by Kate Moretti
I rushed home after last period, skipping study hall. I hadn’t used Fitz in a few weeks, so I just had to do a quick start-up and shut-down to keep him running. Rebekah and Simon, my best friends, would be over any minute. Mom worked most days after school, so I wouldn’t have to worry about the questions until later.
The inner workings of the time machine remained somewhat of a mystery to me. Mr. Fitzgerald had explained it to me simply: time is not constant. Most people think of time as absolute, not relative, but that isn’t true. It’s more like a running river: the deeper water moves slowly, while the water on top rushes by. Movies show time travel as speedy spaceships and gaping black holes. Mr. Fitzgerald claimed that to jump time, you just needed to jump out of the slow-moving water. You needed energy—an enormous amount of it.
Inside the gray box was a cylinder that rotated on an axis. When I sat inside it, I never felt like I was spinning, but the one and only time Mr. Fitzgerald let me use the machine while he was alive, he’d promised that it had moved.
“It moves faster than the speed of light, Meggie. That’s the only way it works.”
That time, I bumped back a whole day, the furthest I ever saw it travel. Once you traveled back, you had up to a half-hour before you blinked back to the present time. That’s what we called it: blinking.
Mr. Fitzgerald said the machine was rudimentary, the caveman of time machines. He didn’t have a lot of control over exactly how far back he went, although he did claim to have ended up two days behind once. That time, he’d stayed for a whole hour.
I’d been doing a series of experiments where I tried to adjust the hydrogen amounts in the fuel cell. I found that more hydrogen took me further back. Most of the time, I would hide, trying to stay out of sight until I was blinked back into the present, Fitz slowly winding to a stop. The further back I went, the longer I seemed to be able to stay. I had a notebook, and I hoped to create some graphs that would lead me one step closer to being able to control where—or when—I went. Theoretically.
Footsteps banged down the stairs, and I quickly pulled the sheet over Fitz. I slammed my notebook shut and threw the pen, so when Simon came into the room, I was just standing there with my hands behind my back, like an idiot.
“What are you doing? Again?” Simon was my neighbor on the other side, the opposite of Mr. Fitzgerald’s house. He was tall, with a large nose and a chipped front tooth. I’ve known him my whole life. Most of the time, we’re best friends, but not always. For the past year, he’s gotten a lot ruder to me, and sometimes, he goes days without speaking to me. Mom says he’s hitting puberty; all I could think was finally!
“What do you care? Is Rebekah here yet?”
We were going to walk back to school because the science fair was the next night and we had a complicated rat experiment to set up. We were a team, the three of us—at the science fair and in life. Simon once called us the Isosceles because he was so much taller than us, but I’d cut that down real quick. How nerdy do you want me to be?
“Uh, no. I’m early.”
I looked at my watch. It was only four thirty. He was way early.
“Why? I was doing something. Couldn’t you come at five, like we planned?”
“Well, I wanted to talk to you.” He shoved his hands into his jeans pockets, and I backed up. No. Oh, no. No way. “I, uh, want to know what you’re doing down here all the time.” His neck burned bright red.
I sighed and brushed past him, upstairs. I waited at the top of the steps, biting my lip. He had to follow me. I wanted him out of that basement. Simon was cool, mostly. But he wanted so badly to fit in. My main concern in telling him was that he’d surely tell other people. Mr. Fitzgerald had been explicit.
“Helloooo!” Rebekah’s sing-song voice rang through the living room, and I thought I heard Simon groan before he finally trudged back upstairs.
“I’m in here, Beck!” I scurried to the kitchen and hopped on a stool at the island, going for casual. Rebekah knew nothing about the basement, at least no more than the other kids did. Simon had caught me enough times to know something was up, no matter how many times I ignored him. He kept popping up when I least expected it.
Rebekah appeared in the kitchen doorway. “Where’s Simon?”
“He’s here somewhere…” I looked around, like maybe he’d just gone to the bathroom. He spent a ton of time in the bathroom, doing his hair and God knows what else.
