by Ginger Rue
“It’s not a matter of knowing the way,” Aunt Zephyr said with irritation. “It’s what you just pointed out, and in the nick of time too! We can’t simply traipse into the Prophet’s Porch from my past! What if I can’t exist in two realms at once? What if I somehow damage my past self by trying to cram two Zephyrs into one realm?”
I didn’t know what to say exactly, but I figured she had a good point. One Zephyr was probably about all any time period could handle. “Well, what are we supposed to do, then?” I asked. “Forget the whole thing?”
“Aleca,” Ford cautioned. “Your aunt is right. It’s possible that her theory of damaging her former self could have merit. Or what if attempting to exist twice in the same time period were to harm this Ms. Zephyr? It might cause a cosmic blow to her health in some way. And she’s not exactly in the prime of her life at this point—she might not be able to withstand it!”
Ford hadn’t meant to, but he had managed to say the perfect thing to get Aunt Zephyr to come over to my way of thinking.
“Are you suggesting, young man, that I might be too old and frail to do this?” She scoffed.
“I meant no offense, Ms. Zephyr,” Ford replied. “But the facts are the facts.”
“Here are the only facts you need to know,” Aunt Zephyr said. “First of all, I may not be a young whippersnapper like you, but I am in excellent physical health for a woman of my age. And second, I am spry. And third, I am resolute. Do you know what it means to be resolute?”
I’m not sure if Ford didn’t know or if he was too scared to answer, but he didn’t say a word.
“ ‘Resolute,’ ” continued Aunt Zephyr, “means I have made up my mind, and there is no point in trying to change it. I have decided that we are going to cross that bridge, young man, and we are going to cross it right now, and I don’t want to hear any more lip about it! Does everyone understand me?”
Ford and I nodded. And I tried really hard to keep from grinning, because I didn’t want to remind Aunt Zephyr that only a moment before, she had been the one trying to talk me out of doing this.
We walked across that bridge so quickly—so resolutely, you might say—that we barely even got a good look at the steel zigzags as we whizzed past. But I didn’t mind. I couldn’t wait to get across and see . . . whatever we were going to see.
Just as we got to the end of the bridge, Aunt Zephyr suddenly stopped again.
She took a deep breath. “Here we go,” she said. We could see people and old automobiles in the distance. The cars were big and boxy, not curved around the edges like modern cars were. And their colors were brighter and prettier. Lots of blues and yellows instead of grays and tans. The people were all dressed up like it was a Sunday morning church service, even the kids, and the men and the women were wearing hats. “If memory serves, my guess is that this is right around when I was eleven or twelve.”
“Oh boy!” I said. “This is the coolest thing I have ever done!” And that was saying a lot when you are a girl who can stop time. But I meant it. “Come on!”
I tugged at Aunt Zephyr’s hand, and we went forward, almost at a gallop. Which is probably why it hurt so bad when we smacked our heads.
9
Time to Wonder Up
“Ow!” I yelled. “What was that?”
Ford put out his noggin-rubbing hand and laid it against a sort of window. It wasn’t clear like a window in your house; it was more like looking through a thin freezer pop after you’ve sucked all the flavor out of it. “It’s a barrier of some sort,” he explained.
“No kidding,” I huffed. “I figured that out when I smacked into it.” I looked at Aunt Zephyr, hoping she had a better explanation.
“Hmmm” was all she had to offer.
“Ford, what’s wrong with your ability?” I demanded. “What good is it to take us across a bridge to the past if we can’t get through to the past?”
“I don’t know,” Ford said. “It’s not like I’ve ever tried this before. Give me a break. I’m seven.”
“Perhaps that’s it,” Aunt Zephyr replied.
“What’s it?” I asked.
“Ford’s only seven,” she said. “We’ve discussed before how unusual it is that he came into his Wonder ability before the age of ten. Maybe he’s only partially Wonder-ful. Maybe his power isn’t fully realized yet.”
