by Julie Cross
But we didn’t sit longer. Holly got off the bus and went inside because she was scheduled to work until six and I headed for home, on foot.
Around six, I left my building, after showering and changing into jeans and a t-shirt, for my roommate, Danny’s robotic club softball game that I had somehow been roped into playing every Monday night for the rest of the summer. As soon as I crossed the street and texted a meeting spot to Danny, a bright green shirt and blonde hair caught my eye.
I had to check twice to make sure it was really her and then I stood for several seconds, contemplating what I would do about it.
Holly had her beach towel spread out on the grassy area directly across from my building, as if she had planned this possible meeting and because it was so obvious, I knew she most likely hadn’t planned it.
Ear buds were plugged into her ears and her hair sprawled all around her while her lips moved without sound. The bliss I had felt sitting so close to her earlier came back and my feet were moving closer without permission. I leaned over her, blocking the sun and causing her eyes to open. “Holly Flynn…are you stalking me?”
“This is Central Park, not your bedroom,” she snapped and her face got all red again.
Maybe she did plan this? Probably not, but she’s embarrassed that I might think she planned it…which could mean…
I flopped down on the grass next to her and changed the subject to let her off the hook. “Don’t you usually jet out of the city to go see Danny or Donald…whatever his name is?”
She rolled her eyes. “David is working and I’m just…well…I’m trying to see if I can get used to this…living in New York.”
“A little different than Jersey, right?” Okay. Not Stalking. Unfortunately. And yeah, I remembered David’s name, I just didn’t want her to know that.
I rolled on my side to face her. “You parked yourself right in front of my building. That’s the reason for the stalker accusations.”
She didn’t respond with the snappy sarcastic remark that I’d been prepared for. Instead, her face looked slightly vacant, staring at me, like she’d just smoked a joint, which would have been understandable after the day she’d had, but somehow I doubted Holly would do that.
“You have dimples,” she mumbled and her face became even more flushed than a minute ago. “I mean…I never really noticed them before.”
“I’ve had them since birth…it’s a curse. Old ladies pinching my cheeks all the time.” And in that instant, I was suddenly desperate to know everything about her. Every tiny microscopic detail…either to make me like or her more or less, I really wasn’t sure. I plucked one of the ear buds from her ear and placed it in mine. I hit play on her i-Pod before she could stop me. “I’m dying to find out what a real Jersey girl listens to.”
It was an old song I recognized from an episode of The Simpsons. “Janis Joplin…I guess it’s a little bit Jersey girl.”
“Are you a fan of Bobby Magee?” she asked me, keeping her eyes on the sky above us.
“Sure, who isn’t.” I flipped to the next song and heard a horribly drab voice start reciting pages from an old novel. “Dickens, yuck…this isn’t Jersey girl enough for you, Holly.”
She grabbed her backpack and hit me over the head with it, but she was laughing, too. God, I love her laugh. Her whole face was bright and curious. And pretty…so pretty. My planning and thinking stopped. We were an island. Me and Holly. Completely alone in this strange moment. All I could feel were the blades of grass tickling my ear and the way her body remained perfectly still but looked as if her muscles were itching to move closer.
My mouth was so close to her ear and the British man’s voice still played so I started reciting the book with him. It was a section I had memorized years ago for school. She was completely frozen, listening to me with such intensity.
“Why do you have this book memorized,” she muttered so softly I barely heard her.
“Mean, torturous English teacher in high school,” I said, then added, “Want to hear it in French?”
“Yes,” she breathed out immediately.
I closed my eyes and switched to a different language, which was almost easy. French sometimes flowed off my tongue more rhythmically than English and I was totally lost on this island.
And so was she.
After a couple minutes, I felt her fingers brush the inside of my palm. The words tumbling out caught in my throat for a split second as goose bumps spread up my arm. The very tips of her fingers moved along the inside of my hand, tracing over the lines. She was barely touching me and yet it felt like her hands were everywhere all at once.
My mouth was so close to her cheek and if I could just feel her skin against my lips for a second—
A shadow fell over both of us and then I heard Danny’s voice, like he was speaking from the far end of a tunnel. “Dude? Are you playing or what?”
I jumped up from the grass, my eyes moving between Holly and my roommate. “I…uh…”
“Got distracted?” Danny said, smirking at me.
Holly sat up and started shoving things into her bag, obviously waking up from the same little daze I had been in.
I slapped on my sane face and grinned at Danny. “Yeah…I was walking through here, toward the softball fields, and this chick grabbed my ankle and tackled me to the ground. I almost had to break out the mace.”
