Page 28 of A Thousand Second Chances

Quinn’s eyes brighten when she sees him. “Oh, hi. Percy, right?”

He nods. “Hi, Quinn. You, uh, excited for the bike trip?”

“Totally! There’s so much cool history on this island. I can’t wait to take it all in!”

“Yeah. Um, me too. Hey, Chris? Can I talk to you for a sec?” He tips his head to the side, indicating for me to follow him.

I consider refusing, but in the end, I reluctantly trail after him. As soon as we’re out of earshot, I say, “I think we should tell her.”

His face gets this pinched expression that’s equal parts cute and irritating. “Are you sure that’s a good idea? It’s kind of a lot to take in, and I don’t want to waste all day convincing her.”

“Trust me, no convincing necessary. I sort of already told her most of it this morning. She was there when I started to put the pieces together.”

He runs a hand through his mop of messy hair and sighs. “If thisisa loop, she won’t remember anything tomorrow. We’d have to bring her up to speed all over again.”

I shrug. “So, we do it if it seems like it’ll be helpful and skip it if it seems like it won’t.” He looks ready to protest again, and I cut in before he can. “Look, like you said, we don’t even know if there’s going tobeanother repeated day. All we can do is focus on thenow. And if two heads are better than one,threeheads working on a solution trumps two.”

Reluctance oozes off him as he bows his head. “Fine. If you genuinely think it’s a good idea, I’ll go along with it.” He shoots a glance toward the front of the Royal Lilac. “But whatever we’re doing, we need to come up with a believable excuse for Professor Oshkoff so she doesn’t drag us along on the bike tour.”

I check my phone and see it’s almost 9:00 AM. She’ll be looking for us soon. “Easy. We slip out the back before she notices we’re gone.”

Percy looks at me like I suggested we murder his favorite pet. “We can’t do that! It’s against school policy.”

I fight to keep the exasperation from my voice. “Percy, we’re experiencing an inexplicable phenomenon that may or may not be a time loop, and you’re worried aboutschool policy? Jesus, you sound like Hermione right now.”

His lips quirk. “Yeah, well, without Hermione, they’d have died a dozen times over,Harry.”

I meet his grin with one of my own, and for a brief, glorious moment, it’s as if everything’s all right between us. Then, his smile falters, and he looks away. I grimace as reality comes crashing back in with a vengeance.

“Fine.” I turn toward our table, where Quinn’s still waiting. “We’ll play by the rules—thistime anyway. Let’s go fill Quinn in and see what we can come up with for Oshkoff.”

As I expected, Quinn takes the news in stride, nodding along calmly as we relate what little we’ve gleaned so far about our predicament. Only Quinn could accept something this absurd without batting an eye.

“Sounds likeGroundhog Day,” she says when we finish.

“Exactly!” I agree. “Though, I’ll pass on the romance.”

Percy tenses at that, and Quinn blinks, appearing confused for the first time. I mentally kick myself.Of course.She doesn’t remember my blurted confession from dinner last night because, to her, last night never happened. That’s…huh. Percy might’ve had a valid point. If this thing lasts through multiple iterations, it’ll be hard to keep straight what she or anyone else knows in any given loop.

“Okaayy,” Quinn says slowly, drawing the word out as her eyes dart between us. “No romance. Got it. That’s not what that movie was about anyway—at least, not entirely.”

“It’s not?” Percy asks.

She shakes her head. “It’s about learning from your mistakes so you can become a better person. Finding love was only one facet of that.” She grins, fixing her gaze on me. “Maybe this is the universe’s way of telling you to stop being such a grumpy asshole.”

I groan. “Quinn!”

“Hey, just calling it like I see it.”

While I glare at my current best friend, my former best friend’s expression grows thoughtful. “I guess that’s one possibility for why this is happening. Not necessarily because we need to work on ourselves,” he adds hastily when I switch my glare to him, much to Quinn’s amusement. “But because there’s something we need to do.”

I raise an eyebrow. “You honestly believe God or fate or whatever has selected us so we can carry out some ineffable plan?”

“Maybe, maybe not. At this point, we can’t discount any possibility. I’m open to other suggestions.”

He says it as a challenge, and I hesitate, racking my brain for other plausible explanations. Short of hallucinations, insanity, or brain tumors—none of which I’m particularly keen to raise as options, even in jest—I come up blank.

Quinn, thankfully, breaks the silence. “Well,Groundhog Day’sonly one example of a time loop. There are plenty of others we could draw inspiration from. TakeEdge of Tomorrow, for example. In that one, alien technology creates the loop. To break the cycle, they have to stop the invasion.”