Bargaining with Einstein — Helena Wang
General relativity
Albert Einstein, 1918
Time dilation is
My notes trail off as I begin twirling my pencil between my fingers. I can’t help but watch her as she writes, eyes flitting down to the closeness of our desks, our chairs. But my pencil catches on my thumb, clattering to the ground. Face flushing, I snatch it from the floor, but it's too late: she's already turned toward me. Her mouth tugs into a grin and she tilts her head, giggling, hair rippling down her shoulders like sunlight over water. It'd take my $10 heatless curling rod and frayed yellow scrunchies to achieve those kinds of waves. I do my best to smile back, like someone is yanking the corners of my mouth.
The speed of light in a vacuum
must always remain constant
no matter what.
I don't realize how tightly I’m clenching my pencil until I hear it crack in my fist. I look down. Splotches of white blossom across my fleshy, scarlet fingertips. I loosen my grip, taking a new pencil from my backpack, continue scrawling notes in my notebook. So does she, except her bullets sit atop each line in an even row, her e's looped together like ribbons.
Thus, when gravitational fields increase
and space curves,
time slows as a result.
The teacher paces the front of the classroom, hands behind his back.
“Can anyone give me a good analogy for general relativity?”
She raises her hand first. He calls on her, and she stands up. Elbows propped up against my desk, I rest my head upon it and lean towards her.
“Imagine a ball rolling down a bathroom sink. The ball is some mass in the universe, and the curved basin of the sink is bent space-time. The ball races round and round the sink’s edges in a circular motion, similar to how planets orbit their suns.”
Like how planets orbit their suns.
Just as Einstein postulated, space seems to pinch around her, and the world slows down. I could count just how many freckles dotted her rosy cheeks. And she'd turn away, dimples crinkling her lip's edges, but I'd tell her they look like the stars suspended in the Milky Way.
Racing around the sink.
I can pinpoint the exact moment the sun shifts outside, flooding her eyes, spraying her irises with flecks of gold. I feel like a fly trapped in their amber, always lagging behind her.
But I wonder what'd happen if I reached through spacetime anyways. If in the sliver of this moment, she'd reach out, too. If her fingers would settle upon my knuckles, warmth tracing my river-veined skin. Together, we'd write with bold, swooping letters; I'd write like her, and she'd write like me.
Forever.
I scribble out the words as soon as I write them, scattering crumbs of graphite across the white page, leaving ashy trails of gray. I spring up from my chair; it almost topples backward. Our teacher raises his eyebrow, inviting me to speak.
“In real life,” I say, chin steady, “wouldn’t the ball eventually fall down the sink drain?”
She turns toward me. Her eyes are wide, dripping with honey; they bear into my dark, beady ones. Mine will probably never glow like hers. Even so, I hold her gaze, a twitch of my leg in the sticky resin.
The teacher knits his eyebrows together. "What do you mean by that?"
"Well… sink drains are fixed. Suns aren't, since the same gravity affects them and their planets both." My stomach clenches, a fist closing around nothing. "Because of Newton's, uh, third law."
His eyes narrow.
"Perhaps you are right, but suns are much more massive than their planets and aren't meaningfully affected by their gravity. Only the planet orbits. Your classmate's analogy holds true."
Well, even physics has failed me. Stiffly, I nod, heat flooding my neck and crawling up my ears as I sit back down. Hunching over my notebook, I try to swipe away some of the graphite crumbs, but I only further smudge the paper.
She's still looking at me as I jot down my final note.
Planets do not meaningfully
affect their suns.
Only the planet accelerates,
far,
far
smaller.
Her eyes linger a second longer, tugging at me. Just enough to keep me circling.
Helena Wang is a high school junior attending Hopkins School in New Haven, Connecticut, USA. Her work has been commended by Scholastic Writing and she is a Finalist for DePaul's Blue Book: Best American High School Writing 2026. She enjoys writing prose inspired by scientific and speculative concepts. In college, she wants to study physics alongside literature or journalism. Outside of writing, her hobbies include playing the viola, (trying to) understand quantum mechanics, listening to indie-rock, and drinking overpriced lattes.