by Barry Lyga
As if I have a choice, Kyle thought sourly. “Yeah.”
“Do you want to come home for dinner?”
Until Danny said dinner, Kyle hadn’t even thought about food. But now he realized how hungry he was — practically starving, ravenous. But just walking into some stranger’s house? “Um …”
“Please, please, come home,” Danny begged, to Kyle’s surprise. “If you come home with me, my parents might be distracted and not ask where my Walkman is. And even if they notice it’s gone, they won’t yell too much if we have company. Come on. Please?”
Kyle checked down the road for the mystery man, but he was long gone. His rumbling stomach made the decision for him, and soon he and Danny were walking along Major Street. Kyle recognized some of the buildings and landmarks, but others were either missing or just plain wrong. It felt like some weird cousin of déjà vu — he kept thinking he knew what building or street would be next, but he was only right some of the time.
“So will your parents really not notice the missing, uh” — What was it called? Oh, yeah — “Walkman if you bring me home?”
“I think so. My parents are pretty stupid,” Danny confided.
Kyle grinned for the first time since arriving in this ridiculous time period. “I know what that’s like.”
They turned down Kimota Road, which looked pretty similar to the Kimota Road of Kyle’s time. The neighborhood had fewer houses than he was used to, but the big old colonial on the corner of Kimota and Batson looked the same. Except its shingles were clean and the paint wasn’t peeling and the yard wasn’t overgrown with weeds.
Danny led him to a house on Batson and marched inside, calling out, “I’m home!” and tossing his book bag in the corner of the foyer. Kyle looked around. It was a typical Bouring house, which meant it was a typical, boring house. Back in the Stone Age, someone had built a thousand dumb little houses just like this one in Bouring, all of them the same, and they hadn’t changed at all between 1987 and Kyle’s time, apparently.
“I brought a friend home for dinner!” Danny shouted toward what Kyle presumed was the kitchen. A woman’s voice answered that this was fine and that they should both wash up, so Kyle followed Danny down a short hall to a bathroom, but before he went in, he noticed something and chuckled.
“What’s so funny?” Danny asked.
The house was already decorated for the holidays, right down to a small decorative table that held a little porcelain statue of a girl throwing a snowball. Kyle pointed at the statue. “My grandparents have that exact same statue, is all. Except theirs is really old and has a chip in the base.”
Danny frowned. “How can they have an old one? This one is new. We had to send away for it because it’s only for this year’s club members.”
“No, no,” Kyle said, “my grandparents got one awhile ago. It’s sort of worn….” He trailed off.
Danny handed the statue to Kyle. “See? Look.”
Sure enough, stenciled into the bottom was MAIL-ORDER EXCLUSIVE, 1987. GIRL PITCHING SNOWBALL.
“But …” Kyle looked around. Wait. Wait a second. He knew this house. It was familiar. It was …
Oh, no!
“Danny, is your last name —”
Just then, Danny’s mom yelled from the kitchen: “I don’t hear water running! Wash those hands, Daniel Camden!”
Daniel … Camden?
He was so shocked that, before he could catch himself, Kyle dropped the statue. Without even looking, he knew exactly how much damage it would take — a small chip in the base. He had seen that same chip, run his fingers over it, many times as a child.
At his grandparents’ house.
His grandparents’ house!
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to drop —”
Just then, Danny’s mom — Kyle’s grandmother — came around the corner. It was unreal — Kyle had seen pictures of his grandmother when she was younger, but here she was for real. Her hair was reddish-brown not gray, and there was a lot of it. “Did I hear something — Oh. You must be Danny’s friend.”
“Yes. Yes, I’m Danny’s” — son — “friend.” Kyle extended his hand. “I’m sorry. I think I broke your statue.”
Gramma — Kyle couldn’t help thinking of her that way — gasped. “Oh, no. It was brand-new.”
“I’m really sorry.”
“It was an accident, Mom,” Danny/Dad chimed in. “Maybe we can glue it.”
