by Abra Ebner
“Hi.” I was standing at the bus stop, waiting.
A boy stood there with me, a new kid, someone I did not know. He had a black hat and a green coat that was far too large for him, and I figured it had been his father’s, or perhaps an older brother. I fumbled with the ruffle of my pink dress, hoping he would answer me.
He gave me a nervous look under the bill of the hat as he kicked a rock on the ground. “Hi.”
I looked away toward the road and smiled. “Are you new here?”
His blue eyes met mine, and there was something about them, something curious.
“I, uh…” he paused and adjusted his backpack. “I just moved in down the street.” He pointed behind him over his shoulder.
“Oh.” I nodded and clasped my hands in front of me.
He looked older than me but not by much, though his aura seemed very mature and I deduced he must be a sixth grader.
“Which house?” I pressed, looking back down the lane.
He kicked another rock. “The green one, at the end.” He pointed again.
This time my eyes followed where he was pointing down the lane, toward the green house that had sat abandoned for years. It didn’t look as though anyone lived there, but I wasn’t about to press the point any further and seem nosey. There had been a family there once, but the mother had left with the boy the day after I moved into the neighborhood and the father ended up drinking himself to death. I always wondered what had happened, made up stories that filled my head with fear.
There were four houses on our lane, all modest homes built in the roaring sixties when baby-boomers were a way of life. There was a park nearby that was shared by five other conjoining lanes, built in the middle, like the nucleus of the whole thing. Each house had a fenced yard with beautiful landscapes, each except the green one, of course.
I cleared my throat. “Do you live there with your mom and dad?”
He nodded quickly, but gave no real reply. It was then that he looked at me and smiled, distracting me away from the conversation and enchanting me with his dark blue eyes.
Changing the subject he then spoke. “So you’re a fourth grader, right?”
I smiled back and stood up tall. “Yep.”
He nodded. “I remember fourth grade. It was a lot better than sixth.”
I blinked back pride, finding I was right about his age and gloating to myself. “Sixth is exciting though, next year you get to go to Junior High.” I sighed and tilted my head. I hated school, all I wanted was to grow up and get out.
The bus came over the hill, barreling toward us. We both stood in silence, both aware of the other’s presence, and both curious. Having a new kid at school felt exciting and fresh, something I had been waiting for that could give me something to do.
The dogs in the neighborhood began to bark and I watched as the kid looked over his shoulder and back toward his house, smiling at the dog in the neighbor’s yard.
“That’s Rover,” I added, seeing the look on his face, a look of joy as though he wanted his own dog.
“Is that so?” The boy’s eyes met mine and I pursed my lips, finding his answer unexpected and strange.
The bus crawled to a rattling stop in front of us as the crossing sign squeaked out from its side. The driver ushered us around the front of the bus where the new boy allowed me to climb up first, offering me a hand. Though I wanted to, I didn’t take it, sensing the eyes of a million kids watching me. More teasing was the last thing I needed. I was strange enough as it was.
I walked toward the middle of the bus, feeling everyone’s eyes still on me. I kept my gaze on my feet as I moved down the aisle where I sat in an empty row, the same one I sat in by myself everyday. I watched the boy look from one kid to the next, a smug smile on his face as all the girls seemed to swoon. I looked down into my lap, afraid to stare. At ten, I hardly found boys attractive, but this new kid had something about him that felt warm, though I knew better than to hope.
“Do you mind if I sit with you?” My eyes shot from my lap to his face.
“Er…” I grabbed my things with a nervous hand and pulled them into my arms, making room for him on the seat. “No.”
He smiled, and I couldn’t help but gawk as he sat down.
“My name is Jordan.” He pushed his hand toward me.
“My name is Kenzie,” I stuttered, placing my now sweating palm in his and giving it a soft, nervous shake.
He laughed. “You don’t have to be so nervous Kenzie. I won’t bite.”
I let out a nervous laugh. “If you did bite, I hardly think it would matter,” I uttered under my breath, touching my face. I could tell he pretended not to hear what I said, but I hadn’t really meant to hide it. I was an open book at this point because I no longer cared what people thought of me. No matter what I said, it always came down to the way I looked. My horrid fate was now a cage.
He let out a sharp breath as though content. “So Kenzie, what do you dream about?”
I glanced at him sideways, giving him a strange look. “Um…” I paused as he turned to me with a steady stare, insinuating the fact that he wasn’t kidding. I thought hard for a moment, trying to collect my thoughts. No one had ever really asked me this question, let alone a complete stranger, and I wondered for a moment why that was. Perhaps people just figured I didn’t have dreams, that I didn’t deserve them.
He waited patiently for my reply, tapping his foot against the seat in front of him. The coming bus ride to school was a long one, so we had time. I opened my mouth to speak, only to close it and think further.
Finally, my thoughts gathered and a smile grew on my face. “I want to be a doctor,” I said in a plain manner, knowing that was all I’d ever wanted since I was old enough to know what a doctor was. “And I want to be popular,” I added under my breath, with a bit of vanity.
