by Melissa Faye
“He gave this whole impassioned speech. ‘We’re all here to help people. We have to do the right thing. But Stacey is in it for herself. She isn’t thinking about the greater good.’” Honey’s face lit up again with laughter. I tried to smile, but couldn’t manage one. Honey must have been appeased though, because she excused herself and returned to the common room to gossip with Marlene.
Dammit. Now the people we make fun of on the reality show we loved to despise were better than me. I would have lost the margarita round if I was there. I glanced at my messenger bag. Honey had put me in a better mood. Now I needed to act like a better person.
I went upstairs. I knew Harrison was one floor above me, and luckily the RAs had made name signs for all the doors. I knocked on the one with his name.
His roommate Anton poked his head out.
“Oh. You.”
I scowled. Oh, me? Was he disappointed I wasn’t Honey or something?
“Yeah, is Harrison here?”
“What do you want with Harrison?”
I shifted my weight. Anton apparently wasn’t annoyed that it was me rather than Honey; he had a problem with me specifically.
“Umm...I needed his help with something. I wanted to check in. Is he there?” I tried to wedge myself between Anton and the door. Social norms dictated that he should move out of the way, but he did not.
“He’s out.”
I sighed loudly, but backed off. “I don’t suppose you’d give me his number so I can text him?”
Anton closed the door in my face.
Harrison must have been complaining about what a jerk I’ve been. And now I wanted to talk to him, and had no idea when he’d be back. I swiped through my phone to text Ridge, but stopped when I got to the H’s.
Harrison.
He put his number in my phone. My heart fluttered. The idiot’s been complaining to Anton about me, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to text me. I sent him a message.
Meet me at Ridge’s.
I grabbed my bike from my suite and headed out the door towards Harlem.
RIDGE’S DOOR WAS OPEN for me as always, and I slipped off my shoes before stepping inside. The carpet was thick and rough under my feet. I couldn’t move. Moving would mean sitting with Ridge, and sitting with Ridge would mean admitting what I’d done.
“June? You here?” Ridge appeared from the bedroom with a book in hand. When he wasn’t watching criminal show reruns, he was reading a crime novel. He went through paperbacks faster than the library could refresh his stacks. I tried to pick some up for him whenever I passed by used book stores.
I sank into Ridge’s couch. I couldn’t manage to look him in the eye. My messenger bag weighed heavily on my shoulder, like the tablet itself was pulling me down into the depths of my guilt.
“June, what happened?”
I covered my face with my hands. This was much worse than the time I lit Ridge’s kitchen table on fire back when he lived in Queens. The fire department had to come; the whole place could have been burned down. Even though it happened years ago, he still gave me grief about it.
I didn’t need to uncover my eyes to identify the footsteps coming up the stairs and into Ridge’s apartment. I heard Harrison’s voice.
“Hey, Ridge. Wires told me to meet her here.”
His voice was gentle. Harrison may have complained to his roommate to me, but he still cared about what was going on. Stop feeling sorry for yourself, June.
I lowered my hands, pulled out my tablet, and opened up my bank’s app.
“I did it.” I passed the tablet to Harrison. “I hacked into the bank’s security system and put all the money back into my account.”
Ridge blew out through his mouth. Harrison squinted at the screen.
“When did you do it?” he asked.
“This morning.” My cheeks were hot. “I stayed at my grandparents’ last night. They don’t have enough money for my grandfather’s medical bills. They couldn’t help me. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“What about “June’s Rules of Time Travel?” Don’t you have one about how you’re not allowed to do stuff like this?” Ridge stood over the couch, looking down at me.
I pulled the list of rules out of my bag and handed it to Ridge.
“I broke Rule 4-A. I don’t get to time travel, or use any of what I know from time traveling, for personal or financial gain.”
Harrison read the rules over Ridge’s shoulder. A smile appeared on his face.
“To be fair, Rule 4-B says you can if it’s very, very important.” Harrison delicately took the paper from Ridge’s hand and admired my handiwork. “And it specifically says you can’t time travel for personal gain. It doesn’t say you can’t hack into the bank.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Ridge’s tone was the worst. I’d let him down. “It’s a technicality. And it doesn’t matter if she thought of this technicality when she wrote 4-B. What, June, were you in high school when you wrote that, or earlier?”
“Ridge is right,” I said, looking at Harrison. “I shouldn’t have done it. I have access to a lot of advanced science and programming technology. I shouldn’t have hacked into a bank. I took funds from them that weren’t there. That money is Smith’s now.”
Harrison looked back and forth between the Ridge and myself as we looked at each other. Unspoken words passed between us. Ridge was disappointed, but he wanted me to forgive myself and set it right.
“Let me.” I took the tablet back from Harrison. “I’ll fix it. You’ve been helpful, Harrison, and I could be better at all of this now that you’re here.” I pulled up the program I created that morning and began to undo my work.
“Just to be clear, June, it’s not all about you.” Harrison stood with his hands on his hips now. “I like helping you because we’re...friends. But I also want to help because I want Smith gone just as badly as you do.”
Ridge snickered.
“I’m mostly involved to make sure you don’t set any more fires,” he muttered, mostly for my own amusement.