That actually made a lot of sense. But it was still pretty depressing. “So we have to wait three more years to go back in time?”
“I don’t know what the solution is, Aleca,” Aunt Zephyr replied. “But I doubt it involves whining.”
“I understand how you feel, Aleca,” Ford said. “It’s a letdown to come all this way, only to give up.”
“Who’s giving up?” I said. If there was one thing I wasn’t, it was a giver-upper. “Let’s just put on our thinking caps until we get an idea. I’m sure we’ll come up with something.”
We all thought awhile, and then . . . I had it!
“Mystical three,” I said. “I stopped time. Ford saw the bridge. So now, Aunt Zephyr, you’ve got to do your part.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“I Wondered up. Ford Wondered up. Now you Wonder up,” I explained. “We’re here. The barrier is here.” I knocked on the invisible wall that kept us out of the past. “And Prophet’s Porch from your childhood is over there.” Ford and Aunt Zephyr were both looking at me like they didn’t know what I was getting at. “Your special Wonder thing is transporting from here to there, right? So get us from here to there. Aunt Zephyr, teleport us!”
10
So Many Reasons Not to Do It (but Doing It Anyway)
“Aleca, have you lost your mind?” Aunt Zephyr said. “We’ve never attempted group teleportation, even under the best of circumstances! If we’re going to try that, the first time should be to a place on the map, not to a place in the past. We should try it in our own normal time period. And probably not when there are three of us. Just trying to take one more person with me might prove to be too big a strain. And all of that doesn’t even touch on the most obvious of problems, which is that my teleportation has been on the fritz for some time now. You know that. Aleca, with all these crazy variables at once, my trying to teleport you and Ford and myself past this invisible barrier back into my own past is nothing short of—”
“Insane?” I said.
“I was going to say ‘highly irresponsible,’ ” Aunt Zephyr replied. “But your word might work better.”
“She’s right, you know,” Ford said. “There are too many ways it could go wrong.”
But we all knew that no matter how many reasons there were not to do it, we were going to do it anyway.
Aunt Zephyr took a deep breath. “Fine. Let’s just do it. But look, you two. No matter where we end up, do not let go of my hands.”
Aunt Zephyr squeezed our hands, and we all shut our eyes. Then she whispered, with a little shakiness in her voice, “Here we go!”
11
A Lack of Pizzazzy Chickens
It worked!
Aunt Zephyr’s teleporting was not wonky, not even a little bit. We went right where we were supposed to go, which was just a few inches away from where we had been. I turned to touch the invisible barrier we’d just crossed over with my free hand, but there was nothing there. “The window is gone,” I announced.
Since she didn’t have a free hand, Aunt Zephyr leaned toward where it had been. “Well, I’ll be swanny!” she said. “Swanny” meant “surprised” or something like that. I actually didn’t know what it meant specifically, but when old people in Texas were shocked, they said that they would be swanny.
“Ford, can you still touch it?” I asked. Ford put out his hand too, but nothing was there.
“You know what this means, don’t you?” Aunt Zephyr said. “It means we are actually one hundred percent in the past!”
“YES!” I shouted. I got so excited, I started to dance. And when I did, I swung my arm so hard that I acciden
tally let go of Aunt Zephyr’s hand!
We all gasped because we expected the past to go away, at least for me and Aunt Zephyr, but it didn’t. It was all still there.
“How come everything is still here even though I goofed up and un-held hands?” I asked.
“Fascinating!” said Ford. “I guess once we get through the portal, the hand-holding thing is off.”
“Cool,” I said. “Now that we can roam free, I want to check out the town.”
In the distance I could see what looked like Prophet’s Porch’s current downtown area, except not. “Is that the folk-art museum?” I pointed to a building on the corner. The outside of the folk-art museum in Prophet’s Porch was painted all kinds of weird, and I loved it. On the side of the building there was a giant chicken in different colors, and the chicken’s wings were made up of reflective shiny glass. That chicken had pizzazz. This building looked like it was in the same spot, but there was no pizzazzy chicken, just brown bricks.
