Springback

by Jana Miller

  Clearly my caution was warranted, because he found me at lunch. I was sitting by Jordyn at our table, and Maya and Nikki were on their way over when Jake caught my eye from across the commons. He was headed straight for me. No, I told him with my face and my non-existent mind powers. Don’t you dare come over here. He just raised his eyebrows and kept coming like he didn’t understand my wide-eyed telepathic message. I tried shaking my head a little, my eyes darting from him to Jordyn to Nikki.

  “Are you okay, Chloe?” Jordyn suddenly asked. “What are you staring at?”

  I startled, looking over at Jordyn as Nikki and Maya sat down. “Nothing, I just—” He was still coming. “I just realized—” I stood up, grabbing my stuff. “I just remembered something I—forgot.” I stumbled over my chair legs. “To do.” I backed away, adding “See ya” as I turned and speed-walked out of the lunch room, cheeks flaming.

  I barely made it around the corner before Jake caught up with me. “Hey, what was that about?”

  I glanced at him and kept walking. “What do you mean, what was that about? What are you thinking? You can’t just come talk to me in front of everybody.”

  He smiled a little, pulling his head back. “Uh—why not?”

  “Didn’t I tell you yesterday? One of my friends likes you.” His eyebrows shot up, and I realized I hadn’t told him that. “And anyway, you’re a senior and I’m a sophomore. Oh, and also, I’m—well, me—and you’re a—”

  His face showed great interest as he waited for me to finish.

  I was practically out of breath from walking so fast. “Why does it seem like you’re walking at a normal pace?” I demanded.

  “Because I am,” he said easily, humor in his eyes. “You were saying?”

  Stupid long legs. I huffed. “I don’t remember,” I lied. “But don’t talk to me around other people, okay? I can’t deal with that right now.”

  He narrowed his eyes at me a little but didn’t leave. He put his hands in his pockets as if we were having a leisurely stroll, and I finally realized I didn’t have to walk so fast and slowed to a normal pace. I glanced at him a couple of times, but he was just studying me. “What?” I finally asked, and my irritation grew when he clearly tried to hold back a smile.

  “Nothing,” he said innocently. He waited a minute before leaning in a little and whispering loudly, “Is this away from people enough that I can talk to you?”

  I stopped and turned to him with a not-amused expression. “No,” I said shortly, then turned and walked back toward the commons.

  It would have been a great exit if he hadn’t followed me.

  “Okay,” he reasoned, not even having to hurry to catch up with me, “then when?”

  “I don’t know—Saturday,” I said, stopping. When there’s nobody around at all.

  His voice finally turned serious. “Come on, Chloe. If we’re going to help Leah, it needs to be soon.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t you think fixing the strands is pretty urgent?”

  I pressed my lips together. “Yeah, well, how do you propose we find her? I don’t have her number. I don’t know where she lives. I don’t even remember her last name. She’ll probably come to the library next Wednesday; we can—I can talk to her then.”

  He stopped walking. “So you thought about it?”

  “Yeah,” I said with a sigh. “I need to at least talk to her.”

  “Good. What are you doing after school?”

  “Uh, going home.”

  “Can I give you a ride?”

  “No, I have to meet my sister to walk with her.”

  “I can give her a ride too.”

  I hesitated. Janie meeting Jake? Um, no.

  “Or…you could give me your number,” he offered.

  My stomach thought that was also a very awkward idea. But this was going to be awkward either way. “Fine.”

  He grinned and pulled out his phone.

  When he came into creative writing later that day and approached my desk, I didn’t look up at him as I muttered out of the side of my mouth, “If you make these people think there is something going on with us, I will rewind the crap out of you.”

  He laughed out loud and went to his desk.

  But at the end of class, he had no problem casually tossing out, “I’ll call you later” as he passed my desk, knocking on it a couple times. I didn’t even look up to see if anybody was looking at me before I closed my eyes to rewind; I’d warned him. But then I realized I might as well have a moment of payback. I turned around and just before he reached the door I called out, “Hey, Jake! Sorry about your hemorrhoids!”