They waited while I went through the program. Every character I typed lifted a little more weight off my chest until the money and guilt were both gone. I breathed out a long sigh of relief.
“Harrison, I’m so sorry. I don’t know how you can forgive me.”
“June, it’s ok! He took the money, and you put it back. Illegally. You fixed it.”
“No, not that. I’m sorry for erasing your memory.”
“Oh.”
Harrison took a seat on the other end of the couch and looked out the window.
“You have to understand, Harrison. I didn’t think I’d see you again. I didn’t know you or if you’d tell someone. I even asked you what you did that day to make sure I wasn’t erasing anything too important.”
Harrison scowled. “My day wasn’t important enough for you?”
“No, not like that. It was more like, you bought your textbooks and went for a run. It’s – I had to make a judgment call. I don’t know. Maybe it was wrong.”
“I get it,” Harrison said. “Can we not talk about it? I don’t think you made me come all this way to tell me you stole money and apologize for whatever you did last month. What are you thinking about doing with Smith?”
I exhaled slowly. I wanted to clear my conscience, and I needed Harrison’s forgiveness. But right now, there was a bigger problem to take care of.
“I know how we can get Smith to leave.”
Harrison edged closer to me on the couch. I wanted him to move so he was sitting too close again, but no luck.
“I bet – I mean, I think we can get him to go if we beat him in a dare.”
Ridge shrugged. “The man does like competition. If you made a bet, you could stipulate that he has to leave.”
Harrison shook his head. “No. That’s not all. He has to leave, and he has to fix your account.”
“That’s not how it works,” I said gently. “If he ‘fixes’ my accounts, he’s st
ealing from the bank like I was.”
“Fine. Then he pays you back from his own wallet. He said he has plenty of money, so that’s the second stipulation.”
I looked at Ridge, and he shrugged again.
“If you’re going to make a wager with this man, how do you propose you’ll win?”
“That’s where I was hoping you two could help me. What can I dare him to do that I can win at? He’s faster, he’s stronger, and he’s more agile. He’s probably smarter, too.”
“I’d like to learn more about that bracelet,” Harrison said. “I barely got to touch it yesterday, but I got a pretty good look. It’s definitely unlike anything I’ve seen before. It’s not for counting his steps.”
“June, you know I don’t like telling you what to do...” Of course you do, Ridge, I thought. “But you need to take your time here. You are not fighting Smith tonight. Go talk to Leslie Leslie about the bracelet and make a plan from there. And it has to be a better plan than having this boy lunge at the man.”
“Leslie Leslie?”
I stood up. “You’re going to love her, Harrison.”
Chapter 9
We left Ridge to enjoy his crime novel, and as usual I promised to send him regular updates. Harrison nodded to Ridge as if he was promising to keep me in check, so I punched his arm.
“Who exactly is Leslie Leslie?” Harrison didn’t have his bike with him so we rode the subway to the Carnegie Hall station. People usually shot me dirty looks for bringing my bike into the crowded subway cars, and it didn’t help that it was rush hour. I was in a huff from everyone’s sneers about the bike, and refused to tell Harrison anything about my favorite and only traveler informant. Annoying Harrison did seem to brighten my mood.
I led us to Leslie Leslie’s place: a small pawn shop nestled between much swankier buildings. It was grimy and dark, and featured a large yellow sign on the outside that read PAWN.
“What is this place?” Harrison circled the shop while we waited for Leslie Leslie to come out. He found a cardboard box with different gauges of wires inside and pointed it out to me. “You should buy this. You need more wire.”
I grinned. I didn’t want to encourage it, but when he helped me at the zoo, he called me Wires. It drove me crazy – but crazy in that good way.
“Junie!” Leslie Leslie called out as she approached from the back. She stopped short, thumping her ornate crane down on the floor when she saw Harrison. “And you brought...a boy?”
“This is Harrison.”
Harrison’s eyes crinkled at the sight of this short, heavy woman with glasses that swallowed up most of her face and crazy white hair. He shook her hand.
“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Leslie.”
Leslie Leslie and I laughed. Her laugh was loud, and it always seemed to engulf the entire room. I never heard anyone call her anything besides Leslie Leslie. Harrison frowned, unsure about why we were laughing.
“What do you have for me, Junie? Gimme gimme.” She held out her hands. Her face fell when I didn’t drop anything in her open palms.
“What, you didn’t bring me something to inspect?”
“We wanted to ask you about a – a traveler. He was wearing a bracelet.” Harrison had stopped pacing and joined us at the counter.
Leslie Leslie gave me a sly grin when Harrison spoke, then turned to address him.
“Let me see it. Or, you don’t have it? What did it look like?”
I took a sign off the dirty window advertising a concert that took place twelve years ago and Harrison offered to draw. It was a thin metal band that fit perfectly against Smith’s wrist. I showed Leslie Leslie how it was blurry in all the pictures we had of him. Harrison showed us how he thought the band was glowing with a lighter metal all around the edges. He added a detail to the drawing with three parallel lines of different lengths that he saw at the bar.
“Hmmmm....”