Rebekah twisted her lip-glossed mouth.
“Are you wearing make-up?” I wrinkled my nose. Figured. She had the biggest shot of any of us at being normal. I knew it was only a matter of time. With her dark, curly hair and long eyelashes, she’d already started attracting the attention of boys at school, despite her nerd status. The week before, she’d even worn a low-cut T-shirt, showing some yowza cleavage. Our friendship had an expiration date; I could feel it. Me, with my half-wavy, half-straight, no shine, pond-water-brown hair and gray eyes—gray eyes!—I wasn’t ugly. I just looked like nothing.
“Maybe a little?” She hitched her backpack up on her shoulder and picked at a speck of dried jelly on the counter. “What’s it matter? We’re not kids anymore, Meg. Besides, I wouldn’t mind having a boyfriend before college.”
I hopped off my stool and turned around, crashing right into Simon’s chest. He’d seriously gotten tall. Maybe Mom was right. Was everyone growing up but me?
I hawked a disgusted noise at both of them, for different reasons, and snatched my lab notebook off the counter. “Let’s go. We have rats to prep.” I clipped a pen inside the notebook coils and banged out the backdoor before either of them could say anything.
The three of us hiked across the yard, through the cemetery, down the railroad tracks, and came up to the back of the school. I let myself in the back door, the one that was left open for all the science fair kids.
The science fair was a Big Deal—capital B, capital D. The winner won a five-thousand-dollar scholarship, and the way things were headed at my house, I needed that money. It was my ticket out. Someday.
We had a fairly kick-ass experiment, but as far as I could tell, I was the only one excited about it. Simon sulked, because that’s what Simon did, and Rebekah checked her reflection in the lab window.
The Skinner boxes were lined up, three in a row, each containing two rats separated by a Plexiglas partition. Because we had an animal experiment, we had special privileges, which included after-hours access and our own private prep area. The rats were calm, and my two were sleeping.
We were conducting an experiment on peer pressure. First, we’d taught three of the six rats to run the maze. Then, we’d positioned them next to untrained rats and timed how long it took for the untrained rats to learn the maze and to press the lever for a food pellet. Our conclusion was that untrained rats learned the maze significantly faster when positioned next to trained rats. Peer pressure was innate and not strictly a human behavior. This was true for all three of our “teams” of rats.
I stood at my cage and tapped the top gently, so as not to scare them. Doc, my trained rat, blinked to life, his little nose twitching, the purple dot on his head pulsing. Marty lazed back, like he usually did, only alert at the very last minute. I was going to miss these guys. We were donating them to the biology department in two days.
Rebekah was busy touching up the dye on her rats’ heads, and I gave my team some “free” pellets because it would be their last meal until after the fair. They had to be good and hungry for the judges tomorrow. Simon opened his plastic gate and let his rat, Yoda, scamper up and down his arm. He nuzzled the fur behind his ears.
“You’re so cute,” I teased. “You love them! Are you going to be able to say goodbye in a few days?” I kicked my foot in his direction, and he shrugged, smiling shyly.
“We’ve been doing this for months. I’ve gotten used to litt
le Luke and Yoda.”
Even Rebekah looked a bit teary. She wiped under her eyes, careful not to smudge her mascara. I made a face.
“What?” she snapped. “I like Harry and Dumbledore just fine. Doesn’t mean I want to kiss them.”
“No. You want to kiss someone else. I just haven’t figured out who yet.”
I slid the rats back into their places and snapped the gates shut, then I grabbed the poster and motioned for Rebekah and Simon to follow me.
“Come on. We have to get this to the gym.” I almost skipped down the hall, certain that our experiment would place. It was virtually revolutionary. At least, I’d never heard of anyone doing it. I wished for the hundredth time that Mr. Fitzgerald was still around. He would’ve been so freaking excited.
