Springback

by Jana Miller

  “You too,” I said with a smile as Jake opened the door for her.

  “K, bye!” she sang out, and then she was gone.

  “So that’s my mom,” Jake said with a grin as he headed to the kitchen to take some Tylenol with a huge glass of water. He threw some popcorn in the microwave while I looked around at pictures of him and his mom. “Where does your mom work?” I asked.

  “She’s a nurse in the OR,” he answered. “She has kind of crazy hours, so she has a hard time keeping track and being on time.”

  “She seems fun.”

  He grinned. “Totally. We have movie nights and she makes me watch eighties movies every time. Lindy always wants to hang out here if she’s around.”

  He set the bowl of popcorn on the table, and I took the chair across from him as he sank into the couch, resting his head against the back of it and closing his eyes while he talked.

  “Okay. So when we got to the library,” he reported in a tired voice, “you told me a bunch of stuff about rewinding. You said it was the same stuff you told me the first time.” How smart of me. Now I wouldn’t have to repeat it. “And you tried to be in the same place as you were the first time so you’d see her come in. After you waved to her, I followed her to the kids’ section, you know, for reconnaissance, but she didn’t get any books. She just wandered around and kept checking her phone. She looked kind of stressed out.” He opened his eyes and lifted his head. “I was a pretty great spy, by the way.” I just looked at him skeptically and he elaborated. “Hid behind bookshelves, held a book open in front of my face and peeked out from behind it . . .” He demonstrated the move for me.

  “No you did not!”

  “Okay, no, but I did hide. When she went to talk to you, I circled behind the shelves closest to your desk.” He shoved a handful of microwave popcorn in his mouth. “Like a ninja.”

  He relayed the conversation as far as he remembered, and the beginning was almost word for word what she’d said the first time around. “After she told you she’s known about you for a while, she said she needed your help, something about fixing something—it sounded like she said something about a ring, but she was talking pretty quietly and she didn’t explain any more than that. Then she asked if you’ve felt more jolts than usual lately. But she called them…switchbacks? No, maybe springbacks. Like when you pluck a guitar string. She said that when you let go of the time strands, they snap back into place and kind of vibrate, and anyone who can rewind feels it.”

  I let that sink in for a moment. I didn’t know how she would know that about the strands, but it made sense. And it was a cool way of describing it. “Okay, so that’s her word for the vertigo jolts.”

  He nodded.

  “And the new ones are from you, the same ones I’ve been feeling.”

  “Guess I’m a pretty big deal around here,” he said in a satisfied way. I smiled and shook my head.

  He leaned forward, resting his forearms on his thighs. “So then she started telling you how you’re not supposed to be able to rewind because only her family is supposed to.”

  I shook my head a little, bewildered. “Why would she tell me that?”

  “I don’t know. But I think it was actually just background information for whatever happened that she needs help with. She was trying to explain something her mom had wanted to do, and then she reached into her bag, and I rewound.”

  “She reached into her bag? Why would that—?”

  “It freaked me out, okay? Like she was going to pull out a taser or some time-travel-related...I don’t know. Like—” he made a zombie-like face and switched to a creepy-girl voice—“‘You’re not the chosen ones, so I’m here to stop you’ or something. It was too confusing and the whole thing felt way too weird, and kind of threatening, and I panicked. Plus you said I had to beat her to the rewind.”

  His voice had gotten a little defensive, so I put my hands up to show I wasn’t trying to attack him. “Hey, I get it. I mean, not the part about feeling threatened by a time-travel taser, but I totally panicked before she even told me anything.” I sighed. “Anything else? Wait, what exactly did she say about her mom? She can rewind too?”

  “Yeah.” His gaze was now fixed on something across the room as he focused on remembering. “She said there used to be two families who could rewind, and they passed down the ability until one of the families did something bad, and now only a few ‘chosen’ people are allowed to rewind.”

  “Chosen by who?” I demanded. “Someone controls it? Like the government? Or like...the cosmos, or something dumb like that?”

  He gave a dramatic shrug, holding his hands up as well. “Nooo clue.”

  “Okay,” I said, trying to organize the information in my head. “So, she wanted to ask me about fixing something, maybe a ring”—I looked to him for confirmation and he nodded—“and to see if I knew anything about the ‘springbacks,’ and to tell me that I wasn’t supposed to rewind.”

  “Well, no, I don’t think she was telling you that you shouldn’t. It was more like she was explaining why her mom did whatever it was she did, or was planning to do.”

  “And you don’t know what that was?”

  He shook his head. “It has something to do with whatever she needs help fixing, that’s all I know.”

  “A ring?”

  “Maybe. That’s what it sounded like, but it didn’t really make sense. What do you know about fixing rings?”

  “It must have something to do with time manipulation.”

  His eyes grew big. “Maybe they have a magic ring that makes time manipulation possible!” I looked at him skeptically. “No, it makes sense! And the ring is broken, and that’s why the strands are all crazy!”

  I wrinkled my nose. I hated that that kind of made sense. Time manipulation wasn’t supposed to be magical. It just—was.

  Chapter Seven

  Just then, a fluffy white dog emerged from the hallway and ambled up to Jake.

