The Retake

by Jen Calonita

  I felt myself pale. I thought she’d seen me, but there was nothing I could do about it. Did Clare know about the retake because of me? The one rule of time travel in movies was you weren’t supposed to tell anyone else you were doing it. Well, that, and also not to go back in time and change anything in the first place, but that ship had sailed. I laughed nervously. “Disappeared? You mean left early. I had a headache and hung out in the cabana the rest of the day. That’s why I didn’t see you again.”

  Clare started tripping over her own words, unable to form her thoughts. “No. I saw you in the changing room. One minute you were there, and the next you just faded away. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s almost as if you were…I mean, you couldn’t be, but it looked like you were…I was just wondering if…”

  I couldn’t let Clare finish that sentence. If Clare knew about the app, she’d definitely try to get it and use it herself, and who knew what would happen then? My life was spiraling out of control, and I didn’t know how to stop it.

  “People don’t just disappear!” I said with a laugh. Except me. “I should go find Laura so I can get to school. Don’t want to be late the first day. See you there!” I opened the door and quickly shut it behind me.

  My phone beeped again. Twelve percent! There was no more time to waste. If I was going to attempt another retake, it had to be now. But where did I go to do it? I couldn’t let anyone else see me. I spotted a door across the hall and opened it fast. It was a storage closet. I stepped inside, turned on the light, and pushed myself up against several cases of paper towels. The door had no lock. What if someone came in? What if Clare followed me?

  My phone made a weird warning beep again. Nine percent!

  Would the app still work with so little power left? It had to! I couldn’t stay here. But where was I traveling back to now? I’d tried looking cool at the sleepover with Laura’s friends, and that backfired. Then I tried making Laura look good in front of Jake to make her happy, and now I was in a reality where I still wasn’t worthy. How did I convince Laura that our friendship was worth fighting for? I needed to find a moment when it was just the two of us—no sleepovers, no water parks—and really show her how amazing our friendship is. But when was the last time we did that? I opened the Retake and started scrolling backward. The group of pictures had only grown since the last time I looked. Finally, I landed on something that looked familiar. Laura and I had taken a selfie in front of a giant white poster board that said urban agriculture.

  Laura had hashtagged the picture #futurecityready!, which I’d reposted.

  Our Future City club had made it to the finals for our district and had to do a presentation of our urban development plan at a Long Island competition. The winner went on to the regional competition. Each person in our club had a part to work on, and somehow, I got stuck giving the oral presentation. Laura had come over the weekend before to help me run through my part of the speech. I remembered us hanging out all day. She might have even slept over. I could still see us burning popcorn in my microwave and cracking up over something my dad was watching on TV. It wasn’t a big moment, but it was ours alone.

  Maybe I had to stop thinking of big events and concentrate on a time when we were just being Laura and Zoe. This could be that moment. I could show her I wasn’t a baby and that I could still be cool and fun, even if I didn’t like a boy as much as she liked Jake. This time it had to work. I clicked on the retake button, closed my eyes, and waited for the magic to happen.

  Someone pounded on the door, making me open my eyes and jump.

  “Anyone in there? Is this the bathroom? Emergency! Too much coffee!” a guy shouted.

  My phone whined again. My charge was down to 5 percent! Why was it draining so fast now? And why was I still here? Was the app still working? I felt my mouth go dry as I started to panic. Quickly, I made my plea to the universe: “I wish I could retake this picture of Laura and me working on the Future City presentation and show her how great our friendship really is.”

  My heart was pounding, my forehead was sweating, and I had an overwhelming sense of dread as I stared at the app and waited for my chance to make things right. Please don’t let me be stuck here. Please!

  Just as I was about to give up, I saw familiar flash, and everything around me faded away.

  “Zoe, move in closer. I can’t see the poster board!”

  Laura was giggling so hard, I couldn’t understand her, but I did know what was important.

  The retake had worked again.

  This time I had to get things right.

