All Our Yesterdays

by Cristin Terrill

  I stand and sway on my feet from the sudden rush of blood to my head. I feel heavy and foggy, and the tattered edges of my dreams keep brushing against my mind. I grab for them but come up with empty hands. In fact, now that I think about it, the last couple of days are a blur. I remember James in a tux, Nate’s beautiful speech at that fund-raiser, and stupid Finn Abbott tagging along with us everywhere. I remember James asking me to breakfast, and vowing that I would tell him how I felt before the pancakes were finished, but everything else is a muddle.

  “I love you, James,” I whisper, practicing the words. God, it sounds stupid.

  I trot down the stairs to the front door and throw it wide open. I have a joke about James’s chronic earliness already on my lips, but I stop short.

  “Congressman,” I say. “Hi.”

  Nate looks so much like James, the same fine, strong features and humble tilt of the head. He looks up at me slowly, heaviness pulling down the corners of his mouth and his eyes puffy and red.

  Somehow, I don’t even have to ask.

  Forty

  Marina

  I don’t understand it. I can’t. The James I knew had plans. He’d been happy. He’d smiled at me and asked me to breakfast just hours before driving to his parents’ old cottage on the Chesapeake and taking his life. It doesn’t make any sense.

  I guess you can never really know what’s going on inside another person.

  But as I cried long into that first night after Nate told me what happened, the little bits and pieces of James that never seemed quite right—the sudden flares of temper, the intensity in his eyes when he would say the world needed to be changed, the way it sometimes seemed like the slightest pressure would crack him in two—began to fit together like the pieces of a puzzle, painting a different picture of the boy I thought I’d known so well. One more frail and damaged than I’d realized. Nate thinks he never got over their parents’ deaths. He’d been in therapy for it for years, starting after the breakdown he’d had the day of their funeral. I never knew about that; he never told me.

  At the funeral, I stand between Nate and Finn Abbott. I’ve spent the last two days in bed sobbing and screaming, and I have no tears left for today. I’m empty, like I died right along with James. I lean against Finn because I’m not sure I can stand on my own and glare at the sun for daring to shine today. It should be like the movies, all dark, drizzly rain and black umbrellas stretching into the distance. But the crowd at the graveside is a small one, only the people who had really known and loved James. The circus was left back at the church.

  As the minister speaks, my mind slips away from where we are, the casket and the flowers and the hole in the ground. I think of the stacks of notebooks from James’s room that Nate gave me because he couldn’t bear to see the work James had loved so much go into a storage container somewhere. Burning tears—I guess I have some left after all—cut through the numbness shrouding me as I remember the first time James ever told me about his work. The memory rises up in front of me, as fresh and untouched as if I were reliving it.

  “Marina!” My eyes are glazing over as I try to listen politely to the chatter of my mother’s friends when I hear someone hiss my name. “Marina! Hey!”

  A hand closes around my wrist, and I turn to find James—gangly and awkward, not yet grown into his height—behind me. He pulls me away, and we slip through the crowd of guests, each clutching a wineglass and a little plate of hors d’oeuvres. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

  “Sorry, Mom was making me talk to those women on the board at the symphony with her. I think she just wanted to show me off.” I look down at the party dress Mom dragged me to Neiman’s to buy and forced me to wear to the Shaws’ annual Christmas party. It’s silver and beaded at the top, and objectively it’s probably a beautiful thing, but it makes me feel like Mom’s Debutante Barbie.

  “Look what I swiped from the kitchen when the caterers weren’t looking,” James says, brandishing a half-empty bottle of champagne. “Let’s get out of here.”

  He pulls me up the stairs onto the darkened second floor, and I find I can’t resist him. He takes me into the library and closes the door behind us, wedging a doorstop underneath the crack to stop anyone else from coming in. He flops down onto the leather sofa, and I sit more carefully beside him, resting my head back against the cushion and studying him as he rubs his eyes with both hands.

  “I don’t know why Nate insists on throwing this damn party every year,” he says. “I know for a fact he hates it as much as I do.”

  “It’s kind of a nice tradition, though, isn’t it?” I say, even though I’m sure I hate the Shaws’ Christmas party more than anyone. “Your dad would be happy he was keeping it up.”

  “Yeah, I guess he would.” James takes a swig from the bottle and tries to hide his grimace at the taste. “It wouldn’t really be Christmas without the party to dread, would it?”

  I smile. “Or stupid dresses to wear.”

  “I know you don’t like it, but you look pretty.”

  My tongue feels suddenly too big for my mouth. The light in the room seems to change, and James looks different to me. More perfect. My breathing goes shallow, and I look down at my hands to hide the strange feeling washing over me.

  “Yeah, right,” I say, forcing a laugh. “I look like some senator’s wife trying to show up her friends. I look like my mother.”

  “Hey, your mother is a fine-looking lady.”

  “Ugh, gross!”

  I shove his shoulder and he laughs, and for a while we pass the champagne bottle back and forth. I’ve never seen James drink before; I don’t think he ever has. But there’s a shadow in his eyes, and he throws back the bottle like it could chase whatever those dark thoughts are away. I play along, even though I only take tiny sips of champagne and sometimes just press the bottle to my closed lips. Soon it’s nearly empty, and James is loose and open, sprawled across the couch with one hand brushing my leg, and his smile gone messy and wide.