“Maybe …” Gramma said, now turning the statue over in her hands. Kyle knew that they wouldn’t be able to fix it; it was still broken in his own time. He felt bad that the first thing he’d done in 1987 was break something.
“… my friend,” Danny was saying. “His name’s Dore.”
“Is that what they call you?” Gramma asked, the statue forgotten. “Dore?”
Kyle supposed “they” did. “Yes. Short for Theodore.”
“Isn’t ‘Theo’ usually short for Theodore?”
“I’m a little different.”
“Well,” Gramma said, setting the statue back in its place, “let’s go sit down to dinner. Dore, I hope you like lamb.”
“Are you kidding?” Kyle’s mouth watered at the memory of his grandmother’s amazing grilled lamb shanks. “I love your lamb!”
She looked at him quizzically. Danny did, too. “Have you … eaten here before?” she asked.
Oops. “Uh, I just mean that —”
“I told Dore about it,” Danny said quickly. “And he feels like he’s already eaten it.”
In the dining room, Kyle had another shock: At the head of the table sat his grandfather.
If seeing his grandmother young and with a head of crazy red hair had been surprising, seeing his grandfather was even more stunning. In his own time, Kyle’s grandfather was a slender, weak, quiet man, victim of a stroke when Kyle was just a baby. He’d never fully recovered and at family gatherings he always sat alone, answering questions with a shrug, a grunt, or a single word.
But now … today … in 1987 …
Gramps seemed huge — thick across the chest and through the shoulders, with a thatch of almost-black hair that didn’t so much grow on his head as appear to be attacking it. He laughed like a bull, his big, meaty hands smacking the table and making the dishes jump every time he heard something funny or said something that amused himself, which was often, judging by how Kyle’s food jerked here and there on its plate. Kyle had been worried about slipping up again and saying something that would reveal he was from his family’s future, but that wasn’t a problem: Gramps did most of the talking.
The lamb shanks were terrific, better even than Kyle remembered them. The only problem was that there was spinach with them, and Kyle hated spinach. He was a little surprised to see his father avoiding the green stuff, too — in the present, Kyle’s dad always ate spinach.
“You’re not cleaning your plate,” Gramps said at one point, gesturing to Danny’s spinach, which by now looked like a pile of congealing moss. “Make that stuff disappear.”
“I don’t like spinach,” Danny said. “Can’t I have green beans instead?”
“Your mother made spinach; you eat spinach. End of story.”
“But —”
“I said end of story,” Gramps said.
Danny started shoveling the spinach in, practically swallowing it whole without chewing. It made Kyle want to gag. From the expression on his face, it made Danny want to gag, too. Kyle watched his father’s eyes bug out, watering as he forced the spinach down. He polished it off with a huge gulp of water, as if the spinach threatened to come back up and the water would drown it.
As Danny had predicted, with Kyle present no one asked about the missing Walkman gadget. Gramps held forth at length about his day at the coal mine, where he supervised a team responsible for equipment maintenance. According to Gramps, they didn’t have enough brains between them to fill a thimble, and he spent the meal recounting all of their various idiocies in exacting detail.<
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After dinner, Kyle helped Danny clear the table, stalling. He knew what would come soon, and he wanted to avoid it.
But it happened anyway.
“Danny?” Gramma said. “Isn’t it time for Dore to go home? It’s getting late.”
Problem: Kyle didn’t have any “home” to go to. His mother didn’t even live in Bouring yet. His father was a kid. And the house where Kyle had grown up either belonged to someone else or didn’t even exist.
Still, he had no choice but to leave, so he accepted a hug from his own grandmother and a firm handshake from one of Gramps’s enormous paws.
Outside, he stood on the front stoop for a moment. Now what? Where could he go? What should he do?
He couldn’t believe that they were just going to let him walk home by himself. In Kyle’s time, a kid on the streets alone after dark was cause for half the parents in Bouring to form a special task force to escort the kid two blocks. But apparently in 1987, no one was worried about that.