He nodded but did not reply, suggesting he wanted to know more.
I took a deep breath and let it all pour out. “I want to change the world, change everything. I’ve seen so much of the bad side of life. I just wish something could give.” I pulled at the strings on my backpack. “I know I will never be the Homecoming Queen, or that girl who dates the quarterback or the one that makes head cheerleader, but I don’t mind.” I shrugged, watching Jordan’s reaction.
There was sadness in his eyes, as though he knew me, as though he had seen into my soul and felt the same pain I had. Something about him felt comforting, like a long lost friend but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I looked at his messed up hair, held together by a bit of gel in a fashion that seemed cool and trendy.
He smiled then. “You deserve all that, Kenzie. Don’t you see?”
I frowned and shook my head. “But how does that work? The world is based on superficial things, on vanity. When you look like I do, you see that it’s true. Even you…” I paused. “Even you get treated differently because you’re…” I swallowed, my cheeks becoming hot. “You’re perfect.”
A sharp laugh escaped his lips. “Hardly.” He hesitated for a moment before grabbing my hand, and I felt my heart stop. “Just because I look perfect,” he touched his chest, “Doesn’t mean I am, inside.”
I frowned as I wondered what he meant, finding the conversation far too advanced for elementary school kids. Was he sick, perhaps? Was he crazy? A million options as to why he was anything but perfect racked my mind, but I came up with nothing other than the fact that he seemed smart.
Since the accident, I had grown up fast and I always outsmarted the other children at every task, ignoring my childish desires and embracing maturity. I was too damaged to get away with acting clumsy and careless. The fact was, I didn’t fit in no matter what aspect. I was too smart and too ugly, two things kids my age did not typically relate with.
“How did it happen?” He squeezed my hand, and I felt as though he already knew.
I lowered my gaze. “It was a car accident.”
He watched me with steady eyes as the girls across the aisle
began to whisper to each other in a way that I knew meant they were talking about me.
“My mother and I…” Tears grew in my eyes but I held them at bay. “My mother and I got rear-ended by a semi-truck in the city, the tanks exploded and I was stuck. My mother made it out and she managed to grab me, but it was too late and my face had been burned. I was in the hospital for months as they worked to graft the skin.” My guard failed as a tear fell from my eye and I was surprised as Jordan wiped it away. “It was never the same.” I pulled up the sleeve of my shirt, “Twenty percent of my body was burned but I would give anything if it were the twenty percent that didn’t include my face. That alone would change everything.”
“When did it happen? What was the date?” He seemed adamant about this question as though it mattered.
I laughed. “Why? You think you can change this? Do you own a time machine, a Delorean?” I continued to laugh, but his face remained straight and my laughter faded. I narrowed my eyes. “Who are you really?”
He laughed then. “I was just curious Kenzie. I just wanted to know you.”
I felt awkward, “Well…” I shrugged, “For what it’s worth, it was in the summer, August 22nd, three years ago.”
He looked toward the ceiling of the bus. “So that was 1991?”
I watched as he repeated the date under his breath, shaking my head and realizing that though he was cute, it was true that he was a little odd.
“So where did it happen?” He was brave to keep pushing for answers like this.
I swallowed, not exactly finding myself excited about this conversation. “It happened where Southampton meets Massachusetts Avenue, where the packing plants are.”
He smiled then and nodded, taking a moment to consider this before changing the subject. “I don’t see why you think so little of yourself; I don’t see why you can’t be the Homecoming Queen and date the cute guys.” He smirked, “No matter what, Kenzie, you will always be the person you are inside. Someone will see that one day.”
He released my hand, and I discreetly wiped the sweat from my palm on my dress.
“Well, I hope so,” I snorted.
As the bus came to a halt outside the school and the noise in the cabin grew loud, I knew our conversation was over. Jordan picked up his bag, and I noticed how out of date and used it was. His clothes and overall style seemed up to date, but the bag threw me off. I gathered my things and slung my backpack over my back, gripping the straps with nervous hands.
Jordan turned to me. “Well, Kenzie, hopefully I will meet you again.”
I gave him another strange look. “Sure…”
And with that, he turned and walked off the bus, cutting through the students and heading through the school as though he knew exactly where he was going. Whoever Jordan was, I found my heart would not slow down. Something about him was far more exhilarating than anything I had ever done, anything that had ever happened to me, and I liked it.
Statement from Dr. Ashcroft,
Vincent Memorial Hospital, Boston
August 4, 2009
01:36 a.m.
Agent Donnery:
Oh, wow, so you really remember that conversation pretty well.
Dr Ashcroft:
Yes, I had dreams about it for years, and then of course, dreams about what really happened, because I had met him again in the same situation on the same bus on the same day, only I was no longer ugly.
Agent Donnery:
What’s next?
Dr. Ashcroft:
Well it continues from there, but this is the part I didn’t know about, so I’ll just read what he said.