Leslie Leslie looked at the drawing for several minutes while we waited impatiently. I bit my nails some more while Harrison began pacing in circles around the store again. He gestured at the box of wires again, but I jokingly waved at him to stop.
“Alright, Junie. I don’t know what this is.”
“You always know what everything is, Leslie Leslie.”
“Alright, Junie, I can guess what this is.” She pushed the drawing towards us and we looked on as she pointed.
“I’ve seen bracelets that have different...effects on the wearer. Sort of like a mood ring. Or more like a vitamin. You know, wear this one if you want shiny hair or wear this one if you are an older woman.”
“So this bracelet could have some biological effect on Smith?” Harrison asked.
“Yes. Maybe. I can’t say for sure. It could also be a regular bracelet. Not very fashionable, though.”
“It makes sense, sort of.” I bit my lip and absentmindedly touched my wrist where Smith’s bracelet would sit. “Travelers are always fit, but they’re not stupid. I’ve never seen one act this way.” I turned to Harrison. “Remember his face before he jumped the subway tracks? He wasn’t worried about those jumps at all. Not even a little. Even if he’s athletic and all, he should have still been the tiniest bit nervous, don’t you think? The subway could have hit him if, I don’t know, the signaler didn’t see the train in time.”
“He knew he had an advantage and couldn’t fail.” Harrison shook his head again. “That’s not someone I want to be betting with, June.”
“What do you think the bracelet does? Exactly?” I asked Leslie Leslie.
“It could be impacting his metabolism. Making his body more efficient. If his body is more efficient it has the resources to accomplish more. He would have more energy. Get tired less easily.”
“It’s not just that he has more stamina, though. It’s also his balance. And the way he moves around so fast and so fluidly.” Harrison mimed the subway jumps with his arms.
“Right. He grabbed your wrist so fast I couldn’t even see it!”
“Hmmm...” Leslie Leslie kept staring at Harrison’s drawing. “I suppose one bracelet could have multiple effects. A multivitamin. This one makes him physically capable in a way you haven’t seen before in a traveler, Junie.”
Harrison nudged my shoulder. “Junie!” he whispered. I nudged him back.
“If that bracelet is giving Smith all of these capabilities, Leslie Leslie, what am I supposed to do about him? How do I stop him?”
“Junie! We’ve been through this before. The bracelet must have a chemical, organic element to it, but it also must be programmed.” She smiled towards Harrison. “And if someone can hack into a piece of technology, it’s our Junie.”
“Oh, our Junie can do anything,” Harrison said with a wink.
“I don’t suppose you have one of these bracelets back in your storage area, do you?” I pleaded with Leslie Leslie.
“Sorry, my dears.”
“Thanks anyway, ma’am.” Harrison turned to leave but I held him back.
“But I do have something else that might help.”
I grinned. Leslie Leslie always had something that might help.
LESLIE LESLIE HAD AN old tech magazine from the future. That is to say, she had had it for a long time: it was yellowed and water-stained. But it hadn’t been published yet.
Harrison and I hunkered over it as we rode the subway back up to school. This particular magazine, “NEW WONDERS,” was digital, but Leslie Leslie told us that people printed them on magazines occasionally to be retro. Like how people still listened to records.
We reviewed an article titled “10 REASONS WHY BIOBANDS ARE RIGHT FOR YOU.” The pictured matched Smith’s band exactly, including the lines and glow that Harrison noticed. There was also a picture of a woman wearing the BioBand at the top of a mountain while others around her breathed through oxygen tanks.
The article outlined many of the BioBand’s most popular features. It improved a person’s balance. It could speed up a person’s metabolism. It increased a perso
n’s endorphin levels. The most expensive versions had a feature that slowed down cell death, though this was still in an experimental phase. Researchers predicted that over time the feature could increase life expectancy by 5-10 years.
The only side effect the magazine mentioned was that the BioBand gave off an incredibly subtle vibration that traveled through the wearer’s body. A person could wear the band and show up on a video feed, like on television, but a picture or screen capture would come out blurred. There were no physical downsides, though; the user wouldn’t notice.
“That’s what he was wearing, right?” Harrison leaned over the page and traced his fingers over the headlines. I passed the magazine his way so he could get a better look. My bike stood in front of us, and I was busy shooting back glares at the other passengers.
“I can’t turn it off,” I thought aloud. “That’s what he’s wearing, but turning it off won’t be enough.”
“Why’s that?”
“It won’t change what he’s done. He’ll still play around. Steal money.” I closed my eyes and pictured my empty bank account. And Pops on his recliner, in need of more money than any of us had to help him.
“But maybe we can catch up to him if it’s off. You know, use that –“ Harrison pointed towards the messenger bag where my Some Gun was tucked away.
“Maybe. But he’s smart, and the last time I attacked...you know what happened.” That number was seared into my brain. $0.00.
“So you can do more than turn it off.” Harrison pushed the magazine into my hands and sat forward on the edge of the subway bench. “You can reverse it.”
“No way! I have no idea how the chemistry works. I could make him overdose on something. Or sap his body of, I don’t know, adrenaline.” I started to laugh. “I don’t even know if that would be a bad thing!”
“If you had access to the code and someone told you what to shut off or change, could you do it?”