  “I’m going to fix everything, you know,” he says.

  I have no idea what he’s talking about, so I just say, “Yeah?”

  “Mm-hmm.” He closes his eyes. “I’ve been talking to this professor at Johns Hopkins about my work, and he’s going to mentor me.”

  His words are starting to run together, and his breathing has slowed. I lean toward him and pat his cheek.

  “Don’t go to sleep, James!” I whisper. “Then I’ll have to go back to the party!”

  He cracks one eye open. “M’not sleeping.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “No, I’m not.” He sits up straighter. “I’m going to figure out time, and then I’m going to fix things.”

  “What things?”

  “Everything. I’m going to change the world.” The shadow in his eyes returns. “I’ll make sure Mom and Dad never get in that car.”

  I feel like I’ve been socked in the stomach. My eyes stray to the wall, where in this same room two years ago, James threw a lamp in a blind rage that left a deep scratch in the plaster. It’s gone now, long since patched up and painted over, the evidence erased so easily.

  “James . . .” I whisper.

  “Everything will be different then,” he says, eyes closing as he rests his head on my shoulder. “I’ll make everything right. I’ll make everything better.”

  The first handful of dirt hits the coffin and brings me back to the present. James was going to make everything better, but now he’ll never get the chance.

  I start to cry, and Finn the Idiot takes my hand. It should feel strange and uncomfortable, but for some reason it doesn’t. It actually feels . . . nice. I lean against the solid warmth of him, and he gives my fingers a squeeze.

  I’m suddenly very scared. Not of the explosion, which defies my comprehension, but of what I’ll have to do when it’s all over. Of what this is all for.

  You have to kill him.

  Either Finn senses my fear or he feels it himself
, because he puts his hands on my cheeks, lifting my eyes up to his.

  “It’s going to be okay,” he says, the words barely audible above the roar.

  But then things get very quiet, for me at least. Somehow I find silence in Finn’s dark blue eyes. God, how did I survive so long in that cell without being able to see those eyes?

  I’m hit with a crashing realization. Something so obvious, I can’t believe I haven’t thought of it until now. My heart breaks and spills white-hot misery into my body.

  “Finn,” I say, “if we can do it, if we change things, I’ll never fall in love with you. And you’ll never fall in love with me.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” he says, pressing his forehead to mine. “I think I was in love with you long before any of this started.”

  I don’t know whether I want to laugh or cry. “Really?”

  “Really.” He presses a sweet kiss to my lips. “There’s always hope for us.”

  I squeeze Finn’s hand back, and my eyes fall closed. I feel something like the whisper of a touch to my face. Deep from the back of my mind, a voice that sounds a lot like my own speaks to me like a memory, telling me I’m strong and loved and that everything is going to be okay.

  And, for some strange reason, I believe it.

  Acknowledgments

  I must have been very good in a past life to end up surrounded by so many smart, supportive, and wonderful people, without whom I wouldn’t be here.

  First I want to thank my incredible agent Diana Fox. I don’t know what possessed her to take me on as a client, but she made me the writer I am today, told me to write this book when I didn’t think I should, and was instrumental in making it what it is. Thank you, Diana, for being such a great teacher, advocate, and friend.

  Then there’s my fantastic editor Emily Meehan, who saw and understood exactly what I was trying to do with this book and helped me make it happen. She and the entire team at Disney-Hyperion have been huge champions of All Our Yesterdays, and I don’t have the words to thank these incredible people enough: Laura Schreiber, Lizzy Mason, Dina Sherman, Holly Nagel, Elke Villa, Stephanie Lurie, Marci Senders, Kate Ritchey, and everyone else at Disney-Hyperion.

  I also owe a huge debt of gratitude to my amazing foreign rights agent Betty Anne Crawford, whose support and advice has gone above and beyond the call; film rights manager extraordinaire Pouya Shahbazian, who works magic; Fox Literary’s Brynn Arenz and Rachael Stein for their invaluable perspectives on the manuscript; and my indefatigable publicists Julie Schoerke, Marissa DeCuir Curnutte, and the JSK Communications team, who believed so much in this book and did so much to keep me from losing my mind.

  A huge reason this book exists at all is because of the hand-holding, cheerleading, and shoulder-lending of my incredible friends and critique partners. Sara McClung is a trooper who has read this book as many times as I have, maybe more, and her insight and support was invaluable to me in writing it. Tanya Byrne was the first person who ever made me think I could actually be a writer, and her conviction never wavered, even when mine was nonexistent. Cambria Dillon and Copil Yanez were much-needed fresh eyes and endless sources of enthusiasm. And I feel confident that the D.C. MafYA is not only the best group of writers in the world but also the best people to blow off writing to go sing karaoke with. Their friendship and support has meant the world to me.