  The shock on his face as he whipped around was priceless. For a split second I considered not rewinding it so he could remember this moment as well, but then I thought better of it. I closed my eyes, tugged back to when the bell rang, and left in a hurry before he could announce to the world that he’d managed to weasel my phone number out of me.

  Chapter Eight

  I was walking toward the junior high when I heard my name being called from behind me. I turned around and my heart constricted for a nervous moment when I saw Leah jogging to catch up to me.

  “Please don’t rewind!” she said when she got close enough. “I know you must have rewound yesterday, because you didn’t show up at all,” she said in a rush. “I must have freaked you out. I was going to talk to you about how the Ring is messed up and about all the new springbacks we’ve been feeling.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t have much reason to trust her, but I realized that until she gave me any more information, I probably didn’t have to worry about her rewinding this conversation. I folded my arms. “Why didn’t you tell me you could do it too?” I demanded.

  She sighed. “I’m not allowed to,” she responded, apparently resigned to answering my questions. “I’m not supposed to talk about it. I’m allowed to talk to you sometimes, just to keep track of what you’re doing with your power and make sure you’re not trying to teach anybody else.”

  I stared at her for a moment, speechless. So she had been spying on me. “To keep track of me?” Was she some time-manipulation secret agent or something? “What am I supposed to say to that, Leah? You’ve been lying to me, trying to control me.” My shoulders involuntarily shuddered.

  “I know, and I’m so sorry,” she replied quickly. “I wanted to let you remember, because I know how it sucks to be alone in it. But my—”

  “Alone in it? You’re not alone. Your family can rewind. You don’t know anything about being alone with this.”

  She held her hands up in surrender. “You’re right,” she admitted. “You’re totally right. And I wish I could have let you remember the times we’ve talked about it, because I do at least know a little bit of what you’ve been though. I know your parents took you to a therapist, and I know it happened when you were nine, after your brother died.”

  My chest tightened. I had told her about Max? This kept getting worse. “How much have I told you?” I forced myself to ask.

  Leah took a deep breath. “Will you let me tell you everything?” she asked. “Promise not to rewind?”

  I looked at her incredulously. “I don’t think I should have to promise you anything.”

  She pulled back a bit, hurt flashing briefly in her face, but then she nodded resolutely. “Fair point,” she conceded. “You’re right. So how about this: I’ll promise not to rewind anything, and to tell you everything I know about rewinding, about my family, about your family, and maybe you’ll consider helping me?”

  “What about my family? Can more of them rewind?”

  “No,” she answered, shaking her head. “Not as far as we know. But they used to. A few generations back.”

  My suspicions warred with my curiosity as I tried to decide if I should listen to her. But she seemed to be the only resource I had here. Like Jake had said, if I wanted to know more about rewinding, about what was wrong with the strands, she was pro
bably my only chance.

  When she saw my hesitation, she spoke up again. “I think I know what’s wrong,” she said carefully, “with the Ring of Time.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “The Ring of Time?”

  “Yeah. The strands you pull on to rewind. They’re part of the Ring of Time.”

  I stood there trying to form a response. She’d said it like it was no big deal, but the Ring of Time sounded like...a really big deal. A little too cosmic and universal. And it seemed Jake had been right—at least partially. “How—” I finally said stupidly, “how can it be a ring? The strands are straight. And they go on—forever.”

  “They do,” she answered as one side of her mouth pulled up, “in a way. But if you were a tiny speck on a huge circle, the part you could see would look straight to you.”

  I blinked. “Oh.” Wow. “So—” I tried to jumpstart my brain. “So you know what’s wrong with it?”

  She took a deep breath, looking away, before she faced me and blew it out. “My mom—she’s a little obsessed with it, and”—she winced a bit—“and I think she kind of broke it.”

