voice been real? Was it just a dream? Right now everything felt like a dream.
Something smelled. Burning and chemicals and--oh, right, an explosion! Piper looked at the wreckage across the room and met eyes with a long dead frog staring at her from a shattered jar of formaldehyde on the floor. Something in those lifeless amphibian eyes seemed to be urging her to leave. She realized it was a good idea. Thanks, frog.
Stumbling like a sleepwalker out of the classroom into the school hallway, Piper was immediately confronted with a thick cloud billowing from the room next door. The smoke swirled and danced in the air, hypnotically, compelling Piper to stop and stare into its gray depths. No, not just gray, there was a definite hint of green. The analytical part of Piper’s mind had to ask what would cause something like that? What chemicals in a middle school science lab would have that reaction? As the smoke began to twirl closer to her, Piper quickly adjusted her addled mind for ‘less analysis/more running away’ and fled down the hall.
The four big words still echoed in her head: “THERE I AM OOPS!!” Weird, weird, weird...
Mr. James, the Vice Principal, was standing in the school entrance, beckoning to her furiously with his big meaty hand. “Get out of there, kid! Why aren’t you with your class? Get your butt in gear!”
She dutifully jogged toward him, a tiny figure of freckles and brown hair emerging from the haze.
“Were you in the...?” He looked over her head to the cloud of smoke spreading through the hallway, obviously wanting to help but keeping a firm grip on the exit door. “Is anyone hurt?”
Piper was ashamed that she hadn’t thought to ask that herself. Then she remembered that she was in the only class that would have used that room at this time. “It was the science lab. I don’t think anyone was in there.”
“Thank God! What happened?”
Piper tried to say what she knew, but the words wouldn’t come. After three false starts, she stopped, looked up helplessly at the man, and yelled, “THERE I AM OOPS!” at the top of her voice, then finished in a calmer tone, “...and everything went ‘Boom.’”
Mr. James looked down at her with a stunned, lost expression on his sweaty face. Piper had to laugh. “Exactly!” she said, pointing to his face. "That’s exactly how it felt."
Before he could ask anything else, Piper Lobe walked under his arm, without ducking, and headed out into the sunlight.
She hoped things would be better outside and life would return to normal.
It wouldn’t.
A universe had found her.