Saving Lucas Biggs by Marisa de los Santos

scoffed.
    It’s possible that I rolled my eyes at this point, because my dad said, “Once you’ve stopped rolling your eyes, ladybug, do me a favor.”
    “What?”
    “Picture your average pair of workout pants.”
    I laughed, again.
    “Or shirt. Actually, any item of breathable, high-performance athletic apparel will do. When you look at your item, it appears to be all one piece, right? But actually, it’s full of holes , exactly like . . . can you guess?”
    I shook my head.
    “ The fabric of the universe! Everything you see around you is at least as much not-there as it is there. The spaces between the particles inside the atoms that make up your own body? Huge, like the distances between the stars in the Milky Way. The pinholes in the garden hose? No need to poke them yourself; they’re already there, at least until they close up. The basic material of reality is all loosely connected and shifting, the tiny bits shimmering and scattering into holes that flash open and shut, blinking all around us.”
    I tried to picture this, and, weirdly, I could. So I nodded.
    My dad continued. “The problem is that almost nobody can see the blinking holes because most people’s perception is as holey as everything else. You know those flip books? The ones with a picture on every page, pictures that vary just a little, so that when the pages are turned quickly, the pictures turn into a kind of animated cartoon?”
    “I made one in art class,” I said. “Remember? The guy diving off the edge of the soup bowl and swimming around with the dumplings.”
    “I do remember. The animation with those books, even one as excellent as yours was, tends to be a little herky-jerky, but if you added more pages and flipped faster, it would smooth out, look continuous, tell a story. Same goes for perception. Take Mr. Yang, for instance.”
    My dad nodded in the direction of our neighbor, who was running down our street, like he did every weekend morning, listening to his iPod and dancing to the music just ever so slightly. I smiled.
    “Take him where?” I said.
    “Ha ha. Your eyes are seeing him at just ten frames per second, which is pretty herky-jerky, but your brain is guessing what’s in those blank spaces and is kindly filling them in for you, adding pages to the flip book, so that Mr. Yang’s running looks seamless, smooth as silk.”
    “Well, except for the dancing,” I said.
    “In situations like these, your brain usually guesses correctly, but there’s always the chance that in one of the gaps, Mr. Yang doesn’t keep running, but instead jumps—at lightning speed—twenty feet in the air, grabs a Frisbee out of the sky with his teeth, and flings it into the distance. And you miss it because your eyes don’t see it and your brain guesses that he won’t grab a Frisbee, that he’ll just plain run, with a few dance moves thrown in. Get it?”
    “I think so.”
    “Similarly, your brain guesses that in one of the gaps between frames in whatever you happen to be seeing, a pinhole in the form of a portal into the past doesn’t blink open and shut. So you miss it, the portal, as though it were never there because, for you, it never was. Unless you’re an O’Malley.”
    At this, I jerked my head around to look at my dad. He nodded.
    “Or a Picasso or a Tubman, if Uncle Joe is to be believed, which maybe he isn’t. If you’ve got the O’Malley quirk, your big, odd, glass-green eyes, at least while you’re young, before your eyesight starts to fade, can see things other people’s eyes don’t.”
    “Like what?”
    “Like way more pages of the flip book than other people can see. Like the Frisbee between the teeth and the blinking holes in time.”
    “Whoa.”
    “Whoa is right. But even we don’t see this stuff all the time, because how would that be? Can you imagine it?”
    I imagined it. Images coming at me from every direction all the time, bombarding my brain. I shivered at the thought. My dad grabbed a piece of