  All the questions I’d been about to ask flew out of my head. “She—she what?”

  Leah sighed. “It’s kind of a long story.”

  I folded my arms. “I’m listening.

  She tucked her short hair behind one ear. “Okay...I kind of don’t know where to start. Did I tell you anything about it yesterday? The conversation you rewound?”

  Between Jake’s rewind and mine…“It was all too much to take in,” I told her. “Why don’t you just—cover everything.”

  “All right. Well—for the last couple weeks, my mom has been talking about entering the Ring of Time.” She watched my face, but I just gave her a questioning look.

  “Not just access it, like we do to pull time, but actually go—into it.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut for a second, completely at a loss. “Into it?”

  She nodded. “Into it,” she confirmed. “A long time ago, probably hundreds of years ago, somebody opened the Ring. Kind of like creating a portal so we can access it in our minds. But what my mom wants to do is to actually enter it. I’m still not totally sure what the difference is, because the information we have on it is pretty vague, but supposedly, entering it makes you become a ‘Master of Time.’” She rolled her eyes a little like she knew it sounded cheesy.

  I just stared at her. “Master of Time?” I repeated slowly. “What could a Master of Time do?”

  “Maybe...go as far backward or forward as they wanted? Even years or decades?” she guessed.

  My mind reeled. Go back decades? Who would want to relive decades? “Wait, or forward? I didn’t think that could really work. Can you guys go forward?”

  “Not really,” she answered. “I’ve tried it, but it seems pretty pointless. So I don’t know why you’d want to go forward. Unless,” she added pointedly, “unless you could kind of...speed through whatever you’d reversed.”

  Well, that would explain how someone could go so far backward. It would be a lot more like time travel. Going back years and years, then speeding through the repeat...that kind of power could cause some big changes.

  Huge changes.

  Saving-someone-from-dying huge.

  I shook myself mentally. I’d forced those thoughts away long ago.

  “Wait, how could you go back decades? Wouldn’t you...cease to exist? You’d have to rewind through your whole life. You’d have to...shrink back to a kid. You’d have to . . .” I couldn’t even follow this train of thought.

  Leah was shaking her head. “I know; I’ve tried to figure it out too. It doesn’t make sense. I don’t really believe you could go back any farther than your own lifetime. But my mom thinks that if it’s really possible, there must be different rules. If you’re not limited on how far you can pull like we are, maybe you’re not limited in those other ways. Maybe there wouldn’t be any springbacks or headaches.”

  Now that I could appreciate. Still, it seemed impossible. “But how would you speed through a repeat? Especially if you changed something big, something that affects your life? You still have to actually live it.” Otherwise, what would the point really be?

  Her hands went up in a helpless gesture. “No idea. It’s too confusing to try to guess how the rules might change.”

  I sighed. Anything was possible; my own experience should have taught me that by now. Still, it all sounded pretty dangerous.

  My phone buzzed with a text.“Just a sec,” I said as I pulled it out.

  Janie: Where are you?

  Shoot. I’d forgotten Janie was waiting for me. She got out of school ten minutes before me and hated when I made her wait any longer.

  Chloe: Sorry, I’m going to be a while. Go ahead without me.

  Janie: ��

  I didn’t blame her, but I didn’t have enough room in my brain to care about it right now. I turned back to Leah.

  “So you think your mom broke the Ring of Time by trying to enter it,” I summarized.

  She nodded. “Right.”

  “Did you actually ask her if she did?”

  “Of course I did. But she just brushed me off. Like it’s not my business. But if it hadn’t been her, I guarantee that if nothing else, she at least would have sent me to ask you about it.”

  I shuddered a little. It was just so creepy. “But instead…you just sent yourself.” I said.

  She tilted her head a little, her face telling me she didn’t think that was fair, but she didn’t say anything.