I could hear the buzz from the gym in the hallway. It seemed like everyone had come in early to set up. We pushed open the door, and it seemed like the whole room stopped to look at us. The buzz died down until all I could hear was deafening silence.
“What?” Simon spoke before I could, but his tone was defensive, and I cringed.
I saw Trina and Rowen whispering in the corner, and my brain short-circuited. There was no way they were in the Science Expo—unless they were doing an experiment on Rowen’s behind. I covered my mouth to suppress a giggle.
“What is everyone’s issue?” I pushed past Simon and Rebekah toward our section, number thirty-one. As I passed kids in my class, I could see everyone was holding a piece of white paper, looking from it, to me, and back again.
I leaned over and snatched a sheet from someone’s hand.
“Mr. Fitzgerald was my science teacher in eighth grade and was an incredible physicist. Everyone knows he died last year. But no one knows that he left me a time machine…”
I crumbled the paper and shoved it in my backpack. My arms and legs went numb. My secret, it seemed, was out.
My feet pounded on the grass, my ankles turning this way and that in the uneven divots of the cemetery and the snarled railroad ties of the tracks. I had to get home, get downstairs, and go back. It would be easy… wouldn’t it? Wait, how exactly was I going to fix this?
I couldn’t just tell my past self to not write it. Because if Mr. Fitzgerald was specific about one thing and one thing only, it was that you never talk to your past self. Ever. Ever! Not even to save your own life. Except that would be impossible because then you wouldn’t be alive to go back and… erm, never mind. This is complicated.
So I vaguely understood why; it made sense, but at the same time, I wondered what would happen. Would we both poof! and evaporate into some unknown parallel universe? I had to come up with another way to stop that note from spreading. Unfortunately, I didn’t really know how it had spread. As soon as I’d seen what everyone was reading, I’d bolted. It occurred to me that people wouldn’t believe it was true—they’d just believe I was insane. So I hadn’t ruined my whole life, just my social life.
I stopped running long enough to figure out if this was worth trying to save.
Simon would believe it. He knew something was up. I took off again, banging through the back door and into the kitchen. I ran around the corner to the basement door and crashed right into Mom.
“Meg! What are you doing, sweetheart?”
I had to play cool, but my mind was skittering all over the place. I had to get downstairs now, before Simon and Rebekah followed me. They couldn’t be far behind. They’d come after me, right?
“Oh, I left stuff downstairs. For the science fair.”
She slitted her eyes. “What stuff?”
Whenever I mentioned downstairs, Mom sniffed the air around her. I get it. Dad left two years ago to marry my ex-kindergarten teacher. Mom works nights and thinks kids use their basements for making meth and planning to shoot up their schools. Mom was a good mom; the only reason I haven’t been grilled is because Fitz looks like a metal tube inside a metal box and I’ve provided semi-decent, although fairly unscientific, explanations. Also, she knows I’m afraid of guns. And fire. And blood. I don’t even like taking Tylenol. I’m a well-documented wimp.
“My environmental chamber.”
“You’re taking that whole big metal thing? To school? How, exactly?”
“Oh, erm… it’s on wheels. And I have a lift cart.” Sure. Why not? It didn’t matter; as soon as I went back in time and got rid of the journal entry, somehow, this whole conversation would never happen. I just needed to get away from her, fast.
“Okay.” We stood there facing off, me wide-eyed and innocent, and Mom’s eyes narrowed, as thin as paper. I glanced out the back window and saw Rebekah and Simon jogging across the backyard. Finally, she moved to the side and watched as I scampered to the basement door, slamming it behind me. There was a tiny hook and eye latch at the top of the door that no one knew about. I stood on my tiptoes and fastened it before running down the steps, almost falling.
I heard voices above, Rebekah and Simon talking to Mom, muffled by floorboards and deep-pile carpeting. I hit the power button, and the machine spun to life, running through all the start-up processes. Why did I have to shut down today? Come on, come on, come on, COME ON!
