When the telephone jangled near my sleeping head, I sat bolt upright and sent my cat Templeton flying across the room in a hissing cloud of black fur.

Who died? was my first thought, followed closely by, who’s about to die? for waking me.

I groped for my glasses, shoved them on my face, and looked at the clock. It read four minutes after six in electric blue numerals. The phone rang again. I snatched it up.

“India?” My brother’s voice, hyped up on caffeinated pop and mathematical theorems, zipped out over the line “Could you look up Yang-Mills Theory for me at the library today? I think I’m really onto something. I’d do it myself, you know, but I’m hitting a wall here with work. And the library’s slow, right, because it’s summer—”

“Mark.” I interrupted.

“Huh?”

“The library’s closed today.” I swatted a hank of long, dark hair out of my face and tucked it behind my ear.

“It’s closed? But why?” He sounded shocked.

“It’s the Fourth of July. You know, Happy Independence Day and all that.” I glared at the clock. “It’s also six-oh-five in the morning on a day I don’t have to work,” I added in case he was having trouble grasping the point, which Mark often did.

“It is?”

“Where are you?” I asked while rubbing my gray eyes, which were gritty from sleep.

“In my office?”

“You don’t sound very sure of that.”

There was a pause. “Definitely my office. I’m working on this really great theorem. I think I have it now, India. My dissertation—”

“I understand,” I stepped in before he could enter another long-winded explanation about The Dissertation. He’d worked on it for half a decade. It’d become a bit of a swear word in my parents’ house.

“Well, Mark, I better let you get back to it. Call me at the library tomorrow, and I’ll see if I have time to look up that Yohoo-Miller thing for you.”

“Yang-Mills. It’s a partial differential equation that—”