  The biggest thanks goes to my family, who had more confidence in me than I ever did and who have always made me feel loved and safe in this world: my sister Annie, who is one of my first and most trusted readers; my sister Ava, who carried a copy of my truly terrible first novel in her backpack to school for weeks; my wonderful dad Ezra and stepmother Amrita; and especially my mom Lynn. I never would have written this book without her and her inability to just let me have a hobby when she thought I could be doing more. I love you guys.

  And, last but not least, thank you.

  Meet Cristin Terrill

  Cristin Terrill has a Bachelor of Arts in Drama from Vassar College and a Master of Arts in Shakespeare Studies from The Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon. She currently lives outside of Washington, D.C. and teaches creative writing to children and teens.

  Describe All Our Yesterdays in five words.

  Teens time travel, chaos ensues!

  What is your favourite bit of All Our Yesterdays, and why?

  Em’s obsession with the drain at the very beginning was the thing that made me want to write this story, and it came to me so much more easily than anything I’ve ever written.

  I check the spoon again, and this time the sanded edge fits perfectly into the groove of the screw. I jam it in and feel the temperature of my blood rise. A dull little voice in the back of my mind asks me why I care so much about this stupid drain, but I barely hear it over the pounding in my head, like a drummer leading soldiers to war. I begin to turn the spoon, but the screw doesn’t budge, held in place by years of dirt and rust and God knows what else. I turn harder, trying to force it to move, until the plastic creaks and threatens to snap.

  “Come on, damn it!”

  I pinch the spoon at the very base, as close to the screw as my fingers can manage, and turn. With a squeal, the screw begins to move. I laugh, little huffs of air that feel foreign but wonderful on my lips. When that screw gives way, I attack the next and the next, scrabbling at them with my fingernails until they bleed when the spoon doesn’t work fast enough, and finally yanking at the grating when only a few threads of the last screw are holding it in place.

  It pops off in my hand, suddenly nothing more than a thin piece of metal, and I drop it with a clang.

  All Our Yesterdays shows that the line between good and evil is not easily defined. Is this something that you feel society should question more?

  I thought the question of whether it’s okay to hurt one person for the good of the many was an interesting one to explore, but I didn’t have a specific stance I was trying to get across. The truth is, I’m not at all sure what I would do in Em’s shoes, or even in the future James’s.

  What do you hope readers will take away from reading All Our Yesterdays?

  Mostly I just hope they’ll be entertained! If they consider going easier on themselves and loving themselves a little more, then that’s a bonus.

  Which three people from the past would you like to go back in time to meet, and why?

  William Shakespeare. I have a Masters in Shakespeare Studies, but there’s still very little we know about the man himself. I’d want to see what he was like and ask him about how he wrote his plays and what he was trying to say with them. (I’m also dying to know if that line from Hamlet was supposed to be “too too solid” or “too too sullied”.)

  As for the other two, it’s hard to decide! I’ve loved Elizabeth I since I was a little girl; she was such a fascinating and complex woman. I’m also a big science geek, so it would be difficult to pass up the chance to meet Albert Einstein. Mark Twain or Oscar Wilde would probably be a ton of fun to hang out with, and who wouldn’t want to find out what such an influential figure as Jesus was really like? I can’t choose!

  Do you see yourself, or anyone you know, in any of your characters?

  There are bits of me in all of them, which I think is pretty much inevitable for any author. They have some of my rhetorical ticks—according to friends and family, Finn sounds like me sometimes—and the relationship between Em and Marina is similar to the way I think about my younger self.

  I’ve never used someone I know personally as inspiration for a character. That just seems like a recipe for trouble to me! More often, I draw from other characters I find compelling and use them as inspiration. For instance, Em’s got a little bit of Sarah Connor from The Terminator franchise in her, while Finn has a touch of Logan Echolls from Veronica Mars.

  If you could go back in time and change one thing about your past, what would it be?

  I would want to be braver.

  If there was a film of All Our Yesterda
ys, who could you see playing the central characters?

  This is a tough question. I worked in the theatre for many years and in casting specifically for some of that time, so I have a lot of respect and affection for actors. I feel like dream casts are often based primarily on who looks the part, but I’m much more interested in what an actor brings to a role that I never saw there myself, and the person who brings a character to life the most is often not who you’d expect (like Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games movie, which is a piece of casting that was initially surprising but turned out beautifully). So to give a total non-answer answer, I would want whichever actors brought the most life and authenticity to the characters, regardless of any other factors like appearance, name recognition or experience.

  As a teenager, what did you like to read?

  As a teen, I mostly read heavy classics (think Les Misérables, unabridged) for fun. This is probably because YA barely existed at the time. Many of my favourite books were still the ones I’d read as a child and continued to re-read in secret, like The Westing Game or The Giver. I was also the nerd in English class who actually liked a lot of the books we were assigned, such as A Separate Peace, Rebecca and A Tale of Two Cities.

  What book do you wish you had written?

  So many! I wish I could write with the poetry of Markus Zusak or Laini Taylor, the wit of John Green or E. Lockhart, or the plotting prowess of Suzanne Collins. The most recent thing I’ve read that I would kill to have written was Maggie Stiefvater’s The Raven Boys, mostly because of how beautifully drawn and authentic those characters are. But my favourite books of all time (at least so far) are the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman, so I’ll say those.