  “Hey, Mitzy,” Jake cooed as the dog hopped up onto his lap.

  I watched the dog, a small smile tugging at my lips. She looked so much like Puffy. “Hi, girl,” I murmured, getting up to sit by Jake so I could pet her. “She’s so cute.”

  “You like dogs?”

  I shrugged. “Not usually, but she looks just like my”—my throat caught, unable to say the words my brother’s dog—“like our old dog.”Three weeks after Max died, I’d accidentally left the side gate open, and Max’s dog, Puffy, had gotten out. I’d ridden my bike around the neighborhood for fifteen minutes frantically searching for him, panicked sobs building, eventually taking a corner too quickly and skidding my bike sideways, right out from under me. I’d landed in a random yard and sat with my knees up, my hands pulling the back of my head down, scrunching into a ball to disappear as I lost control of my thoughts and emotions completely. It was Max’s dog, but it may as well have been Max himself. And it was my fault, again. My sobs led to a full-blown panic attack as my mind insisted that I relive over and over the moment I’d left the gate open, reaching back as if I could change what I’d done if I fixated on it hard enough.

  Then, for the first time, the strands had appeared in my mind while I was actually awake, and without thinking, I tugged them in desperation. I was jerked backwards, up onto my bike, and experienced the terrifying thrill of high-speed reverse bike riding. As soon as I realized I was still pulling the strands, I let go in a panic—and fell off my bike again, crashing and stumbling from the sudden reversal, the vertigo, and a sudden, intense headache.

  I hadn’t gone back far enough to fix my mistake, so despite the pain I was in and my heavy, panicked breathing, I closed my eyes and forced the strands to appear again.

  But no matter how hard I concentrated or how insistently I willed them to glow again, the strands stayed dull and silent. I couldn’t rewind again.

  Puffy had come back on his own once he got hungry, but I had discovered what the strands meant. What they allowed me to do. And from then
on, I’d had a new obsession.

  Because if I could go back in time—if I could go back far enough…

  I’d never let myself think it consciously, but I had to at least try. Because back then, I was convinced this ability must have been given to me as a way to fix my mistakes, and there was one mistake that would never stop tormenting me unless I could go back far enough to fix it.

  After the gate incident, I tried to rewind every day, even though I couldn’t explain to my parents all the headaches and dizzy spells that came with it. It took me a week to be able to do it again, and when I finally managed it, I couldn’t go more than ten minutes back. Every day I went a little farther, but every day that passed was another full day I’d have to figure out how to rewind—and it had already been more than a month since Max’s death.

  So I pushed harder. Which led to more headaches, more dizziness, more crazy-Chloe moments.

  Which had led to the psychologist, and my decision to keep my abilities to myself for the next seven years.

  I sighed, pulling myself back to the present—where suddenly there were people I could talk to about my ability.

  “So Leah came to talk to me about about fixing a ring that controls the messed-up strands,” I summarized, unable to sound as mocking as I wanted to since it made a weird sort of sense.

  “Exactly!” he answered, eyes wide with certainty.

  “But why would she need to tell me about the two families?” I argued. “Was it some kind of warning? Or am I somehow related to the families? And what about you?” I challenged. “Could we both be related to Leah?”

  “Uh, no,” he said firmly. “I am definitely not related to Leah.” I gave him a questioning look, and he acted like it was obvious. “She’s my future girlfriend, so.”

  I tried not to laugh. I tried hard, but a snort came through. “You are such an idiot.” I took a handful of popcorn. “And hey,” I added in an offended voice. “She was still going to be your girlfriend when you thought she was about to tase me with a—time…weapon?”

  “Uhhh, no?”

  “Thanks,” I said drily. “Well, not that I should be encouraging this, since you already have a girlfriend, but probably you’re more likely to be related to me, since you don’t know anything about any of this stuff either. And Leah obviously doesn’t know that you can rewind, or she wouldn’t be asking me about the jolts.”

  “Or”—his voice took on a conspiratorial tone—“she does know about me, and she’s just checking to see if you do, too.”

  I eyed him, not sure if he was being serious or not, though he did have a point. It wasn’t like anything else she’d said or done made any sense. “So maybe you’ve met her before and don’t remember it?”

  He shrugged. “I mean, I have a hard time believing I’d forget meeting her, but—”

  I shook my head and he half-grinned.

  “What did I tell her when she asked about the springbacks?” I asked.

  “Nothing. She didn’t actually seem as interested in that as she was in explaining the thing about the families and her mom. I think she expected it to convince you to help her.”

  “Why would that convince me to help her?” Right now, it was doing the opposite. “She’s telling me I’m not good enough to rewind, but then asking me for help?”

  “I mean,” he said, “it would really be helping us too, right? If she knows more than we do about whatever is wrong…”

  A slightly sick feeling I hadn’t particularly noticed before suddenly ballooned and twisted in my stomach. She knew a lot more about it than we did. And she seemed to know a lot more about me than she should.