Just then the front door opened and Danny poked his head out like a thief casing an empty apartment. “What are you still doing here?” he stage-whispered. “You’ve been standing out here for, like, five minutes.”
“I have to tell you something,” he said, making a split-second decision that he hoped he wouldn’t regret. “I’m not … from around here.”
“Well, yeah.” Danny slipped outside and joined him on the stoop. “No kidding. I know everyone my age around here.”
“I sort of … ran away from home.”
“Really?” Danny’s expression said Cool!
“Yeah. Really. So I don’t have anywhere to sleep tonight —”
“Don’t worry about it,” Danny said. “I’ve got an idea. Meet me out back.” With that, he went back into the house.
The backyard of the Camden house was like an alien landscape to Kyle. In the present — Kyle’s present, the real present — it was a well-tended flower garden with two comfortable benches. But in 1987, it was just a flat, scrubby plot of land. The only thing Kyle recognized was the big oak tree, which was a little smaller than he remembered, but otherwise the same.
Right down to the tree house in its branches.
No way, Kyle thought. There is no way in the world I’m sleeping in —
“You can sleep in the tree house!” Danny said, having sneaked up on Kyle. He thrust a rolled-up sleeping bag at Kyle. “I do it all the time!”
Kyle sighed. He didn’t really have much of a choice, did he?
“Just go up the ladder,” Danny said. “You’re not afraid of heights, are you?”
Suppressing a chuckle, Kyle wondered what his father’s reaction would be if Kyle suddenly soared into the air under his own power. But instead, he just slung the sleeping bag over his shoulder and climbed the boards nailed at intervals into the tree trunk. In his own time, most of them were missing.
He had been inside the old tree house as a child, when visiting his grandparents’ house. In the present, his father was too old and too fat to climb the tree, but when Kyle had begged to see the inside of the tree house, Dad had dutifully dragged a ladder over and held it steady as Kyle climbed. Kyle remembered the inside being smelly and moldy and disgusting — warped boards, exposed nails, rotted wood.
But like everything else lately, the tree house surprised him. In 1987, it was brand-new. The boards were straight and true, the nails pounded flush. And it didn’t smell at all. There was a little battery-powered lamp in one corner, and when Kyle turned it on, the place filled with warm light. It was cozy.
“I’ll leave my window open a crack,” Danny called from below, “so if you need anything, just shout.”
From the tree house’s window, it was a straight shot to the window Kyle knew to be his father’s.
“Thanks!” he called down.
“No problem!”
Kyle settled in, propping Erasmus up nearby. This would work out. It would be cold tonight, but cold no longer bothered Kyle — he had flown in the mesosphere with no ill effects. He would get a good night’s sleep and then in the morning he would begin his quest to track down the components he needed to repair the chronovessel. He wouldn’t be in 1987 for long, and as long as he returned to his own time shortly after vanishing, it would be like he hadn’t left at all.
He turned off the lamp just as he caught something from the corner of his eye — the light in Danny’s room had come on. Kyle leaned out his own window to say good night.
Sure enough, Danny had cracked the window. Kyle could hear everything in Danny’s room.
“I’m not sure,” he heard Danny say, and realized he’d tuned in to a conversation already in progress.
“Not sure?” Gramps’s voice, sounding angry. “What do you mean you’re not sure?”
“I just mean it’s in here somewhere. I just —”
“If you kept this room a little cleaner, you wouldn’t have trouble finding things.”
“Well, it’s in —”
“I want to see it.” Even as far away as the tree house, Kyle could feel Gramps’s anger, and he knew immediately what was going on: Gramps wanted to see the Walkman.
“I’ll find it in the morning when I get up —”
“Find it? So it is lost!”
“No, no, it’s not —”
“Then show it to me.”
Kyle gnawed at his lower lip. He wished he’d tripped not-yet-Sheriff Maxwell instead of his stupid brother.