“Right. ‘Cause that looked really violent just then,” Danny said. “And I might believe you picked up a random girl if I didn’t recognize her camp staff shirt.”
I rolled my eyes at him and then looked at Holly. “This is my roommate, Danny. He’s not socially acceptable ever.”
“We met,” Holly said. “At your party.”
Oops. Forgot about that.
“Jackson’s partially right,” Danny explained. “I have issues. Unlike Jackson.”
And I knew he was about to overstep his boundaries and start spouting off various examples.
I gave him a shove in the other direction. “Are we playing softball or what?” After another nudge to Danny, I called over my shoulder, “See you tomorrow, Holly.”
Danny seemed to find my slight distress humorous. “What was going on there?” He slapped a hand over his mouth, eyes widening. “Oh damn…I remember now…that’s the high school chick…and she had a boyfriend, didn’t she? Dude, that’s so messed up.”
I groaned and rubbed my eyes, suddenly feeling too exhausted to play softball. I didn’t know what had just happened between me and Holly, but whatever it was, it made me feel so far out of my element.
Nothing about being around Holly was predictable and I couldn’t help but wonder if it was the same for her? And more importantly, what did she want to do about it?
Don’t Miss
Tempest
Available January 2012 wherever books are sold
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Tempest
by Julie Cross
SATURDAY, APRIL 11, 2009
Okay, so it’s true. I can time-travel. But it’s not as exciting as it sounds. I can’t go back in time and kill Hitler. I can’t go to the future and see who wins the World Series in 2038. So far, the most I’ve ever jumped is about six hours in the past. Some superhero, right?
Tonight, I finally
let someone in on my secret. Someone whose IQ is light-years above mine, so, basically he might actually be able to figure me out. The one request Adam insists I follow is documentation. A record of nearly every moment from this point on. Actually, he wanted the eighteen years prior to today, but I talked him out of it__for now. Even though I’m going along with this journal idea, it doesn’t mean I buy into it. It’s not like the world’s going to end just because I can jump around in time. Or that I’ll serve some greater purpose, like saving the human race from dying. But as Adam says, I must be like this for a reason and it’s up to us to find out why.
Jackson Meyer
Chapter One
TUESDAY, AUGUST 4, 2009, 12:15 p.m.
“How far back should I go?” I asked Adam.
We kept a good distance between us and the long line of kids gathering around the polar bears.
“Thirty minutes?” Adam suggested.
“Hey, let that go!” Holly snatched the bag of candy one of the campers had swiped from a toddler’s stroller and threw an exasperated look in my direction. “It’d be nice if you would actually watch your group of kids.”
“Sorry, Hol.” I scooped Hunter up before his kleptomaniac habits got any worse. “Hold up your hands,” I told him.
He grinned a toothless smile and opened his chubby hands in front of my face. “See? Nothing.”
“Let’s keep it that way, all right? You don’t need to take other people’s stuff.” I set the kid back down and gave him a shove toward the others, who were heading for the large stretch of grass reserved for campers having lunch at the zoo.
“Holly Flynn,” I said, grabbing her hand and twining her fingers in mine.
She spun around to face me. “You have a soft spot for the klepto kid, don’t you?”
I smiled at her and shrugged. “Maybe.”
Her face relaxed and she tugged on the front of my shirt, pulling me closer before kissing my cheek. “So…what are you doing tonight?”
“Um…I’ve got plans with this really pretty blond chick.” Except I couldn’t remember what we had planned. “It’s a…surprise.”
“You’re so full of it.” She laughed and shook her head. “I can’t believe you forgot your promise to spend an entire evening with me reciting Shakespeare…in French…backwards. Then we were supposed to watch Titanic and Notting Hill.”
“I must have been drunk when I said that.” I glanced over Holly’s shoulder before kissing her quickly on the mouth. “But I’ll agree to Notting Hill.”
She rolled her eyes. “We’re supposed to go see that band, remember?”
A little girl from Holly’s group tugged on her arm and pointed toward the bathroom. I darted around her before we could discuss my inability to make plans two weeks in advance and actually remember them two weeks later.
“Yo, Jackson, over here,” Adam said, nodding toward a tree.
Time for precise and exact time-travel planning.
“Are you coming with us to see that band tonight?” I asked.
What I really wanted to know was if he remembered it.
“Um…let’s see. Spend an evening with your high school friends who, I’ve heard, are like a real-life version of Gossip Girl? Not to mention blowing an entire paycheck on an appetizer and a couple drinks?” He shook his head and smiled. “What do you think?”
“I see your point. How about we hang out in your and Holly’s neighborhood tomorrow?”
“Sounds good.”