  Laura squeezed me tighter, trying to fit the poster and the two of us into her selfie. Finally, I saw the shot line up perfectly, and she clicked on the camera button. The light reflected off my eyes and I blinked, trying to get a grip on my surroundings. We were in my room, and music was playing softly from my wireless speaker. My bed was unmade, and there were scraps of corrugated paper all over my bedroom floor, along with glue bottles and a paint kit on a folding table. My trusty glue gun was sitting in its holder, just waiting to be used.

  “Okay, now that we’ve pretended to be ready with this poster, we need to actually get it done,” Laura said with a laugh. “Help me color in the bubble letters.” I heard her phone ping. “Hang on. I have to see who this is.” She started backing out of my room. “I’ll be right back. I’m just going to go out on your front steps. I’ll explain later!” she said, and disappeared.

  I didn’t care who Laura was on the phone with. All I cared about was that my phone still worked. I looked around the room and found it charging on my bedside table. The little green battery light was illuminated, and the phone was up to 50 percent charged. I scrolled through the apps and found the fluorescent pink app illuminated. I breathed a sigh of relief and hugged the warm phone to my chest.

  “You love your phone enough to hug it, huh?” Mom was standing in my doorway, watching me.

  “I thought it died,” I said. “It’s been running really hot.” Why did I just tell her that?

  “Really? Let me see.” Mom walked in, grabbing random shoes and discarded clothes off the floor. My room was a mess.

  “I’m sure it’s fine.” I held tight to the phone.

  “Can I see it?” Mom put her hand out and I had no choice but to hand it over. She frowned. “Wow, it is warm. Did you leave it out in the sun?”

  “Nope. I’m sure it’s just from being plugged in overnight.” I reached for it, but Mom wouldn’t let go.

  “Maybe I should take it to the store to be looked at,” she said. “We don’t want it blowing up or anything.”

  “Phones don’t just explode.” Do they? I wondered. “I’m sure it’s just from being plugged in too long.”

  Mom looked at me. “Please don’t tell me you’re becoming addicted to your phone like Laura is. Dianne said she sleeps with it next to her on her pillow and answers texts all night long.”

  Those texts weren’t from me. They were probably from the drama queens about boys, kissing, and makeup. They were things I really wasn’t familiar with yet, and the girls and Laura thought I was a weirdo because of it. I felt the tears coming, and this time I couldn’t stop them.

  “Oh, Zo-Zo, what’s wrong?” Mom sat down beside me and placed the phone on the bedside table. For once, she didn’t say anything about the fact my bed wasn’t made (she hated unmade beds even more than she hated food left on plates in the kitchen sink). She pushed my hair off my forehead. “Are you feeling okay?”

  “No.” I wiped the tears away from my eyes, but more kept falling. I needed to make them stop before Laura got back.

  I wished I could tell Mom about the Retake app and how it just showed up on my phone, and what I’d been trying to do, but I had the feeling she’d think I was delusional and march me to the doctor. I was in so deep with this app that I didn’t even know how to stop myself. The more I tried to
change the past, the more I destroyed the future. I needed to talk to someone before I exploded. But, like always, there was no time. “I just feel like everything is changing faster and faster, and there is nothing I can do to stop it.”

  Mom nodded. “Middle school can be tough—”

  “This isn’t about middle school.” I didn’t mean to cut her off. I glanced at the door to make sure Laura wasn’t coming. “It’s about Laura.” Mom turned her whole body toward me to listen, her knees touching my knees. “We’ve been kind of in a weird place lately, and I don’t know how to fix things without making them worse.” I wasn’t even sure how to explain it. “Nothing I do is ever right.”

  “Ah, honey. I love Laura—she’s practically a third daughter—but friendships change over time. Just because you’re not best friends every moment of every day doesn’t mean you’re not still friends. No matter what happens with the two of you, you’ll always have amazing memories.” Mom stood up and went to my corkboard, which was overflowing with pictures I recognized since nothing had technically been altered yet. “Look at all the incredible things you’ve done together! No one can take those moments away from you.”