Formulated from the journals
of Patient #32185
August 22, 1991
12:54 p.m.
I cursed to myself as I remembered that I hadn’t asked Kenzie what time the accident had happened. I entered the front hall of my old house down the lane, the floor dented and cracked below my feet from the force of my landing, my blood boiling as I waited for it to cool before I pressed forward.
I was still wearing the same clothes from the bus, seeing as I left right away, unable to bear letting her suffer with such unhappiness much longer. My green coat now swam on me and the hat was loose so I took it off my head and shoved it in my bag. I was nine again, my favorite age.
It had taken me a while to get to this specific incident in her life, to save her from her scars. First, I wanted to see what sort of life she had endured on both paths, to make sure I wasn’t making a huge mistake by changing this moment, because God knows it would be impossible, not to mention sadistic, to try and change it back in the future.
Pulling at the belt of my now oversized pants I managed to fasten them enough that they could stay up while I walked out the front door of the green house down the lane. I sighed. By now, the house had been abandoned. At eighteen, the house would officially be mine when the trust is released from the bank, but for now, the house was theirs, and I missed it.
The front yard still held a sense of order, and a few tulips left their petals spread across the ground. The blue flowers that lined the drive had now burned out under the hot summer sun of Boston and lay limp across the barren dirt, overgrown and wild. The path looked better than it had three years in the future, and I marveled at its youth, though it was anything but pretty. There was a stone by the driveway where acrylic paint still clung to the surface, spelling out my last name, McKay.
My mother and I had painted it one day while my father was out working odd jobs and spending hours at the bar with his buddies. We had laughed and made a mess. She had been beautiful in her joy. I only wish she could have had a better life, but there was nothing I could do to change that. I was born after they had been married, so I couldn’t travel back to before, and until I was old enough to talk, there was little I could say to save her. I often visited those days, just to have her there to hold me before she died.
Though I tried, I could not save her from the cancer; it was too advanced and too aggressive to ever stop, but God knows I did all I could. There had at least been the few years after I had managed to get her out and away from my father. He was too proud to allow her a divorce after we had run away, even on her deathbed. I found it was hard for me to resist the urge to kill him, but I had to. Murder was never a path I wanted to travel down, no matter what my talents of evasion were.
My father was a tyrant. A man deeply tormented by what could only be described as the devil himself, and to my relief, he died not too long after her. Because of what I had said the day I had saved Rover, my mother had left him when I was four, and that was why her car had been gone that day in the beginning when I had come home to the green house at the end of the lane that was no longer my home; where my father no longer recognized my face or even cared. When we left, my father took to drinking more than in the life where we had stayed, and his liver did not last.
I was all alone now, from age seven on. Luckily I did have my condition, so at times it felt good to see her, to tell her I loved her, even though it made no difference now. I sometimes wondered if she could see me from Heaven, if there even was a Heaven. If so, I wondered what she thought of me, my skill and my curse. Telling her had never been something that had made sense. She had enough to deal with already.
I dragged my feet across the cement by the painted rock, pressing forward as Rover ran to the fence and wagged his tail. He didn’t bark anymore, he was so used to seeing me at this point that he’d given up. Though the house wasn’t yet mine, that didn’t mean I didn’t still use it as a crash pad of sorts. There was little the bank could do but let it sit, so everything down to the silverware remained inside. They never noticed, and it was in that fact that I knew they didn’t care either. We were twenty busy street blocks away, and too much of an inconvenience to have an agent check in on the house once a month.
As I walked, I pulled my bag from my back. After discovering my talents, I spent a few years figuring it out, traveling through time and visiti
ng my entire life as it had been intended, before I discovered my abilities. It had been a lovely life, full of happiness, sorrow and pain, but no Kenzie. I saw my death at age eighty three, and my birth, all things you’d expect to see. As I traveled, I found my brain expanded, gaining the knowledge of a life spent in college and the fulfillment of great friends, leaving my heart ready for the loneliness I felt now, and the knowledge to keep it all straight.
I took the bag everywhere with me and it was the last thing I had taken when my mother died, the last bit of that life I still owned. Unzipping the worn canvas, I reached in to search for a knife. There were stacks of papers and journals now, each a depiction of what I saw, and a new one depicting our life, Kenzie’s life.
I hadn’t had time to formulate a plan to stop the scars from occurring, so I decided the knife was my best bet. Looking up, I saw Kenzie’s house just ahead, shaded by a large willow. Each yard was well spaced for the city, and each still as perfect as they had been three years in the future, though the trees and bushes were smaller and more manageable. The fact that Kenzie had ended up being my neighbor felt strange, like an omen. It was fate that I had actually met her at age twenty-five, before I ever met her when she was four. God must have decided then that we were important to each other, and that’s why he gave me a second chance at finding her.
I remembered the day in the park, the day I also found out that my father no longer knew who I was, seeing that I’d been handed over into child custody after my mother’s death instead of living with him alone, as I had been before all this. I let out a deep breath, finding life was now too complicated to keep track of.