“All right, on with it. I can’t eat while smelling camel ass, so we might as well experiment now.”
Adam tossed my journal onto my lap and threw a pen on top. “Write down your goal, because time-travel without a goal is just—“
“Reckless,” I finished for him, trying not to groan.
“The gift shop is right behind us. I’ve been watching for the last hour and the same girl’s at the register.”
“You’ve been checking her out, haven’t you?”
Adam rolled his eyes and pushed his dark hair from his forehead. “Okay, so, you set your stopwatch and then jump back thirty minutes. You go into the gift shop and do whatever it is you do so a girl remembers your name.”
“It’s called flirting,” I said quietly so no one else would hear. Then I focused on writing my notes before Holly got back from the bathroom.
Goal: Test theory on someone who has no knowledge of the experiment.
Theory: Events and occurrences, including human interaction, while traveling into the past will NOT affect the present.
Non-geek-speak translation: I jump back thirty minutes in time, flirt with the girl in the shop, jump back to present time, walk back into the store, and see if she knows me.
She won’t.
But Adam Silverman, winner of the 2009 National Science Fair and a soon-to-be MIT freshman, won’t confirm this conclusion until we’ve tried it from Every. Single. Angle. Honestly, I don’t really mind. Sometimes it’s fun, and until a few months ago, nobody except me knew what I could do. Now that the number has doubled, I feel a little bit less like a freak.
And a little less lonely.
But I’ve never been friends with a science geek before. Although Adam’s more of the bad-boy-hacking-into-government-websites-kinda-geek. Which is beyond cool, in my opinion.
“Do you know for sure you can jump back exactly thirty minutes?” Adam asked.
I shrugged. “Yeah, probably.”
“Just make sure you note the time. I’ll record the seconds you’re sitting here like a vegetable,” Adam said, placing a stopwatch in my hand.
“Is that really what I look like when I jump? How long do you think I’ll be like that?” I asked.
“I’m guessing that a twenty-minute excursion, thirty minutes into the past, will leave you catatonic in the present for about two seconds.”
“Where was I thirty minutes ago, just so I don’t run into myself?”
Adam clicked his stopwatch on and off about ten times before answering me. He’s so totally OCD. “You were inside, looking at the penguins.”
“Okay, I’ll try not to end up over there.”
“We both know you can choose your location if you really concentrate, so don’t give me that I-don’t-know-where-I’ll-end up shit,” Adam joked.
Maybe he was right, but it’s hard not to think about anything but one place. Just one tiny half-second thought about any other location than the one I was aiming for, and I’d end up there instead.
“Yeah, yeah. You do it, then, if you think it’s so easy.”
“I wish.”
I get why someone like Adam is so fascinated by what I can do, but for me, I don’t exactly consider it a superpower. Just a freak-of-nature occurrence. And kind of a scary one, at that.
I glanced at my watch, 12:25 p.m., then closed my eyes and focused on thirty minutes in the past and on this exact spot, though I really, truly have no clue how I do this.
The first time I jumped was about eight months ago, during my first semester of college. I was sitting in the middle of a French poetry class. I nodded off for a few minutes and woke up to a cold breeze and a door slamming me in the face. I was standing in front of my dorm. Before I even had a chance to panic, I was right back in class again.
Then I panicked.
Now it’s fun, for the most part. Even though I still have no idea what day or time I traveled to that very first jump. As of today, my known record jump has climbed from six hours to forty-eight hours in the past. Jumping to the future has yet to work, but I’m not going to stop trying.
The familiar sensation of being pulled into two pieces took over. I held my breath and waited for it to stop. It’s never pleasant, but you get used to it.
Chapter Two
TUESDAY, AUGUST 4, 2009, 11:57 a.m.
When I opened my eyes again, Adam was gone, along with the rest of the kids and my coworkers. The horrible splitting sensation stopped, replaced by the light-as-air feeling I always get during a time ju
mp. Like I could run for miles and not feel a bit of ache in my legs.
I hit the start button on the stopwatch and glanced at the giant clock above the zoo entrance.
11:57 a.m. Pretty close. I strolled over toward the shop and walked inside. The girl at the register looked about my age, maybe a little older. She leaned on the counter, holding her face in her hands, staring at the wall.
Whenever I do these little experiments, I have to constantly remind myself of one very important fact: Hollywood gets everything wrong when it comes to time travel.
Seriously.
Okay, here’s the weird part. The chick at the counter could punch me in the nose, maybe even break it, and when I jumped back to the present time, it would be sore or bruised, but not broken. Why it’s not broken is a whole different (unanswered) question, but the point is…I’ll remember being punched.