  Well, technically, the Retake app could.

  “You are who you are because of how you’ve grown together, but it’s okay to grow apart too.”

  But I didn’t want to grow apart from Laura. Was it wrong to want to keep things exactly as they were? I wanted it to be me and Laura against the world, telling ghost stories in my tree house, shooting whipped cream from the can into each other’s mouths instead of on our ice cream sundaes, and playing Tenzi at my dining room table on a Saturday night. We’d always been so happy together.

  “I just wish we still liked the same things,” I said, listening carefully to make sure Laura wasn’t coming up the stairs. “I think she feels Future City is dorky.”

  Mom made a face. “Dorky? Finding ways to design cities that include spaces for urban agriculture is not dorky. It’s helping your planet. I watched this news clip the other night about a group of Future City kids who created a water filtration system that is being used in the Dominican Republic. Many of these people had access to clean water from the tap for the first time.” Mom cocked her head to one side. “If that’s dorky, then I want to be a dork.”

  I thought of the club again and how much fun we had designing buildings and trying to solve real-world problems. I didn’t love presenting, but I loved the competition. Did I really want to give Future City up for Laura? No.

  Mom was right. Maybe Laura and I didn’t have to do everything together, but we did have to put our friendship first. I had a feeling if we could finally have the heart-to-heart we needed, we could find a way to grow and change together instead of getting pulled apart. “Me too,” I said.

  Mom went to the door, leaving it ajar when she left. “Let me know if you two need anything.”

  “Thanks, Mom.” Laura was taking forever. Who was she talking to, anyway? I went back to my phone to text her and dropped it in surprise. It was practically burning now. I grabbed it with the bottom of my shirt, and read the message on the screen. There was a tiny picture of a thermometer.

  Temperature! Phone needs to cool down before you can use it.

  This wasn’t good. Even with the new charge, there was a chance the Retake app was going to destroy my phone. I needed to finish things with Laura and get rid of this app before I got stuck in a reality I didn’t want to be in.

  “I am not throwing away my shot!” I heard Laura singing as she ran up the stairs. (Her dad had recently surprised her with tickets to see Hamilton, and she sang the soundtrack all day long.) “Sorry about that!” she said, but didn’t explain who she’d been talking to or what the call had been about.

  “That’s okay,” I told her. “But now we get down to work,” I said, trying to be funny, but I was in a time crunch here.

  “Okay. Time to be serious.” Laura tried to keep a straight face but couldn’t. “Sorry! I’m just in the best mood. Did I show you my tattoos?”

  “You got a tattoo?” I freaked.

  “They’re temporary, silly.” Laura thrust out her right arm. “We did them at the wrap party for the play. That’s a henna tattoo of the Stinky Cheese Man, and this one is of Cinderella’s glass slipper, and…”

  The sixth-grade play was The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales. Laura had played Cinderella and Princess 2. I’d run lines with her in my bedroom and gone to see the show both nights. Laura, no surprise, had been really good.

  “I wish you could have been at the party,” Laura said. “It was so much fun. Ava Sinclair’s parents let her have it at their house, which is huge! Her pool looks like the one at that Coconut Point resort.”

  That explained Laura’s pool posts. “The one with the rock walls?”

  “We didn’t swim because her parents had just opened the pool that weekend, and I had my hair up from the Cinderella costume, but it looked like the best pool ever. We have to get an invitation to go over to Ava’s,” Laura said.

  But I didn’t want to waste time talking about Ava. The clock was ticking, and today could be my last shot.

  “Earth to Zo-Zo! Come in, Zo-Zo!” Laura was waving a hand in front of my face.

  My thoughts snapped back to the (current) present. “Sorry.”

  Laura leaned back on my bed and picked up a stuffed manatee. “I can’t believe you still have these.”