“In your time period, yes, that’s the museum,” Aunt Zephyr replied. “But in this one it’s Newman’s grocery.”
“Newman? Isn’t he the one who tried to cheat your brother Zander, but Zander read his mind?”
“The same.”
“Hey, I know! Let’s go tell him off!” I suggested.
“You’re the first person in history to time travel, and all you can think of to do is tell someone off ?” Ford said. “Shouldn’t we be righting the wrongs of history or telling people about vaccines or something?”
“Absolutely not!” Aunt Zephyr replied. “The last thing we want to do is try to alter history in any way! Haven’t you ever heard of the butterfly effect?”
“Is that the thing Dylan and her friends do with their eyeshadow?” I asked.
“It’s the idea that small things—even something as small as the flutter of a butterfly’s wings—can have large consequences,” Ford explained.
“And I suppose you’ve studied it in science?” I asked.
“No. I’ve read about it in sci-fi books and seen it in probably a hundred TV shows and movies.”
“The point is,” Aunt Zephyr interjected, “we don’t want to do anything that might change our own time period. We are here simply to observe. Got it?”
“Fine,” I said. And really, it did seem fine. Because messing around with history sounded like more of a headache than I wanted to take on. I’d already had pretty much all the excitement I could take for one day.
“I must say, the past is remarkably hot and humid,” Ford said. “Just like the present.”
“Good ol’ Prophet’s Porch,” Aunt Zephyr said. “So many things come and go, but you can always bank on our insufferable climate.”
“If all we’re doing is observing, let’s observe somewhere that’s air conditioned,” I suggested.
“Good luck,” said Aunt Zephyr. “Air-conditioning wasn’t common when I was a child.”
“You mean you didn’t have AC?” I asked. “For reals?”
“Not in our homes. I mean, maybe a few rich people did. The movie theater was one of the first places to get air-conditioning, and some of the stores used it to attract customers. My family and I would go into town on Saturdays sometimes just to feel the cool air. The places that had it hung signs in their windows that said in big letters, ‘AIR CONDITIONED!’ ”
“That is the saddest thing I have ever heard!” I said. “How did y’all survive?”
“Oh, don’t be so dramatic,” Aunt Zephyr chided. “Come on. I’ll show you the signs. You’ll get a kick out of it. And then we’ll—”
“Ms. Zephyr,” Ford interrupted. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“What?”
“The butterfly effect? And all that discussion about two of you existing in one realm and what might happen if your present self encounters your past self ?”
“Not to mention that you don’t exactly, um, blend in.” I gestured to her colorful sequined dress.
“Oh.” Aunt Zephyr sighed. “I got so excited, I suppose I forgot all that.”
“There’s only one thing to do,” Ford said. “Aleca and I will have to explore by ourselves.”
12
Gallivanting and Dillydallying
“Woo-hoo!” I shouted. “Let’s go!”
“Wait just a minute,” Aunt Zephyr cautioned. “Are you proposing that I just sit here on this bridge and wait while the two of you gallivant all over past Prophet’s Porch?”
“Yes!” I said. “Come on, Ford! Let’s gallivant!” I wasn’t sure I had ever gallivanted before, but it sounded like fun.
“I don’t think it would be wise for you to wait here on the bridge,” Ford replied. “Actually, I think you should consider hiding in the bushes over there.”
Aunt Zephyr huffed, but I could tell she thought Ford was right. She didn’t like it one bit, though. “What a treat this whole time travel thing is for me!” she said. “Don’t be long.”
“We won’t!” I promised. I figured we would be gone just long enough to see what stuff was like back then. Because they did not even have Wi-Fi and probably for fun had to do stuff like churn butter or milk cows. “We just want to see what it was like in the olden days. Right, Ford?”
“The technology! I can’t even!” Ford said. “You said there’s a movie theater? Just think of all that vintage projection equipment!”
“Whatever floats your boat,” I said. “Can we go now?”