  “But we’ll get to that later,” I said. “You’re sure it was her.”

  “Yes.”

  “Because she wants to become a Master of Time.”

  She nodded.

  “And then what?” I asked. “She’ll just be amazing and powerful? Or does she have some…specific goal in mind?” Like taking over the world…

  She hesitated. “The only specific goal I know she has is to…to be sure that only the ‘right’ people can pull time.”

  She couldn’t be serious. But then I remembered what Jake had told me about the two families. “Don’t tell me her whole purpose is to…stop my family from rewinding.”

  Her pained expression confirming it made me feel a little sick. “Seriously?” I asked.

  “Well, I’m sure that’s not the whole reason . . .”

  My phone started buzzing with a call and I absently declined it as I asked, “Why would your mom want to stop my family from rewinding? Because you guys are ‘the chosen ones’ or something?” No bitterness there. Or sarcasm.

  She sighed, but I couldn’t tell if she was feeling frustrated with me or with the situation in general. “Our family has always said that yours did something—wrong with the ability,” she explained slowly. “They weren’t careful enough. There was an accident.”

  “An accident?” I hated talking about accidents. “What—what kind?”

  “I’m not sure exactly,” she admitted. “I just know that, at least from my family’s point of view, someone in your family a long time ago wasn’t careful. And somebody died.”

  I blinked, trying to let the wave of anxiety pass. I didn’t want to hear about any death my family supposedly caused with this stupid ability.

  My phone vibrated with another text, so I took it as an opportunity to escape that particular topic. “Sorry,” I said, checking my phone. It was a text from the number that had just called me, one I didn’t recognize.

  Hey, it’s Jake. Call me.

  Relieved that it was him, I replied.

  Chloe: Talking to Leah. She was waiting for me outside the school.

  I stuck my phone back in my pocket and took a deep breath.

  “So what did your mom actually do?”

  “That’s the problem,” she answered with a pained sort of look. “I don’t know. I have some theories, and a couple clues, but all I know is that she caused that huge springback on Monday night, and the problem with the strands now. She was
trying to enter the Ring.”

  “But how could she do that?” I pressed. “How could one person break the whole ring of time?”

  She shook her head again. “I honestly don’t know how. I have some other things I can tell you, but it might take a while. Can we maybe go somewhere?”

  I bit my lip and studied Leah. She seemed to be telling the truth, but why had she kept so much from me all this time? How could I trust her after that?

  “How did you find out about me?” I asked abruptly, ignoring another buzz from the phone in my pocket.

  She was only momentarily thrown by the change in subject, a flash of guilt in her face before she recovered her calm expression. “First of all, you have to understand something. I don't know if there have been other people before who just—got the ability without anyone teaching them, or if you're the first one, but—”

  “Wait-wait-wait. Teaching them? Rewinding can be taught?”

  She nodded. “Yeah. Sorry, I keep forgetting you don’t know any of this.”

  No thanks to you, I thought bitterly.

  “But that’s how it’s always worked,” she continued. “My family taught yours, the parents taught the children—it’s always been taught, never just appeared. You’re the only one we know of who wasn’t taught. Before that, my mom and I—and my grandpa, sort of—were the only people who ever rewound."

  Oh. Apparently there wasn’t a whole world of time manipulators with rules and rivalries and a special time manipulation academy after all. "Really? Just the three of you? So…how did I join the club?" And how did Jake?

  “I’m not sure. But we started feeling springbacks when you got your ability.”

  My stomach clenched. She had known about me all this time. The whole time.

  “Yours were really strong at first. It took a long time to find you, since there’s no way to pinpoint where they come from.” I cringed, trying not to think of nine-year-old me being stalked. “But that's not how we tracked you down," she hurried to say when she saw the discomfort on my face. “It’s just how we knew about you.”

  “So you’ve always been aware of—every time I rewind?” I felt exposed, knowing my secret hadn’t been a secret to them all these years.