The laptop that was Velcroed to the metal cylinder flipped through its cycles. 3… 2… 1… Ready. I climbed inside as I heard the door jimmy and shake. I jabbed the red Start button about ten times in a row and then closed my eyes. I didn’t feel a thing.
When I opened my eyes, I was in the biology lab, where the rats were kept. The room was dark and windowless, and I reached out and touched Plexiglas that I thought belonged to one of our teams’ cages. I had no control over where I would be when I blinked back. I’d already narrowly escaped trouble, and generally, my first instinct is to get down, out of sight, until I can get my bearings. Like I said, I don’t know what happens if Past Me sees Present Me, but it’s probably something very bad. Well, maybe. The bell rang, and I dug my flip-phone out of my pocket and hit the backlight just to see the time. Eleven thirty. Okay, good. It was lunch, and Past Me was probably leaving Mrs. Shotwell’s class right now. If it was still today; I didn’t even know. It could have been yesterday. In that case, the assignment wouldn’t be written yet, and I’ll blink back, and nothing will be fixed. I’ll have to deal with Rebekah and Simon, anyway. I pictured them waiting beyond the basement door. I’d be in the hot seat; that was for sure.
“What are you doing in here in the dark, weirdo?” The light flipped on, and Trina stood there, one hand on her hip. “And how’d you get here so fast? We just left class.”
“What are you doing here?” The easiest way to deflect attention is to go on the offensive—it’s the biggest tool in the geeky-kid arsenal. “Don’t you have a police station to frequent?”
“Don’t you have any other jokes? You used that one, like, ten minutes ago.”
Damn. “Seriously, why are you in here?” I didn’t trust her alone with the rats. She would let one out just to mess with me.
“I’m meeting someone.” She had an uneasy glint in her eye. On the counter sat a microscope and a container of Trypan Blue, used for staining cells. It was loosely capped. As I walked by, I “accidentally” pushed it over. The bottle bounced on the floor, and blue stain spattered on Trina’s nice white capris.
“What the hell, you bitch!” She grabbed paper towels off the sink and started blotting her pants.
“Ohhhh, you better go change. Do you have gym shorts?” I asked sweetly.
She gave me a death look and stomped out of the room. I flicked the light switch off and followed her into the empty hallway. The cafeteria was buzzing just down the hall. I looked at my watch. Freaking Trina had taken up, like, ten minutes. I had no idea how much time I had left. I scurried to the left, in the opposite direction from the caf, toward Mrs. Shotwell’s classroom.
The room was dark—sh
e must have had cafeteria duty. I grabbed a laptop and logged on. In the virtual classroom, there sat Journal assignment 04.02.14, Meg Bryant. I saw the problem immediately: I had somehow, stupidly, posted it in the community board, not the assignment board. I’d been distracted, excited to get it all off my chest. God, I’m such an idiot sometimes! I have no idea who had seen it first or when the printing-out-a-million-copies hell had happened. I hoped I’d snagged it in time.
I hit Delete. I wouldn’t get credit for the assignment, but I didn’t care. I didn’t want to take the chance again. I emptied the Trash in the application and then double-checked it. I triple-checked, actually. Journal assignment was gone.
Now I just had to hide out until I blinked back. I shrugged off a wave of fear. What if I got stuck here and I was forever doomed to hide from myself, watching my life happen from afar, never really experiencing anything? Or what would happen when Past Me got to the point where she climbed into that time machine? Would we just forever keep self-propagating? Then, which one of us would really exist?
When I opened my eyes, I was standing in my basement. Sometimes I blink back, and I’m still sitting in the time machine. Once I blinked back, and I was in the shower. That was a weird day.
I heard the basement door rattling and Simon’s voice calling downstairs.
“Meg! Are you down there?” I raced upstairs and unlatched the lock. “I’ve been looking all over for you! Did you find them?” He stood inches from me and smelled like aftershave. When did Simon start wearing aftershave? He always smelled like pencil shavings.