Danny couldn’t stall anymore. Kyle strained to hear and managed to make out a couple of syllables, but nothing more.
Didn’t matter. Gramps’s reaction told the story: “You did lose it! I always know when you’re lying! Never forget that. I always know.”
“Well …”
“You lost it,” Gramps said, his voice somehow soft and dangerous at the same time. “You lose everything. You know why? Because you’re a loser, Daniel. You’ve always been a loser and you’ll always be a loser.”
“But, Dad —” Even from his position, Kyle could hear the trembling of Danny’s voice, a prelude to tears.
“But nothing,” Gramps snarled. “I don’t know why I expect anything from you. Haven’t amounted to anything so far. Why should anything change now?”
Danny started to say something, but Kyle couldn’t make it out — his father’s voice was clogged and watery. Gramps interrupted, snorting. “Don’t you cry. I should be the one crying. I drove all the way to Centre City to buy that gizmo for you and you lost it after one day. Do you have any idea how expensive it was? You better learn some responsibility. You better learn how to shape up, or you’ll be a loser your whole life.”
Obeying his father’s orders, Danny didn’t cry. Until Gramps left the room, closing the door behind him. And then Kyle heard the sound of his father weeping gently and quietly.
The eighties suck, Kyle thought.
In the morning, the eighties still sucked.
Kyle had hoped for at least a moment in the morning when he would wake up and — for just a second or two — forget that he was trapped in his own past and sleeping in his father’s childhood tree house, but that didn’t happen. From the instant he opened his eyes, he was miserably aware of where and when he was.
He was also miserably aware of the fact that his grandfather was sort of a jerk.
He picked up Erasmus, tempted to switch him on and get the AI’s snarky opinion on things. But, no. He had to conserve battery power, at least until he could cobble together a new power cord.
Kyle’s first priority had to be repairing the chronovessel and getting back to the present, but he couldn’t help thinking that maybe he had another priority now, too: helping his father….
Just then, his dad’s childhood voice interrupted him, stage-whispering from below. “Psst! Hey! Dore! You still up there?”
Kyle looked down the ladder. “Yeah.”
“I’m coming up. I have breakfast.”
A moment later, Danny scrambled up the last rung
s of the ladder and into the tree house, barely breathing hard. Kyle couldn’t help thinking of his father in the present — the man huffed and puffed just rolling out of bed in the morning.
“Here.” Danny shared out some Pop-Tarts and foil-packs of juice. At least something about the eighties was familiar!
They ate in silence, until Danny said, “So, uh, where are you running away to?”
“Somewhere …” Kyle paused. He didn’t want to outright lie. “Somewhere sort of like here. But bigger. And, uh, more modern.” That was a pretty accurate description of Kyle’s own version of Bouring, he realized.
“I want to go with you,” Danny said with finality. “I want to get out of this town.”
“You can’t.”
“Why not?”
Because if I took you to the present, then you would never meet Mom and I would never be born, which would be a total bummer of a time paradox. Kyle wasn’t 100 percent sure if Erasmus had been right about time paradoxes, but he figured maybe it was best to be cautious at this point. “Because I need to travel alone,” Kyle said in his toughest, cowboy-est voice.
“Come on, Dore. Take me with you. I hate it here. It’s all mean people. Like the Monroe brothers,” he added quickly. “Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you have to do it. Just because you’re bigger or stronger or smarter doesn’t mean you have to treat other people badly.”
“No.” Kyle rolled up the sleeping bag. He couldn’t stick around. The longer he did, the better the chances he would say something to his father that would cause time problems.
“I helped you out,” Danny said, hurt. “I gave you a place to sleep, and I brought you breakfast. You owe me.”
That much was true. And there was the cruddy way Gramps had spoken to Danny last night, which he couldn’t forget, no matter how much he tried. Yeah, this was the past, this was history, but could Kyle really just leave his father in this situation?
“Okay, fine,” Kyle relented. He would just have to be careful what he said. “I can’t take you with me, but I’ll pay you back.”