The Thermometer That Wouldn't Move

The freezer door sealed behind them with a thunk like a refrigerator the size of a room, which is what it was.

"Minus eighteen," Soren read off the dial by the door. "It says minus eighteen in here."

Maya was holding the little plastic thermometer her uncle kept clipped to a clipboard, the kind you put under your tongue. She had borrowed it without asking, which was the only way she ever borrowed things.

"Put it in," she said. "Before we get cold."

Soren put it under his tongue. They stood between the stacked boxes of frozen peas and breathed out clouds. Maya was already shivering, her arms crossed, hands shoved into her armpits. After a minute Soren took the thermometer out and turned it toward the door light.

"Thirty-seven," he said.

"Thirty-seven what?"

"Celsius. Thirty-seven point oh."

Maya frowned. "But it's minus eighteen in here."

"I know."

"So you should be colder."

"I'm extremely cold," Soren said. "That's not the question."

They pushed back out into the store and the heat hit them like a wet towel. Outside the propped back door the parking lot shimmered. Maya's uncle had said it was thirty-six degrees in the shade and there was no shade.

"Okay," said Maya. "Now do it out here. In the hot."

Soren stood in the doorway with the sun on his neck until sweat started on his forehead. He put the thermometer back under his tongue. Maya watched the second hand on her uncle's wall clock. A whole minute. The back of Soren's shirt was going dark.

He took it out.

"Thirty-seven," he said again.

"No."

"Thirty-seven point one."

Maya took the thermometer out of his hand and looked at it like it had lied to her. "That's basically the same number. You went from a freezer to an oven and you're the same."

"I'm not the same. I was freezing in there and I'm sweating out here."

"But the number didn't move."

"The number didn't move," Soren agreed. He wiped his forehead and looked at his wet hand. "Why am I sweating?"

"Because it's hot."

"But why does being hot make water come out of me?"

Maya stopped. That was a real question and she hadn't thought about it before, which annoyed her in the good way. "The water," she said slowly. "It's wet. Wet things dry off and get cold. When you get out of a pool you're freezing even if it's hot out."

"Evaporation," Soren said. "It pulls heat off you when it dries."

"So the sweat is to cool you down." She looked at the freezer, then at the parking lot. "Then in there. In the freezer. You were shivering."

"My whole body was shivering."

"Shivering is moving. Moving is warm. When you run you get hot." She was talking fast now. "So the shivering is to make heat."

Soren had gotten his notebook out of his back pocket. He drew a small box and wrote minus eighteen next to it, and a sun and wrote thirty-six, and under both of them he wrote thirty-seven and underlined thirty-seven twice.

"Look," he said. "Sweat to cool down. Shiver to heat up. They're opposite. And they both end at thirty-seven."

"Like the freezer dial," Maya said.

Soren looked up. "What?"

"The dial. On the freezer. It says minus eighteen and the freezer stays minus eighteen. When it gets warmer than that, the freezer kicks on, you can hear it. The motor. And then it goes quiet again when it's cold enough." She held up the little tongue thermometer. "You're a freezer set to thirty-seven."

They both went quiet. Out in the lot a delivery truck idled.

"But a freezer only does one thing," Soren said. "It only cools. The sun does the heating, the dirt does the heating, the freezer just removes it." He tapped the notebook. "You do both. You make your own heat and you throw away your own heat. At the same temperature. Without a dial."

Maya put her hand flat against her own cheek. "Feel your face," she said. "In the heat my face goes red. Hot. My uncle's face goes really red mowing the lawn."

Soren felt his face. It was warm at the edges.

"And in the freezer," Maya said, "my hands went white. White and they hurt." She held them up. They were pink again now. "The blood goes away from the outside when it's cold. So you don't lose the warm out your fingers. And the blood comes up to your face in the heat so it can dump the heat out."

"You're moving your own blood around to where you need it," Soren said. "Closer to the skin to lose heat. Away from the skin to keep it." He wrote it down. Sweat. Shiver. Blood out. Blood in. Four arrows, all of them pointing at the same number.

"Nobody told it to," Maya said. "That's the part. I wasn't deciding. I didn't decide to shiver. I didn't decide to sweat. I didn't decide which way to push the blood."

"Something decided."

"Something in me has been holding me at thirty-seven my whole life," Maya said. "While I sleep. While I'm at school. In winter. In here." She pointed the thermometer at the freezer and then at the sun. "Minus fifty somewhere, plus fifty somewhere, people live in both, and they're all thirty-seven. All of them. Right now. Every person."

Soren stopped writing.

"Half a degree," he said. "My mom's a nurse. She says if you go up two degrees you're sick in bed. Two degrees and the whole thing falls apart. So it's not just holding thirty-seven. It's holding it that close. All the time. Without you knowing."

Maya ducked back through the freezer door into the cold. Soren followed her. They stood in the white breath-cloud between the frozen peas, both of them shivering, and Maya put the thermometer under her own tongue and watched Soren count the seconds on his fingers while the motor of the freezer kicked on around them.