Ford and I left Aunt Zephyr behind a big bunch of hydrangea bushes on the side of what was called a “motor lodge,” which she said was like a hotel except everything was on one level. She made us promise not to dillydally, and I said, “Don’t worry. We won’t dilly or dally,” and then Ford and I beat it out of there so that we could start exploring.
It was weird seeing the ladies downtown wearing hats and little white gloves and dresses when all they were doing was running errands. When my mom ran errands, she wore sweatpants and a big shirt that had stains on it from when we painted the living room a few years ago. Also she put her hair in a wad at the bottom of her head, where her neck started. But these women had put a lot of effort into their curls and had probably used gobs of hair spray and pins. It seemed like a lot of trouble, but I guess it was also kind of neat. I wanted to ask one of them how long it took them to get ready to leave the house, but I didn’t want to butterfly-effect anything, so I just kept my mouth shut.
“How come you’re wearing that?”
Ford and I turned around, and a little boy was staring at us. He looked about Ford’s age.
I glanced down at our outfits. Ford was wearing some of those baggy shorts like basketball players wore, which was what all the boys at school wore. But he definitely stuck out now, because the boy who had asked was wearing blue jeans and a plaid short-sleeved shirt that looked like cardboard, it was so stiff. I, of course, was wearing my pink sneakers with the aqua plaid laces and a T-shirt that said TAKE A HIKE.
“Are you poor?” the boy asked. He pointed at my jeans, which were torn and had patches sewn on them for the sake of fashion.
“We’re not from around here,” Ford answered.
The boy scoffed. “I’ll say!”
I was tempted to give this boy a good sock in the face, but I’d promised Aunt Zephyr not to butterfly-effect anything. I looked down at the tears in my jeans and tried to sort of smooth them over so that they wouldn’t show as much.
“Can you believe the nerve of that guy, Ford?” I asked. But Ford did not answer because he was not there. “Ford!” I called. “Ford! Where are you?”
I looked all over, but he had vanished!
13
Little Aunt Zephyr
I wasn’t sure what to do. Either I could look for Ford or I could go back to the hydrangea bushes and tell Aunt Zephyr that I’d lost him. I thought about how she would take the news that I had misplaced the only person who could get us back through the time portal. Then I decided I’d look around for Ford.<
br />
Think like Ford, I told myself. That was harder to do than it sounds, because the thing that made Ford Ford was that he thought like no one else did. Still, I tried. I thought about numbers until my mind wandered, which wasn’t very long. Then I tried to think about advertisements, but I couldn’t remember any. Then I remembered what he’d said about the movie projector equipment. I snapped my fingers. The movie theater! It was just like Ford to get so excited about how something works that he’d forget all about the butterfly effect and have to go investigate.
I headed to the theater at the end of the block. Just as I started to walk through the doors, a little girl standing in line outside called to me. “You have to buy a ticket.”
I turned to look. She was a skinny little freckled red-haired girl. I’d have known her anywhere.
Which was why, before I could think about what I was doing, I shouted, “Aunt Zephyr!”
14
Finding Ford
If you are ever time traveling and you don’t want to disrupt things, it’s probably a good idea to not call the childhood version of your aunt “aunt.” Because it would freak her out.
“How do you know my name?” demanded Young Zephyr. “And why did you call me ‘aunt’?”
“Oh—uh,” I stammered. “I have a friend who lives in town who told me about you, and so I knew it was you, and also where I come from, we call everybody ‘aunt’ and ‘uncle.’ It’s kind of like saying, ‘Hey, bud!’ Except it’s ‘Hey, uncle!’ Or ‘What’s up, aunt?’ It’s just a thing we do.”
Young Zephyr looked at me, all skeptical, and then said, “I was born during the day, but not yesterday.”
And I couldn’t even help it when I gasped and replied, “That is totally something you always say!”
Young Zephyr cut her eyes at me, just like she always did as an old woman, and said, “Who do you know in town who knows me?”