  Had Leah been…spying on me? Had she only befriended me because of this, or had she discovered it later? I’d met her at least six months ago at the library, and she’d been talking to me more and more lately. But if she’d known for “a while,” why had she kept it from me? It felt completely unfair—manipulative, even. I couldn’t imagine Leah doing anything evil, but how was I to know? Our whole “friendship” could be based on a lie.

  A quiet voice in the back of my head asked how what she had done with me was any different from what I’d done with Jake—and to some extent, what I did with everyone almost every day—but I shook it off.

  Jake was talking to me through my haze of confused emotion, but I couldn’t try to solve unsolvable mysteries anymore right now. I asked Jake to take me home.

  * * *

  “So,” Jake said when we were almost back to my house. “What’s next? Do we help Leah?”

  I sighed. “I don’t know. Can we talk about it later?”

  “Well, yeah, I guess, but don’t you think we should do something?”

  “We don’t even know for sure what she wants help with. Just—let’s talk tomorrow, okay?” This had already been the longest day ever.

  Jake didn’t bother hiding his impatience. “What if it’s urgent? You owe her an answer.”

  “I don’t owe her anything,” I argued. “She’s been using me.”

  “You don’t know that for sure.”

  “I don’t have to know for sure! And she hasn’t really asked me yet. You rewound it.”

  “Chloe.” This was the most serious I’d ever seen him.

  I held up my hands to stop him from lecturing me. “I know, Jake. I’ll think about it.”

  “What is there to think about? If it’s about fixing the time strands, you have to do it.”

  “Why? Why can’t we just leave it alone and all of us stop rewinding? What about that?” He acted like fixing it was so obviously the only choice, but had he really thought about it that much? “Why does it have to get fixed? Maybe we’re not supposed to do this in the first place!”

  His expression as he pulled over in front of my house was a mixture of confusion and disappointment. He stopped the car and turned to me. “What if we have these abilities for a reason?”

  I shook my head. “Trust me, we don’t,” I insisted, reaching for the door handle. “I’ve had them almost eight years and have never seen a good reason.”

  “Have you even tried?”

  “Tried what?”

  “I don’t know—tried to figure it out. Tried to do something with it.”

  I pressed my lips together. “Yes.”

  “Really.” His sarcasm said something more like Yeah, right.

  I turned to him. “Of course I’ve tried. I tried lots of things. For a long time. And I asked a lot of questions, but there was nobody to answer.” Memories of that first year pressed on me. “I pushed and pushed, trying to go back far enough—trying to figure out why—but what was I supposed to do? By myself? If I was supposed to do something with it, I would have been able to—” I broke off and looked away, embarrassed by my own intensity.

  He sat silently for a few moments and I finally said, “I’ve been doing this for a long time, Jake. I know what I’m talking about. I know what works and what doesn’t. We’re not superheroes, if that’s what you’re thinking. We can’t save the world.”

  “Of course that’s what I’m thinking. We have a superpower! We could do so much!”

  “Yeah, well, it doesn’t work.” I looked at him, resolute. “And if we’re going to do anything with this together, whether or not we help Leah, you have to follow the rules.”

  He made a face. “You have rules?” I felt my face heating up. “You have a crazy-cool superpower that nobody knows about, and you have rules for it?” He looked like he was about to keep going, but at the unamused look on my face, he stopped short and cleared his throat. “What are the rules?”

  “Well, other than the obvious rule—not telling anybody—I just have one,” I answered. “No big changes.”

  He stared at me for a few seconds. “No big changes,” he repeated, and I nodded slowly. “What do you mean, no big changes? Isn’t that the whole point of going back in time? To make big changes?”

  “No, it’s to—I mean, it’s not—” His tone had me flustered. “I don’t k
now what the point is. It’s not like anybody ever explained anything to me. I don’t know if there even is a point. I just know we’re not supposed to change the big stuff. Bad things happen when you do.” The image I had in my mind of my sister lying motionless in the middle of the road constantly reminded me of that.

  “How are you ‘supposed to’ or ‘not supposed to’ do anything if you’re on your own with this thing? You sound like Leah, talking like there’s someone in charge of all of this. Geez, Chloe, I mean, you can rewind time. You could do so much with that.”

  “It doesn’t work that way, Jake,” I insisted. He just looked at me, waiting for me to continue, but I refused. I didn’t have to explain myself to him. He wasn’t going to make me feel bad—I’d done enough of that on my own. “No big changes,” I said, opening my door. “That’s the deal. Can you handle it or not?” Maybe it wasn’t fair to him, but he had to know that I knew what I was talking about, whether or not I was ready to explain it.

  “Wouldn’t fixing broken strands of time be considered a big change?” he argued.

  “Maybe,” I answered. That’s why I had to think about it.

  He let out an angry breath, his jaw clenched. “Fine. No big changes.”

  “Okay. Well…I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “See you,” he muttered, not looking at me.

  I hated the disappointment in his voice, hated that his opinion of me suddenly mattered, hated how timid I sounded when I said “Bye” before getting out of his car and hurrying to the door without looking back.

  * * *

  I was nervous all the next day, keeping an eye out for Jake, partly afraid he would be mad at me and partly afraid he would think that now he could talk to me in public. I passed him in the hall between second and third hour and ducked behind a group of tall guys so he wouldn’t see me.