  The word “baby” flashed in my mind. I had about a dozen stuffed animals that resided on my bed. We got most of them together. As much as I wasn’t ready to give up Sir Moosington, maybe it was time. “I’m tossing them this weekend,” I lied. “Middle school is too old for stuffed animals. No offense.”

  “Oh, mine are gone too.” Laura tossed Manny the Manatee aside. “I just thought you weren’t answering me because you were daydreaming about Kyle Evans.” She sat up on her knees and looked at me. “He’s so cute. Not Jake Graser cute, but you said you loved watching him pretend to be Jack from Jack and the Beanstalk. So are you going to talk to him?”

  I had meant his acting. But if I didn’t say I liked a real boy—meaning anyone other than the professional German soccer player whose picture hung on my wall—then Laura would think I was immature. “Oh, he’s totally cute. He has a great voice too.”

  “I knew it!” Laura grabbed the throw pillow on my bed that said “Beach, Sleep, Repeat” and hugged it. “Why didn’t you tell me? I could have asked him if he liked you during the wrap party.”

  “Uh…” I didn’t want to wake up in the future and have broken up with yet another boy I didn’t remember dating. When I had my first kiss, I wanted it to be for real. “That’s okay.” Better to change the subject. “But what about you and Jake?”

  She threw herself back onto my bed. “Jake just talked to his friends and painted props during play practice. He never even spoke to me, and he didn’t go to the wrap party either.”

  “His loss.”

  Laura’s phone chirped—she’d recently changed her message sound to birds chirping—and she read the text, then burst out laughing.

  “What?” I said.

  “Nothing. It’s stupid.” She put her phone down again. Her phone continued chirping. It sounded like we were in a bird sanctuary. “Okay, where are your flash cards? I want to hear your part of the presentation.” Her phone chirped again. Laura quickly texted someone.

  “Who’s texting you?” I asked. “Kyle Evans?”

  Laura clutched her phone to her heart. “No! I want Jake to text me so badly! We have to figure out how to sit near him on the bus for Aquatopia next week.”

  “Uh, yeah.” I did not want to think about Aquatopia again. “Okay. Why don’t I read my part, and then you can read yours? I memorized my half.”

  “Impressive! You’re a true actress. Hit it!”


  “Okay.” I stood up straight and cleared my throat, then looked down at the flash cards. “When we set out to figure out where we could create an aquaponic farm, we looked to Bushwick, in New York, where Oko Farms is doing just that—cultivating freshwater fish while also growing fruits and…fruits and…uh…” I seemed to be missing the next card, and it had been a while since I’d rehearsed this. “I need to practice the rest.”

  “That was good! You didn’t need my help at all. You never do,” Laura said.

  “That’s not true.” Was it?

  Laura shrugged. “I just mean you’ve got this down. We don’t need the practice.”

  “Oh, I need the practice,” I lied. What if she tried to leave already? “I’m really stressed about tomorrow.”

  “When I’m stressed over my lines, I play music,” Laura said. “Alexa! Play today’s top hits.” Immediately, a song we both knew filled the air and we started singing along. “I’m dying to dance to this song with Jake!”

  “Oh my God, all you talk about is Jake!” I said, laughing at the absurdity of it. I was sort of glad I didn’t like anyone that much yet. It seemed like a lot of work. I still couldn’t believe I dated him in another reality.

  “Because he’s so cute!” Laura said, and her phone chirped again. “Hey. What are you wearing tomorrow? All the girls from the play are going to the mall, and I lied and said we had a family thing so I didn’t have to tell them we were going to a Future City competition.”

  I stopped dancing. “Why do you care what they think? We’re changing the world here. Or we could be.”

  Laura rolled her eyes. “Don’t get all dramatic about it. I just said I didn’t want people to know. I’m still going.”

  “You’re allowed to do your own thing, you know.”

  “Ooh! I love this song!” Laura ignored me and started singing a Taylor Swift song at the top of her lungs. “Remember when we made up that routine to that Shawn Mendes song?”